A Plan for the Future

She came back last night after. . . a year?  Maybe.  It seems so.  The night we first made pictures together, I was enamored of her looks.  Besotted.  She was no classic beauty.  She had "imperfections."  Some.  Quite a few.  She had a quirky personality, too, nothing learned from television or movies or a book.  She held a new degree in graphic arts and a boatload of debt.  She fascinated me.  And, of course (as I am a romantic), I worried about her.

Mostly, though, I made her up.  I mean, I wrote her, made narrative meaning out of an image, a few stories, the swell of her belly, the curve of her thigh.  It is what we do, and I know I am doing it, but it never matters, really.  The stories we tell ourselves take hold.

She would come back soon and a lot, she said.  We would share ideas, processes.  Yada, yada, yada.

Soon, she moved out of town.  Not far.  But things were rough financially.  She couldn't afford to live where she was.  She moved to a smaller town where living was cheaper.  I had trouble getting in touch with her.  Sorry, she said eventually.  Things were rough.  She had to sell her computer.  She was living with a boy.  She'd gotten a job but didn't have enough money for gas most of the time.

Then the line went dead.

A few days ago, she contacted me.  She apologized for not getting in touch before.  She'd moved again.  She was even further away now, but she would love to work together.  Right away.  She'd thought of me often.  I had one night open.  I needed the break, but I didn't want to chance not seeing her again.  Tuesday, I said.  Great.  She'd be there, she said.

She showed up with her boyfriend, a long, thin, tattooed fellow with lots of face metal.  He reminded me of Tommy Lee.  He was a nice enough boy, really, and I knew I was doing it again. . . writing a narrative, projecting a life.  She told me that she was not working.  She had recently quit a retail job.  I couldn't make out that Tommy was gainfully employed.  They lived in a house, she said, with three other people.  But everyone came there, all their friends.  "I guess the fellows all like to look at your girlfriend?" I asked Tommy. "Pretty much," he said.

Me too.

We went back into the studio while Tommy lay down on the couch with a beer and a book.  "Help yourself to anything," I told him.  "Oh sure, I will," he said.

"I didn't think I would ever see you again," I said to her.  "I'm glad to."

"I wanted to come back, really.  Things have been so difficult.  But I want to get going again.  I've had some paying gigs now."

I looked at her with the same fascination as before.  When she took off her glasses, she was blind.  Maybe that is what gave her that strangeness, the outward gaze directed inward, feeling herself rather than looking out at the world.  When she moved, everything was odd and beautiful.

"Have you been posing in the mirror," I asked.

"I have since you said that last time."

Jesus.

We shot for a while, but I could feel Tommy in the other room and I was tired from working every day and shooting every night.  And I was hungry.

It was still light when we went to dinner.  They looked like vagabonds, like travelers.  The waiters and waitresses at the sushi restaurant grinned at me when they came by.  He still looked like Tommy.  She was wearing black knee socks with heavy black worker's boots, a pair of shorts, and cut up t-shirt with something painted on it and her thick fuck you glasses.  Whatever.  More for them to wonder about.

We ate.  I probed.  The story I had been making up was corroborated.  And more.  Tommy wanted to be a writer, he said.  He had all these great stories that people just wouldn't believe.  "You must write them then," I said.  "You must write them every day.  But that's the hard part."

And so I listened to his stories.  He didn't have a strong sense of structure.  The stories were of drugs and sex and scams and unusual characters.  He had an idea that he just wanted to write the stories from different points of view.  He didn't use those words, but that is what he meant.

"Sort of like Tarantino, eh?"

"Yes," he said, "like that."

I looked at her.  She was beaming, nodding her head up and down, in love, knowing that it all lay before them somewhere like a promise they would keep.  You could almost touch it.  It was what they had.  She hooked her arm inside of his and squeezed.  She looked at me and grinned as if to say, "See!  We have a plan.  Things are getting better."