PHOTOGRAPHERS by Daniel Pearce
She lets him in as though she knows him – places a hand on his shoulder and applies just enough pressure that he feels the permission to enter. And in he comes, huffing with each slow step like the small impacts to his feet are enough to wind him. He stops when he’s reached the center of her living room, which is also her bedroom, for there is only one room in her small apartment. The ceiling fan swipes its small circles just above his head, distributing whatever cool air her old AC unit can drum up. He doesn’t offer to remove his shoes.
“Welcome, welcome,” she says in a chipper voice. That she must adopt such an ingratiating tone so that the two of them can comfortably speak annoys her.
“Thank you for having me.”
He clutches a bouquet of dyed flowers, upside down at his side like a closed umbrella, but does not yet offer it. Because he is wearing a raincoat and because his thinned, graphite hair is so wet and matted, she assumes it is raining, but then remembers that she can see the weather through her window, can see that the night is cloudless and still. Through the imperfections in the glass, the sky looks like the rainbow‑inflected blackness of an oil slick. He is merely sweaty.
Beneath the rattle and hum of the AC, a siren somewhere. The sound has become a commonplace – there are stretches of time during which sirens ring without interruption, with one attacking as another decays – and yet each seems to her a potential harbinger of collapse. Maybe this is the first siren to respond to the final call, is the thought, every time. Either her world is ending, or a cat needs to be rescued from some backyard tree.
As the siren nears, then passes, she notices an improvement upon the sound’s familiar design: its high end more piercing, its bass more disruptive, the sound making a hostage of every available frequency. Hearing this new siren reminds her of walking through Times Square so many years ago only to discover the faint and pixelated screens replaced with ones of radiant, crystalline picture – a worthless technological advance representing someone’s private fortune.
Another siren, this one more antiquated, follows. Over his own heavy breathing he seems to take in the sound, unsure of whether to be disturbed by it.
“Every minute now, practically,” he says, which earns a nod from her. His unverified name, the bluntly indistinct Will, suits him and therefore seems correct and true, as though the name were the resonant pitch of his specific body. (The name she has given for herself is Cindy when actually it is Beth.) He still cannot meet her eyes, perhaps unable to come to terms with his own fantasy, but he appraises her space, boldly now, nodding with recognition at posters of Klimt, fridge magnets of Manet and Arbus and Picasso and Stieglitz, enamel pans hanging from wall hooks, urn-like vases in a row atop the kitchen cabinets. And while he appraises, she sees that at least his face is unmenacing, and the greater head sweetly spherical, but with the natural indentations and folds of a potato. Still, there is a vague core of darkness to him, as there is to anyone who wants from you some hard, unspoken thing.
Which is all of us, she supposes, and so she tries to see him as harmless. If he were a vegetable, which would he be? Something starchy comes to mind, but that seems too easy. The online quizzes that ask and then answer such questions are to her no better or worse than astrology: false but useful frameworks for understanding a patterned world.
“These are for you, obviously,” he says.
She accepts the bouquet from the extended arm, and when he adds that the cost of it will be deducted from her total payment, she gives him a minor smile, just obliging enough to convey that she’s gotten the joke. She steps onto her footstool to retrieve a vase, giving him a chance to look at her without having to account for his looking. She fills the vase with water, cuts the stems, and pauses to admire the arrangement. (“How pretty,” she says.) The whole sequence is pure reflex. But the flowers are pretty in their way: chrysanthemums of pale synthetic purple, supplemented with sprigs of something wilder.
“I’m glad you like them, Cindy,” he says.
She thumbs the stone in the pocket of her jeans, which she keeps there as a charm – small and brown, smooth as obsidian, with a stark ridge not sharp enough to cut a fingertip but sharp enough to impart sensation.
“So – what’s your vision for the evening?” she asks.
“I know this may surprise you,” he says, grinning proudly to himself, “but I would like to go on a walk.”
