Look Yourself

She met the photographer at her sister’s wedding. It was a hell of a job, lining up a fleet of coiffed bridesmaids in ascending height, in eggshell sateen. In 105-degree heat. Her grandparents – soon to be dead – nearly croaked right then and there in the English garden among the giant alliums and Culver’s root. The heat made guests so thirsty and therefore so drunk, people were making out against every gnarled, ancient tree, as if the whole wedding (minus those puking in a lilac bush) had been struck by Cupid’s bow. It was a scene. Her sister was in love. She was alone, standing inside the steamy greenhouse looking out on the lawn, when the photographer came upon her.

Don’t move, he said. Right there. You’re perfect. Just as you are.

Before she could do anything, the camera clicked.

I love how you’re veiled by shadow and light. He inched closer, lens raised, like she was a gazelle spotted from a distance on a Jeep safari. She turned her head. Click. Lately, it had become nearly impossible for her to look anyone in the eye, hold a direct glance without self-consciously breaking away, reflexively reaching for her face, her hair, her lips, but as he held her wrists, her pulse in his touch, and moved them off her body, click click click, there was no hiding, no ducking for cover, color bloomed in her face, only it was not shame or unease but life, this was the color of life, she, at 25, had come alive. He wore a leather harness like a foreign correspondent. He was around her age, or older. There was an agelessness about him, as if he’d always simply been around.

How many rolls do you take?

As many as they pay me, he said, switching out canisters. Because good, old-fashioned cellulose was still being used on the night they met.

She remembered taking a photography elective in high school. The marsupial smocks with the specially designed sleeves they wore for safe film removal, to prevent ruinous exposure, the piercing chemical scent of the developing baths. The claustrophobia of that coat closet-cum-darkroom.

Do you develop your own?

Yes, he said. No. I mean, I do. With my own work. This is just a side gig. Weddings, anniversaries. Milestones are bread and butter. Really, I do editorial. With that he reached into his pocket and gave her his card.

That was when she looked at him again, not just his face, but his entire carriage, his narrow build, and realized she’d seen him before, portfolio braced awkwardly under the arm. She worked the front desk at a popular fashion magazine – not exactly as a gatekeeper, she answered the phone. She manned reception. She wore skirts. She said things like the editor will see you now. She escorted freelance hopefuls down the long, framed hallway to the art department. There was a steady stream of talent coming through, aspirational, nervous, deflated. Afterward, she pushed the button by the elevator bank to carry them down, saving them the embarrassment of trying to free their hands. She said, Have a nice day. Taking him in, dusty hair longish by the ears, bushy at the sides, like he wanted a style but couldn’t quite commit to one, more hippie than hipster, she was positive he’d made a pitch call. Maybe she’d glanced up from the stack of magazines she mindlessly flipped through all day long. Her only job was to look busy. Approachable yet unapproachable. The pay was shit, but one of the perks was a complimentary stack of every magazine the publishing behemoth put out each month – 29 titles at its peak – excessive, even for a luxury brand. Who, besides her, could sit around reading all of them? No wonder the company would dissolve within the decade. The trees wasted alone.

She parted her lips as if to say something.

This is just paying the bills, he said. It’s important to have aspiration.

Was shooting designer watches aspirational? Windblown models on a cliff? What could be her aspiration? He cupped her chin like a collectible figurine. Look at me, he said. She looked. He made her feel pretty, not sweaty or disheveled, nor hopelessly plain by comparison, less lonely than she’d ever been. Did he recognize her? Had she said better luck next time? Had they exchanged anything at all?

To be clear, he went on. Photography is my passion. And passion of any sort is an art. It’s all about following that insatiable curiosity. Going deep on a subject, getting up-close, then closer still, seeing beyond what the eye can see.

For some reason, she thought of Oedipus Rex.

Like an oracle?

He chuckled. I hate to brag –

There you are, a voice interrupted them. They turned. Down the hall a tall man in a dark suit, hair a slick, silver wave, approached. His shoes tapped against the floor, a chunky heel, they were lifts. He said, I can’t have you going rogue, son. I need you to carry my light.

***

When it was her turn to get married, a few years later, it made sense that she’d look him up. She’d kept the card – his name, Norman Wax – an old man’s name. He was still working for the same wedding photographer, which elated her and also made her sad. On the website, he’d graduated from a non-entity to a landing page, with his own bio and pic. She could hire him directly at an apprentice rate.

She and her fiancé met at the office on the west side. The space, above a wholesale fabric store, was barren and white, unfinished or austere, not what she’d expected. They sat in the waiting room on a black leather couch flipping through books.

Norman walked in and sank beside her. Leather exhaled. The heat off his shoulder warmed her shoulder. They did not touch. He said, Do you know what you’re looking for?

