A Clean Slate

by Laura Caldwell

  “I feel so much better,” Laney said. “Thanks for listening.”

  “No problem.” Actually, it had been a treat to get out of my head for once.

  “Okay, so tell me what’s up with the job,” Laney said, “and please do not use the words panic attack.”

  “Deal. Here’s the thing. I’m way too old for something like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “A frigging assistantship. Being an assistant is something you do when you’re just starting out.”

  “Aren’t you just starting out in photography?”

  “Yes, but maybe it’s too late to begin something like this. I should have done it a long time ago. It’s embarrassing to be making a paltry hourly wage at thirty.”

  “Why?”

  I struggled to find an answer for that one. I finally settled for, “People will talk.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, the Bartley people for one. I had a 401K and insurance and a pension plan over there. And now look at me!”

  “I’m looking, but I don’t see what you’re talking about. This is an opportunity of a lifetime.”

  “But I’m giving up the path that I was on, the one I worked so damn hard at.”

  “Can’t you climb the corporate ladder after you’ve done this for a while and gone through the money you have? Couldn’t you get another analyst job then if you want it?”

  “And what am I supposed to say at an interview? That for a year or so I’ve been lying on my couch, going to therapy and probably making coffee for a crazy, washed-up Brit?”

  Laney sighed again. I could hear the door open and Deb saying something to her. “Kell, look. Do you want to do this?”

  “I don’t know. I mean this guy used to be famous, but who knows if he’s even any good anymore?”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m asking you, in a perfect world, would you want to make a living doing photography?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t have to ponder for even a millisecond.

  “Then listen to me. It doesn’t matter that you’re doing grunt work or that you wish you’d done this in college—or that people will talk. What matters is that you’ve got a shot, and you’ve got some time to do it. Granted, it might be harder to get back into the investment banks later, but you’ll always be able to be an analyst. You might not make as much money as you did before, but you know it’s true.”

  Though she couldn’t see me, I nodded. “Thanks, Lane. Again. You’re my savior.”

  She chuckled. “Tell that boss of yours I said hi.”

  Cole’s building was no less scary in the daylight, and the closed blinds inside his place made it seem like nighttime again.

  “I’ll finish shooting the washer ad today,” I heard Cole say when I was a few steps out of the elevator.

  I still had my coat on, my eyes hadn’t adjusted to the dark and we hadn’t even greeted each other, so all I could do was blink and say, “Okay.”

  When my eyes started working again, I saw that he was standing near a tall butcher-block table, the kind most people would have in their kitchen, only his was covered with film and notes and contact sheets. He flipped through a few of the sheets. “I’m not happy with the light in here.”

  I looked around, thinking, What light in here? Even the shades in his living quarters were pulled down.

  He lifted his spiky-haired head and looked at me. “I’m going to need you to hold the strobe.”

  “You don’t have a stand for it?”

  “I do, but I want you to hold it.” His tone had a faint snippiness to it, but it could have been just the British accent. Or maybe this strobe-holding thing was some punishing ritual similar to fraternity hazing. I was a photographic pledge in the house of Beckett.

  Since he obviously wasn’t going to tell me where to put my coat, I slung it over a chair just outside the elevator. I walked down the few steps to where he stood and looked over his shoulder, seeing that each little rectangle in the contact sheet showed the topless model and her best friend, the Spring Clean Washing Machine. As I glanced at the sheet, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that Cole’s hair was wet, as if he’d just gotten up and taken a shower. Then I realized why we’d started so late—Cole was apparently still the bad-boy of the photography world, even though he was in Chicago now. He’d probably been out all night boozing with a gaggle of models.

  “I need a soft-focus effect.” Cole peered at the contact sheets.

  “Couldn’t you move the lens or shake the camera?” Those were two of the tricks I’d learned in my last class, and I felt ridiculously proud of myself for being able to dredge them out of my head.

  “Hypothetically,” Cole said, the British snippiness creeping back into his tone, “but I’d rather have you holding the light.”

