by Andrew Ervin
“Mine? No.”
“Good. Smile!” She pointed it at Melanie and pressed the shutter. Then she held it out away from herself and took a crooked self-portrait. “Let me get one of me and you,” she said and sat on Melanie’s lap for another shot. “See that guy over there?” she slurred, pointing at a bow-tied Hungarian waiter who was being hassled and pushed around by the soldiers. “I’m gonna go take a picture of his cock. I’ll be right back.”
Nanette staggered across the dance floor, pushed her way into the circle of soldiers, and took the waiter by the arm. They watched in amazement as she led him compliantly into the women’s room. Five minutes later, they emerged again and Nanette waved the camera at Melanie to show her that she’d gotten the photo she wanted. Nanette always got the photo she wanted, so Melanie learned that night. Frequently at someone else’s expense. She sauntered back to the soldier she had been flirting with all night and kissed him on the mouth. He recoiled from Nan’s face and then shoved her violently to the ground. The waiter tried to help her up, but the soldier smashed a half-empty beer glass against the side of his head. Someone screamed. Nan sat on the floor laughing and laughing, with the waiter crumbled next to her. An expat friend of Nan’s took a swing at the soldier, which set off a free-for-all. Bottles flew through the air, tables got overturned, chairs splintered. Techno pulsated around the combatants. Someone dragged the unconscious waiter by his legs to Melanie’s table, leaving a thin trail of blood across the dance floor. She watched in fascination, then grabbed her purse and joined the stampede up the gangplank into the summer night while the fight raged on.
Melanie sat on the curb outside to regroup. A cab pulled to a stop and Nanette stuck her head out the window. “Jump in!” she said, and Melanie did. “Well, that was fun, but I am parched. Let’s go get a drink.” She clutched the stolen plastic camera to her chest like a trophy. “I can’t wait to get these developed.”
The next day, when the photos came back, the last one on the roll showed the korsó at the moment of impact, before the waiter could react. Nanette had it enlarged, as she did the photo she took that night—the very first photo she ever took—of Melanie. The first ten pictures on the roll were of the birthday girl, whom neither of them knew very well, blowing out her candles before the party started.
It wasn’t until months later, after Melanie moved in, at first to Nanette’s spare bedroom, that she learned what had started the brawl. Just for laughs, Nanette had gone into the bathroom to take a photo of the waiter’s penis, but once in the stall she decided to blow him. When she got back to the dance floor, she kissed the American soldier who, she said, had been harassing her all evening, and slowly spit the waiter’s semen into his mouth.
That was Nan: willing to fellate a stranger just to get revenge for a perceived slight, no matter the consequences. Melanie adored her recklessness, at least at first.
“I mean it this time,” she said. “Do you know a good stylist or not?”
“One that’d be open today?” Nan asked.
Melanie had already forgot about the holiday. She was also trying to forget about the concert. Her head hurt.
Nanette scrounged around for a clean cup and poured some coffee. Melanie had never seen her eat breakfast.
“You better think about it first,” she said. She slurped her coffee. “I’d kill for hair like yours.” Slurp. Nan cut and dyed her own hair, cropping it into short, stylishly uneven tufts. She sat at the table and flipped through the stack of envelopes, each one containing several rolls’ worth of negatives. Slurp. She removed a few strips and absently cut through them with a pair of fancy medical shears. Much of her more artistic work—as opposed to the journalistic stuff she did for the local magazines—incorporated double exposures she created by cutting negatives apart and stacking them on top of each other while soaking them with light in the darkroom. She sipped her coffee some more and freed miniature portraits of Melanie from their backgrounds. She took a lot of pictures of Melanie. Too many, maybe.
“I have thought about it,” Melanie said. “I need a new look.”
“You’ll regret it, that’s all.” Snip snip snip.
Melanie would deal with that remorse if and when it came, but right then she hated everything, everything, about her appearance and needed a change, especially because she was going to be on MTV—Magyar Televízíó—in just a few hours.
In addition to teaching the occasional private lesson here at home, Melanie had regular work far in the back of the string section of the Budapest Opera Orchestra. Of Hungary’s many full-sized symphony orchestras, the opera was the oldest, though no longer the most respected. Its prime passed long before Melanie arrived in Hungary. Over the past two years, she watched the budget shrink and with it the players’ enthusiasm, including her own. Three solid weeks of Tosca to a near-empty house will take its toll on even the most dedicated musicians. And another prominent conductor in the city, a man whose artistic work she admired to no end, routinely raided all the best players in town for his own, better ensemble. She was one of only a few foreigners on the official payroll, and the only American. Her conductor found or invented every possible excuse for promoting less-talented musicians simply because they were Hungarian. But if nothing else, the job provided a paycheck, and no amount of practice time at home could simulate the sensation of surrounding oneself on all sides by usually competent musicians working toward a common end. And there was the occasional, sublime concert experience. On a great night it felt like sitting inside the belly of a fire-breathing beast.
