It’s Friday night at TGI Fridays. Alcohol is allowed during dinner as long as the jurors pay for their own drinks. The mood is celebratory. Tomorrow their families are visiting.
C-2 orders a martini. She misses her husband terribly, but she doesn’t miss helping him fill his pillbox every morning and then crawling around the kitchen floor to find the pills he has dropped. If she is honest with herself, she dreads his arrival.
After dinner, as they are smoking near the restaurant entrance in sight of the deputy, F-17 says, “You never answered me. May I come over tonight?”
“My husband will be here tomorrow,” she says.
“I’ll be gone by then.”
She could say, You knew I was married. But she loves her husband too much to conscript him into her mendacity.
“I’ll come to you,” she says.
To wait in her bed for her lover to arrive is one thing—more an acceptance than an act. To sneak out past midnight, open his door, and feel her way across the carpeting to his bed is quite another.
He is already erect.
Is this why she’s here, to remember being desired that badly? To feel her sexual power again?
An erection in an octogenarian is less a manifestation of desire than a celebration of life and modern medicine.
After sex, she can sense his need to talk, the postcoital sharing that lovers do.
“Is this the first time you’ve slept with someone since you’ve been married?” he asks. His tone isn’t flirtatious. He sincerely wants to know if he is her first affair. As she suspected from his lovemaking, he is developing a tenderness for her, and that isn’t why she’s here.
She strokes his face to put a salve on what she says next. “I don’t want to talk about my marriage, and I don’t want to know about your girlfriend.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend at the moment,” he says, but his tone is light again.
He gets it. She thinks he gets it.
To change the subject, she asks, “What age were you when you decided to cut up bodies for a living?”
“I’m not a serial killer,” he says, “I’m an anatomist.”
“Did you own a Visible Man as a boy?”
“Visible to whom?”
“A see-through man with plastic organs?”
“I didn’t want to be a doctor when I was a boy. I wanted to be a musician.”
“What instrument?”
“My voice.”
“Were you a choirboy?”
“My parents were both psychiatrists who believed that religion should be listed as a disorder in the DSM.”
“Were you talented?”
“I thought so.”
“What changed your mind?”
“Stage fright. My acne. The Talking Heads. I saw them in concert when I was fifteen.”
C-2 saw them in concert when she was thirty. She is grateful that he chose a band she has heard of. Had he chosen a band that she didn’t know, she would have been prepared to lie.
“About halfway through the concert,” F-17 continues, “Byrne began slapping his head each time he sang the refrain, same as it ever was. The knock on his skull gave his voice vibrato. It sounded as if these were his last words. I knew that no matter how much I practiced, no matter how many hours I trained, I would never be that creative, that uninhibited.”
He sings in a near whisper, “Same as it ever was, same as it ever was,” and on the third chorus he slaps his forehead.
She can’t see him do it in the dark, but she can hear how the slap changes his voice, from clarity to stupefaction, crediting the refrain with an illusion of profundity.
“That was beautiful,” she says.
“I can only perform like that because you can’t see me.”
She imagines him at fifteen, the aspiring singer in the throes of acne. A drooping lid is hardly the equivalent of erupting pustules, but she has an idea of what it cost him.
She touches his face again, reading the pitted skin like Braille. His lack of guile, and the leftover scars, and his precocious understanding of his own limitations cracks open her resolve to forbid herself feelings for him, a crack in the teacup that opens a lane to the land of the dead, according to Auden.
Saturday morning, the Prius pulls into the Econo Lodge parking lot. Her husband exits the car with a shopping bag.
He shields his eyes against the low sun to search the parking lot for her, where they had agreed to meet. C-2 remains behind the blackout drapes in her room, waiting for the elderly man with the flyaway white hair to transmogrify into her husband.
“Hey,” she calls to him from the second-story walkway, but he doesn’t appear to hear her over the interstate din. The open door of the Prius catches the sideways glare of the sun. He squints in every direction but hers until he finally spies her crossing the parking lot.
“I thought maybe I had the wrong motel,” he says, hugging her.
She walks him to the office so that he can register with the deputy.
“I have to show ID to visit my wife?” he says, signing the form.
