The Beautiful Anthology (10 page)

It really doesn’t smell good in the gents. Whether they’re elegant expanses of heavy white porcelain or prison-aesthetic folded steel, communal urinals are the worst offenders. Late in the evening, near last orders, a solo user will indulge himself, spraying the entire width or chasing the brightly colored freshener tablets along the trench.

Individual pods are slightly less odorous, and not such a social challenge. Not as much fun, true; the single bowl encourages more precise aim, as each user has his own clear target (the drain), set centrally within white space, his own personal white space, delineated by porcelain fins protruding from the wall.

These fins, these urinal dividers: You probably wouldn’t notice as you’re suffocating in the stench, but they’re incredibly elegant, simple, sculptural things.

Unless they’re intended to act like blinders, reducing your peripheral vision to
THX1138
blank whiteness, dividers are not for privacy. It’s far too easy to look over at the next chap’s chap (if you’re so inclined) or for him to look at yours (if he’s so inclined). Ideally, neither, or both, but they’re probably there as splash guards, protecting everyone from their neighbors’ gusto.

My admiration of urinal dividers goes against the function-overform principles of my industrial design background. My absolute top choice for aesthetics is the shark fin shape. What do they do? Not much.
Maybe
they prevent strangers from urinating on us;
maybe
they perform a psychological function;
maybe
they keep us in line (both physically and behaviourally) – but not really. They’re a bit useless and pointless, and therein lies their appeal; an attempt to create something with a prosaic, base function has resulted in a piece of pure, uncluttered form.

I’d like to own one. A new, clean, fin-shaped urinal divider, straight from the manufacturer – not one with, um, narrative
.
I’d put it in the middle of my kitchen table, as if a white porcelain shark were swimming just below the surface. Men would work out what it was after a while, although seeing it out of context – literally off the wall – might throw them at first. Women? Maybe. Eventually.

I’d explain to everybody that it was factory fresh. And then we could all have a nice cup of tea.

LANCE REYNALD

BLACK PAINT

… how did I get here?

4 a.m. The cold purity of night snow is falling gently outside the windows. My mind wanders to an October sky along the coast, scarcely more than a year ago. My memory jogged by a snapshot on the table in front of me. I woke suddenly and had to rummage through my desk drawer to find the photograph.

“Baby, what you doing here?”

Even though his words are sleepy soft, he has broken the silence I’ve been trying to understand for the past hour and a half. I hear him, but the words aren’t reaching me. My mind has been grabbing at memories and song lyrics trying to figure out how it is that I’ve come to be here now. The Talking Heads are playing a prophetic loop.

… and you may find yourself in another part of the world.

I am, but never would have been if not for the two years with her that preceded coming here. The snapshot of her face with her usually immaculate bob windswept as we walked along the deserted, off-season beach. In the middle of our argument, I snapped the photo with the camera she’d bought me at the Sunday flea market shortly after we moved in together. I had shown her some of the contact sheets of the photos I’d taken in school. She had said the shots were beautiful, that I had what they called an eye for it. She wanted to know why I wasn’t still taking pictures. I told her that I’d given it up. I didn’t think it was something that would ever lead to anything, or more accurately, that my father didn’t think it was going to lead to anything. I’d lost my camera from back in my school days and hadn’t thought to replace it since it had been just a passing hobby that couldn’t lead to anything.

“Being able to see beauty is a gift. It doesn’t have to lead to anything but that.” She wasn’t challenging anything, just stating a belief. She put the neck strap over my head as she placed the camera in my hands and said, “It’s time you start seeing again.”

… and you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife.

The apartment we shared was our beautiful house, though she wasn’t a wife. I’d asked after a few months and she’d refused. Not because of the fact that she was twenty years older than me, but because “wife” wasn’t a thing she’d ever wanted to be, and I shouldn’t believe that my happiness could be so simply answered, either. We could be lovers for a while; that was permitted. She could teach me to see the world around me again and we’d remain friends, no matter what. She had plans for us and great hopes for me while the traditional rules of society were of no importance to her, us.

I started to see again. The spent canisters of film dropped into the candy dish on the table in the entry hall of our apartment, replaced by a fresh roll of black-and-white film from the top shelf of the refrigerator door. The contact sheets from the lab were always on the kitchen table with the magnifying glass nearby. Together, we’d look through the images of our world as I had seen and documented it and find the perfect ones to enlarge. She then sent them to the frame shop to be matted and framed so she could become curator of the exhibit on our dining room walls.

Even away from the lens, I was seeing beauty again. Leaning against the door frame of our bedroom, watching her at her dressing table using a toothbrush to scoop black dye from a bowl and touch up her graying roots between visits to the salon. Silently sitting there with her eyes closed waiting the thirty-five minutes it took for the color to erase the years between us. Watching from across the table at the bistro as she raised the glass of red wine to her lips, the deep burgundy gently staining the scarlet cream of lipstick before a gentle smile at the berry tones of the vintage passed across her face.

