Equivocality

When I first met Michelle she was wearing the white dress, and I suppose the first thing I noticed about her was her slightly too-large nose. She looks like a goddess in the book, and she would later be very beautiful to me in even the most quotidian and unflattering light, but her face is not the one that launched a thousand ships. I liked her immediately though, and that dress did look good on her.

Two weeks later, I was watching the same face during breakfast. We were in her New York apartment, the one with the view. A perfect shaft of yellow sunlight came in through the big window, sparkling on the white kitchen table. She sat outlined light that morning, in her worn white bathrobe and messy hair.

“Pass the toast,” she said.

I passed her the toast, and saw that thing in her smile again.

“Are you working tomorrow?” she asked me. And then something ignited in her expression just a split second later, when she realized what it might mean if I said no.

She couldn’t hide it. We went to a friend’s house for dinner that night and she did the same routine, talking only about normal things while her face betrayed her. Other guests noticed, and teased her about it. We had it that good.

It was not long into our first year together that I found the book.

It was a handsome hardcover volume, the sort of heavy, expensive book of photographs that the too-stylish always seem to have on their coffee tables. When I first came across it, it was sitting on the small desk next to the big window in her study. The title was simply “Michelle,” written in elegant gold script subtly embossed into the dustcover. The black and white cover image depicted a woman sitting at an outdoor café, in the process of bringing a big latte to her lips, smiling. I looked hard at that photograph, and saw that the woman with the coffee was indeed my Michelle, in her famous white dress.

I opened the book, flipped past the front matter and found a street shot of her, younger, perhaps mid-twenties, stepping out of a grocer’s with a pair of paper bags suspended awkwardly in her arms. The photographer had caught her unaware, looking over her shoulder in the direction of the camera, and there was something endearing in her slightly awkward pose. The next page was a glamour shot, Michelle at a classy party in a black cocktail dress, smiling at the camera, glass of something sparkling in her hand. Then she was on a beach, an unidentified dazzling strip of sand, with umbrellas and dark-haired tourists that made me think of Italy. It was the expression on her face that caught the eye, her vague half-smile beneath big dark sunglasses, like she found the whole world just slightly intriguing, including you. Next page: Michelle wearing a big floppy hat, drinking a milkshake with lipsticked lips around a straw. All of these photos were black and white. In fact the whole book was printed without color, an entire volume of unreal photographs of the woman I knew so well. There was Michelle in a power suit gesturing over a document with a colleague. Michelle standing at the edge of a misty cliff, looking out contemplatively. Michelle in high heels splaying her arms drunkenly around two girlfriends on the street, grinning toothily, the neon blur of an unidentifiable late-night metropolis behind her. Brushing her teeth in a bleary-eyed morning. Sleeping, burrowed down into the covers, just a mop of blonde hair and a lump under the blankets. Caught snickering in front of a gallery painting in the glare of a flash, fingers curled in front of her mischievous mouth. And in all of these shots her too-big nose, transformed into the charming imperfection of the face of a star.

“What is that book?” I asked her that night. She answered my questions but told me nothing. It’s a book of photographs of me, she said. Different photographers, she said. I guess they wanted to photograph me, she said. More, she would not say.

I think I was jealous of whoever had taken the photos, whoever had access to the private Michelle I had thought was mine alone. I went back to the book the next day before she got home from work. This time I inspected the front matter closely. The publisher was a well-known producer of photographic books. The editor was a credited as “Peter Welt.” I checked the ISBN and found that the book had been published just around the time Michelle and I had started seeing each-other. I searched for Peter Welt on the internet and found nothing. I was mystified, but the mystery was less important to me than the beautiful photographs of Michelle, and Michelle was more important than the photographs. Annoyed by my distraction, Michelle put the book away on a shelf somewhere and led me by her soft hand back to bed. I forgot all about it for a while.

Life went on for the two of us. She was eventually promoted to the head of her department, and I finally sold my first novel. We didn’t have the kind of money you need to be a star, but we were social enough and interesting enough to be part of the scene. We knew the artists, the big-shot editors, the gallery owners, the young and the beautiful and the tortured geniuses with colored hair. We fit in perfectly. We were more than an item. We were some sort of standardized icon, the poster couple. I think that I was just a little too short, that she was just a little too fat, that we were both a little too poor to make the cover of any magazine, but we relished the roles.

