Claire feels, once again, rather like the woman in the photo that’s so fascinated her since the day Jackie hung it. She glances at it—it’s across the room, so she can’t see the details, but she committed them to memory a long time ago.
Under the flash of Jackie’s camera Claire wonders what it would feel like to have Jackie leaning against her arm like the other woman in the picture. Claire can almost feel the buzz of the alcohol; though she has never in her life considered smoking, she can definitely smell the cigarette Jackie would be lighting.
Something inside Claire is glowing like that ashy ember, and Jackie’s brown eyes are stoking it.
Jackie snaps picture after picture, each one a closer shot than the last, and when she runs out of film in her fancy camera she switches to the instant-print. When the first few of those fully develop, Claire can hardly believe it.
“It doesn’t even look like me,” Claire says quietly, looking back and forth between two shots.
Jackie takes them from her, and hands her a few newly developed ones. “It does. Look closer. This is how I see you,Claire. You’re…fascinating.” Jackie’s voice is so quiet on the last word that Claire almost can’t hear it.
The person looking back at her, the person Jackie apparently sees, is a stranger to Claire. And yet she’s somehow intimately familiar—she’s something close to who Claire was once, before time and expectations changed her. It’s the person she never thought she could be. Jackie is sitting close to her, all heat and distraction, and Claire never wants to move away.
Jackie is such a good friend. She’s such a good friend that it makes Claire’s chest ache, like pressing on a bruise.
Claire goes home with three photos. Jackie gives her two of them—one is one of Claire, sitting on the ottoman with a wry smile and looking more confident than she’s ever felt. The other is of both of them, taken close up and slightly off-kilter. Jackie had held the camera up and out as far as she could, snapping it blindly. Jackie is laughing, and Claire is looking at her with that emotion she can’t explain.
She wonders if that’s always how she looks, when she looks at Jackie. If anyone else can see it. If Jackie can.
The third photo is one Claire slips into her pocket before she goes back to her own house to get started on making some casseroles for Martha. It’s the one she took of Jackie, before their impromptu photoshoot. She’s smiling at Claire with a cigarette between her fingers. Her eyes are soft. Her hair is tucked behind one ear, but there’s a stray piece of it falling across her forehead.
Claire puts the photos in her bedside drawer, pressed like flower petals between the pages of her favorite book.
Chapter 17
Claire doesn’t hear from Martha for the rest of the month. It’s not a surprise given their last conversation, and Martha will need time to recover from childbirth, but it’s still strange not to hear from her for such a long stretch. Not even a phone call. Martha’s curtains stay closed in the weeks after she returns from the hospital. Claire learns through Pete’s occasional chats with Walter that they’ve named the baby Daniel.
Jackie also disappears for a week around the same time. She has a high-paying extended gig in San Jose, and she’s opted to get a hotel rather than driving for hours every day. It leaves Claire with nothing to do outside of the household chores, which she’s gotten down to an art at this point to make time in her day for other things.
If only to fill the time, Claire finally sets up the paints Jackie gifted her in the sunniest corner of her kitchen table. She sits in front of the mini-easel, a brush in her hand, poised to start.
Nothing comes to mind. Claire has so many colors to choose from, and yet she can’t call to mind a single image that she wants to commit to paper. She flips through her sketchbook, but none of her drawings call to her.
After a whole fruitless hour, Claire dials Anita’s number.
“Cozy Corner Arts and Crafts, how can I help you?” Anita says cheerfully. There’s a pottery wheel working in the background of the call.
“It’s me. Claire, I mean. Davis,” Claire says, wincing at her own stammering. “I hope I’m not interrupting?”
The pottery wheel stops abruptly, followed by thethunkof what Claire can only assume is a large hunk of clay hitting thefloor. “Damn—no, not interrupting. Or if you are, I welcome it. I can’t get this goddamn bowl to shape up the way I want.”
“I know the feeling,” Claire says.
“Happy to hear from you either way,” Anita says cheerfully. “I was hoping you’d be in touch after Jacqueline came to buy you those paints.”
“I tried to use them today,” Claire says. Everything is still set up at the other end of the table, the unused water cup taunting her in the sunlight. “I couldn’t do it. I stared at the paper for an hour and nothing came. This used to be easy, didn’t it?”
“You’re rusty. It’ll take time to get back in the saddle. We all change over time, dear.”
“I suppose we do,” Claire says. “When you knew me—I mean, before I married Pete. What was your impression of me?”
“My impression?”
“Your memory of who I was. Lately I’ve been feeling…strange,” Claire admits. “Like I don’t know myself anymore.”
Anita makes a thoughtful noise. “My impression of you…you were whip-smart. Honest. Shy, but when someone got you on about art, you’d talk their ear off,” Anita says. “And…lonely, I’d say.”
“Lonely?”
