A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  “I don’t see why we can’t be friends.”

  “I can think of several reasons. Wanda being one.”

  Having greeted Stella and also relieved himself, L’Forte trotted down the sidewalk in the direction of the lake and then turned to look over his shoulder, as if to say, come on, what are you waiting for?

  “I can have a friend,” Stella said.

  “I liked Wanda.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  “She’s from Arkansas too.”

  Stella laughed. “So. Ozark solidarity?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m only asking you to come to the baseball game with me this afternoon. Please.”

  Lucybelle did love baseball: the sun passing overhead, its yellow glare and pockets of blue shade; the sharp tang of mustard; the audible wave of cheering fans, yelling in unison for a bunch of men running around on a field, playing a game, just a game. It was almost as good as theater.

  “I’ll pick you up at noon.”

  She wanted to say, don’t pick me up in front of SIPRE, but she didn’t. She wouldn’t. She knew Bader considered baseball a cultural excess, a waste of human energy and money. In his view a game that didn’t advance an idea, or at least satisfy a bodily need, was useless. But she’d only promised to not have a homosexual entanglement; she hadn’t promised to have no friends. Stella was not a member of the socialist party, as Valerie Taylor apparently was. Stella was a veteran who’d served her country. Even better, romantic involvement with Stella was out of the question. And baseball, no matter how Bader felt about it, was the number one American pastime. Even Joe McCarthy couldn’t complain about her attendance at a baseball game.

  This kind of thinking was how people ended up in the loony bin. Was she seriously considering whether she was allowed to go to a baseball game?

  Stella’s eyes never left her face. Lucybelle nodded her yes.

  Right before lunch she walked into the foyer and told Beverly, “I’m leaving for the afternoon.”

  “Oh no, you’re feeling ill again. I want you to see a doctor. You’ve been looking piqued all week. Here. I’m going to call mine now. He’s excellent. I’ll tell his girl you need in this afternoon.”

  “Please no. I just need an afternoon off.”

  “I don’t like this. It’s a long time until Monday. You look awful.”

  Lucybelle laughed. “Well now you’re getting downright insulting.”

  The office manager didn’t look any too chipper herself. She had a smudge of pinkish pancake makeup on the Peter Pan collar of her beige blouse. Her eyebrows were asymmetrical, as if she’d been in a hurry drawing them in this morning.

  Ruthie coughed. She too looked ragged, her pageboy limp and her gray eyes flat.

  “She had a spell this morning,” Beverly said. “We barely got to work on time. Which, I noticed, you did not.” The office manager held her two hands aloft and immobile over her desk, her lips pursed, and waited for an explanation.

  “I’m so sorry,” Lucybelle said, meaning about Ruthie’s asthma attack, but Beverly dropped her hands and unpursed her lips, making a show of forgiving her tardiness.

  “I’m concerned about you,” Beverly persisted.

  “I appreciate that. No doctor today, however. I’ll see you on Monday.”

  “Ruthie and I will stop by tonight to see how you are.”

  “That’s sweet of you, but it’s not necessary. Have a good weekend.”

  Lucybelle walked out of the foyer, down the stairs, into the sunlight, and climbed into the front seat of the waiting taxicab.

  At the ballpark, Stella appeared to be far more interested in the game than in her company. This time there were no prolonged looks or draped jackets. Stella entered a nearly prayerful state as it looked like Billy Pierce was going to pitch a perfect game.

  “Take that to the Yankees!” Stella shouted at the top of the ninth, her voice joining all the other cheering fans. Everyone was ecstatic about Pierce’s performance and Lucybelle was having even more fun than she’d had at the opening day game, if that were possible. Did she really look piqued? She’d never felt more hale.

  Then, with two outs in the ninth, pinch hitter Ed Fitzgerald hit Pierce’s first pitch down the third baseline, the ball landing just inches inside for a double.

  “Foul!” Stella shouted. “That was out!”

  “It was clearly inside the line,” Lucybelle said. The entire audience of Sox fans groaned in unison.

