Eight Girls Taking Pictures (50 page)

“So, I drove over here,” said the girl, “in Emile’s car? He wanted me to bring his stuff, you know, to meet him here?” Her voice trailed off as she took in her surroundings, searching for him at the same time. “He said he’d be here?”

Without warning, she swooped down on Cymbeline, giving the elderly woman a hug of such spontaneous affection that Cymbeline was startled into hugging her back. The photographer’s stature seemed that of a child next to this tall, willowy girl who commanded attention with the sheer force of her Nordic beauty. “I hate to ask, but can I get a drink of water? I’m parched.”

“Inside,” said Cymbeline, whose eyes followed the sylphlike girl as she went into the house.

“Jesus,” said Cymbeline. “She’s like something out of Greek mythology. The sort of being that lives in a stream or a wood and has Hera turning everyone into livestock. Who is she?”

Jessie shrugged.

The girl called out to ask if she could use Cymbeline’s phone, and Cymbeline told her to help herself, then said under her breath, “Just don’t expect Emile to be on the other end,” which caused Jessie to laugh. Which caused Cymbeline to laugh.

The women were sitting on the painted metal slider; Jessie closed her eyes, enjoying the sun for a moment.

Then they heard the girl on the phone laughing.

“You know,” said Cymbeline, “I sometimes think things are harder for young women now than they were in my time. Oh, we could also be shamed into doing things that didn’t really benefit us in the name of modernity.”

“No one’s forcing me to do this project.” Jessie shifted her position, sitting up just a little straighter.

“Yes, well, maybe that’s the true burden for women—progress—the thing that appears as liberation when it’s really just another way for men to get what they want. Not what you want.”

“I do want to photograph all the different women,” said Jessie.

“Except the women aren’t all that different, are they?”

Before Jessie could think this through, or argue with Cymbeline, they were joined by the girl, hurrying into the garden, her beautiful body collapsing next to Cymbeline in a pose of forceful exhaustion, setting the slider in motion.

“I’m Ibis,” she said to Cymbeline, whose smile said everything about the girl’s name being Ibis. “Short for Scarlet Ibis. Like the firebird.” These days, everyone seemed to be rechristening themselves with names like Zephyr or Free or Love Butterfly—as if everyone under twenty-five was engaged in a child’s game of pretend. It seemed no one wanted to be an adult. As much as Jessie wanted to comment on “Ibis,” she knew that her own self-chosen name of Berlin more or less disallowed commentary. Then again, when Cymbeline was young, what about all those Italian and Eastern European names that entered Ellis Island and came out anglicized? Sometimes, Jessie thought, only in America is identity a choice and reinvention an imperative.

“I’m Jessie,” said Jessie to Ibis.

Ibis laughed her wonderful, throaty laugh. “I
know
who you
are
.”

Of course, thought Jessie, Emile.

“Your house is really cool,” said Ibis. “I could live here really easily.”

“Did you talk to Emile?” asked Jessie.

“Not exactly,” said Ibis, her eyes now closed and her lovely face tilted toward the sun, light mirroring light, much in the manner of Jessie moments before. Except for the light mirroring light.

“And?” said Jessie.

“Oh, he’ll be here,” said Ibis. She smiled a wide smile, lowered her face.

“Fuck,” said Jessie softly, then, louder, “We’re losing the light.”

Cymbeline struggled from the swing with help from Jessie and Ibis.

Jessie noticed that Ibis’s bright mood had seemed to darken slightly when the two women were left alone, Cymbeline in the house.

“He
did
say to meet him here,” said Ibis, her tone a little wounded.

The childlike moue of disappointment, the posture of a gangling adolescent.
Except the women aren’t all that different, are they?
That’s what she meant, thought Jessie, those women, they’re all young.

“He wants to take my picture,” said Ibis. “I’m supposed to be part of a project he’s doing.”

A bruise, already beginning to yellow, showed on the tender underside of the young woman’s upper arm as she stretched in the sun, her long legs dangling over the arm of the swing. Catlike is such a cliché, but even more cliché, thought Jessie, is the colorful bite mark on the sweet softness of the girl’s outstretched arm. She’s very young, this girl, maybe (maybe) twenty. Maybe.

Cymbeline had correctly guessed Jessie’s reasoning when she’d agreed to this dual photography experiment: It would allow her to keep Emile to herself. It wasn’t about gender, or the male gaze, or who can better read a woman; no, it was knowing Emile’s charms and history, and trusting that, if she encouraged him to take pictures of all the girls he wanted—all those nude girls, or girls in diaphanous hippie garb; girls in bedrooms and sitting rooms and sunrooms and gardens. In the bath, in a pool, sleeping in the tall grass—then he would be satisfied. It would be all the possession he would need.

Look,
she was saying, I won’t be like those other women you’ve left brokenhearted with your wandering.

Here,
she was saying, I’ll go those brokenhearted women one better and stay by your side. I’ll admire the girls you admire and see what you see and want what you want. It’ll still be you and me, babe.

She remembered the first lines of Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency”:

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.

Jessie turned toward the house to see Cymbeline coming outside, the Rollei dangling from its leather strap. Cymbeline dropped the camera in Jessie’s lap, saying, “You don’t need him. You just think you do.”

