An Amateur's Guide to the Night by Mary Robison

Author:Mary Robison
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640090903
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

MINDY WAS IN A BEAN-BAG CHAIR IN THE CORNER, loading film into her camera. “You know, I bought this camera with money I won in the football pools,” she said. “I always win. That’s why I love to gamble.”

“What?” Allen said.

“Nothing,” Mindy said. “Don’t worry.” Her chignon had come undone, and the left side of her hair—blonde, though she was fifty-one—had fallen onto the shoulder of her kimono. “I clicked off a couple I didn’t mean to. It’ll be all right.”

“It will,” Allen said, in a low voice to the cowboy-hatted teenager who sat on the couch with him. “She’s really more or less a professional. Her work’s appeared in a couple of the D.C. galleries—places you’d recognize if I could remember the names.”

“One gallery. They just showed two of my self-portraits,” Mindy said. “A picture of me at the stove, and one of me petting Abra.”

“Cat that ran away,” Allen told the cowboy.

Both young men had been drinking earnestly. Allen tugged off his cotton shirt and laid it out on the floor. He removed his loafers and his wristwatch. The cowboy took off his vest.

“What may I call you?” Allen asked.

The cowboy puffed his right cheek full of air, then noisily let the air out. “Baker,” he said.

“First, or last?” Allen said.

The cowboy shrugged.

“Baker, alone, is fine,” Allen said. “Easier to remember.”

“One more minute,” Mindy said from the corner. “I’m truly sorry this is taking so long. It isn’t my fault. The spool’s in backwards or something. I wouldn’t have had Allen get you up here,” she said to the cowboy, “if I’d known this was going to happen.”

“These’ll be great photographs,” Allen said.

“Oops,” Mindy said. “Oh, I did something, and now I can’t—do you know anything about cameras?”

“I had a basic film theory and technique course,” Allen said.

“Loading,” Mindy said. “L-o-a-d-i-n-g.”

“Not for any camera,” Allen said.

Mindy struggled out of the bean-bag chair. She came toward them, stepping over the coffee table and showing one of her legs from the thigh down. She dropped the camera. Its timer ticked off fifteen seconds against the floor carpet.

Allen squeezed his forehead and sighed.

“The joke is, I do make good photographs,” she said. “Maybe—who’s to say?—great ones. But you’ve got to do daily work to be great, and for that you need a darkroom in your house, and not way across the g.d. town.” She sat on the coffee table with her skirt hitched up.

“That’s true,” Allen said.

“I had a camera,” Baker said.

“Good for you, Tex,” Mindy said. “Seriously, I got two rolls of thirty-six people each. What did I just say? Did I say, ‘thirty-six people each’? Isn’t that a scream? Thirty-six exposures each.”

“Faces?” Allen said.

“Yes, honey, that’s what the world is. There’s no world without faces. Look at that face.”

Allen and Mindy looked at Baker.

He was whistling through a cavity in a front tooth. He wiggled his eyebrows at them, hard enough to make the brim of his cowboy hat move up and down.

“What’s in that face, Allen?” Mindy said.

Allen narrowed his eyes at Baker, and asked him to turn his head left, then right.

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