Chapter 5
Look at This Photograph
Cecily
I suppose there’s a time in everyone’s life where you discover you’re a fool. Sometimes, maybe, it’s a slow revelation. For others, there’s a moment when it becomes obvious. In my case, I can tell you the precise date and time. I even have a text to prove it. It arrived at 2:22 p.m. on my twentieth wedding anniversary.
I’d been running around frantically all day trying to find the perfect outfit for the trip to New York Tom and I were taking to celebrate. Making sure my mother had the list of all the things Henry couldn’t eat because of his allergies, arranging for carpooling for Cassie’s and Henry’s activities throughout the weekend, and ticking items off the long list I’d been working on for weeks, as if making my family function for a weekend without me required the same level of planning as a minor invasion. It all sounds so stupid now, like that point Teo made about the furniture in our house.
None of it was necessary, but it felt like it was at the time.
After two hours of questions, I ask Teo if we can take a break.
“Could we stop for the day, actually? My head is splitting.”
“Of course.” Teo turns off the camera and starts to efficiently pack it away.
I like that about him. He’s compact. His equipment fits into a reasonably sized bag and consists of his camera, a tripod, and a boom mic that folds out like the protractor set I had in high school. His body is compact, too, no extra flesh but not any extra muscle, either. Proportional. He seems to take up less space than Tom, who was always the center of attention in any room he occupied.
“I should’ve noticed the time,” he says. “It’s almost six.”
I noticed every minute going by, counting down until I could reasonably say “enough” for today. I haven’t felt this anxious in months. I wanted to jump out of my body and land somewhere soft, white—oblivion. But now that the interview’s over, the feeling falls away.
“It’s fine.” I stand stiffly.
“You all right?”
“Just stiff. I’m a casualty of a lifetime of running. I shouldn’t do it anymore.” In fact, I haven’t run in a year, but that hasn’t helped the problem, only exacerbated it.
“I couldn’t ever do it.”
“You look like a runner.”
“Do I?”
I smile, then lower my eyes. Our interactions are often like this, full of undercurrents. Not flirting, exactly, but not strictly professional, either. Sometimes he looks at me like he’s looking at me now, and it feels like a caress, one I want to prolong.
It’s been so long, you see, since I’ve been touched.
“You’re probably one of those men who stays slim no matter what you eat.”
“That’s possible.”
He tucks his camera into his bag and zippers it closed. Whatever part of myself I gave up today is safe inside there, too.
“I’ve noticed, you know,” I say.
“Noticed what?”
“You don’t like it when I ask you personal questions. Which is . . . I don’t know . . . ironic?”
“You’re probably right.”
Cassie wanders in. She’s changed out of her funeral clothes and into a tight-jeans-and-T-shirt combination I would never have had the confidence to wear at her age. Part of me wants to shield her from the attention dressing that way might bring, and another part is proud that she feels comfortable enough to do so.
She’s had a crush on Teo ever since she met him a couple of months ago when he started coming to the house for preinterviews. A teacher crush, or perhaps it’s a my-dad-is-gone-forever crush, nothing sexual despite the provocative clothing, but a gap that needs to be filled. Though she’s not as vocal about it as Henry, she misses Tom, misses how he used to watch her soccer games with intensity but never embarrassed her by yelling like some of the other dads. How he went over her essays for English with a special red pen he bought for that purpose, and how proud he was when she brought home an A. The horror movies they used to love to watch together on Saturday nights while they made fun of how I screamed at every squeak of the floorboards.
“What’s ironic?” Cassie asks.
“The expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect,” Teo says. “See also: ‘A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.’”
“What?”
“It’s the definition of irony.”
Cassie hugs herself, her thin arms pale against her dark shirt. “Oh, ha. But that’s not what you were talking about.”
“You’re right,” I say. “But it’s none of your beeswax.”
“Jeez, Mom. Where do you get these expressions?”
“Your grandmother.”
“My mom said that, too,” Teo says. “So the question is, why aren’t the kids today using it?”
