by Jenna Blum
“No,” said Elsbeth, “that’s fine, if you want.” Holding in her breath, she strolled to the railing and gazed out at the view: the lawn and pool and trees and marsh and Long Island Sound, a stripe of glitter in the distance.
“What’s your name?” she asked, as the man came to stand beside her. Which was when Elsbeth realized he was drunk, or at least had been drinking: he smelled of alcohol, although rising from his skin it smelled warm and rich, instead of pickled and rotting, the way Sol smelled when he’d had too much.
“I’m Julian,” said the man. “How do you do?” He held out his hand. Elsbeth shook it. Julian’s palm was dry and smooth despite the heat.
“Are you one of Sol’s artsy-fartsy . . . I mean, one of Sol’s friends?” Elsbeth asked.
Julian laughed, a deep, happy, vital sound that came all the way up from his stomach. “Friend I don’t know about,” he said, “but definitely artsy-fartsy. I’m the taste of the hour, the flavor of the day.”
“Excuse me?” said Elsbeth.
Julian leaned next to Elsbeth on the railing, propping his elbows on it. He was like a toothpaste model; Elsbeth had never been this close to anyone so handsome and yet so normal-looking.
“Sol bought out my first show,” he said. “And he’s still my biggest patron.”
“Oh,” said Elsbeth, “I see.” So this Julian was one of the artists Sol sponsored, a painter or a photographer. She was about to ask which when Julian said, “Excuse me, I’ve got to shake the lily again,” and he walked off the terrace.
“Why don’t you just go inside?” Elsbeth called.
“I don’t want to have to deal with everybody,” said Julian, and then he put his finger to his lips and glided out of sight beyond the bonsais.
Elsbeth certainly understood that. She sat on one of the iron deck chairs to wait for him, its metal hot through the material of June’s dress, and toyed with Julian’s cigarette pack. “Marlboro,” she murmured, “maroon, navy, red, light blue, orange, purple, red, purple—”
“What’re you doing?” Julian said behind her, and Elsbeth jumped and put the pack back.
“Nothing,” she said. “Sorry. It’s just this dumb habit I have—”
“You think letters have colors?” said Julian. Elsbeth nodded, embarrassed. “You’re synesthetic!” he said in great delight.
“I’m what?”
“You’re a synesthete,” he said and sat beside her. “So am I. We have synesthesia. We think letters and numbers have colors.”
“You do too?” Elsbeth said. She had never met anyone else who did this.
“I do,” Julian said. “We’re two of a kind. There aren’t many of us synesthetes, but there are a few. It’s our synapses. Something up here”—and he tapped his temple—“is scrambled, but in what I consider a marvelous way. Our senses are cross-connected, so that tastes have colors, and music and numbers, and abstract concepts—like months and days—have shapes. Tell me, for instance, how do you think of the calendar?”
“It’s round,” Elsbeth said, “like a clock. January’s at the top and June’s at the bottom.”
“Exactly,” Julian said. “And numbers?”
“They march into infinity! In a horizontal line that’s light at the beginning, but the higher up you go, the more it shades into darkness. And the numbers have colors too: five is red, and seven is green.”
“It isn’t, though,” Julian said. “Seven is blue.”
“Seven is not blue,” Elsbeth said indignantly. “Three is blue.”
“Three is so not blue,” said Julian. “It’s beige.”
“It is not!” Elsbeth cried. “Next you’ll be telling me your name doesn’t start with yellow.”
“It doesn’t,” Julian said. “J is red.”
“No way,” said Elsbeth. “Your name is orange-yellow, yellow, navy blue, black, blue-black, mustard yellow.”
“And your name is yellow, forest green, navy, red, neon pink, charcoal.”
“E is not yellow!” said Elsbeth. “It’s blue.”
“Ah, but I didn’t spell Elsbeth. I spelled Charlie. That’s who you are. Charlie the synesthete.”
“Right,” said Elsbeth. She was laughing. “Excellent.”
Julian picked up his sweating glass from the table, sipped from it, and handed it to her. Elsbeth drank gratefully: gin and tonic with lime, hot and flat from the sun.
“Would you like to pose for me, Charlie?” Julian asked.
“What?” Elsbeth said.
“I’d like to shoot you. You’ve got a unique quality, a look. And I’ve never shot a synesthete before.”
“Shoot me?”
