A Clean Slate

by Laura Caldwell

  Someone had to break the silence, though, so I finally opened my mouth and said, “How are you?”

  This caused Ellen to blink a few times. Apparently, she didn’t get asked that question very often. “Fine, fine, but I’m concerned about your loss of memory. Why don’t you tell me about that.”

  “I pretty much told you everything on the phone, and as I mentioned then, I feel great. Better than I have in a long time.”

  “Mmm-hmm. What do you think caused this gap in your memory?”

  A legit question. “I honestly don’t know. That’s one thing I am wondering about. Can you tell me about the different reasons that someone might lose their memory?”

  “Well, psychologically and psychiatrically speaking there are a number of reasons. Trauma, alcohol abuse, senile dementia—”

  “Dementia? Isn’t that just another word for crazy?” I said defensively.

  Ellen grinned. “We don’t think of it like that, and I don’t think you’re crazy, Kelly.”

  “Then what do you think it could be?”

  “Well, first we’d have to rule out a physical cause for your amnesia. Have you had any physical problems?”

  “Nope,” I said, deciding not to mention my alcohol-driven headaches.

  “I’d still like you to see a colleague of mine at Northwestern. Dr. Hagar.” She leaned forward and handed me a business card.

  I slid it in my bag without looking at it. “You’re an M.D., aren’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “So why can’t you give me your opinion?”

  “Why are you so anxious about the cause?”

  “Wouldn’t you be? I can’t figure out why I don’t remember the last five months. I know I was down, depressed, whatever you want to call it. My friend told me that I’d been seeing you a lot—”

  “Who told you that?”

  She’d stopped me in midthought. “Excuse me?” I said.

  “What friend told you that?”

  “Laney.” I watched her face for a reaction that I knew she wouldn’t reveal. The woman should play professional poker in Vegas. “Why?”

  “Mmm-hmm. Just curious. Keep going.”

  I was frustrated now. “Can’t I ask you some questions for a change?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’d like to know your opinion about why I can’t remember.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” She pursed her lips again. “Kelly, I wish I could give you that, but I can’t possibly, based on the limited information I have. All I can tell you is that although I saw you a few times last January, I’ve been seeing you regularly since…” she looked down at the notes on her desk “…mid-May. During that time, we’ve been dealing with your very natural reactions to your sister’s death, the breakup of your relationship with Ben, the loss of your job, your mother’s move out west. You’ve had an extraordinary amount to deal with. Your anger and sadness over these issues are nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  “I’m not embarrassed. Honestly.”

  “Then why are you focusing so much on the whys and hows of your current situation, rather than what you’ve been dealing with for the last half a year?”

  I looked down at my lap, and, realizing I still wore my leather jacket, shrugged it off. “Here’s the thing. If we talk about those issues that I was dealing with, if we talk about the depression I had, I might remember it, right?”

  “That’s possible. Memory is very tricky.”

  “Then I don’t want to talk about it, because I don’t want to remember any of it.”

  “Mmm-hmm. Why is that?”

  “Would you want to remember that kind of a time? A time when you could barely get out of your pajamas?”

  No response from Ellen.

  “Look at me,” I said, holding up my hands in sort of an offering. “I don’t need a doctor. I feel great. Why would I ever want to recall that time?”

  “I understand what you’re saying, but I think it’s dangerous to push that time away.”

  “I’m not pushing it away, I’m just not trying to remember.”

  Ellen looked at me for a long moment. “I think in your situation, that’s the same thing. However, I see your reluctance to discuss this issue, and so I’m going to let it go. I just need to ask you a few questions for clarification.”

  I took a breath and nodded, relieved that she was going to drop it. As I waited for her to talk, I noticed that one of the lamps on the desk was sending a yellow ring of light over Ellen’s blond hair, and that the headband had some kind of glitter on it. Maybe she did have those stilettos in the closet, the martinis in the fridge, after all.

  “Are you still taking your meds?” she said.

  I thought of the prescription bottles I’d found in my apartment, the ones that still sat in the kitchen cabinet. “No.”

  “You know, you really must wean yourself off those. You can’t just stop.”

  “Too late. I don’t even know the last time I took one.”

  “Just so I understand this completely. Do you not recall anything at all about those months?”

  “Nothing.” Great, could we move on here?

  Ellen read something in her notes. She seemed to be going over and over one particular entry.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Something had been troubling you,” she said.

  “I know, I know—Ben, Dee, the job.” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. Were we going back to that again?

  “Well, you were very caught up with Ben. You seemed to think that if you could get back together with him, the rest of your life would improve, a notion I tried to rid you of. But there was something else that was bothering you, as well.” Ellen glanced at me, that expectant look on her face again.

  “What was it?” I blurted out.

  She shook her head slowly. “That’s the thing. I don’t know, either. I can’t be sure, but I often felt that you were holding back something. In fact, you essentially admitted that you were. You said you wanted to focus on the other issues, primarily your breakup and your desire to reunite with Ben.”

  I thought of what Laney had told me on Saturday—that a few weeks after my birthday something sent me from a sitting-around-in-pajamas kind of mood to an antidepressant-popping-and-stalking-Ben kind of mood.