An engagement photo.

He sucked his teeth. He could barely hide his disdain for The New York Times Style format, couples with their heads pressed together like conjoined twins. He’d rather capture people in their “natural habitat,” he said, and because the studio, cut from a drafty warehouse of undergarment designers and shared workspaces, was hardly natural, down the industrial-grade elevator and outside into the cold they went, to frame the shot against a vibrant splash of graffiti between a dollar pizza shop and a dingy bodega.

Much better, he said. They stood stiffly before the wall as if posing for mugshots, hesitant to press themselves against it. Face each other, the photographer commanded. She could feel Norman’s eyes on her. People bustled by. Don’t mind them. Everyone wants a glimpse of conjugal bliss. The photographer positioned their hands on shoulders like middle schoolers at a dance. Picture your life together! Her eyes welled. Now, kiss! I feel like a buffoon, her fiancé said. The word baboon flew out instead. They laughed. Emotion! Her photographer clicked.

Ultimately, she hired the main guy. The same guy as her sister. The best in the business. No hard feelings, Norman said. Most people in this world stick with what they know.

On her wedding day, Norman showed up in the bridal suite, anyway. Secretly, she’d hoped for this outcome. He was still an assistant, after all, and big affairs warranted multiple assistants. The deluxe photo package promised to capture – immortalize! – all stages of the magical day, so someone had to be there as she perched on the leopard skin pouf before the vanity in her girdle and strapless bra, as she slipped bobby pins into her tightly fastened chignon, as she leaned over the bulb-studded mirror to brighten the nervous pallor of her mouth. Forget about me, he said. I am a fly on the wall. Later, there would be grainy shots of the slope of her neck, the arch of her spine. His wedding gift: casting her always in the best light. He tucked the wisps by her face, straightened her shoulders for a clean view of the pearl buttons running down the back of her dress, like she was some pristine package that had yet to be opened. She, who had never been photogenic, felt almost seductive before his lens. The proboscis of his Nikon tracing her slightest move. She wished they could stay in the dressing room forever. Later, when the album arrived, these would be the images she’d love the most.

By the time the veil was secured by the teeth of a tortoise shell comb, he’d been replaced. Assistants were interchangeable, and hers had another gig. Norman had started booking his own affairs by now. Some chick with a buzz cut and a fitted tux stepped in. The female assistant wore a leather harness too. Like a dominatrix. Straight out of a sex den. The bride blushed beneath the huppah. Her eyes flitted over to the cummerbunded groom. Did they share the same thought? The world’s shortest distance is between laughter and crying. No one zoomed in on her tears in black and white.

***

Work threw her a baby shower. Maybe they knew she was not coming back. Or maybe, more accurately, there would be no job for her after the birth. What good was a mommy gal Friday? The engagement, the marriage, the pregnancy, it all happened in such rapid succession, at the overachieving clip of the city where everything – even love – was a competition. She was on the up and up.

In his studio with a bump the size of a strap-on buoy.

Look at you, he said, clapping his hands.

She reddened. It wasn’t her idea, she preempted, already apologizing. Her colleagues had given her the portrait sit as a gift – to commemorate this life event, the momentous before and after – glossed body and all. Ever since the Halle Berry cover, all the women were doing it.

Anyway, she said. How have you been?

Good, he said. Busy. He was milking the trend. Wink. No pun intended.

He led her to the back. He had rented the place next door to the main photographer. Smaller, but at least it was his own. He was on his own now.

Gotta stay hungry, he said. Still working at the mothership?

Stop by sometime, she said, knowing by then she’d be gone.

She stripped down in a supply closet the size of her high school darkroom where people went to smoke pot or give blow jobs. She could almost smell the vinegar burning her nostrils. She wore lacy hot pants her coworkers had given her. Immediately, she realized there was a cheeky slit in the crotch, but she had no other alternative. She clenched her thighs shut. Her breasts, heavy and full, felt absurdly mammalian in her hands.

Mercifully, he got to work. For the photographer, there was no such thing as an extreme act of vanity. He led her into his studio, black drapery, umbrella light. He set up the shoot. As he spit out instructions, neck over shoulder, how to position her feet so as to elongate her stature, to maximize whatever angles were left, it was a disembodied feeling. Her arm flattened her chest like a blackout strip. Was she subject or object? Is this what motherhood would be like? Separated from herself, her mind floated to the night that landed her here, she and her husband tumbling home, drunk, crashing into their practiced pattern, her unimaginative body assuming its position at the edge of the bed, until her ass dangled off, fighting gravity as he hooked her feet onto his hairy shoulders, like a gyno exam. Afterward, he fell atop her like he’d been shot.

