Extraordinary Renditions (19 page)

After dumping the dregs of her coffee into the sink—it was
still
Nanette’s turn to do the dishes—Melanie helped set up a portable portrait studio in the living room. The only natural light in the place seeped through a set of double doors that led to a small balcony facing the top floor of the building across the street. By leaning over the rail, they could see a small patch of the river and island to the left, and of course the beer sign at Eve and Adam’s. Even with the windows closed, a cold draft forced its way into the room. The sky, still a good month or two from showing any sign of blue, didn’t provide enough light, so Nanette set up two softboxes containing all but one of the special bulbs she had found in Prague at the end of a long day spent dragging an increasingly grumpy Melanie to
musty camera shops all over the city. One of them got broken, quite accidentally, during the train ride home.

Nanette went digging on her hands and knees in the hallway storage closet, cursing up a storm. She emerged with an antique wooden tripod and two white umbrellas. She placed five cameras of different manufacture and expense on the floor, then tested the room at great length with a pocket-sized light meter. She didn’t say anything, but her body language complained bitterly about the endless Budapest winter. Nan came from California originally—
Southern
California, she always clarified, as if it were a different state—and talked about moving back almost as frequently as Melanie talked about getting her hair cut. Did Melanie give
her
grief about
that?
No.

A web developer whom Nanette used to sleep with, and maybe still did, credited the Soviet system for the Hungarians’ reputation as gifted computer programmers and scientists. The government back then, this guy said, distributed very little funding to the scientific community in comparison to what it gave to the military, or even to the arts, yet it demanded results on par with the advances coming out of the United States and Japan. Those tech professionals who remained behind after the short-lived revolution of 1956 and their descendants learned to make do with substandard equipment and facilities and even to create comparable products despite the limitations. When the free markets opened up and new equipment came rolling over the Western border, the Hungarians found themselves able to use it more efficiently than their lazy, capital-fattened counterparts around the globe. That was the theory at least, and it was one Nanette co-opted for her photography. She figured that if she could make do with five months of miserable weather and poor light every year, by the time she got back to San Diego she would
understand
sunlight in a way somehow different from the local, art school-trained losers. And her approach was already beginning to pay
off. The Ernst Galléria, one of the better small museums in the city, had included a series of her platinum prints in an international group show. The sequence, “Cinders I-XIV,” titled in part after Cindy Sherman, included claustrophobic self-portraits of Nanette sitting on the toilet in a tight V-neck, with her nipples erect and panties at her ankles, pouring petrol on herself from a metal can, as if, most people thought, in preparation for setting herself on fire. A wet T-shirt contest done with gasoline. She never told the show’s curator, but once confessed to Melanie that she really did intend to immolate herself that day. To record her own death. She never explained what stopped her, the box of matches already in hand.

Nan had some emotional issues. It got to be a bit much sometimes.

The critical reception of her “Cinders” earned her a job as staff photographer for a local English-language weekly, and her work also appeared with regularity in
HVG
and other national publications. She closed the curtains again in disgust. “You know what I want?” she asked.

Melissa had heard this a hundred times before. One great photograph.

“I want to take one great photograph. Just one, that’s all. The kind of photo, like that Chinese student in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square or the colonel shooting a Vietcong prisoner in the head. The kind of photograph that can take the symbolic—you know, something universal—and make it specific enough to tell a story about one particular moment in history. Make it iconic. Close your eyes.”

The words didn’t register quickly enough: Melanie was staring into one of the light boxes, humming along with the opera in her head and growing steadily more nervous, when Nanette switched it on. Melanie yelped.

“Oh, my bad. You O.K.?” Nan asked.

“No, I’m good,” Melanie said.

Blindness took over, then panic, then the room emerged from a thick red gauze. Her headache swelled into allegro con brio and she considered going into the water closet—where she swore she could still smell gasoline—and
make herself throw up just to be done with the hangover. Even as her eyes cleared, the white after-image of the light box followed her view for several more minutes and projected itself onto everything she looked at, lending Nanette a ghostly appearance. For years afterwards, when Melanie would think of Nanette, she still pictured that glow around her.