There were perfect days. One Saturday we dressed and ate breakfast around the corner at her favorite brunch place. The waiter, I remember, was irritable. He looked hung over and annoyed as we placed our orders, and threw me murderous glares when I tried to convince him to serve Michelle’s hollandaise on the side. But we just laughed about it as we headed to the park afterwards, where we giggled at the ducks and the tidy families and the surly punk kids, all the beautiful scenes and scenery of the urban greenspace. She wore the white dress again. It was getting old then, more of a comfortable rag than the elegant frock it had once been. It was not one of those days where I had the thrill of catching other men stealing glances at her, but they couldn’t see what I saw. As always her slightly indelicate features sent a warm surge through me whenever she turned my way and focused her puzzled eyes on me. That night, I took her to the opera and watched her face more than the production. In the dark, she glowed with a perfection unavailable in less imaginative lighting.

I sought out the book again the next day. I traced her outline in all the familiar photographs, and studied her face in the various poses I knew so well. This time I noticed something odd. In many of the photographs she appeared older than when we had met, a Michelle who had not existed until years after the book had been published. And in a few pictures, the woman in black and white was several years more aged than my current Michelle – yet it was still recognizably her. As before, all the shots were candid, and all showed a proud, elegant, beautiful woman. The photographs showed no faults; the woman in the book had only charming eccentricities, touching naivety, and endearing vulnerabilities.

The difficulties began slowly. Her career expanded and I missed her when she worked long hours. She went out with colleagues after work while I often stayed in. I let it be; she needed the stress relief and it gave me time to write. She didn’t get enough sleep and would be cranky. One bleary Thursday breakfast she actually snapped at me for putting too much sugar in her coffee. I forgave her, and she cried in my arms that night, apologizing. The simple things no longer pleased her. I missed the way she was once delighted by a bag of fresh croissants, a new CD of her favorite band, or brunch at the diner with the surly waiter. She aged. The corners of her eyes began to show the stress, and still she was beautiful to me.

Still she glowed. In the white dress she never wore anymore she glowed, stepping out of the shower in a bathrobe she glowed, and even on those mornings when she had dark circles under her eyes and didn’t seem to see me at all, she was still radiant. Sometimes, often enough, she glowed just for me. I remember most of all one evening when we went out to a fancy private party at someone’s penthouse. I cornered her on the balcony while all the other the guests drank on inside. I don’t know if there was a moon that night. If there was, the light was full and liquid and heavy, and her skin was powdery and luminescent. She was elflike, beyond perfect. Her evening gown left her back exposed, and I kissed it as I took the glass out of her hand. My hands found her hips through the thin material, and then the hem of her dress. She murmured something as I gathered the fabric around her waist; she opened her mouth wide with the shock of sensation as I entered her. I shielded her from the view of the distant guests with my body. They couldn’t possibly see us; they were much too far away to see her skin radiate, to watch her features smooth and reshape themselves into something unreal as she tilted her head to the sky. A gentle breeze came out of nowhere and disheveled her hair perfectly over her gasping face. The city lights splayed out beneath us and a thousand faces envied us from far below. Her dress fluttered and clung to her in just the right ways, and she clung to me. All the longings of youth and beauty and ever-after were contained in that moment. In that moment she was the Michelle in the book.

I think I loved her most at the end. She needed to go in new directions, she said. She still cared for me but she couldn’t share her life with me anymore, she said. I pleaded, I said I didn’t understand, but in truth I think I did. She was moving faster than I was then, and I was getting tired of being her other, of always being introduced second. Yet I still loved her. She had long since become something beyond real for me. He whole being still rearranged itself for my adoration whenever I was near.

When Michelle was just about the age of the oldest woman in the book, she moved out. I cried for a long time.

When I felt I could bear it, I went to look at the book.

It was gone. I looked everywhere. She was completely out of my life then, on another continent, and for a time no longer answering my emails. One sad afternoon I felt that just had to see her again, and wandered through the apartment for hours, zombie-like, listlessly seeking the book. As the gray light dimmed to evening I became desperate. I tore our old home apart. I broke things. I couldn’t find it. I looked through old snapshots on my laptop but I was never a good photographer; none of my pictures had the grace of the book of Michelle.

When I awoke in my demolished bedroom the next morning, I checked online. I would pay any cost, I would choose the fastest express shipping and have a copy by tomorrow. But the book was gone from cyberspace too. Google admitted nothing; the library of congress told me that the ISBN was invalid. I phoned the publisher. The said they’d never published a whole book of photographs of a single woman.

Eventually, I understood.

Monday morning found me at the courthouse with a change-of-name form in my hand. Printed in dark block letters on the first sheet was the name “Peter Welt.”

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Favorites, Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.