  “When did you first note that I was holding something back?”

  She glanced down at the desktop. “May 22.”

  A few weeks after my birthday.

  “I didn’t tell you anything else?” I asked.

  “I wrote here that you were concerned about someone’s opinion of you.”

  My mind sped through a host of possibilities, the people whose opinions I cared about—Laney, Ben, my mom. But I’d talked to Ellen about all of those people.

  “I got the distinct feeling,” she continued, “that you were focusing so much on the other issues that we’ve already mentioned because you didn’t want to deal with this person or their opinion.”

  “What was the opinion?”

  “I can’t say. You wouldn’t tell me anything else about it, and ultimately, I had to respect that. It’s possible that it was just a minor issue, and I’m making too much of it.”

  She smiled at me again. Something about the sympathy in that smile made me realize that she didn’t think it had been such a minor issue at all.

  The next day, as I rode the El to Cole’s place (a starting time of ten instead of noon) I puzzled over my talk with Ellen. Whose opinion was I so concerned about, and what was that person’s opinion of me? I gripped a silver bar for balance, the train careening around a corner, feeling a wave of dizziness, an ache in my head. The faces of the other commuters seemed terrifyingly blurry for a few seconds. I could see the red of a man’s baseball cap across from me, but it was fuzzy, almost as if the bloody color was undulating. I increased my grip on the bar, afraid of falling to my knees. But then, just as quickly, the dizziness was gone, the other people on the train restored. The dull throb
in my head was still there, though. It was just exhaustion, I decided. I’d been going over the same questions all night, barely sleeping more than a few hours. Laney had no guesses for me, but she agreed with Ellen that there was something I’d been concerned about, something I wouldn’t tell even her, something that had made me more depressed than I had been.

  The train lurched to a stop and a pimply, teenaged kid vacated a seat. I saw another woman about my age eyeing it, but I dived and managed to grab it before her, fearing another dizzy spell.

  As I settled into the curved plastic seat, I couldn’t help but notice a coolness inside myself. It was separate from my headache, and it wasn’t due to the temperature in the train because they had the heat cranked up. The cold feeling was coming from something Laney had said last night.

  “I don’t know what it was,” she’d said on the phone, “but you hinted that someone had given you some news you didn’t like, and it was after that you got worse.”

  Some news you didn’t like… I’d gotten an opinion from this mystery person, and according to Laney and Ellen, that opinion had sent me over the proverbial edge.

  The whole thing scared me to death. I could deal with the other issues. I could hear about my birthday night with Ben and feel sad and pissed off. I could think about the fact that I’d lost my job and feel rightfully bewildered and, once again, pissed off. I often thought about Dee—crying when I found a sweater I’d borrowed from her or one of the little notes she used to leave me when she’d stayed the weekend. These issues produced all sorts of emotions in me—sadness, anger, confusion—but despite my hesitations, none of them threatened to return me to that dark place Laney had told me about. None of them truly scared me. This other thing, though, this thing I wouldn’t tell Laney or Ellen or apparently anyone, terrified me. If it was enough to make me lose it at the time, couldn’t it do the same thing now? As Ellen had said, memory is tricky.

  The train stopped at the last station in the Loop, and most of the remaining passengers disembarked. An older, very dirty man with a collection of plastic bags stuffed with God-knows-what fell into the seat across from me and gave me a lecherous grin. I gave him a defiant stare before I looked away. That was my usual tactic—show ’em you’re not scared, but don’t tempt ’em.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man groping around at something in his lap. I prayed it was one of his bags and not his fly. Still, I wasn’t scared of the guy. Leery, maybe, but not scared. What I feared was that other thing that lurked in the city, in my mind somewhere.

  “You’re late,” Cole said, when I walked into his loft at ten-fifteen. He looked pointedly at his watch, then returned his attention to the equipment he was setting up in neat little rows on the butcher-block table—lenses, filters, film.

  “The El,” I said, not bothering to explain further. In fact, I had a perfectly legitimate excuse, since the train had come to a stop in between stations and sat there, inexplicably, for twenty minutes before we started moving again. I couldn’t bring myself to relate this tale to Cole, though. It seemed beneath me. When I was at Bartley Brothers no one looked at me strangely if I came in fifteen minutes later than usual. No one even blinked, because I was a professional, damn it. I felt a little sinking in my chest. I wasn’t a professional now. I was nowhere close to being a professional photographer, and that’s why I had to take Cole’s shit if I wanted to get anywhere in this business.

  “Sorry,” I said, mostly under my breath. “Won’t happen again.”

  Cole didn’t even acknowledge my half-assed apology, which made me want to retract it. Instead, I made a quick decision to do my best today. None of this thinking that the job was a crappy little gig that a twelve-year-old could do. None of this hostility toward Cole. It was entirely possible that if I changed my attitude for the better, so would he.

  “What’s on the schedule for today?” I said, throwing my leather jacket over the chair and walking into the studio.

  “Commercial shoot.” Cole was dressed in yet another pair of black pants and heavy black biker boots.

  “You want to tell me what it’s for, what we’re shooting exactly?” I made my voice pleasant and curious.

