The Cage

by Audrey Shulman

  Within a few years of college Beryl had already had a few photography shows and was making a steady living from freelancing for magazines. At her shows she’d begun to hear strangers say “Findham” a lot, as though by saying her name frequently during any discussion of her photos it would be obvious they understood her meaning. They would confidently ascribe to her name many qualities as though describing a substance like a rock with clear, easily definable veins. She still associated her last name with her parents and each time she heard it she saw her mother cocking the camera, her father adjusting the lights. In a way it was easier for her to imagine her parents taking the pictures all these people came to see.

  When she was twenty-six she attended the show of a man three years older than she and as well-established. He specialized in photographing the insides of vegetables, magnifying to huge images the hidden seedy nooks and curls inside. She marveled at his technical expertise. One of his reviews, reprinted in foot-tall letters over the wine and cheese table, said his vision of the alien hidden future was focused, involuted and withering.

  Beryl completely believed in his ability, his true claim to his reputation as an artist and a man with a vision. When they’d met she’d felt the firmness of his handshake, the width of his hand. Crow’s-feet appeared around his eyes when he smiled; she assumed they came from peering into a camera and thinking hard. His teeth gleamed so white and smooth she’d known immediately that he didn’t smoke or even drink coffee. He said he’d been to two of her shows. She noticed the way he concentrated directly on her face whenever she talked as though she were saying something quite complex and it was critical that he follow. When she turned away to get more wine, she’d also caught the way he glanced down her body. She felt honored and nervous, finished her glass of wine too quickly. She tried to smile the way she thought he thought she should: a small confident world-weary smile. They went out to dinner.

  During the relationship she found herself copying his speech, his mannerisms. He tended to couch his own thoughts in what she considered the impersonal style of textbooks: “It can be assumed …” and “It need not be said …” This style made what he said sound proven and factual. While talking philosophically he habitually brushed back his hair, massaging his scalp as though he were thinking so hard his head hurt. He twisted out his lips in grimaces while searching for the exact word. Her imitations of his speech never sounded as imposing. Her grimaces looked more like twitches than deep thought.

  Gradually he took on the role of older teacher, gave her treatises by Krishnamurti, The Moosewood Cookbook and Diet for a Small Planet. He maintained that eating macrobiotic took less from the world. For her birthday he gave her a carton of recycled dioxin-free toilet paper and some perfume made without animal testing. She had been quite excited by the size of the wrapped package, then confused when she saw the first roll. He had explained the dangers of dioxins; once she saw he was serious she tried to thank him for the present as though delighted by the originality of his thought.

  One day when he said she should do her laundry using only baking soda and vinegar, she’d listed all the chemicals he used in his photography. She meant only to tease him, but his face went quite stiff, the nostrils of his thin well-formed nose whitened.

  “That,” he said, “is Art. One cannot curtail the needs of one’s expression, nor divert the means it chooses.”

  She had worked immediately at mollifying him. In the end he had relaxed only when she maintained that it was really the fault of scientists for not coming up with more ecologically sound chemicals. He was a passive victim from lack of choice. He had nodded his head at her wisdom and together they had decried the scientists’ greed for profit.

  And from the third breakfast they shared together, he had continually told her she should give up coffee.

  “It is widely understood that there are three substances dangerous to clear vision,” he said the first time he enumerated the evils of coffee. He held out his hand and counted off the items on his large, neatly manicured fingers. Those fingers last night had moved so cleverly across her body she’d almost been scared of them. Afterward she’d traced the outline and texture of his nails and wrists for a long time while he slept. The blond transparent hair on the backs of his knuckles had seemed so vulnerable, so delicate.

  “Nicotine,” he listed, “alcohol and coffee. Mystics around the world, from early Christians to modern-day Buddhists, agree that these three dull the spirit’s sight.” She watched his hands, looked at his red lips forming the words. “It’s fairly obvious the connection between spiritual sight and art. We must have clear truthful vision.”

  She was fascinated by the idea that to photograph well, one’s soul had to have clarity, as though it were another lens to be fitted onto the camera. Unfortunately she liked coffee. Each morning she made it quite strong using a melior, a ritual that helped her to wake up. He said that any awakening must come from within. Something about the weight with which he uttered advice like that made her see it as a country sampler stitched with little roses and hung on the wall. She knew this wasn’t how he’d want her to hear his words.

  When he was around in the morning she’d try to wait until he left to have her coffee, but sometimes he’d stay until lunch and then she’d pull the melior out in front of him. Once he asked how it felt to be addicted. Vocabulary about addictive behavior was quite popular at the time, from chemical dependency to dependent relationships. Several of her friends had confessed to her their addictions and she had felt insensitive and slightly left out that she had no confessions to give in return. She began to wonder if coffee would be acceptable.

  “It’s like seeing you drink ground glass,” he explained. She smiled shyly at his caring, his protection, but each time she took a sip, he’d look away. She began to enjoy her coffee less and less.

  For a week she experimented by not drinking caffeine to see if her photos actually did benefit. She couldn’t see much of a difference. She wondered if it took longer than a week to work the impurities out of her soul.

