by Rose, M. J.
On the bottom, in tastefully small type it said:
Nude Muses: The Photography of Cole Ballinger
I picked it up and turned it over.
You are invited to Cole Ballinger’s first one-man show.
June 2 / 6:00 p.m.
Kulick Gallery
34 West 26th street, NYC
RSVP: 222-3333
Cole Ballinger. A name I stared at as if I had never seen it before, because in that context it was foreign. No, worse than that. It was unsettling. A low-level worry started to hum deep in my stomach. My hand started to shake.
I wanted to take the invitation and rip it into a hundred pieces. At the same time I felt an overwhelming wave of weariness and lethargy. The sense that I’d never be able to move out of the chair, never be able to drink the water Jeff had put in front of me, never be able to put down the photograph but be doomed forever to sit in that chair and stare at the blight in my hand.
No matter how I’d found out about it, it would have bothered me, but like this? By accident?
Looking up, I was not surprised to see Jeff watching me closely.
“I didn’t know Cole was having a show.”
“A one man show,” he said clearly imparting the importance of it.
“Do you know anything about this photograph?” I asked, holding my breath after I’d released the words, watching Jeff’s face carefully.
“Nothing except how much attention he told me it’s getting.”
He meant it. I could tell there was nothing he wasn’t saying. No duplicity in his eyes. No looking away, no embarrassment, which there would have been if he had known.
“I would have thought your mom would have told you,” Jeff said.
“I think she tried. A couple of months ago she started to tell me that something terrific had happened for Cole but I didn’t ask and she didn’t pursue it.”
Jeff shook his head. “Neither of you has ever asked me to get involved. But I think it stinks. After how close we all were. After how much the two of you mattered to each other. That you can’t work it out doesn’t make sense.”
“Cole’s never asked because he knows what a shit he is and doesn’t care. And I care too much to want to have anything to do with him anymore or to put you in the middle of it.”
“It eats him up inside,” Jeff said.
“Really?” my voice was as arched as my eyebrows.
“Really. Does that surprise you?”
“Most of what Cole does surprises me.”
“Isn’t there any way for you two to work out whatever it is?”
“Maybe a long time ago but…” I had to force myself not to look down at the invitation again but instead keep my eyes on Jeff. “Not anymore. So.” I took a long drink of the fizzy water. “Let’s not do this, okay?”
“When was the last time you talked to him?”
I shrugged. “Before Joshua died. He’s called since. I’ve erased his messages without listening to them.”
“Why won’t you hear him out?”
“Because the only thing that would matter to me is the one thing he won’t do. If he did it would interfere with his plans.”
“I don’t understand that,” Jeff was clearly confused.
“I know. But I can’t explain. Don’t want to, really. It’s the past. Or at least it was the past…” I couldn’t help it. I did looked at the invitation again. Quickly. Then I forced my eyes away. I didn’t want to go backwards. Didn’t want to deal with my stepbrother. It was too complicated. Too embarrassing. It had meant too much. To me. But clearly not to him. Never to him.
Cole was on a one-way track to Cole’s success and nothing was going to get in his way. He had been devoted to his career to the exclusion of anything else as long as I’d known him, even if I didn’t always realize it. And I couldn’t imagine anything that would change the single-mindedness of his determination. I knew about wanting success but I didn’t understand how it could be more important than the people you cared about. He’d tried to explain it to me a long time ago, in different ways. None of them had been sufficient to clarify how he could be so insensitive. Bullshit. He knew what he’d done was wrong, and how to right it but to do so would have derailed his plans. And there were plans. There have always been plans.
Cole, at this point, was 29 and one of the bad boys of photography. Sexy, clever, talented, and pushing every edge. His heroes were Robert Maplethorpe and Helmut Newton. His shots were sexual and progressive. Angry and beautiful. They made viewers uncomfortable, which made them think his work was important. Was it? I was too close to it to know. But Cole was getting attention and press at a time when most people felt everything had been done already. He specialized in photographing private moments in a way that made viewers feel as if they were intruding in someone’s life – stepping into a room where they were not invited and witnessing an act that was not for public consumption. And that was exactly what Cole did. He took your emotions, your longings, your wants, your passions, and he exposed them with a click of a camera. He recorded fragments of your soul. And while he was doing it you didn’t even realize what you were giving away.
In several cultures, taking someone’s photograph is forbidden. The fear is that the camera steals your personal essence, robbing you of part of your self.
Cole and his work are proof to me that the superstition is true to some extent. It does happen. And danger can follow when that part of you is lost, even worse when it is given up to the public, allowing them to gape at an emotion you have never even seen on your own face.
In other times, in other cultures, Cole might be considered the devil.
“Marlowe, can’t you give him another chance? He’s not happy that the two of you are estranged.”
“I don’t believe you. He knows – he knew exactly what it would take to work things out with me. He chose to do the opposite. I’m sorry. I’m being cryptic. I don’t want to be but I don’t want to talk about this anymore. And please, don’t tell him I saw this. If you do, I’ll never talk to you again, either.”
