I shrugged. “I took a class in anatomy and physiology in college, more to help us draw the human form than to edify, and I remember the professor saying most embryos of under two months’ gestation look a lot alike. I think this embryo was probably only a couple months along—less if it’s an animal. How long does a small mammal carry its child? A few months, right? The animal probably miscarried and that’s what you heard.” I paused. “I couldn’t photograph this anyway, Derek. At best, it would look like a graphic for one of those charts in a textbook.”
Derek looked disappointed. “I rushed up here at the speed of light too. Got a bunch of weird looks on the bus, I can tell you.”
“You came here by bus?”
“You think I own a car?”
How did I get hooked up with this guy? Traveling by bus with an embryo on the seat next to him? There was a god-awful odor now that the bag was opened and the air was absorbing what was inside.
“I think we need to get rid of this quickly.” I couldn’t see making him take it back by bus. “My neighbor has a compost pile. Maybe we could add it to that.”
Derek nodded and that’s what we did next, my fingers crossed that my elderly neighbor was fast asleep. I followed Derek down the stairs and outside, to the backyard of the modest little bungalow next door. There was a shovel handy. I picked it up and covered the fetus, hoping an animal wouldn’t dig it up and drag it around my neighbor’s yard, scaring him to death.
I offered Derek a ride home, but he said he wasn’t sure where he was going. We parted at the front door, he promising to communicate with me by phone should he find another object of interest. I brushed him off, convinced he was more than half-crazy and that what he found would be worthless at best, inappropriate or criminal at worst. I was pretty sure I’d made a mistake in interesting Derek in my work, but I still wasn’t completely willing to dismiss him. Actually, I kind of liked him.
Detroit Free Press: A 29-year-old man, a paraplegic since a motorcycle accident in 2003, was Detroit’s second victim of West Nile virus this year, county health officials report. It is not believed the deceased, Barry Johnson of northwest Detroit, came into contact with the city’s first victim, Lisa Swaggerty, of Plymouth. The manager of Environmental Health Services stated that the two had apparently never met; nor did they frequent the same stores or restaurants. Both victims were probably bitten by affected mosquitoes several weeks earlier.
(May 2011)
“Key-rist, it takes you a hell of a long time to take your precious pictures,” Bill said from the maroon velvet chair across the room. “You’re the Edward Hopper of the photography world.”
“Did he work slowly?”
I was miffed with Bill. After Derek left, I’d dialed Bill’s number, needing to touch base with a sane person, and got his voice mail. Bill was straying, I was sure of it. Viewings were over long before eleven-thirty. Were we in the death throes of our affair? Had my new venture—a project that would appear to bring us together—pushed us apart?
But now I was with him again, and I focused on the man in front of me, wishing I could take each photograph at the same time of day. No way that was gonna happen. I adjusted the light head for a third time after a quick look at the meter. My back was aching, head pounding. Sometimes the right shot simply eluded me. Couldn’t get the focus or angle or lighting or…well, I didn’t always know what. No magic today.
“Hopper only finished one or two paintings a year at points in his career.” Bill stretched his arms and yawned. “Then there’s de Kooning. Spent an entire year on one canvas, painting it over and over because he didn’t think he’d got it right.”
“I know that feeling. Hey, when did you become such an expert on art?” I asked, still looking at my subject critically. “Anyway, de Kooning was an asshole.” I thought for a minute. “Is an asshole?”
“Was an asshole. I’m studying you is what I’m doing. Trying to understand what you see in the little window and why such a particularly constricted view constitutes your whole world.” He stretched out his legs and yawned again. “Didn’t you study any art history at school in Chicago?”
“Didn’t stick. If I didn’t need information to take a good photograph, I let it go. Very Zen. Keeps my head clear.”
Bill laughed. “Clear or empty, Violet?”
Despite the barrage of insults, I was still trying to compose the shot. Damn. I didn’t care for Bill’s choice of clothing for Barry Johnson: the guy was dressed like a participant in a NASCAR race.