  “I’ll never be able to keep it perfectly still.”

  “That’s right, Kelly Kelly,” Cole said, sounding distinctly bored with me. “The light won’t be as static, and it will soften the effect.”

  I’d never thought about that approach. The pledge had already learned something.

  Unfortunately, the pledge obviously hadn’t lifted weights or done any kind of physical activity in her five months on the couch. Within two minutes of holding the lights, my arms began to shake. Michelle, the same model from the night before, was back in her black bikini bottoms, this time on her stomach over the washer, her knees bent, her feet crossed. I had to give her credit for her abilities. When Cole was snapping pictures, her face was smooth and serene, as if lying on a household appliance made her the happiest woman in the world. When he took a break, she dropped the serene look and said things like, “Shit, it’s cold in here. My nipples could cut glass.” There was no stylist on this shoot—apparently too low budget—but Vicky, the makeup artist, would scurry up to Michelle, hand her moisturizer to massage into her breasts and ply her with pancake foundation. I took those opportunities to drop the light for a second and massage my arms instead of my breasts.

  “Right,” Cole said an hour or so into it. “Let’s go again, shall we?”

  I took a deep breath, like an Olympic wrestler about to enter the ring, and raised the light above my head again.

  This time, I watched Cole instead of Michelle, searching for any of those British stereotypes from the Austin Powers movies. Bad teeth? It was hard to tell since he rarely smiled, but soon he grinned at something Michelle said, and I could see that they were white and quite straight. Bad dresser? No, I wouldn’t say bad—rather, interesting. Today he had on black pants, black Doc Maartens and a navy-blue shirt with a French word in bright orange. I wondered what the word meant. And what about the stereotype that British men say “shag” all the time and do, in fact, want to shag everyone they come into contact with? Well, Cole must have been the exception because it was clear that Michelle was hitting on him, and he seemed oblivious. During a break, she sauntered up to him all cute and naked, ostensibly to look at the contact sheets from the day before, but he barely seemed to notice her brown, “glass-cutting” nipples hovering mere inches from his face. And he certainly wasn’t hitting on me. If anything, he’d forgotten I was there, a fact that made me focus again on the thought that an uneducated, eighteen-year-old could have done my job. Hell, a particularly strong twelve-year-old could have done it.

  At about four o’clock, Cole announced that he’d gotten enough shots and thanked us for our time. The makeup woman left first, then Michelle. As she had the night before, she strolled toward the door, threw her hair over her shoulder and tried to kiss him on her way out. But he turned fast on his Doc Maartens and thanked her very much for her good work. Maybe he hadn’t been out with a gaggle of models last night. Or maybe he was gay. I didn’t get that vibe from him but my vibe meter was notoriously inaccurate on this subject.

  I had initially noticed my deficient gaydar in college with the first guy I dated there, Remy Stanson.

  “Oh, he’s so gay,” Laney had said when she came to visit on a foo
tball weekend. We were in my dorm room filling flasks with pink schnapps, and Remy had just gone down the hall to use the men’s room.

  “He is not!” I said indignantly. Remy was only the second guy I’d ever slept with, and Laney’s proclamation seemed a slam against me as well as him.

  “Yes. He is,” she said, still concentrating on pouring the thick liquid into the silver metal opening.

  At the football game, I watched Remy yelling, “Defense, defense!” just like every other male, and I knew Laney was wrong. He met none of the gay stereotypes—he wasn’t effeminate, he wasn’t a particularly sharp dresser and he wasn’t prettier than I was. But a month later, while I was searching for a pair of socks to wear home from his apartment, I came across a stash of gay porn at the bottom of a drawer, and I had to admit to Laney she was right.

  Unfortunately, my gaydar didn’t get any better. After Remy, I refused to see the light about George Michael, whom I’d had a crush on since his Wham! days. Again, Laney kept telling me that I was an idiot, that he was clearly homosexual.

  “But he says ‘Wake me up before you go, girl,’” I protested.

  “It’s ‘Wake me up before you go, go,’” she explained, yet I remained unconvinced until he was caught in that bathroom.

