When We Disappear

by Lise Haines

  For weeks afterward a vision of that crown lit up my mind, sometimes during the day but often in the middle of the night. It was the pain I felt over what had happened, of course, but I was sure I had also seen a drawing or painting of that halo. When I searched online, I found Our Lady of the Apocalypse.

  I recalled that a photographer friend of Mom’s had given her a coffee table book filled with shots of Virgin Mary statuary. Locating it in the shelves of art books, I read that he had spent months traveling around the States following a path of closing parishes. He would set up his camera the day before a church was going down and shoot those ethereal figures, many already pulled from their pedestals. Some had crowns on their heads, some with stars. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of abandoned Marys with missing noses and arms and heads. On her worst days, I think that was exactly how Mom saw herself after my father took off.

  I went begging and Geary, my old photo teacher, hired me to help in his darkroom. It was my job to set up lighting and backdrops in the studio, order supplies, catalog, and make deliveries around the city. He and his wife, Lettie, had only one car, so this often meant public transportation.

  One delivery was to a fashion photographer on the near west side named Nitro. He did some of his own fine art prints but relied heavily on Geary for the fashion stuff. I was supposed to call if Nitro gave me any shit. Before I could find out what Geary meant he got a call from his wife. So I left and rode the L and when I leaned my head against the train window, I heard the wheels on the tracks sounding: Nitro. Glycerin. Nitro. Glycerin.

  A guy in his late thirties, wearing jeans and a white button down, met me at the door to his loft. He had two controllers in his hands. Halo was on a big monitor across from his couch. Looking a little embarrassed, he said, “Just setting up some new equipment.”

  I held out the two black photo boxes, one stacked on top of the other.

  “You’re from Geary’s?” he asked, making a study of my face.

  I looked down at the boxes, Geary’s studio name and address typed right there, and looked back at him.

  “Halo?” he asked, taking the boxes.

  I shrugged and he handed me a controller.

  He wasn’t very good at it. I had to keep explaining how the controls worked. Or he was good at it and just wanted to sit close to me on his old leather couch. He put his hand on my knee and I took it off. After I beat him at the game too many times I got up and looked around.

  Nitro had photographs of his parents on one wall, their faces blown up so big you could drift into them and feel like a speck, like a bug in their eyelashes. Nothing flattered, nothing pulled back. They reminded me a little of Mehdi Bouqua’s stuff, a street photographer working out of LA. On another wall Nitro had seven shots of young gang members in the city. He used backlight and fill, and somehow this made them appear as if they were about to ascend into the sky in a threatening yet childlike moment. They sat on beat-up playground equipment in a city park and I realized what he was after. “You like William Blake, his artwork,” I said.

  He looked at me as if to say, What kind of creature are you? I could hear that word creature in his thoughts. “Yes, very much. Pity. I think that’s my favorite. Do you know that one?”

  “I like the really blue version at the Tate,” I said. Not that I had been to the Tate but my mother had an art book of Blake’s work with four versions of Pity compared side by side, and I tended to remember things like that.

  “You want to stay for dinner?” he asked.

  “I should get back.” Looking at some of the fashion work spread out on a long table, I asked, “You date any of them?”

  “Used to,” he admitted.

  “I’d never get attached to you the way they did,” I said.

  He laughed and asked, “Why’s that?”

  “Because I don’t give a shit about immortality.”

  “Stay for dinner,” he said. “We could talk about your dreams.” He nursed some kind of tenderness as he coaxed. Dream analysis was a party trick Nitro performed. When I questioned his ability to make interpretations, he said his mother was a psychoanalyst.

  I got my jacket on and wrapped my wool scarf around my neck, and in an odd moment I let him knot it and throw one end over my shoulder as if he were dressing me for a shoot. He came very close like he had an impulse to kiss me but he pulled back at the last moment, which told me he was probably used to this kind of seduction. I took off and got home in time to read Lola a bedtime story.