As they pass the ice machine, he says, “Could they have chosen a more dreary motel?”
Outside F-17’s door, her husband says, “I missed you so much.”
She opens her door without a key.
“We can’t lock the door?” he says.
She starts to open the blackout drapes.
“Leave them closed,” he says.
They sit on the twin beds facing each other. The reading lamp is on. She notices a large bruise on his elbow.
“Did you fall?”
He looks at the bruise in surprise. “I must have banged my elbow during the night. Does it feel hot to you?” he asks, offering her the bruise.
She gingerly touches it. “Does it hurt?”
“You know you’re old when you look and feel like the morning after but there was no night before. I come bearing gifts,” he says.
Using his sandaled foot, he slides the shopping bag closer and hands her the first surprise, a set of white, six-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. He fishes out a week’s supply of chocolate, trail mix, and power bars, and her swimsuit, waterproof iPod and earbuds, and her AquaJogger.
Looking at her gifts, she fights the urge to confess. If she confessed, where would she position the camera? Behind her, so that only her husband’s face is in the frame? Or behind him?
They strip the bed together, the one she sleeps on, not the one she uses as a table.
They undress and get under the new sheets, but they don’t kiss. They talk. Conversation has always been their foreplay. She asks how his memoir is going.
“Remember the time in Bamiyan? You went off to photograph the cliffs where Taliban blew up the Buddhas.”
“I went off to photograph the unemployed people who had been the Buddhas’ caretakers.”
“And I went to the prison made of mud. Anyway, I ditched the warden and got lost and stumbled across a cell with a tiny hole. I looked through it and saw a young girl, maybe thirteen years old, lying in a heap facing the door but with a totally blank stare and nothing else in the cell with her but a blanket and a cot. No sink, toilet, or anything to distract her. I freaked out and got my interpreter and the warden and asked what she was in jail for. He explained that her father had brought her there because she ran away with her boyfriend and their families caught them and then they ran away again. I asked why she had no water and why she was kept so isolated—wasn’t that cruel? He said yes, he felt very bad for her, but there were no female prison guards, so they had to keep her isolated like this without much human contact until a female police officer came by twice a day. He wished they had a female prison guard to take care of her.”
“Just write it exactly as you told me,” C-2 says.
Only an hour remains of the visit. It is time to make love. The familiar domesticity takes over. Each gets up for a last urination.
They kiss and touch, but he doesn’t get hard. “I feel like I’m on the clock,” he says. “You know I want you,” he says. “I can hear people talking outside. The bed is too narrow. These sheets are too slick. I think the words ‘conjugal visit’ did me in.”
She waves goodbye to him from the second-story walkway. If she had her camera, what would she focus on? The splayed fingers flattened against the Prius’s window in a parting gesture, or the pink updrafts and mile-high purple thunderheads rumbling over the Prius with a tiny starfish in the window?
C-2 has said many forgettable things about photography during the occasional lectures she gives at art schools and universities, but she will never regret saying this: Art is a conversation.
In her twenties, when she photographed rock stars and socialites for Interview magazine, she thought the conversation was supposed to be witty, and sexy, and hilarious, and beautiful, above all else, beautiful, the kind of beauty that inspires adoration.
When she met her husband and became a photojournalist, the conversation turned to ethics, and beauty was no longer supposed to inspire love: it was an agent for goodness.
When that conversation became only righteous noise, she started photographing animals, relishing caws, hoots, and bellowing. It took a few months, but she finally learned to distinguish what the bellowing meant. Animals have their own conversation.
Lately, she has been taking pictures without her camera. Blinking instead of clicking. Why does she need to provide proof of what she sees? Lately, she has begun to suspect that the conversation—the wit and the dogma—was all in her head, like a person who talks to God and to whom God talks back.
She leans against the railing. Far from city lights, the night sky is both beautiful and sublime. During her lectures, she explains the difference between the beautiful and the sublime this way: The stars are beautiful—diamonds, twinkles, something you can wish upon. The space in between the stars is the sublime—cold, black, and infinite, something that inspires awe and fear.
She envisions her elderly husband waving goodbye from the Prius this afternoon. Does that image inspire love, something she can wish upon—or awe and fear that the most difficult part of her life is just beginning?