A Bad Bride's Tale (27 page)

He walked and walked. Then something caught his eye. At first he thought it was a pile of clothes on the gravel, beside a bench. Then the clothes belched. It was a human being: a man, young but prematurely aged. Jez’s instinct was to walk faster. The man stretched out an arm, cupped dirty palm upturned. Normally, at this point, Jez would break into a quick trot and once out of earshot mutter, “Get a job.” Today something made him stop. So he stopped.

The beggar stared at him reproachfully, preparing himself for a Jesus-can-save-you speech or an offer of half a Pret A Manger sand- wich. Jez dug into his wallet, pulled out a tenner. Then another. The two notes fluttered in his palm. The heap-of-clothes man

snatched at the money before Jez had a chance to change his mind. “Thanks, mate.”

Jez walked on, heart full, singing and swelling beneath his Ted Baker shirt, reliving the moment of his generosity. The rain stopped. The sun burst out from the clouds, wrapping everything in glorious custard-yellow light. And as Jez walked, he felt almost overcome by an unprecedented desire to be a better person, to throw away the porn mags he stashed in his desk at work, to be nicer to in- terns, to stop moaning about immigration, to live a good life.

Fuck me, thought Jez, something freaky is going on.

THIRTY-THREE
Æ

the new york air was hot. foreheads glistened.
Wet patches bloomed beneath city shirts. Duane Reade had a rush on deodorant. Stevie wore a simple white Gap T-shirt. It clung to her boobs, which had grown to such proportions in the last few days that they made her stoop self-consciously. She kicked her legs into a pair of baggy taupe linen trousers, slipped on her favorite pair of low-heeled turquoise Prada sandals, and tied her hair back into a ponytail, enjoying its shoulder-to-shoulder swish as she walked along Twelfth Avenue in Chelsea, sandwiched between choking traffic and the gray moving mass of the Hudson on one side, and buildings on the other. Now that Lara had gone, she felt strangely alone and small in the city. She looked up at a forbid- dingly large concrete warehouse. Was this it? Above the huge pan- eled sheet-metal doors, in industrial gray lettering it read
tw studio
. She felt uneasy, nervous even. Perhaps she really should have gone to the Met on her own, licked her wounds in front of ab- stracts that she’d never understand, rather than hang out with Sam.

How would she keep up the act? The chitchat? How could she do that when she could almost feel Jez’s breath on her shoulder and hear the
tick-tock
of the clock as the hour of her flight home raced closer and closer? This was all just a distraction from her real life, a reminder of what she would never have. She rang the bell.

After a lift journey in something akin to an old steel crate, she creaked open a heavy door, rung more bells. Ah, a human being. The receptionist was all elbows and huge green eyes, dressed in black. She didn’t smile. “Can I help you?”

“Hi. I’m meeting Sam Flowers?”

The girl’s face immediately softened into a white-toothed smile. “Sam? Sure. Sit down, I’ll buzz him.”

Stevie looked around. The waiting area of the studio was an homage to the studio’s owner, the photographer Ted Watton, who was now in his late seventies but, unlike most of the subjects he’d photographed over the years, had never gone out of fashion. His black-and-white pictures lined the walls: a gun; a boned corset; an assortment of movie stars and sinewy fashion models wearing noth- ing but Watton’s trademark molten lighting. Stevie sat down on a low battered brown leather sofa the size of Lara’s living room, en- tranced by the vast spectacular images on the walls.

“Stevie?” Sam appeared, wearing black-rimmed glasses, his curls messed up, something of the mad professor about him.

“Not one red eye.” Stevie pointed to the walls. “Awesome.” “Aha, we edit the red eyes out.”

“Don’t. I want to believe they all come out perfect.”

“I’ve just finished up some of my own stuff. Do you want a quick look around?” he beamed, full of boyish enthusiasm.

“Love to.” Stevie followed Sam down a dark corridor, noticing

how he walked with a bounce, his body graceful, purposeful, all parts of him—bottom, thighs, arms—moving separately, like the joints of an artist’s wooden model. “So you manage all this?”

Sam shook his head. “Most of it. But Watton’s moved me from an organizational role to more hands-on stuff, which is great. I’m learning loads. He’s kind of taken me under his wing.”

“Clever you.”

Sam smiled. “Well, it’s not law, as Mum keeps pointing out.” He put on his mother’s accent. “ ‘Not a job for life, honey. You make sure that old man treats you right . . .’ Yes, you can imagine.” He stopped by a large door. “One sec, just need to check it’s empty . . .” He poked his head around the door. “Yeah, yeah, it’s free. Come in. This is my favorite studio. It’s a monster.”

