| MOON OF
THE DARK RED CALVES, by Tima Smith |
CHAPTER ONE
It was like that shot of
the billboard outside their bedroom in San Jose. The way she’d
tried and tried and couldn’t get that right either.
Hannah set the wet prints
on the drying rack, keeping her eyes on the street scene. Was
it something simple? Something she just wasn’t seeing?
She stared at the grainy
figure hunched under the black umbrella in the center of the
print. “What about you?” she said, “have you
got any ideas?”
But he stayed silent, huddled, his back to her. Probably not
all that thrilled about being caught in the rain for eternity.
Out in the hall there was
a spike of laughter above the steady buzz of conversation, and
she glanced across the studio just as an arm in a yellow sweater
gestured into the open doorway and disappeared again. There
was the smell of coffee, cigarette smoke. She rubbed at a little
knot of a headache starting in the center of her forehead. Two
things she needed. Caffeine. And a break from staring at this
damn print.
She pulled off her lab apron
and headed for the chatter and the coffee, but then halfway
across the studio she changed her mind. She had to get it right.
Tonight. She’d already spent too much time getting it wrong.
She flipped the switch for
the overhead spot, wondering how she’d managed to turn
it into something so absolutely ordinary when she could still
see, still feel the way it had been that morning – the
quality of the light, the stillness. More than a stillness,
really, a stasis. A shot worth being late to work for, worth
getting soaked for. As close as she’d ever come to Gerzon’s
Commandment. Thou shalt set into thy emulsion the hesitation
between two breaths.
“Well, George ... I
found your fucking hesitation,” she tossed her apron onto
a chair, “and now I’ve gone and printed away every
damn bit of it.”
She backed up until she
bumped into a worktable, sat down on the edge, rubbed the lingering
dampness off her fingers into her jeans.
Composition? Maybe. Cropping?
She fingered her watch. Break would be over in ten minutes,
then lecture until nine. She’d have time to give it one,
maybe two more tests before eleven. She yawned. If she could
stay awake.
Her eyes slid to the other
print on the rack, Robin sitting on a tire swing, looking more
thoughtful than any four year old had a right to. She studied
the serious face, the straight brown hair, the careful eyes,
tried to keep the conversation with Doreen McCauley from going
through her mind yet one more time. Hopeless.
“If you haven’t
already considered it, Hannah, maybe you should. It could be
something you’ve been moving toward without even realizing
it.”
Without even realizing it?
How could you move toward something like adoption without even
realizing it? She’d have realized, she was absolutely sure
of that. And she was just as sure she’d have made herself
stop. Because it was ridiculous, the whole idea. And all she’d
had to do was say that. Sorry Doreen, but it’s simply not
possible.
So why didn’t she?
A drop of water quivered
at the bottom of the print, fell into a puddle on the linoleum,
and she made herself focus on the street scene. She tugged at
the elastic holding her hair, winced as it caught, eased it
out and wound it around her finger. Should she let the focus
go soft? Or did it need more definition? A sharper separation?
Less gray?
She watched a steaming Styrofoam
cup slide to a stop near her knee, breathed in the smell of
the coffee. “Do you have any idea,” she said, “how
happy this makes me?”
“Just a little sustenance.
Though it is exactly the way you like it. Cream. Hardly any
sugar. And just so you’ll know what kind’a guy I am,
I left six very important prints on the drum to bring it to
you. All of which are going to hit the floor any minute.”
She turned her head. He
was leaning on the table, a Kodachrome of red hair, red beard,
blue eyes. “Saint Mead.” She picked up the coffee,
took a sip. “Which should mean you have a knack for miracles.”
He shrugged. “Nothing
people would travel to see. Maybe a card trick now and then.”
She waved a hand toward
the prints. “I’ll take anything I can get.”
He came around the table,
sat beside her. “The kid looks good.”
She took another sip of
coffee, swallowed it along with the urge to remind him the kid
had a name. “Robin’s not the one giving me fits.”
He folded his arms and she
looked down into the cup, letting him stare at the street scene
for her. The overhead spot made the fat in the cream glisten
and she blew into it, feeling the steam on her lips.
Out in the hall there was
more laughter. Somebody said “Bodacious!” She looked
across the studio in the other direction, at the bank of windows.
Two were open, and she put the cup to her lips, watching the
heat from the radiators shimmer up and out into the freezing
black air.