Nan lifted a spinning saloon pianist’s stool and sat Melanie in the center of the room.

Even with her trained and perfect string-section posture, Mel’s hair fell past the wooden seat. Nan squeezed a few Polaroids first, which to Melanie weren’t any better than digital pictures, and let them collect in the camera’s mouth before they drooled onto the throw rug and formed puddles of changing color. Finishing the roll, Nan examined her compositions for a moment and, finding one or two that satisfied her, changed to the eight-by-ten. “I’ll need all my color later,” she said. “I hope black-and-white’s O.K.”

The bleak winter left bright windburns on Melanie’s complexion, which was soft and milky otherwise, except of course for the permanent bruise her violin left under her jawbone. Standing over her shoulder, Nan said something about how the contrast between her cheeks and blonde hair would come out well with a polarizer, or maybe a yellow filter. She used the tripod for the first couple, taking the traditional hands-folded portraits, Mel’s hair hanging over one shoulder. Then she shot from every possible angle: she snapped a photo, spun the stool a few degrees, snapped another, until Melanie traveled a full, woozy circle. She envisioned the freakish, pseudo-cubist collage of her own head that would result when Nanette assembled all the images, if she ever got around to it. The project required an entire roll, one Nan would need to develop carefully in the darkroom if she wanted every shot to match up right. Her sweaty, greasy-fingered editor at the newspaper would pay for the film and paper and developing fluids whether he knew it or not.

Nan unscrewed the camera from the tripod and started again with facials. She snapped them quickly, one by one, from every angle. “Hold on,” she said, leaving Melanie sitting there, then came back with a flannel sheet from the bed. Next, she opened the curtains again and used the scissors to slice a manhole-sized opening in the sheet, which she then hung over the curtain rod to allow a different, localized shape of dull light to leak through into the room. She had Melanie turn her chin back and forth rapidly until her hair fluttered around her head like in a shampoo commercial. Until she grew nauseous. More nauseous. Last night’s vodka had turned to battery acid in her stomach.

Nan made her sit perfectly still while she focused on minute details of her face. “You make a great subject,” she said. “I’d like to get a couple shots of your back.”

“Sure.” Melanie spun slowly around.

“Without your shirt.”

She didn’t stop to think about it. It was by no means the first time she had posed nude for Nanette. She peeled off her turtleneck and twisted her arms behind her back to snap off her bra. “Pants too?”

“Not unless you want.”

“I think I’ll keep them on.”

Nan plugged a fresh cartridge into the Polaroid and took more compositional studies before starting with an SLR equipped with a bulky automatic winder. She snapped the shutter, stepped back a few inches to incorporate more of Melanie in the viewfinder, listened for the whir of the winder, and squeezed again. She continued this until her back pressed against one of the CD cases. Melanie covered her breasts with two ropes of blonde hair. Nan tried to keep the mood jovial. “Life is so unfair,” she said. “Why is it again that you got such big tits and I didn’t get any?”

“It’s just blubber,” Melanie said, swearing to herself that this year, when it warmed up, would be the one in which when she finally got in shape.

Nanette reattached the eight-by-ten to the tripod and picked up another camera. “There’s a couple color shots left in here.” Losing herself in the gentle clicking of the shutter and the low, electric hum of the winder’s toccata-like rhythm, she glided around the room, firing at Melanie again and again, stopping only once to re-check her light meter and reload with more black-and-white. Melanie contorted herself into every conceivable pose, giggling and spinning in obedience with her photographer’s direction, trying to act natural. Whatever that meant. Their session continued for another twenty minutes before she grew cold in her fingers and nipples, even under the lights. She asked for permission to get dressed and pulled on her shirt again while Nanette put her stuff away. She never got around to using the Holga, which was by far the coolest camera in her roommate’s vast arsenal.

“So where’s this salon?” she asked, buttoning her shirt.

“Just up at the körút. What’s that hotel right before Nyugati—the Hungotel?”

