Depth of Field

by Chantel Guertin

  There’s nothing I want more than to stay in New York once I graduate from Tisch. Of course, that means getting in to Tisch after high school. Small detail.

  Ramona holds the door open and I pass through, into the atrium. The elevator doors are just opening and we rush to fit in behind a bunch of other students.

  One of whom is Ben Baxter. He looks up from his phone as the doors close behind us.

  “Hi,” I say, and he nods. I’m about to ask about the David-Deena swap when the elevator doors open again and everyone pushes out.

  Mikael is standing at the front of our classroom, wearing a cowl-neck brown sweater with elbow patches, dark jeans, brown leather shoes. He starts by reminding us he’s had more photos published in National Geographic than any other living photographer. He actually says it again: “I would like to remind you I’ve had more photos published in National Geographic than any living photographer. And there’s a classic National Geographic shot I’m seeking from you: the bird’s-eye view of the city. That’s your assignment. Give me something National Geographic worthy. Work alone, work together—I don’t care. But show me your best shot in three hours. Three hours. Go.”

  We all file back outside—everyone is chattering about what to do, making alliances, trying to keep their idea of how to get the shot secret from everyone else.

  “Gareth and Belinda are heading to the top of the new World Trade Center,” Ramona whispers.

  “What about the Empire State Building?” I suggest.

  “Ooh just like in Gossip Girl?” Savida says. “Can I join you two?” She pulls her thick black hair into a loopy knot on top of her head. Since yesterday she’s bleached a strip of her hair blonde, only her hair’s so dark it’s actually kind of brassy orange, making a skunk-like stripe. She’s got on huge black hoop earrings, which might actually be made of plastic, and on anyone else would look ridiculously juvenile.

  Ramona mumbles that the Empire State Building’s a tourist trap and probably has an hours-long wait already but I just shush her. “Can we take a cab?” I say, remembering my promise to Dace.

  “Sure.” Ramona sticks her arm out and a cab coming up the far lane swerves across three lanes and we all pile in. Ramona tells the guy where to go, but no lights flash, the way they do when you’re actually in the Cash Cab. The cabbie zips across West 4th and then up Lafayette to 4th and then we’re at Union Square and headed up Park Avenue. I snap pics along the way, when we’re stopped in traffic—a set of store window mannequins in Santa suits, trees wrapped with a million little white lights, sidewalks bustling with holiday shoppers—it’s beginning to look at a lot like Christmas, just like the song says. The cabbie cuts across 35th, down 5th to 34th and drops us at the corner. We all chip in a few dollar bills and then pile out of the cab and weave through the tourists and guys wearing those sandwich boards you see in movies and holding sticks with posters attached to the top advertising tours of the city, and through the main doors, following the signs to the ticket booth on the second floor. When we reach the start of the roped-off lines that wind to the ticket booth, the sign attached to the first post tells us the wait is more than five hours long.

  “Five hours?” Savida says. “That’s crazy. We have, like, two and a half to get the shot and get back,” Savida says. “Let’s get out of here. There’s gotta be somewhere else quicker we can shoot.” Ramona agrees and looks at me. I’m disappointed but I snap a pic of the winding line and follow them back out the way we came.

  “What now?” I say as we reach the corner, and I walk straight into none other than Ben Baxter.

  His head’s down, he’s staring at his phone but he looks up, and then when he realizes it’s me, looks flustered.

  “If you’re planning to go up there, forget it,” I say glumly to Ben.

  He looks up at the building, as though he has no clue where he is. “Oh, thanks.”

  “Are you even doing the assignment?” I say, and he nods, but not convincingly, and then sticks his phone in his pocket. I give him a suspicious look.

  “Well, no, not really.”

  “What are you doing up here then?”

  “I just …” He’s at a loss for words. Why is he acting so sketchy?

  I look back at Savida and Ramona, who are deep in conversation and pull him aside. “You’ve got to pull it together. You bullshitted your way into this program but you can’t just not do the work now.”

  “Ben, you want to come with us?” Ramona calls over. I exhale loudly, but Ramona gives me a be nice look and I feel guilty for not wanting him along. I guess it would suck if I were trying to tackle this project alone.