For all the talk about fairness and blind auditions, she had no doubt that the best chairs in the Budapest Opera Orchestra went to the Hungarian musicians who happened to look great on stage. The same principle applied to every orchestra in Central Europe. There was no such thing as an ugly or fat concertmaster. That, sadly, was the nature of the music business. The entire system oozed with sexism and moral degradation. Sitting down in the pit of the opera house, she was hidden from the audience anyway. It normally wouldn’t matter if she cut off her hair or dyed it as blue as the typical audience member’s, but this concert was being held in a church over in Buda. There would be no pit, no hole to hide in. She would be up on stage and on live TV. She had to look good. She had to throw up.
Her cell phone beeped, signaling the top of the hour. The concert was at three, which meant she needed to be at Batthyány Square by two. Hour at the salon. That was ten thirty, eleven. Hour to warm up, play some scales. Change. Find a taxi. Two o’clock. Timing wouldn’t be an issue. She will get her cut this time too.
“Whatever. But if you’re serious, which I doubt, I want some ‘before’ shots first.”
Melanie had a digital camera, which she kept hidden in the guestroom closet in a shoebox that also contained several Milka candy bars. She wanted to excavate it and get some snapshots to e-mail home to Mom and Dad, but she knew that Nanette would only give her grief about it. Her roommate never articulated the specific religious doctrine that opposed the operation of a digital camera, but it had something to do with the fact that it didn’t use real light. Or the prints didn’t. Something like that.
After dumping the dregs of her coffee into the sink—it was still Nanette’s turn to do the dishes—Melanie helped set up a portable portrait studio in the living room. The only natural light in the place seeped through a set of double doors that led to a small balcony facing the top floor of the building across the street. By leaning over the rail, they could see a small patch of the river and island to the left, and of course the beer sign at Eve and Adam’s. Even with the windows closed, a cold draft forced its way into the room. The sky, still a good month or two from showing any sign of blue, didn’t provide enough light, so Nanette set up two softboxes containing all but one of the special bulbs she had found in Prague at the end of a long day spent dragging an increasingly grumpy Melanie to musty camera shops all over the city. One of them got broken, quite accidentally, during the train ride home.
A web developer whom Nanette used to sleep with, and maybe still did, credited the Soviet system for the Hungarians’ reputation as gifted computer programmers and scientists. The government back then, this guy said, distributed very little funding to the scientific community in comparison to what it gave to the military, or even to the arts, yet it demanded results on par with the advances coming out of the United States and Japan. Those tech professionals who remained behind after the short-lived revolution of 1956 and their descendants learned to make do with substandard equipment and facilities and even to create comparable products despite the limitations. When the free markets opened up and new equipment came rolling over the Western border, the Hungarians found themselves able to use it more efficiently than their lazy, capital-fattened counterparts around the globe. That was the theory at least, and it was one Nanette co-opted for her photography. She figured that if she could make do with five months of miserable weather and poor light every year, by the time she got back to San Diego she would understand sunlight in a way somehow different from the local, art school-trained losers. And her approach was already beginning to pay off. The Ernst Galléria, one of the better small museums in the city, had included a series of her platinum prints in an international group show. The sequence, “Cinders I-XIV,” titled in part after Cindy Sherman, included claustrophobic self-portraits of Nanette sitting on the toilet in a tight V-neck, with her nipples erect and panties at her ankles, pouring petrol on herself from a metal can, as if, most people thought, in preparation for setting herself on fire. A wet T-shirt contest done with gasoline. She never told the show’s curator, but once confessed to Melanie that she really did intend to immolate herself that day. To record her own death. She never explained what stopped her, the box of matches already in hand.
Nan had some emotional issues. It got to be a bit much sometimes.
The critical reception of her “Cinders” earned her a job as staff photographer for a local English-language weekly, and her work also appeared with regularity in HVG and other national publications. She closed the curtains again in disgust. “You know what I want?” she asked.
Melissa had heard this a hundred times before. One great photograph.
“I want to take one great photograph. Just one, that’s all. The kind of photo, like that Chinese student in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square or the colonel shooting a Vietcong prisoner in the head. The kind of photograph that can take the symbolic—you know, something universal—and make it specific enough to tell a story about one particular moment in history. Make it iconic. Close your eyes.”
The words didn’t register quickly enough: Melanie was staring into one of the light boxes, humming along with the opera in her head and growing steadily more nervous, when Nanette switched it on. Melanie yelped.
“Oh, my bad. You O.K.?” Nan asked.
“No, I’m good,” Melanie said.
Blindness took over, then panic, then the room emerged from a thick red gauze. Her headache swelled into allegro con brio and she considered going into the water closet—where she swore she could still smell gasoline—and make herself throw up just to be done with the hangover. Even as her eyes cleared, the white after-image of the light box followed her view for several more minutes and projected itself onto everything she looked at, lending Nanette a ghostly appearance. For years afterwards, when Melanie would think of Nanette, she still pictured that glow around her.