  I made another delivery a week later and when he opened the door I saw cheese and bread and wine arranged with a bowl of fresh dates on his coffee table.

  Each visit got a little more elaborate: the four-course meals, the special selected movies, hookahs with full bowls.

  I began to go over there once a week to deliver myself.

  Nitro and I played a lot of Call of Duty after I got him started. We racked up kills and we began to photograph each other clothed and naked and standing in front of a large mirror embedded in a piece of architectural salvage—from a convent bathroom or an Irish bar—he couldn’t remember. We stretched out on his bed and along his kitchen counters and dining table and sink and bathroom floor and fire escape and in front of his giant windows at night and we had unadulterated sex.

  But that’s not why I fell for Nitro. It was watching him burn and dodge in the darkroom, the seconds of exposure, the way he cropped an image. Sometimes I sat on a stool to watch and sometimes I put my head against his shoulder for a minute, and he would tell me how long to make the exposure, and we became inseparable until the timer went off.

  I guess I amused him at first. There was a lot he didn’t ask me directly, so I photographed what I thought was a lack of questions in his face and he photographed the questions in mine. He loaned me cameras and tripods. We smoked too much pot and he bought me eye drops and mints so my mother wouldn’t quiz me when I got home. He asked what I liked in my omelets. We talked about lighting techniques. His loft became that place where I could say anything, do anything. That’s how it worked.

  He had a four-year-old son and an ex-wife. A model. They lived in France and Nitro saw his boy three or four times a year. He said he’d be going over there soon. I waited for him to beg me to go. And then I saw two tickets, one his, one with a woman’s name. I assumed she was one of the flawless women.

  I cried on the way to the L going home, but I figured that was something about modern love. It wasn’t about him. It really had nothing to do with him.

  He told me many times he loved the way I looked: unaltered, pure, almost virginal. But after he took off on his trip, I began to think about legs and arms and bracelets. About jackets, perfumes, stockings, the things he caught with his lens.

  I pushed my way into Neiman Marcus, just taking a cut-through in the mall at first, until I saw this blouse. I was sure he would like it. I tried it on in the dressing room and cut out the device on the bottom hem that sets off the store alarm with the manicure scissors in my makeup bag. It was cream-colored silk with a pointed collar that felt right to the touch. I was surprised at how easily I walked out of that store and how I enjoyed the breathlessness. At home I cut off the bottom and used my mother’s sewing machine to rehem it.

  The day after his return he looked at the delicate custom buttons open to my waist, smiled, and said, “Sabrina.” Then he had to explain that this wasn’t about another girl. He was thinking about an old movie in which the chauffeur’s daughter, played by Audrey Hepburn, suddenly becomes a woman out of Paris Vogue. I was pleased and didn’t care that in his hurry the fabric ripped where I had stitched it. Something had changed.

  I began to clip the kind of jewelry that sits out on counters. I knew it would be easy to take a jacket or scarf holding a place in a movie theater or coffee shop, but I understood his tastes, and this meant small acquisitions from particular stores. I walked away in a handsome pair of heels, leaving behind socks and beat-up footwear on a showroom floor one afternoon.r />
  “You have to figure this out,” he said later that day when he realized what I was doing. He was staring at my heels. I pulled away and sat up in bed. Neither of us had had the patience for the buckles. “There’s someone you’re trying to rattle.”

  Rolling onto his side, Nitro lit a cigarette and I watched the smoke drift, looking for that point where it disappeared. The ceilings were twenty feet high and the late afternoon light poured in through the long sash windows. His loft was part of a converted candy factory taken over by an artists’ cooperative. There were marks where giant copper vats had been strapped to the floors.

  “Rattle?” I said.

  “By getting caught eventually.” He picked up my phone and began to flip through my photos. I tried to grab it away, but he got playful. I decided not to make a deal out of it so he’d stop. He paused on a shot of my parents together at a restaurant. I had used a high intensity flash so they looked half there and kind of shocked. “Nice framing,” he said. “So your mom thinks he’ll be back?”

