Quality Photos by Steven McBrearty

The summer of our wedding my bride Claudia VanderMeer and I leased a split-level duplex on a dead-end street in a close-in gentrifying area of south central Austin, a quiet, in-transition neighborhood of young families and senior citizens and dogs.  The opposite side of the duplex was occupied by the owner/landlord, a white-haired University of Texas professor who we figured was gay.  We were fine with him being gay (perhaps we even wanted him to be gay), both for philosophical reasons and as a counterpoint to our conspicuously heterosexual, pre-children, pre-jaded bliss.  

We exchanged vows at 3:00 PM on a hot summer Saturday in a big, ceremonial Catholic high Mass, but marriage wasn’t the only new thing in my life.  I had recently accepted a position as assistant editor for an architectural design magazine, a glossy magazine in a glitzy downtown high-rise, the ground floor lobby a bank, ornate and open and airy at the same time, giant glass panes opened effulgently to an ever-changing street view.  Claudia remained working for the tax attorney’s office where we had first met.  She was the receptionist, I was a file clerk—basically, I did whatever they told me to do.  I always seemed to fall for the receptionist.    Laughing at my jokes or listening to my stories as I passed by, they seemed to trigger in me some deep, inchoate desire to please.  

This new job was a big deal, a giant step up.  It was actually my first job “in my field” of journalism, and such jobs were never easy to come by for recent college grads. I had been lucky enough to have been recommended for this particular opening by a former features writing professor, an elfin man whose chin whiskers and suspenders made him look something like Ben Franklin.  After a final formal interview with a cadre of over-dressed, self-impressed 30-something blowhards around an imposing glass-top conference table, I was offered a position as Assistant Editor.  We all shook hands and drank a toast.  

As the new guy, one of my tasks was to deliver film (they still used film then) for the magazine’s visuals to a photo shop for processing.  Nobody else wanted this task, but I enjoyed getting out of the regimented office system and into the colorful, hipster-inhabited milieu that was the streets of central Austin.  Driving along with my neatly-sealed package beside me, I felt both rakish and debonaire, protective of my company’s material but also a man on an adventure.  

Quality Photos was a high-end professional photo shop, for magazines and glossy advertising circulars and wedding photographers, located on a busy corner of MLK and Lavaca Streets, just south of the University of Texas campus.  The adjacent streets buzzing with co-eds in shorts and guys walking with backpacks over their shoulders created in me a strong nostalgia for my college years.  Which, in many ways, was where I would rather be.  I found the working world to be both stressful and mundane, a low-security prison of sorts, impinging on my freedom and sapping my energy.  The magazine editor, my supervisor, was a complete stuffed shirt.  At 30 he acted 60, gliding around with a surfeit of pomposity and grandeur, as if emulating Miss Manners.  A few weeks after my hire the editor looked on me rather skeptically, I feared, with a good deal of buyer’s remorse.  

A neon sign over Quality Photo’s threshold read, “Serving Your Photographic Needs Since 1970.”  The lawn out front was small and brown and bare, the unwatered grass beaten down into dirt.  The building itself was a former residence, white clapboard, with a high bay window providing a kind of stage for the activities inside.  The counter clerk there was a young woman of about my own age, a recent college grad herself, short, buxom, attentive, chatty, with her straight brunette hair turned up in a flip at the shoulders in a quite attractive pageboy look.  There was a splash of freckles on her fresh, fair-skinned face.  Her name was Anne, Anne Sommers, in fact.  This being summer, she wore flip-flops and Mexican peasant blouses, scooped at the breast and pleasantly revealing.  She always had something interesting to say, something sharp and witty, and I tried hard to say something sharp and witty back.  Feeling guilty (because of my new wife), I nevertheless looked forward to our conversations, our easy banter, our jokes.  She laughed at my jokes.  I laughed at hers.  One day, we both declared our desires to move to New York, me to be a writer, her to be an actress.  But I told her I didn’t think I’d make it there now.

“How come?” she said.