“That’s a little melodramatic, isn’t it?”
“No. Considering the breach of trust involved, that’s the last thing it is.”
6.
I couldn’t go home. Not yet. If I did, I’d focus on Cole and his photographs and our estrangement and the upcoming show. So I went to Ephemera. Even though it wasn’t a day when I was expected, Grace was glad to see me.
“To what do we owe the pleasure?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“Tell me.”
For a second I heard Joshua saying the same thing and that made me sadder than I’d have thought it would. “It’s nothing… No… it’s not. It’s about Cole.”
“Why don’t you tell me–”
“Grace, I love you. But no matter how many times you ask me, I’m not going to talk about it. Not with you or Jeff. It’s between me and Cole. I’d just gone through this conversation with him and I’m sick of it. I love you but I don’t want to hear about forgiveness and families right now.”
She looked at me with that sweet, concerned expression she gets when she senses that I’m upset, put her arm around me and let me into her office. Her touch started to work its magic and I felt the edge of my anxiety start to dissolve.
As soon as we were sitting on her couch, she pushed a dish of chocolate in my direction. Grace is a chocolate connoisseur. At least once a week, she rescues me from my office and we take a long walk to the City Bakery on 18th to imbibe their heady hot chocolate, made the French way – not with cocoa powder but with melted bittersweet chocolate mixed with milk, a secret recipe they won’t reveal. The bark she was offering, deep dark and shining, studded with fat almonds, came from an even more exclusive shop, Le Maison du Chocolate, which was on West 49th street, where everything cost so much it was a true extravagance. Impossible to resist, I broke off a piece, put it in my mouth and let it start to melt. And then I chewed. And then it was gone and I was sor
ry. I eyed the dish, almost took more, but managed to control myself. The stuff was addictive.
“Better?” she asked.
“Yes. If only it was a real cure not a temporary distraction.”
“What happened?”
“Can I tell you the details later and leave it at the fact that I got yet more proof that I have a stepbrother who is a brilliant photographer and a very selfish prick? Okay?”
She didn’t want to, but she agreed, and we spent a half-hour talking and trying not to finish off the whole dish of chocolate but we failed.
When her client showed up, I returned to my office and sat down to work, buzzing from the caffeinated confection, trying not to let my anger bubble to the surface now that I was out of Grace’s calming presence.
The project I wanted to work on that day required a special rice paper, which I’d ordered, and since sitting still was proving an effort, I went into the back room where deliveries were unpacked to look for it.
Ripping open boxes and unwrapping the packages was therapy. I pulled at cardboard with my fingers, not caring if I broke nails or shredded skin. I picked out staples with my fingertips and tugged at tape that seemed cemented on. I went to work on box after box as if the thing I was searching for might actually be found there.
One box was full of velvet ribbons. About three dozen rolls in pastel colors that felt the way cotton candy tastes. Interrupting my search for the rice paper, I took each roll of ribbon out and put it on the unpacking table in the middle of the room. A tower of hues and tones. Baby blues the color of robins’ eggs, pinks the color of little girls’ ballerina skirts. Greens and yellows that looked like the fancy mints made with white chocolate that my mother bought every Easter and put in a bowl for guests after dinner.
The colors were like lullabyes, finishing off the job Grace had begun calming me.
I cut strips off of eight of them and laid them aside on the table as I continued to search through the boxes looking for the rice paper, which I finally found.
The paper and streamers of ribbon in hand, I went back to my office, more tranquil than I’d been after leaving Grace’s office. Much more so than after leaving Jeff’s.
I opened my door. The windowless room was waiting for me. Small. Cramped. Overflowing with half-finished projects and supplies. It didn’t matter. It was a space that was utterly without emotional connections to anyone or anything in my personal life, and I was free there to work without being bombarded by any of my ghosts. The dead ones, or the ones who were still living.
8.
At 4 p.m., I realized I hadn’t eaten anything all day except for Grace’s chocolate, so I grabbed some money from my bag and went across the street to Dean & Deluca to get some coffee and an apple.
The store is a food museum with every item displayed as if it were a treasure. The fruit and vegetables stand in towering, glittering piles, everything bigger and better and more intensely colored than what you see at an ordinary supermarket. Strawberries the size of your fist. Carrots, thick and robust with deep green leafy stems - beautiful enough to be a bouquet. Giant artichokes from Israel that seem sculpted from jade, Meyer lemons all year long. Raspberries and blueberries that beg to be eaten straight out of their wooden crates. Fresh herbs and more choices of lettuce than you could try in a week, all sparkling with diamond droplets of water from the tiny automatic sprinklers that spray the produce every few hours.
Cases show off an extravagant array of cheeses, chocolates, and pastas as if they were expensive jewelry. The bakery offers more than fifty types of scones, muffins, croissants, and breads, and standing in front of its counters, the scent is so overwhelming you have to hold yourself back from reaching out and breaking off a heel of a three-foot baguette or ripping into a sourdough loaf.
There is something to lure even the most worn out foodie, from the glistening caviar and sushi to the opulence of thirty different kinds of honey, three dozen different salts, four dozen jams and jellies, and almost a hundred varieties of olive oil and vinegar.