  There was no consoling Stella at the end of the game. “We still won three to zero,” Lucybelle said. “Come on. We won.”

  “Damn!” She banged the base of her palm on the steering wheel as they waited in a line of cars to exit the parking lot. No lingering until the lot emptied this time. “So close. So close. I can’t believe he gave away that pitch.”

  “He didn’t give it away, he—”

  “He did. He gave it away.” Lucybelle watched Stella as she segued from Pierce’s letdown of his fans to a tirade against the Yankees, rattling off season statistics and probabilities for upcoming games. Watching her rave about her beloved White Sox—including manager Al Lopez and the players with Dickensian names like Nellie Fox and Early Wynn—was almost as good as watching her take pictures of L’Forte. Her voice rose and fell, her hands flew about the steering wheel, her scowl as endearing—yes, that was the word, and it was okay to say it silently to herself; no one could police her mind—as her smile.

  Stella finally quieted as she pulled up on Evanston’s Michigan Avenue. She parked the car, turned off the engine, and then reached into the back-seat for her camera.

  “I want to photograph you.” As if that sentence followed baseball statistics as easily as a cart followed a horse. “What do you say?”

  “Why on earth.” It was an exclamation, not a question.

  “I just do.”

  “Well, no.” She wanted to say, I’m not beautiful enough, as if that were the reason for the no.

  “I like the way you are in your body. You have this fierce presence, even though you’re so skinny and pale. You’re like a cirrus cloud. Wispy. White. Floaty. High. Bringing in weather. Undeniable.”

  She felt x-rayed, seen all the way through.

  “What do you say? It doesn’t get dark until after nine o’clock. I bet you have plenty of light in your apartment.”

  Lucybelle shook her head.

  “It’s just practice. I don’t mean to scare you. It’s just that, well, when a subject compels me, it’s difficult to turn away. There’s nothing more expressive than the human body.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I mean, no, you may not photograph me.”

  Stella smiled, and Lucybelle knew that even answering the question was opening the door far too widely. “Are you going to walk L’Forte now?”

  “I thought I would.”

  “Mind if I come along?”

  She was not able to say no again. Stella got out of the car, with her camera, and followed Lucybelle up the stairs to her apartment.

  “Ice tea?”

  “That would be nice.” L’Forte ran to greet Stella. “I’ll take him out while you fix the tea.”

  That hadn’t been what they’d agreed on, and anyway, she had a pitcher all made up in the refrigerator, but Stella was out the door with L’Forte and Lucybelle didn’t stop her. Instead, she opened her window and watched while L’Forte lifted a leg on the nearest tree trunk. Stella smiled up at her. Then she ran down the block with the dog, both of them frolicsome and happy, as if they belonged to one another. When they returned, a light film of sweat covered Stella’s face, and she took the glass of ice tea.

  “Anywhere is fine,” Lucybelle said gesturing at her rather bare living room.

  Stella sat on the couch. “I wanted to give him a little run too. Poor guy. Shut up inside all day.” L’Forte jumped up on the couch and settled next to Stella.

  Lucybelle remained standing in the d
oorway to her kitchen. The line “very poor judgment” tapped through her brain like the ticker tape of a telegram.

  “What’s in that other room?”

  “My desk. And typewriter.”

  “Where you’re writing your novel.”

  “Where I might one day.”

  “Tell me about it. Who will your characters be?”

  Phyllis had never asked. No one had. She should say she didn’t know. But she did know, even though the words were still missing. They existed, those words. She knew they did. But they needed to be gathered and combined.

  “May I look at your books?”

  “Of course.”

  Stella bypassed the shelves in the living room. She walked right into the desk and typewriter room. She found the picture of Willa Cather, held it up, and smiled, and then the picture of Elizabeth Eckford in her dark glasses and white blouse, trying to enter Little Rock Central High, the jeering white girl at her back. She held this one up too, but her smile faded. Stella placed both pictures back on top of the typewriter and continued on to the bookshelf. Head cocked to the side, she called out the exact right three authors: Cather, McCullers, Shakespeare.

