Pictures of You

by Caroline Leavitt

  After that, it was pizza every night. Charlie always sat at the same table and watched her. She never bothered to hide the eye with makeup, never looked away when anyone stared rudely. What was her story? he wondered. Was she a runaway wife and the black eye was her ex’s good-bye? Had she walked into a door? Gotten into a fight with a rival for some man’s affections? There were a million things that could have happened to her, and all he wanted was for her to happen to him. He just wasn’t quite sure how to make that so. He told himself it was ridiculous. What did he know about her, really? Was she smart? Did she read? Did she even want a relationship? He chewed thoughtfully at an end of crust.

  She was the only one of the waitresses who didn’t have a name tag, who didn’t joke with the customers, who moved about the restaurant like a guest who was just taking orders as a favor. “What’s that new waitress’s name?” he asked Judy, one of the oldest servers.

  “Why, did she do something bad?” Judy asked.

  “No, no, I just want to know,” he said, and then Judy grinned and told him. “Her name’s April. And she’s a royal pain in the ass.”

  April nodded at Charlie when she spotted him, but she never came over to talk, too busy juggling plates and glasses and pizzas and demanding customers. When she disappeared for her breaks, it unsettled Charlie. But one day, instead of running out, April whipped off her apron and settled at a table, taking out a notebook and furiously writing. He watched her, his heart knocking.

  It was ridiculous not to ask her to dinner. All she could say was no and he had dealt with no’s before. He left his mushroom and green pepper slice and walked over. “April,” he said. She looked up at him, as if she had been expecting him. Her eye was nearly healed, only a faint blush of yellow at one corner. He glanced down at her notebook: “Why can’t I be like that?” she had written.

  And then, “April,” said another voice, and April looked up, past Charlie, her face lighting up. She quickly crumpled up the piece of paper. “There you are, Mick,” she said, and Charlie withdrew. Mick was beefy and tall, with a black leather jacket slung over his shoulders even though it was almost eighty degrees outside. Mick tugged April close to him. “Come on, kitty cat,” he said. “We’ve got miles to go tonight,” and April flung off her apron and wiped her hands on her hips. She put down her order pad and followed Mick outside just as if she were hypnotized. Charlie sat back at the table, watching from the window. April settled herself on Mick’s motorcycle, hooping her arms tightly around him. She rested her cheek against his back, her beautiful eyes half closing. The bike zoomed off in a loud roar.

  Charlie pushed his pizza away. He wasn’t hungry and he felt foolish. He had a crush and that was all. She was just a waitress at a pizza joint. He hadn’t had a single conversation with her except for the thousands he carried on in his mind, and really, whose fault was that? I’m a fool, he thought. A grown man acting like an idiot. Suddenly, the noise and chaos of the place got to him, the couples holding hands, the families teasing their children, the summer people in their touristy Cape Cod T-shirts. Everyone was spinning and moving and he felt as if he were standing still. He put down a few wrinkled bills for a tip, and then he left, too.

  After that, Charlie stopped going to the Leaning Tower of Pizza. Instead, he went to Pie in the Sky three blocks away, where the pizza was more gluey, the atmosphere less lively, but at least he didn’t have to see April. He didn’t have to picture her getting on the motorcycle with Mick. He went out with his friends or he simply went home, sitting on his front porch and waiting for her to fade from his imagination.

  ONE NIGHT, A FEW weeks later, Charlie went to the beach. It was a cloudy, unseasonably cool night. Kids piled into cars and honked the horn as they passed Charlie. It was the kind of weather that tricked you into thinking the summer was already gone. Charlie walked the deserted beach, hands deep in his pockets. It was a private beach and he was the only one on it, so when he heard a splash, he imagined it was a fish of some sort, come too close to shore. When he heard the splash again, he turned, and that’s when he saw, at the other end of the beach, April, in a thin, short summer dress, wading into the water and then suddenly breaking into a swim. For a moment, he thought it was just a mirage. He looked around for Mick, but the beach was empty. It was crazy to swim alone, even more so at night when no one was around, when you’d blend with the sky and disappear. Even from here, he could see how far out she was. “Hey!” he shouted, but she didn’t seem to hear. He waved his hands wildly in the air. He shucked off his jeans and T-shirt, kicked out of his shoes, and headed for the water himself.

