Into the Great Wide Open (8 page)

“Even if it starts to stick on the street in here, the avenue stays clear. You can always get back in and out of town, once you get to the avenue.”

Kenny thought of the short, steep downhill onto the avenue at the entrance to her subdivision, and flinched: no picnic on four bald tires. Then realized that this was an invitation to stay. Be cool, he told himself. He sipped his chamomile tea, leaned over the table again. She shuffled through the pack of photographs, fortune-telling. Junie kept them in the bright yellow Kodak envelopes that the unexposed paper had come in. The prints came out with wavy edges, an uneven, handmade feel. They were chalky, sooty, grainy, out of focus; Kenny didn’t know a thing about photography but he knew that most of them were no good. Once in a while, often enough to keep his hopes going, there was a good one. He wanted her to be good at this. He wanted her to be brilliant.

“This was when I was screwing around with this stupid gold
toner,” Junie said. “You use real gold in the process, you know, I thought it sounded exciting. But everything just comes out brown.”

The photographs were brown the way that shoes were brown: the trunk of a tree, rocks and shadows, a creek in winter where every stone wore a cap of snow like a nightcap. Serious, somber. The temple of Nature. Kenny wasn’t in the mood. Kenny wanted rock and roll of some kind, motorcycles, Mexican prostitutes, something. Looking at these pictures was too much like being in church.

Also there was a body interference problem, a difficulty seeing through her aura. Ginsberg said it: what peaches and what penumbras! She was bent at her desk, looking over her own work, a little too self-absorbed. Wearing her glasses, serious. Kenny leaned on the back of her chair and watched over her shoulder, watching the photographs, the back of her head, her neck … This time it was her ears, too, which were delicate and pink. Something about the way the gold temple-pieces of her glasses wrapped around—she wore the kind that circled her ears, little restraint devices … It was hard to take the photographs seriously when he could look at the line of her back, bare naked ears, her shoulders. He forced his attention onto the pictures, hoping that each new one would be perfect.

They couldn’t hold his attention, though. The pictures seemed to be
attention-resistant
. Bare branches, the sea in winter.

Junie’s room was spare, monkish, the same totalitarian good taste as the rest of the house: burlap wallcoverings, teak furniture, picturesque windows, that faint Japanesy feel. No Barbie dolls, here, no Poky Little Ponies. He saw her for a moment as her mother’s, child: piano lessons, ballet, spinach. The room had a desk the size of a kitchen table, upon which the pictures were now spread out; a single celibate bed; a bookcase, which Kenny promptly judged by his own hard standards.
My Antonia
, good.
Life on the Mississippi
, very good.
Slaughterhouse-Five
, eek!
The Trial
, very good, but only if she actually read it. In fact the whole shelf had the smell of schoolbooks.
Advanced-Placement English classes, either that or books her mother left on the shelf because she thought they matched the decor. Kenny would bet a hundred dollars that Junie never read
Red Cavalry
, by Isaac Babel. (He was wrong about this, as he was wrong about her photography, as he was wrong about everything else, almost. This is one of the places where it’s still sore, looking back. He
underestimated
her.)

The interesting thing was, she kept shuffling unopened boxes of pictures back into the drawers. “Come on,” he said. “What’s in there?”

“Nothing,” she said, a faint rosy flush creeping up her neck. She wouldn’t look at him.

“It says Nudes right there on the box.”

“Well, it’s not exactly …”

“You can’t just sneak them past me, Junie. I’m tired of rocks and trees.”

“You don’t like my rocks and trees?” Even this she said without looking up from the table; and he couldn’t tell if she was angry or not.

“I didn’t say that. I just meant, I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind some naked ladies.”

Junie laughed, and for a minute it seemed to be all right. “These aren’t exactly naked ladies,” she said. “I bet my father’s got a copy of
Playboy
somewhere, if that’s what you’re after.”

“I bet he doesn’t,” Kenny said; remembering, with some murky, left-handed shame, that his own father had an almost complete collection dating back to 1965. His father in a velvet jacket, smoking a pipe. His father and bunnies. It was hard to imagine Hefner having a place in Junie’s house. Jane wouldn’t allow it.

“Maybe not,” she said, and took a breath, gathered her nerves, spilled the packet of nudes out onto the table.

