When We Disappear. Lise Haines
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.”
“Who did you take with you to Paris this time?”
“An old friend, a photographer.”
“Someone you see from time to time?”
“You’re making too much of this.”
“What does she look like?”
He hesitated long enough to realize I’d persist. There were some pictures on his phone. She seemed rather plain, wore almost no makeup. Certainly there was nothing about her clothes to draw him in.
“What type of photography? Show me.”
“You aren’t going to let this go, are you?” he said. He got out of bed and took my hand. I was a little wobbly in the heels. He guided me over to a set of large flat drawers. She had her own drawer. I didn’t. I didn’t have a drawer. She was a street photographer. I wouldn’t say she was better than me, just different. It almost looked as if she had posed her subjects, certainly they were standing still in their settings, and she took her time to frame things. I was more abrupt, more into movement, light, and emotion. I didn’t mind that someone was lopped off or caught at a funny angle. I liked to shoot people before they had time to think, to respond.
She was thirty-five, he told me when I asked. They had seen each other on and off for years. But things weren’t like that anymore, he said. I wasn’t sure I believed him.
I closed the drawer and worked on the buckles and left the stolen heels by the door. I got dressed, and all the time he watched me. I turned my phone on again and began to flip through my mother’s messages. There were seven.
“You understand they arrest you if you get caught,” he said, circling back to my small larcenies, pushing away from his.
“I’ve already got a mother,” I said and held up the phone with her texts stacked in a heap.
“If you need money, all you have to do is let me know.”
But I was already working on other ideas. Not clothes.
Pushing in, he offered to give me a ride back to Evanston. I took the L.
Of course it had to be that night when the bill went online breaking things down in preparation for my first year of college. I didn’t tell my mother and called a financial aid officer the next day.
“Things have changed,” I said.
The woman waited as I told her my father had moved away and wasn’t sending much money before she launched in. Maybe the AC units were broken in her office that day or she was working from home and a cat was gnawing at her toes or she just didn’t like the sound of my voice. Whatever it was, she got merciless about the college’s funding distribution practices, the limits of federal aid, how far from extended deadlines I had drifted, the effort they had put in to arrive at a good package for me, as if her entire office had traveled for months in a desolate country to reach me. Finally, she suggested I consider delaying admission for a year. I could reapply for aid next winter. “You might