Tell Me Something True (4 page)

“I know,” says the blonde happily. “You know Manolo Blahnik?”

Gabriella nods politely. “Yes, I do,” she says nicely.

“They’re Manolo Blahniks. Three thousand dollars!” she adds for effect.

“Wow,” says Gabriella, trying to look suitably impressed.

“You gotta pay the big bucks to get the good stuff,” says the blonde conspiratorially as the elevator doors open.

“Unbelievable,” mutters Juan Carlos under his breath.

But moments later, he has no compunction in waving Gabriella a quick good-bye when he spots his babe.

“You’ll be okay?” Juan Carlos asks, eager to leave her. “You’ll find someone you know, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Gabriella nonchalantly, though she can see this will be a very long night.

“We’ll leave in a couple of hours,” Juan Carlos reassures, backing away.

“Cell phone,” he shouts as an afterthought, pointing to his, pointing to hers as he disappears into the crowd.

Gabriella asks for a vodka with orange juice from the bar and walks the perimeter of the terrace uncertainly. She can’t see
anyone she knows, and she doesn’t want to walk around like she doesn’t know anyone.

Oh, God.

She pretends to look occupied, nursing her drink as she shifts uncomfortably against the railing. Fifteen minutes later, her
glass is empty and she’s still alone. Unconsciously, she begins to gnaw on her thumb, absentmindedly peeling the edge of a
nail that has grown too long for her to comfortably play the piano, tearing an edge of skin in the process.

Gabriella winces and looks guiltily at her finger, automatically balling her hand into a fist.

Bathroom. She doesn’t really need one, but it’ll give her something to do.

But the nearest one is locked. She puts her ear against the door, hears giggling. And sniffing.

Oh, God. The last thing she wants tonight.

Gabriella goes up to the bar and orders another screwdriver. Walks around some more, feeling like an idiot. Tries another
door.

A staircase!

She walks down to a different level. The family area, she thinks uncomfortably. She tries one door, then another. Both are
locked. She suspects she shouldn’t be here. The doors are locked for a reason.

As if reading her mind, a voice makes her jump.

“You lost something?”

She turns around guiltily, even though she’s done nothing to feel guilty about.

He’s tall and wiry, with Indian-straight black hair and bronze skin that’s pulled tautly over chiseled cheekbones. It’s his
eyes that startle her, sly and incongruously light, light green for a face this color. She knows immediately, in the way people
like her always know, that it’s his house, his party, his money, and yet, he couldn’t be further removed from her.

“I’m sorry. I was looking for a bathroom,” she says, distracted by his eyes, the way he looks at her, as if he could read
her mind but finds everything slightly amusing. It sounds lame, so she babbles on. “The one upstairs was taken, and I really
needed one…,” she trails off.

He doesn’t say anything but walks past her, his bare arm brushing against hers, and opens a door that’s not locked.

“You can use this one,” he says, with a calculating half smile that tugs up one side of his mouth, leaving his arm extended
against the door so she’s forced to come up close to him to go inside. “You know your way back?”

“Yes,” Gabriella says, infinitely uncomfortable. “Thanks,” she adds quickly, shutting the door behind her, severing the connection.

When she comes out, he’s gone.

Querida Gabriella:

I’m going away. It may seem like a long time, but it won’t be. Six weeks, that’s it. Really, I’ll be gone for maybe thirty
days.

Oh, I’ll miss you, I’ll miss you, I’ll miss you.

But I have to do this, you know. It’s a book. A book of photographs. A book of beautiful photographs of Cali and Colombia.
It will be a precious, beautiful book, and when you grow up, you’ll be so proud because your mami did it all! You’ll look
at it, and you’ll know a little part of you is from one of these places.

Now, I must tell you, you’ve become a very big girl. A very responsible girl. You dress yourself for school. (Yes, you do!)

I want you to know these things. I don’t want you to grow up and have anyone tell you differently.

Today you chose blue shorts and white top. In other words, you have good taste.

The socks and the shoes, we still have to do that. But the outfits, you pick.

You like to wear a little bow in your curls. So we have all kinds of bows. Hundreds of bows, in all different colors, just
for you.

I’ve spoken with Daddy, and he’s promised to pick a new bow for you, one for every day that I’m away. I’ll call every day,
I promise, and you can tell me what color bow you’re wearing.

Your daddy loves curls. And bows. And making girls with curls look pretty with bows.

When he met me, he was getting his master’s in film at USC. He was an L.A. boy, through and through: the son of a documentary
producer and a TV exec, raised in a sprawling house north of Sunset. Tall. Blond. Handsome. Entitled. The kind of guy you
watch in daytime soap operas.

But he really wasn’t like that. He was smart. Well-read. An intellectual. My father adored him after the first conversation.
He was too prepared, really, to go into film, and yet, there was never any doubt that he would be in “the business.” He wasn’t
into the way things worked but the way things looked. He made little movies as a boy, learned how to cut and splice on his
own. Even in his first year at USC, he knew what he wanted to do. Not direct; he couldn’t deal with actors. But photograph.

He already had several film director credits under his belt when, almost as a whim—because he liked school, really—he took
the job as TA for Horwitz’s Rudiments of Photography class, the must-take for film and photography majors.

I was neither of those things. I was a history major in my senior year. But I had convinced Horwitz to let me take the class,
even though it had nothing to do with the credits I’d taken before and even though most of my classmates were freshmen and
sophomores. I didn’t care. I wanted to be in that class, come what may. I was just an amateur photographer, but Marcus didn’t
know that at the beginning. He didn’t know that the history degree was what my parents had pressured me to do, thinking I’d
become a professor. Photography was what I really wanted to do. And that’s what I did. Remember this, Gabriella. You are entitled
to do what your heart desires.