  He started to give advice about her work each time they met at her studio. He would state the criticism with his face turned a little away from the photograph so his eyes were narrowed and looking out from the side, the crow’s-feet showing, the same pose he favored in the posters advertising his shows. She never ceased to revel in the physical size of his work, blown up to ten feet tall and fifteen feet wide, grainy and hard. Sometimes he nailed wood boards onto the pictures, dusted them with dirt, glued on telephone wiring that curved in and out. The vegetables looked quite alien, like the insides of machines. The critics loved his combination of photography and sculpture. She thought he couldn’t have mistakes in pictures that big.

  One day over lunch, he asked if she didn’t sometimes tire of photographing only animals.

  She had been raising a tofu curry sandwich to her lips. She put the sandwich back down. “What?” she asked.

  “You only photograph animals,” he said. “You must get tired of it. If you do that well with animals, you could say so many more things with a greater subject matter, with something more than …” He thought for a moment, puckered his lips out, and then laughed as he said, “Bambis and Thumpers.”

  She had tried to laugh at his joke. A drop of soyonnaise had clung to his upper lip. She’d leaned forward and wiped the drop away with her napkin, touching his lips with her other hand and then running her fingers down his chin, as though she could stop his voice, his words. She’d given up coffee almost entirely except sometimes in the afternoon if she still felt sleepy.

  “Oh,” she said, “I guess it would be nice if I had a larger scope, but animals are the only things that fascinate me enough to make the photos good.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “you should try harder.”

  They had a long discussion on the subject. In arguments like this he was methodical and earnest, tracking each statement down to its logical conclusion. He would maintain that IF she had a limited subj
ect matter, and IF she thought it would be better to photograph more things than animals, THEN she should try harder to increase her scope.

  She wasn’t as logical in her debates. For her the conversation wasn’t the only thing going on. While they discussed the scope of her work, she noticed that when he made a point he held his hands cupped out toward her as though physically offering her something. She noticed that his eyes hardly ever rested on her, but tended to stare at the salt and pepper near her as though he were describing something as clear to him as the salt shaker’s shape. She saw her own hands ripping up a napkin and wondered what she had in her fridge to make for dessert. After the argument he felt the issue had been settled and action would be taken. She felt they’d examined one side of it.

  After he left she began to wonder. She heard his voice saying “Bambis and Thumpers” again and again.

  The next time she saw him he handed her a portfolio showing his most successful work, so she could start to think about other subject matter. In the moment when her hand closed on the weight of the portfolio, she understood that he wouldn’t let this issue drop. At some point she would enjoy photographing animals as little as she enjoyed drinking coffee now. The skin along her backbone began to sweat. Nothing in her life was worth more than her work.

  After dinner, she kissed him one last time and then walked slowly home to change her phone number and leave on the first assignment she could find that lasted over a month. Some of her best photos ever had come from that assignment photographing the new exhibits at the San Diego Zoo. She’d felt so lucky just being able to stand there for hour after hour watching the animals, holding her camera. Her patience had been inexhaustible. The pictures had an almost confidential feel to them, as though the animals were bending closer to show her something secret.

  Once after that, at a company she worked for occasionally, she’d stepped around a corner in the hall to see him walking toward her, examining two photos in his hands. His hair had grown longer, his face thinner. She stepped back quickly around the corner and then into the women’s room, breathing as unevenly as if she’d run for blocks.

  She’d had other relationships since then, but they had been mostly physical with a clear line drawn by herself as to exactly how far the man could come into her life. Even with those who respected her rules, the relationships usually broke up within two or three months. She didn’t know if it was just bad luck or if she imposed too many limits. Other women she saw, no matter how hurt they had been in the past, still tried with each new man to be as intimate as possible. She wondered if she was wrong not to do so.

  Her last relationship had been the best, with a friend of a friend who had a pet otter she’d wanted to photograph. The man was as humorous and fast-moving as the otter, which had perfected the art of opening doors with its paws so it could join in on any water activity, from washing dishes to a shower. At the slightest slackening of her defense it would roll into the dishwater to curl up round a cup, ready to wrestle determinedly for ownership. Afterward, the dishes would have to be blown dry with a hair dryer to get rid of all the stray otter hair. When showering Beryl had learned not to jump at the otter’s smooth fur slicking unexpectedly round her ankles.

  The man and Beryl were both extremely ticklish and spent hours torturing each other, springing for the other’s weak spots in unexpected moments and trying to defend their own, wriggling and laughing, begging for help. Once when they were going out to dinner, walking along a crowded city sidewalk all dressed up, he’d reached beneath her jacket as though to hug her waist closer to him and instead yanked her underwear halfway up her back. She yipped and twisted in pain and they fell to the sidewalk screaming insults and grabbing at each other’s underwear. People passing them paused, looking back, faces blank and hostile.