  The cold shocked him, making his teeth chatter. Waist deep, he stepped on the edge of a sharp rock and his toes recoiled. Damn, damn. What was he thinking? What was she? He began to swim, fast, until he was out over his head. He couldn’t see her. “Hey!” he shouted again, treading water, turning around. What had happened to her? He shouted, “April! April!” And then, suddenly, there was her head, her hair dark and slick with water, smooth as a seal, and when she turned to him he saw that her eyes were as shiny as moons and full of surprise. “Leg cramp,” she panted. She winced as he pulled her to him. Her dress, soaked with water, tugged around them both. Putting one arm about her, drawing her close, he swam to the shore. “I’ve got you,” he said.

  It was freezing on shore. Shivering, he snatched his black T-shirt and handed it to her. And then he dragged on his jeans, which grew damp as soon as they touched his skin. He rubbed at his arms and then turned to look at her. “Are you okay?” he asked. “What were you doing out there, swimming alone? Why did you go in wearing your dress?”

  “What are you doing alone?” she said. His T-shirt was long on her, like another dress. Her black eye was gone, but somehow, she still looked wounded to him.

  “Thinking,” he said.

  “So was I. And I thought a swim would clear my head. I didn’t have a suit handy so I thought I’d make do with what I had.” She smoothed the shirt down over her body.

  “Let me buy you dinner,” Charlie blurted.

  “Dinner. It’s past midnight. And why would I let you do that?”

  He suddenly felt awkward. “Because I think I just saved you.”

  “I wasn’t in danger. It just looked that way.” She looked down at her body, as if she had just noticed she was wearing his shirt, then she looked back at him. “Thank you.”

  He held out his hand. “Charlie Nash. From the Leaning Tower of Pizza.” He felt like an idiot. Why would she remember him from all her customers?

  She nodded and then briefly took it. “April,” she said finally. “April Jorgan. And I should get home.”

  “I’ll walk you.”

  “I don’t live in such a great area,” she said.

  He walked beside her, his hands in his pockets, letting her direct him through the shortcuts. He couldn’t help it; he felt ridiculously happy even though he was freezing and damp. A collie chained to a front fence barked wildly, straining to get free. “Right here.” She stopped in front of a small gray apartment building. There was a rusted fence surrounding it. Some of the windows had green paper shades. “Thank you for the rescue.” She smiled at him, and he felt that sudden shock again. “Have dinner with me next week,” he said.

  She studied him. “Anything but pizza,” she said.

  A WEEK LATER, he took her to River Nile, a little Ethiopian place where you sat on the floor around low, round tables and shared the food, eating with your hands. He had thought it would be intimate, but as soon as the food came, he was suddenly embarrassed. He couldn’t stop watching her fingers folding the different purees into the spongy injera bread. His mouth went dry.

  Neither one of them ate very much. She told him how she’d moved here when she was twenty and had never left. “I’m happy being a waitress,” she told him. “No matter what anyone says, waitressing is good money. Especially with summer people who tip like there’s no tomorrow. You make enough and then you can just pack up and go som
ewhere new. A customer makes a stink, you may never see him or her again. You don’t have to deal with it. And there’s always work.” She grinned at him.

  She said she had many acquaintances but no close friends. She had no family anymore. Her parents lived in Florida and had died recently, one within days of the other. “True romance,” she said. “They were always holding hands, so I was always trailing behind them.” She had left at seventeen, the last week of her senior year, packing everything she had in a backpack, including the savings she had managed, and she didn’t care if she ever went back. The cruelest thing about it was her parents never asked her to come home. “They never seemed to even notice I was gone,” she said.