This does not surprise her. He has hired her in order to take her picture, one and only one picture, but that is where the constraints begin and end. The absence of constraints is highly exploitable, which is largely the point and is built into her rate. However, the photographers – for that is the easiest thing for her to call the men, and they are men almost without exception – often don’t want to do things that upset her, often don’t even want to feature themselves in the images that they’ve painstakingly imagined beforehand. She can tell from their fastidious directives, from the detail of the poses they try to instruct her into, that they’ve left little room for improvisation. The resulting images, she suspects (as she avoids looking at them even when invited to), are nervously wrought and, as art, rather bad, but they approximate what had before been, in their private particularity, unseen and unseeable, and so they obtain whatever baseline value one confers upon something original. Most photographers use their phone cameras. The process can take hours, and because she is regularly disarmed by the photographers’ defiance of her early impressions of them, she has ceased guessing whether a given man will be supplicating or pushy, or will shift unexpectedly from one into the other. Their demands, too, are unpredictable: She has been instructed to pretend to be asleep in bed, dreaming her most pleasant erotic dream; she has been asked to style herself as though she were her own mother, even though the photographer knew nothing of her mother; she has been brought to the beach at dawn during the worst of winter, and then directed to remove her clothing and jump once into the air (very high, he’d specified, so that no sand or snow would appear in the bottom of the frame) as the ocean frothed behind her. Therefore, no, being asked to go on a walk is not a surprise, but what follows the walk might be.
“Yes, alright. And I take it I won’t need a raincoat?”
“Not at all,” he says, grinning as he flattens his damp hair with a hand. “I always wear this – the weather changes so suddenly.”
This is her first time outside today, and the unfiltered air produces a sensation in her mouth not unlike that of sucking on a penny. Particulate matter – dust, or ash, or an industrial powder that someone should have added water to but didn’t – moves through the air without clear direction, neither rising nor falling, like sand in unsettled water. She brings the collar of her T‑shirt above her nose.
Will looks back and forth down the street, a bit too nervously – if a face could fidget, then his face is fidgeting, she thinks. He has the pale, caged look of a veal calf, or at least how she imagines a veal calf, and this arouses a small tenderness for him as they begin to walk, although the arms of his raincoat produce an irritating squeaking sound – eek eek eek – as they chafe against his trunk.
“This way,” he says, placing a hand against the small of her back, and they turn the corner from her residential street onto the commercial avenue. He stares straight ahead, indifferent to the procession of storefronts, the window displays and lighted signs as natural and uninteresting to him as riverbanks; the street to him is just a corridor.
The garbage bags lining the sidewalk have all been methodically torn open, each tear in the same place, and sheaves of dismantled cardboard boxes stand wedged between them. There appears enough cardboard in these bundles to cover the surface of the earth. They walk past several posters for a film Beth would never choose to see, about a game of dodgeball during which every loser is decapitated, his severed head then entering circulation as yet another ball; the poster features one such ball careening toward the camera, its mouth in a grimace. Play like your life depends on it. Decent advice. She can almost hear the Vincent Price voice.
The air has cleared somewhat, allowing her to drop her collar, and on they walk, past several booted cars, all in such bad shape that if they weren’t abandoned before then they likely will be now, so serious are the fines required to liberate them; past empty stoops leading up to gated doors; past stray packing peanuts and tears of crumpled newspaper, the seeming remnants of some great unboxing; past police cars, which have the aerodynamic newness and buffed beauty of cars she might actually want to own.
They pass her regular bodega, with its jutting yellow awning, and one of the sweetfaced guys who maybe works but probably just hangs out there is standing in front of the entrance, waving at her from across the street. She waves back, keeps walking. Will nods at the man and gives him the pitying smile of someone declining to roll down his window for a panhandler. But there’s fear and shame in Will’s expression, too, and the uneasy coexistence of these qualities gives him a sad sort of inscrutability. If he were a forest animal, which would he be? The question feels productive, but no answers come. He clasps his damp hand onto the back of hers, the action making her think of a crab getting purchase on a small rock.
They turn another corner, and they are on a quiet block studded with streetlights whose expensive bulbs flicker from within to give the impression of oil-powered flames. The street becomes a slight grade, veering up into higher and higher property values, and Will slows a little from the physical demands of it, digging his fingers, his little crab limbs, into her hand for support. To ask where they are going is something she knows she should do but doesn’t, and she instead watches as the style of townhouse changes over the course of the block, lightening from brownstone to limestone and becoming steadily wider and more impressive, the property lines now announced with blunt iron gates behind which are mature trees, bushy with leaves of healthy green, although everything looks a little sickly in the night. In sequence, the homes look like a drawing of one organism’s staggered evolutionary progress, having begun in a gaunt two-story and now culminating in a freestanding corner mansion, large and covered rampantly with ivy.
Will digs harder into her hand, less for stability, it seems, than to remind her that he is there, paying, and what had been a tolerable silence curdles into a stiff, anxious one. She can feel her impulse to be solicitous, to make soothing small talk, overpowering her complete uninterest in him as they move through a crosswalk, continuing uphill, and she rubs her stone, placing the pad of her thumb on the edge of it.
