The Photographer

by Mary Dixie Carter

  She opened the refrigerator and took a bottle of white wine out of the side compartment. She poured herself a large glass. I enjoyed wine as much as she did, but I knew she wasn’t going to offer me any, because I was Natalie’s babysitter and now the surrogate for her baby. After Natalie went to bed, I planned to have a small glass, not enough that anyone would notice.

  Amelia swirled her wine in the glass and raised it toward the light to observe the streaks, then downed all of it quickly and set her glass in the sink. Several minutes later she and Fritz walked out the door. She hadn’t changed her clothes or even brushed through her matted hair.

  After her parents left, Natalie and I played Scrabble and watched The Hunger Games. By the time she went to bed, she’d moved on from the subject of surrogacy, at least for the night.

  * * *

  I awoke to Amelia’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Delta, darling,” she said.

  I looked up and saw her face inches from mine, so close that it was distorted. I could identify the individual hairs of her eyebrows. I had a strong urge to kiss her. I sat up on the leather sofa in the media room, embarrassed to have fallen asleep. I didn’t sleep very deeply or very much. In my youth, I’d learned to sleep with one eye open, especially when certain members of the family were visiting.

  I could feel her breath on my face as she spoke. “Stay downstairs tonight, in the garden apartment. It’s so late.” Bells sounded in my head. I’d intuitively understood that the surrogacy and the apartment were cosmically linked, only I hadn’t known which would happen first, or if the two things would happen simultaneously.

  “Our tenant moved out last week,” she explained.

  A triumphant refrain from Aida replaced the bells. The apartment’s vacancy was official. (I already knew Gwen had moved out, and, to some extent, I’d orchestrated the move. In addition to occasional puddles on the floor, I’d been rearranging her belongings in subtle but unsettling ways. A month earlier I’d noticed flyers from an open house on the kitchen counter. Then she’d started to pack, and a week later everything had disappeared.)

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “we have brand-new sheets and towels. You won’t get cooties.” Amelia’s mood had shifted dramatically over the last three hours. She was a different person. She’d miraculously pulled out of a spiraling dive.

  Fritz appeared in the doorway, still wearing his coat. “Please, Delta.” He sounded genuinely concerned.

  “OK.” I could smell the alcohol on Amelia’s breath.

  “Have breakfast with us in the morning?” Amelia said.

  A few minutes later Fritz walked me down the steps, unlocked the garden apartment, and turned on the recessed lights in the front hall.

  In a way, I was seeing the apartment for the first time, because now I could allow myself to indulge in my dream. I believed it was only a matter of time before the apartment belonged to me. “It’s stunning.”

  “Get some sleep,” Fritz said. His gaze traveled from my eyes, slowly downward. I sensed that he wanted to stay with me. The opportunity was before us. Amelia was so drunk that, invariably, she would have fallen asleep immediately. She wasn’t going to notice what time Fritz returned. Any minute he was going to step toward me and unbutton my blouse. I would have liked to tell him it was OK. I wanted him too.

  At no time did my desire for Fritz eclipse my love for Amelia. The two things coexisted and fed off each other. I hoped to be the center of their worlds.

  “Good night.” Once he made the decision to leave, his face drooped down and his shoulders rounded. He turned and walked out the front door. His departure was mildly disappointing, but I couldn’t dwell on it, given all that I’d accomplished in the last twelve hours.

  Now I had unlimited time to admire every aspect of the apartment anew, with the knowledge that I was going to spend the entire night there. The design, the materials, and the workmanship were on par with the main house. The reclaimed elm wood floor, high-end appliances, marble countertops, plumbing fixtures, hardware, tile backsplash, recessed lighting, the windows, and the cabinetry.

  A number of years earlier I’d been involved with a highly skilled cabinetmaker, so I knew about the time and expense involved in bookshelves like these. The attention to detail. The cabinetmaker and his wife had occupied an apartment down the hall from me when I lived in Queens. I was close friends with his wife, but eventually she found out that he and I were having sex in my kitchen in exchange for my cabinets.

  Amelia had lent me a pair of her pajamas. The faint smell of her lemon-and-bergamot perfume still lingered on them. I knew she would never wear them again after I did. She would either give them away or throw them out. She assumed that I’d love wearing her pajamas. She was right.

  That night, I dreamed that I was trying to escape from a dragon. I found a temporary refuge—a small cardboard house, the size of a child’s playhouse. I stepped inside the playhouse and closed the door. I could hear the dragon outside. When it started to rain, the playhouse collapsed into a pile of mush, and then the dragon saw me with the crumbled playhouse all around me and he realized how vulnerable I was. Only then did he go in for the kill.

  * * *

  After having showered and dressed in the same clothes from the day before, I had a chance to study the apartment in daylight. The living room had sliding glass doors that opened up to a small patio and the backyard. I wondered whether Gwen had been allowed to use the entire yard, or whether she’d been confined to the patio.

  At 10 A.M., I joined everyone upstairs for a late breakfast.

  “Hello, beauty!” Amelia called out in a vibrant, positive voice.

