Lisa Unger - Under My Skin

I arrive at the office frazzled, sweaty, full of nerves, late for the meeting. In the bathroom, running my wrists under cold water, pulling shaking fingers through my dark hair, I stare at my reflection in the mirror.

Pull. Yourself. Together .

My face is sickly gray under the ugly fluorescents, as I dab some makeup on the eternal dark circles under my eyes, refresh lipstick and blush. A little better, but the girl in the mirror is still a tired, wrung-out version of the person she used to be.

Rustling through my bag, I find the bottle of pills Layla gave me. It’s blank, the little amber vial, no label. For nerves , she said. I hesitate only a second before popping one in my mouth and swallowing it with water from the faucet, then try to take some centering breaths. Dr. Nash is not aware of my unauthorized pill-taking, one of multiple things I keep from her. I know. What’s the point of keeping things from the person who is supposed to be helping you?

As I walk past Ben’s desk, he rises and hands me a stack of messages.

“They’re waiting,” he says, dropping into step beside me. “You’re fine.”

“Great.” My smile feels as stiff and fake as it is. “The subway is a mess.”

“Everything okay?”

He inspects me through thick, dark-rimmed glasses, tugs at his hipster beard. He’s a stellar assistant; I keep trying to promote him but he doesn’t want to go. My clients love him—he’s on top of all their contracts, tracks down their payments, helps with grant and residency applications. Over the past year, he’s been more agent to them than I have. He could probably just take over and I could slip away. It’s tempting, that idea of slipping away, disappearing—another life, another self.

“Yeah,” I say unconvincingly. Ben watches after me with a frown as I push into the conference room.

“His work,” Maura is saying. “It’s stunning.”

“Whose work?” I ask, taking my seat at the head of the conference table. “Sorry I’m late.”

All eyes turn to me. When Jack was alive, I could come and go unnoticed. He ran the meetings and I was the number two—critical to the running of the office, but not the magnetic, energetic head of the meeting table. He brought a light and enthusiasm for the craft, for the business into every gathering. I am not the captain he was, I know, but I’m doing my best. They watch me now—respectful, kind, hopeful.

Jack picked out everything in this room, from the long sleek conference table to the white leather swivel chairs, the enormous flat screen on the wall. His photo from an Inca Trail trek, featured in Travel + Leisure , is blown up onto an enormous canvas. He took it from his campsite above the cloud line—orange tents blossom in white mist, as clouds fall away into a landscape of jade and royal blue, the dip of the valley dark and the sky bright.

“Alvaro’s,” Maura says. “He took that Nat Geo job to photograph the okapi living in the Ituri Rainforest, just got back yesterday.”

The photos come up on the screen—lush, jewel greens and deep black, a red mud road twists and disappears into a thick of forest; a girl, her eyes dark and staring, stands on a riverbank in a grass skirt, her expression innocently teasing. A blue-and-white truck travels precariously over a swaying wooden slat bridge.

Maura runs a manicured hand over her black hair, pulled tight into a ponytail at the base of her neck. She’s young, but her almond-shaped eyes reveal an old soul. Olive-skinned, almost birdlike in her delicacy, she’s a firebrand agent, fiercely protective of her clients. She worries over them like a mother hen.

“The colors, the movement, the energy,” I say. “They’re wonderful.”

The trunk of a tree, hollowed out and haunted, twisting, branches reaching up into deep green black. The shots of the okapi, an animal that is partially striped like a zebra, but related more closely to a giraffe, are stunning—a mother nursing her young, a young male hiding in tall grass, a small herd underneath a wide full moon.

“They are,” Maura agrees. Her smile is wide and proud. “He’s— amazing .”

I wonder, not for the first time, if something is going on between Maura and Alvaro. It’s not a good idea for an agent to fall in love with a photographer she represents. In fact, it’s not a good idea for anyone to fall in love with a photographer. The unfiltered world never quite measures up to whatever he sees through that lens. Alvaro Solare, Jack’s best friend and the firm’s first client, is the typical roving photographer, always in pursuit of the next perfect shot. Which means the rest of the world can go to hell. There are a string of heartbroken women in his wake. I’d prefer Maura not become one of them. But it’s not really my business.

The rest of my agents run down the status of their clients’ assignments. Our firm, Lang and Lang, mine and Jack’s, represents photographers. We are a boutique agency, small but successful, with some of the top names in fashion, feature and news photography on our roster.

What started as a small enterprise in our apartment, has grown into an agency with a suite of offices in the Flatiron Building. Jack, affable and mellow, was a natural mediator. When Alvaro was in a dispute with the New York Times travel section, Jack stepped in and resolved it over drinks with the photo editor, an old friend of his. Alvaro paid Jack 15 percent out of appreciation. One thing led to another, and after a year Jack was turning down photo assignments, and representing more of his friends, including me.

So, after years of hustling as travel photographers, scraping together a living, we traded in our life of adventure for a firm dedicated to protecting the rights of people who make a living with a camera in their hands. Alvaro thought it was a mistake, that we were wasting our talent and our lives. And he never lost an opportunity to tell us so. But we thought it was time to settle down, start a family. Except it didn’t work out that way.

I half listen as the other agents run down problems and successes. I comment, make suggestions, offer to make a call to a contact of mine at Departures . But mostly, I am still on that train, chasing after the man in the hood.

I wonder if anyone notices that I am a ghost in my life.

* * *

It’s another half hour before I am back in my office, scrolling through the blurry, useless photos I took on my smartphone. The light was poor, too much motion. That dark form is just a smudge, a black space between the grainy commuters all around him. I use my thumb and forefinger to enlarge the image on the screen, but it looks ever more amorphous as a low-quality image will.

I start to doubt myself, my grip on reality. What did I see really, after all? Just a man with a hood, who might or might not have been looking in my direction.

I don’t even notice Ben until he’s sitting across the desk from me. There’s a look I don’t like on his face, worry, something else.

“What?”

He leans back and crosses his legs. “When were you going to tell me?”

“Tell you?”

“That you’re dating again.”

I shake my head, not wanting to get into it. “I’m not.”

“So, who’s Rick, then?” He slides a message across my desk. There’s another one from him in the stack I’ve just barely started to sort through. I’m old-school; I still like paper messages to toss when calls are returned, write notes on, keep as reminders.

“He’s no one,” I say.

I wouldn’t say I’m exactly dating. There’s a snow globe on my desk, a little farmhouse surrounded by trees. Jack gave it to me one Christmas. This is what our house will look like, out in the country. Quiet. Away from all the chatter. I tip it and watch the snow swirl around the black branches.