Shot In Detroit Read online

  I looked around the room, deciding whether cleaning up might be worth it. Could he respect an artist who lived in squalor? Was there any other kind? My work tended to take over any unclaimed space. But at least it covered the dust.

  “Sure. Come on up.” I couldn’t help but add, “Anything special?”

  I’d been wondering how my pictures were selling but had been afraid to check. Four weeks into a ten-week show and I hadn’t heard a word since my gala opening. The free wine and cheese had brought in a fair number of guests the first night, but I wasn’t the only artist. Woodcuts hung primly on the best wall, the crowd making it difficult to see them. The blue and red abstracts across the room were as lonely as a cloud though so I didn’t feel too bad.

  “Let’s save it. Have ourselves a little face time.”

  Ted’s jokey tone was moderately comforting. Did terrorists about to explode their flak jackets joke with potential victims? I shoved things into drawers and closets, put on some eye liner and blush, thinking that with any luck he was coming over to ask for a few more pieces. Did I have other work to give him? Optimism was not part of my normal makeup, but he’d sounded—well, not negative—if I read him right. Would he come over just to give me bad news? Reading people correctly did not top my list of talents, however.

  When he’d first agreed to show my work, I took the photographs to an upscale framing store in Birmingham, a ritzy suburb. The shop did a first-rate job too—triple matting, maple frames, glare-proof glass; you could hang the damned photos in the Met. This elegant presentation added about $150 to the price of each piece. Ted was encouraging about possible sales so it seemed worth the expenditure. One he’d suggested. The unpaid bill still sat on my desk. So too the email reminder.

  “No one buys quality work out of bins,” he’d said. “That’s for art fairs.”

  He stood in the foyer half an hour later, examining my African mask collection.

  “Holy shit!” he muttered, stepping away from an especially severe-looking face—a dark, rotting brown mask with white slashes for features, dark red feathers for hair, the mouth: a burnt scream. It was meant to frighten, and it did. “Must’ve been some crazy ceremony going on.” He accompanied his words with a war-dance of sorts, managing to be offensive and awkward simultaneously. God, I hated the jerk.

  “That particular mask may be authentic,” I said, trying to get past his rude display. “It was infested with insect larvae when I bought it at a going-out-of-business sale at a gallery in Soho. Got home and realized it ten minutes later—when I felt something crawling up my arm.” Ted made the requisite face. “Had to throw the mask in the freezer for a week. Good thing I never keep food in there.”

  I pulled the mask down from the wall, unable to help myself. “Look at the stains inside, will you? Someone wore this baby more than once.”

  “Sweat, huh,” Ted said, taking it from me. “But most of these are reproductions, right?”

  “Yeah—or decorative art. Souvenirs for tourists.” I took the mask from him, carefully replacing it. “If I sell enough of my own work, I can buy more authentic pieces.”

  Was this true? Would I ever be able to even afford more than groceries and heat? I thought of the ten-year-old car sitting outside at the curb.

  Was a smile lurking on his lips? My stomach rose and fell like an elevator as I tried to figure him out, to keep a step ahead. Why did he feel like the enemy?

  “Why masks?”

  So it was to last a bit longer: the cat-and-mouse part of the evening.

  “A friend gave me the first one.” It’d been Bobby Allison in the nineties. “Got me hooked on them.”

  Bobby Allison could only make love wearing a mask. Rip the mask off and he deflated like a stuck balloon. Bobby’s masks came from Venice and were much more expensive and elegant than any in my collection. Beautiful but boring to me. I still remembered the sensation of Venetian glass beads rattling over my eyes, of feathery embellishments tickling my cheeks. He wore reproductions in the bedroom. He wasn’t crazy, just kooky.

  “Makes for a memorable hallway.”

  “I like it.”

  Ted looked around more openly now. “Spooky, but unforgettable,” he repeated, his mind elsewhere. Suddenly his eyes lit up. “Hey, I wonder if I should do a show using masks. Where did you say you got these?”