Julian let out that deep vital laugh again. “I’m a photographer.”
“Oh, duh,” said Elsbeth. She had forgotten to ask his medium in her excitement at discovering somebody else who did what she could do. “You want to shoot—me?”
“I do,” said Julian. He stood up, took a brown leather wallet out of his back pocket, and handed her a business card.
“Think about it and let me know. You can call me anytime, okay, Charlie?”
“Okay,” said Elsbeth, and Julian smiled at her. Then he turned and went without another word through the sliding door into the solarium.
Elsbeth looked down at the card. It was warm from being in Julian’s pocket, next to his body: julian wilton photography, all in lowercase letters on a white background, and there was a number and an address in New York. That was it. Elsbeth glanced at the house, then held the card to her nose. It smelled of damp paper. She tucked it carefully into her bra.
* * *
Lunch was served in the solarium on the side of the house, Elsbeth’s favorite room because within its glass walls she could pretend she was eating outside. The shelves ringing its circumference now displayed Ruth’s gardening obsession: cacti. There were plants with broad leaves and pink flowers; teardrop-sized pods; sharp four-inch spines or white fuzz that looked deceptively soft until Elsbeth stroked it and came away with tiny splinters embedded in her fingertips. She had learned not to touch anything in here, that whatever a plant’s beauty, it might be painful or dangerous. Some were and some weren’t, and there was no way to know for sure.
Usually Elsbeth tried to be invisible, positioning herself near the coffee table on the orange couch and eating as many hors d’oeuvres as she could before June caught her—Ruth went into the city to specialty-shop for these occasions, and Elsbeth loved the pâté and Brie, the stone-ground crackers, the scallion cream cheese and the caviar dip whose tiny eggs popped in her mouth with delicious flavor. Today, however, she was more interested in Julian; she hovered near the living room doorway, trying to track him among the other guests and wondering where he would sit. This was indeed Sol’s artsy-fartsy crowd, not his regular childhood buddies with their fleshy noses and funny nicknames, pretending to pull quarters from behind Elsbeth’s ears, their soufflé-haired wives whose kisses left thick lipstick on Elsbeth’s cheeks. These people were art critics and collectors, their inquisitive faces vaguely familiar to Elsbeth from the times she met them here and at galleries Sol took them to, from museum openings and newspaper columns. They began filtering in when Ruth clapped her hands and announced lunch was ready, Bach and argumentative conversation accompanying them. Julian was in the rear, talking to a younger man in electric-blue-framed glasses and a Don Johnson white suit; Elsbeth waited, then pounced into the chair opposite from the one Julian chose, elbowing a man out of her way whom she then realized might be the art critic for Newsweek.
“Sorry,” she said to him.
“That’s all right,” he said and gallantly held Elsbeth’s chair out for her.
Julian smiled at Elsbeth as the maid poured a glass of wine over his shoulder. “We meet again, Charlie,” he said and raised his drink to her.
“You’ve met before?” said the Newsweek man, and the woman on the other side said, “Are you surprised?” and there was some laughter that didn’t sound to Elsbeth quite con
vivial. She smiled at Julian, then noticed that the woman taking a seat next to him and fluffing out her napkin was June. Elsbeth scowled.
“What?” June said, feeling Elsbeth’s glare. She bared her teeth: Lipstick? Elsbeth shrugged. June winked at Elsbeth in a just-us-girls kind of way, but Elsbeth wasn’t buying it. That was the trouble with June: she did have her moments, but she was like the sun coming out from the clouds on an overcast day; just when you were enjoying the warmth, she disappeared again, leaving you longing for what you didn’t know you’d been missing and even colder than you’d been before.
Ruth tinged her fork on her water glass and said, “L’chaim,” and up and down the table everyone lifted their glasses and toasted. Conversation hummed again as the guests passed platters, handed along baskets of challah and trays of cold cuts, pinched up lettuce in silver tongs. Elsbeth grabbed whatever came her way, watching Julian from the corners of her eyes. He piled his plate with cucumber salad, salmon, bluefish, and remoulade.
“Oh, Elsbeth,” June said. “So much roast beef? And two rolls?” She herself had taken nothing but a cup of gazpacho, sans the sour cream that went with it. She pushed it toward Elsbeth. “Here, I don’t need all of this.”
“I’m fine,” said Elsbeth.
