Back After This

Chapter Ten The Photographer

Chapter Ten

The Photographer

Eliza wanted me to get new pictures. She was in the process of lining up all my first dates, and while Toby required me to know nothing about them until I met them, she needed my photo and bio in order to get them to agree to show up and be recorded.

She said the pictures needed to be “unassuming” but still make me look “like a wow,” which seemed unlikely, but I wasn’t the expert. The pictures I had were a couple of years old, and in them, I was wearing my most pensive stare, the one I thought would befit a serious journalist. “These make me want to cry,” she had moaned, flipping through them. “You look so sad.” I had indeed been a little sad, but that wasn’t what she meant. I was pretty sure that to her, “sad” meant something like “unlikely to want a margarita.” The photographer she had in mind was in the Czech Republic at the moment, but he’d passed her the name of a friend he promised would do a great job.

She slipped me the address of a photo studio and a time to show up, and she gave me strict instructions: three outfits, black or bright colors, no “clown makeup.” (“Thanks for the confidence,” I had said, but she didn’t react.) She sent me to a salon for a blowout of my shoulder-length hair, which left it stiff and resilient but with the illusion that it might bounce if provoked.

I ran late in part because I was editing an interview in which Miles had needed eight takes to pronounce his subject’s name correctly, and by the time I was near the photo studio, I was alternating between swearing and checking my watch, the latter made more difficult by the garment bag I was carrying over my left arm. I first mistook a 6 for an 8 and wound up standing in front of a walk-in medical clinic wondering if my dating photo was going to be an MRI. I eventually found the right number, and pressed a button that read Cherry Tree Studio . The door buzzed.

Hauling both the garment bag and the Beast, I stepped inside and took a dimly lit hallway to the elevator. I looked down at my phone again. “Fourth floor,” I muttered, and pushed the button. “I can probably get to the fourth floor without getting lost.” I stepped off into a loft space with polished concrete floors and high ceilings.

I had imagined so many things in this studio—bright lights, ugly backdrops, and most of all, myself, attempting unsatisfactorily to smile warmly and being sent home with a note that said, “Perhaps a conceptual drawing would be better.” What I was not prepared for was to be bumped for the second time in a month by the enormous head of a black-and-white dog whose nose brushed my waist. “How many of you are there?” I muttered to him as I rubbed his velvet ears. But then I stepped back from him. “Gideon?” I said.

“Buddy!” came a voice from elsewhere in the space, and then Will came around a corner and was walking toward me. When we were facing each other, he raised his eyebrows. “Cecily.”

“Will,” I said, because it was the only thing I could think of. I watched as he handed a chew to Buddy, who took it from him and decamped to an enormous bed in one corner to begin wetly devouring it. Will turned back to me. He had a smile like a lazy afternoon; it made my shoulders unclench.

“Hi,” he said.

“I have so many questions,” I said.

He looked at his phone. “My booking just says ‘Foster,’?” he said.

“That’s me.”

“I hope so.”

“My card just says ‘Cherry Tree Studio.’ This place is yours?”

He looked around. “Oh, no, are you kidding? I just rent studio space.”

“You’re a photographer,” I said, nodding slowly.

“I hope so,” he repeated with a grin.

“Well, this is…unexpected.” I pointed to the dog. “I thought his name was Gideon.”

“It was. It’s Buddy now. I changed it.”

“You changed it?” I said.

“Well,” he said, “after you saved him from the streets and I found out about his rescue, I called a couple more times to make sure he was doing okay. They told me that somebody left him there a few weeks ago, because he had some vet bills that his people couldn’t pay, and they were getting evicted on top of that, so they’d had to let him go. The rescue had been working on him, getting him healthy, and they said he was probably ready to rock and roll. They said he was going to be a great dog for somebody. I think it was a hint.”

I nodded slowly. “And you adopted him.”

“I guess I’ve always wanted a dog who could push a Honda uphill in an ice storm.” He looked fondly over at Buddy, who at the moment was making noises like a wet-vac trying to pick up maple syrup as he went to town on whatever it was Will had given him to chew on.

