Meet Me in the Garden

One

“Can I draw you?” I ask.

“Of course.”

“All right,” she says. “I’ll try.”

“Wait,” I say. “You’ve kept a secret? From me?”

“I know. It’s just … You’ve been mourning. There hasn’t been a good time to tell you.”

“Tell me now.”

She’s frowning. She says, “You know the photographer’s studio on Magazine Street? The one with the portraits in the windows?”

We’ve passed it together, dozens of times.

She says she stopped to look at a portrait about two months ago, of a young boy.

“His intensity,” she says. “I couldn’t tear myself away.

And then the door opened, and the photographer was there.

Very tall. So handsome. Just standing, sort of amused, watching me.

I remembered the Whites Only sign in the window and thought I was in trouble. ”

“We’re allowed to stand on the street and look,” I say.

“I know. I just didn’t understand what was happening, why he was staring at me. And then he invited me in to have my portrait taken.”

“What about the sign?”

“He said it wasn’t meant for Creole girls like me. I didn’t like it. If I’d been darker, I doubt he’d have felt the same way. But I’ve always wanted to go in.”

She waits for my reaction. A few months ago, my sister’s husband, Al, got turned away from a Creole dance for being too dark.

Before his anger came a flash of humiliation that Delphine and I both saw and couldn’t shake.

We left the dance in protest, spent the night talking about how we’d been complicit, years of showing our fair wrists at doorway after doorway, thinking nothing of it.

We weren’t going to do that anymore. Now she’s done it again.

So that’s the secret. But she keeps talking.

“I said I didn’t have the money, but the photographer told me it wasn’t a problem.

He had an hour free and he wanted to take my portrait.

I can’t begin to describe what it felt like.

Bill has these giant painted canvases lining the walls.

You would love them. Tropical scenes, and garden scenes. Ruins, like in Rome…”

“Bill?” I ask. She takes my hand. A flicker of a smile, a deep blush, the same relief I felt when I told her about Hattie, right after it first started, and I thought saying it out loud would kill me, but Delphine wasn’t shocked.

She said that if it felt right, it was right.

“Bill,” I say again. Not a question this time. “Go on.”

She wanted to sit in front of the tropical scene but he set her up against the plain gray.

She asked for a mirror to touch up her hair and put on some lipstick, but he wanted to capture her just as she was.

He was stern, had her sit in various positions, tilt her head in certain ways.

Sometimes she didn’t understand his directions and he’d cross from behind the camera and touch her face to guide it.

“I hated when it was over,” she says. “But he told me to come back the next day to look at the proofs, so I did. I went in, and he had portraits of me spread out across his table. They’re beautiful portraits.

I can’t really express it. How it feels to suddenly see yourself in a whole new way.

” She stands, circles the bench. Pink dress, bare feet, hair falling in dark curls down her back.

“Odette,” she says, stopping in front of me again.

“The way I saw myself. I was spectacular.”

“You’ve always been spectacular.”

“He said he had to photograph me again, right then, and we stayed there for hours, and I had some of his bourbon, enough that when he did kiss me, finally, I didn’t worry about the fact that he’s white, and older.

I didn’t think about any of that at all.

Except now I’m in trouble. No, no! Not that. We’ve been careful.”

Her shy smile. A churn in my stomach. The last few weeks, meeting here day after day, and she didn’t tell me, and I didn’t notice. It stings, but I’ve been mourning, she’s right. She thought she was being kind. “How was it?” I ask. “The first time?”

“It hurt. But he was very slow and patient with me. Now it’s wonderful. I’ve been jealous, you know. Of you, with Hattie. A love affair.”

“Now you have one,” I say. “But what do you mean, in trouble?”

“I mean in love. I know it’s only been a couple months, but they’ve changed me. He wants to see me all the time. He isn’t ashamed. Yesterday, he hung my portrait in the shop window.”

“Aren’t you afraid someone will see it?”

“You know our mothers. They never go to Magazine Street.”

“Other people do.”

“You think I’m reckless?”

“Maybe. Or brave.”

“I prefer brave. But honestly, I’m fine with reckless, too. I’m outgrowing my life. Both of us are. Don’t you feel that way?”

“Yes,” I say. The truest thing I’ve ever said.

“Are you mad at me? For not telling you right away?” She’s searching my eyes. I forgive her. I have no other choice.

“I’m not mad.”

She smiles. Opens her purse for her rose water. Sprays her face and her neck and the insides of her elbows. “Want some?” she asks, and she sprays me with an extravagant thoroughness. “We didn’t even look at our drawings,” she says, twisting the cap back on.

I expect us to laugh at what we’ve made, but there’s something in them that moves me.

“This mouth,” Delphine says. “It’s just like mine.”

There’s a line on Delphine’s drawing of me, I’m not sure what it is at first, and then I see that it’s the edge of my ear, and its grace takes me by surprise, and the arch of my brow does, too, how carefully she drew it. Our features aren’t placed where they’re supposed to be, but they capture us.

I wish we could talk into the evening, but it’s time to go.

She’s not taking the streetcar back to the Lower Garden District with me, she’s going to stay here in the Marigny to steal an hour with Bill.

She opens her silver compact, engraved with roses, to check her face and her hair.

Sunlight catches the mirror glass, sharp and painful.

And then we’re at the garden gate. “Odette,” she says.

She takes my hand. Gaze searching until she’s sure I’m looking back.

“What does it matter, really, what anybody thinks of us?”

I don’t plan to do it, but when the streetcar stops at Magazine Street, I step out. I should be getting home now—they’ll wonder where I am—but I want to see Delphine’s portrait.

The studio rises from the corner, photographs on stands in its windows.

I don’t see Delphine at first, but when I turn, there she is, spotlit behind the glass.

Her same beautiful face I just drew. But here’s the Whites Only sign, right next to her.

Delphine’s smiling at me and I can’t tell who the joke’s on.