A Clean Slate (12 page)

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man groping around at something in his lap. I prayed it was one of his bags and not his fly. Still, I wasn't scared of the guy. Leery, maybe, but not scared. What I feared was that other thing that lurked in the city, in my mind somewhere.

 

“You're late,” Cole said, when I walked into his loft at ten-fifteen. He looked pointedly at his watch, then returned his attention to the equipment he was setting up in neat little rows on the butcher-block table—lenses, filters, film.

“The El,” I said, not bothering to explain further. In fact,
I had a perfectly legitimate excuse, since the train had come to a stop in between stations and sat there, inexplicably, for twenty minutes before we started moving again. I couldn't bring myself to relate this tale to Cole, though. It seemed beneath me. When I was at Bartley Brothers no one looked at me strangely if I came in fifteen minutes later than usual. No one even blinked, because I was a professional, damn it. I felt a little sinking in my chest. I wasn't a professional now. I was nowhere close to being a professional photographer, and that's why I had to take Cole's shit if I wanted to get anywhere in this business.

“Sorry,” I said, mostly under my breath. “Won't happen again.”

Cole didn't even acknowledge my half-assed apology, which made me want to retract it. Instead, I made a quick decision to do my best today. None of this thinking that the job was a crappy little gig that a twelve-year-old could do. None of this hostility toward Cole. It was entirely possible that if I changed my attitude for the better, so would he.

“What's on the schedule for today?” I said, throwing my leather jacket over the chair and walking into the studio.

“Commercial shoot.” Cole was dressed in yet another pair of black pants and heavy black biker boots.

“You want to tell me what it's for, what we're shooting exactly?” I made my voice pleasant and curious.

He shrugged. “I'll tell you how I want to approach it, because I'll need your help.”

“Okay.”

“I want to approach the subject like a canvas.” He looked up at me, and there was a flicker of excitement in his eyes.

“Okay,” I said again, not wanting to ruin the moment, but not having a clue what he was saying.

“This isn't like the Spring Clean shoot, where the company knows exactly what they want the ad to look like. I've got a little more room to work with, you see? So I want to
start out with the set as minimal as possible and then build the picture from there, element by element.”

I nodded again, excited now myself. “It's like you'll be painting on film. You'll be adding different strokes, different props and backgrounds until you build the picture you want.”

Cole gave me the first genuine smile I'd ever seen. “Exactly.”

I felt a silly swell of pride. “What do you need me to do?”

“I need you to take down the white seamless and set up the light blue.” He gestured toward the dark end of the loft, a place that was jumbled with old furniture and posing stands and other assorted crap.

“Seamless?” My mind whirred through all the information I'd gleaned from my photography classes. Nothing called “seamless” came up.

“Yes, the seamless.”

When I responded with a blank stare, he pointed to the area where Michelle and her friendly washing machine had sat the day before. A long roll of white paper, about eight feet wide, hung from two silver posts and was unfurled onto the floor, creating a curved backdrop of sorts.

“It's the backdrop,” I said.

“Well, right, but it's called the seamless. I need you to get the one that's light blue like a robin's egg. Can you do that?”

I nodded again, annoyed at his patronizing tone, determined to make a go of it before I asked for help. Besides, I was still excited about this ad that we'd be working on. Maybe it was for Tiffany's! Robin's-egg blue was their color, after all. Maybe they'd bring little goody bags for us, and I'd get that chunky chain necklace I'd always wanted. Maybe this was one of those really artistic ads that Cole would win an award for. Possibly I'd win one as well for being an assistant. Did assistants win awards like that? Probably not, but my contribution to a Tiffany's ad might be something I could talk about at interviews and put in my résumé.

I spent the next twenty minutes enthusiastically picking through rusty chairs, discarded film canisters and a host of strobe and back lights until I found a large roll of light blue paper. It was so long that just carrying it through the rest of the junk made me feel like one of the Three Stooges with a ladder. I spent another twenty minutes trying to set up the damn thing like Cole had said, but the silver stands were too tall, so even if I could launch one side up and get it to stay, I wasn't tall enough to secure the other side.

Finally, I called him over. “It's too high.”

“I don't want it
high.
Didn't I say that?”

“No.”

“I think I did.”

“You didn't.”

We glared at each other.

“Well, anyway, it's quite simple.” Cole lifted the paper off with one hand, and using hand cranks that I somehow hadn't noticed, slid down the top section of each pole so it was about four feet high.

“You can't even have a model sitting on a chair in front of this. It'll be too short,” I said.

Cole looked it up and down, then glanced at the notes in his hand. “It should be fine.”

The buzzer sounded a few minutes later, and soon the elevator opened. A thin man with rectangular tortoiseshell glasses and long black sideburns burst into the room.

“Are we ready?” he said, marching straight toward me and my seamless. “Cole, everything ready?”

Obviously Cole and this guy had worked together before because Cole only nodded, a movement the sideburns guy couldn't see, since he was looking at me.

“Artie,” he said, fast approaching me, holding out his hand, “I'm Artie Judd.”

I grasped his hand, and he gave me a dry, quick pump of a handshake. “Kelly McGraw.”

“Nice to meet you, Kelly. I'm the art director for the shoot today.”

“An art director named Artie?”

“Yep.” He gave me a pleased smile. “Perfect, huh?”

“Sure.” Over his shoulder I saw Cole roll his eyes.

“Has Cole told you what we're doing today?” Artie said. His gaze stayed on me only a moment before it fluttered around the room, looking over my seamless, the lights, Cole's table of equipment.

