I jump when a hand touches the cool, bare flesh of my upper arm. I think, irrationally, that someone’s come to punish me for my cruelly revealing pictures, but it’s only Samantha. She’s beaming.
“Did you get everyone?” She leans toward me, a little off-kilter, blowing hot booze breath in my face. I tell her I have. Her mouth drops open and she grabs me by both arms.
“You!” She sends another blast my way. “You and Tom! We have to get your picture, too!”
I try to demur, but Samantha won’t hear of it. She takes my hand and pulls me along behind her. We extract Tom from his group and Samantha plucks the Nikon from my hands.
“Oh,” I say, reaching out for it protectively. I give her tense instructions on how to focus, none of which she hears; she tells us to smile. I’mcertain Tom is grinning; I can smell the booze and cigarette smoke on him, and he leans into me a little more than usual, his hand hot on the small of my back. It’s too hot, really, so hot I want to shake it off. When Samantha finishes and hands the camera back, I loop the strap around my neck with a grateful sigh.
“I hope you’re watching it a bit, Tom,” I say quietly, scanning his face. “The doctor said—”
He waves me away. “I’m fine, fine. He told me to relax, didn’t he? I’m feeling pretty relaxed.” He laughs and gives me a wet kiss on the cheek, not unlike the one Samantha gave Hal. I probably look like Hal did, grimacing. I don’t like wet kisses or drunk men. I don’t like my husband when he isn’t himself, and he isn’t himself right now—too loose and hot and silly. The party is loose and hot and silly, too—and becoming more so by the minute. I tell Tom I want to go home, but he shakes his head slowly like a child. So I leave him to go to the bathroom.
I’m eager to sit in a locked, quiet room and close my eyes for a moment. But when I open the door to what I think is the bathroom, the slice of hall light reveals a darkened bedroom instead—the master bedroom. There on the king-sized bed, a shirtless man is pinning a naked woman down, pressing the flesh of her V-ed arms as he grunts and moves against her. Her head is flopped back but she brings it up, sees me, and says, “Oh,” with her mouth so perfectly circular that, even in my shock, I think about lifting my camera to my eye. But I’m frozen. The man never stops moving and grunting but the woman keeps her head up, staring at me, terrified. I don’t know whether she’s terrified at the sight of me or if it’s the man who terrifies her, if it’s what he’s doing, how he’s pinned her down.
“Stop!” she screams, finally—at me or the man, or both of us—and I slam the door, walk quickly down the hall. I try another door: locked. I try the next door. It swings open to reveal a small, empty bathroom. I lock the door behind me and lean heavily against it, closing my eyes. Pain goes searing through my middle. I wrap my arms around myselfand stumble over to sit on the closed toilet lid. I hunch my body and tell myself,It was just a couple having sex in the dark. Having fun.But I don’t believe it. I never saw his face, but I recognized thekindof man he was: the kind who’d held me down and branded my thighs.
I never sawhisface, either. Or—I could never remember it, even though Grandmother and the police kept pressing me about it.Think, Judith, what color were his eyes?I couldn’t tell them. When I tried to recall his features, they blurred into an awful mask. Grandmother would sigh in frustration, and tell me he’d never be caught if I couldn’t remember. As if the burden were mine—as if I alone were responsible for what he’d done.
I feel responsible now, too. When the woman—a stranger—looked up at me, she reminded me of Parade Girl, though there were no tears marring her face. She was in trouble, though, and I left her there. Left her to suffer alone.
I unlock the door and go tearing past a confused guest who’s been waiting for the bathroom. I fling open the door to the bedroom and see…nothing, no one. Only a bedside lamp casting a yellow glow over the newly tranquil scene. I step closer and study the bed, spotting a few telltale wrinkles in the otherwise smooth duvet fabric. They tried to tidy things before they fled. I leave and look down the hall toward the living room. Everything is the same: the nodding, talking, laughing heads, the skein of smoke hanging in the air. The smell of booze. As I draw closer, I smell more: light body odor mingled with heavy perfume; the tang of imported cheese on people’s plates; and smoke, smoke everywhere. Veiling everything. I scan all the faces, looking for the couple. I go from room to crowded room, ignoring Tom as he waves me over to where he stands with two neighbors. I walk on through the dining room, my eyes furiously searching. But they’re nowhere. They’ve disappeared. He took her somewhere—or they left together happily, willingly. Or the woman managed to run away.