Mead shifted his weight
beside her and she imagined his reaction to Doreen’s suggestion,
took one more sip and set the cup down on the table.
He stuck his legs out, crossed one boot over the other. They
were real cowboy boots, boots he’d had since he was seventeen
and they looked it. But they were better than a woman, he said,
more reliable. Better than a dog even. And some day he was going
to be buried in them. In what was left of them. Her eyes traveled
up his leg to the tear in his jeans, to the patch of skin with
its dark blond hairs showing through. She could smell his soap,
along with the chemicals he’d been mixing, feel his flannel
shirt working up and down with his breathing. Weren’t things
like this supposed to be over quicker? All heat and fire, then
pfssst. She put her hand on his thigh, over the tear, and he
unfolded his arms, covered her hand with his.
“Cropping,” he
said. He slid off the table, went over to the drying rack and
squatted down. He pulled an index card out of his back pocket
and began moving it around the edge of the print.
Nothing he did made any
difference until she saw something so briefly she wasn’t
sure she’d seen it at all. “Stop ... go back to the
left.” She stood up. “Keep cropping in from that edge
slowly.”
He brought the card back
and started moving it inward in tiny increments.
“There,” she said,
“hold it right there.”
The card was slicing the
umbrella figure in half, moving the action outside the print,
shifting the focus to the void in the middle, to that almost
deserted street. And there it was ... the way she’d seen
it that morning. George’s glorious hesitation.
She walked over and rested
her hands on his shoulders. “Do you have any idea how long
I’ve been trying to get this thing right?”
“Do I get a prize?”
“Name it, it’s
yours.”
He stood up and handed her
the index card.
She folded it, stuck it
in his shirt pocket so it looked like a handkerchief. “Now,”
she said, patting it, “you’re presentable.”
“How long?”
She shrugged. “A month?”
Only his eyebrows reacted.
She went back to the table
and picked up her coffee. “Mead, don’t say it, okay?
Don’t even think about saying it.” But she knew he
was going to say it anyway.
“Hannah ... extreme
torture could not make me remind you that you have forked over
considerable wampum to hear what the Chief has to say and that
you are not listening to a goddamn thing he has to say.”
She rolled her eyes, lifted
the cup to him.
“Admit it, Hannah.”
He walked back to the table. “Wakpala’s right. Your
business is faces.” She took a sip, but the coffee wasn’t
hot anymore and she set it down again. “I mean ... do you
have any idea how hard I try to get that kind of connection?
The kind between your eye and her face?” He went down on
one knee. “Tell me how you do it and I’ll give you
my first-born. Hell, I’ll give you the whole fucking brood.”
She laughed. “You’re
nuts, you know that don’t you?”
“Yeah, well ...”
He got up.
“It just doesn’t
work the same way anymore,” she said, flipping a hand toward
the prints. “It used to be fun. The shooting, even the
darkroom.” She rolled the elastic off her finger, gathered
her hair in one hand and twisted the elastic around it. “Or
at least a good challenge. And now it all feels like a plod.”
“You looking for a
solution?”
She yawned. “Is there
one?”
He smiled. “I’ll
spell it … r o a d t r i p.”
“Mead …”
He put his hands on her
shoulders. “Just listen, okay? Because I really think it’s
in the cards. I bet the next time we go to Chin’s it’ll
show up in both our fortune cookies.”
“Oh pul-ease.”
“It’s walkabout
time, Hannah. I think we’ve both been here long enough.
Who knows where things’ll be in a year. We have a Grade
B movie actor running for president, for Christ’s sake.
And he might actually win. I don’t want to hang around
for that. I want to kiss this crappy winter and Boston goodbye.
Right along with nine to five and alarm clocks and deadlines
and traffic jams every other fucking block. I can stake us both.
We pack a few bags, we cancel our respective paperboys, we load
up the van.” He kissed her forehead.
She looked at the white
folded tip of the index card sticking crooked out of his pocket,
straightened it. “The thing is, Mead, most people don’t
even do it once. And nobody, at least nobody in their right
mind, does it twice.”
He bent down until he was
looking her straight in the eyes. “But like I keep telling
you ... I’m going to be there. It’ll be different
this time.” He smiled. “Infinitely better.”