Jessie found Ibis sitting on the concrete stairs leading up to the cottage. She looked distressed, as if she had begun to cry, then stopped herself. Turning toward Jessie, she said, “He’s not coming, is he?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

Ibis said nothing as Jessie, moved by the young woman, this (maybe) nineteen-year-old girl, nearly a decade younger than Jessie, who foolishly fell for an older, involved man. Jessie sat close to her, their bodies brushing against each other, and the sweet, floral scent of the girl mingled
with the jasmine and roses of the garden, punctuated by the exhaust and stray cigarette smoke of a passerby, and that elusive whiff of ocean. An embrace was more than Jessie could manage; sitting side by side on the narrow stairs as they watched the street was her limit.

“C’mon,” she said after they’d sat quietly for several minutes. “Let’s take your picture.” She lightly patted the girl’s back—barely touching her really, the memory of the bruised love bite still fresh in Jessie’s mind. “You’re too lovely to waste.”

“Sometimes it bums me out to be so pretty.”

Earlier, such a comment would’ve sent Jessie into a dark mood. Now it simply seemed silly that her attempt at comforting her lover’s mistress should be met with such undisguised self-love; the girl was very pretty.

“I’m serious,” said Ibis. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

This made Jessie laugh to the point where she found herself reclining on the sharp little steps. “No,” she said between breaths, “I guess I don’t.”

The girl blushed slightly. “God, that sounded terrible. And you’ve been so nice and, God, I mean, I think you’re very attractive, you know, for your age.”

“Oh, Ibis, you must stop before I turn on you.” She stood, extending her hand to the girl.

Beauty was something that the feminists in the women’s art collective didn’t like to talk about, unless it was to disparage men who liked “that sort of thing,” implying that the attraction to beauty was just another failing. But Jessie wanted to say, If you’re an artist, all you think about is beauty. Yes, it was possible to have a more personal definition of what you found exquisite, but there were some beautiful things that most people agreed upon: a cathedral, a house, a bridge, a nature vista, a necklace, a garden, a gown, a girl.

You couldn’t politicize beauty, no matter how much you wanted to; and you couldn’t shame people for being entranced.

It was understandable how a pretty girl could be taken up, then dropped, or not listened to, or accepted into something for all the wrong reasons, or be perceived as being something she wasn’t, or treated as purely ornamental, and that must carry its own class of loneliness.

Then again, thought Jessie, it’s like the I’ve-been-rich-and-I’ve-been-poor-and-rich-is-better problem. Who cries for the pretty girl? Isn’t that why she has to cry for herself?

“Let’s go find Cymbeline,” she said.

As they walked back through the cottage, to the garden where Cymbeline waited, Ibis said, “I’m sorry,” though Jessie didn’t have to ask why. In the same way she didn’t have to ask if Emile slept with Ibis. She knew that Emile was sleeping with Ibis; Emile slept with them all.

 • • • 

The photograph was playful. Ibis, a happy nudist, stood in beautiful contrast with the dark-clothed Cymbeline, her beloved Rollei dangling from her neck, her white hair escaping her bandanna, her sandals and socks and surprise at coming upon such a lovely creature, a nymph in her unkempt garden, the girl as surprised and curious to see Cymbeline as Cymbeline is to see her.

One was short, one was tall, one was a photographer, one was a model, one was old, one was young, one was clothed, one was nude. Jessie used Emile’s Rolleiflex, speaking to the women as she peered down into the viewing screen, the camera no longer between her and her subjects. For the first time, Jessie felt not only calm but content. It was one of those moments of perfect happiness, all the more wonderful because it was unexpected.

It was so perfect, in fact, that when Emile’s knock on the front door broke into the flawless choreography of the afternoon, no one was moved to answer it.

Stellamare was the sort of small town that wasn’t exactly charming unless you considered pushing against any kind of encroachment of late-twentieth-century modernity “charming.” Mostly, it was inconvenient, slightly eccentric, often insular. It was nestled in the wine country of Northern California, in the midst of other, more promising towns, which is why Stellamare wasn’t anyone’s destination. Paradoxically, it was this general lack of interest that transformed it into a kind of travel trophy for the wine tourist always on the search for a “discovery.” By the early 1980s the wine country above San Francisco was so overrun by visitors who glamorized agriculture according to its crop (grapes = sexy; cabbage = not), and fetishized enology and viticulture, that a casual mention of any “out-of-the-way village” at a dinner party was the perfect little conversational bagatelle, a souvenir if you will, that set you apart from your fellow winophiles.

None of this changed the basic fact that Stellamare was a rural, dual-class region of weekenders and workers, with the workers being mostly Hispanic and the weekenders being mostly not-Hispanic. The townspeople shared traits with both groups.

Everyone in and outside of Stellamare knew the local banker, Wallace Westerbrooke Lux, a graduate of Stanford and Yale who’d served in World War II and had the world at his feet upon obtaining his degrees in economics and finance (with lucrative job offers in San Francisco and New York) but chose to open up a farmers’ bank in Stellamare.

His business sense was unerring, even though at times his practices seemed counterintuitive and unorthodox. However, the people with whom he dealt felt him to be a reliable and honorable man. When asked why he’d settled so far from the financial thick of things, he said that money had its charms but his heart belonged to gardening. And to the
construction of the occasional odd little assemblage (bones, claws, jewels), often under a glass dome or arranged inside a box.