“Hello.”
“Hello.”
He was handsome, and he was looking her square in the face. Mary Ellen felt heat gather in the top of her head. Had she invited this? What was happening? The man kept looking at her, his expression unchanging; he seemed to be waiting for her to take off her blouse. Smoke billowed around her face, stinging her eyes. She waved it away. “So how do you know Peter?” she asked.
“Who’s Peter?”
“The person whose bed we’re sitting on.”
The man put his hand on the mattress and leaned on his arm. The arm was remarkably hairy. “I think he’s friends with my wife.”
“Oh.” Mary Ellen looked around to see if there was an angry woman glaring at her. “Is she here?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Um…” Mary Ellen drained her cup. The man was wearing cologne, indicating that he was either foreign or from South Philadelphia. Mary Ellen was reminded that she liked men who wore cologne. Cologne was aggressive; it stuck to you, like a flag that had been planted in your soil.
The man pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Would you like one?”
“No thank you.” Mary Ellen hadn’t seen this many people smoking since the eighties. And in bed, no less! Matt was going to be horrified by the smell. Not just of cigarettes, but of this man’s assertive aroma, which seemed to be extending its long fingers into her clothes and her hair. What was she doing?
She should have invited Matt, even though he would’ve hated this party. Matt didn’t wear cologne. He showered often, though—sometimes more than once a day—so he always smelled like Ivory soap. There had been a time, before the girls came along, when Mary Ellen and Matt had taken a lot of those showers together. Twin babies had put a stop to that a long time ago. Just the thought of all that slippery nakedness was laughable to Mary Ellen now, especially with all the sagging and wrinkling that had happened under her thick terry bathrobe. Mary Ellen’s modesty, she’d long decided, was her contribution to their marital equilibrium.
On the far side of the room, a small door opened, and a blur of bodies streamed into the bedroom. The door appeared to lead to a balcony, but the number of people coming through it seemed wildly out of proportion with the size of any balcony she’d ever seen. “I think I need some air,” she said. “Nice to meet you.” The man shrugged.
The balcony turned out to hold a spiral staircase, which led to a roof deck. Mary Ellen contemplated the twirling open ironwork and wondered if it was up to code. Up above, she could hear music and laughter, so curiosity got the better of her and she slowly, bravely made her way to the roof.
At the top, Mary Ellen hugged herself against the chill and tried to get her bearings in the sudden soaring openness. Peter’s house was in the middle of a long line of row houses, with another row backing up to it, and every house was topped with a roof deck, and every deck, it seemed, was having a party. Strings of glowing bulbs stretched from roof to roof, gathering everyone in a warm net of light as a shared soundtrack thumped from speakers two or three doors down. Beyond the rooftops, to the southwest, the towers of Center City pronged brightly into the sky, shrunk by distance to the same height as Peter’s neighborhood. A man in a flannel shirt poured something dark into Mary Ellen’s empty cup. She sipped. Bourbon. Well, why not.
Conversations were flowing all around her. Mary Ellen found herself slipping easily into one, and then another, even managing to say funny things, relevant things, to actually contribute to the muscular give-and-take. At the same time, she was becoming aware of a sluggishness in the mechanics of her eyes, requiring a concentrated effort to crank each face into focus as she turned from person to person, although she was pretty sure it wasn’t noticeable to anyone but herself. She formed her words with care, coordinating her lips and tongue with precision—or if not precision, composure. She found herself talking a lot about her photography (“I’m inspired by the work of Siskind”), and this spun off into declarations about the aesthetics of film, and the rigor of delayed gratification, and the degradation of photography as an art.
“Are you saying digital technology is killing the art form?” This was from a girl with long bangs wearing high-waisted pants and a batwing-sleeved sweater. She was too young to be dressing this way out of nostalgia, but the outfit was definitely bringing back a lot of memories for Mary Ellen, who suddenly longed for her favorite pair of fold-over-waist jeans.
“I’m just saying there’s so much faux seriousness out there these days, with the filters and the automatic selective focus and all that,” Mary Ellen replied. “It’s cheapening photography.”
“Well,” said the girl, “I’m not saying art history is irrelevant. I mean, yeah, studying the masters helps you situate your point of view.” She tossed her bangs out of her eyes. “But to me, the democratization of technology has radically energized the art of photography. It’s the institutions who are so heavily invested in outdated taxonomies and disciplinary structures—the galleries and museums profiting from a…a…freeze-dried conception of the photographic canon—who’ve been cheapened.”
Mary Ellen folded one arm against her stomach, using it to support the arm holding her cup aloft. She squinted at the girl, trying to sort the words she’d just heard into their proper order so she could figure out how to respond to them. Did she say taxidermy? “I thought you said taxidermy,” Mary Ellen exclaimed, laughing. “Did you say taxidermy?”
“No.”
Someone cranked the music up then, and a tidal