  So now I knew that I certainly couldn’t make any judgments about Cole.

  “All right, Kelly Kelly,” he said when Michelle had left. “I need you to clean something for me.”

  “Sure.” Finally something other than strong-arming the lights. “Your lenses?”

  He looked up at me, then back down at the camera he was disassembling. “No. And don’t ever touch my lenses unless I tell you to.”

  I swallowed down a snappy retort. This was my first day on the job. As Laney had said, I had to start somewhere. “Okay. What then?”

  “The floor.”

  “Excuse me?” I covered the strobe light with a sheet and came a little closer to him.

  “I need you to mop the floor,” he said, in a tone that suggested What else would you be doing?

  I thought of my job at Bartley Brothers, where the hardest manual labor I’d ever done was raise my Starbucks cup to my mouth. “Don’t you have a cleaning service?”

  “Not until the weekend, and I’ve got another shoot starting tomorrow.”

  “Well, cleaning really isn’t part of my job description, is it?”

  He scoffed. “Your job description is whatever the hell I tell you to do, so go.” He made a shooing motion with his hand. “The supplies are in the closet.”

  I hesitated for a very long moment. What was I doing here? I had a business degree from the University of Chicago. I had worked for one of the most respected banks in the world. I wasn’t a goddamn maid. If this was what it took to “start over” in a new career, I didn’t know if I wanted it that badly.

  “Kelly, go,” Cole said, shooing me with his hand again.

  I hated him right then. I knew he was doing this to test me, to see if I’d walk out the door as I was contemplating doing. He was demeaning me on purpose.

  Well, I wouldn’t let him win. I turned and stomped toward the closet, but my irritation slid into something darker. “Jesus fucking Christ,” I muttered as my boots clomped on his hardwood floor.

  Using Jesus’s name as a nifty expletive told me that one of my temper flares was looming on the horizon. Usually I tried to fight them when I got that initial feeling. I would take deep breaths, à la my meditation tapes. I would tell myself to calm down and get over it. I would dig the brown candle from under the sink and hurl it. Today, though, I didn’t even make the attempt to quash the instinct. It was familiar, the red angry flush that came over me, making me feel like I was the same person I’d always been—not at all someone who would sit in a dark apartment for months or stalk her ex-boyfriend. A token of my original self. And so I held on to it, letting it fill my head.

  I kept stomping and slamming around with the broom and the bucket until I heard Cole call out something about watching for streaks.

  “Mother-fucking asshole,” I muttered. Unfortunately, it came out louder than a mutter. In fact, there was nothing truly muttering about it. I held my breath for a second to see if Cole had heard me. Silence. I glanced over my shoulder and across the room. I saw his stunned face, mouth a little open. Humph. Served him right. I stood a little taller, knowing he wouldn’t be messing with me anymore, but then I heard him laugh.

  It was sort of a chuckle at first, but it quickly skidded into outright belly laughing.

  “Oh, God,” Cole said, between snorting and slapping his thigh. “Did you just call me a mother-fucking arsehole?” This, apparently, was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “God, that’s priceless!”

  Before I could come up with what to say to my employer, albeit an unconventional one, who’d just heard me call him a filthy name, he turned and walked into his darkroom, where I could still hear him laughing.

  His laughter was like water to my temper tantrum. It completely squelched it, leaving me crabby and embarrassed, with nothing to do but quit or clean. I went to the sink and filled up the bucket.

  The mop was noxious and stringy, and it gave me shivers. As I maneuvered it around his bed, I thought about pouring the bucket of water on his sheets. When I swabbed around a table that held a few lenses, I felt an overwhelming, childish urge to drop one on the floor. I restrained myself, knowing that if I did, I’d be dropping the job, too, a possibility that didn’t seem so horrible anymore. I decided that I’d give Coley Beckett until the end of the week. If this gig didn’t somehow get better, I was out of here.

  “Mind the lenses,” I heard Cole say from behind me. I hadn’t heard him leave the darkroom.

