The Four Sides of a Triangle: Proof
A TO B
Yesterday
I took your picture once while you were in the bathtub having tea. You held the cup to your lips, the saucer beneath the cup to catch any drips. Your hair was wet, combed back on your head. Your breasts floated on the surface of the water. I had a slide made, and, yesterday, with you gone and me alone in this rented apartment, I taped it up in the middle of a big picture window above my desk, a chip of stained glass. I look out that window, out through you looking up at me in the steam taking your picture. Each night, with the lights out in my apartment, I watched through her window, a woman in the building across the street step from her shower and reach first for a towel to wrap around her wet hair.
B TO A
Not That Long Before
You took my picture as the baby crowned, his hair matted and matte black, a shade darker than my own. His head pulsed out when I pushed, slid back in after. It was months later you developed that unfinished roll and I found those pictures with the other pictures. There was the picture of me, of the dark dome of my baby's head in the oval frame of my stretched labia. It had been the next-to-last one that came back in a pack which contained the series of silhouettes of me a few nights before the night my water broke. I wanted some evidence of how I looked, how dark my nipples had become, how rich and thick my hair. With a wet finger I made myself hard. I teased out a strand of my hair. I pointed to that dark line which had developed, dissecting my belly, running from between my breasts around and down, dark against my skin as if someone had drawn it with a crayon or lipstick and that disappeared almost immediately, along with everything else, after.
A TO C
About the Same Time
I take your picture as you make yourself come, the blank print snapping from the camera. You take it from me as you roll over. As I slide into you, you hold still, meeting me with a little grunt I force out of you. All the time you are watching the print develop. It begins with the small black speck of your hair, your hand growing from it, your arm spreading up your body between your breasts and leading to your taut neck and sharp chin, the wet sheen of your parted lips, your open and unfocused eyes.
A TO B
Years Before
We all had our picture taken that weekend, the four of us, using a one-hundred-year-old camera. We dressed up in antique clothes — hats with feathers, high collars with floppy bow ties, lots of buttons. The single lens on the camera had been replaced by one with four apertures, and, afterward, we watched as the plate of tin was snipped into four smaller squares. The etched image on each was the same, the four of us in disguise, posed and stiff, holding our breaths, trying not to blink, not moving for a minute, but each was also minutely different because of the slight distance between each lens that focused this one long exposure. Later, in our room, we listened to them in theirs make love, the thin motel walls separating the headboard of our bed from the headboard of theirs. I had brought magazines with pictures because I thought it would help, but hearing them that way had the opposite effect of what I had hoped. You got dressed, embarrassed, covering your flushed skin. You disappeared into the bathroom to pull your hair back into place. I looked at our two metal squares. I looked at her, and I looked at her. Back and forth, back and forth, trying to catch the slight shift in the angle of sight, the four lines of vision looking back at the camera then and, now, at me seeing this seeing.
FAQs
FLIGHT LEADER
So, yesterday I am on the phone with a group of students from Mary Washington College who are asking me questions about writing, an interview for a new magazine they are starting called Pendulum, and there is trouble with the connection they are trying to use — they are trying to use Skype for the first time — and each time they connect they sound like the sound of ripping cloth or more exactly muffled ripping cloth, and then a recorded voice with a British accent comes on and says this phone call is being recorded and then the call is cut off, and then they call me back several times until they connect, and then they ask me the first question which is a question I get often when I do interviews which is how do you find the time to write? — or maybe something like, do you need time to write? — and I am getting ready to answer my frequently answered answer when this ripping sound comes tearing into the house as if the ripping sound in the phone has leaked out and been amplified on steroids, and I look up and see the silhouette of a jet aircraft cut through the quadrant of mullions of the window I am sitting across from, streaking through the graphed paper of the tree branches, overwhelming the static of the phone connection, and I ask them, did you hear that? and they all — it is a conference call, and I think there are four of them, but I can't be sure — answer, yes, and I tell them the Blue Angels are in town, and that was a Blue Angel practicing for the air show that will take place tomorrow over at the airfield right across the river from my house.
WING
Outside now, a second jet, dark blue and close enough to the ground I can see the gold trim and the gold number 2 in Helvetica painted on the outside port surface of the port vertical stabilizer, and the jet is so close to the ground (I have gone outside now, and I don't think the voices on the phone know I have, but they can't help but hear the screaming of the jets as they vector back and forth over the neighborhood doing a maneuver they call an opposing knife's edge) that I can see the rudder flexing, and the control surface that is the whole horizontal stabilizer digs into the air, ricocheting the jet up up up, and then the afterburners kick on and through that roar I hear the second question which is what is the difference between fact and fiction? and I am preparing to answer that one with my frequently answered answer about how a fact is a thing done and a fiction is a thing made so that even the most real thing, after it is done, has no reality, and how even the most made-up thing, when it is made up, has a reality — the reality of a book, say, of words on paper, a transcript you can hold, manipulate — when the two jets meeting at the apex of the loop they have both been pulling begin to emit a dark blue smoke that I will learn later is a paraffin-based solid vaporized by the flame in the engines, and the punctuation of the smoke, a kind of cursive wave, is already drifting to the north as the planes (one tucked under the wing of the other) disappear over the horizon toward Mississippi.
FAT ALBERT
The sound, too, of the two jets is drifting away, though it seems (when you do hear anything) the sound is always trailing way behind the jet that is actually making the sound, or, even stranger, the echoes from some other run-by are running ahead of the jet, reverberating, coming to meet the jet as it dives toward the ground, and the sound is bouncing off the ground up to meet it, a kind of stutter or shriek, and the students on the phone ask me if I think teaching has affected my writing, and they can actually hear through the phone the sound of the jets bouncing off the sky and the ground and the trees and the river and the houses, and I give them an answer about how writing isn't like the other subjects of the university, how it is more like a gift that runs through us all, both students and teachers, that what is received must be given away, that art is erotic property, property that stays in motion when, suddenly, a huge blue C-130 cargo airplane, the one the Blue Angels named Fat Albert, rises up behind my house, as if it were a big balloon floating up, almost nicking the top of the longleaf pines in my neighbor's backyard, its four turboprops digging into the humid air as it lumbers so slowly; it is so slow, especially after the blinking speed of the jets, that it doesn't seem to have enough oomph to remain aloft, always already about to fall, as it is more like a blimp, a zeppelin, wallowing now right overhead as it rolls port, showing me its belly like a whale sounding and stalling, sliding backward, it seems, but then splashing forward, a graceful awkwardness out of the water, over the golf course, its overstuffed rounded and rounding organic shadow casting on the organic cutouts of the greens and bunkers and ponds, and the plane shakes, straining to find an inch of lift, and hunkering down to gain momentum, and then seeming to levitate, wagging its tail and launching, like a navy-blue cetaceous cumulus cloud, shading, now blotting out the bloated sun.