“Come on,” said June, “we girls have to watch our figures, right?”
“June, doll,” said Ruth, “you want she should starve?” and Elsbeth, desperate to stop this conversation before Julian noticed—he was talking to the man on his other side—said, more loudly than she’d intended, “I know how to feed myself, Mother.”
“Hey,” said Sol, irritated, “pipe down. We’re trying to have a discussion here.”
“Sorry,” sang June. She picked up her wine. “I give up. Eat whatever you want,” and she turned, to Elsbeth’s horror, to Julian, who had now started in on his lunch.
“Teenagers,” she said, “such an impossible age, am I right?”
The Newsweek critic scoffed, and the lady beside him murmured, “Ask the expert.”
Julian glanced up and raised his dark eyebrows, then ate a forkful of salad.
“You have children too, Mr. Wilton?” June asked, and now Elsbeth heard, very definitely, a snort. It came from the man between her dad and Sol; he was laughing.
“Pardon,” he said, “I couldn’t help overhearing. Really, it’s just too delicious.”
Julian buttered a piece of challah. “I don’t have children, Mrs. Rashkin,” he said.
“But he is the Pied Piper of the art world,” said the Newsweek critic.
“More like Humbert Humbert,” said the lady next to him, and there was more of that sharp laughter.
“Oh!” said June. “Now I know why your name sounds familiar; I read about you in the New Yorker. You’re that photographer . . .”
“Yes,” said Julian, “I’m the one who shoots children. I do love them. That’s why they’re my subject. Their unself-consciousness, their purity and joie de vivre—”
Suddenly the Humbert Humbert woman crashed her fork down on her plate. “I don’t know how you can live with yourself,” she said.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Julian said mildly.
The woman stood, her chair legs producing a violent scrape on the tiles. She was about June’s age, with painfully short hair and what looked like a miniature cuckoo clock pinned at the throat of her black shirt. Her mouth shook.
“Art should never be used to justify immorality,” she said. “There’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed, and you have crossed it.”
“That’s enough,” boomed Sol. “Mr. Wilton is our guest of honor.”
“Mr. Wilton is a pornographer,” the woman said.
“Oh, I think that’s a bit reductive,” said the waxed-mustache man, and the Newsweek critic muttered, “Plebian morality.”
Julian looked calmly at the woman, though Elsbeth noticed his fingers pinching and pinching the seam of his jeans under the glass-topped table. “I create images,” he said. “I’m interested in the play of light and shade on the human form, as artists have been for millennia. Would you level the same accusations at Michelangelo? At Renoir? Impurity’s in the eye of the beholder, and I think it says more about your mind-set than—”
“They’re children,” shouted the woman.
Now the whole table quivered with quiet, even Sol. Then Peter cleared his throat.
“Perhaps Ellie should go for a swim,” he said, and to Elsbeth’s tremendous mortification every head in the room swiveled toward her.
“That’s a wonderful idea,” said Ruth. “Go on, Bubbie.”
“But I’m fine here,” Elsbeth said.
“Elsbeth,” said Peter, “go,” and at her dad’s rare use of her full name, Elsbeth laid her napkin on her plate. She got up and, feeling as though she were in the dream in which she’d come to school naked, walked stiffly from the room. She didn’t dare look at Julian. She was followed by the lady in the black shirt, who brushed past Elsbeth in the living room and stormed through the swinging door into the kitchen. A minute later, over the limp of restarted conversation in the solarium, Elsbeth heard the growling engine of Julian’s accuser’s car as she started it and drove away.
* * *
Elsbeth waited to see if anyone else would come out of the solarium—her dad, maybe, to make sure she was all right, or Julian!—but when nobody did, she wandered into the living room. When she’d been younger, she would have seized this chance to search for the photo: the forbidden, the fascinating, the secret picture of her dad’s first family that Ruth used to keep in her powder room. Elsbeth knew rationally that the photo had disappeared the day her mom had caught Ruth showing it to her and telling her again the terrible story of Masha and the twins, but for years she had kept searching for it anyway, hoping she would turn over Ruth’s silver-backed hairbrushes or panty hose and there they would be, her unfamiliar young dad and his first wife and Elsbeth’s half sisters. They had the same glamour as the scrapbook Ruth kept of Peter and June’s courtship: menus from Peter’s famous restaurant, Masha’s; magazine covers, Harper’s and Vogue, with June’s face on them; gossip columns showing June and Peter dancing at the Rainbow Room or a place called ElMo. They were all memories Elsbeth coveted; they belonged to her, even if they had happened before she was born, and she’d spent so much time trying to occupy them that she felt as if she had actually lived them. How many hours had she spent poring over the photos of Masha’s, the restaurant almost like another person: its red walls, the laughing patrons with hats and furs and cocktails, the giant chandelier? How many times had Elsbeth pictured herself in clogs and chef’s jacket, whisking up recipes in its kitchen? Her imaginings of her dad’s life before the war, the real Masha, her twin sisters—they had been like that too, except sadder.