  “So you were going to shoot from up there?” Ben asks.

  “Don’t get all judgy. Did you have a better idea?” I say.

  “Yes,” he says. “At least, more original.” He pauses. “Don’t give me that skeptical look. Just trust me.”

  “Ha!” I stick my arm out to hail a cab. Because either way, we need to go somewhere. Yellow cabs zip by, one after another. “Is there a trick to this?” I ask Ramona and she pushes past me, sticks out her arm, and the very next cab cuts into the lane closest to us and stops. Ben holds the back door open and Savida climbs in, but Ramona grabs the front seat, forcing me to go next, with Ben beside me for the ride.

  “Where to?” the cabbie asks.

  “How do you feel about wearing maids’ outfits?” Ben says as the cabbie pulls away from the curb. I look at him sideways. He’s looking forward, his jaw jutting out in that Abercrombie way.

  “We’re not shooting porn,” I warn.

  “I know. But trust me. This’ll get us points for originality and ingenuity.” He leans forward into the microphone attached to the glass separating us from the driver and Ramona. “What’s the tallest hotel in the city?”

  “The Diamond,” the cabbie says.

  Ben knocks on the glass. “OK, take us there.”

  A few minutes later he’s pulling over to the side of the road, and we pile out onto the sidewalk. Ben pulls us aside, out of the way of the crowds, and tells us the plan. Then Savida goes into the hotel first, as directed, and we follow Ben, through the revolving doors. Savida’s standing at the concierge desk, flipping her long hair over her shoulder and laughing. We walk briskly past the bank of elevators for guests while the concierge is distracted, and through a set of double swinging doors that reads STAFF ONLY.

  There’s a service elevator to the left and Ben hits the down button. “If anyone stops us, Ramona, you act like you have to pee and can’t hold it a second more.”

  “Got it,” she says. The doors open. Ben presses B for basement and holds the Door Close button. When the doors reopen, he tells us to hold the door as he rushes out, down the concrete hall to the right, disappearing from sight.

  The elevator starts to buzz and Ramona takes her finger off the Door Open button, just until the buzzing stops, and then she slams her finger back on the button again and the doors open. We breathe a synchronized sigh of relief just as the buzzer goes again, and Ramona repeats the cycle. That goes on three more times before the buzzer starts a long, continuous buzz and the doors start to close on their own and there’s no stopping them. I’m just about to suggest we get off because if the elevator goes back up to the main floor with Ben stuck in the basement what are we going to do, when Ben rushes through the small space in the doors, pushing a room service cart. The doors close behind him. “All right,” he says, reaching under the cart and pulling out a white coat. He whips off his coat, stows it under the cart and pulls the coat over his clothes. The name on the pocket says Javier.

  Ben reaches under the cart again, then shoves a handful of gold uniforms at us. “Put these on,” he says, and I stare at him. “Quick!” Ramona tears off her coat and then she’s yanking off her black sweater so she’s standing in the elevator in just her hot pink bra and jeans, like she does this every day.

  “I’m not stripping in front of you,” I say, and Ben turns around surprisingly obed
iently. “Throw your stuff under the cart.” I strip down to my underwear, and I focus on getting the uniform on as quickly as possible, but I’ve only got the maid uniform over my head when the elevator jerks to a stop and I can hear the doors opening and I’m seriously freaking out and trying to squirm into the uniform when Ben says “Sorry! All full!” and then the doors are closing, thank God, and I’ve got the uniform on and I step back into my boots, which looks ridiculous, but I don’t have any choice. Seconds later, the doors open on the 89th floor. Ben pushes the cart out into the hallway, and we follow, Ramona asking, “Is it at all suspicious that there’s a room service guy pushing an empty tray and two maids with no cleaning supplies?”

  “You have a better idea?” Ben asks just as a door to our left opens. A couple—in their late twenties, maybe early thirties—walks out. She has long, straight blonde hair and is wearing a fur vest over her outfit, stretchy black pants and boots. She’s complaining about how stuffy the air is in the hall, and he’s ignoring her, engrossed in his phone.

