A Blind Spot for Boys by Justina Chen
For Steve Malk,
much, much more than a literary agent,
but an agent of love and friendship, faith and change.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
—Marcel Proust
Part One
Nothing condemns a photograph more than a blazingly bright sky.
—Annie Griffiths, photographer
Chapter One
If you want to see the world with fresh eyes, haul yourself off to the Gum Wall in Pike Place Market. At least that’s what Dad said twelve years ago when he brought me to the brick wall studded with spat-out, stretched-thin, and air-hardened wads of gum. Thousands of pieces. Hundreds of thousands. Both of us were armed with cameras for my first photo safari. His was a heavy Leica with a powerful telephoto lens, mine a red point-and-shoot I’d inherited from him, not some chubby plastic toy.
Back for what must have been my thirty-sixth trip to this weirdly mesmerizing wall, I still felt vaguely nauseous as I looked at all that petrified gum. I sighed, restless from fifteen minutes of positioning my tripod and another five waiting around for the perfect light. Last night, Dad had suggested the wall might make the perfect addition to my college application portfolio. He was right. After all, what’s more unique and memorable than the Gum Wall? But then Dad begged off this morning—yet another panicked SOS call to our family business, Paradise Pest Control—leaving me to face the gum alone.
The morning sun had yet to trace its way over the alley. I shifted my weight and fiddled with my camera some more. Patience has never been my virtue, which could be a slight problem. My favorite photographers talk about being on constant alert for that split second when the ordinary transforms into the extraordinary. Until my portfolio review a few months ago, I thought I’d captured plenty of those moments: my grandparents holding hands, gnarled fingers interlaced, during their fifty-sixth and final anniversary together. The sunburst of disbelief on my mother’s face a moment after her only game-winning goal in her adult soccer league. The first grin from the guy who stole my heart…
Stop, I told myself whenever my thoughts slid back to the boy who ruined me for love: Dominick Adler, Crew Boy, Mr. Yesterday. Stop.
As if my thought had conjured Dom himself, my heart lurched as it had done for the past year whenever I glimpsed a black Gore-Tex jacket. Always thinking, hoping, believing it might be—
I lifted my camera, tripod and all, and zoomed in on disappointment.
Not Dom.
Just a balding middle-aged man venturing down to the market for first dibs on fresh fish and flowers. Of course. Dom, a.k.a. Mr. Wrong—wrong boy, wrong time, wrong place—was in California, interrupting the best years of his post-college life, not to mention my love life, to create some rescue-the-rat cell phone game. A game, excuse me, I had inspired after telling him about an impossibly huge alpha rat that had outwitted Dad’s traps and bait for months. A drop of rain hit my head as if I needed a reminder that Crew Boy had washed himself of me seven months ago. And that was precisely what I should do with this inscrutable Sphinx of a Gum Wall, all come hither but never revealing its secrets.
But I couldn’t bail on the wall, not when I needed an iconic shot. The associate director of admissions at Cornish College had said as much with my portfolio laid flat in front of her. “Your photos of street fashion are really good, and good makes you pause,” she had said after a close look at nine of what I thought were my best shots. “But a great photo knocks your heart open. So give some thought to that. What knocks your heart open?”
I didn’t have to think; I knew. But it wasn’t like I could exactly call Dom up and ask to take a series of portraits of him, not when he’d been black-ops incommunicado for more than half a year.
The Gum Wall, I figured, at least forced a reaction. So I spent another couple of minutes fussing with my tripod. The sky, though, remained stubbornly dark.
Time to face facts: This scouting trip, like every other boy after Dom, was a total bust. I was about to lean down to unscrew my camera off the tripod when the clouds parted. Through the cracked gray sky came a luminous ray of sunlight. The Gum Wall glowed with an otherworldly translucence. Right then, I could almost believe in miracles.
The decisive moment, that’s what Henri Cartier-Bresson, who pioneered street photography, called it. The fractional instant when a moment’s significance comes into sharp focus. And there it was at last: my decisive moment.
I crouched down to my tripod, perfectly and painstakingly positioned, already savoring my photograph.