The First Time (6 page)

“I’m really so sorry,” Mattie repeated, and promptly burst into tears.

“Mattie?” Roy Crawford’s gray eyes shifted warily from side to side, his lips pursing, relaxing, then pursing again as he reached for Mattie, gathered her now-shaking body into his arms. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

“I’m so sorry,” Mattie repeated again, unable to say anything else. What was happening to her? First the laughter in the courthouse, and now tears on the steps of Chicago’s famed Art Institute. Maybe it was environmental, some insidious form of lead poisoning. Maybe she was allergic to majestic old buildings. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to leave the comfort and security of Roy Crawford’s arms. It had been a long time since someone had held her with such overt tenderness. Even when she and Jake made love, and their lovemaking had remained surprisingly passionate throughout the years, it was this tenderness that was lacking. She realized now just how much she’d missed it. How much she’d missed. “I’m so sorry.”

Roy Crawford pulled back, though not away, his strong hands still resting on her upper arms, his wide fingers kneading the flesh beneath her coat. “What can I do?”

Poor guy, Mattie thought. He didn’t do anything, and yet he looks so guilty, as if he were used to making women cry and ready to assume full responsibility, regardless of his innocence. Mattie wondered for a moment whether this was the way all men felt, if they went through life afraid of the power of a woman’s tears. “Give me a minute. I’ll be fine.” Mattie offered
Roy Crawford what she hoped was her most reassuring smile. But she felt her lips wobbling all over her chin and tasted salty tears burrowing between tightly clenched teeth, and Roy Crawford looked anything but reassured. In fact, he looked terrified.

Who could blame him? He thought he was meeting with his art dealer to view a photography exhibition, and what did he meet up with instead? Every man’s worst nightmare—a hysterical woman carrying on in a public place! No wonder Roy Crawford looked as if he wished the earth would open up and swallow him whole.

Still, the look of discomfort on Roy Crawford’s face was nothing in comparison to the look of sheer horror that had overtaken her husband’s entire being during her earlier outburst in court. What he must have thought! What he must be thinking now! He’d never forgive her, that much was certain. Her marriage was over, and it had ended not with accusations and recriminations but with laughter.

Mattie had fled the courthouse, hooting with laughter as she ran along California Avenue between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Streets, not the best area in the city, she knew, noticing a drunk zigzagging across the street to avoid her. Even the winos want to get away from me, she’d thought, laughing louder, hearing footsteps and looking behind her, hoping to see Jake, instead seeing two black men with knitted wool caps pulled down around their ears, who looked the other way as they hurried past.

Her car, a white Intrepid in need of a wash, was parked at an expired meter two blocks from the courthouse.
Mattie had fumbled in her purse for her keys, found them, dropped them to the sidewalk, retrieved them, dropped them again. Securing them tightly between her fingers, she’d tried repeatedly to open her car door. But the key kept turning over in her fingers, and the door remained stubbornly closed. “I must be having a stroke,” she’d announced to the row of decaying small buildings beside her. “That’s it. I’m having a stroke.”

More likely a nervous breakdown, Mattie decided. How else to explain this outrageous behavior? How else to explain her complete and utter lack of control?

The key suddenly slid into the car door. Mattie had taken a deep breath, then another, shaking her fingers, wriggling her toes inside her black suede pumps. Everything seemed to be working okay. And she’d stopped laughing, she noted gratefully, sliding behind the wheel and checking her reflection in the rearview mirror, using her car phone to call Roy Crawford, to ask if they could change the time of their meeting, possibly view the exhibition early, then discuss possible purchases afterward at lunch, her treat.

Some treat, Mattie thought now, wiping away the last of her tears, struggling for at least a semblance of control. Why hadn’t Jake followed her? Surely he had to have realized that something was wrong. Surely he had to know that her outburst hadn’t been designed to sabotage him. Although how could he know that when she wasn’t sure of it herself?

“Think you’re okay now?” Roy Crawford was asking, his eyes pleading for a simple yes.

“I’m fine,” Mattie told him, obligingly. “Thank you.”

“We could do this another time.”

“No, really, I’m fine.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” This time Roy Crawford’s eyes begged for a simple no.

