Blue Hour

When Kwame called to arrange the job interview—his voice like sea glass and not at all like the sharp-tongued recruiters who grated me with questions about long-term goals and role models—I was relieved. It had been almost a year since I graduated from school into what the headlines were calling a “jobless recovery.” My college friends had joked that we’d all be living in our parents’ basements, thanks to the recession that followed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War. Yet, while my friends landed somewhere from which the rest of their lives could come into view—law school, the Peace Corps, Silicon Valley—I was the one to return home, prospectless, to my mother and her vinyl-sided Cape in our neighborhood that wasn’t quite the city, wasn’t quite the suburbs either. My father’s boxes still lined the front hall, unopened. And I still had nothing to say when anyone asked what was next for me.

I had only a vague idea what the job was (“office assistant,” the newspaper said), and an even vaguer idea of what the company did (“mostly slide production,” Kwame said over the phone), but I went on the interview because I was desperate. I knew I needed to become something even if I didn’t yet know what that something was.

I put on my mother’s blue blazer and drove my father’s Chevy Nova to the outskirts of Cambridge, circling the rotary three times until I worked up the courage to break into the right lane and pull into the parking lot of an uninspired building that looked like it was built with construction project leftovers.

It was February. Snow lathered the roads with slush, and I slid into the lot, just missing a parked car out front.

Kwame was standing at the door to greet me. “Snow tires,” he said. “You need snow tires.”

Snow tires were something I’d never thought of. College hadn’t taught me anything useful.

College had been like a cruise ship, self-contained, forward-moving, where nothing much had been demanded of me beyond getting out of my bunk each morning and heading to class where the air was frothy with chatter about Nietzsche or Apartheid or the problem of women in Hemingway’s work. The future had felt like an open sea. Now, it felt like a blank wall. Each day dissolved into the next with my mother leaving the newspaper for me on the kitchen table, folded open to the page of job ads she’d circled in marker. “Don’t spend the day in front of the TV,” she’d say and twirl a lock of my hair with her manicured finger before heading out the door.

Kwame was wearing bike shorts and a racing top when he met me at the door. He was slim and compact, and his long, black dreadlocks were gathered into a ponytail.

It was only the two of them in the office—Kevin (the boss) and Kwame, he explained as he showed me in. The place was small, just the reception area and a studio out back, where he and Kevin spent most of the day developing and mounting slides.

“That’s where you’ll sit,” he said, pointing to a small desk below a bank of windows. “I mean, it’s where you’ll sit if you take the job.” Outside, traffic swirled around the rotary. Large, framed photos hung on the adjacent wall. The largest was of a pregnant woman in a field of poppies, her sundress catching the breeze.

I followed Kwame down the hall to the studio, his bike shoes clapping against the floor.

He opened the door. The studio smelled of body odor and chemicals. Kevin stood up, about a dozen slides, all charts and graphs, were laid out in front of him on a light table, and he shook my hand.

I was disappointed to learn that most of the slides Kevin and Kwame produced weren’t photographs but were for business presentations for clients who worked along the 128 Belt. This was before Power Point. The World Wide Web wasn’t yet a thing.

Kevin looked like a disheveled Al Gore—tall, middle-aged, solidly built. His khakis were wrinkled at the thigh from sitting; the underarms of his oxford shirts circled with sweat. Like the vice president, he made no distinct impression on me one way or the other.

“The Arthur Andersen slides are ready to go,” Kevin said, placing the slides into a box. “Our biggest client,” he said, turning to me. He winked.

“I’m also the bike messenger,” Kwame said and gave me a sly wink. We both smiled.

The days were long. The office was quiet when Kwame and Kevin were holed up in their studio and I was alone up front with the whirring sound of cars circling the rotary and the linty smell the baseboard heater kicked up. I’d brought my writing journal to work, thinking I might start writing poetry again, but instead I passed the time listening to National Public Radio and reading the newspaper.

Winter turned to spring.

Spring turned to summer.

There had been a police standoff with the Branch Davidians.

The Unabomber struck again.

I wasn’t writing, but at least I could be someone informed of current events.

A few of our customers were professional photographers who freelanced for magazines. Whenever there was something worth looking at, Kwame placed them on the light table. I looked forward to those moments when Kwame clip-clopped up to my counter to show me slides of the Milky Way or a hummingbird in flight.

Kwame and Kevin were photographers, too. Kwame shot photos of the Vets who hung around Harvard Square. Guys with missing arms and legs. One in a wheelchair, no legs below his knees. He had this scruffy dog on his lap and a big smile on his face. Another one, missing an arm, was concentrating on a chess board. Kwame’s photos always made me feel something.

He told me the photo of the pregnant woman that hung over my desk was Kevin’s wife. Kevin had gone to photography school but gave up taking pictures when he got married, Kwame said. They had four kids and were paying college tuition for two of them—that was the reason Kevin was always sweating, Kwame joked. After Kwame told me that Kevin quit taking pictures, I felt a little sad every time I looked at that picture.

