Eight Girls Taking Pictures (49 page)

Two years and they
almost
live together, they joke. Emile has a place in Berkeley that they
mostly
share, when he isn’t
mostly
sharing her studio in the City. After the show in New York, Jessie won a Guggenheim Fellowship, had a catalog published, had another show of her
Violent Rooms of Love
series, got another small grant, enough to photograph statues in France for a month, resulting in a show called
Women on Pedestals.
She received a trio of honors, including an artist-in-residence at a college in Rhode Island that she hadn’t yet decided to accept.

They didn’t officially live together, much less marry, because “no right-thinking radical feminist would buy into the current cultural hegemony of marriage,” which did nothing for women but expect them to accept and submit. However, living together wasn’t far off from marriage, and while Jessie and Emile never rejected the idea of an open relationship, they never agreed on it either. Maybe this was why she was hesitant to bring up his recent behavior, which included not always being where he said he would be. She wasn’t the kind of person to keep track of anyone, and now she wondered if her trust was just naïveté. The confusion for her was that he was still the same Emile. Loving. Supportive. Making her laugh.

They also never discussed the possibility of one of them having the greater success, and that one not being Emile.

“Is Berlin your given name?”

Jessie had been struggling with distraction, taking a few frames of Cymbeline on the blue chaise.

“It’s Saltman.” It was sometimes odd to have a camera to your eye as you were talking to someone.

“Were you married?”

Jessie gave a little laugh. “Never. Um, maybe tilt your face, to catch the light—there.” Working with the glare off eyeglasses is always a bit of a trick.

“Warum heiβt du Berlin?”

“Sorry? I don’t speak German.”

“I asked why you’re called Berlin.”

“Why should I continue the patriarchal theft of my identity by keeping my father’s name?”

Cymbeline shifted on the chaise, placing her feet on the floor.

“Besides, most of the women I know have rechristened themselves: Chicago, London, Shanghai, Cairo—”

Cymbeline burst out laughing. “You all sound like an atlas.”

Jessie laughed along with her.

“So, you aren’t close to your father.”

“You know, he supported everything I ever wanted to do. He never once said that I had to marry and have children.”

“We sound as if we had the same father,” said Cymbeline.

“It’s a conflict for me because I don’t care if a man opens the door for me. I mean, I don’t see it as patronizing. My consciousness-raising group? Forget it. All that talk about men crying, and the Masturbation Issue, and the Good Girl Tradition, the Orgasm Issue, and there is no way that I will ever be down enough to taste my own menstrual blood like Germaine Greer.”

“I’m still thinking about the men crying.”

“Yeah, they’re only ‘good’ men because they’re ‘in touch with their emotions.’ ” Jessie dropped into the chair next to the chaise.

“I thought it was because they were being asked to partake in the menstrual part of your program.”

“Can I tell you something? My father is a thousand times better to women than those men who cry, but I won’t even bring him up with the other women because I don’t want to hear how I have false consciousness when all I know is my dad is a great dad. I’m not a feminist because of my father. It’s the larger world. Geez, if society followed my father’s example, the women I know wouldn’t even be having these conversations. I believe absolutely in equal rights—it’s the other stuff—”

“The blood and the orgasms?”

“Yes! That I don’t care about. I think I changed my name so the other women would know how deeply I feel about legal abortion and equal pay and employment . . .” She fell silent.

Cymbeline touched her hand. “Sometimes I don’t understand how you young women can get it so right and so wrong at the same time.”

When Cymbeline said she needed a break from posing, Jessie knew the older woman understood that Jessie’s concentration was shot. Jessie followed Cymbeline out to the garden, where every so often the summer air revealed the nearness of the sea.

When Jessie mentioned that she recognized some of the plants from Cymbeline’s pictures, Cymbeline said, a touch of tension in her voice, “Tell me that this day isn’t about some lovers’ quarrel.”

“Actually, we rarely fight,” said Jessie.

“I’m not one of your feminist friends,” said Cymbeline.

“It’s true.”

“Then why don’t you tell me what else is true?”

So Jessie said, Emile is so good at his profession he makes it seem effortless. He can be funny without strenuously trying to entertain, and he understands the art of flirting and self-deprecation. He isn’t petulant
or prone to silent fits of ill temper. One of his most winning characteristics is his endless interest in everything.

And his most dangerous trait is his interest in everyone.

And that there is no drug like the moment he discovers you.

She said that when she fell in love with Emile she believed she had found that mythical love of equals, thinking, Oh, we’ll travel and takes pictures, side by side. He didn’t care if they had children—odd fact: He was great with kids—or if she knew how to cook. He was a bit of a neatnik and accustomed to cleaning the kitchen or doing laundry.

“You know what I love?” she said. “To watch him iron.”

It was Emile’s blurring of traditional roles that bolstered Jessie’s confidence in their chances to make it work, though it also distanced her from the women’s art collective, all those women with their complaints that began with the words “He never—” The women seldom noticed that Jessie didn’t join in when their talk turned to the angry weariness at the physical caring for another human being over the age of consent.