“In an emergency where he couldn’t push the car, you could probably ride on his back.”

“Or,” he said, “I could sit on a trash can lid and let him pull me.” He mimed putting a rope in his teeth. This was hard to reconcile with how cool and serious he’d seemed at Madeline’s, but in a good way.

“So,” I said. “Here we are.”

“Yes,” he said. “So, you need pictures. What can you tell me about what they’re for?”

“Just personal stuff,” I said. “I think my producer talked to you about the thing, the show, when she interviewed you at the restaurant? It’s kind of connected to that.”

“Ah,” he said. “Sure. You’re the dating guinea pig.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You want to use the pictures for anything else?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “Maybe for my work bio, different projects. My FBI file. A T-shirt with my face on it for my mother.”

“Ah, sure. My family settles for phone calls, but I get it,” he said. He took the garment bag from me and laid it down on a table. He stepped back, and I became extraordinarily aware of my physical body in a way I usually wasn’t except at the doctor. He gave me a quick once-over, which was mercifully much less thorough than when the dermatologist checked me for moles, even if I felt almost as exposed. I was in a lightweight black sweater and dark jeans, which Eliza likely would have wanted me to describe as a gossamer onyx pullover and traditional navy laborer’s pants. “This will work,” he declared.

Having a man with his particular brand of angular attractiveness check me out and say, matter-of-factly, “This will work,” is the kind of thing that could have become a recurring nightmare that would wake me up screaming. It was like having your stylist walk around the chair examining your hair from every angle, cutting stray strands, rearranging it, and then saying, “I guess.”

I looked around the studio at the lights and the stools, and at the cords crisscrossing the floor where umbrellas on stands competed for space with a lot of equipment I didn’t fully recognize. “I should tell you I’m not photogenic at all.”

He leaned backward and gave an exaggerated moan, and it made me laugh. He started futzing with a camera. “Oh, ‘I’m not photogenic,’ ‘I look terrible in pictures,’ ‘I hate my face.’ Every day with this. And I’ll tell you what: It’s never somebody with a squid for a head or a full set of cat whiskers or something. It’s just regular people heckling themselves.” He looked back at me. “Besides, you don’t have to be photogenic. A good picture is my job, not your job. You’re going to be great. The restroom’s that way if you want to touch anything up, and then I’ll see you back out here.”

The restroom in the hall was small, but it had a mirror and a shelf. I took out my brush and tried to neaten my expensive hair without destroying it. I added a bit more lipstick and checked to make sure there was none on my teeth. No bra straps showing? Check. No obvious makeup smudges? Check. Nothing in my nose? Check. I looked at my reflection. It wasn’t terrible; Justin used to casually call me “beautiful,” like, “hey, beautiful,” and although I didn’t take him literally (he also called my mother “young lady”), he used to touch my cheek and I could see his eyes skitter around from my forehead to my eyes to my mouth, and I believed it a little then.

But I had been avoiding pictures—not strictly, but when I could—for most of my life. I lined up obediently for family photos when Molly and I were little, wedging in next to her, looking shorter and shorter beside her as she shot up and I didn’t. But around sixth grade, I started looking at myself in the mirror every morning and seeing my bad skin, along with what I was certain were my weird nose, my blotchy cheeks, and my dull eyes. I was happier not thinking about it, so when cameras—and then phones—came out, I would offer to take the picture, or I’d say I didn’t feel well, or I’d just sit off to the side consumed by something else. Even in Molly’s wedding pictures, I had been sure the one-shoulder dress made me look lopsided. Standing next to her friends, I felt stubby and flawed. Molly framed a picture of us from that day and gave it to me, but I couldn’t bear to hang it, because every time I looked at myself standing next to her in the gorgeous halter dress she chose, I felt like the off-brand version of her.

