A Clean Slate

by Laura Caldwell

  “I’m Kelly McGraw.” I stretched out my hand.

  “Cole,” he said, shaking it. He looked at Laney. “And who, may I ask, is this?” he said.

  “Laney Pendleton.” She stepped forward with a little swing to her hips. “Official friend.”

  They shook hands, both smiling at each other, until I felt I had to say something.

  “Look. Thanks for having me up, Cole, but this probably isn’t the position for me. I’m not prepared to work on these kinds of shoots.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “What on earth do you mean by that?”

  “You know.” I waved an arm at the model, who sighed loudly. “Ethically, I can’t be involved in something like this.”

  Cole glanced back at the model, then at me. “I see. You’re ethically opposed to washing machines then?”

  “No, of course not. It’s not that. It’s…”

  “Come have a look,” he said.

  I hesitated.

  “I won’t bite,” he said. “I promise.”

  He led us down a few stairs toward the studio area and picked up a contact sheet on a table, handing me a loupe to look through. The shots, featuring the topless model in various poses across the machine, were surprisingly tasteful. None of them showed her breasts, or her spread-eagle as I’d feared. In fact, the way he’d shot them, in black and white, from below, and with the model’s hair hanging over her face, made them artistic.

  “You’ve heard of Spring Clean Washers?” Cole said.

  I nodded, raising my head from the contact sheet.

  “They’re trying to sex up their image a bit.” Cole gave us another wicked grin. “But look, you’re obviously involved in some sort of antiwasher movement, so you’re right. You’re probably not the one for the job.”

  “No…I…It’s just—”

  “Hey, Beckett,” the model called, interrupting my stammering. “Let’s get the show on the road.” She threw her brown hair over her shoulder, her breasts swinging with the movement.

  I leaned forward as if I could somehow confirm what I’d heard. “Did she just call you Beckett?”

  He turned away from us and picked up his camera again. “Thanks for coming by,” he called over his shoulder.

  I looked at Laney, who appeared amused with the whole situation.

  “Did she just call him Beckett?” I said in a fierce whisper.

  “Sounded like it. Why? Will that make you want to sleep with him?”

  I gave her my sternest, meanest look and took a few steps toward Cole. “Are you Coley Beckett?”

  “I’m called Cole now.” He snapped a shot, the flash booming, making me blink.

  The model had her arms over her chest again, but she smirked. “Just don’t ask him why he’s not in New York anymore,” she said. “He doesn’t like that question.”

  “That’s right, Michelle,” Cole said. “Now keep your mouth shut and smile.”

  I could do nothing but stand there, helpless, wondering if my “ethical” talk had prevented me from being an assistant to one of the most famous photographers of the last decade. Coley Beckett was a fashion photographer—or at least he had been—and he was as renowned for his antics and bad-boy image as he was for his work. In college, we’d studied his photographs, spread across the pages of Vogueand all the other glossies, my professor gushing about how insightful, how sensory Beckett was for someone so young. I didn’t know about insightful and sensory, but I knew that his pictures always made me feel something—not always good emotions, but always something. That’s what I wanted to do, too. I wanted to take pictures that made people feel. After college, I’d followed his career. He was in the press because of his partying, his steady stream of model girlfriends…but then something happened a few years ago, something big that got him blacklisted from the business, but no one seemed to know what his grievous crime actually was. He’d dropped out of sight, as far as I knew, and now here he was in a warehouse studio in the South Loop.

  Beckett snapped another few shots and told Michelle they were finished. The model stepped into her clothes and, as she went to leave, leaned in to kiss him on the lips. Beckett turned his head quickly so that the kiss landed on his cheek. The woman sighed and strode past us to the elevator.

  Beckett began cleaning up his lenses, putting them in a large black case. I was still too stunned to know what to do.

  “Kell,” Laney said in a low voice. “Are we staying or going?”

  I looked at her, then back at Beckett. “Excuse me,” I said, practically tiptoeing toward him. “I’m sorry if I said anything to upset you, but—”

  He gave a sharp, caustic laugh, yet said nothing.

  “So can we talk about the assistant job?” I took a few more steps toward him.

  “Why?”

  “Look. I love your stuff. I always have, and I’d like to learn from you, if you’d let me, and help you at the same time.”

  He looked up from packing his lenses. “Do you have a portfolio with you?”

  I handed it to him.

  He flipped through my prints, too quickly it seemed. When he was done, he took two out of the bunch and placed them on the table. One was a picture of Dee, taken a few months before she died. She was holding a wineglass and laughing, a candle flickering in front of her, the light making an oval halo. The other was taken at North Avenue Beach, the sand rippled from the strong Chicago wind.

  “Which of these,” Cole asked, “do you prefer?”

  I pointed to the one of Dee.

  “Why?”

  “Because of the subject. That’s my sister. Or it was.” I shook my head. “Anyway, it’s not technically the better photo of the two. The texture is better in the other one, and the lighting, but I like this one the best.”

  Cole placed the two photos back in my portfolio. “You’re absolutely right. The one of the lake is much better. Do you know what ambient light is?”