“Why this costume?” I asked. “Didn’t you say he was paralyzed? It’s macabre dressing him like this.”
And why did you choose a canary yellow shirt for him, I felt like asking but didn’t. See, I could keep criticism to myself. Black people didn’t look good in yellow—at least not in my viewfinder. And this yellow was too loud; the color slid off the garment and shone on his face like a dandelion. Almost no one looked good wearing yellow in my opinion. Okay, maybe Tweety, but that was about it.
“Did you read the bio I emailed you?” Bill sighed. “I laid it out there.”
I couldn’t please him today. Truth was, the less I knew about my subject the better. It was different from Bill’s relationship with the deceased. He needed to bond with his client to a certain degree to relate well to the family and friends. To choose the right clothes perhaps. But for me, it just made my job more difficult. I could get lost in their story, lost in their face.
“He must have been bitten by the first mosquito to make a foray around southeastern Michigan. It’s hardly May.”
“Back to the choice of yellow. The fellow drove in motorcycle races, then he got into a bad accident a few years back,” Bill continued. “Parents brought over these duds when I asked if there was anything significant in his closet. You’d think this outfit would be the last way they’d want to see him dressed, but I’m guessing since he died of something else entirely, they were okay with it. Maybe racing was his finest moment. His dream.”
“West Nile, huh? I’m surprised he got out of the house often enough to get bit.” I cleaned the lens and looked through it once more.
“Parents tell me he spent most of the day outside when he could. Although with Detroit weather, it was limited.”
I got the shot I wanted and was about to leave when Bill grabbed my arm. “Shall I come over tonight?” His breath on my neck was warm enough to make the hairs stand up. His lips ran across it. Bill wasn’t usually this direct. I was taken aback. It’d been nearly two weeks since Bill and I made love.
I’d always found it difficult to keep men interested over the long run. Once it was clear we weren’t going to marry, weren’t going to meet each other’s parents, no children were going to come along—once the major sexual games had been played to varying degrees of success, things began to fall apart. Slowly but irrevocably. Once my tricks were out of the bag, one of us took off. Usually me. Before it looked like he might leave—whoever the current he was. It wasn’t like there were truckloads of men in my past. A van’s worth perhaps.
Bill came over. He stayed until morning; it felt like a final rite.
“I was on the scene—sometimes drawn there by a power I can’t explain…”
Weegee
I’d reluctantly agreed to meet Bunny, and before I was fully seated at the restaurant was treated to a string of complaints about her current job waitressing at an Ethiopian restaurant in Ferndale.
“Why’d you take a job there?” I asked her. “Don’t they haul the food around in big serving dishes and eat family style? Do they even serve alcohol? Muslims, right?”
Bunny had rarely taken jobs in restaurants that didn’t serve alcohol, claiming the tips were less than half.
My mother’s waitressing odyssey dominated my childhood. Deadbeat dads were permitted to remain on the financial lam in the eighties, so my childhood memories were of packed bags sitting in the foyer, on a bed, on the curb, in the cargo hold of a Greyhound. Of reading road maps in a vinta
ge Buick seeming to require a new muffler twice a year and new brakes even more often. Of being the new kid in school, on the street, at the church, in the Brownie troop. If there was a man involved in any of this travel, I never heard mention. And the reason for finally landing in Detroit when I was eleven had never been satisfactorily explained. Bunny may have run out of steam. Some waitresses spend their life in one spot, but Bunny must have had a travel bug. One thing was certain, she wanted out of Massachusetts.
My father’s complete disregard of my birth and subsequent life did little to increase sympathy for my mother with her family there. When my sister, Daisy, was still alive, she’d brought out the best in neighbors, in relatives. But I evoked tidings of death and destruction once Daisy died. People kept their distance—we were tragic, bad luck, nasty.
Bunny survived this treatment by appearing strong, and I both held this against her and depended on it. Hal Hart’s weaknesses passed for strength to my immature mind. He ditched the things holding him back—a good lesson for me, I thought. Put the art first. Family on idle; career got the gas.