“And like I keep telling
you,” she put her fingertips against his chest and pushed
him away. Gently. “That was ten years ago. The sixties
are over. And there’s nothing worse than a hippie gone
a little ripe.”
“Ripe shmipe. You got
a way to go girl before you start getting punky. And what the
hell’s to say we can’t do it? What’s keeping
either one of us here?”
She picked up the cup, walked
around the table and dumped the coffee into a rubber plant.
The leaves were covered with dust and she wiped her thumb across
one, rubbed it onto her jeans. “Tell you what,” she
said, “you go first and I’ll catch up.” She smiled,
tossed the empty cup to him. “You can leave a trail of
crumbs.” He grinned, caught it, tossed it back, but when
she grabbed for it, it bounced off her thumb and landed under
the table.
She got down on her hands
and knees and crawled in after it.
The noise level was rising. People were trooping back in from
the hall, but she could only see them from the knees down. The
windows banged closed.
“And what if I do go
alone?” He crouched down beside her. “What if you
miss me?”
She grabbed the cup. “Then
I’ll just have to get over it.”
“And what if you can’t?”
She sat back on her heels,
squeezing the Styrofoam until it cracked, knowing he was right,
that she’d miss him, and wondering how exactly that had
happened when they’d promised each other right from the
start it wouldn’t.
She looked at him. “Didn’t
you say something about leaving prints on the dryer?”
His eyes went wide. “Oh
Jesus …”
She watched him jog across
the studio, took her prints off the rack and tossed them into
the wastebasket along with the cup, then she walked over to
the lecture area and took a seat in the back row near the windows.
She could feel the heat
coming off the radiator and the cold coming through the windows.
The whole studio was reflected in the glass -- walls, equipment,
lights, people -- formatted pane by pane, everything slightly
distorted by the rising heat. She looked at her own reflection,
put one finger against the cold glass. And who was the real
Hannah? The one looking in? Or the one looking out?
Jerry dropped into the chair
beside her.
“Hey,” he said,
“turns out you were right about that print, the one they
used on the brochure. They did print it backwards.”
“Will they do it over?”
He shrugged. “I doubt
it.”
“But you should insist,
Jerry. It’s your work. It’s important.”
“Yeah, I know I know.”
He yawned. “Except they already printed a hundred and twenty-eight
thousand of them. You get your Arts Council submission together?”
I hope by the end of the
night. “How about you?”
He shook his head. “No
time.” He slid down in his chair and put his head back,
closed his eyes. He was in this classic bind. Couldn’t
spend enough time shooting because of plumbing, couldn’t
spend less time plumbing because he had four kids and a mortgage.
She had an urge to ask him – would you do it again, Jerry?
Kids? But then Wakpala came in and everyone quieted down.
He glanced at them, nodded,
shifted a coffee mug from one hand to the other and pulled the
big studio door shut behind him. A sepia monochrome, that’s
what he always reminded her of, except for the hair, which was
the saturated black you tried for in the darkroom and hardly
ever got. She watched him walk over to his desk. Big, angular,
homely. He pushed some papers around, and then someone in the
front row said something and he leaned forward, listening, frowning
slightly. It was the same look he’d had in that picture
in Newsweek when his exhibition had to be canceled. A kind of
long-suffering angst. A mild reaction, considering almost every
print in his show had been slashed. Not to mention the loony
wife’s wrists.
He cleared his throat, paced
a little back and forth. “You’re all well aware that
the real sweat in producing a photograph gets shed in the darkroom,
not behind the lens.” He walked to one end of the lectern,
turned and started back. The overhead light cast smudges under
his eyes, his nose, in the hollows under his cheekbones.
“Okay now. As far as
composition goes, you want everything being viewed to focus
the eye naturally toward your subject. That’s a given.
But you want something more than that. You want to send a message
and you want to be sure it’s received.” He looked
at them. “Accurately.” He walked back to his desk.
“Example.”
He held up a print and it
hit her like a jolt of pure electricity. It was one of hers.
A full negative print of Robin. A test that had ended up in
the wastebasket.
“Technically,”
he said, “not bad. Well-balanced, crisp whites, neutral
grays, good shadows.” His eyes swept the group. “But
an artistic failure. Why?”
People shifted in their
chairs. Someone coughed.
“No focus.” A
woman’s voice.
