Exposure

by James Lockhart Perry

  Rudy's voice came back with, "Get out of my fucking studio!"

  Sheri leapt out of her chair and sent it crashing into the wall. She flung open the door. The woman shouted, "Your studio! Since when is anything yours?"

  "None of your fucking business!"

  Sheri raced the corridor to the office and stopped, surprised. Inside, the old photographer's receptionist—the angry old lady who had gotten Rudy thrown out of Malloy's the week before—stood over him, a camera in her hand, about to bring it crashing down on his head.

  "Hey, wait!" Sheri cried. Was this déjà vu or what?

  The woman pivoted and demanded, "You! What are you doing here?"

  "Hey...," Sheri repeated, easier. This wasn't the post office. She was pretty sure something was going on that went beyond an employee thrown out of work.

  "Get the fuck—" Rudy started.

  "Shut up, Rudy!" Sheri stopped him. "Both of you calm down!" She gave both of them a chance to catch their breath, then said to the woman, "Put down the camera, okay? He didn't tell you?"

  The woman reluctantly complied, and the camera clattered to the desk. "Who? Tell me what?"

  "He sold us the business. Your Sam, he sold us the studio."

  "Us?" Rudy attempted.

  "Shut up, I'm handling this."

  Sheri waved aside Rudy's indignant protest. Already, in the confusion, an idea was beginning to form in her head. Rudy was gasping along miles behind her.

  "He sold you the business?" the woman repeated, stunned. She looked nothing like the lush Sheri recalled from the bar. Younger, definitely younger. And hot—for an old woman, definitely hot. Sheri touched her on the arm. The gesture brought the intended effect. The woman relaxed her guard far enough for Sheri to grasp that she was as lost as they were.

  "Have a seat," Sheri said, as soothing as possible. "You're just the person we've been looking for."

  "We have?" Rudy asked, but neither woman heard him. Back at Malloy's a million years ago, the two women had connected in a split-second glance of mutual pity. Now they reconnected again, Sheri was sure of it. Instantly. Easily. They were reading each other with an unspoken intimacy that sent shivers down her spine.

  Sheri swallowed, unsure where to go with it. The thoughts in her head were way too complicated to fit into human speech. For no reason she could fathom, she wanted to say welcome home, Mom, but let it pass. Her flighty mother Marta would never have filled this lonely woman's soul.

  "You wanna have lunch? We were just about to go have lunch." It was the best Sheri could do under the circumstances. Anything more she would have to think about. But between Rudy's pictures and now this, things were shaping up into one wonder of a day.

  Chapter 10

  Lydia glanced across the bar at the neat, gleaming row of bottles. Sheri read her mind and said, "Either one of you orders a drink, I'm walking out." Lydia checked her natural response to the young girl's insolent threat and kept her mouth shut. She was already wired up tight enough just to be back here.

  Mac had jerked his head their way when the three of them came in, then studiously returned to polishing the bar top. That must be one shiny surface, Lydia smirked to herself. God, she needed a cigarette. The two children sat facing her across a table along the opposite wall from the bar. A stranger might have read the conversation as an interview, but he would have been hard pressed to say who was interviewing whom.

  Children! Lydia wrenched that thought back into her brain and re-routed it to her mental dustbin. What was she thinking? This was the pair of drunks who had trashed her husband's studio. The young hoodlum bridled at his girlfriend's tone and told her he would drink whatever and whenever he wanted. They were launching into what sounded like a tired routine. "Why you?" Lydia interrupted, irritated. "And what are your names anyways?"

  The girl Sheri Ballin introduced them. Her boyfriend Rudy Spavik was still too busy trying to figure out what was going on. Lydia glanced at him and wondered what had changed. Of course, she laughed—no purple.

  "What?" Sheri asked.

  Lydia shook her head. "Why you two?" she asked again. "Why would Sam sell out to you?"

  Rudy jumped in. "He said my uncle Mischa bought it for him. He said—"

  "Wait a minute! You're Vera's kid?" Holy mother of God!

  "What about it?" Sheri asked.

