‘The Closing Shutter’

Take a photograph, steal a soul. I’ve heard that certain cultures — Arabs, American Indians — refuse to allow their pictures to be taken because of this reason. We’ve called these people “backward” and “primitive” in the past, but I don’t know if that’s accurate.

My name is George Middleton, and I’m a thirty-six-year-old photographer. I live in Canby, a small town south of Portland, Oregon, although until recently I didn’t spend much time there. I’m sitting at my keyboard, and all I can think of is biographical information.

Ever since I was eleven I wanted to be a photographer. Through my camera the world comes alive, glistening with color, frozen in perfection. I’m thinking of a picture of my grandmother. Today she is ninety-two, folded over herself as her spine curls like paper on fire, hands knuckled around a cane, hair falling out in whispery strands of silk. Her picture is dated 1928, and she is shockingly alive in black and white. Her lips perch on her face, her nose hidden in plain sight, her clothes demurely cloak all while enticing everyone. Black and white photographs are the stuff of genius; only a genius can snap a photo and make the colors live without color. I am good, but I am not a genius. I am bound by color, seduced and enslaved by it, and a slave cannot be a genius.

Today I am looking at a photo of my wife, Katherine, not the Kate of today, but of ten years ago, when we were young and in love and nauseating. It was good to be nauseating. Today we are comfortable. Ten years ago, we were both in our mid-twenties, just out of college, no money, no future. The picture I am looking at now is my wife standing on the Oregon coast near Cannon Beach, bundled in an angora and holding the hair out of her face. It’s a sentimental and bad picture, but it stirs something in me and always will. Neither of us really changed, but somehow we did. Today she has her life, I have mine, and we’re hurtling toward separation but neither of us has the energy to stop it.

***

I’m writing a short story about photography, and perhaps that is why my wife and I are growing more distant. When we were younger, I was away for weeks at a time on photo shoots in exotic locations; she was working at the clinic in Portland, putting her psych degree to good use. We found passion in our separation. Somewhere we came together and realized our passion was not strong enough to sustain a relationship. We weren’t friends, we were lovers, and lovers burn out.

I start by introducing myself, but my name looks hollow on the screen. I realize my true nature is not in my name, but in my art. Perhaps it will come to me if I take a walk, feel the world around me, feel my subjects tease me with beauty until I seize them onto rolls of film and press them into journals and magazines. I grab my camera and go.

***

Photography is a struggle. Your camera is a tool, tearing something out of time and confining it. A maple leaf resting on a sea of grass, bisected by a blur between sun and shadow, pleading to be photographed, yet screaming when your camera focuses on it. I take seven pictures while I am out. A child clutches a dog’s leash desperately while her mother explores her purse in search of money to pay for an ice cream cone. That is what I saw, but what I distilled from it through my camera is the quiet pleading on the girl’s face, the worry that slips across her brows, the whiteness of her knuckles as they clench around a leather strap. In my camera, she becomes a struggle, not a person, a struggle between control and abandon.

I look at my camera, resting next to my keyboard, containing within it not only the girl, but the maple leaf, the lake in the park that shimmered like a polished penny in the late afternoon sun, the trailer like a fossilized dinosaur carcass lying on the tar pit of the parking lot, just scenes from the world that now will never die. I stare at the keyboard and see words float up at me. I begin typing. “Leo’s camera was a weapon, burning into the heart of its subject like a laser, cauterizing flesh. He extracted the necessities from his subject and left an empty husk. His camera did not kill, it annihilated.”

***

Katherine comes home after I have typed three pages. Katherine is a strikingly attractive woman, but I see none of the buoyancy that originally drew me to her, just the harried string of hair that flips lazily over her face, the green eyes that are dulled by stress, the hands that were once whispers but are now screams of agony, the pain in the trembling lip.

“Rough day?” I ask, as sweetly as I can through uninterested teeth.

She never answers anymore, because every day is a rough day. Instead she walks over to me and leans down.

“You’re typing,” she says, a smooth voice stretched tight by too many cigarettes and arguments.

“How very perceptive of you.” At times I can’t seem to stop my sarcasm, even at times like these, when our marriage is held together by the most tenuous of threads. I don’t want to be this way. I love Katherine, but instead of apologizing, I add another brick to the wall between us.

A cigarette appears in her hand, then in her mouth. “Don’t be such a dick,” she says. She wants to fight. For once I ignore her plea for harsh words.

“Yes, I’m writing. You knew I was.” A small victory, to pull back from the precipice of an argument. She understands and softens her tone.

“I don’t want you to. I don’t see the need.” I know she is scared of my writing, because through it I could discover a hidden world, one that doesn’t include her. She belongs in my world of photography, no matter how distant we have become, but she may not belong in my world of writing.

Her cigarette flares. I despise the smoke, so I push away from the keyboard and head into the kitchen for a drink. From the den I hear her sit down at the screen. For a few moments the only sound in the house is the hollow sound of root beer spilling into a glass, then fizzing like a miniature volcano. I leave the kitchen and rejoin Kate.

“What is this?” she demands. “What is this bullshit? ‘The camera had become part of him, an extension of his hand, his lover.’ ” She glares at me, her lip quivering from anger, and, I know from years of experience, some strange sort of excitement. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

I walk over to her and take her hand, fighting, for now, a winning battle between anger and love. She reacts as if I’ve hit her. When did my touch become so repugnant to her?