  “EBay, flea markets, Ann Arbor, downtown at DuMouchelles, you know.” Was this what he came up here for? Ideas for a show? “See that one over there?” I said, pointing to one that looked like a plaster cast but with a tin nose.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s from the First World War. There were no cosmetic surgical procedures to deal with disfigurement, which was rampant. So they made masks like this one.”

  Zero interest. It wasn’t pretty enough for Ted. So I went on.

  “You know, like for a soldier who lost his nose?” No reaction. “One or two I got on a trip to the Caribbean—when I was flush once.”

  Now he looked engaged. “You look a little flushed now.”

  Oh, so that’s why he was here. Not a good line, but enough to sway me when paired with the image of Bobby Allison rattling around in my head. And suddenly, we were in the bedroom. Had this been his sole intention? He was probably horny tonight and knew he had the upper hand here. But as an imperfect person in an imperfect world, I was going to let him have his way. The question was: was I easy, was I attracted to him, or was I desperate? Strike one and two. Well, at least two. Did I think a quick—and I do mean quick—roll in the hay would change my luck? I’d have the whole night if not lifetime to regret it. I could tell a fast finisher a mile away.

  Along with his freckles, Ted had a pelt of reddish fur running from his neck to his ass. He looked like a fox in his reflection in the mirror over my bed. I ran my fingers through the hair on his back cautiously, not sure if he regarded his pelt as unfortunate or not.

  Our activity was further punctuated by the guy who lived upstairs pounding miles out on his treadmill. Why had my neighbor decided he needed a huge piece of machinery in his apartment—a one-bedroom unit if I remembered correctly? I used to run into him at the gym. Ben—that was his name—was one of the guys who watched himself in the mirror. Maybe I could shoot a group of photos of gym patrons examining themselves with a critical but loving gaze. Fingers on the offending bulges or pictorial pecs. A sideways glance to see if anyone was watching. Damn, a good idea finally. I filed it away, betting they’d readily agree to being immortalized. But just the men, I reckoned. Women would never be satisfied enough with their body to allow it.

  Ted and I tried each other on for size: sucked, kissed, moaned, traded positions, indicating preferences and dislikes. The stuff new sexual partners did, and it wasn’t as quick as I’d expected. Both our bodies instinctively picked up the thumping rhythm going on above, finishing only moments after Ben walked heavily across the floor to the bathroom to pee. I’d listened to the sequence of events enough times to know his routine and anticipate the stuttering flush of an old toilet. Ben was slower than usual tonight, perhaps diverted by the mirror over his bathroom sink. Or else he’d drunk a lot. Perhaps he’d heard us below. Did I scream? Not tonight. It was possible Ted had though. He seemed like a screamer. Maybe he’d spotted his pelt.

  I was breathing heavily.

  Ted, of course, credited his skill as a lover. “Good way to burn calories, huh.”

  I scurried him out the bedroom door as soon as it didn’t look like bad manners, shutting the door behind us. He reached for seconds, but I ducked away. Afterwards was seldom more than afterwards for me.

  “Is there construction going on upstairs? Funny time to be doing work.”

  Shrugging, I didn’t bother to explain.

  “So how’s the show going?” I asked when we were back in the living room. “Sold much of my stuff?”

  Ted frowned. It was a deeply practiced frown, and I sunk into myself as he began to speak. Was it a pity-fuck we’d engaged in or was he exa
cting a payment? Either way I’d been had.

  The unsold photographs were neatly wrapped in brown butcher paper and sitting on his counter when I arrived later that day, well after my sojourn at Belle Isle. Nine studies of the implosion of Detroit apartment buildings along with one photo of the demise of the downtown J.L. Hudson’s store, the signature Michigan department emporium for most of the twentieth century. At first, I thought the tenth photograph had sold, but there it was in Ted’s white hands. Hands all over me sixteen hours earlier.

  “They lack—je ne sais quois—” Ted said unctuously, holding the tenth picture up. “I wish I could tell you what it is, Vi. What’s keeping them from selling. Maybe this subject’s been done before and perhaps a bit better.” He ducked his head. “FYI, I can’t tell you how many photographs I’ve seen of the Hudson’s Department Store implosion.” He thrummed his fingers on the counter—like a drum roll before his final shot. “Makes you seem like an amateur to shoot such dull subjects.”

