Back Talk

by Danielle Lazarin

  On Wednesdays we have a two-hour city walk as part of our Advanced Photography class. I passed over the more familiar options in the States for the school’s competitive, yearlong photography courses, for the reputation of our professor, Peter Lincoln, as rigorous, as a career maker.

  Oliver and I meet every week at the same tabac beforehand. Two years ahead of me in school, in Parisian life, he orders a coffee for me the way I can’t seem to do correctly myself, the only way I can drink it without making a sour face.

  The November day is gray and flat but I walk in wearing sunglasses. My hair is still wet, coiled in a rubber band at the base of my neck. I’ve forgotten a scarf; I don’t own a hat.

  “Night out with Jamie?” Oliver says when he notices me, and points to the coffee he has waiting for me on the bar. I push my sunglasses up off my face and take a sip of my coffee. He smirks. “Those first-year boys are always a little wild. Thought you’d have learned that by now.”

  It hurts to speak back but I have to. “I’m fine.”

  “Wait till we start walking,” he says.

  I groan. Peter is a notoriously fast walker; he waits for no one. My stomach turns at the prospect of keeping up. Oliver rubs my shoulder in a brotherly way and says we’d better get going.

  Of the photos I end up taking that day, all Peter will say is, “Put something alive in it!” as if he’s searched so hard for the words and is only now finding them, as if they are only for me, when he says this to someone at least once a week. At my midterm critique, he directs the other students through my work as quickly as possible; he doesn’t like me, doesn’t understand the work I’m making, but neither do I.

  Oliver and Peter go out drinking together some afternoons. I should come along, Oliver suggests repeatedly, wanting to change both of our minds. I refuse.

  “We don’t connect,” I say back, and count the weeks till the semester ends, till I can go home for winter break.

  “You could, like, maybe not roll your eyes at him,” Oliver says.

  “He doesn’t see me doing that.”

  “He knows.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. And for once I don’t care whether the professor likes me, if I’m pleasant, or easy to teach, whether my work is any good.

  • • •

  Jean-Luc is perhaps married and definitely older but not American. On the day after Thanksgiving, which I have spent alone for the first time ever, he buys me a coffee and insists Sam is cheating on me back home. He insists on my youth and my naïveté and my future alignment with his truths. We spend four hours together before I remember that I can just get up and go.

  • • •

  I don’t know a lot of women in Paris. They seem to be from another life of mine, and when I transfer to a college in California the next year I’ll be hungry for them but I’ll have forgotten how to be around them. It will take years to understand the different things that women want from me than men do.

  Ilana, Oliver’s ex-girlfriend, is a cocktail waitress at a bar we go to sometimes. For twenty-five francs, she will pour a shot of tequila into your mouth from her holster and pretend to like it. She does this wearing spandex shorts and a leather bra that matches the holster. “Would you ever?” he asks me, knowing no, I would not.

  I’m afraid of her, more so when she is fully clothed, her knees bent to her chest while sitting on someone’s floor at a party in the 11th, in an attic apartment with sloped ceilings. I have yet to meet anyone here who does not live under slanted walls. In this city, we all live in garrets.

  Ilana is a dancer, and her body is something she uses to paint a scene, I hear her explain to a semicircle of our acquaintances, but not to me. She’s never spoken to me. The scene in the bar pays her bills, she says, and “I don’t give a fuck what you think of it.”

  • • •

  Jamie and I talk about sex, generally, but in detail, as if our bodies are parts of a radio, or instruments we’re both learning how to play. Strings. Him, a violin. Me, a guitar, a harp, a stand-up bass, maybe. I don’t blush, don’t think of him doing to me what he’s describing doing to Rebecca, who is studying abroad from Tulane, who screams in bed so loudly the neighbors bang on the walls. He puts his hand over her mouth—“I think she kind of likes it,” he says, and I roll my eyes and say, “Of course she does. It’s a performance.”