“Kate, you don’t understand. This character has a passion you don’t understand. I want you to, but you don’t.”

“Is it you?”

How can someone answer a question like that? The character is my child. He is my dream, a photographer who shares with his camera and almost sexual relationship. He is the genius I could never be, because I sacrificed just enough for Kate, to life, to comfort. I have some passion, but not lust. Which is better?

“Kate, dear, of course it’s not me. This man is twisted beyond all recognition. I admit I admire his dedication, but at what price? He will never know the touch of a woman, the simple joy of seeing someone he loves sleeping beside him, never know all the things that make us human. He is a genius cut off from reality, and that sort of genius is a false one.”

I placate her, for now. She nods absent-mindedly and stands, kissing me on the cheek. I cringe slightly. When did her touch become so repugnant to me?

***

Leo is a photographer who lives in a small loft in New York. He works in black and white; he is a genius; he sees Aztec calendars in manhole covers and Madonnas in streetwalkers. He is somewhat famous, but this does not deter him from his dedication to his art. Was I ever dedicated to my art? My eye is drawn to nature, to the furious avalanches of the Himalayas, to the delicacy of a tree frog, but can it be called art? Leo’s passion frightens me, because he is so focused on the object of his desire he ignores everything else. He is married, but he is cruel to his wife. “Leo left her crying; she hated him for knowing everything about beauty but nothing about what is beautiful.”

I am not Leo, I can never be. I care too much about life to see it as just a great photo opportunity.

“Leo touched the camera with his fingertips. It trembled like a woman in the first throes of passion. Leo held the camera to his face and felt it vibrate with tension. The film was in his mind. He no longer needed the physical presence of the camera.”

***

I return from one of my walks today and find Kate home. She is at my computer, hypnotized by the fluorescent wash of the screen. My words scroll in front of her as she dissects my creation.

“What are you doing?” I feel violated. This is my work, an extension of my photography, and I don’t want her looking at it. She remains at the screen.

I walk over to her. “I asked you what you were doing.”

Another cigarette. The smoke burns my nostrils when she lights it. Finally, “I believe it is obvious.”

“You know I don’t want you reading my story.”

“This is not a story!” she hisses. “This is an obsession! This, this … Leo is you! I know it! All this time, this is how you saw me! A statue, a carved beauty, something to be placed in a magazine or framed over your bed! Why can’t you admit it!”

I try to get angry, but I am speaking to a stranger. “I won’t admit it because it’s not true. Leo … is a dangerous man. Look at me. Am I dangerous?”

The cigarette trembles between her lips. Her cheeks are pulled tight around her mouth, the pressure of the years etched into them. “You’re more dangerous than Leo is! He’s blatant, an artist who is obsessed with photography. But you …” She pauses, considering her words. We are near an irrevocable break, we both know, and perhaps she is considering whether or not to end it now. “You are subtle, you pretend to be a real person, a person who can love and lead a normal life, with all that goes with it. You were … passionate, yes, but you knew what was real, what was necessary. A relationship, the need for a home, the need for a future! But you’ve been revealed, through this Leo of yours. He is you seen through the eyes of your unconscious. Admit it!”

“No.”

It is the end. She can no longer live with me because I do not fit in with a reality in which everything is known. She does not fit in with my reality, which shimmers just outside the borders of our perception, and which I capture sporadically in my pictures, a reality consisting of vibrant colors, lions under a tree in Kenya, a waterfall trapped against a cliff in Venezuela, a young woman coyly challenging the world on a beach in Oregon. It was once both our worlds.

“I’m leaving.” I try to sound surprised, make small protesting noises. She stops me. “I rented an apartment in Portland. I’m leaving today. I’ll send for my stuff later.” She gets up, and I see the burden of our relationship lifted from her. She walks over to me. “George, I … don’t know what to say.” She touches my cheek. I do not cringe. “It … just wouldn’t work.”

“I know.” She walks past me. I want her to hate me, because that would mean there is still some emotion left, some way I could believe we could love each other again. But we feel nothing. I hear her pick up her coat, grab her purse, and move to the door. There is silence as she pauses, which she must do. She is leaving eight prime years of her life. I hear the door open, and then slam.

***

I have finished my story. It is at my right, printed out and ready to be sent to various magazines. I don’t know if it will be published; right now I don’t care. I am looking at my photographs, the record of my life. Kate is in many of them, playing by the banks of the Mississippi, hugging a tree in northern California, always standing on the sand at Cannon Beach. It was the first picture I ever took of her, which is why I am so attached to it. Perhaps it did take her soul. Perhaps it took my soul as well, grafted it into the film, leaving me to wonder what would have happened if I had been like Leo.

I stare at Kate, hair struggling against the wind off the ocean, sweater both muting and highlighting her curves, eyes flashing a seduction. This is the woman I love, this woman I unwittingly imprisoned a decade earlier. Her soul burns on the table, yearning for a lover. I miss her, and I know I can never be an artist like Leo. I am too human. I enter the photograph and take her hand, leading her down the beach as the gulls cry and the surf crashes.

**********

[I wrote this for a creative writing class in college. Everyone in the class disliked it. My teacher thought it was great. Suck it, fellow students!!!!]