by Jessica Lott
None of the Great Neck furniture seemed to have migrated with her to this new apartment, which had white carpets and white walls and delicate glass bulbs that hung from the ceiling. It was as if an entirely different person lived here, and yet there was a polished, faithful adherence to style that made me suspect she’d used a decorator, and the same one.
In the living room were several intimidating modernist paintings. One was particularly arresting, sleeping women were sewn into the canvas, the loose threads dangled, obscuring the scene. I got up closer—the women weren’t sleeping, but engaging in oral sex.
Behind me, Laura said, “Beautiful, isn’t it? That’s Ghada Amer. I was lucky to pick it up years ago. Her work tends to be a little one-note—anything commenting on the Muslims is very heavy-handed—standing in front of the Eiffel Tower with a burkha on, gimme me a break. But her work appreciated well, and I just love that canvas.”
She directed me to the sofa, low-backed with white cushions, and asked if I’d like a glass of wine. What I really wanted was tea, but I accepted the wine anyway, and when she returned, we opened my portfolio.
Looking over Laura’s shoulder, I saw an impressive, professional body of work. I had included some older photographs and made prints from a few of the best images in the bird series, which I was still completing. It had taken much longer than I’d projected to create the composites—it was painstaking work compared to shooting. I’d been spending nights at the digital lab, slowly going through the entire process of cleaning the negatives with compressed air and then mounting and carefully feeding them into the drum scanner, which looked like a little tower. They gave me a good rate and so I’d stayed on and used their computers to layer the images in Photoshop. One of the professional retouchers, Big Mike, stopped by occasionally to give me advice on the color balance. Some of the images were eerie, the bedroom looked like a forest on a night with a full moon, the birds more at home there than I was. I looked as frightened as I had been in my childhood nightmare.
Laura flipped through the book, hesitating momentarily on a photo of Chechna looking weak-eyed and incredulous at someone out of the frame. “I know her,” Laura said, tapping the plastic with her nail. I had debated not including photographs that could be linked to him, but a stubborn sense of artistic integrity prevented me. Rhinehart. I wanted not to think about him while in Laura’s house, to remain professional—but in the moment before repressing the thought, I felt an excited shiver of anticipation run through my stomach. He would be home in less than two weeks.
Lingering over the images taken in his bedroom, she said, “These remind me of one of Tolkien’s watercolors. A black wing emerging from a closet—it was a nightmare of his. They’re very good, but it seems as if the series isn’t fully worked out yet.”
“It’s not. I’m still playing with the progression of it.”
“I wouldn’t want to break it up anyway—it has the potential to make an ambitious show.”
I tried to suppress my exhilaration with a serious look.
“These shots are interesting.” She was referring to a series of black-and-white photos I’d taken when I’d first arrived in New York that I’d recently reworked at the lab, digitally removing the focal point. The car everyone was pointing to or one person in a conversation. “They remind me of Páez and Consuegra’s work. They did a series of storage facilities around Brooklyn, which were whited-out. It was a commentary on the American habit of hiding personal belongings in public space. I should have bought up some of that work when I had my chance.”
We had reached the end of my portfolio, and it didn’t seem as if she was interested in anything. She pulled the contact sheets out of the sleeve.
“That stuff’s really new,” I said. “It’s not finished.” I’d been photographing a lot recently. I needed to get rid of some of the nervous energy I was storing, anticipating Rhinehart’s arrival. More shots of New York. A photograph of a woman my age, linking arms with her mother in Central Park, stridently trying to explain something to her. Children hyperactive from neglect, crawling over the seats on the subway and facing out the window into the dark tunnel. They were all active scenes, scenes of impatience.
Laura made a dismissive motion with her fingers. “Now this is good stuff. More refined than the older work but not too slick. It’s still got that odd edginess to it. You have more confidence here, I can tell.” She brought the sheets over to a drafting table that stood inches from the dizzying floor-to-ceiling window and held up a red marker. “You mind?”
“Go ahead.”
