by Blake Nelson
I hesitated for a moment. “But what about your mom?” I said.
“She won’t know.”
So we did that, taking off our wet bathing suits and sneaking down the hall, holding our towels around ourselves. The McMansion bathroom was quite luxurious, with lots of white tile and silver faucets and everything super shiny and new.
She turned on the shower and held her hand under the water until it got hot. I stood waiting, holding my towel around my waist. I had never gotten totally naked with a girl before. Not with all the lights on. There were a lot of lights in that bathroom.
“Do you want me to go in first?” she asked.
I nodded.
She grinned at me. “You’re shy, aren’t you?”
“I guess so,” I said, laughing a little.
She dropped her towel and went in the shower. She sort of hopped around a little, while she adjusted the water temperature.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s warm now. You can come in!”
I dropped my own towel and got in with her. It was a little weird to be two people in one shower. It was also very weird to be naked with a girl like that. I mean, I knew people took showers together. Hanna and Claude did it. But it seemed strange to me. I felt very exposed.
“Oh my God,” she said. “You’re trembling!”
“Just a little,” I said.
“Here, get under the hot water.”
She switched positions, so I was in the water stream.
“Let me wash your back,” said Krista. “Turn around.”
So we did that. She had a fancy sea sponge, which she moved up and down my back. It did make me feel better. Then she soaped me up with some organic lavender soap from England, which she claimed had special calming qualities.
“Now you wash me,” she said, smiling up at me like she did. It was weird to wash a person. But I did it. And then I liked it. And then we kissed a little and then a little more. And then it was time to get out of the shower.
We got in her bed. She had condoms in a little drawer right beside her bed, which seemed odd to me, since wouldn’t her mother see them? But I didn’t stop to think about it.
It was very easy, very comfortable, the actual doing it part. I guess I was relieved to not be standing in that shower. Krista didn’t hesitate to guide me and move me around. She was very sweet about it, which seemed like a good sign. And also that was just her personality: taking charge, teaching you, helping you do things a little out of your comfort zone. I could tell I was going to learn a lot from Krista Hoffman.
• • •
It was almost midnight when she let me out her front door. She was wearing a bathrobe then, her hair all over the place, since she’d never dried it properly. Her mother was gone to some other wing of the McMansion. We had never even seen her dad.
“Thanks for the tennis game,” she said, giving me a last squeeze.
I had totally forgotten that we’d played tennis.
I gave her a last kiss and began the walk down her driveway to my car. I was a little shaky on my legs. And then, in my car, I had to sit for a minute and gather my thoughts. My brain was as messed up as my legs. The only clear sentence that came into my head was: Well, that was fun.
Then I started the car and drove away.
29
So then I was super into Krista. It was an odd relationship though. We fooled around so much. Sometimes that was the only thing we did. We’d make a plan to go somewhere and I’d drive to her house to pick her up and we’d never leave her bedroom. Her mother didn’t seem to have any problem with this. We were free to hang out, take showers, take hot tubs, whatever we wanted.
Eventually—while we were lying in her bed—I asked Krista: “So your mom’s cool with us hanging out all the time?”
Krista nodded that she was. “We discussed it.”
“What did she say?”
“We both agreed that it was better if I was home and not in the back of some car somewhere. . . .”
“What about your dad?”
“He knows to mind his own business.”
So that was that. It still seemed odd to me though. I was used to the idea that you had to earn certain things from your girlfriend. You’d take her places and do stuff and have long conversations and then you’d do the other stuff. But Krista wasn’t like that. She was into physical things. She loved sports. She loved riding her bike fast. She loved anything that felt good to her body. “If I like someone, I want to feel them,” she told me. “What am I supposed to do, pretend that I don’t?”
• • •
During this same time, Antoinette and Kai were having adventures of their own.
In February, Kai got caught smoking pot in the parking lot with some senior boys. One of them had already been accepted to a prestigious college so there was a big controversy about whether our principal should tell the college or not. The senior and another boy blamed it on Kai, saying it was her idea, and her pot, and that they didn’t actually smoke any. I guess Kai went along with this. I didn’t know the details. It was quickly hushed up.
Not long after that, Antoinette was at a party where a Hillsdale drug dealer accidentally shot himself in the foot. This guy was Hillsdale’s version of Bennett. He was showing off and waving a pistol around and it went off. The police came and an ambulance. And then the police wanted to search everyone at the party. Antoinette refused to be searched. So they arrested her and took her to the police station and called her mother.
The thing about that was: Nothing happened to her. Antoinette didn’t get in trouble or suspended because it was off school grounds on a weekend. And anyway, people were used to Antoinette by now, so it wasn’t a big deal. Of much more interest to our students was that this Hillsdale guy was stupid enough to shoot himself in the foot. This became a running joke. When we played Hillsdale in basketball, the Evergreen students chanted: “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot your foot!” which was considered very funny and a major burn on Hillsdale.
• • •
Naturally, I avoided telling Kai and Antoinette about Krista for as long as I could. I knew what they were going to say, and as soon as they heard, they said it.