To help sharpen my sight, she painted the walls of our apartment a flat black and the furnishings were a study of textures in black from satin to gloss. She said the effect would help me sense the details of everything else. Dinner guests became more vivid and animated. A solitary bright silk scarf printed with equestrian buckles draped on a hook by the front door. The graceful white ribbons of smoke from her Dunhill cigarette pulled from the distinctive blue box would drift toward the ceiling, lingering against the dark backdrop. The box of chocolate croissants fresh from the bakery atop the dining table appeared as a shock of bright color, and my nose filled with the bold aroma of espresso brewed in the double-chambered Italian pot over the gas flame of the stove. Every detail sensed, even beyond sight.

In that first year, I became conscious of the art that was our life together, and her dining room exhibition of my photographs began to spill into the other rooms of our apartment as I created more images to share with her the details that my eyes noted in our first year together. The more pictures I took, the more refined my vision became, the products of her encouragement and direction.

It was during our second year together that she started selecting the best images and gathering them in a portfolio. Tirelessly, she visited her friends in the galleries and showed them my work, determined to get me a showing. She thought it was time for others to see our world through my eyes. After months of campaigning on her part, we were asked to submit eight photographs for a group show. Together, we looked through thousands of frames on the contact sheets and selected the eight that she would deliver to the gallery in a taxi.

It was a Thursday night in the August heat, and I stood nervously in the corner of the gallery and held tightly to a plastic cup of cheap white wine as she stood by my side and proudly discussed my photographs with the gallery patrons. For me, the work was something we shared; it was our life together and a way of seeing she had cultivated in me. To have her do all the talking for me was the most natural thing in the world. She found the perfect words for the conversation I could only show in pictures. My sight was the product of our collaboration. I felt as though my feet were nailed to the floor as she talked for hours and the crowd dwindled to just a few.

In the last moments of my first gallery exhibition, she started a conversation with a Frenchman in a shabby gray suit. He was another photographer, whose work hung on the wall opposite my own. Together, they crossed the room to look at his images as I stood against my wall and watched them.

While my work was a study of the objects in our world, his were portraits of the people he’d encountered that summer, strong images that captured the beauty of the ordinary people passed in his travels. His photos had a voice of photojournalism compared to the fine art captured by my lens. As she studied each image intently, he told her the stories of the people he photographed. When they finally returned to my side of the room, she introduced the two of us, and we shook hands. His grip was strong and his gaze direct; my eyes darted between the two of them, unsure of what I should say or do next.

She excused herself to the ladies’ room and left us standing in front of my photographs. Finally, the Frenchman pointed to one of my images and asked me about it. I tried my best to remember how I had heard her describe the contrast and composition to another person earlier in the evening and repeat it.

“It is not so easy for you to put in words?” His direct gaze was

followed by a smile. “No, I don’t like talking much.”

“Easier to show, yes?”

As I shoved my free hand into my pants pocket, I raised the plastic cup and finished the last gulp of wine with a nod:
Yes.

After the opening, the Frenchman started to spend more time with us. She thought it would be good for us to become friends; he could help me take my art to someplace new. He joined us for dinners at home that would last into the early hours of morning, the three of us on the sofa, drinking bottle after bottle of red wine as we talked.

For entertainment, we would venture out to a jazz club a few blocks from our apartment. The two of them would talk and laugh for hours in French, and I often couldn’t keep up with the speed of their conversations, able to understand only a few words here and there. I wasn’t jealous, but I was uncertain of her interest in him. The beautiful world we had shared as two had become a new world of three. Something had changed, but I couldn’t quite figure it out.

And you may ask yourself, well … how did I get here?

The three of us took an off-season trip to the coast. It was October, and most things there had been boarded up for the coming winter. He slept in at the rented bungalow as she and I took our morning walks along the beach. My uncertainty had started to fade, and I accepted the Frenchman as one of us.

On the morning of our last walk along the beach, she and I argued. He was moving back to France in a week, and she thought I should join him there. She said he still had things to teach me that would make my work great; I would be a fool not to go. She said that he could teach me to see people the way she had taught me to see things.

“But I do see people.”

“No, you don’t. You’re missing what’s right in front of you.” She had made up her mind that I would be moving away. She had also made sure it would be with someone who would protect and care for me as she had. I didn’t understand it that day, but I knew I had to go because it was what she wanted for me.

The snapshot in my hands reminds me of the argument. An October sky with the light softened by the early-morning autumn haze. The wind whipping her immaculate coiffure against her cheeks as she tries to push it back behind her ear with the delicate arch of her fingers. The photograph as proof that even in an argument, I was able to see her in a moment of beauty, as she lived every moment, right in front of me.

GINA FRANGELLO

WHAT YOU SEE