  Charlie thought of his parents, who had a chilly sort of relationship. When he was a kid, he was always worried they were going to get divorced, and one day he simply came out and asked. His mother had slapped his face. “Don’t you ever say such a thing!” she warned. “You keep saying it, then your father and I will really divorce and leave you and you’ll be all alone forever and it will be your own fault.” He rubbed his stinging face and began to cry. His mother’s face softened. “How much do you love me?” his mother said. He stared at her. “Go on, tell me,” she urged, and she wouldn’t stop until he had spread his arms wide. “This much,” he said, choking, and then she nodded, satisfied, and he cried some more.

  He studied April, the wistful way she spoke about her parents. She rested her head in her hands. “They’re gone,” she said simply. “My mother died of a heart attack when she was just fifty. Keeled over at the hairdresser’s while she was getting highlights, and my father was right there because God forbid she should go someplace without him. When I went home for the funeral, my father could barely move. He cocked his head to the side when he saw me, like he needed a minute to place me. I did everything for him. I kept telling him how much I loved him, but he just kept saying, ‘Now, I have no one.’ Was I really no one to him?” April rubbed one hand over her face. “Two days later, I got up early to surprise him with blueberry waffles for breakfast. The whole house smelled wonderful. I went to wake him and that’s when I found him. Her nightgown laid out beside him, his arms wrapped about it.” Charlie heard her swallow.

  “I never want to feel like that again.” April looked at him so intently that for a moment he thought he had lost her and he felt a sudden, overwhelming sadness. “Let’s go home,” she said, standing, reaching for the light sweater she had brought with her.

  “Of course. I’ll take you,” he said.

  “To your home.”

  As soon as he opened the door, he wished he’d hired a housekeeper. He wished he had remembered to stack the newspapers neatly, to put away the plates from breakfast, to put fresh flowers from the garden in one of the countless vases he had. He was embarrassed by the pile of books in the corner that he should have reshelved by now, by his worn bathrobe he had flung on the couch this morning. But she didn’t seem to notice. She was quiet in his house. She looked at his books, picking up one on orchids. “Can I borrow this?” she asked, and he brightened because when someone borrowed something, it meant you’d see them again. She picked up the snow globes he collected and put them back. She didn’t speak when she led him to the bedroom and turned to him and began unbuttoning her blouse, taking everything off except her earrings. Her skin shone. They tumbled onto Charlie’s bed. She leaned across him to turn off the lights. “I like it dark,” she said. He was used to women making noise in bed, asking for what they wanted or whispering what they were going to do to him, but April was so quiet, he worried that he was hurting her, or that she wasn’t having a good time. He kept searching for her face, trying to see her in the dark, but when he reached out, he felt her lids fluttering beneath his fingers, tightly closed. “Do you like this?” he whispered, trailing his hand along her back. “Does this feel good?” She sighed and put her hand against his mouth.

  Afterward, they lay together, his arm about her. He held her tight, waiting. His eyes had grown used to the darkness and he could see her now. He could feel her breathing against him, weightless. He put one hand on the top of her head, almost as if he were protecting her, keeping her safe, and then she looked up at him. She finally saw him. “You,” she said, and touched his face.

  EVERY DAY AFTER work Charlie would go and pick up April from the restaurant. He waited for her to close up, watching her tally the register, admiring the easy way she wiped the counters clean.

  One day, she got in the car, looked Charlie in the eye, and said, “Let’s drive.”

  “Where?”

  “For miles. Let’s just see where we end up.” He thought of Mick, the way he had said to April, “We have miles to go tonight,” and how she had taken off. He shook the image off. She was with him now. This was different.

  He put on the music, but she shut it off. “Let’s just listen to the night,” she told him. She made him stop after an hour because she said she wanted to drive, and when she did, he began to doze off. When he woke up, he didn’t know where he was. The road was ink, the sky dark. Charlie sat up straighter. “Where are we?”

  “On the road to Paradise.” She laughed.

  “Put on the headlights,” he said. “Really. This is dangerous.”