Squinting at the page, she circled three images: two were black-and-whites—the children on the subway and a woman crying in Tompkins Square Park. The other was a color image of a couple fighting outside a Senegalese restaurant in Washington Heights. “Can you make me prints of these? Large, like thirty by forty. Or even larger. The way you are technically, I can tell they’ll work. I’d like to buy them. On a limited edition of no more than five. I’m sure that will determine the price.”
Before I had come, I had asked around to see what I should charge. I had researched prices based on the photographer’s name, the number in the edition, and the print size. I was still incredibly uncertain. I quickly calculated printing costs. She was looking at me expectantly and I was tempted to ask her what she felt she should pay if I wasn’t convinced she’d lose respect for me. “I have them priced at two thousand each, framed.”
“I’ll give you thirty-two hundred for all three, unframed.”
I was suddenly irritated, being low-balled. “For a limited run, I can’t let them go for less than forty-five hundred.”
“Okay.” She put on the dark-framed glasses that hung around her neck and wrote a check. Tearing it off and handing it to me, she smiled. “I would have gone up higher, but as one of your first collectors, I expect a hefty discount.” She stood up. “You should really finish that surrealist series with the birds. I will kick myself later for not getting it at basement price.”
• • •
I was thrilled with the entire swift, clean transaction, and the money, by far the most I’d ever made off my own work, and Hallie said, “That’s great, but keep smart. She wouldn’t have bought them if she didn’t think she was getting something important. I know you—you think people who have money are better than you.”
Was she referring to herself, growing up? Frequently when Hallie made these confident assessments about me, she was close enough to the truth to fool me at first with what seemed like a brilliant insight.
We’d met on the East Side after her salon appointment to go have lunch. I insisted on walking since it wasn’t too brutally hot a day. I didn’t feel like being cooped up in a cab.
“I actually feel sorry for Laura,” I said.
“Why? She’s a shark.”
“I don’t know. There was just something a little sad about her, alone in that lavish apartment way above the street.” Her life with Rhinehart had ended and mine was beginning again, and for a moment, sitting there, I wanted to apologize to her—my former rival.
Hallie had turned bright red. “It’s because she’s divorced, you think that.”
“Not just because she’s divorced.” Hallie knew Rhinehart was returning soon, but I hadn’t told her about his email. I didn’t want her in there, analyzing, spoiling it.
“Anyway, this is probably the last I’ll see of Laura,” I said. “I’m pleased she thought the work was good, if nothing else. Maybe it will lead to something. Maybe not—you know New York.”
“You seem awfully blasé about this all of sudden.” I sensed her on the verge of questioning me about Rhinehart, so I redirected the discussion to Adán. She hadn’t mentioned her adulterous suspicions in months.
“It’s because I can’t find anything. I keep checking his credit cards, email account, cell phone—nothing. Don’t give me that look.”
I disapproved of spying. I didn’t like the rush Hallie got off of it, like a hit of coke. E
ven if, as she claimed, it enabled her to trust him again.
“The important thing is that I’ve found a Buddhist practice I like. My calm state is influencing my environment in a positive way. At home and here.” She gestured with a Vanna White sweep of the arm to indicate all of East 28th, the honking traffic, harried pedestrians, storefronts of handbags, and a garbage can.
At one time she’d been into mysticism, had studied metaphysics and Reiki and borrowed heavily from the Kabbalah, blending these with her own ideas. In her definition of the afterlife, souls, in a cosmic lottery, were seeded out into other living forms postmortem. It was a brand of reincarnation that was more wily and unpredictable than most Buddhist beliefs. You didn’t move steadily up the ranks from mineral to human, you could jump around—man to rock to horse. Rhinehart loved discussing this as well, and I remembered an entire afternoon at a sidewalk café with the two of them guessing what type of people various passing dogs and children were in previous lifetimes. I was uncomfortable, as I couldn’t tell how much of the discussion was meant to be in jest. They had gotten into a heated argument over a stocky dachshund who had failed to make eye contact with Hallie. She had called the dog a pickpocket, while Rhinehart had claimed the dog’s “deep, suffering eyes show he’s a survivor of some national tragedy.”