  I don’t know why this was sitting in his foreground now. His cheeks were pitted and this made him look rough at times. He told me once that he couldn’t stop scratching when he had chicken pox as a kid.

  “She’s waiting for him, that’s all I know.”

  “They don’t do well,” Nitro said, lost in his own meditations. Then he looked over at me and began to blow smoke rings as if I needed entertainment.

  “‘They’? Who doesn’t do well?” I asked.

  “Left women. You know, when children are involved.”

  I felt my blood pick up pace. “He was out of work for a long time,” I said. “And then this job turned up in New Jersey. I wouldn’t call that leaving her.”

  “You don’t have to go to New Jersey to sell insurance. Besides, if this was strictly about a job, you wouldn’t look troubled.”

  “You think I’m a child,” I said and pushed into his stomach with my elbow to reach the bedside table. I pulled the last cigarette from his pack and grabbed the lighter.

  His father, who had died of lung cancer, looked down at me like a dark cloud from the wall. I lit up, inhaled, and found out how light my head became on tobacco.

  “Maybe you’re thinking about your son, about the way you left him,” I said.

  “But I didn’t,” he said, clearly pained now. “She left me and took off for France. And in the French courts there was little I could do.”

  “Who did you take with you to Paris this time?”

  “An old friend, a photographer.”

  “Someone you see from time to time?”

  “You’re making too much of this.”

  “What does she look like?”

  He hesitated long enough to realize I’d persist. There were some pictures on his phone. She seemed rather plain, wore almost no makeup. Certainly there was nothing about her clothes to draw him in.

  “What type of photography? Show me.”

  “You aren’t going to let this go, are you?” he said. He got out of bed and took my hand. I was a little wobbly in the heels. He guided me over to a set of large flat drawers. She had her own drawer. I didn’t. I didn’t have a drawer. She was a street photographer. I wouldn’t say she was better than me, just different. It almost looked as if she had posed her subjects, certainly they were standing still in their settings, and she took her time to frame things. I was more abrupt, more into movement, light, and emotion. I didn’t mind that someone was lopped off or caught at a funny angle. I liked to shoot people before they had time to think, to respond.

  She was thirty-five, he told me when I asked. They had seen each other on and off for years. But things weren’t like that anymore, he said. I wasn’t sure I believed him.

  I closed the drawer and worked on the buckles and left the stolen heels by the door. I got dressed, and all the time he watched me. I turned my phone on again and began to flip through my mother’s messages. There were seven.

  “You understand they arrest you if you get caught,” he said, circling back to my small larcenies, pushing away from his.

  “I’ve already got a mother,” I said and held up the phone with her texts stacked in a heap.

  “If you need money, all you have to do is let me know.”

  But I was already working on other ideas. Not clothes.

  Pushing in, he offered to give me a ride back to Evanston. I took the L.

  Of course it had to be that night when the bill went online breaking things down in preparation for my first year of college. I didn’t tell my mother and called a financial aid officer the next day.

  “Things have changed,” I said.

  The woman waited as I told her my father had moved away and wasn’t sending much money before she launched in. Maybe the AC units were broken in her office that day or she was working from home and a cat was gnawing at her toes or she just didn’t like the sound of my voice. Whatever it was, she got merciless about the college’s funding distribution practices, the limits of federal aid, how far from extended deadlines I had drifted, the effort they had put in to arrive at a good package for me, as if her entire office had traveled for months in a desolate country to reach me. Finally, she suggested I consider delaying admission for a year. I could reapply for aid next winter. “You might need to submit an updated portfolio,” she said, topping off my empty glass.

  “That can’t be right,” I said.

  “You’ll want to check with the department.”

  “There’s a small fortune in photographic paper, chemicals, the time it took to—”

  “I just wanted to give you a heads-up,” she said in her monotone.