There was this one photographer client of ours that Kwame and Kevin were nuts over. She was pretty famous, although I had never heard of her. She placed an order only a couple of times a year, when she needed slides to archive, or to send to a magazine, so it was a big deal when she called. She’d made her name working with a refrigerator-sized large-format camera that Polaroid had built as a publicity stunt. There were only a handful of those Polaroids in existence, but she had somehow convinced the company to lease her one. She’d taken pictures of Julia Child, Bob Dylan, and Allen Ginsberg with that thing. Kevin had showed me some of her pictures she’d archived as slides. I said I thought her pictures looked kind of ordinary, these famous people standing in their ordinary clothes in front of a blank white wall. They could have been anybody, if you didn’t know any better.

“Portraits,” Kevin said, wiping his forehead. “They’re portraits.”

“Portraits,” I corrected myself.

I’d gone through a Ginsberg phase in college. Or rather my boyfriend of the time had, and we read “Howl” in his bed together. When people would ask what I wanted to do after I graduated, writing poetry was all I could think to say, but I never said it because writing poetry wasn’t actually a job, and I didn’t see how it could be.

My mother used to paint. This was when I was little, before my parents split up. She’d sit on our back stoop with watercolors. From the sandbox, I’d watch her flex her slender feet in her Dr. Scholl’s sandals as she sat at her easel. After my parents split, she got a job working for a group of actuaries downtown. Instead of working at her watercolors each morning, she made herself up at the bathroom sink, working an eyelash curler into her socket, spraying her hair, belting herself into suits whose shoulder pads made her look like a star from Dallas. She’d slip her feet into navy pumps and drop me at our neighbor’s house on her way to work. I hadn’t seen that easel in years.

Another thing I looked forward to each day was picking up Kevin’s lunch because it was a chance to escape the office. Kevin always ordered the same thing—a meatball sub from Ma McGuires. Ma’s was just on the other side of the rotary, but there were no crosswalks, so although I could see Ma’s from my window, I had to drive to get there.

Usually, I’d drop off Kevin’s sub and then get back into my car and drive to one of the fancy neighborhoods outside Harvard Square to eat the turkey sandwich I’d brought from home.

I liked walking around those neighborhoods and imagining myself living in one those oversized Victorians. I stopped in front of a Queen Anne with a wraparound porch. Someone had thought of painting the decorative brackets blue. Someone had thought of planting ornamental grasses out front. Inside, French doors opened into the back yard. Paintings hung from picture moldings. A grand piano stood in a corner. How did someone end up inhabiting such beauty, I wondered. Out back was a gazebo. All the times I walked past that house, I never saw anyone in that gazebo. I thought about going over to the gazebo and eating my sandwich there. I thought about how someone might come to the window—a woman probably, in a silk robe, most likely—and she’d see me there and her face would turn from curious to angry. That pleased me, for some reason, imagining that.

“I need you to do something for me,” Kevin said when I got back from lunch. He wiped his brow. “I gave Kwame the rest of the day off.”

Kevin didn’t give us days off very easily, so this surprised me but I understood why he had given Kwame the day off once he explained. Kwame’s photos had been accepted into an exhibition up in Portsmouth. The opening reception was that night.

I knew I should feel happy for him but instead I felt a lump in my stomach.

“I need you to deliver some slides,” Kevin continued. “To her.” He stopped wiping his brow and looked at me.

“Ok,” I said.

“Normally Kwame would deliver them.” He pressed his fingers to his forehead.

“I know,” I said. I knew he didn’t trust me. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t trust myself either.

He looked at the clock. “She needs them by two o’clock. She has a flight to catch.”

“That’s fine,” I said, and picked up the purse I’d borrowed from my mother.

I drove to her neighborhood. My low-fuel light had been on since the day before and I didn’t get paid until the next day. The lump in my stomach was growing. It wasn’t because of the low fuel light; it was because Kwame hadn’t told me himself about the exhibit. Of course, he wanted more than his job at the service bureau. He had talent, anyone could see that. Of course,  he deserved something more. But I was jealous that he was brave enough to do something about it and I wasn’t even brave enough to want anything.

When I got to her neighborhood, I could see that it wasn’t one of the neighborhoods where I typically walked at lunch time. The houses were closer together, most of them multi-families, cars parked along both sides of the narrow street. People had thought to paint their clapboard all sorts of vibrant colors. They’d planted wild flowers in the small rectangles of garden between their houses and the sidewalks.

I found her house—a cheerful yellow—and walked up the front steps and knocked.

She didn’t look at all like a famous photographer should. I thought she’d be tall and lean and wearing a black V-neck sweater, a cigarette suspended between two bony fingers—I thought she’d look mysterious, or perhaps French. The woman who answered the door was short and stout. Her big round glasses made her round face seem rounder. She wore a muumuu printed with big red poppies all over it. On her feet were those Reebok high tops that had been popular with aerobics instructors but had gone out of fashion. She gave me a big smile. “Come-in come-in come-in come-in,” she sang. She didn’t look mysterious or French; she looked like a kindergarten teacher.