  I didn’t often experience the Straub house in the morning light. The southern light streamed in through the skylight from above—an intense, unfiltered, unrelenting California kind of light. I had a fresh surge of appreciation for the Straubs’ architectural talent.

  The dining table was already set, including a place for me. I sat down and Fritz brought me a cappuccino. Amelia served me a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon. Her appearance had improved significantly overnight. She’d obviously washed her hair, and her gray roots were less noticeable because she’d pulled her hair back in a ponytail. The circles underneath her eyes had disappeared, likely with the help of her seventy-dollar concealer, which she’d applied for the first time in weeks.

  “What if you rent our apartment from us for the rest of the year?” she asked.

  Bells echoed in my head, and then Aida again. I feared that my voice would crack if I answered, so I said nothing, hoping that my silence would indicate thoughtfulness, as opposed to hyperventilation or euphoria.

  I took a sip of my cappuccino and wiped the foam off my upper lip.

  “You’d be close by.” Amelia took a seat next to Natalie.

  I thought Amelia expected me to voice an objection or a concern. “My cat,” I said.

  Amelia placed her hand on Natalie’s shoulder. “It would be incredible for Natalie.” Natalie looked at her mother’s hand as if it were a bug.

  “You can pay the same rent you’re paying now,” Amelia said. “Babysitting would be so much easier.”

  “Your cat would like it too,” Natalie said. She was wearing pajamas decorated with question marks of varying colors and sizes. Her long lashes stood out against her pale skin.

  I didn’t reply, but, of course, of course, I knew what my answer was.

  “Just consider it,” Amelia said. “Especially given what we discussed yesterday. It all makes so much sense.” She raised her eyebrows meaningfully.

  I looked at Natalie to see if I detected a reaction, but fortunately, she’d backed away from the confrontation with her mother.

  “It’s a beautiful apartment,” I said.

  Fritz sat next to me and served himself bacon and eggs. He took a bite of his undercooked bacon. I sensed a fissure in the family. “Only downside is you’ll get sucked into babysitting more often than you want to.” He laughed in a self
-deprecating manner.

  I wasn’t listening anymore. I was suspended above my body, watching my new life emerge.

  * * *

  The lease on my Crown Heights apartment was up May 15. I tried and failed to get out early. Since I had enough money in the bank to cover both apartments for an overlapping month, I never mentioned the situation to the Straubs. The extra rent was a small price to pay. I didn’t want to wait.

  Once I began packing, my cat, Eliza, tried to sabotage the move. She stood in front of the kitchen cabinet that held my pots and pans so I couldn’t reach them. When I tried to pack the dishes, she blocked that cabinet too. Eventually I gave up and locked her in my bedroom.

  The move proved an opportunity for me to streamline my belongings and part with old clothing, photos, and knickknacks that were weighing me down, literally and figuratively. In the process, I cleaned up the digital files on my hard drive that I no longer needed. I had folders full of images dating back ten years. I held on to the best ones, in case the clients returned for more prints, but deleted many of them.

  I had twenty-two folders of my private photoshopped images, representing twenty-two families. Of course, the twenty-two folders were a small fraction of all my clients. But those were the families who had made an impression on me. In certain cases, there was a story to be told, with groups of images that conveyed something about a life I’d shared with someone. In other cases, it was just a matter of one or two gratifying pictures.

  I opened the Straub, Alternates folder. Clicking through the photos, I stopped when I came to the pictures of me and Fritz in bed together. I had done impressive work in making the photos feel alive. In my estimation, they were artistic creations. I’d successfully fabricated an expression of ecstasy on Fritz’s face. Some of the photos were tight on our body parts and some allowed a view of the whole scene. I stopped again when I came to the photoshopped pictures of Amelia and me and took a few minutes to savor the image of us sharing a piece of birthday cake. I felt uneasy leaving all the images on my hard drive, now that I would be living in the Straub home. So, painful though it was, I deleted each photo individually, followed by the entire folder.

  * * *

  Ian and I were having coffee around the corner from my apartment, at his insistence. The coffee shop was mostly empty, except for one woman with headphones working on her laptop in the far corner.

  He was angry when he learned about my being the Straubs’ surrogate. But I wasn’t inclined to discuss my choices with him.

  “Have you ever heard of generosity?” I said.

  “It’s not generosity,” he said. “You can’t bear to be in your own skin.”

  I felt pressure in my sinuses and ears, like I was on an airplane. Ian was trying to provoke me. I couldn’t allow him to see that he’d succeeded. He felt he had the right to talk to me like that because we were having sex. In his mind, we were in a relationship. I resented his presumption. I’ve always considered the contents of my brain private.

  I wiped up a little coffee that had spilled on the table in front of me.

  “If you want to get pregnant so badly, then have a baby with me,” he said. “The idea of being someone’s surrogate. I don’t even get what you think it does for you.”

  I wasn’t interested in Ian’s idea of normal behavior. He thought that the surrogacy was fulfilling some short-term desire, at the expense of my long-term happiness. He didn’t realize that my definition of long-term happiness had nothing to do with his.

  “It’s an end in itself,” I said.

  “What does your son think of it?” I saw some challenge in his gaze.

  “No one is asking for your opinion.”