Usually I wandered up and down the aisles, allowing myself to give in to the temptation of one treat: a portion of lobster saffron ravioli for dinner, a bottle of extra virgin olive oil infused with garlic along with one perfect head of butter lettuce, or a small sack of fleur de sel tied with a black ribbon.
But not that afternoon.
I grabbed one green apple and went straight to the counter at the front and got on line for coffee.
“Next!” the barrista called and I stepped up to the register. Ignoring pastry, panini, soups, slabs of carrot and zucchini cake, wedges of pie and cheesecake, I ordered black coffee. Plain. I wasn’t in the mood for a creamy cappuccino or a sweet mocha. All I wanted was a cup of coffee, hot and bitter.
After paying, I walked over to the window and sat down at the six-foot long marble topped bar surrounded by high wooden stools.
Usually Dean & Deluca was crowed, but that afternoon there was only one other person there: a young woman wearing a paint- stained shirt who was sipping a tall iced tea and eating a brownie in tiny, tiny bites as if she was trying to make it last forever.
Taking the top off my paper cup of coffee, the steam escaped, and I took the first sip, inhaling the dark, aromatic scent.
The woman smiled at me. There were rings of paint around her cuticles and more splattered on her hands. I liked seeing her there. SoHo had become so gentrified that artists were now greatly outnumbered by business people and tourists.
Cole – my anger with him, my disappointment with him, my embarrassment that I had been fooled by him – was like a splinter. I felt him there.
For years, too many times, I’d taken the needle and tried to fish out the remaining sliver of him that seemed lodged forever under my skin but I hadn’t been able to exfoliate him. I had to figure out a way to clean him out of my system. Finally.
“You were pretty damn rude the other day to walk out on me, after I did everything but kiss your hand to make it better.”
Once again, I didn’t see his face first, but his hands as he put a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a cup of espresso on the table beside me.
Then, pulling out the stool, he sat down.
I didn’t want to be interrupted. Didn’t want anyone to intrude on my self-pitying anger at my stepbrother. Didn’t want to be polite to a potential client and didn’t know how to extricate myself from a stranger who had made me feel undressed in my own office.
“Why did you do that? Is that how you treat all your potential clients?”
That he had used the exact same phrase I’d been thinking startled me. Logically, “potential client” wasn’t that unusual a term for it to be odd we’d both used it, but I still felt as if he knew more about me than I wanted him to or understood how he could.
Meanwhile, he was looking at me expectantly, waiting for an answer. I fumbled for a reason, something that wouldn’t be personal but that would satisfy him and prevent him from asking me any more questions.
“I didn’t walk out on you.”
“What would you call it?” He’d swung form sarcastic kindly banter to a moment of sincere anger. Looking at it from his point of view, it was not undeserved. I had left him sitting there.
He took a gulp of his coffee and then waited for me to say something. I didn’t. Not right away.
Gideon was wearing blue jeans again. And a sweater with thin ribbons of blue, indigo, green, and white stripes. His hair had the same tousled look it had before, and when he reached up and brushed his hand through it I knew why. His habit of running his fingers through the dark curls and pushing the forelock off his forehead gave him a perpetually breezy look. That, with the slightly insolent slant of his cheekbones and the sparkling but hard to read eyes - unusual eyes that were like fine Italian marble, verdant green with threads of black swirling through them - engaged my curiosity. Despite myself.
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said sincerely.
“What happened then?”<
br />
I knew I probably owed him an explanation but what could I say that would make sense?
Always try for some version of the truth, my dad had taught me. He’s an ethics professor at a New England college but none of his theoretical arguments were behind the advice. I am simply a lousy liar, he says. My face always gives me away.
“I never heard anyone read one of my letters out loud before. It was like standing there and being undressed by a total stranger.”
He didn’t respond to that except to push his plate of cookies closer toward me. “Have one,” he said, implying how good they were. How did he do that? I didn’t think I’d ever met anyone who conveyed so much in so few words. Or so much behind his words.
They smelled delicious and eating was something to do instead of just sitting there feeling even more foolish than I had before I’d blurted out the thing about being undressed, so I broke off a piece and took a bite. It was soft and sugary and started to dissolve as soon as I put it in my mouth. First Grace’s chocolate and now the cookies, I was going to be on a sugar high for the rest of the day.
It was as strange to be sitting beside him doing something as ordinary as sipping coffee and eating cookies as it had been to have him read my own words to me, in my own office. I was too aware of all the tastes and smells and how he moved and what I said and how I sounded. I didn’t feel like myself in Gideon’s presence, and I didn’t know why. No, that wasn’t right. I felt like a version of myself I hadn’t been for years. Open. Vulnerable. Wired. Receptive. Angry. Aware of every fleeting feeling.
“So… I’d like to talk to you about an assignment,” Gideon said as he brushed crumbs off his hands and shifted so that he was facing me instead of the window. “How long have you been writing these stories?”
“About six months.”
“How did you start?”