  “Have you read Baldwin?” she asked.

  Lucybelle nodded. “They’re in the front room.”

  “He’s brilliant.”

  “He has more eloquence and courage in his pinkie than any other living writer has in his whole body.”

  “True.” Then Stella clapped her hands in a businesslike let’s-get-to-work way. “The light in this room is softer. It’s perfect. A little dusty. Warm-smelling.”

  Lucybelle leaned against the doorframe, arms tightly crossed.

  “I’m not propositioning you. I’m not asking for anything improper. I’m asking as one artist to another.”

  “I’m not an artist.”

  “You’re a writer.”

  “I want—”

  “You are.”

  I’m not even beautiful, is what she wanted, again, to say.

  “You want honest,” Stella said. “I’ve never photographed a white woman. I don’t know that I’ve ever even seen a white woman without her clothes. Except in pictures. I’m telling you this so you’ll understand. I mean to make art.” Stella looked out the window. “Just art.”

  Without clothes? Lucybelle looked for the word no and didn’t find it.

  “It’s just practice.”

  It was time for Stella to leave.

  “You’re wondering why you. There’s a reason. I’m not sure you’ll believe me.”

  Another opportunity for no and please leave now.

  “I trust you,” Stella said, raising her hands, palms up, as if she were at a loss, as if she had no idea why this would be true.

  Yet it was exactly how Lucybelle felt. She trusted Stella. The words made her want to undress.

  “I just want to take your picture.”

  When Lucybelle still didn’t speak, Stella said, “I’m going into your bedroom. I’m going to get the bedsheet, okay? You can use it as a drape, until we’re ready.”

  “I’ll go. Wait here.” Lucybelle went into her bedroom and took off her glasses first, and then her dress, slip, and shoes. She took the top bedsheet off of her bed and wrapped herself Roman-toga style. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t leave the room.

  Then she did. Stella was sitting on the chair at her desk, twisting the rings on her camera. She looked up and smiled when Lucybelle walked in barefoot with the sheet tight around her torso.

  “I’ve been studying the light in here. At first I thought, right here on the floor, in this late afternoon yellow light, but now I’m thinking half in and half out.”

  “Which half where?”

  They both laughed.

  Stella took several steps back, cocked her head at the wooden floor, and used her toe to trace the line where the windowsill cut off the pool of light. “I’m not sure. We can try different things. Start with your legs in the light, up to the tops of your thighs. The rest of you will be somewhat obscured by the shade. Except with your pale skin . . . maybe . . . well, we’ll see. Will you do that? I hate to ask you to lie on the floor. Do you have a broom? Let me sweep first.”

  “Don’t look.”

  Stella turned her back. Lucybelle dropped the sheet and lay on the floor. She scooted until her legs were in the sun, her pubis and torso and arms and head in the shade. She rolled onto her side and brought her top leg forward, for modesty’s sake. “Okay,” she said.

  Stella stared flatly, as if she were looking at a field of corn. “Can I fix your hair?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. I just want to maybe loosen it up a little. Okay?”

  “My hair is always a little too loose.”

  “I know. I want to exaggerate that.” With crisp, businesslike movements, Stella approached, squatted, and used her fingers to fluff Lucybelle’s hair out from her face and head. “Good. You comfortable?”

  She considered the question. Yes would be too strong. And yet she wasn’t anywhere near as uncomfortable as she ought to be.

  Stella took the first picture. She took two more from the same angle and then lowered her camera and scowled. “You’re too bifurcated. The contrast in light is too much. Will you lie right on the line between the two, but with most of you in the sun? Say, just part of one leg and one arm in the shade.”

  Lucybelle found she couldn’t move. She couldn’t lift her covering leg up and over. She couldn’t flip onto her back. Stella approached with both caution and impatience, took hold of her ankle, and gently pulled it over, turning her onto her back. “Now bend the other knee. Yes. Good. Scoot your head into the sun. Okay, and your upper body too. No, too much. There. Perfect.”