  I feed him bits of my and Sam’s sex life, never talking about him by name, as if there is anyone else I have loved in this way. I am only eighteen.

  “It’s simple,” I say to Jamie over and over again, about what makes two people good together in bed, the talk becoming another kind of study for us, a working theory of pleasure. “Trust.” I’m on his bed in his latest apartment, but sideways, and my shoes are still on. I am waiting for the Metro to reopen, trying not to fall asleep.

  “Wanting,” he says, “and then still wanting it. Take off your shoes already, will you?” he says, and kicks the soles of my boots.

  • • •

  Sam comes to see me in February, when it is dark and wet and flights are cheap. He has no French, no real interest in exploring the city, which I don’t know how to show him; my list of places belongs to the other boys who have been showing it to me. I can’t seem to find a corner of Paris that he would care about. He wants to stay in, anyway.

  “I’m here to see you, for you,” he says, trying to be tender, but by then, day five, neither of us is able to hide our mutual feelings of failure at how to be with each other here. We get too drunk; we fight. He calls me ungrateful; I tell him, on the steps of Montmartre, that his life is so much easier than mine, and always will be, to which he holds his arms out to the city I have decided I hate. Later that night, I bury myself in the familiar hollow of his collarbones, trying to figure out how he can still smell the same, how that smell draws a wet tang into my mouth. The sex that week is a poor antidote to our months of wanting, the pressure of its significance relieved only by getting my period the last two days of the visit. I stain through to the mattress that comes with my rented apartment.

  When Sam leaves, I skip three days of classes. The day I go back, Jamie is outside the small building on a smoke break. Without even saying my name, he puts me under his arm like I am his, tells me we are going out that night whether I want to or not. Andrew, at the same bar, doesn’t even look at me. I’ve dropped the lit classes this term; I wasn’t pulling the grades I needed to transfer back to a college in the States.

  “Don’t be sad,” Jamie says, tapping his pint glass gently against mine. “Be fun Anna.”

  “But you like the sad Anna,” I say.

  Before he’s even drunk, he makes the offer to sleep with me, as he has so many times before, as he will continue to do till we’re not speaking at all.

  “Anytime you want,” he says, his hand on my elbow in the way it often was that year, in a way that made me seem, to the other men around us, taken.

  “Noted.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know,” I say, and touch his face because it’s right there.

  The next morning, Jamie breaks my window by accident, a broken latch and our hangovers. He gets cut, but not so deeply he needs stitches. We ruin some towels cleaning him up. We do this together, a silent teamwork in which neither of us takes or places blame. It doesn’t even seem funny, or that it could be, but it becomes that, a story we tell each other, though I don’t know what makes us recall it at various times. We don’t tell it to anyone else because it’s always just the two of us; we don’t like or understand each other’s friends, don’t need them. It’s just us. We are an echo chamber.

  Jamie doesn’t offer to pay for any part of the window. When my landlady threatens to end my lease, Oliver says he will cover it, but I refuse. I overdraw my bank account again. Jamie never apologizes but I never expect him to.

  • • •

  That
spring in Paris, I carry my camera in my backpack but most days I don’t take it out. When I do, it does little to help me forget where I am. I don’t turn it on myself, till one day I start setting the timer, arranging the camera on a chair, or a low wall, or a café table as I stare into the lens from above.

  “What’s the story?” Peter asks me after looking at my contact sheet.

  I shrug. He taps the loupe against the table’s surface loudly. “Anna, Anna. Try.”

  “I am,” I say.

  “Well then print whatever,” he says, and walks across the room to another student.

  The girl working across from me avoids my eyes, blushes as I don’t. It isn’t time to leave the lab yet, and I bend over the sheet again, looking for one I can print, one that will prove Peter wrong. My hand shakes as I shift the loupe. I want to smash it against the classroom floor, but it’s stronger than I am; the shards of glass would be so small, besides. I think of Jamie a few nights before, his bandaged hand in his pocket as we walked to his apartment with dinner: wine and bread and steaks he’d bought with a credit card he wasn’t supposed to be using.