Her new Buddhist practice was much more structured, chanting twice a day to develop compassion and to open herself up to the rhythm of events. God’s plans, I assumed, but Hallie used the word “universe.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said, genuinely pleased. I had a lot of extra pleasure to spare lately. It was almost embarrassing how upbeat I was. “You do seem happier,” I said. “And you look great.”
• • •
After lunch, I was anxious to leave her so that I could think about Rhinehart undisturbed. As the 4 train train pulled into Borough Hall, I was thinking about sex. What would it be like now? What would his body be like? His flat, sensitive nipples, the erotically charged place below his jaw line, more so on the right side than the left. The thick head of his penis, which turned an alarmed red when he became excited. At one time, he’d known a lot of technique, and kept his sexual books in the bathroom next to the medical texts.
I remembered what it felt like to be lying in bed naked and hopeful. I was always hopeful that Rhinehart and I would have sex. It was the time when I felt us most alone together, all his focus on me. For a period he was studying tantra and the channeling of energy. He’d lay a warm hand on top of my inner thigh. “Now concentrate all your energy here. Every molecule.” I felt a rush of sexual heat in my lower abdomen, maybe because he was using that deep voice I associated with lovemaking. He moved his hand to my wrist. I turned over to embrace him, and he said in that maddeningly low voice, “Concentrate on the forearm. Focus all your energy there like a laser beam.”
I did feel a shimmying under the skin, which was increasing. I craned my neck up and kissed him under the chin. It was like kissing the statue of the college founder that stood outside my English classroom. With clinical precision he moved the hand to a spot underneath my left shoulder blade. He pressed it with the upper phalanges of his three middle fingers. “Now here. What does that feel like?”
I tried to focus but all I could feel was the wetness between my legs. I suspected this lesson was meant to tease me. Sometimes he would do that. “But I get turned on when you touch me here.” I moved his hand to my breast, and then slipped it down between my legs. “That gets me wet.”
“Not so fast. You can train your body to have an orgasm when you’re touched anywhere.” He pressed the back of my neck.
I thought of the part in Sleepers when they get in the orgasmatron. I started to tell him this—it was Rhinehart who had introduced me to Woody Allen—which made me start laughing, until finally he gave up on me, and we went at it the typical way. For me, that alone was almost too much fun, an overwhelming series of moods and complex positions, directions, rump slapping, and shouted encouragements. The mossy smells of semen and sweat. And sometimes, I would go somewhere else in my mind, be teleported to a modish living room in London, to the back of a galloping stallion with glistening flanks, then I was the stallion. Afterwards I lay on my back, my breasts sloping to the sides, and smoked a Camel Light, dazed with visions of myself as a great artist. Sunlight on the grass, a glass-walled studio by a river. All mine.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Monday. I was waiting for Rhinehart outside Customs, empty-handed, without even a purse, my fists thrust in my pockets.
In the swarm of people rushing through the doors I saw him before he saw me—he was in the same jeans he’d left in but he was tan, leaner, unshaven, as if he had spent months trekking across difficult country. He was searching the faces around him, cautiously smiling, and I saw the deep creases under his eyes that appeared when he was overtired. I thought, “how handsome he is,” and went up to him, and before he could focus on me, kissed him on the mouth. He took my face in both his hands and said, “Here you are.” He filled the entire frame, and behind him, distantly, I heard the sounds of the airport, rattling baggage carts and the squeal of taxi brakes, announcements.
He was smiling. “I’m so glad you came.”
“I emailed you to say I would.” I put my arm around his waist, and we walked through the sliding glass doors to the car.
“Yes, but it was so short. I wasn’t sure if you’d change your mind. I became less certain the longer the flight was in the air. I tried to call you during the layover, but I couldn’t reach you.”
“You did?” I looked up at him. “I think I like being the mysterious one.”
“It’s agony putting your feelings out there. I checked my email more in the last two weeks than I have all year.”
