“You’re fighting with a cop, Sylvia. Look at yourself there. For God’s sake, you’re fighting a cop.”
She looks at the screen. He backs up the picture and they watch it again. The cop grabbing the camera. Sylvia grabbing back. The picture cuts away to another brawl before she’s pulled inside the Skin Palace.
She looks at him. She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t want to say anything. She wants to take a bath and throw down a drink and go to bed for the next two days.
“What were you doing home?” she finally says and knows it’s a mistake as the words leave her mouth.
“That’s not an answer,” he yells, then continues, “I wasn’t home. I was in my office with the FUD people having a planning session when Ratzinger buzzes me to come upstairs. He’s sitting on the edge of his desk playing this as I walk in. He was watching the local news at noon. When he saw the fighting, he popped a tape in for our personal-injury people. Then he spotted a familiar face. He gave me the goddamn tape, Sylvia. Ratzinger taped the thing.”
“I’m sorry, Perry,” she begins, feeling like she’s going to start crying which is the last thing she wants to do right now.
“Are you hurt?” he finally asks. “Did you get hurt at all? Did you break anything?”
“Not a scratch,” she says, too low.
“You’re sure?” he demands, and before she can reanswer he says, “Were you arrested? Did they arrest you?”
“I wasn’t arrested,” she says. “They had their hands full.”
“I can see that,” he says and they both stare at the screen as he plays it all over again, her now famous dance, her ten seconds of fame. He mutes out the sound and the silence almost makes her sick.
After a minute, he sits back down on the hassock and looks up and simply says, “How, Sylvia?”
She swallows and says, “Does it look like I planned this, Perry? Do you think I woke up today and said I think I’ll cause some civil unrest down in the Zone?”
“How many times,” he says, showing his strained patience, his heroic restraint, “have we talked about you going down there? How many discussions have we had about that part of town, Sylvia?”
“I’m an adult, Perry.”
“Yeah,” he says, “that’s what this looks like. You being an adult.”
Her nerves are shot. The toll of the entire day is shorting her out and all her hurt is starting to mutate into anger. “Thanks for the concern,” she manages to say.
He bolts to his feet and screams, “I sat here for hours not knowing whether you were dead or alive. You didn’t even call me—”
She screams back, “You’re pissed off that I looked bad in front of your goddamn boss. That’s the extent of your goddamn concern, you bastard.”
He rears back and heaves the remote control at the television. It misses the set and sails into the wall, explodes into a rain of black plastic and batteries.
“Your aim is off,” she says. “I’m over here.”
He stands fuming, hands on his hips, his chest pushing out.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” he says, then he adds, “I’m going out,” and moves past her, down the hall and out the back door with a slam.
And now the tears come and she folds down on herself, slides her back down the wall and sits on her feet and just lets it happen. She doesn’t know what’s wrong with her either. She doesn’t know why she didn’t call him. She doesn’t know what she was thinking of, following Mr. Quevedo, hiding out in the Skin Palace, walking into Der Garten. She honestly doesn’t know how today happened. She feels as controlled as the TV set, as if someone she can’t see is holding another kind of black box, that they’re thumbing down buttons that make her move in ways she can’t understand.
She looks up at the TV and into the eye of the Skin Palace riot, finally advanced past the point of her walk-on, her public insult to Perry’s career. She watches the jumpy, off-balance shots of chaos, the bouncing pan of frenzied upheaval. It’s as if the TV is plugged into her head instead of the VCR, as if the images ricocheting across the glass are a reading of her brain, an X ray of the inside of her skull. And she’s watching it through the blur of her water-logged eyes so everything’s obscured just that much more.
She pulls herself up from the wall and goes into the bathroom. She turns on the water and cups her hands under the faucet, lets her palms fill up with a pool, leans down and soaks her face. She repeats this several times, then she opens the medicine cabinet, takes down her mother’s old Valium prescription, ignores the expiration date and swallows a couple.
She towels her face dry and moves out into the kitchen, opens the refrigerator and grabs a half-full bottle of white Burgundy, pulls out the cork and takes a long draw from the mouth of the bottle.
She walks out the back door and leaves it open. She walks down the stairs to the cellar and locks herself in the darkroom.
She turns on the safelight and the room goes red. She sits down on the step stool and just closes her eyes and takes another sip off the bottle. She takes some deep breaths and tries to calm down, but she starts to get dizzy so she opens her eyes and puts the wine bottle down on the ground. It dawns on her how much she’s had to drink today — the absinthe in Schick’s office, a Pernod, then a glass of wine at Der Geheime Garten, and now the Burgundy. She never drinks this much, especially not during the day. She realizes she has no idea what time it is. And that she doesn’t really want to know. She doesn’t want to do anything right now except sit here in this darkroom and be alone.
Of course, finally, she looks up at the pictures. She lets herself stare ahead, at the drying line, at the photos still hanging there in front of her. The Madonna and the child in the ruins. She looks at the whole run of photos, takes them in together, as a whole, a set, a series of connected images. She wonders if she laid them on top of each other and then fanned them fast with her thumb would she detect any movement of the figures? Would she get any sense of motion, something minute, a barely shifted arm or leg? And if she did, what more would this tell her?
She stops looking at them as a series and focuses individually, left to right, down the line. And in this way they remind her a little of the Stations of the Cross, of going to the Stations with her mother when she was maybe seven or eight years old. How many Stations were there? More than seven. There was all that singing, that chant-like song. Kind of a dirge, really, Stabat Mater. How did that translate? She can still hear it, the mournfulness of it. The sadness inherent in that sound.
What are these photos? The Stations of what? What did Terrence Propp want me to see when I stare at them like this? Or am I an idiot thinking he had that much of a plan, that extensive a design? Maybe it was just instinct. Classic artistic inspiration. Maybe Propp just let the mood of the day hit him, move him. Maybe he simply set the mother and child up in this awful, broken-down setting and started shooting film. Maybe he wasn’t thinking beyond the next exposure, beyond the click of the shutter. Beyond the image at that instant.
Maybe Terrence Propp wasn’t thinking about me at all.
She gets up off the stool and moves over to the dry line. She stands with her face about a foot away from her first photograph. She brings her hand up to touch it, but stops herself. She wants to make up her mind — what’s the first thing that strikes her about the picture? What’s the premier image? What is it that first draws and holds the eye?
She wants to say the Madonna’s shoulder, the smoothness of its slope, the tone of the skin, so white. Or maybe it’s the relationship of the shoulder to the neck, the sleekness and the perfectness of the bend. Whatever the dynamics of the attraction, it’s the Madonna’s shoulder.