  After six months he brought up the possibility of moving in together. She told him she would think about it. That same week she drove the otter and him to a lake near the Maine border. At the lake the otter shot out of the car and down the mud bank on its smooth belly, tucking its head at the last moment into the water as if putting on a dress. It dove and frolicked, until it lay exhausted on its back in the water, its flat feline face tilted toward the sun. The man then stripped off his clothes and dove in, chasing the otter around the lake. At one point it scrambled up his back and onto his head, pushing him underwater with its weight so he surfaced sputtering. The otter swam back to nuzzle his coughing face, and the man grabbed its tail from behind to dunk it.

  She watched them, feeling the sun on her back while she dabbled her toes in the cold black water. She sucked it all in with sharp bright happiness, the kind of happiness that made her skin prickle. She knew she would remember this day forever. She wondered if other people had a lot of these easy simple days. She thought if she moved in with him she’d be able to have this type of day all the time, and she felt a tight and vicious greed.

  After that day at the lake, she felt more needy around him. She wanted that sort of happiness more often. She wanted nothing to threaten it. She watched for changes in him or in her feelings toward him. He said she should move into his place because it was bigger. When she went over to his house now she felt lucky each time she turned the front doorknob, a large wooden smiling sun. Each breakfast she ate there, she chose her spoon with care from his mismatched set of yard-sale silver. She felt pleasure holding each utensil, feeling its well-made balance and age-smoothed surface. She thought if she moved in there each detail would become normal instead, expected. The house would narrow with her knowledge and its repetition, and at the first fight it would become a cage. She knew sooner or later he would lose interest in her, he would tell her what to do. Every other man had done so. She began to fear this more and more, to withdraw from him. She said she wasn’t so sure she wanted to move in at all.

  Confused at first, he’d finally begun to argue with her. Each time he yelled at her she felt joy, for she understood that this wasn’t half so bad as she had imagined.

  On the last day they fought with the kind of frenzied cruelty that can only pass between people who love each other. Fearful, the otter bit the base of her thumb badly. She still carried the scar, the clear imprint of sharp animal teeth across the meat of her palm.

  CHAPTER 13

  Each day it got colder. At the town dump, Beryl began to have problems with her cameras. They stuck and the battery needed to be warmed against her belly before it would work. She felt stupid that she hadn’t anticipated the extent of this problem. Back in Boston she’d thought if she just kept a spare camera warming inside her parka at all times, she could switch them as needed. However, when she developed some of the film in the town newspaper’s darkroom, she found the pictures had fine lines etched across them as though she’d shot them through the glass of a broken lens.

  When she showed David, he said, “Oh, that’s the emulsion freezing and then cracking. What a ridiculous climate. Why on earth do people live up here while Florida still has lots available? Keep the cameras warm and be real careful rewinding the film. Do it slowly, by hand. In this sort of cold, static electricity builds up. If you rewind quickly, the static’ll discharge and you’ll get a pretty lightning fork across your best images.”

  In spite of their care David and Beryl’s problems increased. They stacked spare cameras near the car heater, but the buttons still stuck, the batteries slowed. David would push at the controls again and again, swearing.

  Butler phoned the magazine’s headquarters in New York for some heaters for their cameras, but he said they couldn’t expect anything for at least a week. David began to keep his camera plugged into the car’s battery for extra electricity, the long cord snaking across the van and sometimes winding around David’s feet six or seven times while he followed the circuitous movements of a bear. Beryl continued to keep two extra cameras always inside her parka, a single layer away from her skin, switching cameras every five minutes. Even with long underwear between her stomach and the cold metal, she w
ould feel the slow chill, the numbness sneaking across her hips and up her back.

  In this cold, her hands also began to slow up. She could feel the lethargy in her fingers as she tried to focus, then shoot. She fought the frustration. She wanted that picture, that one now. Her fingers moved too late. The gloves fumbled. The camera hummed sickly, trying to wind itself forward. After twenty minutes with her upper body out of the van, she could feel the cold invading her movements. When David touched her shoulder, her descent took long seconds, her knees complaining.

  One day when she was rewinding some film it actually snapped clear through the center, the knob spinning free. When she opened the camera in the darkroom the broken ends of the film were shattered as finely as glass. There’d been a picture on that roll of a bear lying on its back, arms limp across its flat chest, looking toward her with its dark eyes. The bear had looked sleepy, patient and very human. It didn’t have the flat gaze of a bird or fish; it had regarded her with an expression, a presence.

  In this cold she felt much older, an aging woman whose body didn’t work properly. She understood why Jean-Claude walked so slowly, why he didn’t smile. Once you had known the power of such cold for extended periods, every movement would seem an effort.

  She knew her slowness might also be caused by lack of sleep. Each night that week she’d snuck out with Maggie for the first three hours of her watch, then Maggie would drop her back at the hotel. Each night Beryl climbed slowly up the stairs to her room, fumbled with the keys, her fingers wooden. She had to work even to pull her gloves off. She would run cold water across her hands and face, feel the water burn, the prickling. She turned the temperature of the water up slowly and the skin of her face itched as it warmed. She rubbed cream into her skin, then crawled into her bed, the clean rustling of the sheets surprising her, any sounds surprising her other than the car’s hum and the slow beat of the windshield wipers against the snow. Beryl closed her eyes, seeing only the snowy dark houses rolling past the windows.