  “You don’t ever lie, do you?” he’d asked, implying an ease to my life, to have always appeared as I am, guileless, without needing to hide or change myself.

  “Sure I do,” I said, but he’s a man, and the lies I’d told wouldn’t register as big enough.

  Peter always warned us against waiting for the story to appear through the loupe. “Know when you shoot,” he’d say. I pretended I didn’t know what the story was. There’s something about me at that age that is trustworthy, that makes men think I will not judge them, though I do, all the time; I just keep it to myself. I am not beautiful, but I am pretty enough. That year, and for years after, I hold on to the pretty parts, to the appearance of being open. If only I had allowed myself to look mean in those photos.

  On that day, I don’t wait for Oliver like I usually do after class. I leave while he is still in the darkroom.

  He’s heard what happened. He finds me in the café that is our student center, and as he takes the chair across from mine he says, “He’s pushing you.” Oliver’s work is thriving, but I am, I was told, wasting film. I am passing time.

  “Do you want me to look?” he offers. I give him my contact sheet.

  “This is so different than your other stuff,” he says.

  “The birds?” Earlier this year, I’d taken roll after roll of birds invading the parks.

  “The New York stuff,” he says.

  Those photos got me into this class. I’d always been book smart, but photography was the thing that made me happiest, what I thought I wanted to pursue.

  “Dead inside now,” I say, and thud my heart with my fist.

  “That’s not what I meant,” he says, annoyed. He taps the top right corner. “This one’s good,” he says, and hands me the sheet back. I don’t print it.

  • • •

  When Jamie says to me, “I will not participate in breaking my own heart,” what am I supposed to say?

  It’s the middle of the night, and we are both sober. We sit side by side on my bed. I don’t want him to go. I could say his name; I could touch his knee. I could lie down next to him the way we have been all year when the loneliness gets to be too much. It’s April; we’re at the border of how hard I will try not to love him. I don’t want him; I’ve waited all year for want to come to me so I don’t have to think, but I think and think all year long and all it gives me is a series of near-mistakes I’m not smart enough to make. Those last few months in Paris nothing gets better, not my grades, or my photography, or the ache to return to a place I already know won’t feel like home anymore.

  That night, it’s Jamie who takes one of my hands and wraps it in his, squeezing so hard it hurts a little.

  Instead of saying ow, I tell him I’m sorry. I wasn’t actually sorry. I lie, and he takes it, big enough for him at last. He kisses me on both cheeks, this French habit we’ve both affected, and he goes, forever.

  • • •

  Two months later, back in New York for the summer, I read the first of Oliver’s letters with Sam’s arm around my shoulders. He’s shirtless, tan already, late June. The Paris postmark on the envelope makes me lonesome, a feeling I then understand will follow me wherever I am.

  “Which one was he?” Sam asks as he scans the movie listings. We’re in his family’s apartment; we both have the night off from work.

  “The one with the dancer ex. They’re back together again, apparently.”

  I write Oliver back, apologizing for my handwriting. I tell him I miss him, but not Paris, that it’s a shame he’s fallen for it like every other sucker out there.

  • • •

  In July, I ask Sam to slap me while we’re having sex, but he won’t do it. It happens one night when we are both drunk after a party thrown by one of his new friends, on a week when we finally seem to be getting along again. I put his palm against my cheek. “There,” I say. “No,” he says. He slows down inside me but doesn’t stop.

  The next morning Sam pretends nothing happened. His year away from me has made him more beautiful: his jaw sharper, his body leaner and looser. He lifts me onto beds; his hands are strong, greedy for me in a way that should make me feel like I can’t want anything or anyone else. In a month, he’ll say that he has been worried about me all summer, that I am different. “Here I am,” I’ll tell him, repeatedly, sarcastically, unsure what else to offer him. He doesn’t want to talk about what the year was like, how all my friends were men who didn’t want to meet him when he came to visit, how I haven’t reloaded my camera since I got home.

