by Mira Jacob
Jackie moaned.
“Get up,” Mr. Beale barked, but the girl did not move. Her breasts dangled out of her dress, and she fumbled, trying to pull the material back up.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“Get up now,” Mr. Beale said again, pushing her shoulder.
The swishing noise just behind Amina sent the camera to her waist, her lungs cinching. She turned to see the coat checker hurrying down the hallway toward them, eyes stuck on the scene in front of him. Amina followed behind him, slinging her camera around her back. Mr. Beale frowned as they approached, and Amina looked away as he stood and yanked his pants up.
“I’ll, um … take-take-take care of the coats, sir,” the coat checker stuttered, and Mr. Beale stepped off of them.
“Jackie, get up,” Mr. Beale said again, calmly this time, like he was talking to a toddler, but she didn’t stir. She was looking behind him, behind all of them. Amina turned around to see the grounds manager in the hallway, with Lesley and a few guests trailing behind him.
“What’s your name, son?” Mr. Beale asked the coat checker.
“Ev-Evan.”
“Evan, let’s you and me see if we can lift this thing.” Mr. Beale motioned to the coatrack. The folly of this was evident by what was on top of the coatrack, namely, Jackie, hands smashed over the bodice of her dress. Amina looked at Mr. Beale, who looked at the grounds manager, who looked at the coat checker, giving him a sharp nod, so it was the coat checker who bent down to the girl, hoisting her up clumsily while the guests looked on. Underneath her, Amina spotted her own crumpled coat.
“Too much to drink,” Mr. Beale announced loudly as the help heaved the coatrack up off the floor. “No big deal.”
He gave the guests in the hall a knowing wink, and Jackie’s face filled with color.
“I’m so sorry about this, Mr. Beale,” the grounds manager offered quickly. “Evan is new here and doesn’t know—”
But Mr. Beale waved away the rest of this sentence, walking to where Lesley stood with the hollow-eyed look of a cat ready to spring. He put his arm around his wife. “Let’s all just go back inside, shall we?”
And how did it happen, the calm turning around, as if there were nothing to actually see besides Brock Beale’s unfortunate explanation? Amina could not quite fathom it, and she couldn’t look at Lesley again, so she stood still in the wake of receding people, her hand clutching her camera as if it were in danger of being swept away with the easily swayed current.
“You’ve got to be shitting me.” Dimple stood in the back doorway of the gallery, paint fumes and blindingly white walls leaking into the alley where Amina stood. “So you just left your coat there? They’d better goddamn reimburse you.”
“Yeah. That’s their first priority, I’m sure.”
“Well, at least it was ugly anyway.”
“It was?”
“Did she know? I mean, she must have known.”
“No idea.”
They walked to the car, Seattle’s Saturday-night Pioneer Square crowd milling drunkenly around them. A few recently emptied beer bottles had been added to the truck bed, and Amina tossed them out, opening the door for Dimple, who ducked her head in and sniffed around suspiciously. “What fucking masala bomb went off in here?”
“It’s samosas. We’ve got to drop them off at Jose’s on the way.”
“They’re on my seat! I can’t sit there now.”
“Come on. We’re running late.”
“Great, so I’m going to have curry stink.”
“Sajeev’s Indian. He won’t care.”
“I’m Indian. I care.”
“You’ve got issues.”
Dimple put the bag of samosas on the floor and climbed in gingerly. She cracked her window and reached under the seat to scoot it up, then stopped. She pulled out Jose’s manila envelope.
“ ‘Amina only’?”
“It’s just wedding stuff.” Amina reached for the envelope. “Gimme.”
Dimple pulled away, opening the flap.
“Wait, don’t!”
But it was too late. Dimple was already sliding the picture out, her face lighting up like she’d swallowed a sunset whole. “Holy Christ, what happened to her?”
“Nothing!”
“She OD’d?”
“She’s a grandmother!”
“So they can’t OD?”
“Dimple, give it!”
“Someone wanted a copy of this?”
“It’s not—yes. They did. Can you just—”
“Who made the print? Nice work.”