The room was dark and cavernous—of airport proportions. Sam pressed a button. The far wall, which appeared to be a vast window covered by one black shutter, began to slide and click as the shutter came up, exposing New York in sunshiny slices. There was the usual paraphernalia of a photographer’s studio—lightboxes, silver umbrellas, industrial spotlights with bulbs the size of human heads—but on a spectacular scale. Stevie had never seen anything like it.

“We had Scarlett Johansson here last week,” grinned Sam, un- able to contain himself. “Condoleezza Rice the week before.” He laughed. “Sorry, I’m insufferable. Come on, through here.” He touched her hand lightly.

Stevie jolted at his touch, a charge of energy shooting up her wrist. Where the hell did that come from? Shy of meeting his eye, she concentrated on the studios, the dark chemical-smelling rooms, the closets with clothes racks as long as runways, the lightbulb- studded makeup areas—where mirrored walls reflected beautiful

faces to infinity, more printing rooms. Sam carefully explained the processes and chemical alchemy that took place in each white space. Stevie listened, fascinated. She’d never seen him in a professional en- vironment, infused in the things he loved.

At that exact moment Stevie felt she got her first real glimpse of Sam as an adult, who, like a photographic image dunked in the de- veloper fluid, was beginning to fill out and take form in front of her very eyes. And his enthusiasm was catching. As a graphic designer, she shifted things around on the computer screen, enlarged, shrank, and rotated them, but here was the physical industrial pro- cess behind the very best of those images, where the alchemy from spotty model to supermodel took place. It was strangely humbling. In the last darkroom, lit by a soft pink safelight, Sam pointed to some prints, dark, shadowy images, some still wet, pegged up on wires along one wall. “Mine,” he said, quietly, unable to keep the

pride from his voice.

“You did those?” Stevie looked at Sam, wondering why she hadn’t seen his work before. “They’re great.” One print, small, with mottled edges, caught her eye. She leaned closer to it. “That is very beautiful. Although, if I may be so crude as to assume it’s meant to represent something, I have no idea what that is.”

“A dandelion clock. Very close up. Hand-tinted.” Sam affected an exaggerated expression of sheepishness. “Originally from your parents’ garden.” He unpegged the print and blew on it. “Hope you don’t mind. It was so perfect. . . . Do you remember the day I gave you those pencils? I picked it then and shoved it in my back pocket. When I got home, I found the dandelion had survived the encounter with my Levi’s, more or less. It was still this defiant round ball. I thought that was kind of cool. I liked its spirit.”

She hesitated. Sam Flowers picking dandelions? It all just

seemed too unlikely for words. And yet it also made a kind of per- fect sense. “Where is this denim-defying dandelion now?”

“Oh, in the ether somewhere. Seeding some front garden in Jeri- cho, probably.” He offered the photo in his upturned palm. “Would you like it?”

Stevie nodded hesitantly. She didn’t want to betray the fact that her mouth felt dry as a pistachio shell, her heart thumping.

Sam stared at the floor, embarrassed. “I know it’s not exactly Irv- ing Penn. I won’t be offended . . .”

“No, no. I love it.” “Then you must have it.”

As he handed her the photo, she took hold of one of its corners. For a strange intense moment, both their hands were attached and connected by the same square of photographic paper, neither of them wanting to let go. She laughed. He smiled and finally dropped his hand away, relinquishing the image. Stevie stared at the picture, wondering why this gift felt inappropriate. Her heart began to pound. “Thanks, Sam,” she managed.

Sam shuffled his feet, and coughed. “Let’s go,” he said quickly, as if eager to escape the intimacy of the room.

The door opened. An old man sporting a beanie hat, architec- tural glasses, and a crumpled black linen jacket stood in the door- way, his small, wiry frame silhouetted by the corridor’s bluish light. He didn’t smile. “So you’re here, Flowers.”

Sam stood up straighter. “Ted, this is my old friend Stevie, from London. Stevie. Ted Watton.”

“You’ve not come to take him away, have you?” asked Watton gruffly, looking Stevie up and down with unmasked irritation.

Stevie shook her head, in awe of the great man with his famous piercing eyes embedded in folds of suntanned, crinkly skin.

Sam smiled, unfazed. “I’ve just finished up. About to head out, if that’s okay?”