But Elsbeth had long moved beyond the need to look for the photo; she was mature now and accepted that it was gone. She was easing back toward the solarium to eavesdrop when she saw the book, lying on the coffee table amid a crumple of napkins, glasses half full of liquid and the pulp of desiccated fruit. luminous beings: images by julian wilton was printed on the glossy cover, beneath a photo so intensely colored that it reminded Elsbeth of the time of day just before sunset, when the vibrant light made her feel melancholy for no reason. The image showed a girl about twelve or thirteen, with long, light hair, a chest flat as a boy’s except for pushpin nipples that pointed at the viewer, and a challenging stare. She was straddling the fork of a tree—and she was naked.
Elsbeth appropriated the book, swiping it from the coffee table along with a half-eaten tray of cheese and crackers and carrying it all to a wing chair, which she turned to face the bay windows—from behind, if she pulled her legs up, nobody would know she was in it. She arranged herself so the book was on one knee and the food on the other and leafed and ate, leafed and ate, careful to hold the pages by their edges. They all featured the girl on the cover and another who was probably her sister: a second blonde with light eyes wh
o stared almost angrily at the camera. They swam in ponds and lay on riverbanks; they ate tomatoes in fields, the juice running down their bare arms; they sunbathed on a city rooftop deck, the faces of office workers visible in tiny windows across the street. In all of the photos they were naked. It was all on display.
When Elsbeth got to the last image, the cover model sitting alone on a boulder, she closed the book. Who were these girls, who displayed their nudity with such unself-consciousness, such lack of shame? It was totally alien to Elsbeth, who in every locker room and at each slumber party hunched in corners to hide her cone-shaped breasts, the rolls of fat at her stomach. She had been different for as long as she could remember: a matryoshka doll among puppets. In first grade she’d been called Elsbeth the Elephant, in fifth the Doughnut after she’d been caught eating a box of them. In the lunchroom one day, while Elsbeth was blissfully unwrapping her Laughing Cow cheese cubes, Christy Albertson, thin and popular with two long braids, had wrinkled her nose and said, “Are those butter?” Snickers, and everyone moved away. At camp, Elsbeth’s peers weighed 45 pounds, 48, 50; when Elsbeth stepped on the scale, clumsy with shame and dread, the nurse announced, “Ninety-six-point-three pounds!” Now, as a sophomore, Elsbeth was five foot three and 145 pounds; she had been surpassed in height by some girls and in cup size by others, and she could hide among the tall and the busty. But she still knew that every bite she took would congeal in lumps on her body; she would never be like the others, who ate candy bars, ice cream sandwiches, and Fritos because they were hungry, because they wanted them, without a second thought. And Elsbeth was even more bitterly envious of Julian’s models, showing everything with careless confidence. Everything—in front of Julian!
Chairs scraped back in the solarium, and Elsbeth implemented a hasty strategy. She raced through the kitchen, grabbing a Pepperidge Farm cookie from the tray on the table—“Did you get enough to eat, miss?” the maid called, and Elsbeth said, “Yes, thanks!” as she escaped down the basement stairs. She had to shout it; Bertha, the new maid Ruth had found after Maria retired, was a little deaf, a kindly, grandmother-age woman with Brillo hair and missing teeth. “She’s far too old for any real work,” Ruth had whispered to Elsbeth one day, “but she went through the Shoah like your father, so I took her on as a mitzvah.” Apparently the Nazis had damaged Bertha’s hearing, though whether by bomb blast or torture with a hot poker or something, Elsbeth didn’t know. She couldn’t imagine anyone doing that to Bertha, let alone Bertha having the kind of secret anyone would want that badly.