  It had taken Lydia a crowbar to pry that story out of Sam's past. Vera the stripper with the heart of a heroin-soaked glacier. Ice queens like her ruined their men for the women cursed with coming along afterward to pick up the pieces. By the time Lydia met Sam, Rudy's mother was ancient history, but there were no time limits on gouges that deep. "When were you born?" Lydia asked, a little more urgently than she would have liked.

  "1981, why?"

  Thank God for that anyway. Lydia pulled a stray lock of hair off her forehead. By 1981, Sam was already long gone from South Gate, photographing one civil war or another and trying to get himself killed. "What are we doing here?" she asked. "What's this about?"

  "We need help," Sheri said.

  "Who says?" Rudy interrupted.

  "I say," Sheri interrupted.

  "With what?" Lydia interrupted in turn.

  "We don't know what we're doing," Sheri tried.

  "Speak for yourself," Rudy tried.

  Lydia sighed. "About the business or the photography?"

  "Either."

  "Bullshit," Rudy said. "You just—"

  Rudy!" Sheri said. "We're drowning, alright? How many pictures you taken in your whole life? Fifty? And she can help us!"

  Rudy leapt to his feet. "It's my business, got it? You don't talk to me like that! My business! My name on the fucking door!"

  Lydia whacked the table with her hand and knocked over a ketchup bottle. She glanced across at Mac. He had frozen in the middle of pouring a draft. His hand mechanically released the tap, but he stood there, staring at them, not noticing the beer foam all over his nicely polished walnut. The lone customer at the bar and the two other occupied tables had dropped their thoughts to gawk along. Sheri caught on first and lapsed into an angry silence. Rudy was still too intent on his anger.

  Lydia stood and backed up her chair. She had heard enough. She gazed evenly at Rudy. "Actually, it's my husband's."

  "What?"

  "The name on the fucking door. You probably want to start by changing it." And with that, she walked out.

  On the street, the cigarette lit on the third try. Lydia took a second out of the box, just to be ready, and gazed up the sidewalk. A man and woman approached, what Sam would have called a Hollywood couple, delicately touching at his-and-her hairstyles and glaring instructively at her cancer stick. As if an opinion out of their plumped-up Botox lips would constitute any less of a health hazard.

  This Rudy and Sheri made one strange pair. Both the other night and now, Rudy had struck Lydia as a violent young dude, one of those immature hoodlums full of an unspecific rage that could erupt on anyone anywhere and anytime. Sheri seemed to have him on a steel choke leash, but who knew how long that would last? Lydia had never met Rudy's mother, the legendary South Bay beauty who had parlayed her looks into a one-way, all-expenses-paid trip to hell. How much of Lydia's opinion of the boy was a reaction to the woman who had tried to destroy her husband? Lydia couldn't say. With a mother like Vera, she guessed, Rudy could rip a hole in a woman's heart and walk away unaware.

  "Mind telling me what's going on?" Mac asked behind her.

  Lydia turned, surprised. She had expected to hear Sheri's voice. She nodded inside. "What are they doing?"

  "Kissing and making up by the looks of it. What are you doing here?"

  Lydia laughed. "Nothing. They invited me. They want me to help them straighten out the photography business."

  "Don’t tell me Sam—"

  "Who knows how his brain works?"

  She lit the second cigarette, then remembered the first in her hand, and dropped and squashed it on the sidewalk.

  Once
Lydia had prodded Donny—Mischa's lover and the hard-ass in the gang that surrounded Sam's brother Henry—for details of the transaction that brought Sam into the South Redondo studio business. At the time, Sam had no more idea how to stage a studio shoot than Rudy did now, and less interest. War photographers like Sam were adrenalin junkies, instinct-driven, incapable of sitting still long enough to let a baby blink, much less smile—unless grenades were going off nearby, of course. Donny played along with Lydia and warily fed her the official version—Vera's treachery, Sam's fleeced apartment, sorrowful Mischa, Sam's bum knee, the whole works—until she made the mistake of asking how Henry fit into it all. Donny clammed up and never spoke another word to her.