The photographer zeroed in on her belly, tight and round. He told her to clutch the swell of her stomach like a golden egg. Norman knelt before her with a small bottle of baby oil, to shine her up for the light.

Mother may I? He said, palms out to touch. She didn’t laugh. She could feel the wind in the seat of her shorts. In what universe were crotchless underpants erotic? She did not want him rubbing anything on her. Movement rippled through her, a foot, a fist. She was no exotic fruit.

I can’t, she said.

That’s cool, the photographer said. As he stood, his knees creaked. He wiped his greasy hands on a hand towel.

This isn’t me, she said.

Don’t apologize. He handed her a plush robe and flipped on the electric kettle. She sat on the couch as he prepared her cup of chamomile. She lifted his hefty portfolio into her lap. He really was good at what he did. While she flipped, he drafted up a store credit. Stood over her bowed head and handed her the slip. She demurred. Take it, he insisted. The paper flapped like a bird. They couldn’t look at each other. He told her, There’s no expiration date.

***

She returned once the baby arrived. Not exactly, not at first. The baby looked like a wrinkled, humorless old man, and behaved accordingly. The baby complained all the time. She could practically hear her baby sending back the soup. She no longer slept. It was beyond her wildest imagination, weeks upon months of not sleeping, a military torture technique, a physical impossibility, and yet, all the same, it felt fitting, the not sleeping, as she’d entered a world where dreams went to die. The baby latched to her breast like a permanent fixture. She was a milk machine. She was a repository of want. A reservoir of tears until she wasn’t. Until, like all sources, she dried up. Work receded to distant memory. The magazine shuttered. She was not going anywhere. She was going to her baby. Her husband had no patience for this nonsense. He had to get up in the morning and function like a real person. What else did she have to do? She was a mother. She heeded the cries. She sat in the rocker they had custom upholstered in anthropomorphic frogs and held her baby, this child she nourished and grew, her baby who somehow already knew life would disappoint you.

In these dark, muzzy hours, she googled him. Norman Wax had a new and extensive website, multiple social media handles, but that’s not all. Call it serendipity. Call it dumb luck. He’d caught a tech giant on a park bench contemplating his coffee as pigeons scrounged for crumbs by his feet. The image had gone viral. Billionaires, they’re just like us. Everyone is oblivious to what’s beneath them. The shot landed him the provocative final cover of a shuttering glossy, a drug-addled ingenue draped in the American flag, and now he was riding the wave. There he was on the arm of an actress, a model, an NYC it-girl. He was no longer just a photographer but a star fucker. He must be fucking them all, fucking assistants, how else did anyone get anywhere? She scrolled through image after image captured by someone else’s camera: walking down the street, canoodling a neck, at a Yankees game, at an art opening, beanie-clad, clinking beers.

That clinched it. Norman Wax would take her baby’s pics. On his website, he had a designated page of babies. Babies dressed as chickens as avocados as sunflowers. Famous people’s babies with names like Harlequin and Sage. The photographer had influence. The photographer levied opportunity. The photographer resisted categorization. He was nimble. The man had range. Who could afford to be just one thing?

When she wrestled her baby into a lion’s mane, however, he refused. I’m not condoning the Hallmark crap, he said. You’re better than that.

I’m not, she insisted. Actually, she pleaded. Her eyes red and bleary. The jagged birth scar along her lower abdomen itched. Please, she looked at him. He evaded her gaze. She did not wish to argue or think. It’s a baby announcement. Do me a solid here.

You’re the client, he shrugged, and did what she said.

***

When the second child turned three, they scheduled a family portrait. It took months for him to fit her in. By now his studio had moved uptown to the parlor floor of an extra-wide brownstone on the east side where he also lived.

Look at you, he said.

Look yourself, she said. The walls were hung in heavy, gilded frames. The images, a mix of editorial, celebrations, limited-edition sneakers, and custom commissions.

Aspirational, she said.

Everyone wants a bespoke version of their life, he said.

Like everyone, her family wore white. It made her think of that Bee Gees album. As if all they needed was angel wings.

The photographer tried his best. He arranged them affectionately. He cracked corny jokes to loosen them up, to elicit spontaneity, to capture the family in their natural state, but there was only so much he could do. It was like herding cats. Her oldest was shy. Her youngest was cranky. Of course, she was pregnant again. Her face shiny, hair greasy. She would always be pregnant. Her husband kept taking calls outside.

At one point, she followed him onto the stoop.

Can’t you be present, just once?

I am present, her husband said. This is as present as it gets. Why is it so important? What are you trying to prove?

Have a little passion!

It came out shrill. She could feel the photographer appear through the bay window, hidden beneath his lens. She could have sworn she heard a click.

When they returned to the shoot, she said, I’m sorry. I must look wrecked.

You are beautiful, he said. You are my favorite subject to shoot.