I took several deep breaths. It was for work, I told myself. It was for work, it was for a job, it was for a story. They’re barely even pictures of me. They’re just part of the story. I stepped out, back into the loft. “Okay,” I said. “I’m ready, I guess.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said. He had pulled a stool in front of a gray background that rolled down from a bar. “Have a seat.” He stepped back and looked through the lens of a camera on a tripod. “Great, this looks great.” He came back over to me. “Turn a little to your right. That’s your left. Your right—no, your whole—”

I leaned over with my elbows on my knees. “I knew I was going to be bad at this.”

“Hm. Would you rather I move you around a little? I really think you can do it if you just relax. But if you want to go puppet-style, I can do that.”

“You can just do it,” I said. “It will be faster.”

He stepped toward me and put his hand on one side of my knees to rotate me to the right. “I’m going to turn you a little bit this way.” He held one finger up. “Then turn your head so you’re looking here.” He put his finger under my chin and nudged it up. “This is what I’m looking for. As far as the angle.”

I was caught off-guard by the feeling of his hand barely brushing my skin, and I said, exactly: “Oop.” Now I was focused on not blushing, which would probably make me blush, which would make me look like I had an uneven sunburn.

He kindly pretended I hadn’t made a weird noise out of nowhere. “You’re going to look right at me,” he said. “People angle down because they think it’s flattering, the eyes-up selfie thing, but just, straight at me is right.” He stepped back behind the camera, and then I started to hear clicks.

“I wasn’t ready,” I said.

“I’m just doing a lighting test. Don’t worry.” He looked at the back of the camera. “Okay, good. Now. Without really smiling, like cheeeeese, think about the best meal you ever ate.”

“What if it was cheese?”

He looked over the top of the camera at me. “Was it cheese?”

“No.” I thought about a tapas place in D.C. I’d gone to with Molly. They had kept bringing and bringing beautiful food as we nodded eagerly at each other with every first bite.

“Okay, doing great,” he said. “Chin up a little more again. More toward me. Okay, let’s try some smiling ones.”

I made my best effort at the very difficult task of smiling naturally on command. “Tell me if I look like the Joker,” I said through my tight lips.

“I promise you don’t look like the Joker,” he said. “I would tell you if you did. For my own safety.” He looked at me over the camera. “You look great. You’re doing great.” I sat on the stool and he clicked and clicked, and he told me “Turn toward me,” and “Half as much smile,” and most of all, several times, he said, “Chin up a little . ” It was something my mom used to say to cheer me up—“chin up, honey”—and it sounded funny, but good, coming from him.

He moved over to one side. He moved to the other side. He told me to try not looking into the camera, and my first thought was to slide my eyes up and look at the ceiling as if it were about to fall on us, which made him laugh. “Okay, no smile.” “Big smile.” “Look over at Buddy.” “Look back at me.” Once, he said, “Do this,” and he exhaled a floppy-lipped trill like a siren. I imitated him. “You’re doing awesome,” he said.

He had me shrug my shoulders up to my ears and then drop them. He had me close my eyes and then pop them open. He told me to make the funniest face I could think of. He told me to look as serious and pretentious as possible. Finally, he clapped his hands. “Okay, I’m happy with that. You want to go try the next thing you brought to wear?”

I stood. “Sure,” I said. As I picked my way past him, avoiding cords and stands and lights, I said, “I’ll be right back.”

“You are perfectly photogenic, by the way,” he said as I passed. “My view’s better than yours.” I hurried off to change so he wouldn’t see me turn bright red.

When I was in my deep green sweater, he took me over to one of the big windows. “Okay,” he said. “I want to do some over here. There’s lots of natural light but it’s not too harsh and sunny, so this should be good.” It was a padded bench that was pushed against the wall perpendicular to it. I sat. “Make sure the sun isn’t actually in your eyes,” he said.

“How many times have you done this?” I said as he changed his lens and set up a reflector.

“Headshots? A lot.”

“How long have you been doing it?”

“Informally, a long time. Here in D.C., a couple of years.”

“What did you do before that?”

“That is a long story,” he said. “Okay, don’t think about the camera, just think about the window. We’re going for something more casual here, a little less official-looking. Little bit of a smile.”

