He lowers his eyes again, and jeez, his eyelashes. Maybe it’s Maybelline. “Yeah. I shot with that camera for years before switching to digital. I still have it.” He looks a little wistful, andmy heart tugs.
I set the tip of my finger on the Nikon, surely imagining that it’s still warm from the heat of Alex’s hand. “This is thebrand you use?”
“Yeah. Different model, but I’ve always shot with Nikons.” He shifts on his feet, his brow furrowing. “The Canon wouldn’t be bad either. It’d be a bit lighterin your hand.”
I purse my lips, not liking that suggestion. I don’t need it to belighter. I pick it up, feel the solid weight of it. I sense I don’t have the right hold on it, that there’s something unnatural in the way it shapes to me, and I can feel Alex’s eyes on my hands. For the first time since this whole thing started, I’m excited about the possibility of this camera, this course. Sure, this is a massive roadblock to my major goal, but I wanted to go to college for just that kind of experience. I wanted to learn as much as I could, wanted to take as many classes as I could fit into a day. It’s its own type of freedom, learning something new. “I’m going toget this one.”
“Okay,” he says, and raps his knuckles once on the glass.
Bart emerges from the back, coffee in hand, big smile on his face. “Great choice. How about a camera bag?” He points to a display behind him. “I’ll give you half off, a nice couple like you.”
Now I have basically died, and my ghost is standing here with this camera. Maybe Bart’s into that spectral photography I’m always hearing about. He could snap a quick photo and I’ll just be an orb, or a smudgy white blob no one will notice because Alex’s eyelashes and cheekbones areso captivating.
“You ought to have a good bag,” says Alex, completely ignoring Bart’s assumption. “Keep your equipment safe.”
“Okay,” I say quickly. “The brown one.” Bart makes a face, and that’s because there is no brown one. “I mean the black one.”God. Would that there had been more “Acting Normal” classes offered during my tenure atthe university.
Bart chatters loudly while we check out, and lucky for me Alex takes it cheerfully; despite my earlier concerns, he seems to relish being in a shop like this, unrecognized by someone he’s talking to as a fellow professional. Alex’s face lights when Bart says he still develops film even though hardly anyone asks him to anymore, a comment Alex greets with a sort of sad, shaking head familiarity.Nerd alert,I think, gently, happily, not minding the cramped space and funny smell much at all.
There’s only one glancing moment of tension, and that’s when I slide my signed credit card slip back over to Bart and he looks up at both of us with his guileless smile. “See you both in here again soon,” he drawls, and I can tell he’s waiting for Alex, more than me, to respond. I think of myself the other day, asking Alex to wish me luck, the leaden weight ofhis non-answer.
“See you soon,” I say, wishing I were speaking forthe both of us.
* * * *
“I think we ought to put the paperwork away for a bit,” says Alex, an hour later. We’re sitting at a café table outside of Boneshaker’s, under a thick canvas awning that keeps the noonday sun off our faces but also seals in the noonday heat. Beneath the cotton dress I’m wearing, my skin is dewy with sweat, but across the table Alex looks temperature neutral and comfortable. I should’ve picked a table inside, at least for my own sake, but the memory of the last time we were in there together—tentative and then tense—still feels too close.
“We’re only on page twenty, though.” I put my thumb on the corner of the packet I printed this morning, the PowerPoint Hiltunen loaded to the course website from the session I’ve missed, and lift to fan the pages. “There’s a lot left to go.” If it’s possible, I’m even less temperature neutral now, hearing those pages shuffle like a card deck. There’s somuch, and I have my first class in two days, and I still have to complete my first assignment, and—
“This is too much about your equipment,” he says, reaching a hand out, raising an eyebrow in question. I pass him the packet, and he flips through a few of the remaining pages and his mouth twitches in annoyance. “Metering system,” he mumbles. “What a load of garbage.”
I’m not sure if he meant for me to hear him, but I ask anyway. “You don’t think I needto know that?”
He does that move over his beard again, but this time I watch it—the heel of his hand set first on the hinge of his jaw, dragging down, his fingers loose, slightly bent. I’m convinced that the sound of it can be heard from miles away, a siren call to single people everywhere.
He shrugs. “To take a good picture? No. I didn’t know half this shit when I started. Are you going to have a quiz on it?” He saysquizlike he’s talking abouta colonoscopy.
“I don’t think so. I just need to have the assignment done.” I make a move to take that piece of paperwork out of the folder I’ve brought, but Alex stops me with a shake of his head.
“We’ll worry about the assignment tomorrow.”
I blink across the table at him.Tomorrow.This is lots of days-in-a-row Alex. I wish I had a tiny cooling device in the waistband of this dress. He flips back through the packet, takes the paperclip off that’s binding it all together, removing a few of the pages and setting them on the table between us.
“These three terms, that’s what you need to know most. Basically, your exposure system. ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. Those are the most important functions on your camera.”
I pull the pages toward me. They’re ones we’ve already gone over, and while I understand them in the abstract, I also suspect it’s the kind of thing you don’t really get until youdo. Dennise is always talking about that at work, the difference between theory and practice, between what’s in your textbook and what’s in the hospital room with you when you’re talking to a patient. I look toward where I’ve set the camera on the table, wondering if we should experiment a little. There’s a flare of excitement in my belly.
“Let’s get you comfortable holding the thing first. The first teacher I had—the one who gave me the FG, that’s what he taught me. Photography’s not just about what your camera can do. It’s about what your body can do.”
The flare of excitement is replaced with a sinking feeling. Talk about starting with my weakness. I’m pretty sure Alex doesn’t wake up every morning and do a scanning inventory of his aches and pains. Maybe Ishould’vegotten the lighter camera. For a second, I sit, hands clasped in my lap, expecting that Alex demonstrate something for me—hold the camera himself, ask me to imagine my hands like his. But he doesn’t do that. Instead he leans back in his chair, hands clasped loosely over his flat stomach—gunh—and waits, roguish eyebrow raised again.
I pickup the camera.
“First thing is, don’t listen to what your teacher tells you. Listen to what your hands tell you. Me, I always shoot with my left hand under the lens, like this.” He holds up one hand so that the back of it is facing me, his thumb pointed upward and his index, middle, and ring fingers straight. His pinky finger curves slightly inward, toward his body. “The lens sits right here,” he says, stroking the index finger of his left hand, tracing the corner where it and his thumb make an L. “My right hand I use to operate the shutter, but the thing is, I like it so my pinky finger here”—he makes a small motion, waggling that curved-in digit—“is always touching my right hand. I don’t know why. It’s just what feels right.”
I adjust my hands, shifting them in a way that mimics what he’s just described, but I can already tell that won’t work—my hands aren’t big enough, my fingers feel stiff and awkward.
“Remember, my camera’s bigger. I shoot with a longer lens.”Hey-oh,thinks the dumbest, crudest part of my brain. My cheeks feel newly warm, and I’m grateful to have something to keep my eyes and hands on.
