Curveball : The Year I Lost My Grip (9780545393119) (8 page)

“My grampa hasn't done anything like that yet. But sometimes he just spaces out, and when I look into his eyes, it's like there's nobody home. And he never falls down. This is a man who hikes mountains with a full load of camera gear for fun. And now …” I didn't know what was with Angelika and my lump-in-the-throat problems, but at the moment, it seemed kind of like a sleazy way to be racking up points with her.

“All right. Maybe he's losing it and maybe he's not. But, Pete, you have to tell your mother. She's his daughter, right? She's supposed to handle this stuff.”

“What about me? I promised I wouldn't tell.”

“He shouldn't have made you promise that. It's not fair to you or your mom. And what if he does something really bad, and you could have stopped it by getting your mom involved? How are you going to feel then?”

“Angelika, I'm not a total moron. I made him promise he'd tell my mom if he thought he was in any danger.”

“OK, whatever.”

“What do you mean, whatever?”

“I mean, the whole point of getting senile is that the person can't think right. His judgment might be impaired. Or maybe he's already forgotten about his whole encounter with you today, and he's sitting around eating bonbons while you're torturing yourself over this. Even though it's not your job. Listen, why don't you sleep on this? Maybe in the morning, you'll feel more like talking to your mom about it.”

The worst thing about talking to perceptive people is that they notice everything. But I didn't feel like hearing any more about how wrong I was, so I changed the subject. “I hear you, OK? And I appreciate the advice. Really, I do. Now, can we talk about our next sports assignment? I think we should do the girls' swim meet this Friday, and then the first JV basketball game on Sunday. Mr. Marsh said Linnie Vaughn is going for a record in the backstroke this week, so it would probably be a good idea to get some shots of that for the paper.” Linnie Vaughn was the star swimmer at our school. She was also kind of legendarily hot.

Angelika hung right with me on the quick switch. “Sure. Hey, isn't Adam on the JV team?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe we can get a really great shot of him in action, and then blow it up into a poster or something for him.”

“Why?”

“Well, because I owe him one. Plus, he has nice eyes. I think they would really pop if we got the right shot. It would be fun to try, anyway.”

Suddenly, I felt a flash of jealousy. That's why I said something stupid for the fourth time in, like, twenty minutes. “OK, that's cool. So, can I blow up a shot of Linnie Vaughn?”

She laughed, but it wasn't her usual, merry laugh. I don't know how to explain it, but she sounded kind of sly and angry at the same time as she said, “Sure. I know one thing: You won't have to be a great photographer to make her, um,
features
pop!”

Three photos. In the first, a hand holds a baseball in the classic pitcher's grip: first two fingers across the top seam, thumb underneath. The pitcher's arm extends almost straight back into the picture and blurs into his face. The hand and the front of the ball are what photographers refer to as tack sharp: You can see whorls of fingerprint pattern on the skin, a jagged nail, every stitch and scuff on the ball. And you can somehow feel the tension in the fingers, almost imagine that hand crushing yours in its clawed grip. Maybe you've heard somewhere that a pitcher is supposed to hold the ball loosely. Then again, this pitcher isn't going to be throwing the ball anyway.

The second photo is composed exactly like the first, except now the focus is on the middle of the pitcher's arm, so that both the ball and the face are blurred. You can't even read the label on the ball in this one, nor can you be sure the pitcher's eyeglasses are still on his face. What you can't avoid seeing in this one is that elbow: knurled and knotted with scar tissue. The sleeve of the
pitcher's Under Armour shirt has been pushed up to his bicep, but you know he must not roll that sleeve back very often. If your elbow looked like his, you'd probably invest in 365 sweaters.

In the third photo, the focus has shifted to the face. The ball is so blurry you can almost see right through it, and the elbow, mercifully, is now smoothed over, stripped of painful detail. The pitcher's eyes are facing forward and slightly down: He may be looking at the ball in his hand. He may be looking at his ruined elbow. His mouth turns down at the corners; his brow is creased in concentrated sorrow. Light catches on a tear that balances on the lower lid of his left eye. You can stare into this face all day, and the eyes are never going to stop their downcast gleaming.

Looking at the three pictures side by side, as they are presented in the photographer's plain black matte frame, you may very well wonder: Who is the subject here? Is he the hand that holds the ball? Is he the scarred and twisted elbow? Could he be neither of these? Could it be that the pitcher will learn to define himself in some brilliant, brave new way? Or is he, in the end, nothing more or less than a sad face behind a blur?

I didn't want Angelika to turn in her three-shot portrait of me. The pictures were incredibly, painfully perfect, which meant Mr. Marsh would probably gather everyone around to
ooh
and
ahh
about them. Can you imagine standing by while a bunch of upperclassmen listen to your teacher say, “See how this tear is sitting there, just waiting to fall? That's genius!” And then he'd probably want to post them in the hallway or something. In which case I'd have to fling myself from a high window.