He moved around a little with the camera in his hand, higher then lower, a little closer, then a little farther away. There wasn’t all that much to do but look directly at him. Most of what I could see of him was his curly hair, which had a pleasingly unkempt quality even though I, as it happened, knew exactly when he had last had it cut. I could see his black shoes, and wrapped around his camera were good hands, nicely kept hands.

He had me look out the window, then back at him. I looked past him, over his shoulder. I looked above him. I looked off to the side quizzically, even though it made me feel like I was posing for a severe black-and-white picture to go with a story announcing that I had solved a murder. I got antsy and got up to shake myself all over, so he also shook himself all over, and then I sat back down. Buddy walked over, so he took a picture of me and Buddy, my mouth open like I was shocked at his size.

When we finished the window pictures, he just stood there fussing with the camera. “Am I getting changed?” I finally asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.” He froze, focused on his hands.

“Is everything okay?”

He looked up at me. “Sometimes I just like a moment. You know?”

I wanted to be able to say yes. I wanted to tell him I was trying to figure out how to have that feeling, or maybe relearn how to have it. But I said, “It’s not easy.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not.”

The last outfit I had brought was a cream-colored shirt and a brown canvas moto jacket. He led me up a cramped stairwell and out a door that opened onto the roof of the building. Surrounded by aluminum railings and littered in only one corner with beer cans, it had views in all directions. I whistled softly.

“Has its moments, right? The city?”

“It does,” I said. “I get wrapped up in everything, you know?”

“Yeah. I’m temporary here, so I soak it up when I can.”

“Why temporary?”

“Oh, I came here for a relationship that didn’t work out. I’m just here until my lease is up, and then, whatever, who knows. In the meantime, at least there are a lot of nice people.” He looked down at the camera and then back up at me. “You know, people who help strangers by having peanut butter at exactly the right moment.”

“People who chase dogs for ten blocks that aren’t even theirs.” We were looking at each other now, and the city blurred behind him, and I felt a little warmer.

He nodded. And then he put one hand on the back of his neck. “I’m talking way too much.”

Not for me he wasn’t. I had once wound up sitting in a corner with a relative stranger at a friend’s New Year’s Eve party and ended up explaining to her why I considered Midnight Run a romantic comedy. She got up to get a cocktail and I never saw her again. Justin had called me The Opinionator. “Not at all,” I said. “Just the right amount.”

He smiled, and I felt it. Zing. It had been an awfully long time since my last zing. And then he said, “Okay. Okay, we’re not done. Back to work.”

He had me lean against the railing on one elbow with the city sprawled behind me, and when he picked up the camera, suddenly I was self-conscious again. “Okay, these are going to be the most relaxed ones we do,” he said. “Just look wherever you like for now.” I fixated on a church spire in the distance. “Okay, you look a little tense, blow a raspberry.” I did. He kept shooting.

I heard a siren and looked down over the railing. “Aha! There it is,” he said, and the camera kept going.

“Wait, I was distracted,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said. “Some people are most themselves when they’re very interested in something else,” he said. “Look over my right shoulder and tell me what you’re looking at, then take three breaths and do it again. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

“I’m looking at an office building that’s probably half-empty but once had a bunch of, I don’t know, tobacco lobbyists in it,” I said. One, two, three. “I see a bunch of police cars at an intersection, so there’s probably an accident. People speed like crazy on that street.” One, two, three. “I can see some of the streets that are overrun when the cherry blossoms are out.” One, two, three. He had stopped telling me to relax my shoulders, to relax my face. He had maybe stopped needing to tell me.

We switched to me looking over his left shoulder, we tried a couple of other spots against the railing, and then he began to pack up. “You did great,” he said. “I think you’ll end up with some really nice ones you can use for your work or, you know, whatever you need.” He looked at me and smiled. “So tell me more about this show you’re making.”

“Ah, right,” I said. “That.”

“I’ve never even heard of a dating coach.”

