Eight Girls Taking Pictures (47 page)

There was affection between the two.

“I’ve seen your work in Berkeley, in that group show,” said Sam. “The lady in the Chinese pajamas with the sable cuffs? Man, that picture just kills me.”

“In his real life, Sam is a photography student. And a very good cook.”

“Yes, as long as it’s something, like, without too many moving parts,” he said. “You know, it really is great to meet you.” He pulled out a dining room chair for each woman, settling Cymbeline in without drawing attention, before moving into the kitchen.

The Rolleiflex camera that sat amid the jumble on the end of the table was classic and nostalgic and beautiful all at once. A compact box of metal and ground glass with wheels and hand-crank film advance moved in a backward and forward motion. The back of the camera had a metal inset chart of f-stops. There were tiny silvered numbers and concentric circles that resembled a target and a reflective double lens cap that was tossed to the side of the camera.

“Go ahead,” said Cymbeline.

Jessie loved the weight and scale of the Rolleiflex in her hand. She gazed down into the viewfinder to scan the room, finding, as she expected, the image perfectly clear yet reversed. The image was true (this is the room, no doubt) and not true (everything is backward). It was hard for Jessie not to love a camera that told the truth and lied.

“I’m sure it’s unnatural to adore cameras as much as I adore Rolleis,” said Jessie, returning the camera to its original spot, then gently collapsing the magnifying glass and viewfinder.

“My second one,” said Cymbeline. “I’ve had that since ’fifty-seven, though the screen’s been replaced. My eyes,” she said. “I bought my first one for portraits.”

“Did you have a studio in San Francisco?”

“No.” She smiled. “I didn’t have a studio at all—I had a family. Two kids and a husband who taught art at Mallory.”

“I’m a Mallory girl,” said Jessie.

“Had you been there from 1920 to 1934 our paths may have crossed.”

Mallory College was a pleasantly situated girls’ college, nestled in greenery, not far from San Francisco. There was something insular about
it; the girls used to call it Brigadoon, in reference to the enchanted Scottish town surrounded by a mist that separated it from the real world. The town was accessible only once every hundred years, and anyone who entered believed they had traveled back in time, for each Brigadoon day was the equivalent of a real-world century. None of the townsfolk could leave the village, lest the place vanish forever.

Other people referred to the college (predictably, Jessie felt, insultingly) as the Nunnery, in part because of its architecture, which resembled cloisters. The verdant grounds that were perfect for meditation. And partly because it was a women only institution.

“I graduated in ’sixty-five.”

“Nineteen sixty-five,” Cymbeline said wistfully. “Living at a college was almost like living in suspended time-space where you girls never changed while I just got older.”

“But—” Jessie caught herself before insisting that Cymbeline “wasn’t old” when she realized that her meaning could be mistaken. In truth, Cymbeline seemed physically very old (she was in her late eighties), but she also had that air of amusement that touched her facial expressions without coming into full view, the intelligence in her eyes, and that sort of playful timelessness that often attaches itself to artists. It isn’t that they refuse to age; it’s their connection to nearly everything around them (how else to have grist for the mill?), seldom missing a thing, that keeps them contemporary even when the body is clearly breaking down.

Sam set glasses of lemonade before them.

“I’ve applied for grant money to print up a barrel of glass plates that I’ve had in storage since I moved to California, in 1917. That’s the real reason for Sam. That he does all the rest is my good luck.” She sighed. “All those glass plates—I wonder if I was any good.”

“The Mallory portraits were good,” said Jessie.

“They weren’t mine.” Cymbeline took a sip. Her face, for the first time, lost some of its softness. “They were made by Angel Andrs,” she added quietly, “that pompous ass.”

“I thought you were friends. Didn’t you start f/64 together?”

“F/64 was before all those ridiculous commercials he’s starring in these days. God, even when I was younger, Kodak tried to sell to young women. Now they use an old man who likes young women. He’s a good photographer, and I don’t care about the girls—but it’s an affectation that I keep telling him he may want to rethink.” She took another sip of lemonade.

“Even years ago at Mallory, people were falling all over themselves over him. You see, Leroy taught painting at the college—I was the faculty wife with the kids. That’s how they saw me—not as someone with a university degree in chemistry, or a professional photographer who once had her own studio. I had already been to New York, even took a picture of Stieglitz—and it was a girls’ college after all. I tried to keep up, but it was hard with a husband and kids and all those students always coming over for dinners.

“So, I got my first Rollei and starting asking the girls to sit for me. I couldn’t pay them anything—living on a teacher’s pay—but I did their portraits for three years. Just to keep my hand in, as they say.

“One day the dean called me to ask if I had a phone number for Angel Andrs. I didn’t think anything of it until they hired him to take portraits of the girls.” Cymbeline’s face relaxed, her lightness returned. “As I said, Mallory was a timeless place. Even my resentment is timeless.”

Though they laughed, Jessie could imagine the disappointment Cymbeline must have felt. The anger that she’d had to tamp down, lest she be labeled ungracious or, worse, envious. Watching a man hired to do the job that you were already doing, then having your reaction called jealousy would’ve been too much.

“You know,” said Jessie, “I didn’t want to say it before, but I did feel that the Mallory pictures weren’t your best work.”

Jessie asked if she could use Cymbeline’s phone. She called Emile’s apartment, which was more like a catchall for his things since he, for all intents and purposes, lived with Jessie. No answer. She called her studio. When he failed to pick up, she told herself that he must be on
his way and that traffic from the East Bay could sometimes be tricky, even if you were only coming over from Berkeley; she told herself that he was coming from Berkeley and not somewhere else, and who knew if there was an accident or bridge problem or some other mishap. As difficult as it would be for her if he forgot, she allowed that possibility on her mental list.

