Pictures of Us Page 7

  Liza was Nell’s best friend, and her other bridesmaid. Shit. She’d be driving all the way from Connecticut, and I hadn’t even told Nell that I wouldn’t be around. I hadn’t told anybody, and they had no reason to suspect it, since Michael and I never went anywhere but to my parents’ house over the holiday weekend.

  And yet, that Mom had made it a question rather than a statement was already proof she understood something was up. The woman was preternatural about some things, and reading her kids had always been one of them. She set down her glass of iced tea as I glanced back at Emma.

  She’d straightened up, blinking, her fork suspended over her plate, and her eyes were brighter than they’d been all day. Michael cleared his throat as I sent her a warning glare, but Emma was too quick.

  “We won’t be here next week, Nana,” she said, and the nearly vicious satisfaction in her tone resounded like a slap.

  “Tess?” Dad was building another sandwich, shoveling chicken salad into a roll. His expression was only mildly curious, but I knew my mother felt the tension. Her face had closed up like a flower after dark.

  “We do have other plans next week, Mom,” I said. I sounded calm—that was good. The paper napkin in my lap had already been shredded into pieces.

  “Tell them where, Mom,” Emma said, letting her fork clatter to her empty plate. “Or maybe Dad should.”

  Oh God.

  “This isn’t the time or the place, Emma,” Michael said, and I cringed. His voice was actually shaking. Everyone had a breaking point, and I was pretty sure he’d just reached his.

  “Michael, what’s wrong?” his mother asked. She inched forward, her lips working soundlessly for a moment. “Is everyone all right? Is someone…sick?”

  “Mom, it’s fine, really.” Michael took a deep breath and stood. The silence was alive, thrumming with electricity. This was not the usual family lunch, not by a long shot. Even the boys were quiet, staring wide-eyed at the grownup drama. “Emma, why don’t you join me in the kitchen.”

  She surprised me then. She had her breaking point, too. But something in the air had gotten into her—the audience maybe, or her own sense of righteous indignation. Her chin was up when she said, clear and firm, “No.”

  Robin stood up suddenly. “I’ll just get the boys some more—” she began, but Emma cut her off.

  “No, wait, Aunt Robin,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Don’t you want to know why we’re not going to be at the party next week?”

  I was still finding my voice when my mother said, “Emma, you’re being unbelievably rude.”

  “I don’t care,” Emma shot back, and then she was on her feet, too, ready for flight as soon as she aimed her next barbs. I froze, waiting for them—there was no stopping this now, and part of me was almost relieved. A few words and at least the news would be out, even if the repercussions were bound to reverberate for a while.

  Michael had frozen, too, and I fumbled for his hand as Emma’s throat worked compulsively.

  “We have to go to Cambridge next weekend,” she said, when her tears began. I was vaguely aware that my own were right behind them. “And you know why? You’re never going to believe it. It’s like the stupid Springer show or something.” She flicked my father’s steadying hand away from her arm and took another breath.

  Michael didn’t let her finish. I closed my eyes as he opened his mouth, one hand held up to silence Emma. I clung to his other hand, so hard I was afraid I’d broken the skin with my nails. But his voice was steady when he said, “We’re going to Cambridge to meet my son.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I WISH I COULD SAY THAT Michael’s relationship with Sophia, and therefore Drew’s existence, was all Jackson Devic’s fault, since it started with him. But that would be the coward’s way out. In the end, Jackson wasn’t the one who decided I should end things with Michael. That was my decision.

  I borrowed Nell’s battered little Civic to drive up and visit Michael in March of my junior year. The train would have been more sensible—the forecasters were predicting snow up and down the East Coast, and I wasn’t used to driving anymore, living in the city. But I wanted to be alone. I wanted to crank music and smoke cigarettes, which I’d taken up again in the past few months, even though I’d never smoked during all the time I’d spent at ballet school, where everyone smoked incessantly to keep from eating.