“Well, it’s a work thing. It’s about self-help, I have this woman working with me, she’s setting me up on all these blind dates, she’s like a one-woman dating app. I mean, normally, this is not what I do. Normally, I’m a producer.”

“What do you work on?”

“I’ve worked on a lot of things. I did The Perspective with Miles Banfield.” He did not react. “I sometimes step in on a couple of others, Dear Wendy and this show President Hottie. ”

He squinted. “What is President Hottie ?”

“Oh, I’m so glad you asked. You know Halls of Power ? The show with all the political people having sex and getting murdered?”

“I may have seen it once or twice. Or binged it at my sister’s house when I was getting over the flu.”

“Okay. It’s a recap show of that. So they run down every episode and sometimes they interview the cast and stuff.”

“That sounds fun.”

“It is.” I paused. One, two, three. “I used to work on Scanner Stories. ”

Now he turned to look at me. “Oh, sure.”

Greedily, I wanted him to tell me he liked it, and then I wanted to tell him I halfway invented it. I wanted to have it back, without the breakup, without the relationship, just the show I had spent so much time reporting, then even more time laying out as waveforms on a screen that I could snip and mix. I wanted it back with me, back in the story of my work, back in the list of things I told people when they asked me what I had done with my life. “Ah,” I said. “You know that one.”

He twitched his head to get a bit of hair off his forehead as he stood up with his stuff in his arms. “Yeah, I’m not really a podcast person, but that’s Justin Dash’s thing, right?”

My lungs emptied. My stomach seized. I tried to keep my face from collapsing, my features sliding down my neck like one of those cakes they make on The Great British Bake-Off when it’s 100 degrees outside. “Yes,” I said. “Justin Dash’s thing.”

He turned around. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“I feel like I just said something wrong.”

“Not at all.”

“Okay, good. Good.” He crossed his arms. “So do you think it’s going to work?”

I blinked several times in a row. “What?”

“The dating thing, the coach. It didn’t really seem like you were having that much fun.” He was trying gamely not to laugh. Perhaps I was overthinking it, but this line of questioning seemed to leave something unspoken.

“I mean, that wasn’t exactly a real date,” I said. “It was sort of a trial run.”

“Not a real date?” Will said in exaggerated surprise. “But you seem like such a good match.”

“That’s not funny,” I said. “I asked him what his favorite book was, and do you know what he said?”

“I’m going to say… Infinite Jest. Did he say Infinite Jest ?”

“I almost wish,” I moaned. “He said Keto for Closers. ”

“Mm-hmm.” Will folded his arms and squinted at me. “But I shouldn’t ask you out.”

So much for unspoken. “Oh. I mean, probably not? Because I’m doing this thing?”

“Okay. I do like you, though.”

My mouth was dry, my hands seemed to be sweating, my knees went wobbly, and it felt like I blinked about fifteen times. “Yeah. I…me too, same. I mean, I like you, not me. I’m not ever sure if I like me.”

“You should.” He laughed, and I really liked it, and it felt so messy. “We could be friends,” he said. “Is that a conflict of interest or anything?”

I shook my head. “No. I think we’re allowed to be friends.”

—

I didn’t get back to the office until late afternoon, which meant I didn’t get home until almost 8:00, which meant it was 9:30 by the time I finally lowered myself into a tub full of bubbles with a glass of wine on the little table next to me. This was my favorite place to listen to anything completely unrelated to work—in this case, an audiobook of a novel I’d been trying to finish for a couple of weeks. As I lay back into the water, my phone buzzed on the table. I reached for the towel next to it and dried my hand, then picked it up just enough to see that it was Will.

Great to see you today. Buddy can’t stop talking about you.

I didn’t normally answer texts in the tub, for fear of dropping my phone into the water, but I made an exception. He’s probably just mad I didn’t have any peanut butter.

No, but he did say he’d like some cheese next time.

I paused and looked at the words “next time.” I’ll see what I can do. I added a cheese emoji, because I couldn’t figure out what else to say to him.

