LIGHT TRAVELS INVISIBLY THROUGH THE AIR AND COMES
to rest upon a surface—cloth, a jewel, skin. It streams through the tall loft windows, it pulses out of the hot halogen bulbs, or flares off shimmering office towers blocks away, reflecting sunlight a million miles old. Fill light, soft light, key light. Boxes of light, doughnuts of light, balloons of silk light. Light bounces off the brilliant aluminum-skinned umbrellas. Rim light, backlight, eye light. Light as palpable thing, shaped and sculpted, aimed and trimmed. Present and absent, echoed and burning. Illumination that lasts almost a full second, or that bursts with a pop, leaving only the tiniest trail of a sizzle tattooing the retina.
Adam holds a black meter up to Rena’s face and calls out cryptic numbers to Paul. Paul spins dials on his camera and then, almost absentmindedly, snaps as the strobes pop one after another. Polaroids are yanked and flipped onto countertops and apple boxes. More huddling. Rena, with scoured face and brushed-out tresses, frail and looking slightly lost, stands alone on an enormous sheet of paper that loops onto the loft floor like a royal train.
Adam shifts the skeletal light stands and reflective sheets of white board and makes sculptures Rena can’t understand. She tries to smile. If she were standing here without her clothes she could not feel more naked. No one says a word to her. This is a big misunderstanding. In another minute a TV camera crew is going to jump out from behind a wall. Ridiculing me, the farm girl, the knucklehead. “Surprise, it’s all been a big joke!”
Paul abruptly scrunches his brow into his viewfinder, then looks up as if angry, as if to glare at her. He stares through her. He wipes his forehead. Rena is hungry again and her temples throb. Fatigue migrates up the insides of her skull like a toxic fungus. When she was washing, there was a spot of blood in her jeans. Is she still bleeding down there? Was that boy touching her only ten hours ago? This isn’t working out.
“Do you like music?” Paul is bent over a set of Polaroids, checking them with a loupe. A wizard fishing through his box of spells.
Rena catches herself biting a cuticle. Her mouth is dry, gluey. Why are they torturing me like this? I’m ugly and too tall. Obviously, this guy Paul is bored to shit. Now, he wants to stop and listen to music. His assistant is grinning at me like a blond monkey. She says, “Look, I should probably get going. I’m supposed to be meeting my brother.”
“Rena? Honey? Just keep your shoulders straight, face the window and then turn your eyes to me. No, keep your head turned. Just your eyes. Yeah, that’s it.” He still isn’t looking at me. “What kind of music do you like?” Like a doctor when he hits your knee with the little rubber hammer. As if he doesn’t really care.
“I like dance music.”
“Oh, so do we. Adam?”
Adam puts aside the Leica he’s been loading, strides to a mini-sound system scattered into a corner of the loft. He squats over a pile of CDs. His bleached yellow hair is cut short and ragged and he is incredibly skinny. On his T-shirt is emblazoned:
PIG BOTTOM
. And so far, he hasn’t said a word. For twenty minutes Paul has been barking orders at him and Adam has done what he’s told. Adam’s smile is stiff, like the grimace of a beaten animal.
“You know what would be great, Rena?” Paul is studying her. He pesters his camera.
The exhaustion gnaws into her leg muscles, but she wants this, and she’s screwing it up. She says, “I’m not really good at this. I’m sorry.” She catches a scent of Dallas in her hair. The memory of the night grabs her like a demon, stroking her all over, blowing its sweet breath over her belly.
“No, darling, you are. You are. I know you are. You just have to relax. And listen to me when I say something.”
“How do you know I’m good at this?”
“When I saw you eating that Egg McMuffin. I could tell just by the way you move your mouth. Now listen, honey, just pretend you’re at home, in your bedroom or whatever and just, you know, dance. Can you do that for me?” The music wells up under Paul’s words. Moby.
“Just dance?” Reba likes Moby.
“Like we’re not even here. You’re alone. Dancing by yourself. Like you do in your bedroom. You know what I mean?”
How does this guy know I dance in my bedroom? One thing is for sure, I’m not in my bedroom right now, I’m a million miles away from it, just like I always wanted to be and maybe this isn’t going to last, but fuckit, here it is, dance to it. The Moby girl is calling her like a siren. Just dance and let this guy throw you out and go home to Billy and let Billy holler. And then you can go to bed and sleep. But for now, fuckit, dance. She opens her eyes and sees Paul and Adam watching her and it’s all so stupid. Suddenly she can’t stop laughing. And now Paul is smiling, too! And then she says, “No. Not like this!” and she covers her face, peeks out and he takes her picture again!
“That’s very nice, Rena!” He’s shouting over the music.
“This is so retarded!” She thrusts her arms by her side in frustration, Paul takes a picture. She points at him. “Stop!” He takes another picture.