“What do you do, Will? We can start with that.”
“I work in software development,” he says between big exhalations.
His words thud, and she doesn’t touch them, the silence no longer feeling like her responsibility. Silence but for distant car brakes, and the eek eek eek of his raincoat sounding off.
“I know that line of work sounds lucrative,” he continues, “but it’s not quite what you’d expect. I could never afford one of these places.”
She can tell that he thinks such blandly humanizing disclosures will reassure her, but their effect is mostly neutral – they do little more than define him as someone aware of the discomfort he might arouse in others. “Well, it’s a job,” she says.
“It is a job, Cindy,” he says earnestly. “That’s the winner’s approach right there: identifying positive attributes of a situation you’d like to improve.”
And playing like your life depends on it, she thinks.
“When I started, I gave an honest shit that I was mastering a valuable skill set, to use the term of art. There’s a pride that comes with that, to be sure, but the best aspect was the assurance, the ongoing assurance.”
A man bundled in a wet-looking blanket shuffles past them, face hidden, and Will waits until the man is out of earshot before resuming.
“What a depressing thing, a skill set. When I chose to major in computer science, the people in my life praised me not for my talent or my drive or any of the small things people like to get praised for, but for my practicality.” He pauses again, this time to wipe his sweaty forehead with the back of his free hand, which only seems to add a different type of wetness. “So many people had my same idea, though, and because no one doing what I do has to be anywhere in person, you end up competing in larger and larger pools. National, international. Turns out that leaning into the demands of practicality only feels good if it ends up advantaging you in some way. I guess. Even my English-language proficiency is less and less an asset. But you’re right, it is a job.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sure things will get better.”
“They will or they won’t,” he says curtly. He has worked himself into an anger, its abrupt appearance like the hiss of a flare. She avoids his quick little rodent eyes, newly active, searching her face. She looks to her surroundings for any indication that she is not alone with this man, but finds only houses, their occupants missing or asleep.
The living room windows on this block are gaping panels of translucence – billboards for privacy. The houses here make it seem as though there is no premium on space, no scarcity in this dense city where even the site of a tree stump can command millions, and the houses’ delusional insistence upon their own modesty is to Beth the ultimate sign of their owners’ affluence. It is comforting to look at them.
If she were a house –
Many of the homes in the historic downtown district where she grew up, about three hours north of here, look similar to these, but they weren’t as valuable then and are even less valuable now. Even as a child, location location location made sense to her, insofar as location location location was something her childhood home didn’t have. And yet the home had nonetheless felt opulent to her, which is to say it felt like just more than enough. At seventy-four, her mother still lives there, the same house, and it still looks not unlike the houses that appeared a block or so back: a slender row house with vertiginously high ceilings and floors that have been refinished countless times but that groan at even the lightest touch. The size of the house makes no sense for her mother – all those stairs to get from living room up to bedroom and back down again to kitchen – but she can’t bear to give it up; moving into a smaller place would, she always says, feel even lonelier than remaining in this big empty familiar home, where she can fill each evening by moving her brittle birdlike body from room to room: reading the Times in what was once Beth’s father’s office, and sometimes handwriting letters there; streaming new hourlong dramas on the living room TV; making vegetable casseroles that she can carve up and freeze and thaw and rebake. Check back with me in five years, is how Beth feels, for the impracticality of it all – the excess of space, of stairs – will catch up with you eventually.
The two of them are no longer very close; her mom only knows that she does something in the arts. She can never quite tell whether her mother’s incuriosity about her day‑to‑day life is respectful of her daughter’s privacy or willfully ignorant – whether it is at root a sign of compassion or of cold self‑interest. Regardless, best to let her mother’s life keep its unalloyed simplicity, a simplicity threatened only by loss and aging. Because, while not wealthy by any stretch, her mother is fine for money, one of the lucky retirees whose schoolteacher pension hasn’t been reneged, and because of this she’s able to spend her days volunteering at a nearby animal shelter and tending the vegetable beds in the back, and to send Beth envelopes of four or five mint hundred-dollar bills every few months, a practice that gathers together anachronisms – snail mail, hard cash, the use of money to express love – in a manner that makes Beth ache dully and inexplicably with sadness each time an envelope arrives.