  He shrugged. “I’ll tell you how I want to approach it, because I’ll need your help.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want to approach the subject like a canvas.” He looked up at me, and there was a flicker of excitement in his eyes.

  “Okay,” I said again, not wanting to ruin the moment, but not having a clue what he was saying.

  “This isn’t like the Spring Clean shoot, where the company knows exactly what they want the ad to look like. I’ve got a little more room to work with, you see? So I want to start out with the set as minimal as possible and then build the picture from there, element by element.”

  I nodded again, excited now myself. “It’s like you’ll be painting on film. You’ll be adding different strokes, different props and backgrounds until you build the picture you want.”

  Cole gave me the first genuine smile I’d ever seen. “Exactly.”

  I felt a silly swell of pride. “What do you need me to do?”

  “I need you to take down the white seamless and set up the light blue.” He gestured toward the dark end of the loft, a place that was jumbled with old furniture and posing stands and other assorted crap.

  “Seamless?” My mind whirred through all the information I’d gleaned from my photography classes. Nothing called “seamless” came up.

  “Yes, the seamless.”

  When I responded with a blank stare, he pointed to the area where Michelle and her friendly washing machine had sat the day before. A long roll of white paper, about eight feet wide, hung from two silver posts and was unfurled onto the floor, creating a curved backdrop of sorts.

  “It’s the backdrop,” I said.

  “Well, right, but it’s called the seamless. I need you to get the one that’s light blue like a robin’s egg. Can you do that?”

  I nodded again, annoyed at his patronizing tone, determined to make a go of it before I asked for help. Besides, I was still excited about this ad that we’d be working on. Maybe it was for Tiffany’s! Robin’s-egg blue was their color, after all. Maybe they’d bring little goody bags for us, and I’d get that chunky chain necklace I’d always wanted. Maybe this was one of those really artistic ads that Cole would win an award for. Possibly I’d win one as well for being an assistant. Did assistants win awards like that? Probably not, but my contribution to a Tiffany’s ad might be something I could talk about at interviews and put in my résumé.

  I spent the next twenty minutes enthusiastically picking through rusty chairs, discarded film canisters and a host of strobe and back lights until I found a large roll of light blue paper. It was so long that just carrying it through the rest of the junk made me feel like one of the Three Stooges with a ladder. I spent another twenty minutes trying to set up the damn thing like Cole had said, but the silver stands were too tall, so even if I could launch one side up and get it to stay, I wasn’t tall enough to secure the other side.

  Finally, I called him over. “It’s too high.”

  “I don’t want it high. Didn’t I say that?”

  “No.”

  “I think I did.”

  “You didn’t.”

  We glared at each other.

  “Well, anyway, it’s quite simple.” Cole lifted the paper off with one hand, and using hand cranks that I somehow hadn’t noticed, slid down the top section of each pole so it was about four feet high.

  “You can’t even have a model sitting on a chair in front of this. It’ll be too short,” I said.

  Cole looked it up and down, then glanced at the notes in his hand. “It should be fine.”

  The buzzer sounded a few minutes later, and soon the elevator opened. A thin man with rectangular tortoiseshell glasses and long black sideburns burst into the room.

  “Are we ready?” he said, marching straight toward me and
my seamless. “Cole, everything ready?”

  Obviously Cole and this guy had worked together before because Cole only nodded, a movement the sideburns guy couldn’t see, since he was looking at me.

  “Artie,” he said, fast approaching me, holding out his hand, “I’m Artie Judd.”

  I grasped his hand, and he gave me a dry, quick pump of a handshake. “Kelly McGraw.”

  “Nice to meet you, Kelly. I’m the art director for the shoot today.”

  “An art director named Artie?”

  “Yep.” He gave me a pleased smile. “Perfect, huh?”

  “Sure.” Over his shoulder I saw Cole roll his eyes.

  “Has Cole told you what we’re doing today?” Artie said. His gaze stayed on me only a moment before it fluttered around the room, looking over my seamless, the lights, Cole’s table of equipment.

  “Not exactly.” I glanced over Artie’s shoulder again and saw Cole dip his head toward his notes, almost as if he was hiding.

  “Well, it’s very exciting.” He moved around me and began playing with the seamless, rolling the sides up a little higher, but accidentally ripping the paper at the ends where I’d taped it. “Public service ads are our way to contribute.”

  “Public service ads?” I had a flashback of the well-dressed herpes sufferers in Laney’s marketing campaign.

  “That’s right.” He had completely dismantled the seamless as I’d constructed it, and the paper was now crumpled. “Sorry about that, but it’s got to be sturdier. Animals are notoriously unpredictable. Everything’s got to be solid, you know?”

  Artie pushed past me, moving back toward the elevator. “Where is the handler?” he said in Cole’s direction, but he didn’t seem to notice when Cole said nothing.

  “Animals?” I said, with a smirk in my voice. “This artistic picture you’re going to build element by element is a public service ad with animals in it?”

  Cole shot me a mean look that made me quash the laugh rising inside me. “If that’s your attitude, you’ll never make it as a photographer,” he said. “You’ve got to take work where you get it, and you’ve got to do your best no matter what the subject.”