“Jesus, Dimple, it’s confidential! For a client! Can you not stick your nose into everything for, like, five seconds?”
Dimple looked at her heavily, as if to crush more information out of her, then, when it wasn’t forthcoming, shrugged and lit a cigarette. They rode in silence, smoke hovering between them.
“So what—”
“Dimple.”
“I was just going to ask what you think Sajeev’s going to be like this time, you freak.”
“Oh.” Amina’s shoulders dropped a tick. She tried to picture the skinny boy they had avoided as kids, the teenager they’d seen twice. “I dunno. The same. Quiet. Bucktoothed. Too small for his nose.”
Dimple laughed. “That’s mean.”
“It’s true. So, which bar?”
“The Hilltop,” Dimple said, and Amina groaned. The Hilltop was frequented by the kind of people who sized one another up by their shoes. “I know, I know, I tried to get him down to the Mecca. It wasn’t happening. He insisted on a place where he could get us dinner.”
“He’s getting us dinner? Isn’t it kind of … formal?”
“Dinner is nice.”
“But for us?”
“Listen, the whole conversation kind of threw me. One minute I was trying to figure out how to negotiate drinks down to coffee, and the next I was saying ‘Sure, yeah, dinner on you, great.’ ”
Amina looked at her cousin. “Are we going on a date with Sajeev?”
“Not even in his fantasies. There’s a space.”
The Hilltop was bustling, filled with polished faces of women who looked like the “after” images on a magazine makeover page, and men who looked for women who looked like that. Amina smoothed a hand over her own peach-colored dress, part of the wedding-ready work wardrobe that Dimple insisted on calling “Cadbury Couture.”
“Holy shit,” Dimple said, and Amina’s eyes homed in on the long arm waving to them across the bar, the dark eyes and smile just beneath it.
“Holy shit,” she agreed.
Sajeev had grown into his nose.
Truthfully, Sajeev Roy had grown in almost every way, and half an hour into the dinner conversation, Amina could not stop shifting her eyes from his overly white teeth (still slightly bucked) to his toned forearms, squinting like he was made of sun. Strangely, the years since high school had turned him pretty, the femininity of his thickly lashed eyes offering strange friction to his button-down shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes just nice enough to let you know they cost more than Italian leather. Something charged with vetiver and sandalwood escaped from the neck of his shirt every time he leaned over, leaving her aroused and suspicious. What kind of a guy wore cologne to dinner with family friends? Certainly not the Sajeev she had imagined they would be meeting. As he detailed where he lived (a few blocks away), what he was doing (programming centered on artificial intelligence), how he liked Seattle (all good but the rain), Amina slipped quietly into a dazed, oversaturated place. Dimple, for her part, was in rare form, her eyes and teeth and fork winking like flashbulbs as she gave him a three-minute life update for both of them.
“And what kind of work do you show at the gallery?” he asked.
He didn’t know Dimple well enough to catch the slight flare in her nostril, the disdain for what she often called an “art for beginners” question, but she humored him, saying, “I like all kinds, but what we look for at John Niemen is actual
ly the dialogue between works. We always feature two photographers in every show, and I look specifically for what the works will lend one another. It’s a conversation of sorts.”
“Is it a conversation other people understand?”
“Just the smart ones.”
Sajeev leaned back in the booth, one long arm draped across it. His mouth had a funny way of twisting into a little bow in the corner when he wasn’t talking, and Amina wondered idly if he could lift Dimple with one hand. There was certainly enough in the glances over his beer that made her think he wouldn’t mind trying. “So who’s up next, then? Anyone I’d know?”
Dimple stabbed a tomato wedge on her plate, trying, and failing, not to look self-important. “Are you familiar with Charles White?”
“The guy who makes everything look like a bad acid trip?”
Amina laughed as her cousin set her fork down. Charles White’s work had been a revelation for both of them in college. His most recent photographs, a series taken at a women’s shelter and featured in Art in America, had stayed open on Amina’s bed stand for months, its pointed article about the male gaze much less interesting than the photographs themselves—lushly colored, taken at angles stark enough to make the shelter look like Wonderland, its inhabitants modern-day Alices.
