Photo: © Depositphotos.com/RumisPhoto
Written by Rachel Klein
Rachel received the art above as part of Volume Ten, “The Challenge Edition,” in which contributors selected art for each other, and had the option of selecting rules for the piece to be created. Her partner chose the art above and gave her the instruction, “Please write something from the perspective of the photographer that this guy hired to take his portrait.”
“You can’t make a living selling photos,” my mother said the day I graduated high school. “A father can’t feed his children on handouts,” my dad said when I received my college diploma. “This ain’t the Medici’s,” my grandmother said on her deathbed, which I assume had something to do with art patronage, though her moments of clarity during that time were punctuated by longer stretches of vivid hallucinations, so that she might very well have been referring to her time waiting tables as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. In any case, I ignored all their sage and safe advice and moved to New York, living modestly, selling what little I could of my art as I tried to make my own way in the world. I was sensitive, withdrawn, not like the other artists I knew, who threw themselves into their work and the world, announcing loudly, “Here I am!” It was not in my nature to want to be seen, which was why, perhaps, I took refuge behind the lens. Still, I had some talent, and my work began to sell for modest prices in some of the more respectable galleries. I continued, of course, to earn most of my income as an event photographer. It didn’t feed my soul, but it fed my pockets. And it was how I’d come to meet Edrick, which had in turn brought me here, today, to face him, and what had happened between us.
Bar mitzvahs pay well—sometimes better than a wedding, you’d be surprised. Especially when the wedding is your ex’s, since asking him to pay would simply add insult to the injury you were already feeling at seeing the man you thought you would grow old with seal his fate with another. The theme was Lady Godiva, the invitation calling for “Godiva Garden Formal,” which, like so many wedding dress codes was both extremely specific and carried almost zero content whatsoever, but luckily the lovers, who might have been groomzillas, as was their right on such a day, were not picky regarding anyone’s particular interpretation of the phrase. Yet as I watched the guests float gloriously and proudly about the cocktail hour in various states of undress, I was the one who felt naked.
It took nearly an hour and a half of photos in various configurations to finally isolate Edrick from the rest of the bridal party—and from Thomas. “Look lovingly at the bouquet,” I directed as I watched his smooth, glistening, just-waxed torso glow against the dark backdrop I had chosen to reflect my own funereal mood.
“Anton, don’t,” Edrick said, looking up at me, his voice almost a whisper, his groom and their families standing on the edge of earshot.
“Don’t look at me. Look at the flowers. It’ll make a great shot,” I said, still attempting to mask my pain with professionalism.
“I know what makes a good photo,” he said. “How many times did I come along on these jobs?” Edrick and I had met when he was a guest at a wedding I’d been working. That was over three years ago. “Hold this, would you?” I asked a man in a tight, crisp white button-down and a bolo tie with gleaming turquoise embedded in the center. I was always asking event guests to hold my flash bulbs when I needed an extra set of hands, and thought nothing of the interaction. But when our eyes met, my heart throbbed. He was so fiercely present. He demanded to be seen. He was everything I could never be, and I wanted him.
“It’s different when you’re the one in front of the camera,” I said, nearly losing my composure but regaining it by retreating back behind my instrument.
There was a silent pause then as Edrick did look down at the bouquet, but his mind was somewhere else, and it showed in the shot. “I tried,” he said, as though speaking to the flowers. “We tried.” The flowers had nothing to say in their defense. “You always hid the truest parts of yourself from me. You refused to bloom.”
“Sometimes, I find that I am standing perfectly still, and it is the subject who has moved out of focus, causing the whole composure of the shot to collapse,” I said, snapping back as I snapped the photos I knew I would never develop.
Edrick, for his part, began speaking to what to my mind was a particularly gaudy daisy. “You’re so beautiful, but so delicate. So afraid of the world. I was afraid I would destroy you by exposing you too soon.” I felt myself wilting before him, and feared that if I did not tell him the truth now I would not get another chance.
“Didn’t you know that I would do anything to hold onto you? Didn’t you know I wanted to change, to develop into the kind of man you needed me to be? Now look longingly,” I instructed, and he did, at the roses, not me.
“Love fades.” Here he stroked a sprig of greenery that protruded from the cluster. “We were always living on borrowed time.” He brought his hand down to rest in his pocket—that way he always did when he was melancholy—and I snapped a final photo, one I was sure would never see the light of day, much less the dim of the darkroom.
“I think that’s the one,” I said, referring both to the photo that would never be and the man I would never have again.
Edrick looked up from the flowers wistfully. “He is,” he said, sighing. As he walked out of frame, I watched his face run through a lifetime of emotions, from the sadness of loss to the painful pleasure of remembering, to a sort of expression I’m quite sure I’d never seen from him in our time together. It was the sort of subtle but transcendent emotional arc only the greatest of photographers might be lucky to capture once in a career. I decided not to try to capture it, but just to watch, not with the tool that kept me at arm’s-distance from the world, but with my naked eye, through which one can truly see all the beauty and pain of life, the exquisiteness of love and loss and love again, an unending development until the picture comes into full relief and you see things finally for what they truly are.
As I scanned the space to discover the source of Edrick’s final expression, the one I’d never seen before, I saw Thomas’s eyes meeting his, their bare, luminous chests seeming to reach toward each other like plants growing toward the sunlight. They were happy, I realized. He was happy. Finally. Without me.
***
Rachel Klein is a writer and teacher living in Boston, MA. Her personal essays have appeared online at Catapult, The Toast, Hazlitt, and The Rumpus, and her humor writing has appeared in The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, McSweeney’s, and Reductress. Follow her on twitter @racheleklein, if that’s your thing.