“Oh well, you know,” I said.

“Your wife?” she said.

“Uh-huh,” I said.  I fell into a dark, indicative silence.

“So you’re an actress?” I said, changing the subject.  “What have you been in?”

She took a small, theatrical bow.

“I played Emily Webb in Our Town and Ophelia in Hamlet and Elaine in The Last of the Red Hot Lovers,” she said.  “Oh–and Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire.”

“I’m impressed,” I said.

“I’m actually in rehearsals for a play at Zachary Scott right now,” she said.  “It’s this Sam Shepherd production, very avante garde.  You’ll have to come see me sometime.”

“I will,” I said.  “I sure will.”  Honored and pleased, I smiled, and we stood facing each other across the counter for a long time.  Then touching her arm I said goodbye.

It was easy being with her.  It was fun.  At first, our conversations lasted only as long as it took to drop off the photos or pick them up.  Later, I would linger, sometimes keeping the words flowing through other customers, linger until she was called to the back.  

One day, she reached across the counter to place her hand on my wrist–and left it there while ringing up my receipt.  She laughed.  We continued on with our banter.  She removed her hand when the bell over the door clanged indicating another customer was coming in.

I guess I didn’t talk about my marriage much, but maybe she could pick up the vibes.  Six weeks in, and I was already uncertain whether I wanted it to work out.  Claudia and I really didn’t know each other all that well.  We didn’t like many of the same things.  Her sense of humor was different from mine.  She had standards for organization and comportment that I was unable to meet.  I found out very quickly that she didn’t want me going out with my friends at all, that after work was over I was supposed to stay put with her and only her.  I missed hanging out with my friends.  I didn’t want them to disappear from my life.  Furthermore, she remained angry for days after a the slightest argument, withholding sex, smiles, a sense of security.  None of these were things one wanted to find out after a marriage started.

Some days I stormed off to work fuming, convinced that we were going nowhere and that my life was in ruins.  One morning there was a giant flare-up when I asked Claudia (softly, in the nicest tones possible) if she could iron my shirt since I was running late—and got chewed out royally.  I never figured out why exactly, but apparently this request triggered an intense emotional reaction based on some incident from her childhood or an experience with an earlier boyfriend.  I rarely asked Claudia to do anything for me again.
Shirt wrinkled, I walked out trembling, stepping on my own shoelace and spilling coffee on my dress slacks.  I turned back to make some vengeful remark but Claudia breezed right past me to her car and drove away, tires squealing.  Squealing her tires was yet another aspect of Claudia’s personality that I hadn’t known about before we were married.
That afternoon I drove over to Quality Photos to deliver some film.  I didn’t really need to go that day, but unable to focus on work I convinced myself that fresh air and a change of scenery would revitalize me.  Even with Anne, my conversation seemed stilted, forced.  I was pressing too hard.  I couldn’t think of the right things to say.  Leaving, I felt even more depressed, empty, incomplete, locked in a prison of solitude and angst.  A cloud of doom trailed over my head.  My life was a sham.  My future was a wreck.  But as I started the engine to drive away, Anne ran out to the car after me.  It was the first time since I had been making my visits that she had left the building.

“Wait!” she called, waving wildly.  I eased the car to a stop alongside the curb.  I smiled, uncertainly.  She opened the passenger door and slid inside.

“What’s up?” I said.

“You forgot something,” she said.

“Really?” I said.  I patted around between the seats reflexively.  I smiled again.  “What did I forget?”

“Some of your finished photos,” she said.  “I’ll go back and get them.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” I said.  If I left something this would give me another trip back in the near future.  I found myself delighted to have her near me in the car, her face, her voice, her hair, her fragrance, her ample breasts.  She had really ample breasts.  “I’ll get them next time.”

She drew in a breath and looked at me in a way I had failed to observe in my previous visits.  It was almost—well, in that one instant I almost thought it was a look of love. 