The fickle ones, the irresponsible ones, always attract young women and daughters, and I was no exception. I knew this but was helpless to alter it. Over the years, I had analyzed the hell out of my family to no avail.
Bunny shook her head across the table now. “No booze and lousy tips. After the last place—a little cubbyhole making crepes—went belly-up, I jumped on this one. A local institution with a Muslim population nearby—it sounded like a great gig. Little did I know the number of Middle Eastern restaurants would mushroom. Imagine living paycheck to paycheck at my age, scrounging for the extra quarter’s fall to the sticky floor.”
But as was Bunny’s style, she quickly assembled a second list of the job’s positive aspects. “Look, I like being able to walk to work. It saves a lot of money. And the owner’s pretty nice. Paid for a pair of shoes with orthopedic support when he saw how crippled I was by the end of the night.”
We both looked down at Bunny’s feet, now clad in a pair of duck-yellow Crocs. “I only wear the orthos to work in,” Bunny explained. “They’re ugly as sin.”
“Do you mean the orthopedic shoes or what you’re wearing now?”
Bunny made a face and added, “I get a lot of the Ethiopian holidays off. Plus the American ones. Two Christmases probably.” She squinted. “At least, I think I do. It hasn’t come ’round yet.”
“There are a million restaurants across Nine Mile Road and up Woodward Avenue, Mom. You could walk to any of them from your apartment.”
She didn’t hear me. “I hate wearing the African clothes. Sure, they look cool on a twenty-year-old—all those swirling pieces of cloth, bright colors. But I look like the fortune teller at a seedy carnival. I get vegetable alecha on me and have to run a load of wash at midnight. If I forget to push the delicate cycle on the 1950s washer they have in the laundry room in my building, I’m screwed. The fabric is real fragile. Like papyrus. Can you believe it? Using that kind of material for a waitress’s uniform?”
And as I was thinking her list of pros and cons would go on forever, she stood up. “Gotta have a cig, chickie.” She looked for the pack in her purse. “Another tricky issue, the damned fabric goes up in flames if you don’t watch it. You could solder it to your skin.”
I watched as she briskly walked outside and lit a Marlboro, immediately sucking the smoke back with a well-practiced cough, standing against the brick building, one foot propped on the wall behind her, looking like an employee of a factory. Or possibly like the world’s oldest hooker.
The people sitting near the window turned to watch, noticing in an inchoate way that Bunny was spoiling their view: Bunny, who picked imaginary pieces of tobacco off her tongue though she’d smoked filtered cigarettes for the last forty years, was an eyesore. Her stomach pushed at the spandex of the pink pants she wore like an overfilled balloon at the helium pump.
“Vodka on the rocks,” I said to a passing waiter.
Two stiff drinks before one-thirty wasn’t a good idea, but it’d get me through the lunch and possibly assuage my continuing worry about Bill and my project. And the image of that fetus—no matter what kind it was—was burned on my retina. The waiter, not mine, threw me an irritated look, nodded, and after a few minutes, my own waitress returned with the drink. Bunny had lit a second cigarette and was talking to the valet, laughing in the raucous way she had. Though I knew it was impossible, I imagined I could hear her through the plate glass. It was likely the opening and closing door let in Bunny’s laugh like an unwanted gust of hot air. Why was I so hard on her?
I remembered one Thanksgiving, soon after our arrival in Detroit. Bunny’d brought me along to her current place of employment when the sitter hadn’t shown up. I passed the next six hours reading Archie comic books and sketching at a small table at the back of the dining room, watching family after family celebrate the holiday. Bunny ran back and forth with a smile on her face all evening, carrying heavy platters, her last table at nine o’clock getting the same careful attention as the first one at four.
“The only thing standing between us and the poor house is good legs and a big smile,” Bunny often said.
But rather than admiring her for her fortitude, I blamed her for settling for this life. Why hadn’t Bunny gone to night school like the mothers on television and become a secretary or a teacher?
