Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Author:Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017-03-14T19:00:00+00:00

1973, Payne’s Gray

Invented by William Payne, painter of ruins and hovels. A blue-gray designed specifically for shadows. It is the February of paints.

The day of her opening it rained, umbrella-smashing, bus-skidding rain. The show wasn’t really a show. It was in a diner that belonged to a friend of one of The Guys. He’d seen the copy of Emily in which she and Odile stood hand in hand and had apparently accepted that as a photographic résumé. After three years of crumpled paintings, sketches thrown into The Paper’s trashcan, and being too shy to say anything at all to the girls who worked the galleries on the Upper East Side, this was all she had. If just one person would walk in and understand—to see what she was doing, that would be enough. Just one person.

She opened the door with her back, her arms filled with her work. The rain hit the awning with a popping noise. At each booth, knives clinked as they snapped bacon and hit china. She’d tied the photographs into two bundles of five. Lou had offered to tie them to her chest, like the babies those women in National Geographic carried through the desert. She said she could manage. Wet and lopsided from the weight, she regretted that now.

Her hair stuck to her scalp. She licked her lips, and the rain tasted salty. Was that chemicals or just the sweat of a few million New Yorkers? She hoped the frames were watertight. They cost more than she spent on food in a month, and she’d chosen the cheapest. Pale unpainted pine, half an inch thick.

“Hey, how can I help you?” The waitress was young. The dark line crayoned in above her upper lid did not exactly follow the line of her socket. The impression was innocent, but also a little lazy-eyed.

“I’m here to hang some pictures.” Yuki wondered where she could hang them. She could imagine few spaces further from the clean walls of a museum. The diner stank of sausages and greasy regret. She wanted to walk back out into the rain and take her photographs away. But Lou would be angry if she disappointed his friend. And Edison had been so hopeful when she told him. “You never know, it’s near the new galleries, all these art types come in.” She couldn’t see a single art type. Guys wearing overalls shoved fried bread and ketchup into their mouths. None of them looked up at her.

Edison gave her the camera for her twenty-first birthday. He showed up at her work with it. A Canon F-1—Interchangeable viewfinders, FD lens mount, intervalometer, The Motor Drive MF, so said the booklet. It had been the camera favored by the reporters of the Sapporo Olympics, or so Edison told her.

“This is too much.” But she was clutching the box to her chest. This new tool was so much lighter than Lillian’s war-machine, and it was all hers. “Way too much.”

“You kept complaining your paintings weren’t better than photographs. So I thought you could try taking photographs.

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