  The cigarettes were a by-product of stress. I was edgy, itchy, restless, and had been all fall. I needed something to do, something to hold on to, something to keep me from screaming, which was what I really longed to do.

  And the reason for that was Jackson Devic. There was no denying it.

  I’d been working for him since late September, and since October I’d been sick to my stomach, and sick at heart. Jackson was my boss, as well as a divorced man nearly twice my age, but it didn’t matter. Like Cyrus, he fascinated me, and I knew—or believed—he shouldn’t.

  Michael and I were completely happy, despite the geographic distance between us. There were the summers, of course, and the long winter breaks, and phone bills we’d be paying off until the end of time. We’d grown into the huge, sometimes frightening feelings that had consumed us when we first met. And the miles didn’t matter—we were connected where it connected.

  Or so I thought. And then I met Jackson.

  He was a photographer with a studio in Chelsea, and in September of my junior year I had answered his ad in the Village Voice for an assistant.

  A Winston hung from the corner of his lips as he scanned the book of photos I’d brought with me. He squinted when the smoke curled up past his stubbled jaw, and a moment later flicked the butt into an overflowing ashtray on the worktable where he was balanced, one narrow hip on the edge.

  “Not many photos here.” His tone was curt, flat, and his gray eyes were the same color as the smoke.

  “I only started last year,” I pointed out, hoping he wouldn’t notice me twisting my hands into a knot beneath the surface of the table. “I was a dancer all through high school, and I had planned to dance instead of going to college.”

  “What happened?” He’d flipped back to the first pictures in the book, the shots I’d taken of graffiti all over the city.

  I shrugged in my best imitation of a bored, blasé college girl. “I smashed up my knee. By the time the surgery and physical therapy were over, I would have been starting from scratch.”

  “You’re at NYU?” He glanced up and raked a hand over the salt-and-pepper hair cropped dangerously close to his head. “Majoring in photography?”

  I nodded. For no good reason, my heart was hammering, and I could feel the buzz of adrenaline in my veins. Getting into the program hadn’t been easy, but never once had I been this nervous during the whole process.

  Jackson’s photos were everywhere in the crowded little space, tacked to raw corkboard, enlarged and framed, stacked in contact sheets on the worktable, taped to the brick wall at the far end of the room. And they were magnificent. Everything I loved about photography was evident in his pictures—perspective, shadow, lighting, color saturation, tinting, angles and fades and effects. My professors were brilliant, for the most part, but Jackson Devic was the real thing, a working photographer. Jackson could teach me the truth about what I could make a camera do, and more—the disappointments and the screw-ups and the secrets about working as a photographer that no one ever bothered to include in a lecture.

  And I was sure Jackson knew all of them.

  The studio was a man’s space through and through, coated in a fine film of dust, with empty disposable cups and crushed cigarette packs littering the floor and over-flowing the wastebaskets. Music played in the background, something strangely bluesy and mournful; a forgotten pair of jeans was draped over the radiator underneath the window, and a dozen white roses had died in a plain glass vase, their shriveled, brittle petals scattered over the surface of another table.

  “Dancing is a long way from taking pictures,�
� Jackson said, considering me as he lit another cigarette, striking a wooden match against the wood.

  He wasn’t wrong. Photography was about as different from ballet as anything could be, outside of statistics or dead languages, but a camera felt as natural in my hands as my pointe shoes had once felt on my feet. Both visual art forms, yes, but photography allowed me to be outside the art I was creating—when I was dancing, I could only feel the way I appeared onstage, the effect I made. When I thought of the early-childhood-education major I had declared in desperation at the beginning of my sophomore year, it was hard not to laugh.

  “I had a course last year,” I explained, and reached out to point to the graffiti pictures again. “Modern art. It was just an elective, and I only took it because it fit into my schedule, but one of the things we could do for the final was a photo essay. I borrowed a friend’s camera, and I realized…”

  The words dried up in my throat. What was I going to tell him? That I’d fallen in love? I had, but it would sound trite, impossibly childish and romantic.

