14. Imogen
— ? —
Imogen
Hendrix is already there when I come out, and he’s different tonight.
Not the patient sidewalk version of him, the one who stands ten feet back with a tea and asks nothing and leaves without protest.
This Hendrix is keyed up, coiled, standing too close to the door with his hands pushed into his coat pockets and his jaw set hard, the look of a man who drove across a city with a thing he couldn’t hold any longer.
“Imogen. I need to talk to you.” His voice is low and fast. “There’s a thing you need to know, and I need you to hear all of it, start to finish, before you decide anything about me or about us or about the divorce. Can you give me five minutes? Please.”
“Hendrix, I have a class…”
“Not for forty minutes. I remember the schedule.” A ghost of the old wryness, gone as fast as it comes.
“Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking. I found the truth of it, and it changes how you should be looking at the last month, and I can’t stand the idea of you walking around one more day believing the version they built when the truth is… ”
“They.” My arms cross without my telling them to. “Who’s they?”
“That’s the part I have to explain, and I need to do it right, because if I get it wrong it’s going to sound like every other excuse I’ve handed you.
” He takes a breath, steadying himself the way he does before a hard sentence.
“Imogen, a few weeks ago I started to notice a pattern, and I pulled the thread, and what I found at the end of it…”
And that’s when I see the photographer.
This is the kind of block where a man with a long lens doesn’t look entirely out of place, a few streets off the Boulevard where the tour vans crawl and somebody is always half-hoping to catch somebody, and maybe that’s why I don’t clock him right away.
Until I do.
He’s across the street, leaning against a parked car with the studied ease of a man who wants to look like he’s just loitering and is failing at it completely.
Long lens, baseball cap. The whole angle of his body aimed at the studio door, pre-framed, waiting for a shot he already knows he’s going to get.
A cold weight drops through my chest, because you don’t set up a shot like that unless you know the scene is coming.
Behind me, a car door opens.
“Imogen.”
Hendrix goes still beside me. I watch the sentence he was building die on his mouth, unfinished, and I feel the shift in him, the way a man tenses when a thing he’s been dreading arrives right on schedule.
I turn around.
Bridget Walton stands on the sidewalk in front of my studio, and she is devastating.
I don’t mean that as a compliment. I mean it the way you’d describe a weather event.
She’s in a sleek black coat over a dress that’s expensive in the way that pretends not to be, her hair in the kind of effortless waves that require a professional and the better part of an hour, her eyes already glistening with the exact moisture of a woman who has rehearsed this cry in a mirror and found the precise level of wet that reads as heartbroken without ruining her mascara.
Across the street, the lens is already clicking.
“I’m so glad I caught you.” She steps forward, hands clasped in front of her, the posture of a woman arriving to deliver condolences at a funeral she scheduled.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you. Just the two of us.
Woman to woman. There’s been so much noise, and none of it has been fair to you, and I couldn’t keep letting that sit. ”
The audacity of that sentence is so total that I almost admire the craft of it.
“I know this is unexpected,” she goes on, reading my silence as an opening, which it is not.
“And I know you probably don’t want to hear a single word from me, and I respect that, I do.
But I need you to know that I never meant for any of this to happen.
The book. The attention. The way it all spiraled.
It’s been devastating for everyone, and my heart just breaks for what you’ve had to go through. ”
Her voice fractures on breaks. A tiny, surgical crack, timed to the syllable, and behind her the photographer shifts his weight and re-frames, and I understand with perfect clarity what I’m looking at.
The tearful other woman reaching out, the wounded wife receiving her.
The grace and the grief in one frame, the clip that feeds itself for a week.
I know choreography when I see it.
I have spent my entire life studying movement, reading bodies, learning the difference between a gesture that comes up from the gut and one that’s been drilled until the seams disappear.
I trained under women who could make a grand jeté into pure flight and turn a révérence into a thing that seemed to occur to them only in the moment.
So I can read a performance from the last row of a theater built to seat thousands, and I am standing four feet away from this one.
Bridget is dancing a part she blocked out in a mirror, and I am the worst possible audience for it, because I know every step before she takes it.