“Not exactly.” I glanced over Artie's shoulder again and saw Cole dip his head toward his notes, almost as if he was hiding.

“Well, it's very exciting.” He moved around me and began playing with the seamless, rolling the sides up a little higher, but accidentally ripping the paper at the ends where I'd taped it. “Public service ads are our way to contribute.”

“Public service ads?” I had a flashback of the well-dressed herpes sufferers in Laney's marketing campaign.

“That's right.” He had completely dismantled the seamless as I'd constructed it, and the paper was now crumpled. “Sorry about that, but it's got to be sturdier. Animals are notoriously unpredictable. Everything's got to be solid, you know?”

Artie pushed past me, moving back toward the elevator. “Where is the handler?” he said in Cole's direction, but he didn't seem to notice when Cole said nothing.

“Animals?” I said, with a smirk in my voice. “This artistic picture you're going to build element by element is a public service ad with animals in it?”

Cole shot me a mean look that made me quash the laugh rising inside me. “If that's your attitude, you'll never make it as a photographer,” he said. “You've got to take work where you get it, and you've got to do your best no matter what the subject.”

He was right. Absolutely right. Everyone had to begin
somewhere, and I should know that by now, but the thought of the famous Coley Beckett shooting some kind of animal-farm ad that would probably run in the free homeless newspaper seemed strange. Obviously, though, Cole was starting over after whatever had happened to him in New York, and I, of all people, should be more sympathetic to that. Wasn't I starting over myself? Besides, it was probably an ad reminding people to pick up their dog poop, and I'd get to play with puppies all day.

I constructed my seamless again. A few minutes later, the elevator opened, and a tall, burly woman dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt stepped out.

“Cole Beckett?” She looked around the room, reading from a scrap of paper. She looked inordinately stressed out. Her brown hair fell in dirty clumps around her face, and her ruddy face gave the impression that she'd just run ten miles.

Cole came out from his living area and looked her up and down. “You're Tina?”

She nodded.

“Bring him in,” Cole said.

Tina breathed heavily, as if she was preparing herself for major lifting. She stepped back inside the elevator, then with a grunt, pushed out a large, silver metal crate on wheels. Rustling and a low grunting sound came from the crate, and I found myself taking a cautionary step back. That was no puppy.

“Where do you want him?” Tina said, moving back and forth on her feet like a boxer.

Cole ducked his head down and looked inside the crate. “Right,” he said, and pointed toward me.

Tina began pushing the crate in my direction. More grunting sounds came from within the metal cage. I wasn't afraid of animals—although to be truthful, I hadn't been exposed to much more than dogs, cats and mosquitoes—and yet I felt increasingly nervous as the crate rolled closer.

Finally, Tina reached me. “Where do you want him?” she said.

I lowered my head a few inches, bending at the waist, until I could see inside the tiny metal squares of the crate. Inside was something quite large, the size of a very fat German shepherd, but the thing had pearly pinkish skin. It swung around in the crate and looked right at me.

I stood back up, all my thoughts of a glamorous Tiffany's shoot, or at least a cute puppy shoot, screeching to a halt in my head. “It's a pig, right?”

Tina nodded. “His name's William.”

 

William, it turned out, was a bigger diva than any model could have been. The picture that Cole built step-by-step started with plunking William's fat ass in a red toy car in front of my sky-blue seamless. Apparently, the public service announcement was an ad for road rage, which would read
Don't Hog the Road
.

“Get it?” Artie said to me at least four times. “Don't
hog
the road! Get it?”

I nodded and attempted to seem interested, but the truth was that William made me jumpy, so I tried to fade into the background, hoping Cole would forget that he'd hired me. Instead, he kept calling me to the set and asking me to add another item—a silk scarf around William's squirming, fleshy neck, a pair of sunglasses on his thick, snorting head. Each time, I approached the pig like Clarice approached Hannibal, sure that he was going to attack at any minute.

“Why can't Tina do this?” I asked Cole once as I tiptoed up to William with a different scarf.

“Because you are my assistant, not Tina.”

That was true enough, but I hadn't signed up to be a pig whisperer.

“Hey, William,” I'd say, sidling up to him. “Nice piggy…
Nice piggy, there you go, sweetie. I'm just going to put this little scarf on you. Won't that look nice?”

Inevitably, William would stare at me with eyes like two black marbles and then start snorting and squirming viciously in his little car. Tina, his handler, continued to disappear for cigarette breaks, and so I would wrestle the scarf around William's stout body, only to have Cole or Artie tell me that the tassels of the scarf needed to be realigned.

Strangely, thankfully, William didn't smell like a pig. Tina said she'd given him a bath before they drove into the city, and as a result William smelled a little like soap and a little like dirt, which was not altogether horrible considering that I'd expected him to smell like shit.

“For Chrissakes, Kelly,” Cole said at one point. “The scarf should look like it's flowing back behind him.”

I glared at him, then tried to readjust the scarf, but it just kept hanging limply over William's shoulder. I wondered absently whether pigs had shoulders, while trying to take my mind away from how much I was beginning to despise Cole.

“Kelly.
Please
get it right,” Cole said, after I'd spent ten minutes with the scarf and with William's oddly sweet breath in my face. “It must be flowing.”

“Why don't you just use a fan?”

Tina, who was actually nearby this time, and not outside sucking down a cigarette, coughed and held out her hands. “No, no. William doesn't like fans or high winds. At all.”