  “You liked it,” Jackson said, instead, and for the first time since I’d walked into the studio, there was the hint of a smile on his lips. “You’re talented, too. Inexperienced, but you’ve got an eye. That’s a good thing, as I’m sure all your professors have told you.”

  I nodded, my cheeks hot with pleasure. Even now I don’t know whether I was more thrilled that he thought I had talent or that his tone had skidded just up to the edge of contempt when he said “professors.”

  I began work the next day, and within two weeks I was spending most of my free time either at Jackson’s studio or out with him on shoots. He picked up all kinds of assignments—stringing for the newspapers, a lot of editorial work, the occasional portrait. “I’m an equal-opportunity photographer,” he would say with that same not-quite smile as he packed equipment into one of his bags.

  He was teaching me to be the same kind of photographer, whether he meant to or not, and over the next few months I learned dozens of other things from him—the nuances of film brands and speeds, favored lenses, developing techniques, lighting tricks. But I was also learning the meaning of confusion. Curiosity seemed to have very sharp teeth, because it was gnawing through my certainty that Michael and I were meant to be together.

  My infatuation with Cyrus, during freshman year, had ended nearly as soon as it had begun. Everything had been new that year, and the glimpses of other lives, other paths, other choices had been overwhelming. Cyrus’s laidback charm had been appealing at a time when I was confused about what I wanted, not only from college but from my life, when I was overwhelmed by how easily and how deeply Michael seemed to love me, when most of the time I didn’t feel I deserved it.

  I loved Michael. I did. But somehow that fall I had begun to resent him and everything he meant to me. In Jackson’s company the comfort of imagining my life neatly mapped out in front of me—college, photography, marriage to Michael, kids, a home—had begun to seem like a vise, instead.

  A vise that meant I would never know if I had chosen right. If I was supposed to be with Michael, or if I was ignoring other paths—one with Jackson Devic at the end of it, for instance.

  I can see it all now so clearly. I had a ridiculous school-girl crush on Jackson, a combination of idol worship, old-fashioned lust and an ego-stroking that felt too exhilarating to ignore. And Jackson was so good at his particular style of stroking. I was the teacher’s pet, no question, and I blithely wrote off the fact that I was the only pupil.

  Jackson encouraged me, praised my eye and my style, and when he chastised me for laziness or poor composition, the implied meaning was that I could do better, that he wouldn’t stand for me wasting my talent. I could have spent every minute in that smoky, gritty studio above West Twenty-second Street, with Jackson’s Johnny Cash records spinning in the background, jittery with stale coffee and the electric rush of possibility.

  He took me to a coffee shop way over on Eleventh Avenue one night after a photo shoot. It had begun to rain, a chilly gray drizzle, and inside the diner the dull, greasy windows had steamed up. He slid into the booth in the back corner, shaking raindrops from his closely shorn head, and shrugged off his navy peacoat.

  We ordered coffee and pie, and I babbled as I made notes on the shoot, an editorial piece for Mademoiselle. Jackson had let me take a roll of film myself, and I was high with the excitement of it.

  “Come back to the studio,” he said when the waitress had bussed away our cups and slapped the check on the table. “Come back with me now.”

  For a moment that seemed endless, everything stopped—the clatter of dishes in the kitchen, the noisy conversation in the next booth, the whisper of tires on the wet pavement outside. The distance between us, not even three feet across the scarred Formica tabletop, closed up until I swore I could see each of his eyelashes individually, feel his breath against my cheek, hear the muffled thump of his heart.

  He was asking me to sleep with him. I’d imagined it, dreamed about it, but until now I hadn’t really believed it would happen. There was safety in that—fantasizing wasn’t cheating, after all. But the moment I let Jackson kiss me…

  My ears were still ringing with the rush of adrenaline when he leaned across the table and added, “I want to develop your film right now. I want to see what you did.”

  Turns out that relief and humiliation can actually coexist, with room left over for an unexpected jolt of pride. I couldn’t do anything but nod at him as he pulled out his wallet to pay the check.

