I shut the door behind me as carefully as I could, which wasn’t carefully enough, because a whole pack of crazed dogs came pouring down the stairs, barking like wild animals. Cass’s house smelled like patchouli incense and cigarette smoke, and was so bright it seemed like her whole ceiling was made of glass.
“It’s you,” she said from the top of stairs. “I thought maybe it was a serial killer.”
“Then you should lock your doors,” I said.
Cass shrugged. “You don’t have to pay off your debts if you’re murdered. Or worry about really anything anymore.”
If a serial killer did come, they’d have very little resistance from her dogs, who were excitedly rubbing their faces against my legs and jumping up to lick my face.
“Come upstairs if and when you succeed in fighting them off,” Cass called, and turned to go. She wore a long black hooded gown, something I am sure sold for thousands of dollars and was gifted to her for free. Cass treated it with utter carelessness, as evidenced by the stains on the wrists from her photo chemicals.
I didn’t know why I’d come. It wasn’t like Cass could help me through the trauma of suddenly being able to see another world. Or, worse, suddenly discovering that I was way more messed up in the head than I had previously believed.
But if there was anywhere I could go to get out from under the weight of all that, to feel better about humanity, to feel less helpless about swastika graffiti and Solomon’s madness, it was here.
Once upon a time, and for many years, Cass had been the editor in chief of Strut magazine, which for most of the seventies made Vogue look like Highlights. The most artistic and innovative photography; the most edgy-looking and diverse models. Vogue didn’t put a Black woman on the cover until 1974, but in 1972, Strut did a whole issue featuring exclusively Black models and designers. Every photographer and designer and model and celebrity were dying to be in its pages, but Cass had the final call, and if she didn’t think you were It, she couldn’t be convinced by fame or love or money.
Before that, she had been the assistant to—and protégée of—my favorite photographer, Diane Arbus. Somewhere along the line Cass’d gotten obscenely rich—maybe through marriage, maybe through savvy real estate investments—and bought this huge house far away from New York City. She was our town’s only Recluse, which is to say, the only person with enough money to be listed separately from all the other shut-ins, who are Just Crazy.
“Coffee in the kitchen,” she called from upstairs. So I headed that way.
When I was fourteen, and deeply obsessed with Diane Arbus, I saw Cass mentioned in a footnote in an Arbus biography. I knew the name, from hearing my parents talk—Cass was the closest thing Hudson had to a celebrity. I rode my bike to her house and went up to the door and knocked. She was pretty impressed by my fourteen-year-old chutzpah, and the camera around my neck (a battered barely working vintage Leica I’d bought cheap online), and she took me on a tour of her house. Her walls were covered in exquisite, priceless framed photographs by the greatest artists of a century and a half, carelessly hung in chaotic jumbles. Haunting sculptures crowded shelves and tables. She also agreed to look at my photos, if I brought some back, and give me her honest—brutal—opinions. That was the beginning of our awkward awesome relationship.
I poured myself a cup of (cold) coffee and went up to see her. Her work desk was heaped with old photos and she was inspecting them with all the intensity of someone who still had a job. I picked up a photograph and then immediately dropped it. An Avedon; I could tell at once, from his signature minimalism and the almost-invisible expression on the model’s face. I felt like I’d just committed a grave sin. Like accidentally getting my greasy dirty fingerprints on a Rembrandt.
“Calm down,” she said. “He’s dead; he can’t yell at you. Although he definitely would, if he saw that.” She tsked. “Such a little bastard.” She shuffled pictures from one pile to another. I noticed that she was wearing thin white gloves. “So, Ash, how is your project coming? What have you figured out?”
“I’m stumped,” I said. “I want to create something that means something. Tells a story that needs to be told. If I’m going to get into a decent art school—and get the kind of scholarship I’d need to actually be able to go there—I need to create something . . . important.”