  Was this a quiz? If so, his questions were easy. “Sure, it’s just natural light.”

  “And aperture?”

  “It’s the opening of a lens.”

  “And the size of the lens is controlled by what?”

  I had to think about that one. “The diaphragm?”

  Another nod. “Which lets in more light, an f/8 or an f/5.6?”

  I thought for another second. “The 5.6.”

  Cole leaned his head back, perusing my face. “Well, you seem brighter than the coeds I’ve been interviewing, and I’ve been without an assistant for seven months. Also, I need someone with an ‘official friend.’” He leaned past me and gave Laney that wicked smile. “So you’re all right,” he said, looking at me again.

  “All right? What does that mean?”

  “It means you’re hired. I’ll see you tomorrow at noon.”

  9

  Laney invited me to stay with her again, but I knew I couldn’t do that forever. I hailed a cab back uptown to the Lake Shore Drive apartment I’d come to consider my new place. In my mind, I tried to pretend that I’d chosen it knowingly, that it had a sort of hominess to it, some feelings of coziness and comfort. Once I was there, though, I was restless and antsy. I had a photography job! Starting tomorrow! Granted, this Cole character wasn’t my dream boss, but everyone had to start somewhere, right? I was partly nervous, partly excited and partly nauseous at the thought that I was nervous and excited about a job that an eighteen-year-old could get when I should have been moving into a partner’s office.

  My stomach churned at the thought of Ben getting his own partner office. I’d taken down the shrine of Ben photos that afternoon, and I felt like defiling one of them now, maybe cutting his head out and pasting it onto a picture of a goat, but I knew I’d regret that someday, the same way I regretted so many other graceful gestures I’d decided to make when I was pissed off. (The time I “accidentally” spilled coffee on Attila’s keyboard comes to mind.)

  So I sort of drifted around my apartment. The fact that it was now free of all my clutter an
d junk made it feel even less like my home, as did the fact that my furniture seemed to be in the wrong place. I went into my bedroom where my other framed photos were and brought them into the living room and kitchen, sprinkling them around on the end tables and the countertops, so that my mom, Dee, Laney and Jess smiled out at me from all corners of the apartment. While I did this I wondered why all the photos were in the bedroom to begin with. Was that where I’d spent most of my time?

  I went back in the bedroom and looked around for anything that might give me the answer to that question, or, even better, the answer to the bigger question of why I couldn’t recall this past summer. I suddenly focused on my jewelry box sitting on the end of the bureau. What if I’d been pawning off family jewels to buy drugs? Maybe I was a coke whore and I simply couldn’t remember it. But I didn’t seem to be craving anything. I looked through my jewelry box and ruled out that possibility. There weren’t really any family jewels, anyway, at least not anything that other people would be interested in. Just my mom’s modest platinum ring with the small inset diamonds that had been her wedding band when she married my father, and the pearl earrings that my mom’s mom had left to me in her will.

  Lacking anything better to do, I put on my favorite flannel pajamas, the blue ones with the white fluffy clouds, and got in bed. Leaning against the headboard, I picked up one of the three spy novels I had on the nightstand. It was dog-eared but I had no memory of ever reading this book. I started reading and got sucked into a tale of a young man traveling through Russia who stumbles onto a college where they train Russians to act and talk like Americans so that they can infiltrate our country. The novel was written during the Cold War, and as a result, no longer had the urgency or scary undertones to it, but it did get me to thinking about my own situation. What if I, not Beth Maninsky, was the covert operative for the CIA? Maybe I’d been involved in a shoot-out during an undercover investigation or maybe I’d seen something horrifying that could change the world, and as a result, I’d lost my memories of the past five months. I liked this potential. I liked the thought of myself in black leather, packing heat, sneaking around the Kremlin or some such place. The problem was that I could recall my whole life prior to these last five months, and I was quite sure that I had never been a spy.

  Another potential came to me: maybe as part of my job in the financial industry I’d stumbled onto an explosive international secret. It was possible that they’d surgically removed a part of my brain so I couldn’t recall it. What secret I might have found while studying retail stocks and who “they” were I wasn’t quite sure, but I rather liked this theory, as well. It took any blame away from me.

  I slid my fingers through my hair and felt around my head for healed incisions or telltale bumps, and I discovered absolutely nothing.

  Okay. What kind of job starts at noon? I’d been too startled to really think about it when Cole had said I was hired, but by nine-thirty Tuesday morning it seemed ridiculous that I didn’t have to be at work yet. By the time I would get there, most people would be halfway done with their day.

  I hadn’t slept well the night before, and as a result, I felt a little like Laney. I’d been up since five, and since then I’d cleaned my camera and all my lenses. I’d picked out a professional yet casual outfit of black pants and a crisp white shirt. I’d dug out my coffeemaker from a cabinet, made myself a pot, and now I still had two hours to go.

  Earlier this morning, from my living room window, I’d watched the normal people bustle by in their suits or their business casual, all heading to the train or bus that would take them to their jobs, ones that paid more than the few bucks an hour I’d get from Cole. By now, everyone was gone except for a few beer delivery trucks and a couple of stragglers.

