I put one of Joan's negatives into my enlarger, projected her image onto the white surface of the easel and, with the aid of a powerful magnifier, brought her smiling face into tack-sharp focus. There were a few frown folds between her eyebrows. Many lines radiated fan-like from the corners of her eyes. A blemish here, a blemish there. The hint of bags under her eyes. And the slight but noticeable sag of a wattle under her chin.
The lens of my Bronica was precise, literal, unforgiving. And if I were as passive/aggressive as she accused me of being, I'd print these photographic images straight and show her as the aging woman she actually was. But instead I slid a softening filter into the holder under the enlarger's lens, and in an instant all her physical imperfections disappeared into a gentle romantic mist.
I did the same to the rest of the others she'd selected. Then, as they rolled around on the drum of my dryer, I went to my briefcase and got a photo I'd borrowed from her earlier, and had forgotten about in my nervous anticipation of our meeting with her beloved Victor.
In the picture Joan plays her cello with a slight devilish grin. Her friend Lucy, with a similar look of amusement, plays the violin. Both are as naked as they day they were born. In the background are heavy dark purple draperies flanking a large window overlooking a lush garden. Their chrome plated stands gleam; the yellow covers of the sheet music says BACH. Joan's hair falls down in curls on her shoulders, and her pale skin is flawless, smooth, luminescent. Her breasts are firm with upward pointed rosy nipples, and of course those lovely orbs ride much higher up than they do now.
I'd asked her if I could borrow it. "Why?" she wanted to know. I said it was such a beautiful and evocative image that I just had to make a copy for myself. And I could make additional copies for her, if she wished. Oh, yes, she said. That would be great. Another nice post-Christmas gift for her various friends.
It didn't take long for me to make a copy negative. Again I framed her image on my easel. My God, she was a stunning beauty 25 years ago! I wondered how that boyfriend of hers kept the camera steady during that shoot.
* * *
Joan asked me what we should tell Victor was our purpose in meeting him as a couple. "Why not just tell him the truth?" I said. "Which is that we feel a need to demystify him, which by the way is a most excellent word, that fits perfectly in this situation. And if wants to know why we need to do this, we could just smile and say: 'Guess!'"
But then I said, "Wait. Something about that isn't quite right. I'm not going to open up to a man I've never met. And besides, I very well might immediately perceive him to be a charlatan."
I could feel the heat of her anger coming through the phone lines. "I've known Victor a long time," she said, "and he's helped me a great deal, and I can assure you, James, he is not a charlatan."
"But you know that Rasputin, after all, was a holy healer in the eyes of Czar Nicholas and Alexandra, but to the rest of the world…"
"Stop it," she said.
"All right."
At that moment I was suddenly seized by...what? A very peculiar sensation of not liking her very much. I saw her as cold, and selfish, wholly self-absorbed. Almost pathologically Narcissistic. Look at all those pictures of herself she'd asked me to print. She's eager to pass them out to her depressed mother, and also to a multitude of her close personal friends, and I don't doubt precious Victor is among them. The only thing on her mind is the zealous and exclusive pursuit of her own self interest. Without any awareness of the impact her behavior has on others. Me in particular.
But then I thought, hold it. She's not entirely unaware. She appears to be genuinely struggling with this crazy relationship of ours. Maybe what seems like Narcissism might simply be what happens to a woman who has never been married, who has lived alone for virtually all of her life. She simply has not had the experience of a sustained involvement with another person. Plus there's the thing about her father's expectations…
Which was touched upon peripherally just the other day. She announced, calmly and clinically, that she was disturbed by my reading aloud some poems of T.S. Eliot to her the night before.
"Why?"
"Because as you were reading I could clearly see how much you were truly into that poetry, so utterly swept along by it, just like when you listen to that Beethoven of yours."
"So?"
"So it deeply disturbs me that I just don't get it like you do. To me they are just words."
Just words!
There was more. She'd told me about her dream. An extremely vivid one. They'd arrested her, put her in cuffs, shoved her into the back seat of a squad car. The charge? She'd murdered an innocent dachshund. Yes, a cute little dog. Why, she wondered, were they all so upset about it? It wasn't a human, after all, but merely an animal.
"Of course you realize the dog resembles a sausage, or shall we say, a phallic symbol," I said, playfully. "And your killing it is a symbolic castration."
"Oh, I see. Now you think I'm a castrating bitch."
"No, no, no. You're the one who dreamed that you were accused of being a castrating bitch. The dream is yours, not mine."