  Speaking of Henry, Lydia had walked off and already reached the last block before the bluffs over the ocean. From the parking lot of Diane's—the long closed South Redondo romantic hideaway where Sam waited until sunset to propose flying off the next morning to Las Vegas and the Little Chapel of the Flowers—waited until sunset, because he knew what a sucker Lydia was for a good man with perfect timing—from that precise spot this afternoon, Lydia glanced across the Esplanade and spotted Henry's baby brother sitting doubled over on a stone bench above the path down to the sea. Alone, lost, pathetic, sad. And dying.

  So Sam was back after all. "Go to hell," Lydia muttered angrily and turned on her heel to walk home.

  Chapter 11

  The trouble started that morning when Sam woke up at the Airport Hilton in Louisville. He had never been much of a sleeper—bad knee, ulcers, and all—but when he rolled over on the hard, unforgiving mattress, an explosion blew through his gut. Bright red blood oozed from his anus and smeared a gash across the sheets as he crawled out to the bathroom. He knew a photographer once who had defined pathos and indignity by dying on a toilet seat in a hotel room in downtown Istanbul. The man had missed the plane that was supposed to fly them out to the Kurdish action. When the maid found him...

  If only Henry could see Sam now. Henry with his endless supply of contempt for any form of weakness. Henry and his gang had always treated Sam like a little puppy, trailing along behind them, pissing where they pissed, barking where they pointed, and snatching up the scraps of dignity they tossed onto the kitchen floor. And Sam had taken the bait like a young fool. He fought more, drunk more, fucked more, and got into more trouble than any of them. Finally, he went after Mischa's sister Vera, five years older and so much smarter than him. Like a puppy falling for a pretty rattle swishing along the desert floor behind its snake.

  The last time Sam saw Vera, he had gone to Bud's Gentleman's Club looking for her. He still hadn't got it, not even after she sold off everything they owned to fill the spaces between her toes with that sweet brown garbage. When he walked into the club, the other dancers greeted him with something like pity or commiseration. He sucked up all the free and meaningless sympathy—weakling that he was—as if any of them had a clue about anything. Vera was halfway through her stage act, so the waitress found him a table up on the wall in the crowded, smoky room. Vera's job had never bothered Sam—if anything the reverse—but after she collected her costume off the stage floor and retreated behind the curtain that night, nothing.

  Had they told her he was there? Finally, the drunks at the next table asked the waitress for a table dance, and only then did Vera show her face. She took this particular dance deliberately, Sam was sure of it. She was sending him a message. And in case he failed to get it, she went far beyond the usual bland contortions. She peeled the clothes off her lush body and let her voice rise to tell anyone who didn't want to hear it, about a guy named Henry and his huge pistol and the myriad ways she had wrapped her mouth around it. She would have come—literally—if Sam hadn't leapt to his feet and shoved her off the table into a heap of spitting fury on the floor.

  But this morning, in the Louisville hotel room, Sam somehow dragged pants and dignity up over his legs, stumbled out, and caught the first flight out to Los Angeles. At least he would die with his clothes on. Sitting up in the plane was another matter, the seatbelt a dull knife in his gut. He stared straight ahead, until the doors closed and they couldn't de-plane him, then closed his eyes, gripped the hand rests, and hung on.

  By the time the plane taxied up to the LAX arrival gate, the pain had receded to a monotonous throb, bearable enough to remind him that he hadn't been able to stomach food for at least three days. Death from hunger, he thought, then laughed at the absurdity of the notion and gasped at the stab that followed. He climbed off the plane and found a taxi. Not until they had passed Malloy's in South Redondo did it occur to him that he had nowhere to go. He told the mystified driver to drop him off on the bluffs, where he sat on the stone bench, waiting for nothing except a break in the wall of pain.

  Sweat cascaded off him and saturated his clothes. Was this the end? It felt like the raw tip of some ghastly conclusion. He thought about stripping and wading out into the bitterly cold Pacific waters—numbingly, beautifully cold—but he would never make it down the bluffs. He had to do something, go somewhere. The studio was out of the question—what a fucking great idea that had been—and the apartment... No way was he going to put up with her pity. He would rather die in a gutter.

  But he had to do something. Eventually. He tottered to his feet and wandered off, forgetting the overnight bag that had somehow followed him this far. The walk actually seemed to help. The pain in his knee kicked in enough to nearly distract him from his belly.

