I double- and triple-check the room before leaving, making sure I didn’t leave anything important behind—like my wallet or Jamie Look-alike’s phone number. Google Maps says it’s a forty-five-minute trip back to the apartment from here, but an Uber would be fifty bucks in rush-hour traffic, and I’m more broke than I am late.
Fuck you fuck you fuck you,my brain whispers at itself as I power walk down the overheated Hell’s Kitchen sidewalk, because this hotelhadto be in Hell’s Kitchen, because a twenty-minute walk just to get to the subway is totally normal, because catching a train at Times Square station during peak assholes-in-business-suits hour is something that humans ought to do, ever.
Muscle memory takes over as I stab my forefinger against the greasy MetroCard machine, which is good because my actual brain is too busy calculating how fucked I am to worry about whether I should get a seven-day ticket or just go ahead and commit to OMNY so I can pay with my phone. It was only yesterday that I kept thinking how losing my luggage might mean the universe didn’t want me to go to Parker at all. And now here I am, late on day one because of my own stupid, reckless choices. I could have made Jamie come home with me and dealt with the awkwardness of being on the subway together. I could have gonehome after instead of sleeping in the hotel. I could have changed my alarm to go off an hour earlier.
Instead I’m sweaty by the time I dash up the stairs to the apartment, hands fumbling the keys twice before I manage to let myself in. Ophelia and Diego are both nowhere to be seen, their doors shut; they’re probably sleeping last night off. I’d forgotten that I don’t actually have a change of clothes, thanks to the luggage issue, but I do manage a quick cat bath in the sink, piling my wild hair atop my head and securing it with a velvet scrunchie before grabbing my camera bag and portfolio and running right back out the door.
I stare at the clock on my phone practically the entire train ride downtown. I text Jamie at Queensboro Plaza while we still have service before the train goes underground:Next time the Sanpellegrino’s on me.I can’t afford to fuck up on my first day of class, so that phone stays in my hand. I keep staring at Google Maps like a goddamn tourist the whole way to the building on Washington Square that houses Parker’s photography program. I still don’t have my actual photo ID—we’re supposed to pick those up this afternoon—but luckily the lady at the reception desk lets me get away with showing her my driver’s license and the program acceptance email instead.
My first class, Mixed-Media Photography, is on the sixth floor. I take advantage of the mirrored walls in the elevator to apply a layer of brick-red lipstick and rip open one of those perfume sticker samples and rub it on my wrists. I figure it’s not like I’m going for an interview at Goldman Sachs. This is an art program. It’s totally acceptable for artists to look like they slept in a coffin instead of a plush luxury hotel bed the night before. I tell myself this because it’s better than wallowing in my anxiety over making a shitty first impression on Wyatt Cole, who is basically the whole reason I applied to this program. The first time I saw his workwas at an LA gallery, a big classy one that I only got admission to because I was (at the time) fucking the curator’s sister. I remember standing in front of a massive black-and-white print of two lovers, hands entwined and legs entangled, the canvas embroidered with jewel-colored thread that twisted into vines and flowers binding them together, and thinking,The only thing I want in life is to make someone else feel like this.
There were other artists on display too, but I kept coming back to that one piece. And even after the curator’s sister took me to our dinner reservation, all I could talk about was how much I wanted to make art the way Wyatt Cole made art.
It turned out I was the last one aboard the Wyatt Cole hype train, which had been running full steam for over a year by then. Everyone was obsessed with him, and the fact that he was notoriously reclusive and rarely made public appearances only made him more appealing. I imagined him as a hermit locked away in a garret somewhere, a shrouded figure in a darkroom backlit in red.
Then Parker announced Cole would teach in its photography program. I never thought I’d get in. Never.
Until I did. And now all I have to do is not ruin it for myself.
I take a moment in the hall to suck in several deep, steadying breaths before going into the classroom. I can be a couple of extra seconds late; that’s better than coming in flush faced, sweaty, and breathless. But when I finally open the door and step inside, I find that all the students are still buzzing in conversation, twisting around in chairs, and perched on desks, the podium at the front of the room still empty.
