Norman Partridge - Slippin' into Darkness

“I’ll get it,” he said.

His girls were waiting for him in the bedroom.

Marvis winked at them. “I guess I haven’t lost my touch,” he said, and his voice held genuine surprise rather than the hollow ring of braggadocio.

Marvis always felt like a teenage boy when he entered his bedroom. It didn’t really seem like an adult’s room at all, not with his girls there. It would forever belong to a nervous teenager that everyone had known as Shutterbug.

Marvis stared at his girls, trying to see them as he once had, with Shutterbug eyes. To his younger eye they had been perfection. Now he could see their flaws. A nose that was just a little too large. Teenage breasts that would never swell to desired dimensions. A smile that would be eternally crooked, because orthodontia wasn’t covered on blue-collar health plans.

And here they were, eighteen years later, still locked in his bedroom. Each one of them trapped in an eight-by-ten inch frame, sealed behind a slab of clear glass. Untouched and untouchable.

Their smiles glowed. Girls were different back in the seventies. At least these girls were different. A little more innocent. Not much, but just enough. They weren’t like the knowing nineties girls with caked-on vampire makeup who visited Marvis’s camera shop to pose for their senior portraits. And they weren’t at all like Shelly Desmond, who dressed like an MTV exec’s idea of a bad girl. When she wore any clothes at all, that is. No, Shutterbug’s girls would have died of shame in Shelly Desmond’s skin. They were daddy’s princesses, and they behaved as such. In Shutterbug’s photographs they wore princess smiles untouched by the cold hand of life.

At eighteen, Marvis had believed that his camera was the only thing that could get him close to that kind of girl. His tongue was more tin than silver, and he certainly wasn’t a jock. His father despised athletics, believing that too many promising black youths crippled themselves playing stupid games that didn’t mean anything. Chess club was as exciting as it got for Marvis.

But the kid everyone called Shutterbug could make wonderful pictures. He told his girls that he was going to grow up to be a fashion photographer. And they believed him, just as they believed that they were going to find careers as models or actresses. Marvis snapped some of them so often that he memorized their entire wardrobes, learning which blouses went with which skirts, which sweaters or T-shirts were acceptable with bell-bottomed Levi’s. Even now he could remember their shoes-mostly those awful cork platform things that girls had worn in the days of disco-though recalling the range of a girl’s footwear after all this time seemed a little sick, even to Marvis.

But he was never Marvis to those girls. He was Shutterbug. It was a whitebread name he could hide behind, a nickname that would have fit a friend of Marcia or Jan on The Brady Bunch, a name that got him past the vigilant mother or father who answered the kitchen phone, securing passage to the ear of the girl who lay on her bed with a pink Princess extension balanced on her flat white stomach.

Even now, eighteen years later, he had to smile at his ingenuity. A whitebread princess’s parents would have been naturally suspicious if their daughter had received a call from someone named Marvis. The kid everyone called Shutterbug couldn’t believe that his father hadn’t recognized that simple fact. The old man had certainly considered Marvis’s voice and diction, because he had taken the time to beat the neighborhood street talk out of his only son. But he’d missed the name- Marvis – a real tip-off to any bigot.

Marvis grinned at the very idea of his father making a mistake. Maybe the old man had been human after all.

Marvis still used his voice to make business contacts on the telephone, just as he still used his camera to make social connections.

The camera had brought Shelly here tonight.

No, it wasn’t the camera. The money brought her here.

Marvis laughed. “Shut up, Shutterbug.”

He opened the bedroom closet. Two shoeboxes were shoved toward the back of the middle shelf. He opened the box on the right, razored a couple of lines onto a cosmetic mirror for Shelly, then did a few discreet toots of his own with a gold coke spoon that he kept in the box.

The rush caught him and his eyelids fluttered. He was nowhere for a brief instant, and then he was staring down at a bent photo jammed in a box of high school junk. It was a shot of the cheerleading squad that he’d snapped in his senior year. Five beauties in the foreground, in the background-barely visible through a biology lab window made nearly opaque by hard afternoon sunlight-a young man’s silhouette. Faceless, but anyone who looked closely enough to see the solitary figure knew instinctively what the young man was watching.

Voyeurism. Some things you didn’t have to see clearly to know what they were. Or more simply put, Marvis thought, it takes one to know one.

Not that anyone would notice the young man’s silhouette now. The photo had been ruined long ago at the direction of the editor of the 1976 yearbook, a real ice princess named Amelia Peyton. Well, the order had come from the vice principal himself, but Amy Peyton had obviously enjoyed passing it on. Shutterbug had been forced to excise-that was the vice principal’s word-the face of the cheerleader who’d been kicked off the squad. He had backed the hole with some black mounting paper, and once that was done the viewer’s attention was invariably drawn to the stark nothingness of the black pit.

Minutes ago, in the living room, Shutterbug’s eyes had been drawn to the ebony eight ball and the pocket of shadow on the pool table in just the same way. And before that, an equally strong, nearly magnetic pull had drawn his gaze to a face lost in shadow behind a curtain of blonde hair.

The face of a ghost.

No. Only the face of Shelly Desmond.

Marvis closed the closet.

The faceless ghost was gone. Hidden away.

Shelly was in the living room.

Suddenly, Marvis wanted to be with her.

Barefoot now, wearing only a black silk robe, Marvis returned to the living room, and Shelly.

The girl had stacked the scattered videos, save one, on a shelf above Marvis’s stereo. The other cassette was playing in the VCR. Shelly lay on a throw rug in front of the 32” Sony television, a video remote held in her hand, studying her mirror image. The two Shellys moaned in unison. Marvis had to smile. To think that, even in shadow, he hadn’t recognized Shelly’s busy fingers.

Shelly hadn’t noticed his presence. He set the coke-lined mirror on the edge of the pool table and watched her. There was almost something innocent about her unconscious nudity.

But there was nothing innocent about the girl on the screen.

And he’d never feel the same way about her, anyway. He knew that. He’d never desire her in that crazy, unquenchable way. That was the hell of it. Shelly’s eyes were wrong. They were green, not gray. And her hair was wrong. It was straight and uniformly pale, not curled and frosted, as the girl’s hair had been on that night in 1976. That girl, whose face had been excised from the 1976 Lance amp; Shield, she’d had a wonderful smile, too, one of those Mona Lisa smiles that were as good as a whispered secret you could never forget even if you wanted to.

The girl with the excised face had been the main attraction in the first erotica Shutterbug photographed (Shutterbug never called it porno – that was declasse, one of the first words you learned to avoid when you got involved in the industry). A little 16mm job he had done at eighteen. It had been a complete surprise, that film. Nothing he had ever planned to do, but those fifty feet of 16mm had started him on the road to fortune, if not fame.