“Judith,” Tom says. Right behind me. When I turn, I can tell he’s sobered up a little. “Everything all right?”
“I was just—looking for a couple I saw. Someone I thought I recognized.”
Tom furrows his brow and scans my face. “One couple just left. I don’t think we know them, but I saw them leave,” he says. My chest tightens at this, to hear they left together.Ifit was them. If it was, it means the woman didn’t escape, that he led her out with his hand gripping the back of her neck, pushing her forward. She might have smiled at Samantha and Hal and wished them well in a tremulous voice before vanishing through the door, into the night, with the man close behind.
“Judith?” Tom asks. My eyes refocus on his face. He looks as weary as I feel.
“I’m tired, that’s all. Can we go home now?” I lean my head against his chest, inhaling the familiar Tom smell of drugstore soap, sweat, and warm skin. A good man, a pure man. Nothing like the one I saw tonight.
I pull back from Tom with a tired smile. He takes my hand and leads me home.
6.
I dream of the couple—if that’s what they were. The woman and the man.
In the dream the man has hot irons for hands. He’s bringing them toward her face, which is turned to me, frozen not in terror but annoyed surprise. I tell her to move, to get up and run, but she just lies there, looking. He brings his iron hands up and scalds her, causing her mouth to form that same O, but without sound. The smell of burning flesh fills the room and when I scream, I’m muted, too.
I turn away from her smoldering cheeks and wake in the dark next to Tom, tears streaming down my face and onto the pillow.
Save your tears for your pillow, Grandmother told me when I was a child. And I did. I saved them all for my pillow, and here I am, soaking it some forty years later.
Leave the past in the past, she also told me, with something like disgust. I’ve struggled my whole life toobey.
7.
Early the next morning, while Tom is still sleeping, I slip downstairs to the darkroom and pull the door closed behind me. I woke thinking I may have captured the couple on film, in one of my wider party shots, and was eager to see the pictures anyway—not the stiff, posed ones I took for Samantha, but therealones.
My lingering anxiety—after the party, then the dream—fades quickly as I set to work. Fishing out the rolls from my camera bag, I begin with one, carefully threading the film onto the reel before dunking it in the first tank, then into the fixer. The work clears my head and grounds me with purpose; I move through the steps automatically, in a contented trance, washing the reel, then trimming and hanging the negatives to dry.
Later in the day, once I’ve prepared and eaten an early dinner with Tom, I head downstairs again. I love how the dark swallows me as I descend the steps. It’s a good dark down here, a private, soothing dark. My heart beats quickly as I take down the negatives and begin to print. If I could hurry the process, I would—but it isn’t until after ten o’clock, after I’ve fiddled with the cropping and exposure, that my pictures are ready to hang on the line. I’m tired, and Tom is confused by my working so late—I’m not usually in such a hurry—but I told him over dinner that Samantha wants her prints ready tomorrow.It isn’t like she’s payingyou, he said, and then returned to his food with that slight grimace I’ve learned is just part of his aging face.
I wake at 3 a.m., a time when I usually read for a while to lull myself back to sleep. Tonight, though, I pull on a robe and rise without disturbing Tom. After collecting the dried prints from the darkroom, I spread them out on the dining room table and begin peering at each one. I search first for the couple—or the woman’s face, rather, since I never sawhis. I don’t see the couple in any shot, and the more I don’t see them, the more relieved I am. As if what happened in the master bedroom never happened at all, since the proof isn’t in the prints. But the memory lingers. I saw it; it was real. I start over, searching for her face again. Nothing the second time; nothing the third time, either. My eyes begin to ache.
I tell myself to leave it alone, to step back from this wearying task and just review the pictures, starting with the portraits of Samantha and Hal. I think they’ll be pleased with how vibrant and happy they look—Samantha with her shining black hair and Hal with his straight white teeth and crisp blue button-down shirt, their faces close together. Thriving after twenty-five years with each other, it seems.