Thank god. I’m late, but Wyatt Cole is later.
I slide into an empty seat, take my portfolio out of my bag, and open it on my desk to glance through my work—not that I haven’t spent hours poring over these photos already, but the anticipation of someone else seeing them puts me on edge. I can’t help but seethem through Wyatt Cole’s hypothetical eyes, criticizing the highlights here and the shadows there, wondering if I should have cropped this piece differently, if that one will evoke the same emotions in him as it does in me.
“Are those yours?” the girl next to me asks. I look over and immediately, reflexively, sit a little straighter in my chair.
She’s frum. Which is to say she’s Jewish and religious and observant. Maybe to anyone else she looks a little out of place with her three-quarter-length sleeves, her long skirt and high neckline, in late spring. But I know tznius—the set of Orthodox Jewish modesty standards—when I see it. And the purple and silver scarf wrapped around her head isn’t just for decoration; it’s a tichel, the traditional head covering worn by married women.
The urge to slam my portfolio shut hits me so hard I have to physically sit on my hands to resist it. But then I look at her again, and it’s different this time. Her nails are long and spiky, painted black. A gold hoop pierces one of her eyebrows. She’s frum, but she’s unlike any frum person I grew up with. And her eyes—large, dark brown, framed by gold eyeliner—are kind.
“Yes,” I say eventually, and glance back down at my work. My cheeks flush hot with mixed embarrassment and shame.
People used to stare at me too, when I was frum. They used to stare at my father with his long beard and black hat, my brothers with their kippot secured to the crowns of their heads, my mother wearing her wig and stockings. They looked at us like they thought we didn’t belong in the same city as everyone else. And the fact that I left the community—was kicked out, rather—doesn’t mean I should become part of the same judgmental, derisive, xenophobic culture I despised.
It’s just…
“Can I see?” says the frum girl, and I have no choice; I push my portfolio over to the edge of my desk as she leans over to take a closer look.
The photos tell a story. They’re my life in LA in two parts: before I got sober and after. They show the way the same bridge can look different if I took the photo while I was high and if I took the photo after I was clean—the photo of my feet in the sand next to used syringes, my weight off-kilter, uncertain, juxtaposed with that same angle as water crashes to shore, sea-foam swirling about my ankles and my skirt caught in the wind.
Plenty of people have seen these photos; they were in a gallery in Venice, later in Santa Monica, and they served as part of my application process to Parker. But it’s one thing to know that people are looking at my art—seeing past the flimsy film and into my life, my history,my soul—when I don’t have to personally witness it. I drift through my own gallery shows like a ghost, there but not. I can hit Submit on an application portal and never think twice about what it means. But every time I have to watch someone look, watch themseeme in this way…
It feels like I have opened up my stomach for them and let them reach their hands inside to fumble with my organs, twisting my guts between their fingers.
“These are really good,” the girl says, and she gestures, implicitly asking permission to turn the page. I nod and let her. My heart is beating too fast, and I stare at the side of her face rather than look at my own work. She’s probably just being polite. Everyone here is good; beinggoodisn’t impressive anymore.
I need to be spectacular.
“What’s your name?” she asks when she’s done.
“Elisheva. Ely.”
“I’m Michal,” she says. “Michal Pereira. Are you the—”
But before she can finish, the door opens, and a hush drops over the classroom as our professor, Wyatt Cole, walks between the rows of desks to the front podium. I’m staring alongside everyone else as he goes, drinking in the sight of him, our first glimpse of the mysterious, notorious artist who rewrote the landscape ofmixed-media photography. The man whose work has been on the cover ofTime,who otherwise avoids the public eye as if it will scald him, who is single-handedly responsible for my application to Parker, who can break my heart with a single photograph.
“I can’t believe it’s really him,” Michal whispers, and I can’t either, because the man at the front of the room, our new professor—Wyatt Cole—is the man I had sex with last night.