  I swiveled around and leaned on the handle of the noxious mop. “Excuse me?”

  “Mind the lenses,” he repeated. He was slumped in a beanbag chair now, not really looking at me. He flipped through a black book that looked like an appointment calendar. Back to his usual surly personality.

  “I know how to mop a floor.”

  “Excellent. Just take care around the equipment.”

  I resumed my scrubbing, moving the mop in hurried, angry strokes.

  “Christ, you missed a spot,” I heard from behind me.

  Deep breath in, deep breath out. “Where?”

  He nodded toward a dark circle on the floor.

  “It won’t come out.”

  “Try harder.”

  “Is this asshole behavior the reason you were run out of New York?”

  He froze. I could tell by the way his finger was poised in midair over his book. Finally he looked up at me, silent.

  “Is it?” I said, not caring that I might be fired.

  The lines around his eyes seemed to deepen, and suddenly, Cole looked like a sad little boy. “You wouldn’t know anything about that,” he said, in a low, almost inaudible voice.

  There was a weird, melancholy air around us now. I wasn’t sure what had happened or what to make of it. I finished the mopping without comment from Cole, and spent the rest of the time breaking down the washing machine set. I didn’t know what kind of shoot was happening the next day, and Cole had barely spoken to me except to tell me where to put things. After a few hours of silence, I actually missed the sarcastic snippiness.

  “You can leave now.” Cole called to me from inside the darkroom.

  “Okay, thanks,” I yelled back. Why was I thanking him? The silent hours had unnerved me, I guess. Still, I was excited to escape the place. Maybe I’d talk Laney into getting a margarita at Uncle Julio’s Hacienda, or maybe I’d go see a movie.

  But then I remembered that I had other plans. Ellen Geiger. I had half an hour to get uptown to see my shrink.

  10

  Ellen Geiger lived on the first floor of an elegant graystone on State Street, one of those places built at the turn of the century, with iron carriage posts out front and stone lions guarding either side of the door. At least I assumed Ellen still live
d there and was still using the front room as her office. I checked the name by the doorbell just to be sure.

  As I waited for her to answer, I glanced up the street toward Lincoln Park, which was lit up by tall round lights. I wondered if Ellen’s practice was lucrative enough for her to own this house so close to the park and the lake. Maybe it was a family home, or maybe she had a wealthy husband. The problem with therapy was that the conversation was so one-sided you rarely learned much about the person hearing your deepest secrets. As a result, Ellen probably knew more about my last five months than I did.

  I heard the soft tap, tap, tap of footsteps, then a golden glow came from inside as the hall light was turned on.

  “Kelly,” Ellen said, opening the door. “Come in.”

  She was probably in her late thirties or early forties, and she struck me as someone who could look totally sexy if she wanted to. For all I knew she broke out the leather jeans and fuck-me stilettos on the weekends, but for work she nearly always wore conservative, secretarylike attire. Today she had on a wine-colored cardigan sweater over a white blouse and straight black skirt. She wore low, tasteful black pumps. Her ashy-blond hair was pulled back by a velvet headband.

  “How are you?” She gestured for me to come into her office, a small but stylish room with a huge bay window. I assumed that window overlooked the street, but the heavy silk drapes in front of it were always closed tight and the place lamplit, like now. I wondered if Ellen threw open the drapes after her last client left, tore the headband from her hair and headed for a pitcher of martinis in the fridge.

  “I’m good,” I said, noting mentally that I was particularly curious about Ellen today. The few visits that I could remember with her after Dee had died, I’d just marched up the steps, fell into the couch and talked, talked, talked, not concerned about Ellen or her life. Maybe it was because I was feeling so much better now. I had more space in my thoughts for other people.

  Another thought—maybe I was nervous about this meeting, about what Ellen might tell me.

  She took a seat next to her desk and watched me in that expectant way of hers, waiting, I’m sure, for me to launch into a diatribe about all my issues. The problem was, I honestly didn’t feel as though I had any that I wanted to discuss with her.