Cassie laughs and asks him if his mom’s still alive. He says that she is. She starts to poke around his equipment, asking questions. I’m glad to see that whether or not he’s aware of her interest, Teo treats Cassie appropriately, telling her how his camera works and then what the boom mic is for.
“Are Henry and I going to be in the documentary?”
“No,” I say quickly.
“Good. Hey, can Teo stay for dinner? I’m making my special spaghetti.” She lifts up her hair, a slippery, straight length I’ve never been able to get into any hairstyle since she was little, and loops a hair tie from her wrist around it so it stands up straight from the top of her head like a question mark. “Please, Mom?”
“You’re cooking?”
“I cook. You taught me enough times.”
“Well, in that case . . . Will you stay, Teo?”
“I’d love to.”
At dinner, my kids ask Teo all the questions I’ve wanted to without any prompting.
“How did you get into filmmaking?” Cassie says.
“I wanted to be an actor when I was a kid. I got a few small roles and realized sitting around, waiting for the action to start, was boring. It’s better to be in charge.”
“Why documentaries?” Henry says.
“The first job I got out of film school was on a documentary, and there was something about it, the stories I could uncover, how life was more complicated and surprising than anything you could make up. It grabbed hold of me.”
“Why are you making a documentary about my mom?”
“It’s not about her, exactly. Not only, anyway.”
“It’s about Triple Ten, right?” Cassie says. “Like, one year later and how everything’s changed but kind of stayed the same?”
“That’s a great way of putting it. I like to think of it as my love letter to Chicago and everything we went through that day. And your mom, and a few others, have been nice enough to agree to help me tell that story.”
“That’s cool.”
“Thank you. This dinner’s cool, too.”
Cassie flushes. She’s done an admirable job. She defrosted several portions of the lasagna I swore I’d never eat again, chopped them up, and heated them in a skillet, simmering it all in a can of crushed tomatoes and fresh basil she made into a chiffonade, wielding the knife expertly. She even created a passable Caesar salad and got Henry to make garlic toast, the one thing he knows how to reliably cook, despite the years of lessons I’ve given to both of them.
“Where did you grow up?” Henry asks.
“Chicago. My mother still lives in the same apartment in the Loop. But the Loop wasn’t the Loop back then. We were comfortable but not rich.”
“We’re rich,” Henry says.
“Henry! That is so embarrassing.” Cassie lifts the hem of the apron she’d found hanging in the pantry and covers her face. She always does that when she watches a TV show or a movie if a character does something that makes her uncomfortable. She lifts her shirt and shields her eyes, as if she could cover up their awkward behavior with a bit of cloth.
“Why?” Henry says. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Look at this house.”
Henry waves his hand around. We’re in the formal dining room, with its white wainscoting that goes up a third of the wall and the robin’s-egg-blue paint above it. The table’s a shiny mahogany, not an heirloom but made to look like one. The chairs are mahogany, too, and their seats match the paint and the rug on the floor with its variations on an oriental pattern it took us months to find.
The rest of the house is to the same standard; Tom and I spent enough of our lives making sure that was the case. We both contributed our time and money to the project. Neither of us had much when we started out other than our degrees, which were paid for by scholarships and odd jobs. We both worked hard to make something of ourselves, to have nice things. Tom building up his software company, me managing Knife & Fork, one of the more successful restaurants in the city, where I worked for fifteen years before it closed.
“It’s a nice house,” Teo says.
“We’re lucky to live here,” I say.
“Have you asked everything you wanted to, kids?”
Cassie giggles.
“This is so interesting to me,” I say.
“Oh?”
“Normally, I can’t get so much as a detail. He must like you guys.”
I’d tried to find out everything I could about Teo before agreeing to the documentary. His take, his intentions, the research he was doing. Teo was polite but evasive. “Trust me,” he’d said, and I decided to do so, which meant there were important things about Teo I didn’t know.
Was he a storyteller or a man looking for a story?
I was betting on the first, but I was preparing myself for the second.