The ones on top were in the same brown-light and natural-shape
mode as before, scarcely recognizable as human, closer to green peppers, tomatoes, folded pieces of cloth. After a couple of minutes, three or four prints, Kenny saw that the subject was a fat woman, bending, turning, reaching. The folds of her body shone in a kind of dim twilight. You couldn’t tell, exactly, what was her ass and what was her knee, and which of these curves might be her breast. Kenny felt like a minor dog for trying, but on the other hand … They were safe, hygienic. All the sex had been boiled out of them; at least till Kenny thought to wonder who the model was. He never thought Kim Nichols was quite that fat but maybe, with all the bending and twisting, etc.…

“Where did you take these?” he asked her.

“These? Oh, this was in the class I took last spring, Lee Nye. He’s a crazy man. He had the model come in and we all took pictures, she was sort of draped up there on this stand.”

“That must be a strange feeling.”

“I don’t know,” she said, shuffling to the next. “She was an old friend of Lee’s, it must have been the hundredth time she’d done it. Really she was beautiful, just big.”

“You never see her face?”

“That was one of the rules—no faces.” She laughed, a little nervous. “I don’t know if it was a jealous husband or what. Maybe it’s just, you wouldn’t want to walk into a coffee shop and see yourself buck naked on the wall.”

“Buck Naked,” Kenny said. “Sounds like a bass player in a punk band. Maybe I’ll change my name.”

“One of the things my mother says,” Junie said, shuffling over to another sex-proof green pepper. “She started out in Wyoming, riding horses and everything. She says
crick
instead of
creek
. If she could go out every morning and chop her firewood with a hatchet, she’d be happier.”

“Right,” Kenny said.

“I’m not kidding,” she said, leafing forward. “She’s just not urban. I mean, she’s not anything—she left Wyoming behind a long time ago, too. She talks about it. Oh, shit.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Let me see,” Kenny said. A picture had come out of the pile but it was different; just a glance, a glimpse before she shuffled it back into the pile. What? The shape of a long, tall body, it had to be Junie. Something with the face, and a dark tangle of hair. “What was that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “An experiment.”

“Let me see,” Kenny said.

A standoff. She wouldn’t look at him. He saw the flush across her cheeks, the pink coloring her white lifeless skin. Restored to life, he thought. She turned and inspected his face, and when she spoke she was apologizing, pleading. “I didn’t know these were in here,” she said. “I didn’t, I don’t know. I didn’t make these for other people.”

“I can keep a secret,” Kenny said. As he had been wanting to, he put his hand on her shoulder. She flinched away, then came to a tentative rest; a truce; OK for now, I guess, I suppose. She was wearing a black blouse of t-shirt material that was cut low in a kind of scoop, off her shoulders and across her chest, so that his hand rested half on cloth, half on skin. The architecture of bones and tendons at the base of her neck, a little hollow, shelter. You be whatever you turn out to be, he thought. I’ll just fixate on your body.

“I’d rather not,” she said.

“I’d like to see.”

She turned toward his face, resentful now: she didn’t want to show him, didn’t have the will to refuse him. Turned her face away, and turned up the next picture, the next, the next, fanning them out like a fortune-teller’s deck.

The pictures had all been taken at the same time, the same
place, a room with bare white walls and dark carpet. In the background, on the right, was a hallway that led to a bathroom, or so he guessed—it was dark and hard to see. In the left side of the picture stood Junie, naked. Naked as opposed to nude; nobody would look at these pictures and mistake them for art, he thought. No green peppers here. The strange thing about the face, the thing he had glimpsed in passing, turned out to be a sleeper’s eyeshade, the kind you find in drugstores; a black, blind version of the Lone Ranger’s mask, tied on with black strings that dangled. The light was hard black-and-white. Her hair was longer, shoulder-length as he remembered it, with too-short little-girl bangs. His eyes kept going back to the mask on her face, that and the tangle of her pubic hair, which was black and very thick. It spread in tendrils up her belly, down her thighs, unsuspected by Kenny. It was almost masculine, it had weight and presence. Kenny couldn’t keep his eyes away, that and the mask, balancing off against each other. There was a black cord snaking out from under her foot. “What’s that?” he asked.

“That’s how I took these,” she said. “It’s this kind of bulb thing that you squeeze and the air trips the shutter, very rinky-dink but it works. I did it with my foot.”

