Patti Somlo

Photographing Ellen

 

 

That Sunday morning when Ellen told Alberto it was time to get serious, he left her apartment and drove straight over to Geary Street. After circling the blocks what felt like a million times searching for a parking space, he finally pulled in behind a silver SUV and parked the car. He walked the half-block east, while sheets of newspaper flew against his pants leg. After waiting for the light to change green, he crossed 25th and entered the camera shop on the corner.

 

Without asking a single question, Alberto purchased a mid-priced Olympus camera and three lenses. Late the next Sunday morning, Alberto rolled across the bed and stretched to put on his pants. For a reason known only to himself, he left the laces of his blue and white running shoes untied, and walked the seven blocks from Ellen’s apartment home to his ground-floor flat.

 

That afternoon, Alberto drove to the park with his camera and looked for Ellen. She was sitting on the grass at the edge of the lake. A red-covered book was open and laid spine up on the white sheet. She sat very still and watched couples paddling red, blue and white boats with their feet and laughing.

 

Then she leaned back and closed her eyes. The warm sun played across her face. Her neck was long and pale like a swan’s and her clean blonde hair winked in the sunlight. Alberto noticed the way her chest rose and fell, the red sash twisted tight around her waist.

 

Alberto took photographs of Ellen from different angles, without letting her know he was there. He tried to capture the shadow of leaves falling across her lap. Later, he took shots that showed how the darkness lengthened as the afternoon exhausted itself toward dusk.

 

Alberto developed the pictures in a small darkroom he’d set up in an unused dining room near the back of his flat. He hung the pictures with small metal clips on thin strings stretched between the walls. Looking at the prints, he thought to himself that he could never grow tired of looking at Ellen. He liked to pretend that he didn’t know her but that these pictures of her hung like fresh clean sheets across the room were of a movie star or singer he’d seen in a magazine.

 

Nights after photographing Ellen and staring at a string of her faces across the room, he liked to imagine what he would say if he met this beautiful creature in some dimly-lit café. He imagined seeing her when he walked in the door, stepping over to the small round table where she sat close to the wall, and saying, “It’s very crowded. Would you mind if I shared your table?”

 

The woman from the photograph would look up from the magazine she was reading. Alberto would see that it was a French magazine, and she would smile and say, “No, not at all. Please sit down.”

 

He would ask if she was French and she would tell him, “No, but I lived in Paris and like to read French.”

 

She would tell him that she was a model and he would say, “Isn’t that funny? I’m a photographer.”

 

They would drink espresso and he would notice the red imprint of her lips she left on the edge of the white porcelain cup, her fingernails painted red, the red-smudged filters from her cigarettes bent in the ashtray.

 

 

After Alberto took up photography, he began to see Ellen in a whole different light. When he was lying in bed with her, he noticed the shadows that formed in the hollows of her jaws. He liked to arrange the fragile strands of her hair and see how each style altered the shape of her face. He noticed the way the light blue sheet fell across her shoulder and brought out the pink tones in her skin. He never stopped wanting to photograph her.

 

“You can photograph me,” Ellen told Alberto, having grown weary of his leaving her on Sundays with the excuse that he needed to work on his photography.

 

“It wouldn’t be the same,” Alberto said. “I know you. It’s different to photograph someone you know.”

 

“You’re seeing someone else. That’s what it is,” Ellen said.

 

Alberto got out of bed and reached for his clothes.

 

“I don’t know why I put up with this,” Ellen said.

 

Alberto, who thought he knew, came back to the bed, slid over next to Ellen, and began to caress her breast. He leaned down over her, let his tongue touch the nipple lightly, then pushed her legs apart with his knee, and slid his index finger in between the soft folds. She was already wet, and Alberto kept working his fingers, in and out and around, until he felt the little shudder that let him know he had made Ellen come.

 

 

A few minutes after Alberto left Ellen’s apartment, he called her from his cell phone.

 

“What are you going to do today?” Alberto asked.

 

“What do you care?”

 

“Are you going to the park?” he asked.