“Krista?” said Antoinette. “Krista Hoffman? She’s your new girlfriend? You go from Grace Anderson to Krista Hoffman? What are you, in the Dumb Girl Olympics?”
That got Kai going too. They hit me with the McMansion jokes. And the blond jokes. And then even worse, the sex jokes. I would eventually get these from everybody. The sex jokes started because I stupidly asked Logan if it was bad in some way to have too much sex. I thought this was just between us, but since we were kinda drunk at the time, apparently not. So then I got a lot of “Poor Gavin’s little Gavin” comments. Krista probably wasn’t thrilled about that, but she didn’t care. She was like Antoinette in that way. She didn’t care what people thought. And anyway, we were going out. We were a couple. You couldn’t criticize us for doing what couples were supposed to do. Though you could definitely make fun of me for worrying about it.
• • •
I was still in touch with Richie from Passport Photos that winter. Richie was getting fairly regular assignments from Portland Weekly to take pictures of new restaurants or bands or local events. Richie would ask me to come along. Sometimes he would pay me; most times he wouldn’t. The main thing was, he wanted people to see that he had an assistant. “It makes me look pro,” he said. “And it’s good experience for you.”
Then Richie got another overnight gig. This was in Vancouver, BC, for the same magazine, Travel and Leisure. We drove up in the RAV4, through Seattle and then into Canada. The border guards made us open up our equipment cases, and Richie had to show them the e-mails from his photo editor in New York to prove we had a real job, though we obviously did. Richie had gotten better in that way. He was more confident, more pro. He was still his funny, fast-talking self, but now when he told people he was a photographer, they believed him. I felt like that too, as an assistant.
The gig in Va
ncouver was to cover a big international art show. Most of the stuff on the SHIT WE HAVE TO HAVE list involved the art museum downtown. The first morning, we took shots outside, of a big sculpture and of some of the foreign tourists in their weird eyeglasses and pointy shoes.
The rest of the day we were inside, shooting the artwork. My favorite was this one room that had three huge car wash cylinders, standing in a row, the ones that spin and have the cloth strips that wipe down your car. Not moving, they looked like three enormous Christmas trees. But then, while you were standing there, one of them would start spinning, going faster and faster, so that the cloth strips would stretch out from the centrifugal force. Then it would slow down and a different one would start to spin. Then another. Then they’d all spin at the same time. I know it sounds sort of pointless, but when you were watching it, and hearing it, and feeling the vibrations in the floor . . . well . . . it was pretty mesmerizing.
Lots of the art pieces were like that. You’d stand there and try to figure out what the point of it was, or if there even was a point. And then you’d be like, Who could have thought of that? And all you could think was: a very strange person.
Richie wasn’t into the art. He thought most of it was bullshit. He liked the people more. He was always taking pictures of the best-looking women and then trying to chat them up. I kept telling him about the car wash cylinders, but they were in a special room, in the basement, and he couldn’t be bothered to go down there. Finally he checked it out, and then he liked it. He took a bunch of pictures of it. He said, “I should have brought my car.”
30
That night, Richie went out for drinks with some of the people from the museum. I stayed in our hotel room and watched Canadian TV. There was a McDonald’s a couple blocks away, and I thought about walking down there later for some food. But then I thought, what am I doing? I’m in Vancouver, BC, on a Saturday night with a bunch of great cameras sitting all around me!
So I got off the bed and dug out this old Nikon that Richie always brought but we never used. It shot actual film, which we had a couple rolls of, buried in the bags. Film was kind of the ultimate test of a photographer, Richie always said. You had limited shots and you had to figure out the light and focus yourself. And you couldn’t see it immediately. You had to trust yourself, and hope you got something, without knowing if you actually did.
Richie had shown me how to load the Nikon. You pulled out one end of the film coil and ran it through the spools and then attached it on the other side. When it was ready to go, I put it around my neck. It felt clunky, having no battery and no electronic parts of any kind. It was like a spear or an ax, a primitive tool from prehistoric days.
I rode the elevator down to the lobby. From there I went out into the street, into the darkness of Vancouver, the first foreign city I had ever been to.
• • •
I had thirty-six shots in the Nikon. That made things interesting. You couldn’t just blast away at something randomly like you do with modern cameras.
Outside, it was cold and there was a slightly salty ocean smell in the air. I pulled my collar up around my neck. I walked down the street and then turned down an alley. They had great alleys in Vancouver, full of junk and Dumpsters and metal doorways. Electric wires ran along the top of them. I walked the length of this one, taking a few pictures when there was enough light.
Back on a major street, I got a couple shots of a streetcar, which was brightly lit inside and full of dressed-up people. They were holding on to the poles above their heads and talking excitedly to each other, since it was Saturday night. I walked along the streetcar route and eventually found a kind of square, where the car traffic was blocked off and there were several cafés packed together. This was the hangout spot, it appeared. There were lots of young people: inside the cafés and outside, on the street, and around a couple food trucks. These were the most stylish people I’d seen, so I began to walk around, taking a shot here, a shot there, checking out people’s clothes and the general vibe of the place. And that’s when I met the two art-school girls.