Wakpala nodded. “What’s
it saying? I’m a kid playing? I’m an ad for a swing
set? I’m a kid having a good time?” He hesitated a
second. “And do we care? Not really. Because all it creates
is confusion. It’s saying so much, it’s saying nothing.”
She felt like part of the
chair, wooden, immobile. He’d taken it out of the wastebasket,
hadn’t asked her permission, hadn’t talked to her
about using it. He knew it was hers. Everyone did. “Son
of a bitch,” she said under her breath. Jerry’s chair
creaked.
“Now ... how about
this one?” He dropped the first print on the desk and picked
up another. The second test from the same negative, tighter
this time, but still a throw-away. “What do you think?
You’re the critics. Is it there yet?”
There yet? Of course it wasn’t there yet. But that wasn’t
even the point. The point was who in hell did he think he was?
He knew these prints were off limits. He knew they weren’t
for display. She’d explained that very clearly in her submission
folder. Or was that it? The reason he was doing this? A kind
of punishment for not taking his holy advice.
“It looks okay,”
someone said. “It’s a good print.”
“I agree.” Tricia,
in the front row. “All the extraneous background clutter’s
gone. I mean, you could crop it further, but I don’t think
you’d gain anything.”
Wakpala nodded. “As
it stands then, what’s it saying?”
Jerry stirred beside her,
sat forward. “That it’s good being a kid,” he
said, “no problems, no worries. Carefree.”
“There’s a nice
tension, too,” someone in the front row said, “in
that sense of suspended motion.”
Wakpala nodded again. It
was impossible to read his face. “Okay, then.” He
set the print down and picked up another. “What about this
one?” He held up the print she’d finally been satisfied
with. The extreme close-up of the small serious face, the hands
near the cheeks gripping the ropes.
No one said a word. All
of them unwilling to take the risk that another print on the
desk was going to make this one the wrong choice, too.
He continued to hold it
up without saying a word, let them study it.
“Some of you accepted that second print,” he said
after a while, “and it is a good print. But not the one
that’s required.”
He picked up the first two
and clipped all three one by one onto his display screen, then
he stood back and folded his arms. “The message,”
he said. “The child. The look in the eyes.”
“Not a happy kid,”
someone said.
“For the photographer,”
Wakpala said, “it’s not only a way of seeing, but
a way of transmitting that seeing with precise accuracy. That’s
the rub, what all the sweat’s about.” He cleared his
throat. “Okay, let’s get back to work.”
Chairs scraped. She stood
up and headed for the lectern. She wanted to get there fast
while the anger was still hot and while she didn’t care
who overheard. Except Connie, in her hot pink caftan, got in
the way, grabbed her arm and held on.
“Hannah, now I know
that was your work and I have to find out ... how did you do
it? I mean, how did you get that tragic look in that sweet little
girl’s eyes?” She smiled that awful wide smile of
hers, her front teeth lipstick-marked. “Didn’t use
a rubber hose, did you?”
Connie must have felt her
stiffen, because she let go of her arm and the big smile lost
a fraction of its width.
“No Connie,” she
said, “I didn’t have to.” And she almost didn’t
stop there. Almost said, Because somebody else already did it
for me. Over and over and over.
She was mad enough to want
that smile to splinter into a million pieces. Mad enough to
want to shock the hell out of her.
“Well, it’s wonderful
work, you know,” Connie gushed, “and I hope it’s
going into your Art’s Council submission. Though I’ll
tell you right out it’s not the sort of competition I’m
anxious to face.”
Hannah looked toward the
lectern, but it was already too late. There were people three
deep around his desk now. So she stood there with the things
she’d wanted to say bouncing around inside her head while
Connie talked at her about missing last year’s deadline
and about sand getting in her new lens and about what a dismal,
unending winter this was.
Mead walked by carrying
a gallon jug of chemicals in each hand. He glanced at her but
he didn’t stop, though he might have guessed she needed
rescuing.
Somehow Connie stopped talking.
Somehow she got away.
She headed for her print
cubicle, then changed direction, walked over to the wastebasket
and took her prints out. They were still damp, and she tore
them in half, tore them in quarters, tore the quarters in half
and dropped the pieces back in. Then she went to her cubicle
and pulled the door shut behind her. Hard enough to make the
walls vibrate. Hard enough to make the guy in the next cubicle
swear. |
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