“No, you’re wrong! It’s wonderful. You’re wonderful. You’re doing just fine. Just keep moving. Dance. Let the music get inside you. And then don’t forget to look at the camera. Eyes, it’s all about your beautiful eyes.”
He’s telling me he likes me. He said, “Wonderful.”
The strobes flash, saturating her with blinding whiteness. She moves and moves again, Adam cranks the volume and she lets it all go. For the second or third time in twelve hours she’s having feelings she can’t identify—a combo platter of fear, excitement, depression and confusion.
But the camera doesn’t know feelings. It collects the movement of the muscles and the eyes, records the shadows of structured illumination and tells a story in chapters
1
/250th of a second long. If a girl is laughing, that’s the story. If she’s got wonderful hair and she’s laughing, then she’s laughing about something wonderful.
“You were such a good girl! You want to look at the digital stuff? Adam, show Rena the digital.”
Rena peers into the back of the camera. It doesn’t seem like much but it doesn’t look terrible, either. “I’m not so bad, am I?”
“No, you’re not. You’re very pretty. We’ll develop these and see what we’ve got. I think they’re going to be super. Really wonderful.” A buzzer sounds. “Fuck, they’re here. Rena, leave me a number and I’ll call you tomorrow. OK?”
“I don’t have a number. I’m…I’m moving.”
“Oh, shit. Then you have to promise to call me tomorrow, OK? Please don’t forget?” His voice rings hollow, promising nothing.
“No, I mean, of course not. And thank you.”
Voices echo from the tiny elevator outside. Paul greets them. “Hey! Look who’s here!”
A throng of young women and men invade the room. As Paul flies past Rena he gives her a peck on the cheek, “Tomorrow,” then disappears into a back room. The new people give Rena the once-over, but no one says hello. Slicing kiwis and mangos in the kitchen, Adam seems to have forgotten her. So Rena leaves.
She lets the pathways of the city determine her bearing. I’m one of them now, the people I used to watch from the farmstand. Most of them know where they’re going. Do I? Rena passes a woman flopped down on the filthy sidewalk, her back against a wall, head bowed, a piece of cardboard in front of her. What does it say? “I am sick, anything helps. Even a penny.”
The nice leprechaun is just fooling with me. Screwing with my head. What do I think, I’m going to be a model? Ugly girls don’t become models. Stupid fucking girls don’t become models. But still, I could stay here. I could become one of these people. I could be like that girl on the bench in the park. I could do a lot of things, I don’t have to go home. It isn’t home anyway. Home is where the heart is and I don’t know where my heart is. I could stay here. The city will take care of me.
A sunburned boy ambles by. He asks Rena for a cigarette. He’s shoeless and shivering. His pupils are minuscule, his skin raw and crusted with crud. Rena says she doesn’t have a cigarette but before she’s finished her sentence, he’s moved on, muttering. He’d never actually looked at her.
RICK ABANDONS HIS FAMILY. AS USUAL, HE’LL DRIVE,
find a place to stop, get out of the car and smoke a cigarette. Laura always smells the tobacco if he smokes in the car, so he has to get out. Not many things make her angry, that does. He’ll have his cigarette and come home with some sort of wretched peace. Why am I so nuts? The smallest thing pisses me off. Why? Last week it was the lint in the dryer, this week it’s a burned-out lightbulb in the bathroom.
He finds himself in the old suburb, blindly zeroing in on his parents’ crummy split-level. Mom sold it years ago. And now good old Dad lives in Arizona behind the walls of his gated community, where his other children and his other grandkids come visit. Dad reinvented himself a long time ago, minus Rick and his mother, and it makes him happy.
During his own visits to the desert, Rick makes a commitment to spend one whole afternoon with his father. This usually means driving around, hitting golf balls, drinking. When they depart the compound Dad waves to the security guard, a black fellow from Haiti. Probably doesn’t even know the guy’s name. Doesn’t matter as they roll out into the day, Rick knows his dad feels secure. His life is composed of rituals: rinsing off the car with a garden hose, stocking up on frozen food and toilet paper, watching HBO, folding the laundry, fretting over the high electric bills, schtupping his wife, maybe.
Rick and his dad chop their way through a short round. Rick can beat the old guy now, but it doesn’t make any difference. They both know who’s the better golfer, the better man. They both know who has the hairier chest, the bigger biceps. In the clubhouse, Rick gets wasted on whiskey and soda and expounds on intra-abdominal pressure and its effects on hemorrhoids. The kind of practical medical advice he’s expected to give the old man when he visits. After three stiff drinks, the ride back to the gated community is a pleasant blur. As they enter, Dad waves to the Haitian guy and Rick waves, too.
Contemplating the cacti and the shiny parked Mercedes and Chryslers within the complex, Rick thinks of his mom living alone in an overheated apartment building next to a Dunkin’ Donuts. She doesn’t drive anymore and uses a laundry cart as a walker on her way to the supermarket. She eats a lot of donuts, doesn’t have cable. Rick makes a point of visiting her once a month to partake of her lousy cooking.