  She felt beautiful. A kind of beautiful she’d never known existed.

  “Such ferocity under that pale, vulnerable skin,” Stella said.

  It was as if she were being seen for the first time in her life. She closed her eyes to keep the intensity of feeling at bay. The hot sun mellowed her muscles and she couldn’t stop herself from relaxing into the pose.

  “Yeah,” Stella said.

  Her daddy hadn’t meant to shame her in the sunshine pen. The wooden planks of the pen were like the exoskeleton of an insect, a shell to protect the soft inner self. He’d meant to strengthen her, as if she could draw energy directly from the sun like a plant. Nor had the circling crows been sent to mock her; they’d come to show her how a body could soar.

  It had been a start, isolating her with the sun, the top of her pen an aperture to sky and flight. But this. A photographer’s eyes on her skin changed everything into light and beauty.

  “All right, good. Can you roll onto your stomach now? Yeah, and fold your arms under your left cheek. Eyes open, please. Good. Tell me about your work. What’s SIPRE?”

  “It’s part of the Army Corps of Engineers.” Lucybelle was glad for a factual field, a place to ground herself. “Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment.”

  “What does the Army want to know about snow and ice?”

  Lucybelle knew that Stella asked the question to distract her, so that she could get better pictures, but she didn’t care. She wanted to tell Stella everything. “They look at ice as a kind of rock, though it’s not. They want to find out how it can function as a building material. You know, landing strips and bomb shelters in the polar regions. So we’re looking at questions like, how hard is ice?”

  “Bated breath. Tell me.”

  Lucybelle laughed. “That’s the stuff the Army cares about, but what the rest of us care about is far more intriguing. My boss, Henri Bader, is inventing ways to drill into the ice and pull out whole cores. It’s like traveling back into deep-time. The ice cores, if and when we can pull them up whole and still frozen, will give us a picture of ancient climates.”

  Stella lowered her camera. “Wow. It must be exciting to be a part of that.”

  “It is.” Being naked ga
ve her the sense of being in another world, one where she had no responsibilities whatsoever. She felt lulled by the warm sun-yellow room, dust particles floating lazily about her head, her views of everything fuzzy and blurred without her glasses, the satisfying sound of the camera’s aperture opening and shutting. Click, hum, click.

  Stella knelt by her feet and picked one up, fingertips pressing the thin bones leading to her toes, and thumb on the arch of her sole. She pulled the foot, with the leg following, outward. “Just a bit,” she said. “There.” Click, hum, click.

  “Have you ever been to the Arctic?” Stella asked.

  “No. But I want to go. We’re building this whole city under the ice in Greenland. It’s phenomenal. I’d like to see it.”

  “What do you mean, city under the ice?”

  Lucybelle couldn’t believe she’d just revealed that. What’s more, she wanted, more than anything, to impress Stella by describing Camp Century with its barbershop and nuclear reactor, its tunnels of ice, the way it was completely concealed from aerial view by the Arctic ice cap, how it hid an entire brigade outfitted to respond to a Russian attack. What she really wanted, she realized lying there naked and now afraid, utterly unprotected, was to unburden the secret of Project Iceworm, the possibility of the United States launching its own attack from Greenland, and worst of all, Bader’s view that it was their job to prevent that. Suddenly she felt crushed by the responsibility.

  “A place for the scientists to live,” she extemporized, “while they pull the ice cores.”

  “Amazing,” Stella said. “I’d like to see the aurora borealis.”

  “Me too.”

  “Actually, I want to go everywhere,” Stella said.

  “We’ll start with the coast.” Oh, she shouldn’t have said that either!

  Lucybelle was glad Stella didn’t answer. Click, hum, click. She knew Stella loved Wanda. That much had been clear, even if Rusty hadn’t outlined their history for her.

  “Tell me about Rusty.” There, better footing.

  “Rusty’s just a kid.”

  “She said you helped her out.”

  “I hired her. If that’s helping her out, okay.”