Dimple rearranged her napkin in her lap. “I find his work pretty remarkable, actually.”
“Oh, no doubt! Absolutely remarkable.” Sajeev stuffed a French fry into his mouth. “And so who will Charles White be, ahhhh, conversing with?”
“I don’t know yet. I had someone who didn’t work out.” Stress rose on Dimple’s shoulders, pulling them toward her ears. She’d been in a quiet panic for weeks now, trying and failing to find the right fit.
“Wow. That’s got to suck.” Sajeev leaned in, smiling. “I mean, you don’t want to get anything too domestic, right? That would make Charles White’s stuff seem forced, maybe even mean. But anything too esoteric and you risk mounting a big surrealist in-joke, right?”
Amina looked at him, understanding a little too late that Sajeev knew, and possibly cared about, photography. She saw a flash of confusion cross her cousin’s face, but before either of them could respond, he settled back farther in the booth, waving a hand at them.
“So you”—and here he indicated Amina—“take pictures, and you”—his hand brushed Dimple’s forearm—“put them up. So when is Amina’s stuff going to go up?”
A pungent silence fell across the table. Amina took a sip of beer, watching Sajeev over the rim of her glass. Had he really turned into one of those men who thought asking the uncomfortable question proved something about his integrity?
“I’ve asked,” Dimple said, just as Amina said, “I don’t have anything to show.”
Sajeev looked surprised.
“You would if you tried,” Dimple said.
“Stop,” Amina warned. She looked at Sajeev. “I don’t take the kinds of pictures Dimple needs. I’m a wedding photographer.”
His mouth puckered like he had tasted something off. “Wait, really? I thought you were some hotshot photojournalist.”
“No.”
“Because my mom used to keep your stuff, you know, clippings Kamala Auntie sent. And didn’t that one with the guy—what was his name?”
“Bobby McCloud,” Amina said softly, eyes darting around the room.
“That’s right! That was huge, no?”
Amina nodded, the slow creep of dread filling her lungs.
“And you just stopped? Just like that? I mean, you were really talented.”
“Jesus, Sajeev, she’s still talented!” Dimple snapped. “It’s just a fucking hiatus. You don’t need to make it sound like she’s dead or something.”
Sajeev flushed deeply, looking unsure of himself for the first time all evening. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Amina said, and turned with relief to the waitress who was fast approaching their table.
“How are you guys doing over here? Does anyone need a refill?”
“Please,” Amina said. She had no idea.
He walked them to the truck. Amina tried not to laugh out loud about this, a little embarrassed by the chivalry of it all, but Sajeev hadn’t asked or offered, he’d just strolled out beside them, turning in the direction Amina pointed to when he asked where they were parked.
“So, cool,” he said when they reached it. “You’re sure you’re good to drive?”
Amina rolled her eyes. “I’m fine. Dimple’s the lightweight.”
“I am not! I’m just small!”
“Because my mother would kill me if anything happened to either of you,” Sajeev said. “And then Sanji Auntie would kill me again.”
Amina smiled. “Fair enough.”
He had been distinctly nicer since Dimple’s cut-down, the little whiff of vulnerability on him making Amina remember him as a kid.
“How is she doing anyway? God, I don’t even think I asked about the New Mexico clan. How is everyone?”
“Well, let’s see …” Dimple held out a hand, ticking off six fingers. “Sanji is probably knee-deep in the annual Indian Association Benefit planning, Raj is cooking himself into an early heart attack, Kamala is inducing guilt wherever possible, Thomas is telling himself stories, and my father is probably frowning at my mother’s choice of outfit at this very moment.”
Sajeev laughed a deep, appreciative rumble, and Amina watched Dimple grow a little tipsier from it. They reached the truck.
“So, I live here now,” he said. “I mean, obviously, I uh … but anyway, would love to hang out sometime.”