  “I can see perfectly fine,” April said, but still, she flipped a switch and the road became illuminated. “The first time I noticed you, you put ice on my black eye,” she said. “Why did you do that?”

  “I wanted to help.”

  “But you didn’t know me.”

  “I knew you.”

  “You’re a kind guy, you know it, Charlie?”

  She put her hand on his knee, just for a moment, before returning it to the wheel. “You never asked me what happened.”

  “I thought you’d tell me when and if you needed me to know.”

  She was quiet.

  “You can tell me.”

  “I wasn’t doing something fast enough for Mick.”

  Charlie looked at her, shocked.

  “That day at the beach. I had just left him. I wasn’t sure where to go or what to do. And then you showed up.” She gave him a half smile. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just felt a little lost. Haven’t you ever felt that way?”

  Charlie didn’t know what else to do but take her hand and kiss it.

  “You haven’t said you love me. Do you?” April asked.

  Even in the car, he could smell the scent of her hair, cherrywood and maple. He thought of his mother, demanding, “Say you love me,” her arms spanning wide. He shook the image off. He thought of the way he could make April happy just by bringing her one small, perfect pear, the way he sometimes caught her looking at him like she couldn’t believe her luck. “Can’t you tell?” he asked. “Don’t you know what you mean to me?”

  She looked at him. “I make you really happy, don’t I,” she said, and when he said yes, her face bloomed into a smile. The road swam before them. Charlie saw the signs. They were only a mile away from the house. “I love you. And I think we should get married,” April said. “Then wait until you see how happy we’re going to be.”

  THEY WERE MARRIED in the fall by a justice of the peace. Charlie’s parents hired a car to come up, baffled and affronted because this was the first time they had met April and because Charlie wouldn’t have the wedding in Manhattan where all their friends were. Charlie’s father handed him a sizable check in a pale blue envelope and his mother stared at April, who was in a simple, long white dress, a rose Charlie had grown himself tucked behind one ear. “That’s what she gets married in? It looks like a nightgown,” Charlie’s mother whispered to Charlie. But still, she embraced April. “Mom!” April said, and his mother sighed. Ten minutes later, Charlie and April were husband and wife.

  Oh, but married life was wonderful! They cooked elaborate dinners and ate them by candlelight. They made love for hours. She always slept with her arm draped over him, and the one time she didn’
t—when a bout with the flu had him up all night—he came back to bed to find her cradling his pillow.

  Of course, they both wanted kids. “We’ll be a family,” April said. “A family!” They sat up nights listing all the ways that their family would be different from the ones they had grown up in.

  Two years later, on the coldest day of the year, Charlie crouched beside April in the delivery room, holding her hand, watching Sam being born. When the doctor held Sam up and Charlie saw his small face, the blue eyes wide open and looking right at him, he burst into tears.

  “Why are you crying!” April asked, alarmed. “Is everything all right with the baby?”

  “Everything is wonderful,” Charlie told her, wiping at his tears and kissing her.

  Charlie’s mother offered April a baby nurse as a gift. “With a baby nurse, you can get out. You can have your life back.”

  April was horrified. “My life back! The baby is my life,” she said.

  “You let me know when she changes her mind,” Charlie’s mother said. “And believe me, she’ll change her mind. I know I certainly did.”

  “April’s not you,” Charlie said.

  April might not have taken Charlie’s mother’s advice about baby nurses, but she pored through baby books, tomes she piled up by the bed and underlined in blue highlighter. She couldn’t walk in the park or the beach without cornering other young mothers and asking their advice, without plunking herself down next to a nanny and whipping out her notebook. She talked calmly to Sam while she diapered him, telling him about books she was reading or what was on the news, and when Charlie teased her, she shrugged happily. “It doesn’t matter what you say,” she told Charlie. “Babies just need to hear your voice.” She sang to Sam in his bath, and when he squalled in the middle of the night, she was up and by his side before Charlie even reached for his robe. “I was born to do this,” she said.