  I never ask Sam to slap me again. I still wonder what it would have felt like, why other people like that sort of thing, but I never want it from anyone else.

  • • •

  I’m living in California when the last letter from Oliver comes. Peter’s set him up with a good assistant job in New York. Oliver writes about how he proposed to Ilana while they were living there together, how she said no, how they are over for good. He asks if I’ve ever gotten around to reading the Barthes, what I thought of it. Camera Lucida, in its original French. Inside, he’d written: You can handle it, A. But I sold it, along with the other books he bought me, to Shakespeare and Company before I left. I needed the money, and besides, they would have been too heavy, too expensive to ship back. I no longer shoot on film, or take many photographs at all. I’ve forgotten too much, or maybe I just refused to learn it.

  Window Guards

  The first time Owen shows me the photograph of the ghost dog, I don’t believe it. “That’s a toy,” I say, but I don’t laugh at him.

  I’m sitting in the desk chair in his room. He stands behind me, all the ghost photos laid out on top of his chemistry textbook. He has about fifteen of these photographs—and some of them, I will grant him, are ghostly, but they are not ghosts. It’s as though he’s never seen a photograph before.

  “No,” he says, doubtless.

  “It’s stiff as a board,” I say, and wait for him to say back, “Light as a feather,” to use the language that keeps us tied to childhoods that, every day, feel further behind us than we want them to be. Next year, college.

  He reaches over me and picks up the turn-of-the-century photograph of a girl, no older than five, holding a blur of a toy dog between her fat little hands. The photo is a series of grayscale curves: her perfectly parted hair, the curls they created to frame her round cheeks, the skirt of her dress. The lines of white in the middle of the photo ruin the composition; her eyes are sharp and bright at this understanding of what she’s done. How long they must’ve asked her to hold still. So she shook the dog. Who wouldn’t?

  Owen goes nearly nose-to-nose with this girl, so unlike me: plump and angry and rich.

  “It’s the film,” I say, and start to explain how the developi
ng process works, how f-stops and reflections are all possible reasons for the white mass, but then he tosses the photo back onto the pile and crouches next to me. Lately, Owen avoids the packs of neighborhood boys, loud and careless, that we’ve grown up with; something has been ruined between them. After school, he looks for me. We watch movies and go on what he calls hikes but are really long walks through the parks in this northern part of the city. Sometimes, when we are alone, we make out, but the kissing—and that’s all it is, for now—is just a comfort, an easy place to slip in and out of in the darkening afternoons.

  Who cares, I think, as Owen presses his forehead against mine, whether he believes in ghosts? I still have my father’s discarded hospital bracelets in a drawer, so who am I to say what is right to collect, to keep?

  Owen’s brother, Adam, was twenty-three when he disappeared. For months, people say they have seen him on the park peninsula, flat on his back on a bench, asleep, and when he is not, wide-eyed and silent, his face smudged or clean or looking older, or younger. No one can decide. Dominic says yes, he carries around an aluminum baseball bat; he must have found it near the batting cages. Kira says she saw him jogging, his knees dirty, his eyes distant but focused.

  The last time I saw Adam myself, at their apartment six months ago, he asked Owen, “That your girl?”

  “It’s Lexie,” Owen said to Adam, who squinted at me, and grinned when he seemed to square me, the girl before him, with whoever Lexie was to him. Maybe it had been a good number of months. Maybe I did look different from the girl in his mind who’d been friends with his brother since preschool.

  Adam sat on a windowsill in the living room. It was March, and the window was open. The air was a touch cold still, but he wore short sleeves; the bandage from the IV insertion point from his latest trip to the psych ward, a few days earlier, was visible. Adam slapped a beat on his thighs; he played the drums, once, but this was sloppy, incoherent, and I watched Owen flinch at each strike.