Marcus says I have a “way.” That I make people do things for me. I don’t know about that. I just know what I want, and back
then, I wanted that class. And then, I wanted him.

Marcus often says he fell in love with my hair first. But his gift has always been to discern people’s true essence, their
truly beautiful qualities. My beauty, he finally concluded, was not in my hair but in the shape of my head.

Oh, he was after me to cut that hair for months. But he convinced me only once, when I graduated, and that was only because
I doomed his TA-ship. When people found out we were dating, they considered the relationship “inappropriate” (as if professors
don’t carry on with their students all the time). Anyway. I felt the least I could do was sacrifice the hair to whatever gods
had brought us together in the first place.

To Marcus’s credit, he kept his distance in the beginning.

He was skeptical of my academic background—he was a purist, who felt the coveted slots in Horwitz’s class should go to bona
fide film and photography students. But I surprised him. My background in history had given me an eye for detail and an entirely
different aesthetic from those one-dimensional students of his. Most of them were interested in portraits or photojournalism.
I photographed architecture and landscape.
His
architecture and landscape, I should say. Because I was a foreigner in his town. Then again, that’s why I could look at things
in a different way.

But on the first grading period, for my shoot of the Venice Boardwalk at different times of the day, he gave me a B, for “failing
to elevate the mundane to the compelling.”

I felt wronged.

Wronged by someone barely two years my senior, this Los Angeles pretty boy who, I admit, was good at what he did, but who
wasn’t even a real professor.

The worst part was he liked me. I knew he did.

I was convinced that stupid B had deeper meaning.

So I asked for an appointment.

He looked shocked. I supposed students didn’t ask for appointments with their TAs, because he wanted to have the conversation
right there, in the middle of the hallway.

“No,” I said adamantly and angrily, because my English became more accented with each word. “I need more than a few seconds,
and I want to know exactly why I have this grade. I am asking you for fifteen minutes of your time.”

Marcus was annoyed. I could tell he thought I was some kind of emotional Latina throwing a little Latina tantrum. But he couldn’t
refuse the appointment. So he made it as hard as he possibly could for me.

“You can come by my office at five thirty today or at eight thirty in the morning tomorrow,” he said curtly after consulting
his agenda, giving me the two single most undesirable time slots, way before or after any of my classes and right in the middle
of rush hour traffic.

“I’ll be there at five thirty today,” I replied, cursing him inside. “Thank you,” I added formally and went directly to the
library, where I armed myself with a mountain of Venice Boardwalk photography books.

He was alone in the TA office when I got there, his feet propped up on his desk as he sipped coffee and read a novel, of all
things. I wondered if he shouldn’t be grading papers or something.

“What can I do for you, Helena?” he asked cordially, pronouncing my name “He-lee-nah,” like an American. He wasn’t annoyed
anymore. Just amused, which made things worse.

“It’s Helena,” I said curtly, pronouncing it “Eh-le-na,” as it’s pronounced in Spanish, even though I was resigned by then
to being a He-lee-nah instead in a country that insisted on vocalizing the letter
h
.

“Oh,” he said momentarily nonplussed, but then more amused even than before.

“Helena, then,” he repeated, drawing out the second
e
so it lingered on his tongue, long enough for me to want to taste it. No one had ever enunciated my name quite like that
and I felt the barest of tingles up my arms.

“Marcus, I feel I don’t deserve a B,” I finally said flatly. “I’ve done well in all the projects, and I would like an explanation
and I would like you to reconsider,” I added all in one breath.

“Helena, you’ve done great stuff,” he answered, and it was immediately obvious to me that he’d planned his words. “But in
this case,” he continued, “I have to tell you that (a) the Venice Boardwalk is not terribly original material and (b) because
it isn’t, you have to do something very, very special to make it appealing for me at this point, and you didn’t. Different
times of the day and different light and all that is pretty, but it doesn’t do it for this subject matter.”

Marcus didn’t drop his feet from the desk, nor did he ask me to sit down, which was not only rude, but made me feel at a distinct
disadvantage.

“I brought some books to show you,” I said firmly, determined to win this one, like I had won my place in this class. “I’m
sure my work can stand up to this.”

I placed at least five books on the desk, all on the same subject, none executed with the same flair for detail or lighting.

He picked them up nonchalantly, feet still up on the desk as he thumbed through one, then the next. Then he stopped in the
middle.

“I have something to show you, too,” he said, getting up for the first time and going to the office next door.

He came back with a worn portfolio that looked a million years old and handed it to me.

When I saw the title, I felt my stomach sink a little bit: “The Venice Boardwalk: A Pictorial Study.”

It wasn’t a study of the architecture but of the people. But the juxtaposition of the faces against the buildings highlighted
the architecture in a way that made my more complex project seem simply mundane.

I have a sturdy ego. But I truly also have a healthy dose of realistic self-critique. I knew when I was beaten.

“Yours?” I finally asked, still looking at the pages.

“No.” He shook his head. “Horwitz’s.” He paused. “Look, it’s an unfair comparison, I know. But you have a different kind of
eye that can do much better things, with something that you know better.”

I kept looking at the portfolio, trying to ignore the fact that, now that he was standing beside me, the top of my head didn’t
even reach up to his chin.

“When you’re a photographer, half the work is in picking your subjects,” he said gently, sitting on the desk in front of me.
“You have to photograph what you know best, what you can make look the best. You have to make me see things in a way I didn’t
know they could be seen. You have to make me see things I didn’t know existed.”