  “Do you really have a son?” His eyes bored into me.

  “Of course.”

  A twentysomething man entered the coffee shop and walked to the counter to order. Cold air rushed in behind him.

  “I don’t think you do.” Ian spoke in a low voice.

  I laughed. “You have no idea who I am.”

  “Does anyone?”

  I felt a compression of my rib cage.

  Ian put his thumb and forefinger on the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut, like he had a headache. “Is it about Amelia and Fritz?”

  I nodded. “I want to help them.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In mid-April, two Polish men with thick accents knocked on my door. My father was Polish, so I recognized the movers’ accents as being similar to my two uncles’. The men wrapped my couch in plastic wrap, then blankets, like they were swaddling a baby, then walked it out the door. I’d never hired professional movers. I’d never owned decent enough furniture to make it worthwhile.

  Eliza hissed at the men when they entered, and clawed one of them on his pants. I had a feeling she understood our future home to be precarious. She knew that we were undergoing a sea change. And she also sensed my anxiety. I locked her in the bedroom again.

  I had invested a lot of my artistic self in the apartment over the last several years: painting the walls, hanging the drapes. And over the last few months, I’d hung photos of Jasper everywhere. The home in which my son and I had lived would soon be vacated. I was giving up all that I had for something uncertain.

  Since moving to New York, I’d lived in several different apartments, most of them dumps. I shared my first apartment with Lana and one other roommate. Lana got me my first job in New York as a photographer’s assistant, working for Emily Miller, who was considered the grande dame of event planning at the time. (I’d done similar work in Florida, on occasion, so I already had many of the necessary skills.)

  One day Emily’s lead photographer had a family emergency. I flew to Puerto Vallarta and shot a wedding that night. The pictures were remarkable, especially the ones of the children. Within a year, her clients were calling me to photograph their kids.

  In the end, she and I had a falling-out. She mistakenly thought I was going to give her a cut of my business. She viewed me as being indebted to her and thought I ought to be grateful. I suppose she’d always considered herself superior to me, but I’d chosen not to see it.

  I quit my job waiting tables. After two years I had a regular roster of clients and I’d doubled my rates, so I moved into my present apartment, which wasn’t gorgeous, but it was respectable and more my home than any other place had ever been.

  “Cute kid,” one of the movers said when he removed a photo of Jasper that had been hanging on the wall in order to wrap it.

  “Thanks.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “With his dad.”

  He nodded knowingly and covered the picture in bubble wrap.

  “I got a kid,” he said. “Two years old. Man, what a lot of work. How old’s your kid?”

  “Five.”

  “Ohh.”

  “He’s hearing impaired. He goes to a special school.” Why did I say that?

  “Too bad.”

  “Right now he’s at school.”

  A minute earlier I’d said he was with his father. I was angry with myself for such an unnecessary stumble. And angry with myself for caring what the man thought of me.

  When the men left, I opened the door of the bedroom and my cat raced out. Sitting on the floor of the kitchen, I leaned my back against the cabinets. Eliza ran in circles through the apartment. As she passed me, she hissed. I pushed her away. Then she lifted one paw and scratched me across my chest, above the neckline of my shirt. Red raised lines appeared on my skin, along with a drop of blood. For a minute I thought about throwing her out the window. She must have seen the hatred in my eyes. She hissed at me again.

  “What is it?”

  She stood completely still.

  “What the fuck’s your problem?”

  She made a mental calculation and must have decided that she was better off appealing to my vanity rather than alienating me. She knew it was in her interest to remain docile and subservient to me—to give me love, whether or not it was genuin
e. How would I ever know if Eliza was just pretending to love me because she needed food and shelter? I suddenly had disdain for her. She was a whore, willing to sell her emotions to the highest bidder. She was willing to be the cat I needed her to be, if it meant that she would retain her position. If it meant her life wouldn’t be threatened and she’d have a roof over her head.

  I opened the door to her kennel. She walked in without missing a beat. I closed it. I could just leave her. I didn’t need to bring her with me to my new home, and she knew it. She was completely at my mercy.

  Before leaving, I walked through each room one last time, kissing each wall goodbye. In this apartment, I’d secured a measure of safety. I tried to hold on to that feeling, in case I never experienced it again.

  * * *

  The movers deposited my furniture, dishes, linens, clothing, cameras, and computers in the designated locations of my new apartment. My exquisite apartment. The Straubs could have charged six thousand a month, but they were renting it to me for two thousand.

  I brought the rosewood coffee table, the leather chairs, and the dining table and chairs. (I sold the rest. I couldn’t bear for the Straubs to see that I owned any mediocre furniture.) I never could have dreamed of living in an apartment with this level of luxury—a luxury of exquisite design and exquisite execution of the design. It was a magazine life.

  A whole world was opening up to me. I was now physically connected to the Straubs’ lives in a variety of different ways. I was living in their building, in close proximity to them at all times. I was also the caregiver, tutor, and confidante for Natalie. More and more, I was inextricably linked to them. Natalie was going to come to me for help with her homework even more often because now I was readily accessible. Amelia was going to rely on me more and more as a babysitter. And soon I would be carrying their child.