  The tenth photograph was a shot of the Seville Apartments on the Cass Corridor, one of Detroit’s most notorious streets. I took it when the building was being dismantled, several years ago now. Part of the Seville seemed to be melting into the earth, creating a sort of lava-like concrete eruption. I’d thought it looked pretty cool back then. Still did. Making a good subject a better one was the steady stream of water directed at the building by an unseen hand, making a high arching rainbow with nothing at its end but rubble: perhaps resembling holy water emanating from the hand of God. Occasionally, I could get into spiritual stuff—when a photo captured an image I’d never noticed with my naked eye. There was otherworldly stuff out there: any photographer will tell you that. Images not there when you took the shot.

  “You’re giving the viewer exactly what he’d expect,” Ted said, lecturing me like he was Beaumont Newhall, the art critic.

  I feigned attentiveness, hoping it’d put an end to the agony, but he continued in a hectoring tone. “Too bad you didn’t get into the Seville a little earlier. I hear they kept a shooting range in a back hallway. New Jack City—remember that movie—with a few senior citizens cringing behind plywood doors.”

  What an ass! An ass I’d recently had over mine.

  He blinked twice and began to wrap the photo. “Maybe that’s what you should aim for—getting in there before they implode. Record the final days of these buildings. Might be where the money is.” He found his knife and waved it theatrically before cutting a piece of string. “Funny how often photographers have no sense of which pictures will sell,” he added, mercilessly. “If I see one more picture of New Orleans after Katrina. Or the vineyards in Tuscany, for God’s sake.” He shook his head. “With digitals and cell phones, anyone can photograph doorways and grapes. So too, oil spills.”

  I looked at those soft white hands again, his impeccable eggshell suede shirt.

  “Great idea—the final day thing, Ted. I’ll see if I can get the demolition schedule from the city. Maybe I can beat them to the next site.”

  “Great,” he said, missing my sarcasm. He tied the string around the picture, pushing the pile across the counter. “Guess you’ll need help carrying them to the car.”

  His tone hissed disdain. The bastard didn’t want to touch my work. It was poison; I was poison.

  Ted’s idea of photographing a building’s final days would never work for me, I thought, as we marched to the car. I wasn’t interested in photojournalism, had nothing to say—it wasn’t how my mind worked. My work depended on setting up a shot, getting the right lighting, using a camera that allowed me to manipulate, experiment. Lots of time and trials. The idea of running through deserted hallways in an inner city building, chased by rats, human and otherwise, well, it wasn’t going to happen. Words weren’t my talent. I could go for days without using any.

  Painters, sculptors, ceramicists—they were never expected to expose societal ills. Why were photographers? Why couldn’t I take pictures of the ill, the poor, the disfigured, the freakish without providing a script or an apology, without starting a non-profit to go with the work? When Degas painted his lovely but prosaic dancers for the hundredth time, no one chided him for not marching out into the teeming streets of Paris where urchins panhandled to support their families. But right from the start, photography was held to a different standard.

  Ted seemed to have no memory of his enthusiasm of several months ago when I brought my portfolio to him after meeting him at a cocktail party at the Omni. Back then he’d talked about my idiosyncratic vision, my honed craft—arty claptrap probably designed to get me into bed. A particular sort of arrangement, sex for favors, had happened more times than I cared to remember, but I’d also had a sense my work impressed him. Could I have read him wrong?

  So after Ted used me to scratch an itch the night before, and a mere half hour after he’d dismissed my work as boring and repetitive at his gallery, I sloshed through the melting snow and found myself with Ted at Vicente’s, a Cuban spot on Library Street. I was a chump, but there it was. Give a girl the slightest hint of another shot at a show and she’ll follow you anywhere. Or I would at least.

  After a scotch or two, Ted mellowed, especially in his critique of my work. “You’re still looking for the right subject, Vi. Give it time. Talent’s there.”

  He was all teeth, with a slight odor of wet dog hair, as he moved his chair closer so I could hear his insights over the percussive noise. “The technique’s in place, the skill. What are you—thirty? You’ve got time to find your subject.”