When I complained about the injustice of our Thanksgiving later that night, Bunny told me I should feel sorry for those families at the restaurant.
“The ones to envy,” Bunny said, slicing up the small turkey breast she’d brought home for us, “ate Thanksgiving dinner at home with their families.” Putting a piece in her mouth, she added, “Like we’re doing if only a little late.”
I found it hard to believe after seeing the soft lighting, the gleaming silver, the crisp white linen, the festive centerpieces, the gay conversations heightened by gales of laughter, the well-dressed patrons, the sumptuous food. It seemed like the ultimate in holiday celebrations. How could any dinner at home compete with that?
Dinner at home was at a battered kitchen table with mismatched chairs, or on sticky TV trays, sitting propped against a wall until mealtime.
I couldn’t imagine the typical family celebration well enough to envy it until years later, when I’d actually experienced one—or at least partook of one as a guest. All my childhood notions of families came from the shows Bunny and I watched when she had the night off: The Waltons, Family Ties, Who’s the Boss?
Each of us sat with one of those plastic TV trays, watching television characters live a life that seemed more real than ours. There was always one more thing for me to miss out on—nice clothes, a vacation, a holiday dinner, a dead sister, a missing father. A missing father. I hadn’t seen Hal Hart for years. Did he know his first child was dead?
I began my search for him the summer after seventh grade, haunting libraries in the Detroit area, which all seemed to have a room with out-of-state telephone directories in those days. Hal Hart wasn’t an unusual name, but it was a vague one. Was Hal his real name? Or was it Howard or Harold? Over the years of searching, I called more than a hundred Hal Harts.
“Hal Hart?” This call was to a man in Boston, Massachusetts, the year I was thirteen.
“Yes.”
His voice was high—not the way I remembered my father’s voice if I actually did remember it. Perhaps it was Pa Ingalls and not Hal Hart’s voice that flitted in my head.
“Hi, Mr. Hart. Are you by chance a musician?”
Laughter. “Only if you count the kazoo.”
I didn’t.
“Hal Hart?” This Hal Hart was in Gainesville, Florida.
“Yes.” This voice was deep, raspy. He sounded too old.
“Are you a musician?” I don’t know why I didn’t ask the obvious question: “Do you have a daughter named Violet?”
“I play a little.”
“Trumpet?”
; “Why do you want to know?” He seemed amused.
I soldiered on. “I’m looking for my father.”
“You sound like a white girl, honey.” He laughed a little more.
“Yes, I’m white.” I couldn’t imagine why he was asking this. Of course, I was white.
“Well, you got the wrong branch of the Hart family, sweetie. The Florida Harts are all black.”
The occasional Saturday sleuthing lasted until at fifteen or so I gave up.
A year later, Hal Hart appeared with nary an apology for his long absence, never once mentioning Daisy’s death. It was as if his first daughter never existed. After that visit, I never looked for him again, didn’t ask him where he lived, what he’d been up to all those years. I took his infrequent visits over the next twenty years for what they were. Not much and not worth thinking about often.
I looked up from my empty glass in time to see the valet escaping from my mother, probably thankful for a customer wanting his car. Bunny looked around, smiling at passersby. Maybe Bunny was no more eager to return to the table than I was to have her there—both of us wishing we were having lunch with someone else, somewhere else.
Bill, or was it another guy, once told me I was missing the “pleasing gene,” the magical trait many women seemed to possess.
“Except in bed, of course,” Bill had said, concluding his observation. “There you’re the best. Aces.”
Well, I certainly worked hard at it. Sex and photography. I needed a viewfinder to get through the day and a mirror over my bed at night. Apparently watching the world through glass was my safety net.
“And isn’t that important in the scheme of things?”
“For you, no doubt,” he said, covering his smile with the back of his hand.
I hated the superior tone creeping into his voice and lashed out.
“I don’t see you climbing out of my bed any too quickly. Something must hold you here. Once the sex is over.”
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