  “Good afternoon. We’re just training the new maid staff. Do you mind if we pop into your room for a moment?” Ben asks, while Ramona and I stare.

  The guy looks up at us, disinterested, and stops the door with his foot. The girl doesn’t even pause, walking ahead toward the elevator.

  Ben holds open the door and we walk—quickly—into the room. The door closes and Ramona squeals.

  “How did you even manage that? It didn’t even make sense,” she says.

  Ben shrugs, like no big deal, then looks at me. “Well, I’m sure you’re not surprised I just pulled off a mildly petty crime with ease.” He pulls out his phone. “I’ll let Savida know where we are.”

  The room feels as big as a house—and where we’re standing is just the entranceway. There’s a bathroom to our right, and then a hallway so long it’s like a fashion runway in front of us, which Ramona races down, and I follow, passing doors on either side. I open one, and it’s a huge walk-in closet. Another goes into a dining room—a marble-topped table so long it looks like it belongs in a boardroom. There’s a Jacuzzi tub in the living room and a big-screen TV that looks bigger than the screen at Spalding Screens—the old theater that plays only retro movies like The Outsiders and The Goonies. Another set of double doors opens into a bedroom so big that the king bed in the middle, complete with mahogany spires at each corner, looks like a doll’s bed. Ramona rushes in and throws herself on the bed, and Savida, who found the room a minute ago, follows suit. There’s another bathroom, the Jacuzzi tub reflected in a full-length mirror.

  The windows are floor to ceiling, wall to wall and I walk to the edge, remembering the assignment. The view from the 89th floor is even more stunning than I could’ve imagined. Even though there are a few taller buildings—the tip of the Empire State Building is still visible off in the distance—we feel high. We’ve definitely got the bird’s-eye view of this town.

  Ben stands beside me. “Wow.”

  I grab my camera, only then realizing that the windows don’t open. Which makes sense, I suppose, when you’re up this high, but that means our photos will reflect the inside of the room on the windowpane. I walk into the bedroom, where Savida and Ramona are behind the drapey floor-length curtains.

  “Do those windows open?” I ask. Ramona emerges, shaking her head. I check my watch. We don’t really have time to try somewhere else, not if we’re going to meet the deadline, and since I’ve already been late for class and handed in crap photos once this week, I’m not about to do both again.

  “You think there’s a rooftop we can sneak onto?” Savida says, straightening the curtains. She heads out of the bedroom. “I’m going to go look at the escape route on the back of the door,” she calls, but a second later, she’s back in the bedroom. “There’s a maid cart right outside the door,” she whispers. “We’re screwed.”

  “How much time till we have to be back?” Ramona asks. Ben checks his watch.

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Maybe when we tell Mikael how we got these photos, from this high, he won’t care that there’s a little reflection,” I say hopefully but I know we can’t hand in photos with glare. I pull my GorillaPod tripod—Found! Underneath my dorm bed—out of my bag and mount the camera on it. All I can hope is that if I can slow down the shutter speed and keep my camera steady, you won’t be able to see the reflection. I focus in on the streets below, attempting to capture a grid-like photo, but the angle makes the photo even worse than shooting with the lens right up against the glass. In the end, the only way to minimize the glare is to shoot straight out through the window, which means my shot suffers. Big time.

  “We should go,” Ben says eventually, putting his camera away. Savida holds up her hand, snapping a few final shots, then concedes. Ramona finished shooting a while ago and has been sitting on the couch, flipping through one of those hotel magazines with glossy photos of gorgeous hotels around the world.

  “Let’s lose the outfits,” she says, tossing the magazine back on the coffee table and standing. She grabs our stuff and we swap back into our clothes and stash our disguises, leaving the cart in the room, and Ben opens the door, looks both ways, then waves us out into the hall. The maid cart is outside the next room down the hall, but the maids are nowhere to be seen and we hurry to the elevator. A few seconds later we’re in the elevator and riding down, acting as normal as we can when the doors open—three times—letting other guests into the car. Once we’re back on the sidewalk, Ramona and Savida walk together up ahead, leaving me to walk with Ben.

