Copy Cats

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A close-up of Stephanie’s face. The pockmarks in her cheeks, a slender scar on her temple, lips puckered like a model’s, but something dangerous in the eyes. Stephanie standing in front of a white drop cloth. Stephanie naked with her arms above her head so that she looks flat chested and boyish. Stephanie blowing smoke into the camera. She said, “None of these pictures look like me.” He said, “How about this one?” He showed her another close-up, one where she was looking to the right and grinning so that crow’s-feet formed at the corners of her eyes. She looked older in that picture but pretty, the lines in her face more natural somehow, as if they were caused by motherhood and sunshine. They sat staring down at her kitchen table like they were searching for something. More than a dozen photographs lay scattered there. They had cleared space by pushing aside the CLICK CLIC K 46 morning’s cereal bowl and a weekend’s worth of dirty glasses smelling of rum and Coca-Cola. She moved the photos around and then picked up another, seemingly at random. In this one her arms were behind her back, her head slightly raised. The drop cloth spread behind her replaced the background clutter with a simple white sheen. She said, “I have a funny expression on my face. I look scared.” The cloth was an idea he swiped from Richard Avedon’s fashion photography, and it had worked pretty well. These shots were some of his favorites because they balanced the others—the needles, the pipes, the brightly colored depression medication, her shirtless body with its complex challenge. Look away or look, either way you’re wrong. She put down the photo and said, “Are you hungry?” He smiled. “What do you have?” It was good—and humbling —to accept food from someone who didn’t have much. Three things in her freezer—a container of orange sherbet , a one-pound can of cheap coffee, and a package of film he had left there as backup. The combination seemed to say something profound about her, although what it was exactly he didn’t know. She said, “Rashid and his brother are eating me out of house and home.” When she was feeling desperate or frivolous, she gave hand jobs to men in parked cars in exchange for food. The cars were in the lot behind her house right now. The men had just started the second shift in the metal shop across the street. He had photographs of some of them. He had photographs of her CLIC K 47 afterward, holding McDonald’s bags and drinking strawberry milk shakes. She was laughing now. She said, “I don’t believe it. I sound like my mother.” He thought, there’s something almost clandestine about leaving film here, something intimate. He sat down again and looked at the photographs and suddenly they seemed not very good at all. He had several hundred of them spread out on the table in the basement at home, hung by clothespins along a wire, organized in files, and stuffed into the drawers of an old bureau. But none of them seemed to be exactly what he was looking for. Something was eluding him. “Jesus,” she said. She was slapping the photos on the table one at time now as if she were dealing out cards. He noticed the jug of milk and half-eaten Cheerios by the sink, and he had to fight the urge to record it for posterity—the primitive flowers painted around the edge of the bowl, the white soured crust ringing the mouth of the jug. “Is this how you see me?” she asked, nodding her head slowly, almost sagely, like someone trying to appear old and wise, although she was only in her midthirties, not much older than he was. Then she produced a joint from somewhere and lit it up. She closed her eyes and took a long hit. This was the message for him to leave. On the way down the back steps he turned sideways for two teenagers making their way up. They wore identical Raiders caps and camouflage jackets, and as they passed him one said something to make the other laugh. He wondered if he was the punch line to the joke. When he had first started taking shots...