This is a performance. Every word, every tear, every careful tilt of her chin is a beat in a combination built to make me react.
She wants the meltdown. She wants me to crumble, or scream, or sob, or do any of the messy, human, uncontrolled things that would finish the picture.
Graceful Bridget reaching out, broken Imogen coming apart.
The money shot.
Maybe a month ago, it might have worked.
A month ago I would have stood on this sidewalk and felt every word land like a fist, would have fought to keep my face from betraying me, would have gone home and come apart in ninety-second increments on a couch with a sagging middle.
But a month ago I didn’t have my dream. I hadn’t signed a contract with my own name on it and nobody else’s. I hadn’t stood in a bright room full of wobbling, fearless children and remembered, all the way down to the bone, what it feels like to be a person instead of a headline.
So I watch Bridget work, and what I feel, mostly, is tired. A little contemptuous. And completely, absolutely unwilling to hand this woman one more piece of me than she’s already taken.
“Are you finished?” I ask.
Her expression falters. Barely. The smallest possible disruption in the routine, the half-second where a dancer realizes her partner isn’t counting the same music.
“I’m… I’m just trying to…”
“Because if you’re finished, I’d like to go inside. I have a class in forty minutes, and I need to set up the barre.”
“Imogen, please. I came here because I genuinely…”
“You came here with a photographer.” I nod toward the man across the street, who has at least the decency to drop his lens a fraction.
“You positioned him before you ever opened that car door. You’re wearing makeup built for a camera, and you’ve been crying in a way that reads beautifully from twenty feet and doesn’t make a single actual tear, and I know exactly how that’s done, because I spent years on stages where the back row has to believe you’re dying inside and the technique is identical to the one you’re using right now. ”
I hold her eyes. “I’m a dancer, Bridget. I know choreography. And this is choreography.”
The glistening in her eyes goes flat and still.
“I don’t know what you think you’re…”
“You know exactly what I’m doing, because I’m doing the one thing you didn’t plan for, which is naming it out loud.”
My voice stays level. Calm. Almost bored, which is the single most devastating register I have available, because it tells her the thing she cannot script her way around.
Indifference.
“You came here to get a reaction. You’re not getting one.
I’m not the clumsy partner who makes you look graceful by comparison.
So you can take your photographer, and your rehearsed tears, and your broken heart for everything I’ve been through, and you can go.
My studio is behind me. Nothing in it, and no one standing in front of it, belongs to you. ”
Bridget’s jaw tightens, and the gracious mask slips, and the face pushing up underneath it is not warm and it is not sorry. It’s calculating. It’s the face of a woman who has been steering this entire story for weeks and has just hit the first thing on the road she cannot manage.
She opens her mouth to answer me.
Beside me, Hendrix steps forward off the curb, into the space between us, and the whole scene rearranges itself around him.
He doesn’t look at me first. He looks at Bridget, and the expression on his face is one I have never seen him aim at another human being in the three years I’ve known him. Not anger. Not the smooth Carver composure I’m used to watching him put on the way other men put on a jacket.
It’s cold, certain recognition. A man looking at a thing he has finally understood all the way down, and finding it exactly as small as he suspected it would be.
“Bridget.” His voice is even. There’s no performance anywhere in it. “Step away from my wife.”
“Hendrix, I was only…”
“I know what you were doing. I can see the photographer. I can see the angle he’s standing at, and I can see you positioned in front of a dance studio, cornering a woman who has done nothing to you except be married to a man you decided to use.”
He says it plainly, the way he lands sentences in his books, no decoration, no hedging, the specific weight of a man choosing words because they’re true and not because they test well.
Bridget’s composure slips another inch. “I came here to talk to her. Woman to woman. There is nothing wrong with two people having a…”
“You came here with a camera to manufacture a moment. That isn’t talking.
That’s producing.” He takes a step toward her, not a threat, just presence, making himself the largest and most immovable thing on the sidewalk.
“And I’m going to say the next part clearly, where every lens on this street can pick it up, because for once in my life I want the record to be exact. ”