“I don’t think so.” Mattie took a deep breath, watched Roy Crawford do the same. He has a very big head, she thought absently. “Shall we go inside?”

Minutes later, they were standing in front of a naked woman, artfully angled around an antiquated wash-stand so that only her buttocks and the curve of her left breast were exposed to the camera’s prying eye.

“Willy Ronis is a member of the famous triumvirate of French photographers,” Mattie was explaining in her best professional voice, trying to keep her mind in the present tense, her trained eye on the stunning display of black-and-white photographs that lined the walls of one of the institute’s more intimate downstairs rooms.

When we mix black and white together
, she heard Jake interrupt,
we get gray. And different shades of gray at that
.

Go away, Jake, Mattie instructed silently. I’ll see you in court, she thought, and almost laughed, biting down hard on her bottom lip to ensure her silence. “The other two members of the group, of course, are Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau,” Mattie continued when she thought it was safe. “This particular picture, entitled
Nu provencal
, is probably Ronis’s most popular and widely exhibited photograph.”

So let’s take a few minutes and examine the varying shades of gray
.

Let’s not, Mattie thought. “An interest in the nude
female form is a distinguishing feature of Ronis’s work,” she said.

“Is there some reason you’re shouting?” Roy Crawford interrupted.

“Was I shouting?”

“Just a little. Nothing to get upset about,” he added quickly.

Mattie shook her head in an effort to rid herself of her husband’s voice once and for all. “Sorry.”

“Please don’t apologize,” Roy said, obviously frightened she was going to start crying again. Then he smiled, a big loopy grin that went perfectly with his big head, and Mattie understood in that instant why women of all ages found him so attractive. Part rogue, part little boy—a deadly combination.

“I’ve always wanted to go to France,” Mattie said, lowering her voice and concentrating on the photographs, trying to assure herself she was capable of normal, adult conversation, despite the fact she was undoubtedly in the middle of a total nervous collapse.

“You’ve never been?”

“Not yet.”

“I would have thought someone of your background and interests would have been to France long ago.”

“One day,” Mattie said, thinking of the many times she’d tried to sell Jake on the idea of a Paris vacation, and of his persistent refusals. Not enough time, he’d said, when what he really meant was too much time. Too much time to spend alone together. Not enough love. Mattie made a mental note to call her travel agent when she got home. She hadn’t gone to Paris for her honeymoon. Maybe she’d go there for her divorce.
“Anyway,” she continued, the word stabbing at the air, startling them both, “this photograph is of Ronis’s wife in their summer cottage.”

“It’s very erotic,” Roy commented. “Don’t you think?”

“I think what makes it so sensual,” Mattie agreed, “is the almost tangible depiction of the atmosphere—you can actually feel the warmth of the sun coming in the open window, smell the air, feel the texture of the old stone floor. The nudity is part of the eroticism, but only part of it.”

“Makes you want to take off your clothes and jump right in the picture with her.”

“An interesting idea,” Mattie said, trying not to picture Roy Crawford naked, as she led her client toward another group of photographs—two men sleeping on a park bench, workers on strike relaxing on a Paris street, carpenters at work in the French countryside. “There’s an innocence to these early pictures,” Mattie said, the disquieting thought suddenly occurring to her that Roy Crawford might be flirting with her, “that’s missing from most of his later photographs. While his sympathy with the working class remains a hallmark of his work, there’s more tension in the pictures Ronis took after World War II. Like this one,” she said, directing Roy Crawford to a later photo entitled
Christmas
, wherein a man, a haunted expression on his solemn face, stood alone amid a crowd of people outside a Paris department store. “There isn’t the same connection between people,” Mattie explained, “and that distance often becomes the subject of the photograph. Did that make any sense?”

“There’s a distance between people,” Roy reiterated. “Makes sense to me.”

Mattie nodded. Me too, she thought, as they studied these later photographs for several minutes in silence. She felt Roy’s arm brush against the side of her own, waited for it to withdraw, was strangely pleased when it didn’t. Maybe not so much distance after all, she thought.

“I prefer these.”