On second thought, Angelika would probably capture a few good snaps of that action, too.

We were arguing over it when class started that day. She hissed, “I need this grade. And, Pete, you didn't
have
to roll up your sleeve when I asked you to!”

Which was true. But if I hadn't done it, she would have been all mad. Plus, AJ had once told me that, and I quote, “Chicks dig scars. Trust me: It's well-known.”

“But it's — look, would you want everyone in the whole world to see
you
looking like that?”

“Like what?” She grinned. “You look really great in the picture … strong and manly, yet sensitive. I mean, in real
life
you could use some work, but in the
picture
—”

I sighed. “Can I just see it before class starts?” I asked. She took a flat cardboard mailer out of her backpack, opened it, and slid the three photos out. I grabbed them and held them over my head. She lunged, and you guessed it — once again, Mr. Marsh caught us locked in a full-body embrace.

He said, “When I tell ya that photography should be yer passion, that's not quite how I mean it. Heh-heh.” We scrambled to separate, and tumbled into our seats. I tried to be unobtrusive about sliding the pictures over to Angelika, but apparently Houdini doesn't have to feel threatened by my sleight-of-hand
skills, because Mr. Marsh came over and said, “Well, well, well. What's this, kids? More of the brilliant work ya somehow manage to create when yer not, um, messin' around?”

Angelika put her hand down on top of the pictures, and said, “It's nothing, Mr. Marsh. I took some pictures, but they're not really ready to be shared, so I'll just —”

“Wait, let me see, Angelika. Ya know I will always tell ya if I think a project needs more work.”

“No, I mean they … the … uh, the subject hasn't given his permission for me to share these yet.”

Angelika peeked up at me from under her bangs. For once, it was her turn to blush. Mr. Marsh caught the vibes. “Peter,” he said, “you're the subject, right?”

I could feel all the other students' eyes on me as I answered, “Yes, sir.”

Mr. Marsh turned to the rest of the group and said, “San Lee, I believe you had a presentation due today — is that correct?” San nodded. Mr. Marsh continued: “And yer presentation was on
the photographic style of Henri Cartier-Bresson, yes?” San nodded again. “Then let's table our discussion of Angelika's work until after we have heard from Mr. Lee. I have a feeling he might give us a new perspective on the situation. San? Whaddaya got?”

San roused himself from his usual lounging position, and made his way to the front with a set of prints and a laptop computer. When he was all set up, he started a slide show, and three words were projected onto our room's overhead screen:

 

THE DECISIVE MOMENT

 

Then San clicked through a series of black-and-white photos: Three women doing each other's hair. A couple kissing on top of a tower in Paris. An old woman sitting at a sidewalk cafe, giving a beautiful younger woman a dirty look. A crush of people getting off a ship, with a crying man in the middle, hugging an elderly lady. Each picture was almost too private to look at, yet here they were, on display in our class
room, probably fifty years after some of their subjects had died of old age.

San spoke: “Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer who started becoming well-known in the 1930s. He practically invented the art of street photography. He would walk along, with his Leica camera — just one fifty-millimeter lens, no zoom — and snap pictures of whatever he saw that interested him. He tried not to get the attention of his subjects. He even taped over the shiny parts of his camera with black electrical tape so that the camera wouldn't be as noticeable. In 1952, he published a book of his work, titled
Images à la Sauvette
, which literally means something like ‘images on the run' or ‘stolen images.' But in English, the book became known as
The Decisive Moment
. When I look at his work, I can see how the images are all three things: stolen, taken on the run, and decisive. There's also a kind of Zen to the pictures, because he only had one shot to capture that exact, unposed instant. Of course, he was working with an old-fashioned film camera, so he couldn't just
put it in burst mode and go click, click, click eight times a second. And the instant before or after the one he caught probably wouldn't have been as perfect.”

He paused then to pin up his own photos.

“Can ya tell us about these, San?” Mr. Marsh asked.

“Sure. I decided to imitate Cartier-Bresson by walking through the hallways of our school with my camera and one fifty-millimeter lens. I used the swivel viewfinder on my camera so I could shoot from my waist, and didn't use a flash or burst mode. I also didn't do any retouching or Photoshopping, because Cartier-Bresson was all about the shot. He didn't care about the developing process. Anyway, here's what I got.”

The first photo San pointed to was taken in the stairwell of the building. A really skinny guy was facing the camera, on his way up the steps, and you could see that the shoulder of a huge guy going down had just bumped him pretty hard. The skinny guy was grimacing, but you could tell he was going to keep walking.