In a rush, nervous. Kenny saw why. In one picture, she stood like Venus on the half shell; in another, like a soldier, legs apart; in one that she quickly shuffled back into the pile, not quite before he could see it, she sat back on her haunches like a Vietnamese woman, two white calves and her vagina clearly visible between them, her head resting sideways across the tops of her knees like she was resting. No two of them felt alike, although the lighting, the room, the body were all the same. Different small feelings: secrets, some of them not polite. No mistaking these for art. Kenny didn’t have any problem paying attention to these. Part of it was seeing her naked but there was another excitement besides: she was telling things she shouldn’t say. Something she was working out, alone. These photographs were
evidence
. Also the grainy black-and-white, the mask, the
surprising dark mass of hair—all reminded him of his first dirty pictures, a deck of pornographic playing cards, found in his father’s bedside drawer. Dirty black-and-white; a world unknown, suspected but unplumbed. As she was. “What’s the deal with the mask?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. She wouldn’t look at him. “I wanted to see what I looked like, I guess. I couldn’t do it with my eyes open.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It was just something I did one day,” she said. “I shouldn’t have showed them to you, I didn’t mean them for anyone …”

“No,” he said. “I mean, thank you. Thank you for showing these to me, it’s like you trust me. I’m just trying to think of what to say.”

And it felt like one of those moments—grace, the Holy Spirit—when something told him the right thing to say, and he said it, and it worked. Her shoulders relaxed under his hand and, still not turning her head, not looking up at him, she reached her own hand behind and touched his wrist, a soft, affectionate caress; like they had been married, for years and years. Wet snowflakes batted against the glass, like moths, a tiny sound.

“You don’t have to say anything about them,” she said. “You don’t even have to think anything about them, that’s the thing about pictures. They just exist. The eye sees them, that’s it.”

Kenny was instantly suspicious but now was not the time to start a war. He said, “I don’t know why but I like these better than the others.”

“There is a naked girl in these,” Junie said.

Kenny decided to quit while he was ahead; there was peace between them, restfulness.

“Can I put these away now?” she asked.

“Sure.”

And she didn’t look at him again until the pictures were safely back in their envelopes, the envelopes stacked together in a file
drawer under the desk, and the drawer closed. The room seemed dull without them; too brown, too natural. Junie was black-and-white, the thing that stood out. She sat on the bed, and Kenny sat next to her. He put his arm around her waist and she tried to put her arm around his shoulders but they got crossed up and banged their elbows together. “Ow!” Junie said.

“What are we supposed to be doing?” Kenny asked.

“What do you mean? What does my mother think we’re doing?”

“Whatever,” Kenny said.

“She doesn’t care. She’s downstairs doing good with Jinx Logan. That’s her hobby, or maybe her vice—doing good. She just can’t help herself.”

The bitterness made her seem like a child, unattractive; but there was something else, a restlessness that Kenny recognized. What? He couldn’t name it, couldn’t pin it down. There had to be more, that was all; there had to be more than this. He closed his eyes and saw gardens, topiary shrubs, statues standing in pools of water; he saw a park, springtime, felt the sunshine on his shoulders and his neck. This was his future, the thing he was walking toward, every day another slow step. Will you walk beside me? Kenny thought; then saw her in grainy black-and-white, the pubic tangle. Will you let me inside?

Reached to kiss her, and Junie let him, and no more.

Kenny was opposed to the idea of the future: he was trying for Zen, where everything is the same, the past, the future, good luck and bad. He wanted to get off the wheel, samsara. Birth, suffering, death, rebirth. He didn’t do much of anything to get himself off the wheel, but he thought about it.

At the same time, he knew that he was going to be somewhere for the rest of his life, however long that took, whatever ended up
happening to him. Sunday in the park, with the sun on his shoulders. It was something to hope for, anyway. Other times he saw his father’s face, the dark hollows around his eyes, like an electrical appliance had been socketed in his eyes and then unplugged abruptly, leaving scorch marks. Even when his father laughed, his eyes didn’t. His father had found a way from his own childhood to his present location; Kenny had seen evidence, pictures of his father as a young man, grinning, with an oar in his hand. Kenny could find his own way. The easy certainties of the children in his class—school then college then work then marriage—felt silly to him but they appeared to work: it was Tinkerbell again, the children holding hands, singing together. Successful, interchangeable.
You have to believe …