Once or twice she tried to defend Emile, only to have her group say that she was a victim of “double-consciousness,” W. E. B. DuBois’s idea that one is always looking at oneself through the eyes of others. You are an insider and an outsider, politically and socially speaking, all of which has the effect of keeping you from your own true identity.

Only sometimes she wondered if her true identity was Lover of Emile. The lover, not the loved. Though, she added, she was loved. He made her feel loved.

“I heard of you before I met you,” said Cymbeline. “I hadn’t heard of Emile.”

“I know.”

“Is that the reason for your joint women’s project?”

“No. No. As I said, the BelleFemme Project is about showing that art can be without gender, you know.”

When Cymbeline didn’t say anything, Jessie could feel her throat start to constrict; ashamed if she should dissolve into tears, turning this bad day into a dreadful day. She said softly, “I don’t always know where he goes.”

Cymbeline sighed. “You think that offering up these women—these women that you are sharing with him, will fix things.”

“I don’t know what I think. I only know that I love him and I can’t lose him and I can’t say that to anyone.” Jessie caught her tears before they fell. “You must think I’m foolish.”

“I was married for nineteen years. I don’t think anyone in love is foolish.”

 • • • 

The bedroom was as modestly furnished as the rest of the house. As Cymbeline sat on her bed and pulled a worn copy of Dawn Powell’s novel
The Wicked Pavilion
from the lower shelf of her bedside table, folded papers stuck between the pages, she said, “I was offered an assignment at
Vanity Fair
in New York City. Our kids were gone, and I had been a faculty wife for so long I almost forgot I ever had a life before wife and mother. I was forty-nine years old.

“So, here I was with my heart’s desire and Leroy wanted me to wait until the term was finished—another fifteen days—before coming to New York with me. I told him they wanted me now, and he could meet me later, but they wouldn’t wait. He said that if I left, our marriage was over,” she said. “It wasn’t my choice to have to choose.

“This is what I wrote him from the train to New York,” she said, handing one of the pages to Jessie.

She read, in bits and pieces:

Why in the world would you think that it puts you in a ridiculous position for me to go away for a time on a working job. . . . I am sure you are bitter about my methods of working my exit, but with your attitude nothing else was physically possible for me. I begged too many times for co-operation and permission. . . . I cannot get myself straightened out through idleness—I have never really learned to play—and if I did want to play, I could not afford to. . . . I assure you I do not value myself so highly as a photographer as you seem to think, but neither could I venture afield unless I had some confidence in my ability. Only by putting myself thru it, as it
were, can I really think that I am worth anything to you or the family. . . . Try not to forget that I have always really done the essentials, have always been at home after school, when the children came, that my work has not been as distracting as most wives’ occupational bridge, that I had always had the hope that in place of going down in the scale of worthwhileness and achievement as most hausfraus do that I was going up. . . . I really thought I had the right of an adult to undertake an obligation. I never thought for a moment that a person so liberal in all else would deny me this.

Cymbeline said to Jessie, “I never think anyone in love is foolish. We do the best we can.”

Jessie handed the letter back to Cymbeline.

She said, “But you must know that this project is your affection’s swan song.”

 • • • 

They had just returned to the backyard when the women heard a car pull into the driveway. The seven-foot wooden fence that divided the driveway from the back garden obscured the identity of the car, but Jessie recognized the radio station and the funny little wheeze that accompanied the cutting of the engine. She felt the thrill she always felt at the prospect of Emile: something she thought would lessen over time but continued nonetheless, and mixed in with relief.

The car’s back door opened, and Jessie could hear their camera gear being dragged across the leather seats before the door of the BMW was slammed shut.

It wasn’t until she heard the soft footsteps of the driver walking to the front door that Jessie knew it wasn’t Emile. There was no aural evidence of a passenger.

“Hello? Hello?” The woman’s voice was slightly husky, the vocal equivalent of an unmade bed.

“In the back,” said Jessie, standing with Cymbeline near the fence.

The gate opened to reveal a barefoot girl in a thin cotton sundress that didn’t cover much territory, more youthful and fresher than the
quality of her voice suggested, struggling with the assorted bags that Jessie recognized as belonging to Emile: the camera, the tripod, the strobes, the umbrellas. Upon seeing Jessie at the gate, the young woman said, “Thank God,” and handed off the bulkiest, heaviest bag.

“She’s a little gorgeous, isn’t she?” whispered Cymbeline, as the girl moved past the women, dropping everything else on a lawn chair. The appearance of this girl unexpectedly altered the entire relationship of Jessie to Cymbeline. Whereas they had spent the first half of the day in a conversational thrust and parry, trying to find the common ground that so many women seem determined to find when meeting other women for the first time (in this case complicated by the shy hero worship of Jessie for Cymbeline), they now had feelings of long friendship, a kind of connection, summed up by the word
we,
when Cymbeline whispered to Jessie, “Do we know her?”