Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

Right about now, channel 6 is starting their weeklong Peter Lorre film festival. They’re going to begin with Mad Love and close out with The Patsy. They’re going to run all the Warner Brothers dramas from the forties. There will be a roundtable discussion of The Lost One, a trivia quiz on The Maltese Falcon, and the first uncut, local screening of Pionier in Inoplastaldt with the corrected subtitles. She just wants to be back home waiting for the Sydney Green-street collaborations, checking the schedule for Passage to Marseille, now and then looking at the picture on the tube through the Aquinas.

And she wants to be wearing her sweats and her sneakers. She wants to have her hair pulled back and her face washed. It’s not like she’s reactionary when it comes to dressing up. She’s got on the black velvet dress and the pearls Perry gave her at Christmas a year ago. She knows he likes her like this and she’d be lying if she said she didn’t get a kick out of his reaction as he came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist and saw her in front of the bureau mirror and said, “God. Just gorgeous.”

But it’s so close and humid in here. She wants to grabs one of the waiters and tell him there’s a sweet tip if he can locate the air-conditioning and lower the temp a little.

The killer is that on the drive downtown, Perry started in on how they’ve got to get used to all these receptions and fund-raisers and open-house deals the firm throws. That there are only going to be more in the future and once he makes partner his presence is always going to be required. Sylvia said, “Fine, but why does that mean my presence is required? I don’t work for these guys. I don’t even have a law degree.”

He said, “Because it looks better. It looks good. For you to be there with me.” And she gave a little laugh she couldn’t help and then regretted it right away. He’s still pumped up about the partnership offer and Sylvia honestly doesn’t want to ruin it for him.

He said, “You don’t think so, fine. But it still works this way. It sends a message to the old boys. The guys above Ratzinger. It says I’m stable. It says I’ve got plans and direction. Focus. And, I’m sorry, I don’t want you to take this any way but as a compliment, but it says I’ve got taste. That if this looker came with me there must be something.”

She stared at him as they pulled into the underground garage. She stared until he said, “What?” in this kind of great, flinching whine.

“Looker,” she said.

“Jesus, Sylvia.”

“Looker?” she couldn’t get over the word. “Did you, like, age a generation in the shower?”

“Sylvia, c’mon—”

But Sylvia couldn’t stop. “Looker? Is this part of the deal now? We have to change the way we speak? Should we practice tonight? Perry, could you have the darkie bring your cupcake a martini …”

So she stepped over the line at the end there. He was self-conscious and hurt and she had to calm him down in the garage before they went up to the reception.

Walpole & Lewis has rented out the main gallery of the art museum. If she’d listened more closely Sylvia would know all the details, but she was thinking about the camera while they were getting ready to go. She was thinking about just getting home and playing with it, taking it apart and getting used to the feel.

Perry mentioned something about a new client, some political action group that’s really up and coming and got “a pool of money and a national network.” Sylvia doesn’t know what their grudge is, but they’ve just tossed a wad to W & L as a retainer and she knows Perry said something about “they really want us to put our best teeth in the mayor’s ass.”

The fact is, Sylvia’s just not a political creature and never will be. There’s no juice in it for her. No charge. And for her to make a connection with something, to give it her time and her thought, there has to be some natural gravitation, an ongoing connection where she’s dwelling on it in her sleep, where she’s thinking about it in line at the supermarket or while she’s getting her hair cut.

On Sylvia’s thirteenth birthday, at about six o’clock at night, her mother put the supper dishes in the sink to soak. Then Ma brought this small cake out of the refrigerator, this chocolate cake with butter cream frosting. And after Sylvia blew out her candles, Ma put a small box in front of her, about the size of a doughnut box, maybe a little smaller, and wrapped in pink and white paper with a bow saved from some other holiday. Sylvia sat there a minute to let the excitement build, to consciously savor the feeling and let it expand just a little. She carefully unwrapped the box and handed the paper back to her mother and watched as Ma smiled and sort of absentmindedly refolded the paper on the kitchen table. Then Sylvia looked down to see a bright yellow display case and the red letters on the top that said Kodak. It was a hinged box and she lifted the top back and there, sitting in these black, mock-crushed velvet inserts, was a flashcube, a black plastic cartridge of film, a detachable black plastic wrist strap, and her first camera, a classic Instamatic, all grey and silver and this round bug-eye lens in the front.

She pulled the camera from its resting place in the box. And she was honestly speechless. She stared up at her mother and, she still has no idea why, she started to cry. The tears just helplessly came down her face. And the horrible thing was that Ma immediately misinterpreted the reaction. She thought Sylvia was crushed by what must have been the inappropriateness of the gift. Ma got terribly upset and started repeating, “But you asked for one, last summer, you asked for one.”

And it was probably ten minutes before Sylvia could convince her mother that she was crying from the excitement, from the thrill, that she didn’t know why she was crying but that she loved the camera, that it was, in fact, exactly what she’d wanted. Ma huddled with her and they read the instructions and loaded the film and tried to memorize the Tips For Better Pictures booklet. And then Ma agreed to pose in every room of the dingy little apartment up on Harper Ave. And Sylvia used up the flashcube that had come with the set, then turned on all the table lamps, hoping it would make things bright enough.

It didn’t. The next day her mother brought the film to the drugstore and Sylvia waited out a god-awfully long week until the photos came back. Only four shots were printable. But that was enough. The pictures were wonderful. There was her mother, in full color, captured forever inside a three-inch-square frame of glossy paper, posed, laughing, embarrassed but pliable: At the kitchen table where they ate together every night. Tilted back in the paisley rocker in the living room. Perched on the edge of a too-small twin bed with her hands folded in her lap. Close up and in profile before the refrigerator, looking like a practice mug shot.

Ma hated them all, good-naturedly threatened to tear up the prints and negatives. Sylvia laughed off her complaints and was oblivious to the eight blackened squares on the negative strips — the shots that hadn’t come out. She was infected. She was converted. Very simply, she knew, without doubt or hesitation, with a surety that usually visits the religious or the lovesick, she knew what she wanted to do with her time. She wanted to take pictures. She wanted to bring this miraculous black box up to her eye as often as possible and press that silver rectangular button, and expose her visions to film, enshrine them, verify them, make them into something lasting.

Sylvia had fantasized about going to some hip art school, someplace like RISD or the Kertész Center in Boston. But there was just no money, so she took out loans and went to a state college and studied fine arts with a concentration in cinema. Now, those four years are like a blurry filmstrip for her. Isolated images that refuse to flow together. She got pretty good grades and worked in the dining commons. She wrote papers and took exams and for one semester she shot pictures for the school paper. In her sophomore year, she slept through a standard bout of mononucleosis. In her junior year, she slept with her Cronenberg: Fear, Fluids, & the Body professor. The word slept is a misnomer. The guy seduced her in the projection booth of the campus cinema while screening a double feature of Rabid and The Parasite Murders.