 

 

Alberto liked to focus the camera on different parts of Ellen’s body. Sometimes he used the telephoto lens, to give himself the feeling of being in her presence, listening to her breathe and smelling the coconut lotion she spread on her skin. Other times, he worked with the wide angle lens, to see how Ellen looked as part of the landscape.

 

More than photographing Ellen, Alberto liked to make her come alive in the darkroom. He especially enjoyed pushing the paper down, keeping it trapped below the clear solution, while he used his tweezers to submerge the paper until the outline of Ellen began to appear. In those moments, from the first sign of Ellen in one thin dark line on the paper, Alberto knew he was in control. He had the power to bring Ellen quivering to the surface of life or let her stay buried within the white skin of his paper, that held within it the living, breathing, shadow and light that was Ellen.

 

 

Alberto crouched behind the bush, his camera focused and set to the correct exposure. He waited for Ellen to move. As soon she did, he snapped a quick series of photographs.

 

That night, he developed the photographs. He watched Ellen’s hand move slowly up to her hair. If he eliminated a photograph, he could control her very movement. He knew that.

 

Later, he hung the photographs in a line across the room. There were twenty-four photographs in all. He opened the window to let the breeze lift Ellen and lower her, as her hand moved slowly to her head and just as slowly pushed a strand of hair away from her eye.

 

 

“Why can’t I see your photographs?” Ellen asked Alberto the following Saturday night over dinner.

 

Alberto looked at Ellen without speaking.

 

“You’re not even taking photographs. That’s what it is. It’s just another excuse not to spend time with me.”

 

 

Alberto blew up photographs of Ellen and taped the poster-sized prints on the wall above his bed. He piled three pillows against the mahogany headboard, leaned back and looked at Ellen. How lucky I am, he thought, marveling at the soft waves in her hair, like windblown sand, the small nose and the delicate fingers.

 

In a dream that night, Alberto danced with Ellen on a boat cutting through dark water. When he awoke, he felt Ellen’s fingers pressing the center of his palm and heard the steady hum of the boat motor and the occasional slap of a wave against the boat’s side.

 

“I can’t take it anymore,” Ellen said to Alberto, the night after his dream. “You’re never going to change. You don’t want to spend time with me. You don’t want to share anything with me. Sometimes, I wish you were seeing another woman. At least that would make sense.”

 

 

The week after Ellen told Alberto she was ending their relationship for good, Alberto spent nearly all his time looking for her. He even called in sick to work so he could sit in his car and watch Ellen walk into her office and later go out to lunch and walk back in again.

 

When Sunday afternoon arrived, he picked up his camera and lenses and went to the park, where he waited in the bushes by the lake for Ellen. He waited all afternoon until it got dark and he could no longer see his fingers held out in front of his face. But that day, Ellen never showed up.

 

He carefully laid the black plastic cap over the lens and snapped the camera into its black leather case. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed Ellen’s number. The phone rang five times before he hung up. Then Alberto dialed Ellen’s number again.

 

That night, Alberto returned to his room and pulled apart the metal legs of the tripod and set it in the center of his bed. He screwed the body of the camera into the tripod, focused the close-up lens on the wall and snapped several shots of the photographs he had taken of Ellen.

 

After printing the photographs and clipping them, one by one, to dry, Alberto took a long look at what he’d created. A beautiful creature named Ellen, brushing several strands of hair from her face. Next to her, another Ellen slept in the sun on her back. And at the end, closest to the wall, there was a woman he would think of as Ellen the rest of his life, looking out across the lake, to where couples paddled blue and red and white boats through the greenish-blue water and laughed under the pale yellow light of a warm Sunday afternoon in September.

 

 

 

Patty Somlo has received four Pushcart Prize nominations and has been nominated for storySouth’s Million Writers Award. Her essay, “If We Took a Deep Breath,” was selected as a Notable Essay of 2013 for Best American Essays 2014. She is the author of From Here to There and Other Stories. Her second book, Hairway to Heaven Stories, is forthcoming in January 2017 from Cherry Castle Publishing. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Los Angeles Review, the Santa Clara Review, Under the Sun, Guernica, The Flagler Review, WomenArts Quarterly,and DM, among others, and in fourteen anthologies. She lives in Northern California.