  But I wasn’t completely wrong. He touched me too often, in too many different ways, his shoulder bumping mine here, his hand on the small of my back there. Once that night, when the contact sheet of my photographs emerged from the tray, he slung his arm around my shoulders and kissed me on the forehead. His lips were warm and firm, and his nearness was intoxicating, the dusky scents of smoke and coffee and damp wool so new. So unlike Michael.

  I didn’t decide to leave Michael that night. But the seed was planted and over the next few months it took root until it flowered into something poisonous. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I’d wanted to, and in my heart that was enough to condemn me. In ballet, every ending is either tragic or perfect, death or bliss. Michael was my hero, and he loved me so completely, I was at fault even for wondering what my life would become without him.

  Which meant I didn’t deserve his love.

  That was what I had convinced myself as I drove to Cambridge that late winter day, the radio blaring and the window cracked as I smoked cigarette after cigarette. Nell was going to kill me for it, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t quite imagine the moments after I told Michael that we should break up. The rest of my life was a blank.

  I drove three hundred miles of highway that day, and the only thing I could picture was Michael’s face.

  WATCHING MICHAEL THE SATURDAY morning we were leaving for Massachusetts, as he loaded the trunk of the Volvo with our few weekend bags, I could remember that long-ago Michael so clearly. He was thinner now, just beginning to go gray at the temples, and the angles of his face were more sharply defined, but his expression was so similar to the one he’d given me that day in his stuffy little apartment in Cambridge, my throat choked with emotion.

  His eyes had always been his giveaway. But I could read so much more in the set of his jaw this morning, the omnipresent dark smudges under his eyes that proved my suspicion he hadn’t slept last night. As he slung his overnight bag into the trunk, he glanced up and noticed me on the steps. His attempt at a smile was pathetic as he took the duffel bag I’d dropped at my feet.

  “I hope you’re caffeinated,” I said lightly, holding up a cup of coffee. “Because it’s a long trip.”

  “You can drive if you like.” He slammed the trunk shut and joined me on the steps. “Did you see Emma?”

  I rolled my eyes and wound my arm around him as we went inside. She’d been curled on the sofa earlier, her iPod already on, her bag beside
her and her best sullen-teenager expression pasted to her face. “How did you get her to pack?”

  “I threatened to do it for her.” He shrugged and rinsed out his coffee cup in the sink. “I hope making her come isn’t a mistake.”

  I fought back a frustrated sigh. “It’s too late to do anything about it now. And to tell you the truth, I’d rather have her sniping at us all weekend than endlessly rehashing this with my parents or your mom. Again.”

  He stared at me for a moment before he walked into the living room, and I winced. Way to go, Tess, I admonished myself. As if he’s not tense enough already.

  All week the scene at my parents’ last Sunday had hovered in the house like a foul smell. Getting through it the first time had been hard enough—discussing it would have done nothing but upset us both.

  And really, what was there to discuss? That the stunned silence at the table had rung like struck glass, that Emma had burst into noisy tears moments later, that Michael’s mother had actually shouted at her before Robin hustled the boys out to the backyard, their eyes huge and their cheeks hot with the excitement of the adult drama at the table?

  Everyone was entitled to a reaction, as we’d learned so quickly with Emma. It didn’t change the fact that Drew existed, and that he was Michael’s son.

  But it didn’t mean that I wanted our history dissected and analyzed by my whole family, either. Hell, I didn’t even want to dissect it. Because I was the one who’d pushed Michael away that horrible day in Cambridge. I was the one who’d watched him cry, who’d listened to him arguing that I could have space if I needed it, that he loved me, he would never stop loving me…

  And Michael knew it. Michael knew that I was partly to blame for everything that had happened, and what was more, he understood that the worst part of me hated the thought that Emma and our families would figure that out.

  I drained the last of my coffee, savoring its burn in my throat, and put my cup in the sink next to Michael’s. God, I couldn’t even think about that day, still. I had never felt smaller, more selfish, stupider.