Wyatt:I’m back. Hope you made it home okay.
Guilt seeps in like water through rotten floorboards. One glass. One stupid glass into the mouth of one stupid Ely. The fucked-up part of my brain wants to say that it’s a good thing that I was able to just have the one glass and then cut myself off. It used to be that I couldn’t. If I had a single sip, I’d drink and drink and drink until I wished I were dead.
I scrub both hands over my face, squeezing my eyes shut tight.
No going back now. I made my choice last night, such as it was. And who knows? Maybe it reallyisokay. Maybe four years clean has knocked me out of whatever rut I was in before, fixed whatever was broken in me. I certainly have no desire to drink more. Or worse, to go out and find someone behind a dumpster somewhere to sell me smack.
Still, my hands are a little shaky as I open up the messaging app and text Wyatt back—like he’ll somehow sense what happened through the phone screen.
Me:Hey! Sorry I forgot to text back last night. Made it back. Hope you’re alive and didn’t eat all the leftovers in one sitting.
I shove my phone away from me before I can see if he replies. A part of me hopes he doesn’t. I don’t know if I can stomach his kindness on top of everything else.
Diego is a bundle of blankets on the couch when I emerge from the bedroom, either having fallen asleep there or having nested there, hungover, when he woke up. He doesn’t stir as I move around the kitchen making coffee and grabbing breakfast, but I leave him a mug—black, four sugars—on the coffee table before I go, just in case. At least Ophelia is gone; I don’t have to face her cautious concern and try to explain myself.
The train into Manhattan is running slower than usual today. We keep stopping in between stations, and the normally rocket-fastjourney under the river is reduced to a drudging forward rumble. I find myself staring at the scars along my left forearm. They’re barely visible anymore, just off-white smudges against my skin. I remember when they were angry fissures stretching along the lengths of my veins like portals to hell.
That was so long ago now.
Wyatt has texted me back by the time I get off the train:Two sittings. I finished the brisket for breakfast.
A beat, and the phone shows he’s still typing. I climb the stairs out to street level still staring at my screen like the perfect stereotype of everyone my age.
Wyatt:Could probably go back for more.
I grin and have to make myself stick my phone in my back pocket so I’m not tempted to text back too quickly. I wonder if he’s at Parker, if he bothers to go in on Saturdays. Perhaps he’s on a train somewhere headed here now. He might ascend those stairs minutes after me or be just a couple blocks ahead, tapping out a text while he sips his morning coffee.
So what if I walk a little quicker these last four blocks to campus? Sue me; I’m human.
Although once I’m there, I am faced with the reality that it’d be incredibly awkward for me to just show up at his office demanding attention for no reason. So I have to actually do something with myself, and of course there’s no class on weekends.
I end up in one of the computer labs, uploading my photos from last night to Lightroom and sorting through them. Most of them are kind of shit, but that’s standard. Digital photography has some upsides over film, and one of them is that you can take a million pictures of a scene that is constantly in flux. You aren’t beholden to the number of film cartridges you have on hand—you don’t have to try to freeze time, to capture a moment perfectly in as few slides as possible.
It’s pretty easy to rule out the bad photos and get to the goodstuff. But even then, I usually have way more options than I actually need. It becomes a matter of looking more closely at the scene, especially the exposure and focus. Some things, like crop and even lighting, to a degree, can be fixed in editing. Other things are unchangeable: Either the distribution of figures to negative space is good or it isn’t. Either the exposure is good or it’s hopeless, the light having burned away any data you might have recovered in post.
These particular photos turned out better than I expected. Last night felt like a fever dream at times, like I was existing in some liminal space between the past and the present. But onscreen, it’s easier to see those moments as what they are. I’m not afraid of colors and shapes in a photograph. I’m an artist. This is what I love more than anything in the world.
As I fiddle with my favorite photos, I find myself wondering what Michal is doing today. It’s still Shabbos but late enough that she might be home from shul by now. I find it hard to envision her life outside of what I’ve seen of it so far, both last night and at school. I try to picture her curled up in an armchair, reading a book while her wife and kids play on the floor. But even that simple scene is impossible to visualize. I keep catching myself imposing relics of my own experience onto hers, putting her into a wig instead of a tichel, hanging a portrait of the Rebbe on her wall.
Through my camera’s lens, she is luminous.
“Are these from last night?” a voice says from behind me.
Heat flushes the nape of my neck before I turn to meet Wyatt’s gaze. He’s leaning against the doorframe, cup of La Colombe in hand. His hair is sticking up in an awkward fashion, as if he forgot he put pomade in it this morning then ended up raking his fingers through it one too many times on his commute. And suddenly I can’t stop thinking about how he looked that night we fell into bed together, his cheeks flushed pink and his hair askew, his skin warm and supple beneath my hands as I touched him.
It’s been like a solid ten seconds since he asked the question.Shit.
“Yeah,” I say, and it comes out husky, like I haven’t taken a sip of water in ten years. I clear my throat and try again. “Just doing a first pass.”
Wyatt comes closer, setting his coffee down on the desk next to me and leaning in to peer at the images on my screen. He’s near enough that I can see the stubble on his jaw and throat. One of his hands grips the back of my seat. All I can hear, for one reeling moment, is the pounding of my own pulse in my ears.
“Do you mind?” he asks, gesturing toward the mouse. I shake my head.
He scrolls through some of the images I’ve selected, pausing on two or three to take a longer look. Of course, now that he’s watching, all I can see in my photographs are the mistakes.
“These are really good,” he says after a while—long enough that I’d begun to contemplate faking a doctor’s appointment or something just so I could leave. Which is stupid, because I’m the one who begged him to help me with this project in the first place. “I like how you’ve balanced the light. It makes the scene seem dreamlike almost, like this moment exists in a space between worlds.”
“Thanks. I—I guess I wanted to make it feel…private, maybe? The way you feel when you’re praying. There are other people in the scene, and you can feel their presence, but at the same time you’re alone. Just you and G-d.”