I laughed and he kissed me again. “We’re in for it now, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” I said. “But we’re ready.”
I thought I remembered what it had been like to have sex with Rhinehart but I’d gotten everything rearranged. There had been other men in the way, and I had been different back then, inexperienced and shy. Before Rhinehart, there’d been college boys, still in their teens, with awkward, overly wet or hard-lipped ways of kissing. One used to get so excited during sex, it was if he were pumping away on a swing, trying to lift off into the air without me, his head buried in the pillow next to my ear.
Perhaps I had changed. With Lawrence I was always dominant, using tricks Rhinehart had most likely taught me, and which I later incorporated into my routine. How to pulsate the tongue when giving a blow job, or to make a C-curve with my spine while I was on top, so I caught the head of his penis on a ring of slipping muscle, and with an ecstatic squeeze, released it.
But Rhinehart was still the one in control here, although it seemed for a while we were competing until I yielded. His focus, his warm grip on my wrists, turning me over, leading me. How quiet he was, only the sound of his concentration, his breathing. And I was cut loose of any responsibility, free to swim around near the ocean floor. Because he was new to me again, I was watching him, my eyes as big as dinner plates, he said. He had caught me looking and was smiling. His body was different, but not in the way I expected—he just seemed larger, a more solid presence against me. But I didn’t come. Even as I felt him searching his memory for the way to angle me, slightly to the right, hands lifting my pelvis to hit the G-spot. Still I didn’t. On some level I was holding back.
He was languid and serene afterwards, looking over at me. I was high off the entire experience, as if everything in me had been knocked loose, and in a disconnected jumble of talk, I was rattling on about all that had occurred during the months he’d been away—the show, the dirty walls, finally going to see it, people peering at my piece, overheard comments, tangling that up with future photography ideas, circling back to Hallie and her Buddhism, my own ideas about God, rambling, rambling, but still aware, skirting around the subject of Laura and my meetings with her. I felt, during this stream of talk, an
enormous freedom, as if I were running around naked with the sprinkler on.
• • •
The next day I was up early. As I started to get out of bed he threw his warm body over mine, while pretending to be asleep. Every time he’d relax into real sleep, I’d start to disentangle myself, and he’d tighten his grip. One eye open.
I struggled, giggling. “I have to go downtown and meet the retoucher on some prints I’m getting done.” I would usually do the retouching myself, but I wasn’t as good as a professional, and these were Laura’s images—I wanted them to be perfect. Once I’d made the break from the seductive warmth of the bed, I was eager to be out in the bright fall morning, to complete the task, be done with it.
When I got out of the shower, he was sitting up, his arms folded behind his head, smiling contentedly like some sort of prince. I laughed. Everything struck me as funny this morning.
“Don’t you have any work to do today?” I said.
“No one knows I’m back in town except you. They think I’m returning next week. It’s like a holiday. Let’s walk in the park together.”
We agreed to meet at 6:30 at Amy’s Bread on Ninth and 46th, where he would be having coffee and reading, and I left, as if flung out into the day. The September sun splashing across the sidewalk, my cotton dress and clinking bracelets, the roar of the bus pulling up—all of this made me happy. The world seemed plastered with my happiness.
• • •
The retoucher, Evelyn, worked out of a spare Ikea-furnished office that she shared with her girlfriend, a graphic designer. We had made drum scans of the images; she had already dropped them into Photoshop and was finishing cleaning up the dust and scratches when I arrived. We worked on the two black-and-whites first, adjusting the gradation and adding a little grain; I wanted her to bring up the contrast on the subway shot. The image of the couple outside the restaurant took longer, as she had to balance the color. I was looking for a more heightened, almost surreal look, and was uncertain how tight I wanted to bring in the crop. We spent over an hour playing with it, and in the end I left a lot of visual material around the couple, so that they seemed, even in the private world of their emotions, to be at the mercy of their environment. I was lost in the images most of the day, although occasionally I’d glance up at the clock, sunlight gathering in my chest.
