“This is him?”
We both stare at the black-and-white actor’s head shot of him in his wheelchair, the one he still sends out to movie and television producers. He had to quit his job as a soap opera actor after the accident, but he still gets work as an extra, sometimes even a line or two in a movie now and then. Though you can see the wheelchair handles poking out above his biker-jacketed shoulders, the pic is mainly a close-up of his face looking daytime-television intense, like when a bomb has just been dropped in a scene and the camera closes up on the actor’s expression before fading into black and then commercial. But actually it’s the other photo, the one China pulls up now, that I can’t bear to look at. The one before the accident, before the night he got super coked up and decided to climb a forty-foot palm tree and jump. In this picture, he’s standing smiling and naked beneath a waterfall somewhere in South America, wearing a pair of Reeboks, looking only a few years older than I am now. I don’t know why looking at this picture embarrasses me so much. If it’s his eighties hair or the Reeboks or just how at ease he seems in his sunburnt skin, an ease I’ve never known, so at ease he looks almost cocky. That there was a time in his life when he was happy to stand in the bright light of day and bare himself like this, his smile so wide and open, he might be laughing. And that he would send this shot to me now. I much prefer the wheelchair picture, which is more or less just his face, his expression trying for cinematic but mostly just looking broken and vacant. There’s still a lingering pride in the tilt of his chin and shoulders that I don’t know how to process, that is foreign to me. When he sent me the pictures, I didn’t know what to say. At last I said: I like your eyes.
She stares at his photo so long I want to snatch it from her. I want to explain. Remind her that he’s a Lynch fan. Remind her of the Morrissey connection. That he was a pretty big-deal soap opera star in the eighties. He even had sex with Raquel Welch once.
Finally she turns to look at me. “I guess I could go for some Chinese now.”
“Oh,” I say, “are we done?”
“For now,” she says, like I’ve exhausted her.
When the Chinese arrives, I watch her spend a lot of time opening the little packets of sauce. She spends way more time doing this than eating.
“After this, maybe we should try some other things,” I say.
“Like what?”
“Like some different angles. And some locations. And probably too we should try some with the light on.”
“I don’t know about this, Lizzie,” she says.
“What?”
“This whole thing. It just seems weird.”
“What about the guy who was psycho all over you? Vermont? Who burned the photos. He wasn’t weird?”
“I really don’t think you can compare the two.”
“I guess not. I mean, mine lives far away.”
“Also what is he, like, sixty?”
“Forty-seven.”
“And a paraplegic?”
“Quadriplegic.”
“And are you ever actually going to meet this guy? Are you really going to fly to fucking Irvine or wherever he lives? How is he going to pick you up from the airport? Do you even want this guy to fuck you? Can he even fuck you?”
“I—”
“I just don’t see how this is going to work, like, in reality. He’s way old. And weird. And he’s got Baywatch-era hair. This pic situation”—she shakes her head at her egg roll—“is honestly the least of your worries.”
We pick at the Chinese in awkward silence.
“I should be getting to Java. I’m meeting this guy Andrew there. He’s a friend,” she says. “You’ve got enough there, don’t you? Here,” she says, handing me her dad’s camera. “You can hang on to this and develop them. Just bring it with you next time I see you. You’re coming to class Monday, right?”
“Yeah.”
“We have that presentation.”
“I know.”
She goes to the bathroom to duct-tape her nipples, and while she’s in there, I look at the photos on the camera’s LCD monitor. They’re the same if not worse than the ones I had before. I look startled in most of them. Overexposed. Pissed. My makeup is terrible. I do look like I’ve been punched in the eyes.
She comes back into my room with her dress on up to the hips, her top half totally naked but for the duct-tape crosses.
“Do these look like X’s or crosses?”
I look at her a long time.
“They look more like plus signs, I guess.”
“I guess that’s all right,” she says. “Can you tie me up in back?” She turns to give me her back and holds out the straps of her halter.
I tie her up, gazing at the Asian characters tattooed down her back that supposedly spell out Steppenwolf and wonder, what if they don’t spell out anything? What if she got tricked?