A gust rips along the street, whistling through the leaves and causing them to thrash about so that the whole block is alive with movement. The trees are spaced with such metrical evenness, making each one appear no wilder than a housecat, but as their tops heave and spasm in the wind they seem less a decorative contrivance than an outpost of the natural world.
Will marches on, determined, tilting into the headwind, the walk still a functional passage. Her hand in his like it’s something he’s forgotten he was holding – a receipt, or a set of keys. His breathing has become steady and manageable, and the folds of his brow have deepened further, as have the crinkles at the outside corners of his eyes, all of which engulfs his face in shadow, as if reminded of an unpleasant emotion he hadn’t accessed in a while.
She massages the stone in her pocket; maybe he’s still sore about his discussion of his work, or about his mention of the unaffordable houses, even though her own thoughts have moved so far past that. There is the loneliness we all feel, she thinks, but there is something that happens to loneliness in men – the substance transfiguring itself not into tenderness but into a heat-seeking resentment. If he were approaching her from that tender place she might be able to comfort him, which is what he thinks he wants, she is sure, and the comforting would be not just a private service but a public one. Yet his is a loneliness that he white-knuckles, helping no one, not least himself.
“Where are we going?” she asks, her voice at its gentlest.
“There it is, just up ahead,” he says. The fact of an actual destination is a relief. He points toward a house as big as any, surrounded by scaffolding and opaque plastic wrapping that flaps loudly in the wind. The house is set far back from the street on a wide plot where the absence of any neighboring houses deprives Beth of an immediate sense of scale, and it has an old-world grandness that takes shape as they approach, all cantilevers and spandrels and widow’s walks and bay windows. The house itself an index of such barely remembered terms.
“It’s been empty for months. I think they cleared it out for a remodel a while back, but not much has happened from what I can tell. Money troubles, or someone died, or they could afford to simply leave it and not worry.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Not sure – I pass the house on the bus to and from the supermarket, and day after day I see that there’s no one there, right there, to say that it isn’t mine. Not that I want it, exactly. But to have a place this big and private in the city, and to have the good or bad fortune to just leave it empty. Something so valuable that’s not off limits – A mystery there for the taking.”
They are close enough to the house that they must have transgressed some boundary, whether one dictated by law or intuition, and they step closer still. If the house were occupied and unwrapped, she’d be able to make out complete faces in the living room: lilywhite fathers and mothers petting the fire-warmed cheeks of their children, everyone acting out all the little harmonies one imagines when presented with an infrastructure of bliss as spacious and old and expensive as this house, which is so near to her now that she can run her fingertips along the rough bars of scaffolding, can peel back the wrapping to see that the living room is dark and unfurnished, with not a soul inside.
“We’re going in” – something she knew he’d say before he said it. She stays close behind him as he hoists his weight a few feet up onto the scaffolding and juts a forceful elbow into the living room window. The sound of glass breaking is a stock sound, a window shattered no different from a beer bottle chucked at the ground. No one in the city ever pays it any mind. He clears away some of the shards that straggle in the frame and, once inside, reaches out to her with his damp hand; she takes it and steps in. His potato-like head glistens in the dark. If he were a natural disaster, she thinks, he would be a flood.
“Please, we’re not taking anything, are we?” she asks.
“No, no, we’re only spending a quick bit of time here.”
His smile catches whatever light has managed to leak in from outside, and it looks hard and carved. If he could die right now so that another person, picked at random, could be assured a long, happy life, she would say yes. And yet instead of dying Will is standing here, in this large, empty living room, with his knowledge of their shared future hidden behind that hard, stupid smile. Because supervision is no longer possible, she knows that fear is the obvious and correct thing to feel, but what she feels most acutely instead is impatience.
“What now, please.”
“Now? I’ll have you do something, and it will be nice because I want you to respect me and not be disgusted by me, but it will also be obligatory because I take pleasure in being able to command you to do it. Isn’t that what happens?”
“So what is it you’re asking me to do?” Whatever curiosity she feels now is a matter of self-preservation. Play like your life depends on it.
“I’m not asking you to do to anything, Cindy. I’m telling you to smile. Just smile – that’s it.” His voice takes on a slight shrillness with each angry enunciation. “I was going to tell you to do more, but I’m nice.” He may be playing, but he is not the winner, she thinks. She gives him a smile that glimmers with its own mercenary nature, and she hears his phone camera give its imitation of a shutter’s click as the white flash fills the bare room.
Daniel Pearce has published essays and criticism in the Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB Magazine, and Bookforum. This is his first published story.