When she returned to the table, Cymbeline said, “Let’s get this done before lunch.”

“Could we wait a bit longer?”

“For what?”

“Emile Pasqua. The photographer?”

Cymbeline said, “Are you asking me or telling me?”

“He’s the photographer.”

“Then who are you?” Irritation colored Cymbeline’s voice.

“I’ll also be taking your picture.” Jessie wanted to add that Emile had the other cameras and their equipment, except she suspected that Cymbeline, with her naturalist approach to portraits, wouldn’t understand why Jessie couldn’t take the photo anyway.

Cymbeline reached out to Jessie, bringing her wrist with its wristwatch closer to her face. Her touch was dry and cool. She released her. “I’m not much good later in the day.”

“I thought he’d be here by now.”

“It’s my age,” said Cymbeline. “Mornings are better. You graduated college in 1965, so I don’t expect you to understand.”

Her sharp comment made Jessie realize how much she looked up to her. All the women in her women’s art collective loved Diane Arbus, and the other young women coming up who were photographing street kids, or making self-portraits in which they impersonated men, or movie stars. Jessie liked them, too, but they didn’t influence her the way Cymbeline did.

And here is the funny thing about artistic influences: They don’t always come from the person whose work you love best. For example, Jessie very much liked Cymbeline’s pictures, but they weren’t her overall favorites. The importance of Cymbeline, for Jessie, was that she was
the one who made photography possible for Jessie, both in her own mind and in the external world. She influenced her. And someone that important, that meaningful is not someone you want to think less of you. Again, she cursed Emile.

“I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”

“What is this for again?”

“It’s called the BelleFemme Project, which is a reference to the fashion magazine
BelleFille.
Also a critique—”

“Beautiful Woman instead of Beautiful Girl. I’m already starting to see where this is going.”

Jessie caught something that she couldn’t quite grasp, partly because she spent time in Berkeley and was used to the uncontested feminism of her women’s art collective, and to the men who claimed to be supportive of equal rights, though it wasn’t unusual for them to proclaim one thing and expect something else entirely, making them suspect when push came to shove, as it were. Women were breaking in all over the media, with the culture quickly catching up. So to hear even the slightest sound of cynicism—especially from someone like Cymbeline Kelley—was perplexing.

But Jessie pushed that aside as she explained the BelleFemme Project, born at that dinner party.

“The idea is for Emile and me to photograph the exact same women, either on the same day or within the same week. The gender of the photographer kept secret.”

“Hmm,” said Cymbeline.

At the dinner, everyone had expressed admiration for the “conceptual purity” of the project, so simple, so straightforward. And who better to do it than Jessie and Emile, who had been a couple for a little more than two years, were within the same generational boundaries (she twenty-eight years to his thirty-four years), and were both photographers who enjoyed portraiture? And that they were lovers would only add, they were sure, to “self-discovery.” There was the ensuing talk about “the male gaze, and the female muse.” Jessie said that she agreed to this project to prove the audience couldn’t tell the difference between the male and the female
hand on the shutter, and to finally lay to rest this infuriating idea that men were serious artists while women were hobbyists. The idea that
only
men are willing to sacrifice everything, accepting solitude and silence for their art, as if women wouldn’t give almost anything for the same solitude and silence to do their work. This, predictably, set off a round of vocal affirmation by the women, accompanied by what seemed like agreement on the part of the men until they began their equally predictable qualifications and rationalizations.

Jessie could have added that women were too busy keeping house, tending to the garden, and the children, and trying so hard not be branded “selfish” to fight for their need for aloneness to create. Selfishness is the crime of anyone who isn’t supposed to think of herself first: women, mothers, wives, childless women, women, career women, women, women with only one child. Women. Women with messy living rooms. Women who didn’t get to the market or the dry cleaner. Women who wanted to work. All selfish. But Jessie wasn’t at a point where she said everything on her mind in mixed company.

She did say to Cymbeline, “I guess it’s to show that a woman photographer can be indistinguishable from a male photographer. Or, well, maybe it’s the opposite.” She really hadn’t worked out if she was after difference or similarity because she hadn’t worked out which would cause men to value her as an artist.

The women in her collective would say that she cared too much about a man’s approval.

Sam placed sandwiches on the table, along with a cold asparagus salad. Jessie knew he had been listening as he worked, and she admired his silence; no man she knew would’ve allowed this conversation to continue without offering his two cents’ worth. No man she knew would be making lunch either, not without some applause for his efforts. Sam not weighing in was the most intriguing comment of all. Maybe it was his youth. He looked to be twenty.

“I gotta jam. I’ll be back this evening,” he said to Cymbeline.

They ate in silence after Sam left.

“I’m so sorry,” said Jessie. “Emile isn’t usually like this.”

“What’s he usually like, then?” Cymbeline looked at Jessie, who felt judged with those magnified eyes upon her.

“On time. Mostly.”

“Yes. But what’s he really like?”

It felt as if she would open a floodgate if she were to honestly answer Cymbeline’s question, What’s he really like?
He’s like a habit you don’t remember developing. He’s like a fever, and the best day you ever had.

“He’s a good photographer,” said Jessie.

“As good as you?”

“Well, I suppose that’s subjective.” Her answer was reflexive; anything else was too risky. Not that Jessie was often asked, but to say “Yes” or even “No, I’m better,” would be to knock the earth off its axis—no woman could stay with a man less accomplished than she, and if she did stay it would be almost impossible to freely admit it. It was pressure from within and without. The women Jessie knew might complain about all the ways in which their men’s careers superseded theirs, but secretly they were all a little relieved. Weren’t they all raised in families where everyone depended on the earning skill of the man in the house?