Watton whacked him across the back. “Say hello to foul old Lon- don for me. See you . . . ?”

“Week from Tuesday.”

“Early. It all kicks off again early.” Watton turned to Stevie, smiling for the first time, exposing small, bone-white teeth set with precise regularity in exposed gums. “He’s a good one, this one. And he belongs here, you know,” he said matter-of-factly, and left the room.

“i didn’t think you’d
want to go to
New York—The Movie
places,” Sam said, leading her into a small Cuban café on Prince Street for faultless corn on the cob and hot chocolate, then up to the new MoMA for a whirlwind tour, and then back to the West Vil- lage to one of his favorite coffee shops. Hidden behind faded dark- blue velvet curtains, the café was small and dark and hissed with coffee machines. The walls were lined with shelves of books and rows of colored liqueurs. Louche thirtysomethings hammered away on iMac laptops, solitary on small tables, nursing pint-sized cof- fees. Stevie and Sam instinctively sat at the bar, as if recognizing that they needed the interruption of the bartender to dilute the strange intensity that had begun to clot between them.

They chatted about photography, good art and bad, Thailand and the tsunami, and his cousin’s homosexual cat. They gossiped about Oxford, Toe, the failing marriage of her parents, all the peo- ple who’d populated their past, dated them, humiliated them, and made them who they were.

Two hours passed. To Stevie it seemed like five minutes. Sam told

her that no one believed his accent here in New York because few imagined black—even “pale” black—people lived in England. He was ashamed to tell her that when a black guy had asked him, “Where you from, brother?” he’d said Brixton, even though he’d been living in Borough and grew up in Oxford. How tragic was that? He told her that people stared at him and Lara on the subway. There weren’t nearly as many mixed couples here.

Stevie jolted. Lara. The first mention of Lara. She reached for an appropriate response. “Everything seems to be going swimmingly there.”

Sam shifted on his stool. “Well, yes, early days. But it’s nice. Civ- ilized.”

“Civilized! You two?”

Sam laughed and kicked his large feet against the bar at the bot- tom of his stool. “Relatively speaking.”

“Oh.” Stevie was disappointed that Sam hadn’t confided some dissatisfaction in the relationship. But it seemed that he and Lara were far better suited than even she’d imagined. She wished she could feel happier about it.

Stevie sipped her beer, wishing the subject of Lara hadn’t come up and ruined the mood, bringing her back down with a bump.

“And you?” Sam’s intense dark eyes scanned her face. “You are happy?”

“Oh, yeah. Things have really picked up. Work . . .” “I mean happy married.”

Stevie paused, prepared to lie. “Of course . . .” Then something flipped. It was impossible to be anything but herself with this man, familiar as her own brother in some ways, thrillingly alien in oth- ers, with the ready smile and the passion for pictures and the wiry hair he twiddled around his little left finger when he was thinking.

She wished that they were cocooned in the soft pink safelight of the darkroom together again. “Not terribly happy, right now. No. Since you asked.” The confidence felt like a betrayal.

“Man, I hate to think of you . . .” He put his hand on hers. It felt solid and hot. She didn’t want him to remove it.

“Shit.” He lifted his hand off hers. Stevie breathed again. “Sorry.

It’s none of my business.”

“Oh, it’s probably teething trouble, isn’t it?” she said flippantly, unnerved by his hand and jibbering nervously. “Marriages are noto- riously difficult in the first year.” She laughed. “You know us thirty- somethings. We get used to our individualistic noncommittal ways. Marriage is an adjustment.”

“But you’d lived together beforehand.”

“I know. I know.” In Sam’s presence, her defenses melted like butter on a hot bagel. “Okay, it’s not working.”

“Not working?”

“No. Hell. God. What am I saying?” Stevie felt her emotions threaten to overwhelm her. Quashing thoughts about the cash-for- baby secret, she swallowed hard, shifted on her stool, pulled herself together. How could she be so disloyal? Even if he was a lying shit, he was her husband. “Oh, you know Jez. You know what he can be like. He’s had a tough time recently.”

Sam bent toward the zinc bar top, the metal reflecting a silvery gleam to the underside of his jaw. Stevie looked down and noticed how wide and square his knees were beneath his jeans, straining against the denim. She wanted to place her palms flat against their width. In fact, she had a barely controllable urge to touch Sam, anywhere, somewhere just to feel the heat of his skin. She leaned into him slightly, encroaching the warm fuzz of his personal space. “Yeah, I know what he can be like.” Sam grinned, opened his