Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

“Syl,” he says, “I don’t take it that seriously. Political crap like that just bounces right off me. Goes right over my head. It’s just crap. It’s like it doesn’t have any meaning. It’s like he’s using words I don’t understand. So let him. Doesn’t affect me. You should do what I do.”

“Which is?”

He smiled, shifts his position, puts his hands on her shoulders and starts to massage her. “Which is ignore it. Just tune it out. Let the guy babble. I’m standing there tonight thinking how much of the raise I’m going to take home, you know? I’m thinking interest rates and how much we can afford to put down on a house. Speaking of which—”

She cuts him off by rolling her head back on top of his hands and moaning. “Oh no, Perry, c’mon.”

He gets defensive immediately. “What? I didn’t say a word here.”

“I’m just tired and you know I’m not feeling well.”

“Sylvia, I didn’t say a word. What did I say?”

“It’s just late for this discussion—”

“What discussion?”

“What discussion? The ‘it’s time to plunge ourselves into debt and leave this great apartment’ discussion. Please. C’mon. I’m really not feeling well.”

He gets up and goes to his bureau, takes off his watch and ring. His voice goes edgy and tight. “Yeah, well maybe if you’d gotten home in time to have a little dinner, the champagne wouldn’t have hit you quite so hard.”

She honestly doesn’t want this to escalate into a fight. She lies back on the bed and looks up at the cracks in the corner of the ceiling. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I lost track of time. I got caught up with the camera and everything. I didn’t realize how late it had gotten.”

But they’re already over the line and Perry doesn’t want an apology. “It’s okay,” he says with that sarcastic edge. “I guess eating dinner together these days is just a little too bourgeois for you, right?”

She lets it go for about five seconds and then says, as evenly as she can, “What’s that supposed to mean, Perry?”

He turns around, leans his behind against the bureau. “It means,” he says, the words singsong and drawn out, “How come you’re so concerned about debt when it comes to buying us a home, but not when it comes to buying another goddamn camera.”

She stands up. “I thought the goddamn camera was supposed to be a gift.”

“And I thought we were supposed to be having dinner together at five-thirty. That’s what families do, you know Sylvia. They eat together. They talk to each other.”

“Thanks for the tip. Did Reverend Boetell tell you that?”

She walks out of the bedroom into the kitchen, goes to the fridge and pours herself a glass of Pinot Grigio. He stands in the doorway fuming and says, “I thought you were sick.”

She says, “I am,” and goes out the back door and down to the basement.

The darkroom is at the rear of the cellar. Sylvia moves past the two huge, ancient furnaces and opens a padlock on this rickety chicken-wire door, steps into a little compartment room filled with all the forgotten junk that a hundred years’ worth of owners and tenants have left behind. She pulls on a string and lights the room with a bare forty-watt bulb. She looks down on steamer trunks filled with heavy, rusted old tools, defunct magazines, rough pieces of scrap wood. In one corner sits an antique child’s bicycle without any wheels. In another there’s a silver industrial hair dryer, this big helmet-like unit mounted on a heavy pole. It looks like a prop from some campy old science fiction movie — a brain scrambler or a time machine. She’s always wanted to bring the thing upstairs, clean it up, maybe turn it into a lamp or something. And she realizes now that the reason she never has is because Perry would hate it, would say something like, You’re kidding, right, this old piece of junk …

There’s a small door next to the hair dryer. She keeps it secured with her combination lock from high school. Inside used to be a small closet of some kind, sort of a storage bin, just 5 x 7, but nice and dry. Last year Sylvia asked Mrs. Acker if she could make it into a darkroom and Mrs. A was all excited by the idea. Sylvia spent two weekends cleaning the place out, then nailed some brackets to the plywood walls and hung some shelves. She managed to wedge in two small tables for counter space and ran an extension cord off the light fixture in the outer room. For water she hooked a garden hose up to the spigot near the furnaces.

She bought all her equipment secondhand, got some good deals by watching the classified ads in the Spy. She picked up a nice Durst enlarger at a yard sale over on Mann and got all her pans and tongs, her safelight and a good LePrince timer from a woman who was moving to Europe — Germany, she thinks — and just said, “Make me an offer.” Mrs. Acker donated a padded step stool that Sylvia uses as a chair.

There are no windows in the darkroom. She keeps her mother’s pocket radio on one of the shelves and there are nights when she finishes up her work and tunes in some no-talk jazz station, something from down the Zone with a lot of P.H. Cunningham rotation or maybe some Imogen Wedgewood. And she just sits there in the absolute darkness, can’t see her wineglass in front of her, and she kind of just perches on Mrs. Acker’s stool with the stuffing pushing through the red plastic covering, just swirling the wine around in her mouth, just feeling the soft roll of the horns on the radio, smelling the chemicals drying on the prints that she’s clothespinned to a wire strung between walls. She just sits there for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, feeling not exactly happy, more like contented and secure and relaxed, the muscles of her neck and shoulders finally getting loose.

She’s locked the Aquinas in the darkroom. She keeps all her cameras down here, though Perry says they’d be safer up in the apartment. She’s not so sure about that. And she likes seeing them all together on a worktable. It’s like pretending she has a studio or something. She remembers back in high school, the first time she saw Antonioni’s Blow Up on TV late one night. David Hemmings as the perfect mod fashion photographer, living in London, driving around in a Rolls convertible. He had that big, funky studio that he lived and worked in. He’d set models up under the lights, those ninety-pound girls dressed in those horrible, glittery smocks. And when everything was set, the man just turned into this whirlwind, just fired off shot after shot and you could hear that great shutter-click sound over and over. He had something like half a dozen cameras spread out on the floor and hanging around his neck and he’d be jumping from one to another, you know, grab a Nikon and click off ten shots, then pick up a Minolta and click off a dozen more, all the time yelling at the girls, the models, wooing them one second and insulting them the next. Sylvia thought Hemming’s character was a jerk, but she never got over all the cameras.

She turns on the safelight, pulls the stool up to the table, sits down and opens the Aquinas case. She takes out the camera and puts it on the table. She picks it up, plants her elbows on the table and brings her eye to the viewer. She’s still got the lens cap on and the dark-slide in. She just wants to feel the thing. She just wants to get used to the weight and the design.

It’s a fairly heavy piece of equipment. Probably around four pounds. Once Sylvia met a wedding photographer who said he’d only work with an Aquinas. He said, “You use the Aquinas, you look at the prints, you can count the circles of lace on the bride’s gown.” The downside was he had to go to a chiropracter once a month from lugging the thing around. “But it’s worth it,” he swore. “That’s the price you pay.”