The next shot showed the view down a nearly empty hallway: two parallel walls of lockers seemed to go on forever into the distance. There were only two people in sight. In the background, a custodian was bent over his push broom. In the foreground, a girl was throwing a gum wrapper over her shoulder.

San's third and final picture showed a wide view of the front entrance to the school on a sunny day, looking straight on at the four steel doors. There were four people sitting on the cement stairs, facing the camera. On the left, a guy and a girl were clearly arguing over something. His mouth was open, and he looked really angry. She was turned partly away from him and was raising her palm toward him in the classic tell-it-to-the-hand position. On the right, two guys were sitting with their arms around each other, goofy smiles on their faces, looking completely engrossed in each other.

He turned to Mr. Marsh, who said, “So, Mr. Lee, can ya tell me the essence of whatcha were trying to capture here?”

San looked right at me and said, “The truth. I think the best use for a camera is to capture the truth.”

Meanwhile, I was thinking,
Great! So just because some French dude shot a bunch of embarrassing photos of random strangers sixty years ago, now I'm supposed to let Angelika hand in a gigantic blowup poster of me crying like a four-year-old? And of course the funny part is, we have no idea what those poor suckers thought about the pictures. For all we know, they all jumped off the Eiffel Tower right after the book came out.

I looked down and spent some time picking at the frayed hem of my left pant leg.

“So, guys, whadda the rest of ya think? Is photography all about telling the troot?”

I had to speak up. “Well, my grandfather was a professional photographer, and he said his job was to present his subjects the way they would
want
to be seen.”

Angelika said, “But your grandfather shot weddings. That's different. San was going for more of a photojournalism thing. Right?”

San nodded.

“OK, then,” I said. “What about beauty? Isn't photography an art form? And shouldn't art be beautiful?”

Danielle chimed in. I'd figured she would, being the layout editor of the yearbook and all. “I think sometimes a piece of art can be beautiful because of the way the elements in it are arranged. Even if the individual elements aren't pretty, they can make a beautiful whole. That's why I like doing layouts so much. It's all about the composition.”

Danny said, “I think there's no right answer. Sometimes a photo is for truth, sometimes it's for beauty, and sometimes … it's for something else.”

“Something else?” San asked. “What else is there?”

There was a long pause then, which lasted until I blurted out, “Doesn't the subject get a say in how the photo gets used? I mean, what if that kid who got his shoulder banged into is embarrassed about it? Or what if one of those people from the front steps has, like, a religious objection to being photographed? Is everything and everyone fair game?”

Don't you hate it when teachers act like they're talking about one thing, but really they're twisting the direction of the conversation so they can make a point about something totally different? Mr. Marsh said, “That's debatable in a public place like a school, where the subjects haven't consented to having their pictures taken. But I think there's an implied contract when someone agrees to pose for a portrait — like in the case of Peter and Angelika. Don't'cha agree, Angelika?”

Wow, the only thing worse than the conversation-twisting gambit is when the teacher completely puts a student on the spot. Angelika kind of squirmed, picked a hangnail, and said, “I don't know. I guess … I mean, I kind of ambushed Peter with … um … an object so I could get his reaction on film. And he didn't agree to that in advance, because he didn't know I was going to do it. Obviously. So I think it should be up to him.”

Mr. Marsh said, “Well, Peetuh?”

I generally try to be patient with people, but this was starting to get me mad. “Do we really have to
discuss this in the middle of class? Now even if I don't say yes, I've already been dragged over the coals in front of everybody.”

Mr. Marsh said, “Sorry, Peetuh. Yer right. I just got all excited to have a real-life example of an ethical argument popping up right before my eyes. You can totally do whatever ya need to do with the pictures.” Then he winked. He actually freaking winked. Ugh. “And who knows what might, uh, come up if you two have another session together?”

Angelika said, “I'm sorry, too, Pete. I wasn't trying to … uh, well … Look, I'll destroy the prints and delete the files, OK? It's not worth all this.”

I looked at the prints that were still on the table between Angelika and me. They
were
really good. Then I looked at Angelika. She was looking right back at me, and her eyes just seemed so sad all of a sudden. I sighed, and slid the portraits across the table into her hand. “Hand 'em in,” I said. I still wasn't too sure I wanted the whole world to see them, but on the other hand, they definitely captured some kind of moment of truth. And if the truth was good
enough for Henri Cartier-Bresson, I supposed it was good enough for me.

San stopped on the way back to his seat and patted me on the shoulder. Mr. Marsh smiled, and swept the photos out of Angelika's hand. The class burst into semi-mocking applause. And my ears turned really, really red.

But on the way out of class, Angelika bumped her hip against mine and smiled.