  He was almost shouting over the music and people at the adjacent tables turned to stare at us. Ted patted my hand, and I didn’t flinch at his touch. Another gallery show, a whisper about my work in the right ear, the opportunity to be in on it; for this, I could tolerate a lot of pawing. How far would I go for a few shards of success? I wasn’t sure.

  After my second margarita, I looked him over with renewed interest, now fueled by a possible payoff down the road, a second show when I’d found my subject. I remembered those freckles stretching from head to toe, his strangely hairy back.

  Perhaps I could play it differently this time. I knew what he liked. In bed at least. And his odd smell, by now it reminded me of the seashore: a wet dog at the beach. He repeated himself when I didn’t respond, breaking my trance.

  “You’re still a baby, Vi. You can’t rush it. You’ll find a marketable subject before long.”

  Actually, I was thirty-five, okay, thirty-nine, and had given it time, though till now, I’d never fretted much about the passing years. Someone—even if it had to be crappy Ted—had yanked me from my ennui. My dazed state.

  How old was Weegee when he started following cops around? When did O’Keeffe grasp the concept that certain flowers resembled vaginas? What was the cutoff age for edgy, important work?

  “Marketable? Are you saying I should turn to shtick?”

  This thought woke me up. I’d always secretly, or not so secretly, thought most of the photographs people flocked to in galleries relied on shtick. Here was my confirmation.

  “Good God, no,” Ted said, drawing back in semi-believable alarm. “Hate the stuff. Babies dressed like caterpillars. Psychedelic tints. Yuck.”

  I wondered how he’d define “stuff.” Were the street scenes Helen Levitt or Berenice Abbott shot almost a century ago more or less shtick too? If a photograph reflected honest life, could it still be shtick?

  “But you want art that sells? Right? A moneymaker.” Surely, I could figure it out. Seduce him with the right subject.

  “Well, naturally, I want to eat. But hey, I love being part of the art scene. I could’ve run a hotel or an Applebee’s if I didn’t.”

  He massaged my hand in a way that expressed another desire. Once again, I resisted the impulse to withdraw it. He’d lost the last remnant of any respect back when he’d said “FYI.” No, he’d lost it last night when he played me.

  But maybe it was the moment to get serious. Perhaps taking s
cattershot pictures of whatever caught my interest wasn’t enough. I wasn’t going to fall into success like I’d always imagined. It might take more than that, but of what I wasn’t sure.

  I started to tell Ted about my new insights but realized he might see the panicky look in my eyes even in Vicente’s dim light. So I took him home again—right after the music got loud and Latin dancing took over the floor; had there ever been any doubt?

  “Ever consider hanging the masks in the bedroom?” he said as we passed through the hallway again on his way out. “Anyway, I’ve decided masks wouldn’t be right in my gallery. I’ve never gone in for that primitive stuff. It’s more the province of Detroit galleries.”

  He was down the flight of stairs in seconds, the door slamming behind him, never giving me a chance to tell him not all masks were primitive. What had he meant when he said masks were the province of Detroit galleries? Did he know these masks hadn’t been made to hang in galleries any more than dinosaurs existed only to end up as fossils in a natural history museum? It sounded like a racist remark. Well, no surprise there. It was still 1967 in Detroit in most respects.

  For the rest of the night, I agonized over Ted’s words. Was art like mathematics, where only artists under thirty produced important work? Had I gone from novice artist to spent hack without a period of fertility in between? I also wondered if Bill would understand these two occasions were work and not love related. Bill…

  Detroit News: A 26-year-old Detroit man was rushed to a Rochester hospital today after collapsing on a playing field in Rochester Hills. He was pronounced dead at 2:17 p.m. by doctors at Crittenden Hospital. The victim was identified by his rugby teammates as Rodney Jones, a Detroit attorney. Mr. Jones came to the U.S. from Manchester, England in 2009 to attend law school at the University of Michigan. He was employed as an associate with Barker, Shay & McDougal, a Detroit law firm specializing in patent and copyright law. The cause of Mr. Jones’ death is still under investigation by the Rochester Police.