But she did not answer him. She shrugged, considering a minute. She could have said that photographing weddings was not the easy diversionary activity that he supposed. You were part shrink, part philosopher, part stand-up comic. At weddings you moved snooty great-aunts shoulder to shoulder with skeptical children from the first marriage and linked them for all time in one shot. You tried to subtly communicate in any way you could that there was a sure future, that this was the beginning of a trip that would be sunny, a send-off for people who for one day, at least, had the countenance of angels. You assured the mother of the bride that her daughter’s beauty was due to her; you pulled the tick off the top of the dog’s head without comment; you piled napkins in puddles of champagne on the furniture. You tossed rice if you had a free hand and a free minute, danced one dance if asked, and won their hearts by taking picture after picture and by being the last to leave. Then you went away with memories of the day that would be larger than life because you had a machine that could do the enlarging, smiling with the assurance that you had zoomed in on details people were too preoccupied, or too nervous, to notice.
Would he understand if she made an analogy?
She told him that after the pictures were taken they were pieces of a puzzle. That in the darkroom they would float for a while, like a rose petal that had fallen into a glass of champagne.
She looked at a spot on the table where no glass was placed. He looked at the same spot.
They were images ruffled by currents, she said. Those slips of paper in the developing fluid.
“Images ruffled by currents,” he said slowly.
Whatever mood he had meant to establish, she had broken it. She looked at the tabletop, secretly proud of herself. Then she looked up and gave him a smile as lovely as she could manage, being sure that it was still tinged with regret.
Haveabud knew that his momentum had been interfered with, but he was really quite captivated with what she was saying. If she could say that when she was at his side — when there were people there who mattered — he felt sure that they would be on Easy Street.
Though any day without his mother, and before he went home to his third wife, was relatively easy.
Such a pretty girl, he thought.
She thought: This man is going to be no problem. I am not ever going to have to seriously discuss photography with him.
A waitress in a black fright wig walked out and gave them the menus Haveabud had declined until his companion arrived. He reflected on the fact that he had called her “my companion,” as opposed to many other things he might have called her. He could have lied and said she was his wife. He could have called her, archly, “the lady” or even, pedantically, “the woman who will be meeting me.” He could have said “my daughter” for laughs, since she was about his age.
As he smiled to himself, he was suddenly struck by the realization that he would not have to worry about his mother’s coming into town for another week. The euphoria of that — the 168 hours contained in a week — lifted his spirits.
Jody ordered chili. He ordered another Heineken, and scrambled eggs, loose, with sausage, a dismissive motion through the air with fingers splayed accompanying his order. (Though Haveabud did not, and would not ever, know the waitress, this particular motion would be recreated for the waitress’s best buddy in acting class later that night, and reported to her psychoanalyst. His fingers would continue to rise in her dreams, and she would confide to her girlfriends that she hoped against hope that he would stop by again and this time take notice of her. He was uptown, upscale, uptight in a way she found irresistible. But none of those thoughts and desires had anything to do with the way she pivoted and affected lack of interest, walking back inside the diner. To Haveabud, she was just a girl whose thin lips led him to suspect that she would give cold kisses.)
“You said last night that you wanted to show my work,” Jody said. She touched the top of the saltshaker, letting her fingers linger.
He nodded, as if this were a foregone conclusion and not their only agreement.
Haveabud said that she must move to New York so he could launch her career. He would put in a call to Scavullo that afternoon. She could attend an important opening with him the next night. But she must be in New York. This went without saying, he said, then said it again, even more emphatically.
She looked a little startled, as if she had been strolling along and a stick on the ground had suddenly begun to sing to her.
Haveabud stared as if transfixed. Hypnotize with your insistence. And then — when the person was captured — throw a curve, express a little doubt. What about showing a little wit in her work? Things not quite so … dark.
The feather boa unfurled in her imagination. The early shots of the boa were so much what he wanted, so witty, that it might as well have been there, tickling his chin and provoking a smile. She described the series of photographs: the boa coiled; the tip of the boa dangling from the light table; the boa laid out on the dining-room table so that, against the mahogany, it seemed delicate and lost on so large a surface. The boa wrapped around Mary Vickers’s neck (“a model,” she called her), like a sensual noose.
Haveabud was looking at the multicolored beads on Jody’s shoes, which reminded him of sprinkles on an ice-cream cone: absolutely mesmerizing, when you stopped to examine them. If you stopped to examine them. That was the artist’s imperative, of course. Haveabud closed his thumb and first finger tightly against the bridge of his nose, squinting. The French word for beads … what was that word? Ou sont les beads d’hier? Fallen, every one, like plates from a Schnabel canvas. The waitress asked if they wanted anything else. Haveabud played rogue, raising his eyebrows and turning to look at Jody as if the question were intentionally loaded with sexual innuendo.
Jody was thinking of the flash storm that had hit the week before, soaking a wedding tent as it was being erected. Early in the morning, she had walked east to the photo district to drop off the negatives at the lab, so she could pick up contact sheets at the end of her meeting with Haveabud. She suspected that if she presented the contact sheets to him as amusing, he would see them as amusing; if she said they were sad photographs, he would see them as that.
Haveabud asked the waitress for the bill. As Jody looked away, Haveabud suddenly wondered whether his wife might be having an affair. She rarely cooked anymore — more interesting things to do in the afternoon? Instead, they ate roasted chickens she had delivered to the apartment, along with asparagus-tip salad that cost the same per pound as gold.
Two men pulled out chairs at the adjacent table and sat down. One carried a beat-up violin case with a peeling peace sign stuck to it. The other had eyeglass frames with a false nose and bushy eyebrows pushed to the top of his head. Bushy Brows swatted at his companion and told him to lighten up. “Telling me to lighten up when you’re in one of your manic periods is like telling me to raise my hands above my head as the roller coaster dips down,” the man with the violin case said.
“Do you think they have Bosco?” Bushy Brows said.
“What in the name of God would make you think they might have Bosco?”
“So,” Haveabud said. “Scavullo. Any time better for you than another?”
“I have to go home tomorrow,” Jody said. “A friend is taking care of my son.”
“Aaaaaaah, the son,” Haveabud said, letting her know by his use of the article that the child was interchangeable with an object: the chair, the phone, the stove.