Like a Love Story(73)

“Hey,” I say to Reza. “How would you feel about coming to the darkroom with me?”

“Really?” he asks.

“Yeah, why not?”

“I just, I always thought, that it was . . . private, or you know, a sacred space for you.” God, he’s cute, stammering away like that about sacred spaces when he’s my sacred space.

“Follow me,” I say. “There’s no place I wouldn’t let you into.” I hope he caught the not-so-subtle hint there.

I lead him to the darkroom I use, which is on the ground floor of an Upper West Side office building. I pay a fee per month, the best money I’ve every stolen from my criminal of a father. For that fee, I get access to trays and tongs and chemicals, but that makes it sound so technical. It’s magic. You walk in with nothing, and you leave with an image.

Reza seems fascinated by it all, by the red lights, by the strong scent of the chemicals, and by the black-and-white photos I have hanging from clothespins above my workstation: Old Hollywood–style shots of Stephen and other activists. Jimmy with a gardenia in his hair. Those homophobe bankers at the New York Stock Exchange. And then I see Reza’s eye catch an image that’s almost covered up by another. It’s the photo I took of him at that first protest, the one he pretended not to be at. He’s part of a crowd, but it’s unmistakably him. He stares at the photo and smiles.

“It seems sad now,” he says.

“What?” I ask.

“That I lied to you about being at that protest,” he says.

“You’ve come a long way, baby,” I say.

“I also lied to you about your book bag,” he says, cringing a little. “When you left it at my house. I opened it. I read those notecards. I smelled your underwear.”

“You did NOT,” I say, giddy.

“I did. I’m awful.” The blush on his cheeks is accentuated by the darkroom lights.

“You’re all kinds of awful,” I say, impishly. “Now can we please be awful together?”

He turns his attention back to that image of himself as if there’s an answer to a riddle buried inside it. Then he turns to me and says, “You are so talented.”

“You think so?”

“I know so,” he says.

“I see things,” I say. “I mean, I know that sounds crazy. But it’s like, I don’t snap a photo unless I see its energy. I know they’re all black-and-white, but they have colors to me. Auras. And if they don’t, I don’t take them. And if the aura doesn’t survive when I print the picture, then I throw it out. And I want . . . I want them to mean something. I want to contribute something. To capture all this, so that a hundred years from now, or a thousand years from now, people will remember it all and know that we existed. That we lived.”

“How did you start?” he asks.

“I always liked taking pictures,” I say. “My mom had a camera, and she said when I was a kid and she was always taking photos of me, I would take the camera from her and take photos of her. She has an album somewhere at home of Polaroids I took when I was, like, five years old.” My heart aches a little bit thinking about those Polaroids of my mother with her Farrah Fawcett hair and her chic palazzo pants and fringe dresses, of my father with a fuller head of hair and a thick mustache. My parents, through the lens of five-year-old me, were always shot from below, making them imposing and fabulous. When did that all change? When did I realize the divide between them and me was too big to cross? When did they go from being my favorite subjects to the villains in my story?

“Then Stephen gave me my camera the year I started high school, as a birthday gift, and it all took off from there. I became obsessed.” I remember those early days with my camera, learning everything about lenses and apertures and focus. Practicing on Judy and Stephen. Making them pose for me. Their exasperation when they had to sit too long as I figured out how to get the focus just right, not too sharp, not too hazy. God, I miss Judy. “I guess that’s it. Sometimes, I worry that I prefer life through a lens to life, you know. In a lens, I can . . . structure things. Frame them the way I want them to be framed. It’s safe.”

His eyes pierce through me. “I don’t think there’s anything safe about it,” he says. “Your pictures are not safe. Everything about you, Art, is so . . .”

“Risky?”

“Bold,” he says. “Brazen.”

I think of my mom saying my photographs were “nice.” She doesn’t get me. But Reza does. He sees me.

“Brazen,” I repeat. “I want to be brazen with you.”

He laughs, then looks down at the floor, like he wants to escape this moment.

“Hey, you want me to teach you how to print a photo?” I ask.

He nods, and the lesson begins. As we print a portrait of a female activist in a cowboy hat, staring the camera down like John Wayne, I lead Reza’s hands toward the tongs and show him how to gently place the paper in the different baths.

“Careful not to touch the chemicals,” I say.

“Okay,” he says.

“Safety is crucial in a darkroom. You should always wear closed shoes.”

“Okay,” he says.

“If you do touch anything, always wash your hands right away. And be very careful not to get any in your mouth or eyes,” I say.