Dimple opened the door, slid in, and rolled down the window. “Amina’s leaving for the week. You’re lucky we even got her out at all. She’s like a ghost during wedding season, always stuck at everyone else’s party.”
“Where you going?” Sajeev asked Amina.
“Home. Short visit.”
“Nice. Well, tell everyone hi for me. And Dimple, maybe I’ll stop by the gallery sometime this week? I work right around Pioneer Square.”
“Oh yeah?” Dimple asked, a little more excited than she would have let herself be sober.
“Yeah.” He bent down, looking her square in the eye for a moment before thumping the door twice, backing up and walking away.
“Now that,” Amina said, waiting until he was out of earshot, “is definitely a date.”
It was late by the time Amina arrived home, later still by the time she got the truck unpacked. The film and the camera came out first, along with her light meter, and then she went back to pull Jose’s envelope from under the seat, holding it flat under her arm. The rain had cleared just enough to let some moonlight into the apartment, and she kept the lights out inside, peeling the dress off and letting it slide to the floor. She put the kettle on for tea.
In her bedroom, she felt around the floor for her sweats, sliding one leg then the other into the sensible black fleece and then looking at herself in the dark, in the mirror. She looked like she had come to rob her own house. In the kitchen, the kettle screamed.
Mint. Always mint, always the red mug. She grabbed the envelope with the photo in it on her way back to her room.
A whiff of cedar rushed out as she opened the closet. She tugged the light on, walked in. Boots and shoes lined either side of her like cobblestones, and she made a path through them, reaching for the pile of coats in the back. She lifted them.
And there it was, smooth and small as a child’s coffin. The russet wood glided under her hand; the tiny brass handles were cool on her fingertips. In Montana, the woman who sold her the antique flat file laughed at the two hundred dollars Amina had offered, telling her she could never accept that much for “drawers that won’t hold a damn thing.” When Amina told her they were for pictures, the woman laughed again, and took the money.
One by one Amina opened the drawers, pulling out the contents in order. She moved methodically, careful not to look d
own. It was important not to look down. It was important to be ready.
When every drawer was empty she walked out of the closet and back to the window seat, and placed the picture from Jose on top. She looked at it again for a long minute, staring at the scuffs in Grandmother Lorber’s shoes before flipping it over.
Underneath was Dara Lynn Rose, on the morning of her second wedding, her hand wielding a large hairbrush. She was screaming, her teeth bared like a tiger’s, thin strands of spittle hanging from them. Seconds later she had chucked the brush at her husband-to-be as he fled the room. (“I’m superstitious,” she had explained to Amina later. “My first husband had a heart attack chasing a black cat off the lawn.”)
The next was Loraine Spurlock, looking up at her stepfather with adoring eyes. He bent to kiss her, his mouth open, his tongue lying in it like a wet animal.
Then came the McDonald sisters, Jeanie and Frances, their four hands gripping a just-thrown bouquet, splitting the baby’s breath with determined fingers. They smiled through jaws hard with determination.
Amina moved on to Justin Gregory, the five-year-old ring bearer who had been told he couldn’t leave once the ceremony started. He stood behind the bride and groom, staring up at them with a tiny pillow in his hands, a wet stain spread down the front of his crotch. A puddle shimmered at his feet.
Wide-lipped Angela Friedman and her new son-in-law greeted Amina in the next shot, her fingers digging into his neck as he kissed a bridesmaid on the cheek. Then it was the gray coil of Grandpa Abouselman, legs folded like newspaper against his wheelchair while couples danced in the background.
Amina lifted picture after picture, soothed by the rise of a lip, the splay of fingers, the stillness of passing disasters. She knew them well. She felt images rise off the page, the lines of one bleeding into the next until hands turned into flowers and veils became windows. Her heart unbuckled for the familiar faces, their familiar pains. She shuffled through them slowly until at last she was looking at the satin-covered knees pressing the ground next to a toilet, the bouquet on the tile floor. She stared at this one for long seconds, her fingers pressing against the edge. And then the stall turned into the underside of a bridge, the bouquet into a falling man. She was looking at Bobby McCloud.