I’d noticed them when I’d first started walking around. In that entire square of cool people, they were the coolest of all. And when they saw me taking pictures, they came right up to me and started asking me questions. I told them about Richie and our gig at the art museum. They told me they studied at the art college there in Vancouver. They were originally from smaller towns in central Canada, but where they came from, if you were interested in anything artistic, you had to move to Vancouver. They told me about their classes. Art history and design and one called Concepts of Visual Fluency. They both had cool raincoats and eye makeup that went out to the side. They liked my old camera and that I was shooting real film. That was big with the students at their school. Film cameras and vinyl records.
I told them I wanted to go to art school but I didn’t know anything about art. They said, “You know enough.” They said I should definitely go, that I would love it, that I would regret it forever if I didn’t. They gave me their phone numbers in case I wanted to ask them questions, or if I was ever back in Vancouver and wanted to hang out. When they left they gave me European kisses, one on each side of my face. It felt so strange and warm, feeling a person’s cheek touching your cheek.
After that I felt energized. I hadn’t caught a streetcar before because I didn’t know how to pay. But now I jumped on the first one I saw. And then at the next stop a big gang of drunk college students got on. I snuck up behind some of them and took close-up shots of their faces. I think they noticed but they didn’t seem to care. Since I was shooting film, I’d have to stop and wind the camera by hand after each shot. It helped create a rhythm. Aim, shoot, wind. Aim, shoot, wind. At one point I got a great shot of these four guys crammed together in the back of the streetcar, laughing and arguing and shouting over each other. You could feel the energy of Saturday night coming off them. I thought, I should do a series of different social groups out partying and call it “Saturday Night.” Of course, the photographs would need to be good, and in focus, which I wasn’t sure these would be.
I jumped off the streetcar downtown and walked around the big hotels. There were a lot of people there, too, but these were more tourist types and older people in nice clothes who’d been to the symphony or opera or whatever. I got pretty bold and went right in on people. I shot this rich lady in a fur coat. Another woman said, “That’s awfully rude!” when I stepped in front of her and got a close-up of her face. But I turned and walked away and nothing happened.
In the end, none of these pictures came out very well. The light was bad; the focus was off. But there was a definite excitement in all of them. It was like whatever energy I felt when I took a picture, that same energy would be there in the final image. Like a swooping shot felt like it was swooping and a brash, in-your-face shot had a reckless, stealing-something quality.
• • •
We drove back the next day. I dropped Richie off, and when I pulled the RAV4 into my own driveway, it was one thirty in the morning.
I had school the next day, so I grabbed my bags and hurried inside. I was surprised to find the lights on in the kitchen. That was odd. And the coffeepot was on. I turned it off. I couldn’t imagine who would be awake. My dad wouldn’t be drinking coffee, not at this hour. And my mom was usually the first to bed in our house, since she got up the earliest.
No, something was up. I found myself creeping forward, through the kitchen. Several of the cabinets were open. There were random things on the counter. A pair of my dad’s shoes. A tube of toothpaste.
I continued farther into the house. There was stuff in the hall. One of my dad’s suits, still in its dry-cleaning bag, was lying on the floor of the entryway. I looked in the closet. It was usually packed with coats and parkas; now there were gaps and spaces.
I heard a noise upstairs. Then footsteps. “Gavin, is that you?” said the voice of my mother.
She appeared at the top of the stairs. S
he was wearing a bathrobe. Her face was red and blotchy and she was holding a ratty Kleenex in her hand.
She came partway down the stairs and stopped and sat.
“Something’s happened,” she said.
“What?” I said.
She unrolled the thick knot of Kleenex in her hand. “It’s about your father,” she said. She touched the Kleenex to her nose.
“What about him?”
“He left.”
“Where did he go?”
She opened her mouth. She couldn’t speak.
I stood there, holding my bag, watching her.
“Where did he go?” I said again.
“He has a girlfriend now,” she said. “He’s staying with her.”
31
I barely slept that night. It was a new feeling to have Mom and me be the only people home. That house just got bigger and bigger.
I drove to school the next day. Nobody knew about my father yet, and I kept it that way. I tried to imagine what kind of person would fall in love with my dad. My mother had said she worked at his office, as if that explained it. And now he was living with her somewhere? Where? In a house? In a hotel? It was mind-boggling. The whole thing seemed utterly impossible.
I got through first and second periods. During third period I went to the restroom and sat in one of the stalls. A text had already come from my father. I deleted it unread. I took several deep breaths. I tried to steady myself.
Logan came by my locker after fourth period and we walked to lunch. Claude sat with us. Petra was there too. Krista was not there, which was good. I would have to tell her what had happened. As my girlfriend, she would be the person who would help me through this. But I wasn’t sure how that would work. She was younger than me, and she wasn’t a very emotional person.
Most of the lunch conversation that day was about Mr. Knutson, the gym teacher. Claude and Petra were making fun of him. They told the old story about how he appeared to have a gym sock stuffed in the front of his sweatpants freshman year. Hanna, who wasn’t at the table, had loved to make fun of Mr. Knutson. She could talk like him and imitate his gestures. Anyway, it felt good to laugh and not think about my father for a few minutes.