  “Thanks, I think,” I say. “If it were up to the three of us, we’d still be standing in line at the Empire State Building to get a shot five billion people get a year.”

  He shrugs. “I guess my penchant for breaking the rules comes in handy occasionally.”

  “I think it probably always comes in handy for you. You just didn’t bank on it benefiting me,” I say, raising my eyebrows and making it come out more bitterly than I really feel, just to remind him—and myself—how much I detest him.

  “Come on, at least you can crack a smile,” he says, then holds the door open to Tisch. “After you.”

  I’m glad he’s behind me, so he doesn’t notice that I do smile, just a bit.

  “I commend your creativity in getting this shot,” Mikael says as the four of us present our photos. We chose four different views from the room, and even though mine definitely has the least amount of reflection, it’s not great. “But the reflection? Kind of amateur.”

  “We didn’t know the windows wouldn’t open,” I say defensively, but trying to keep my voice even.

  “You didn’t realize that a window on the 89th floor of a building wouldn’t open? How many windows on the 89th floor have you opened?”

  “None,” I mumble, not adding that the tallest building I’ve even been in is the government building in Spalding where you get your learner’s permit—and that was only 10 stories.

  “Anyone know how they could’ve got around the glare?”

  Connor pipes up. Of course. “Use a polarizing lens.”

  Mikael points at him. “Exactly.”

  Use a polarizing lens? I don’t have a polarizing lens. “Do you have one?” I ask Ramona. She makes a face. “You’d think, given how heavy my camera bag is. Why don’t I have a polarizing lens?”

  “Any other solutions?”

  Rachel, a girl who, up until this point in the camp, has been pretty quiet, raises her hand. “Widen the aperture and blur out the reflections.”

  Mikael nods. “Precisely. Mess with the depth of field. Not ideal, but”—he turns to look at the shot, Ben’s, still projected on the screen—“better than that. All right. Who’s next?” Mikael says.

  The next group—Julian and Izzy and Avery—show their images, all taken mere inches off the pavement. “We shot Washington Square Park through the eyes of the pigeons,” Julian says.

  “It’s ingenious, if not exactly National Geographi
c worthy.” Mikael grins.

  Ramona groans. “Why didn’t we think of that?”

  CHAPTER 7

  David said he’d meet me outside the front doors to Tisch at 1 on Wednesday afternoon, but it’s already a quarter after and he’s not here. I’m feeling a bit like a kid whose mom forgot the after-school pickup. Ramona’s mentor was waiting across the street after class. Ramona saw him, turned, blew me a kiss and rushed across the street to meet him. Yeah, Ramona’s mentor was early. Why did I give David my phone number without getting his? I check my phone for a text from him, but there’s none. Then I go to text Dace, but I know what she’ll say: What are you doing on your phone? That’s what you do when you’re bored in Spalding, not in New York Frickin’ City. And she’s right. It’s the whole reason Dylan and I agreed to the text ban for two weeks—so we could be In The Moment. Though I have to say I really wish I were talking to Dylan right now.

  The sidewalk down Broadway’s like a real-life fashion runway, where even regular people, out on their lunch break, look glamorous, just because they’re In.New.York. I pull my dad’s Nikon out of my bag and hold it up to my face, taking in the scene, but not actually shooting. I scan the sidewalk, left to right, through the lens, but no David. Then I see a guy across the street, standing at what looks like a hot dog stand and so I cross Waverly. But once I’m behind him, he turns, and it’s not David at all. He moves away.

  The guy working the stand is wearing a Santa hat and studying me. I’m about to order a hot dog when I realize it’s not a hot dog stand—it’s advertising something else, but I’m hungry for lunch and I figure, why not? Live a little.

  “Could I have a halal, please?” I ask, hoping I’m saying it right, and the guy just stares at me. Maybe he doesn’t speak English? “Some halal?” I say louder, pointing to the sign above his head, which says, obviously, Halal.

  The vendor adjusts his cap. “Lady,” he says in perfect English, “halal is the way the food is prepared. You’re gonna have to be a bit more specific.”