Nan lifted a spinning saloon pianist’s stool and sat Melanie in the center of the room.
Even with her trained and perfect string-section posture, Mel’s hair fell past the wooden seat. Nan squeezed a few Polaroids first, which to Melanie weren’t any better than digital pictures, and let them collect in the camera’s mouth before they drooled onto the throw rug and formed puddles of changing color. Finishing the roll, Nan examined her compositions for a moment and, finding one or two that satisfied her, changed to the eight-by-ten. “I’ll need all my color later,” she said. “I hope black-and-white’s O.K.”
The bleak winter left bright windburns on Melanie’s complexion, which was soft and milky otherwise, except of course for the permanent bruise her violin left under her jawbone. Standing over her shoulder, Nan said something about how the contrast between her cheeks and blonde hair would come out well with a polarizer, or maybe a yellow filter. She used the tripod for the first couple, taking the traditional hands-folded portraits, Mel’s hair hanging over one shoulder. Then she shot from every possible angle: she snapped a photo, spun the stool a few degrees, snapped another, until Melanie traveled a full, woozy circle. She envisioned the freakish, pseudo-cubist collage of her own head that would result when Nanette assembled all the images, if she ever got around to it. The project required an entire roll, one Nan would need to develop carefully in the darkroom if she wanted every shot to match up right. Her sweaty, greasy-fingered editor at the newspaper would pay for the film and paper and developing fluids whether he knew it or not.
Nan unscrewed the camera from the tripod and started again with facials. She snapped them quickly, one by one, from every angle. “Hold on,” she said, leaving Melanie sitting there, then came back with a flannel sheet from the bed. Next, she opened the curtains again and used the scissors to slice a manhole-sized opening in the sheet, which she then hung over the curtain rod to allow a different, localized shape of dull light to leak through into the room. She had Melanie turn her chin back and forth rapidly until her hair fluttered around her head like in a shampoo commercial. Until she grew nauseous. More nauseous. Last night’s vodka had turned to battery acid in her stomach.
Nan made her sit perfectly still while she focused on minute details of her face. “You make a great subject,” she said. “I’d like to get a couple shots of your back.”
“Sure.” Melanie spun slowly around.
“Without your shirt.”
She didn’t stop to think about it. It was by no means the first time she had posed nude for Nanette. She peeled off her turtleneck and twisted her arms behind her back to snap off her bra. “Pants too?”
“Not unless you want.”
“I think I’ll keep them on.”
Nan plugged a fresh cartridge into the Polaroid and took more compositional studies before starting with an SLR equipped with a bulky automatic winder. She snapped the shutter, stepped back a few inches to incorporate more of Melanie in the viewfinder, listened for the whir of the winder, and squeezed again. She continued this until her back pressed against one of the CD cases. Melanie covered her breasts with two ropes of blonde hair. Nan tried to keep the mood jovial. “Life is so unfair,” she said. “Why is it again that you got such big tits and I didn’t get any?”
“It’s just blubber,” Melanie said, swearing to herself that this year, when it warmed up, would be the one in which when she finally got in shape.
Nanette reattached the eight-by-ten to the tripod and picked up another camera. “There’s a couple color shots left in here.” Losing herself in the gentle clicking of the shutter and the low, electric hum of the winder’s toccata-like rhythm, she glided around the room, firing at Melanie again and again, stopping only once to re-check her light meter and reload with more black-and-white. Melanie contorted herself into every conceivable pose, giggling and spinning in obedience with her photographer’s direction, trying to act natural. Whatever that meant. Their session
continued for another twenty minutes before she grew cold in her fingers and nipples, even under the lights. She asked for permission to get dressed and pulled on her shirt again while Nanette put her stuff away. She never got around to using the Holga, which was by far the coolest camera in her roommate’s vast arsenal.
“So where’s this salon?” she asked, buttoning her shirt.
“Just up at the körút. What’s that hotel right before Nyugati—the Hungotel?”
“With the good cukrászda? That’s the Budapest Suites.”
“Right. They have a salon. Very expensive.”
“Not like I get my hair cut every day.”
“True enough, baby. They’re probably closed today, but if Judit’s there you can just walk in. Tell her you’re a friend of mine. I did some headshots for them that that fucking bitch still hasn’t paid me for.”
She will need to sneak over there right away. “What time you want to meet up later?”
“I have to shoot the prime minister today at the National Museum, or else you know I’d be at your concert.”
Melanie couldn’t remember inviting her. “You can catch it when it moves to the opera house,” she said. “One of the singers in particular is amazing.”
“And the conductor’s supposed to be there?”
“The composer, yeah. Lajos Harkályi. I hope the conductor shows up too, though.”
“Fuck you.”
“I can meet you downstairs at five? Six?”
“Six sounds right. After the speeches there’ll be parades and shit. I’ll beep you if anything changes.”