  No one was going to cut Sam up and drop him in a bed for three months, his hair gone, his translucent skin emptied of flesh by the sucking poisonous hunger of some chemical cocktail. Five-Fluorouracil, Irinotecan, Avastin, Erbitux—Gastro Dude had rattled off the names like a slick bartender in a ritzy hotel, taking orders while shaking up the ice for his signature martini. This particular form of cancer came in all kinds of fascinating flavors. You had to mix the cocktail just right—without killing off the patient, of course. Ho, ho, ho.

  Sam's feet stopped and let a car pass, before crossing at the very spot where he had sat in a Mustang convertible and begged Vera to marry him. What an idiot. He had asked two women to marry him within less than two blocks of each other, but light years apart in the character of the man doing the asking. One of the women was smart, the other said yes. Poor Lydia. Sam forsook all others and kept up his end of the have-and-hold bargain, but he couldn't escape the guilty feeling that he lied to her, proposed to her under false pretenses. Not that their vows included a money-back guarantee of bliss, but still...

  Sam glanced up and realized he had trudged all the way to the apartment after all. He stood outside on the Esplanade, nearly eye level with the worn gray deck. Inside Lydia had turned on the lights to ward off the gathering darkness. Next door the girl—what was her name?—had done the same. From this standpoint, Sam could see not just the physical deck and dining room—which Lydia had apparently cleaned up—but all the dwindling years they had spent there together. The fights, the worries, the lovemaking, the promises kept and unkept, the hanging on. The anger. A lot of anger.

  Sam swayed on his feet, suddenly dizzy. He thought he saw the girl next door move across the shadow of a far wall. It might have been his imagination. He felt his forehead and found it cool with sweat and confusion. What was he doing here? But a sound stopped him from stumbling off elsewhere, the whoosh of a sliding glass door.

  He glanced up, and there Lydia stood, staring out at him from the apartment. At least he thought it was her. She stood with her hands on her hips, feet apart, mind made up.

  "So are you taking the treatments or not?" she asked.

  Sam hesitated. Had he imagined the question? What kind of a fucking question was that to ask a man? It was his body, damn it. Who was she to...? Sam might have unclenched his teeth to shout, "No! I'm not taking the damn treatments!" At any rate, Lydia turned around, walked into the apartment, and closed and locked the door. A few seconds later, the lights went out.

  Sam stood there,
waiting, wondering if she was staring out at him through the dark glass, wondering if she had already forgot him and left, or was waiting for him to turn around and disappear. The girl next door must have heard his shout. She stood at her own glass door, hand up to her eyes, peering out at him.

  "Fuck you, Henry," Sam muttered, and passed out.

  Chapter 12

  Lydia sat across from the gastroenterologist and listened to the melodious, carefully timed voice rippling through all the fascinating details of colon cancer. It didn't take a genius to figure out why Sam despised the man. It was all her fault, wasn't it? She had found the specialist—supposedly, the best in his field in all of Southern California—and made the appointment. It had never occurred to her to shepherd Sam through the confrontation with this slick, self-impressed leading light of the medical world.

  But that item lay far down in the layers of guilt that had smothered Lydia ever since she called the ambulance and brought Sam back to Little Company of Mary. She still couldn't believe how she had turned on her heel and closed the sliding glass door in his face. She couldn't imagine how she had stood there in the darkened apartment and watched him collapse. Nancy, the girl who lived next door, reached him first. It wasn't until Nancy started shouting for help, that Lydia even felt her limbs move.

  The doctor's white teeth moved now in his mouth, soothing, enlightening, re-assuring. Lydia picked up random words and phrases like lymph nodes, anemia, and size of a golf ball. The doctor evidently thought he knew a rapt audience when he spotted one. As he warmed to his favorite topic, his manicured hands spiraled and pulled and twisted into shapes that drew cancer in all of its thousands of tricks and trials. He knew all the ripostes, balanced all the cleverest solutions on the tips of his immaculate fingers.

  "Who does your hair?" Lydia finally interrupted. The doctor fingered his sprayed ponytail and made her think of scissors sharp enough to cut, pointed enough to stab. She wanted him to know that she hadn't heard a damn thing he had to say. She might not share Sam's disdain for convention, but she was with her husband every step of the way on this vain fool.