an art book of Blake’s work with four versions of Pity compared side by side, and I tended to remember things like that.
“You want to stay for dinner?” he asked.
“I should get back.” Looking at some of the fashion work spread out on a long table, I asked, “You date any of them?”
“Used to,” he admitted.
“I’d never get attached to you the way they did,” I said.
He laughed and asked, “Why’s that?”
“Because I don’t give a shit about immortality.”
“Stay for dinner,” he said. “We could talk about your dreams.” He nursed some kind of tenderness as he coaxed. Dream analysis was a party trick Nitro performed. When I questioned his ability to make interpretations, he said his mother was a psychoanalyst.
I got my jacket on and wrapped my wool scarf around my neck, and in an odd moment I let him knot it and throw one end over my shoulder as if he were dressing me for a shoot. He came very close like he had an impulse to kiss me but he pulled back at the last moment, which told me he was probably used to this kind of seduction. I took off and got home in time to read Lola a bedtime story.
I made another delivery a week later and when he opened the door I saw cheese and bread and wine arranged with a bowl of fresh dates on his coffee table.
Each visit got a little more elaborate: the four-course meals, the special selected movies, hookahs with full bowls.
I began to go over there once a week to deliver myself.
Nitro and I played a lot of Call of Duty after I got him started. We racked up kills and we began to photograph each other clothed and naked and standing in front of a large mirror embedded in a piece of architectural salvage—from a convent bathroom or an Irish bar—he couldn’t remember. We stretched out on his bed and along his kitchen counters and dining table and sink and bathroom floor and fire escape and in front of his giant windows at night and we had unadulterated sex.
But that’s not why I fell for Nitro. It was watching him burn and dodge in the darkroom, the seconds of exposure, the way he cropped an image. Sometimes I sat on a stool to watch and sometimes I put my head against his shoulder for a minute, and he would tell me how long to make the exposure, and we became inseparable until the timer went off.
I guess I amused him at first. There was a lot he didn’t ask me directly, so I photographed what I thought was a lack of questions in his face and he photographed the questions in mine. He loaned me cameras and tripods. We smoked too much pot and he bought me eye drops and mints so my mother wouldn’t quiz me when I got home. He asked what I liked in my omelets. We talked about lighting techniques. His loft became that place where I could say anything, do anything. That’s how it worked.
He had a four-year-old son and an ex-wife. A model. They lived in France and Nitro saw his boy three or four times a year. He said he’d be going over there soon. I waited for him to beg me to go. And then I saw two tickets, one his, one with a woman’s name. I assumed she was one of the flawless women.
I cried on the way to the L going home, but I figured that was something about modern love. It wasn’t about him. It really had nothing to do with him.
He told me many times he loved the way I looked: unaltered, pure, almost virginal. But after he took off on his trip, I began to think about legs and arms and bracelets. About jackets, perfumes, stockings, the things he caught with his lens.
I pushed my way into Neiman Marcus, just taking a cut-through in the mall at first, until I saw this blouse. I was sure he would like it. I tried it on in the dressing room and cut out the device on the bottom hem that sets off the store alarm with the manicure scissors in my makeup bag. It was cream-colored silk with a pointed collar that felt right to the touch. I was surprised at how easily I walked out of that store and how I enjoyed the breathlessness. At home I cut off the bottom and used my mother’s sewing machine to rehem it.
The day after his return he looked at the delicate custom buttons open to my waist, smiled, and said, “Sabrina.” Then he had to explain that this wasn’t about another girl. He was thinking about an old movie in which the chauffeur’s daughter, played by Audrey Hepburn, suddenly becomes a woman out of Paris Vogue. I was pleased and didn’t care that in his hurry the fabric ripped where I had stitched it. Something had changed.
I began to clip the kind of jewelry that sits out on counters. I knew it would be easy to take a jacket or scarf holding a place in a movie theater or coffee shop, but I understood his tastes, and this meant small acquisitions from particular stores. I walked away in a handsome pair of heels, leaving behind socks and beat-up footwear on a showroom floor one afternoon.
“You have to figure this out,” he said later that day when he realized what I was doing. He was staring at my heels. I pulled away and sat up in bed. Neither of us had had the patience for the buckles. “There’s someone you’re trying to rattle.”
Rolling onto his side, Nitro lit a cigarette and I watched the smoke drift, looking for that point where it disappeared. The ceilings were twenty feet high and the late afternoon light poured in through the long sash windows. His loft was part of a converted candy factory taken over by an artists’ cooperative. There were marks where giant copper vats had been strapped to the floors.
“Rattle?” I said.
“By getting caught eventually.” He picked up my phone and began to flip through my photos. I tried to grab it away, but he got playful. I decided not to make a deal out of it so he’d stop. He paused on a shot of my parents together at a restaurant. I had used a high intensity flash so they looked half there and kind of shocked. “Nice framing,” he said. “So your mom thinks he’ll be back?”
I don’t know why this was sitting in his foreground now. His cheeks were pitted and this made him look rough at times. He told me once that he couldn’t stop scratching when he had chicken pox as a kid.
“She’s waiting for him, that’s all I know.”
“They don’t do well,” Nitro said, lost in his own meditations. Then he looked over at me and began to blow smoke rings as if I needed entertainment.
“‘They’? Who doesn’t do well?” I asked.
“Left women. You know, when children are involved.”
I felt my blood pick up pace. “He was out of work for a long time,” I said. “And then this job turned up in New Jersey. I wouldn’t call that leaving her.”
“You don’t have to go to New Jersey to sell insurance. Besides, if this was strictly about a job, you wouldn’t look troubled.”
“You think I’m a child,” I said and pushed into his stomach with my elbow to reach the bedside table. I pulled the last cigarette from his pack and grabbed the lighter.
His father, who had died of lung cancer, looked down at me like a dark cloud from the wall. I lit up, inhaled, and found out how light my head became on tobacco.
“Maybe you’re thinking about your son, about the way you left him,” I said.
“But I didn’t,” he said, clearly pained now. “She left me and took off for France. And in the French courts there was little I could do.”