  “Your head’s up your ass,” I said and dropped the phone into its charger.

  A few days later, when Mom asked for my password to get on the site to see where things stood, I said I was taking a gap year. She pushed back hard, but when I said I wouldn’t budge, that I wanted to work at Geary’s full time and save up money, I don’t know, maybe she began to accept the logic in it.

  In the letter I wrote to the department I said I would be traveling during my delayed year in order to photograph national monuments that were sinking into the earth along with the reputations of our best educational institutions. Later, I regretted dropping this into the mail slot and then I had to call and ask them not to open the letter, a second would follow, and so on.

  From the glossy postcards that continued to arrive every two or three weeks from Dad to Lola, I began to believe that if everything else was going to hell, our father had plenty of beaches where he roamed and that the skies were always blue.

  You should see the ocean, he wrote on one card.

  You should see how broke we are, I almost wrote back. How Mom doesn’t sleep anymore, how she worries about things you can’t imagine.

  Mom held up a copy of The Secrets of Car Flipping. I didn’t realize at first that she was saying she had to sell the station wagon.

  “When I went to that retraining session at the newspaper,” she said, “I met a new hire named David, and during the break we talked cars. He just called to say he has to sell his father’s van to help pay for his dad’s home health care. David had his mechanic check it out, and he says it will run until Armageddon.”

  That’s one of those statements you have to think about, but I’m not sure my mother did, given her worries. David drove over to our place the next day so she could give the van a spin. He had hair popping out of the edges of his long-sleeved shirt, cuffs and collar, like a physical manifestation of the energy exploding from his psyche. His father, he said, had babied the thing.

  “He’ll only sell it to someone who loves it as much as his father did,” Mom told me after he was gone.

  “And?” I asked.

  “Well. I could haul an awful lot around in something like that. He said he’d give me an exceptional deal and he offered to pitch in over the next year, change the oil, replace the belts, that kind of thing.”

  “Was he hitting on y
ou?” I asked.

  She reddened, and I felt certain some flattery had been involved. “He showed me a picture of his wife and kids. He has a son your age and …” She stopped and said, “He’s going to list it next Saturday.”

  Over the week, she hesitated and worried that the van would be sold out from under her while she hesitated. She read something in Consumer Reports and talked to her bank and her brother, Hal, who wasn’t all that encouraging but didn’t have any other ideas. He wasn’t a car man by nature.

  “What do you think?” she said, circling back to me.

  It’s not like I knew what she should do. We were both in shock about having to sell our wagon because it had felt so safe driving Lola around in a Volvo. But it was time to get over it and stop asking people. I told her this and she went for that van as if she were leaping from a high-rise, convinced someone would bring out a net if the sidewalk got close.

  Fourteen days after we got it, the van sprang an oil leak, and that hairy guy no longer answered his phone. Was it possible he wasn’t actually employed by the paper? Was he just there at the training session to sell someone a bad vehicle? Was this a business venture or a lark? Did he sell other goods as well? Broken radios, busted dishwashers, books with their front covers ripped off?

  Mom was too exhausted to puzzle this out or to track him down, and it probably wouldn’t have done much good if she had. She began to use cans of this additive to patch the leak. By then we had two leaks, maybe three. When she fired the engine up it smelled like something was burning or dead. The undercarriage dripped and black oil pooled everywhere we parked. Before, when she picked up Lola from a play date, Mom used to pull into her friends’ driveways, but now she made a point of parking on the street—sometimes on the other side of the street or down the block.

  Another letter arrived.

  Dear Mona,

  So I said I’d tell you a story about my Uncle Sorohan, my mother’s brother. I knew him during his carny years, but before that he was a roustabout with a circus, when he was even younger than you are now. Uncle Sor had an old fedora he never took off, even in the tub and even when he went to bed. His face was deeply lined from all the cigarettes he smoked and years of being outdoors, and he was a hardworking man but also a true romantic.