It never occurred to her he might say this to anyone else.

He tucked a hair behind her ear. She accepted a tissue.

Where were we? Her voice drifted off.

As to be expected, the photos were shit. The photographer might have become a big shot, but he was no miracle worker. In the proofs they looked like angry robots. But everything could be cropped and filtered at no extra cost. They found one that was good enough to slap on a holiday card - from our family to yours - where it met its fate beneath a fridge magnet, in the stack of junk mail, the recycling bin.

***

Years passed. Milk teeth fell out, adult teeth muscled in, children stumbled through countless stepping up ceremonies, singing about railroads or dreidels. Periodically, she’d come across his photo credit in the well-thumbed rags at the hair salon. The issues were old. As luck would have it, the media industry crumbled just as he was breaking in. No one was immune. Who could compete with stock imagery? Everyone was back where they started. Sure enough, when she wandered over to his website, she found herself still featured in his gallery, in the greenhouse from her sister’s wedding, the bare shoulder from her own, a blurred outtake, like the zoomed arc of the moon captured from a great distance, unrecognizable to anyone else.

***

Occasionally, she’d see Norman Wax in real life. Second weddings, 40th birthday parties, anniversaries. It surprised her, at first. Hey, big macher! She raised her cocktail.

Smoke and mirrors, he said.

Don’t act coy, she said.

What can I say, he shrugged, I am a simcha animal.

A beast! She teased.

A beast with a mortgage.

Click.

I have a wife now, he said.

She dropped her half-eaten pig in a blanket in a napkin. Covered her mouth as the steam escaped, dusted the greasy flakes off her fingers. Get out! That’s great.

Yeah?

Yeah! I’m happy for you.

Are you?

***

Once she hit the bar mitzvah circuit, there was no avoiding each other. For a pair of years, it was practically every month. There was a comfort in consistency. He was always reliably there, in the entrance, capturing guest arrivals, leaning against an artificial column for the emcee announcement of the bar mitzvah boy, the party space decked out like a concert arena, buzzing with lights, glow sticks, adolescent heat.

We can’t keep running into each other like this, he’d say. And she’d smile. And maybe they’d stare at each other for a second longer, their gaze locking before he lowered his to his viewfinder for a pic and flit. This was the nature of the job. From the confetti poppers to the game room to the dramatic release of balloons, he flitted, snapping all the way, his a strange and frenetic mating dance, like a jester act paired with disappearance, with teleportation, he was nowhere and everywhere, which made her wait, she was always waiting, willing his return, watching him out of the narrow of her eye, acutely aware of her body in space, how she stood, hip out, clutching the long thin stem of one glass then another, stacking cubes of sushi, sliding off skewers of meat, clapping to the hora, shuffling through line dances, trussed in plastic, giveaway shades, until sure enough, he circled back.

My muse! He’d shout over the DJ, with a wink and a click. By the time her cheeks faded, he’d be off again, performing his trick on someone else, everyone else, whatever it took to loosen up his subjects, disarm them enough for a money shot.

You again, she said, sidling up beside him when her oldest turned 13. She laughed at her own joke. After all, she’d hired him. There was something to be said for reliability. The photographer showed up. He wore his leather vest. She leaned against his shoulder. It was warm and damp. She was a little drunk. Maybe a little more than a little.

Look at you, he said, his voice low and slow. Look who has it all.

Look all you want, she said boldly, tittering on heels. Look at us.

My wife, he said. She’s having a baby. I’m going to be a dad.

And then, before she could blink: Say Cheese!

***

Cue the seasons. Death, divorce, natural disaster, piercing, isolating quiet. Happy occasions ground to a halt. There was nothing to do but weather what came. The algorithms were winning. Last time his website popped up in her feed, all evidence of their photographic history had been shifted off his home page.

***

It always happens like this: the minute you stop thinking about someone, there they are. Pushing a child in a nubuck swing in the playground nestled in the heart of the park. For years, she’d run past the playground without pause, but a niggling injury had her hampered. A new coffee kiosk had sprung up where she’d once picnicked with the kids. There were countless options: hot lattes or cold brews, freeze dried or oxygenated. What did she want? It was a breezy, summer day. Iced, the barista decided for her, handing her a cup with a napkin shrugged around it wet as a strip of papier mâché. Sipping, she strolled over to the wrought-iron fence that gated in families like animals at a zoo. Hey, she didn’t say. Norman Wax! She didn’t have to, for as he gazed out toward the swing, following the rise of his child pumping higher and higher in the sky, he caught sight of her standing there, staring. Plump little legs crashed back onto him. Whoosh, he caught and released. This was life’s rhythm. His harm shot up in salute. Look at you, she mouthed. The photographer’s eyes looked tired. He smiled, waved.