Mattie felt Roy Crawford pulling away from her side, like a Band-Aid being slowly ripped from a still-fresh wound. He returned to the earlier nudes, gazing intently at the body of a young woman slouched provocatively on a chair, her head and neck just outside the camera’s range, one breast exposed, her pronounced triangle of pubic hair the focal point of the picture, her long bare legs stretching toward the camera. A man’s clothed leg appeared slyly in the left corner of the frame.

“The composition of this photograph is especially interesting,” Mattie began. “And, of course, the juxtaposition of the different textures—the wood, the stone—”

“The bare flesh.”

“The bare flesh,” Mattie repeated.
Was
he flirting with her?

“The simple things in life,” Roy Crawford said.

Things are rarely as simple as they sound
, Mattie heard her husband say.
And we all know that
.

“Let’s have a look in here.” Mattie led Roy Crawford into a second set of rooms.

“What do we have here?”

“Danny Lyon,” Mattie told him, resuming her most professional voice. “Probably one of the most influential photographers in America today. As you can see, he’s a very different kind of photographer from Willy Ronis, although he does share Ronis’s interest in everyday people and current events. These are photographs he took of the burgeoning civil rights movement between 1962 and 1964, after he left our very own University of Chicago to hitchhike south and become the first staff photographer for SNCC, which you may remember stands for—”

“Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Yes, I remember it well. I was fourteen years old at the time. And you weren’t even a twinkle in your father’s eye.”

A twinkle he extinguished when he left, Mattie thought. “Actually, I was born in 1962,” she said. He had to be flirting with her.

“Which makes you—”

“About twice as old as your current girlfriend.” Mattie quickly motioned toward the first grouping of photographs, Roy Crawford’s easy laughter trailing after her. “So, what do you think? Anything catch your eye?”

“Many things,” Roy Crawford said, ignoring the photographs, looking directly at Mattie.

“Are you flirting with me?” Mattie asked with a directness that surprised both of them.

“I believe I am.” Roy Crawford smiled that big loopy grin.

“I’m a married woman.” Mattie tapped at the thin gold band on the appropriate finger of her left hand.

“Your point being?”

Mattie smiled, realized she was enjoying herself rather more than she should. “Roy,” she began, a pesky smile threatening to destroy the intended seriousness of her tone, “you’ve been my client now for how many years—five, six?”

“Longer than my last two marriages combined,” he agreed.

“And during those years, I’ve furnished your various homes and offices with art.”

“You’ve brought culture and good taste to my boorish existence,” Roy Crawford conceded gallantly.

“And in all that time, you’ve never hit on me.”

“I guess that’s right.”

“So, why now?”

Roy Crawford looked confused. His eyebrows, black as opposed to gray, bunched together at the top of his nose, creating one long bushy line.

“What’s different?” Mattie pressed.

“You’re different.”

“I’m different?”

“There’s something different about you,” Roy repeated.

“You think that just because I fell apart earlier, I might be easy prey?”

“I was hoping.”

Mattie found herself laughing out loud. It scared her, forced her to strangle the sound in her throat before she could hear it again. So now I’m afraid of my own laughter, Mattie thought, swallowing hard. “Maybe we’ve seen enough photographs for one day.”

“Time for lunch?”

Mattie twisted her wedding ring until the skin around it grew sore. It would be so easy, she thought, picturing Roy Crawford’s big head between her slim thighs. What was she worrying about? Her husband was cheating on her, wasn’t he? And her marriage was over, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

“Would you mind terribly if we postponed our lunch till another day?” she heard herself ask, dropping her hands to her sides.

In response, Roy Crawford immediately lifted his hands into the air, as if one act were predicated on the other. “Your call,” he said easily.

“I’ll make it up to you,” Mattie told him minutes later, waving good-bye on the front steps.

“I’m counting on it,” he called after her.

That was really smart, Mattie thought, locating her car in the parking lot around the corner from the gallery, climbing inside. And professional. Very professional. Probably she’d never hear from Roy Crawford again, although even as the thought was crossing her mind, it was being replaced by something else, the sight of her naked body slouching provocatively on a chair, Roy Crawford’s shoe protruding slyly into the corner of her imagination. “God, you’re a sick person,” Mattie said, banishing the troubling image with a determined shake of her head.