“With the good cukrászda? That’s the Budapest Suites.”

“Right. They have a salon.
Very
expensive.”

“Not like I get my hair cut every day.”

“True enough, baby. They’re probably closed today, but if Judit’s there you can just walk in. Tell her you’re a friend of mine. I did some headshots for them that that fucking bitch still hasn’t paid me for.”

She will need to sneak over there right away. “What time you want to meet up later?”

“I have to shoot the prime minister today at the National Museum, or else you know I’d be at your concert.”

Melanie couldn’t remember inviting her. “You can catch it when it moves to the opera house,” she said. “One of the singers in particular is amazing.”

“And the conductor’s supposed to be there?”

“The composer, yeah. Lajos Harkályi. I hope the conductor shows up too, though.”

“Fuck you.”

“I can meet you downstairs at five? Six?”

“Six sounds right. After the speeches there’ll be parades and shit. I’ll beep you if anything changes.”

Melanie watched Nanette repack the rest of her equipment. Then they bundled up and left together, circling the landing to the top of the stairs. They didn’t even bother to try the elevator. Stepping outside felt like walking into a city-sized meat locker. Smelled just as bad too.

“Looks like snow.”

“It’s too cold to snow,” Nanette said, “but at least all the dog shit has frozen.”

They walked up to the körút and took the tram one stop to Nyugati. The platform where they got off sat on an island in the middle of the four-lane road, between the glass-and-iron face of the station on one side and the shiny exterior of a huge communist-era department store on the other. A flight of stairs led to the underpass built beneath the körút and the train station. It reverberated with music and, already, drunken laughter and singing. Everyone wore red, white, and green ribbons. Their favorite of the many colorful local bums, the Fisher King, shuffled among the various street musicians collecting coins from passersby, his Burger King crown and filthy beard likewise decorated for the holiday. Nanette kissed Melanie good-bye and took the escalator farther down into the stinking bowels of the city, where she could jump on the blue line. Mel backtracked to the Budapest Suites. It was a relief to be on her own for a few hours. Away from Nan. The sidewalk seethed with revelers swinging plastic jugs of homemade wine and celebrating Hungary’s almost-was independence.

The Budapest Suites stood out even amid the endless series of gorgeous art nouveau buildings that lined the körút. Each possessed a unique charm and state of disrepair. Melanie’s muscles grew tense as she approached the salon, which turned out to be open despite the holiday. Great news. Now fewer and fewer businesses closed for the national holidays; everything was open today.

A separate entrance for the salon steered people away from the lobby of the hotel, which appeared busy. From cold or worry, Melanie’s hands shook as she pushed through the revolving door. She forgot, however briefly, about her burning stage fright. She wanted to remember to pick up some pastries from the good cukrászda upstairs on her way out.

The building’s heat, cranked all the way up, enveloped her. Sweat licked coolly at the back of her neck and trickled down inside her shirt and cashmere sweater. An acute feeling of exposure lingered on her body from the photo session and she felt embarrassed, revealed in some way to the entire salon. The place buzzed with life and gossip and an annoying, standard-issue techno beat she believed undeserving of the term “music.”

A half dozen people in the reception area smoked English cigarettes and dropped the ashes into their own and others’ glasses of sparkling wine. Whatever excitement she felt about her pending new look faded in a spritz of fruit-scented hairspray. Everyone else looked like models, but she was chubby and gross. As an expat, she had grown accustomed to the locals’ sneers and snide looks—not everyone appreciated the presence of such a large and affluent foreign population. In the eyes of those present, she was no doubt contributing to the stereotype of the ugly American. The disdain was palpable.

“Do you speak English?” she asked the woman behind the desk. The receptionist’s low-cut T-shirt revealed enough of her huge breasts for
Melanie to admire the tanning-bed-induced, baked-potato texture of her skin.

“Yes,” she said, exhaling loudly.

“Are you Judit?”

The receptionist’s lipstick parted like a pouty vermilion sea. “Judit, uhn, is very busy. Do you have an appointment?”