Photography

Camera at my face, hand fiddling with the lens, amusement and anger on her face. She was running at me. She didn’t want her picture taken. She was trying to blur the image. She never wanted her picture taken. I don’t know why. She was beautiful. Perhaps it was superstition. She never explained.
+++++She was successful. The photograph is blurred. It was her camera. A Pentax. I sometimes get the photo out and look at it. Overcast morning, loose blouse, worn jeans, sandals. She had to compensate for the sandals, feet slipping. When she got to me she yanked the camera from my hands. I thought she was going to rip the film out, but she didn’t.
+++++Across the street, in background, there’s a building, heavy wooden beams stacked one atop the other like building blocks, boards slapped onto the sides, entirety painted beige as if to hide the building’s unique construction. A wide front porch. It was an apartment building of the old variety. This was Venice, Venice California. Someone had actually put canals in. The canals were nearby. They rose and fell with the tide. The beach wasn’t far away.
+++++I took a lot of pictures of that building. That was how I almost got her. I was at the side of her apartment building and she was on the sidewalk in front of her first-floor apartment. I was taking pictures of that odd building across the street. We both knew it couldn’t last. Not that building. Venice was changing.
+++++I almost got her, almost had her in focus. Another second or two and she would have been on film—raven hair, long face, complexion darker than olive, freckles over her upper cheeks and the bridge of her nose. She had two children. Her eyes were dark and darting, but it wasn’t that so much, for it was what was behind the eyes that was alluring. She always seemed to know about people and relationships. This offered her amusement. That’s what was in her eyes, mischief, derived from other people’s secrets. I don’t think she wanted that on film.
+++++
+++++
In the living room there was a heater on the wall with a row of blue flames dappling steel vents. Like almost all the walls of apartments in Southern California, the walls were painted Navajo white, an off-white, an unassuming color dented with a tinge of brown, wall heater of the same hue as if to blend in. A modern apartment. Two bedrooms, wall-to-wall shag carpeting, shag orange, a sandy texture beneath bare feet.
+++++We always sought the ambiance of that wall unit when we spread the opened sleeping bag out on the carpet, sleeping bag with a flannel liner. It was winter, kids asleep in the one bedroom, the other bedroom never used except as a hamper. But before the sleeping bag went down we first had to clear a space on the floor in front of the heater because the apartment was a mess. Toys, crockery, books, crayons, pots, pans, papers, eating utensils, food wrappers, discarded gum, banana peels—living room, dining room, hall, bathroom. No surface was spared. The children played everywhere. We had this alcoholic sort of relationship, me and her, not the children. Except I don’t think we were alcoholics yet. Not then. I think it was more like we were trying it out.
+++++She’d be on top, working toward that special gift of hers, heater nearby with a gentle hiss. We never played music. We never watched TV. The children, four and five years old, watched TV in the morning. When the sleeping bag went down, the clothes came off and the lights went out, but there was that blue, flickering row of flames that put a mysterious glow on her body, shadows moving. It was never the same. It was always different. But there was ritual—kids fed and put in the bathtub and then in pajamas and then in bed with books from the library. Lots of library fines. And then, when the little ones were asleep, there’d be this sigh—“finally.”
+++++Of course there was canned beer throughout the proceedings of childrearing, but when the little ones were down and gone, genuine glasses appeared, wine, vodka, rum, as if these formalities in glassware delineated our own, special time. We’d check on the children, tuck them in, remove books, turn the light out, leave the nightlight on. I would have already been to the liquor store. It was only a half block away. Add another block to that, and there was the ocean.
+++++Late at night, when PM turned into AM and continued, we could hear the sea collapsing. We sometimes went to the dining room, in between rounds on the sleeping bag, and we’d opened the drapes and stand in the dark and look out. Streetlights with yellowed halos midst a cushion of fog, dark rum at the bottom of a glass, ocean a gentle lullaby. We didn’t speak. We just stood there naked with the wonder of it all.
+++++We had talked everything out before the sleeping bag went down. Again, ritual coming into play, my right forearm sweeping the coffee table, end to end, to rid it of toys and other paraphernalia, everything onto the floor. This took place in front of the sofa, and that’s where we ate and talked and drank, with glasses—on the sofa—after the kids were out.
+++++Feta cheese, sharp cheddar, Italian bread, Greek olives, Polish pickles, wine or vodka or rum. Sometimes there were stemmed glasses, sometimes not. We’d tuck ourselves into that lazy couch and talk and talk and talk. It all seemed so important.
+++++And then the sleeping bag with that moving blueness on her flesh, and then, after we tumbled, she’d slide off of me, lungs pumping.
+++++I’d get us some more wine or rum or vodka and she’d rise up on an elbow and toss her hair back with a hand and take the glass from me. And sometimes we’d go to the dining room—late at night, early morning, with the mist and the streetlights and the pulse of the Pacific whispering.
+++++
+++++
+++++
+++++
Michael Onofrey is from Los Angeles. He now lives in Japan. His stories have appeared in Cottonwood, The Evansville Review, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Natural Bridge, Two Hawks Quarterly, and The William and Mary Review. He is currently working on a novel.