  I’m not sure why I was so concerned about the measly hourly wage that Cole would pay me. I had enough money to last for the next few months at least, and it wasn’t as if I was worth much in the photography field, with my limited experience. I guess what was bothering me was the thought of the salary and bonuses I used to make at Bartley Brothers. Strangely, I hadn’t gone into the financial world for the money, but in the end it was what had held me there, like a pair of golden handcuffs. It was what was drawing me back even now. Most of my old colleagues, Ben included, were fascinated by money, by the thought of making a lot of it, and that’s what brought them to Bartley Brothers. I was the exception to that rule.

  I’d wanted to be an analyst in the financial world because of my father. He’d taken off when I was just a baby, which made him a mysterious figure to me. My mom must have sensed that and, maybe wanting to compensate for the fact that I had no dad, often made him sound clever and intriguing.

  “Your father played the stock market,” she would say, “and he was the best.” For years, I imagined a Monopoly-like board game called The Stock Market that my dad was an ace at. I pictured him deftly moving bright plastic pieces around the playing field, everyone else groaning at his brilliant maneuvering. Eventually, after my seventh-grade class learned to track stock prices in the paper, I’d realized what the market really was, and that’s when I decided that I wanted to be a stock picker, just like my dad. I fantasized that by going into his field, I would get to know him somehow, maybe give him a reason to stick around. I knew better than to mention this to my mom, who by that time never had anything positive to say about him, and so I grew up, always secretly knowing what I would do with my life. I got a business degree from the University of Chicago and landed a job with Bartley Brothers. It wasn’t until I’d been there three years that I’d confided to my mom the reason why I’d chosen my profession.

  She’d looked at me as if I’d slapped her. “Kelly, I never said he was in the stock market.”

  “Yes, you did. A bunch of times.”

  She thought about that for a second, and then sadly shook her head. “I didn’t mean for you to take it literally.”

  “Are you saying he didn’t play the stock market for a living?”

  “Well, he was in banking.”

  “What, exactly, did he do in banking?”

  My mom scratched at her scalp. “He sold blank checks to banks. And he wasn’t even very good at that.”

  I don’t think I ever forgave her for shining such a false light on my father, the light that made me follow his phantom form into a world he didn’t even work in. But by then it was too late. I was on my way up, I was making a shit-load of money and I’d gotten used to it.

  I turned away from the window and began to clean my apartment, but it was already spotless. I tried to watch TV, but like yesterday, as I flipped and flipped and flipped, there was nothing on. I began to feel more and more jittery. When I could no longer convince myself that it was the coffee, I muted the TV and called Laney at work.

  “Laney Pendleton,” she answered, sounding out of breath and rushed.

  “Hey, it’s me.”

  “Hi, hon. What’s going on?”

  “I think I’m having a panic attack.”

  “What? Hold on, I’ll close the door.” There was a pause, the sound of Laney saying something to Deb, her assistant, then the thud of a door closing. “Okay,” she said. “Shoot.”

  “What am I doing taking this job? That Cole guy used to be famous, but c’mon, I’m not a photographer. I’m not some freshman living in a dorm. I’m thirty years old, for Christ’s sake, and—”

  “Hold it,” Laney said, her tone brusque now. “Are you kidding me with this?”

  “No. I don’t even have to be in until noon. What kind of job starts at noon?” On the TV, Oprah was consoling a crying woman. I flipped to CNN.

  “I meant the panic attack, Kell. You’re not really having one, are you?”

  “It’s an expression.” Why was she being so technical?

  “It didn’t used to be an expression for you.”

  I took a quiet moment to process this. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry. Did I really have panic attacks?”

  “A few times.”
/>   “Jesus.” Just the thought of myself having a panic attack was depressing. I was suddenly glad that I had an appointment with Ellen Geiger tonight. “I’m really sorry.”

  Laney sighed. “That’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not. I’ve put way too much pressure on you this last year. You’ve had to do too much. I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “You’d do it for me,” she said.

  “I would, and I want to do it for you right now, so tell me what’s happening over there.” I clicked the TV off with a firm press of my thumb. I would give Laney my full attention. Something she’d been doing for me for months.

  “It’s nothing. It’ll be fine.”

  “C’mon. Tell me. You’re just not used to confiding in me anymore and you sound frazzled.”

  “Well, I am, if you want to know the truth. I’ve just about had it. Deb has completely dropped the ball on our tampon ad campaign.”

  “Mmm,” I murmured to keep her going, deciding not to mention the funny fact that she had a lot of genitally related marketing projects—the herpes and now the tampons.

  “She said she was going to type up my notes and arrange a meeting with the clients and coordinate it with Creative, and I’ve seen her on the phone around the clock, but it turns out she’s been interviewing caterers and florists for her wedding! And I can’t fire her, not now. She’s the only one who knows how to read my handwriting, and she understands everything in this department if she’d just get off her ass and do it. And…”

  Laney went on for a good fifteen minutes, during which time I murmured my understanding and finally made some suggestions to deal with the wedding-obsessed Deb.