The others have not, and Sanjay is still wary about the whole thing. The over- and under-exposed, bleached, washed out, over-saturated with colour, blotches and speckles and stains like coffee-cup rings, or arcs of white on white where the canister has cracked and let the light slip inside.
My shrink tells me I’m co-dependencing; my father’s death means I’m paralysed, afraid to make my own decisions, so I defer to Jonathan because it’s easy, and this is my core problem. Well, actually, he didn’t; he let me figure that out for myself, which cost a little more, a few months more of therapay, more wasted time, when apparently he had the answer all along.
What he does tell me of his own accord, after this revelation, is that I should move out and cut Jonathan off, get some distance to regain my equilibrium, to recover a sense of self. He uses a lot of shrink-speak that doesn’t translate, like it’s only applicable to someone else’s ordered
life, where the rules work.
So I’m still speaking to Jonathan, still hanging out with him, still sleeping with him – when he comes round. Still deferring to him on the important stuff. Because he’s the guy orchestrating all the moves. Because I don’t have his pull or his contacts, like Sanjay, for example. Sanjay is a major name on the international art scene, responsible for launching the trajectories of people like Susu Ngubane or Cameron Sterling, whose sculptures now sell for in the region of seven hundred grand. Jonathan deals with Sanjay on all of the details of the exhibition. Or should that be exhibitionism? Because isn’t it my soul being laid bare here?
I know he’s been seeing at least two other women in the times between, when we are off, on, off. Because we are just ‘casual’, as he calls it, because quantifying something puts it in its place. But sometimes I feel like he’s reminding himself rather than me. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
I met the one, Stacy, at a party. One of those awful media blitzes, hanging off him like she was his handbag. Old bag. Cos she was – thirtyeight at least. An editor at one of the pushmags he works for occasionally. One of the perks of the job, fraternising with the help. Of course, Jonathan is thirty-eight, so he’s right up there
with her. Closer to her than me.
I asked to take her picture, to Jonathan’s delight. ‘You cunning little fox,’ he whispered, kissing my shoulder, as if we were all supposed to pretend I didn’t know they were fucking. ‘You just guaranteed yourself a publicity splash, sweetheart. We’ll have to make the event worthy of the write-up.’
But, really I was more interested in reducing her to planes of colour, the hard sculptural bones offsetting the flicker of pity in her eyes.
The print I went with was an accident, a misfire while I was adjusting the light settings. It shows her sitting on the edge of the fire escape stair, on the balcony outside the apartment. The focus is on the shapely knot of her knee, one hand resting in the dark fall of her skirt, a black blur. You can only see the angle of her jaw tilted out of frame. It makes her look vulnerable.
When I confronted him about her later, sitting in the window of his loft, the night bitter cold against my naked back and the traffic streaming below, he ducked and evaded. But I know I am cast in the role of Poor Thing. The doomed unrequited who can’t quite let go. And it is my fault that we still fall into bed. His mercy fuck. But really, I think the word should be mercenary, for all the benefits I score: the loft, the career guidance, this show.
‘Do you love him?’ my shrink asks, and I feel angry because it’s so obvious, and is this really what I’m paying for? But I don’t have a coherent response. I love his ferocious confidence, the way he charms strangers, so they flock to him like tame little birds to peck at the compliments that drop from his lips. And the way you know it’s only crumbs, and long for more.
But I have a greater sense of his physicality. The image I have of Jonathan, one of the first, which I have tried to document on film countless times, but also keep in my head, are the lines that crease the corners of his eyes in bright sunlight when he smiles. Why this and not any of the other details – the triumvirate of moles in the crook of his arm; his lips, slightly too plump, too voluptuous for a man; his giant hands with knuckles like the knobbly skulls of little animals – or the whole, I don’t know. But then Jonathan says that’s just like me, to take in the partials rather than the composite.
The shrink doesn’t even bother to make notes. When he gives me the bill, I include it in my expenses, and Jonathan pays it without comment.
‘Hey, dreamy girl,’ Jonathan waves impatiently from the other side of the room. ‘This is your exhibition, you want to pay attention?’ I set down the print and drift across the room. Not telling him about the branding feels like my counter to the Stacys, to all the times he doesn’t answer his phone. An amulet of protection.
‘Babes, you can’t be serious about this,’ he says, tapping one of the photographs, already mounted and leaning against the wall.
It is my favourite.
‘It’s really childish.’
They are both waiting for my reaction, Jonathan irritable and Sanjay polite, but evaluating at the same time, like he already has the measure of my work, but not yet of me.
‘What do you think?’ I ask him.
‘No ways. You’re deluded if you’re making that the centrepiece, sweetheart. It’s not right.’ Jonathan interjects, but Sanjay gives me a little nod of approval.
It’s like the night dive Jonathan and I went on in Malaysia. It was only my eighth dive, and I wasn’t qualified for it, but for five hundred bucks, qualifications can mysteriously be overlooked. In the boat, over the nasal whine of the engine and the oxygen tanks clanking against their restraints, Jonathan teased me about being scared, winding me up about how claustrophobic, how suffocating it would be.
And it was terrifying when I rolled off the boat backwards, and the shock of water engulfed me, but not because the darkness closed in. Because it made the sea wide open.
Visibility limits your imagination of the ocean only as far as you can see, ten metres, fifteen at a stretch. But it’s only in the utter black that you can feel the true scale, the volume and weight of that gaping unknowable drift between continents.
The photograph is called Self-Portrait. It is a print from a rotten piece of film. Two metres by three and a half.
It came out entirely black.
Toby
I’m stoked with my stash, kids: new illicit phone that’s immune to defusings and capable of reading illegal downloads (let’s try not to spread that around too much), and a spiffing VIMbot to restore my swivel to the state of superclean it hasn’t seen since my old lady first picked it out of the catalogue. Not that I’ve ever been especially bothered about fighting the good fight against creeping entropy, but it’ll make for a change.
I spill the VIMbot out of my pack onto the bed and it goes zooting between my Pumas, breaking for the corridor and nearly gets away. Luckily the door has already started to rotate away. A lot of people don’t like this whole cog system of floors, the entire building like a gyroscope in perpetual motion, but, hey, it saves space on doors and it just saved my VIMbot from bolting.