“Oh, what the hell,” she said.  “Life is too damn short.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

And then she leaned across the gap between the seats to kiss me smack on the lips.  I turned into a bowl of Jell-o.  I didn’t invite the kiss (I told myself in my sin-wracked Catholic school mind), I didn’t encourage it, but there it was, the sweetest, softest, most fantastic kiss I had ever received.  I was trembling afterwards.  I wanted more. 
“Oh Lord I’m married,” I said, more a declaration to the cosmos than a real attempt to repel her advances.

“I know,” she said.  “I know you are.”  She pulled me to her for another kiss, and this one was even better than the one before.  I acquiesced with a sense of inescapable inevitability.  God, did I ever acquiesce.  I was squeezing her back, I was stroking her hair, I was caressing her neck.  This was all in bright broad daylight, parked in front of her place of employment.
Finally, Anne pushed me away.  She sat up straight on her side and began to straighten her hair and her clothes.  I was beyond doing that.  I was like a smoking ruin.

“I guess I’d better get back in,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “I’m just so attracted to you.  We have so much in common.  We talk about so many different things.  You make me laugh.”

“Oh, God, I know,” I said.  “You make me laugh so hard sometimes.  I love to hear you laugh.”     

She sat strangely still for a moment, looking away.  Then she turned back to me.  Her mouth seemed almost quivering.
Hey, I need to tell you,” she said.  “I’m going to New York.”
New York?” I said.  “A trip?  A vacation?”
“It’s more than a trip,” she said.  “I’m going there to live.”
My jaw dropped.  My heart skipped a beat.

“When are you going?” I said.  

“Tomorrow,” she said.  “This is my last day here.”     

“Tomorrow,” I said.  The word was like a life sentence imposed by a judge.   My heart was sinking now.  It was dropping like a chunk of steel to the bottom of a deep, dark lake.        

She nodded.
“I was hoping you would come by today so I could tell you,” she said.  “It came up all of a sudden.  I have an opportunity for a part in an off-Broadway play.  They’ve got the audition all set up.  I’m flying out in the morning.”

“Oh my God,” I said.  “Oh my heavens.”  I hardly knew this woman, but I had never felt so desolate, so devastated in my entire life.  I took both of her hands in mine and held them tight.  All bets were off just then in terms of sin and depravation.  I didn’t care what happened to my eternal soul.

“Will I ever see you again?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said.  She seemed to ponder something for a few moments.  

“Would you to want to come with me?  Would you want to come to New York?”

“Come with you?” I said.  “To New York?”

She nodded.

“We could rent a place together.  We could live together.”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I just got married.”

“I know,” she said.  “But maybe this would be the best time to break it off, before you really get established and get a lot of baggage.  If it’s not going to work out why prolong it.  You want to be happy, after all.”

“You’re right,” I said.  “I do want to be happy.”  I paused, considering. But there just wasn’t enough time to make a proper decision.  I didn’t see how I could just pick up and leave.  There were family considerations, career considerations, gifts received and used.  I sat for a long time quietly holding her hands, not wanting to move, wishing we could just stay like this forever.
“I better get in,” she said finally.  She started to pull away.
“I’ll write you,” I called desperately.  This was before the days of email and the internet, of web sites and cell phones and text messaging.  Communication was slow and laborious.  There was the land-line, of course, there were pay phones, but getting in touch with somebody then was not so simple or neat.

“I don’t know my address yet,” she said.

“I’ll write down mine,” I said.  I scribbled my address hastily on a used envelope lying between the car seats.  “Here’s my telephone number at work, too.  You could call me there.”

“Okay,” she said.  “I’ll call you there.”

I knew it wouldn’t happen.  Once she left the car I would lose all hope for future happiness.  She leaned in for one final kiss, and then she was out the door, bounding across the lawn in her girlish way, breasts bouncing, hair tossing.  She stopped to wave one last time before disappearing inside.  I was thankful for that.  At least I had that.

Steven McBrearty

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay – rolls of film in their plastic holders piled up on top of each other randomly