The phone buzzed again in my hand. It was a picture of Buddy, sprawled across the couch. He says he can’t wait.

—

Monday morning, my first meeting at work was scheduled for 9:00, so at 8:30 I was frantically trying to get going. I picked up what was left of my coffee and managed to spill a splash of it down the front of my shirt. I snapped a selfie, thinking I would send it to Molly so she could commiserate with me over my terrible morning. But at the last minute, I pulled up Will’s number instead. Here I am looking photogenic again, as the morning gets off to a great start.

Oh no! (I still think you look fine.)

You have to say that because I’m paying you.

I do not. I can’t be bought.

Off to change my shirt.

I promise my eyes are closed.

Later that day, I was between two editing sessions on two different shows when I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. I pulled it out.

It was a link to a video of a Great Dane even bigger than Buddy sitting on a guy who looked smaller than Will. Worried that this is my future, he wrote.

Oh man, you’ve joined the dog people.

They’re the only ones who know where I can find a toy he won’t rip up in five minutes.

—

The next day, I was coming out of an interview with Eliza when I almost knocked over an intern with an armful of coffees. You wouldn’t believe how close I just came to accidentally causing a bunch of second-degree burns to a 23-year-old.

You’re supposed to keep the coffee in the cup, you know.

Ha ha.

I’m sure they wouldn’t wear it as well as you.

It’s a wonder I don’t drop every cup I ever pour.

I’ll buy you a new one.

—

A few days later, over evening wine at Molly’s when the preview episode was days away from dropping and I desperately needed to not be at the office, she asked about the pictures. “What happened to them?” she said. “I feel like you’re hiding them.” I had explained to her how Will had been at the restaurant, and how he’d been the photographer, and I suspected her curiosity about him was growing.

As it happened, I had been hiding the pictures. I’d been hiding them all afternoon, or rather I’d been hiding from them, because it was always my assumption that looking at pictures of myself was going to be disappointing. I couldn’t stop thinking I would look at them and suddenly realize nothing that day had been the way it felt. “Nothing happened,” I said with a shrug. “He sent me proofs today, but I haven’t looked at them yet. He said he was sending like forty, and then I could pick seven for him to edit.”

“You haven’t looked?” she said, swatting me on the arm. “That’s crazy, show them to me right now.”

“What if they’re terrible?”

“They won’t be. But you have to send them to Eliza anyway, so at least we can look at them first and make sure you don’t hate them.”

I got out my laptop. I opened the folder and pulled up the first picture. It was in front of the background in the studio. I looked good. Professional. The light was flattering, I had color in my cheeks, and my smile did not make me look like the Joker. “That one is actually okay,” I said.

“It’s not ‘okay,’ it’s really nice. Keep going.”

It turned out that on top of everything else I was fond of about him, Will was damn good at his job. The pictures were all subtly different, some a little lighter, some a little more serious-looking. The ones by the window were softer, and the green I wore was flattering. As we paged through the pictures, Molly pointed to one of the early ones he took on the roof. “Look how happy you are here,” she said. “You’re practically glowing.”

I leaned toward the screen. “It’s probably Photoshop.”

“You said he didn’t edit these yet,” she said. “It’s like you think I don’t pay attention at all.” The last one was a shot of me laughing and looking off into the distance, over his shoulder. As a headshot, it wasn’t much. As a picture of me, it made me catch my breath a little. Molly gasped. “Oh, look at that,” she said.

“It’s nice,” I said.

She leaned in toward it, and then she leaned back. She tilted her head to one side, then the other. And then she said something for which I was unprepared: “He really likes you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She rested her chin in her hand. “There’s just a way people take your picture when they’re into you. I can’t explain it. He’s a good photographer, don’t get me wrong, the rest of these are great. But this one…” She sighed. “He really likes you.”

“Well, that’s nice,” I said, “but I am going to start going out on twenty blind dates in a couple of weeks, so it’s kind of irrelevant.” I looked over at her, but she was still staring at the photo.

She said it one more time: “He really likes you.”

“Molly,” I groaned.