Rick’s parents of today are nothing like the parents Rick knew growing up in Bergen County. That mom and dad of childhood past were not white-haired and feeble but volcanic and stubborn. They were spirited, hard-drinking people who prosecuted arguments with religious fervor, screaming and yelling and slamming doors so hard the little house shook. The place itself was just a kennel for mad dogs and Rick made a run for it as soon as he could get a driver’s permit.
He drove away to college and never came back. Years later, when he feels confused, he returns and lets the toxic fumes of his childhood osmotically infect his memory. Memories are known quantities, like old friends, familiar. He thinks to himself, yes, pain. But interesting pain. And mine. The one thing I really, really own.
When Rick was small, boys from down the street would come by and say, “Can Rick come out and play?” When they got him alone they would punch him in the head or kick him in the balls. When he’d complain to this mother, she’d say, “Tell your father.” When he told his father, the old man would lecture him to go back and hit them first before they could do their damage. One day, as he was being taunted, Rick jabbed a fist into the nose of one of the “bad boys.” While the kid cried and bled all over his jersey, an older brother slapped Rick in the face until he fell to the ground, then kicked his ribs and made him eat dirt.
In Rick’s old neighborhood, when it snowed, the plowed drifts by the side of the road turned gray within hours. In the spring the beetle-gnawed trees lining the streets would not bud and leggy weeds infected the lawns. No one cleaned up the dog shit. With its splintery telephone poles and patched asphalt, the neighborhood discouraged happy thoughts. Rick’s crappy little house with its torn window screens and blistered green trim was like a set in a movie about disadvantaged people.
The only respite was the sky blue ranch house across the street. The cheerful tint would buoy Rick up. It said to him, “Happy people exist, they live across the street in that blue house.” In fact, the people who lived in that house were Catholics and before Rick was five he had made the association between the sky blue of the house and the Vatican. He knew that inside that house, the air didn’t stink of canned air freshener and Winstons the way his mom’s did. He knew that their furniture was new and unbroken. He knew the parents were usually in good humor, always busy. And the little girl who lived there, Louise, was very appealing. Like her folks, she was always smiling. She had a scrubbed, clean look and she wore fresh clothes every single day.
Until Rick was six, before his neighborhood pals began to beat his ass regularly, Louise was his only playmate and the two children spent hours tripping around her neat patch of lawn or exploring the ancient railroad tracks that ran across a field behind the subdivision. They were equals, she and he, colleagues in their nascent world of lost teeth and scraped knees. Rick knew she was smart because she could tie her shoes months before he could. Rick was very happy when he was with her. In fact, he was as in love with her as he would ever be with anyone.
A mangy hedge grew alongside Rick’s house. It had been planted there to cover the mystical electric meters. Invisible to casual passersby, a slender dog path ran between the house and the hedge, creating a perfect hiding place for Rick and Louise. They spent hours in their “secret place.”
Rick knew Louise was more than a friend. She was a girl, and Rick had heard interesting things about girls. So Rick bribed Louise with his prized possession, a small cherrywood pirate’s chest. In the chest lay trinkets he had collected from the bubble gum machines at the supermarket. Ornate tin rings, baby Troll Dolls with crazy hair, plastic charms for a nonexistent charm bracelet. Rick let Louise take her pick in exchange for one precious favor.
And so, behind the privet, where no one could catch them, little Rick took his first step down the long winding road of feminine mystique. He would squat so his eyes were only inches from the navel of his little girlfriend and watch as she wrestled her diminutive trousers and cotton panties (freckled with miniature blue blossoms) down over her white thighs.
The texture of the combed cotton, the blue printed flowers, the scent of fresh laundry burned onto Rick’s memory. And of course, the soft flesh, unblemished. The essence of femininity. The essence of beauty. Vulnerability. Softness. Mystery. As Rick knew intuitively, this precious perfect thing was it—the apple in the Garden of Eden. This was the central problem of the female, the puzzle of the girl, the nexus of all mystery, the conundrum to end all conundrums.
Would he be punished for this evil deed? Was someone coming, would he be caught? But no one knew. No one saw him seeing her, examining her, playing doctor. A lone robin redbreast hopped among the dandelions, cocked his head. Maybe this was Louise’s Catholic God-man keeping an eye on things? Could someone’s God cross the street if the sin were bad enough?
Six months after Rick learned Louise’s secret, she moved away, as if to get back at him. From then on, it was all about fists and dirt-eating and Rick missed her very much.
Now Rick sits in his car in the midst of the older and poorer neighborhood. He thinks, I loved that little girl. No, better than that. She was my friend. But he can’t remember how it felt. The neighborhood is strangely empty today, refusing to entertain him. He starts the car and drives home to his wife and children.