They were somber, heavily shadowed, obscure. My husband: unidentifiable, asleep in our matrimonial bed. Shot with a wide lens. His face turned away from the camera. His back a silver whisper in the distance. The sheets gathered and inky at his waist. And the space between us vague and vast. Four frames taken over the course of a night. Focus shifting. Streetlights giving way to the gray of daybreak. The slump in his shoulders varying, the angle of his hips, the fold of the sheets. But the distance remains: cold, uncharted.
It stops me in my tracks. Every emotion flooding back in this very public space.
When I first showed François the prints, he knew. Almost immediately. He knew. He knew that I had not been sleeping. He knewwhy.
“They are beautiful,” he’d said. And that was all.
When I broke the news in the fall that Khalil had chosen them to show in New York, and that the series title wasAfter, he was livid.
“You put it out there like the shit!” he’d said, fuming in our living room one afternoon, when the kids were still in school.
“The shit?”
“Like the garbage, you leave on the street for everyone out there to see!”
“Our dirty laundry, you mean?”
“Laundry.Merde. Oui, c’est ça! You put it out there for the world to see, to know our business.”
Leelou jumped down then from where she’d been coiled on the couch, crossed the room, and left.
For a moment I stared at my husband. How amusing he thought “the world” would see it. Figure it out. Care. “I think your guilt is showing.”
“Merde!” he cursed again, and then disappeared down the hall. I pictured him sulking in our bedroom. Wanting to destroy things, but knowing it was not in his character. Not inanimate things, anyway.
He returned moments later, his eyes red. “I’m sorry. You know. I said I was sorry.”
“I know you did. But you’ve had over two years to wrestle with this in your head. I’ve had ten months. I’m still processing. And this is my way of doing it.”
That was September.
“Voilà! La belle Jamaïcaine!!”
That voice, smooth, distinctive, sails through the booth. I smile, turning in its direction. Khalil Mansour, art dealer extraordinaire, tall, dark, strikingly handsome, impeccably dressed. Always.
“Le beau Algérien,” I greet him with the traditional Frenchbise. Air-kisses on both sides.
“It’s nice to see your face,” he says in his native tongue. “America treating you well?”
“So far, no complaints.”
“And LA?”
I shrug. “It’s…different.”
At that, he laughs. “Mais, bien sûr.”
“It’sbig,” I continue. “Very segregated. There are white neighborhoods and Black neighborhoods. Mexican, Korean…”
“Arab neighborhoods?”
“Persian?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Not the same thing.”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry, I haven’t found the Arab ones yet.”
“Ha! Good luck!” He laughs. “Have you done anything very Hollywood?”