I’d stopped at home, after school, to develop the pictures I’d taken and round up a bunch of other recent prints. I handed them to her, nervous as hell, the same as always.
“This is shit,” she said of the first one, a photo of Jewel.
“What’s wrong with it?” Jewel was smiling, in her living room. Hard focus on her, background blurry. Nothing special, but I hadn’t thought it was shit.
“There’s nothing there. You can’t see that?”
Now that she said it, I saw it. And I cringed as she shuffled through the next ten images, saying Shit for each one.
“I think they’re very competent,” I said, struggling to keep my voice from breaking. I worshipped Cass, and she was forever putting my fondness for her to the test.
“Precisely!” she said, and stabbed one finger at me, like I’d fallen into the trap she’d set for me. “Lovely. Well composed. Competent.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Competence is the enemy of genius,” she said, lighting another cigarette. Dogs barked in the hallway. “You can capture reality. Bravo! That’s the easy part. You need to go deeper. You need to capture something else.”
She stared at a photo of a handsome boy in a T-shirt. “This one is a tiny bit interesting. There’s something naked in his expression. A hunger. A desperation. Very small. I don’t think you noticed it yourself.”
I hadn’t noticed it.
“I totally noticed it,” I said.
Connor. Solomon’s stepbrother. Son of Mr. Barrett, the vice principal and football coach of Hudson High School.
“Is that your boyfriend?”
“Not really. Just . . .”
“Someone you’re fucking,” she said.
I nearly swallowed my tongue. “You know that from looking at the photo?”
She shrugged. “I know it from what you just said. But yes, the photo made me think that. At any rate. I don’t believe you saw it, because if you saw it, you would have dug it out of him. Exposed it. That expression, that thing he’s hiding. That’s what photographers do.”
I wondered how I would have done that. What could I have said, or done, to coax it out of him, the thing he was trying to hide from me?
Photographing Connor, I had gotten stuck on his handsome face, on how he looked like a younger, softer version of his father. How to get past that? Beneath the surface? Sometimes Cass said things that filled me up with excitement and confidence, tips and insights that opened doors and made me feel like I could do anything, and sometimes she said things that made me feel like the most talentless hack in the entire world.
“Now this!” she said, startling me back to reality. “This is something special.”
It was the girl from that morning. The trailer park girl in the hallway, moments before all hell broke loose.
No swirling ink clouds. No monsters. What I had seen through the lens, it didn’t come through in the final image.
“Who is she?”
“No idea,” I said.
“Well. You’ve come very close, with this one. Her face is a marvel. You can see how much she’s been through.”
“So what’s missing?”
“Her smile. It’s practiced.”
“I asked her permission before I took it. So, she smiled. You always told me it’s wrong to take pictures without someone’s consent.”
“You could have paused, for a second. Two, three, maybe five. Wait for her smile to falter just the slightest bit. You could have taken one right away, and when she heard the click, she would have dropped the smile, and you could have taken a second one that she wasn’t expecting.”
I looked out the window and across the street, to the abandoned factories with brontosauruses spray-painted onto their brick walls. Past that were the cow fields. The air smelled like dung.
“Seems shady to me,” I said. “Like I’m trying to trick people.”
“You’re a photographer, not a friend. Being an artist sometimes means breaking the rules of civilized human behavior. Do you have the courage to do that?”
I nodded, but I wasn’t sure if I did. And Cass’s words had reminded me that I hadn’t been a very good friend.
Solomon. He had been hiding from the world. From what was wrong with him. I’d been letting him, because I was too frightened to go where he needed me to go. It wasn’t enough to bring him a vanilla Coke once in a while, and let him talk to me for an hour about whatever cartoon he was obsessed with that week. If I was going to help him, I had to follow him into whatever weird world he was living in lately.
And then another thought occurred. Maybe I could get the honesty that Cass wanted. Maybe I could get to the soul of my subject—if that subject was Solomon.
But first, I’d have to find him.