I stepped into a narrow hallway onto a slanted pine floor that let out a gratifying creak. On my left, a small living room was painted a velvety red. On my right, was a steep staircase and on each step was a pile of books. Artwork filled the hallway and living room walls and hung three and four feet high. On every surface was something handcrafted—a vase, a small figure, woven baskets. It was wonderful. Like walking into a thrift store or an antique market. I wanted to linger over everything. Instead, I followed her into the kitchen where I could smell something sweet baking.

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

Muffins dotted with chocolate chips were cooling on the counter. She offered me one, but I held up my hand and said I had just had lunch.

We exchanged pleasantries. She asked after Kevin and Kwame and I told her about his exhibit. She clapped her hands and said that was wonderful and that she’d pack up some extra muffins for me to take back for them. I couldn’t understand how this was the woman that caused so much stress around the office.

“Here are your slides,” I said and put them on the counter.

“Oh, thank you.”

“They’re very good,” I said, and then felt foolish for saying this. Of course, they were good. She was a famous photographer.

“Are you a photographer, too?”

I shook my head. I told her no. I told her my father had been. I told her his favorite thing was taking photographs in the early morning before sunrise. “He used to take me with him,” I said.

I remember getting out of the car when it was still dark and how I’d climb over the sea wall. The sand was cold. The clouds were smoke against the blue sky. I ran over to where he’d set up his tripod, the water purling around its legs. He lifted me up so I could peer through the view finder at a row of eroding pilings he was shooting. They looked like a ragged battalion marching into the sea. I loved the way that felt: his arms holding me against his chest so I could see the world through his grainy viewfinder.

As the sun rose, I collected pebbles along the beach. Dog walkers came onto the beach. Then joggers. I used a clam shell as a shovel. Roadsters blared from the parkway. I felt the sun on my back. Inevitably, my father called out that it was time to go.

I’d stop at the sea wall and look through my fingers like a viewfinder at my father leaning against the rusted trunk in his cut-offs taking a drag of his cigarette. I clawed my toes into the sand, can’t we stay? I begged. He dropped his cigarette onto the sandy asphalt. No, he said and asked why would I want to stay when the best part of the day—the blue hour, when everything was still possible—had already passed. I threw my clam shell into the sand. He always ruined everything.

The woman photographer asked if my father had passed away and I told her he had.

The funeral had been small, at my mother’s church, where my father hadn’t stepped foot since their wedding. A few neighbors had come. My mother’s parents. A couple of men who said they were friends of my father, but I’d never seen them before. They looked uncomfortable in their suits, as if they weren’t used to wearing them. My mother slid her hand across my back. I’d missed my finals to come there, but the college let me graduate anyway.

“I have all these boxes of his stuff. I still haven’t unpacked them.” After I said this, I realized I had eaten one of her muffins.

She went to the fridge and poured me a glass of milk. It was sweet and cool like when I was a kid.

She asked me if I wanted to see her camera. I said I did.

“But don’t you have a flight to catch?” I asked.

“Oh, I changed it,” she said like it wasn’t important. I realized that Kevin must have been sweating and watching the clock. I thought maybe I should ask to use her phone and let him know her plans had changed, but then I laughed, too.

I followed her downstairs to the basement where her studio was.

Large portraits hung on the walls. Most of them were family portraits of ordinary people. Then I spotted the portraits Kevin had showed me, of Bob Dylan, Julia Child, and Allen Ginsberg. They still looked ordinary, posed against the white backdrop like that, but then I realized maybe that was the point, to see people just as they are.

I was standing in front of the portrait of Ginsberg. “I used to write poetry,” I found myself telling her.

“Don’t you anymore?”

I shrugged. “Not really. I mean, what’s the point?”

“Ahh,” she said, and laughed. “How about I take your picture?”

She went over to the large contraption that stood in the center of the room. I felt foolish for not noticing it before—I mean, I knew it was there, but I hadn’t really looked at it until right then, when she went over to it and started fiddling with its knobs and cranks.

The camera stood on wheels that looked as if they’d come off a pram. The bellow protruded from a wooden box the size of an old-fashioned television. A couple of cranks stuck out from its sides for raising and lowering the lens. The whole thing was as crazily put together as the photographer herself. It looked more like some home-made invention than a Polaroid.

She told me to stand on the rectangle of carpet in front of the lens. The photographer disappeared behind the camera so all I could see were her Reeboks and knee-high socks. It was comical, as if the camera had legs.

“I guess some people would say taking pictures is pointless,” she said from behind the camera. “My parents, for instance. They wanted me to be a teacher.”

That surprised me. I figured she’d come from creative people. I thought about the job ads my mother had left for me.

“So then how did you become a photographer?”

“I fell in love.” She peeked out from the side of the camera. “You know how it is: you go on one date and then suddenly it’s everything to you.” She disappeared again behind the camera.

I knew what she meant. I had fallen in love the fall of my final year of college. At first, I’d known him only tangentially, through friends, exchanging quips at the table in the dining commons or sharing a joint at house parties. Then we spent days and nights in his single dorm room. I read to him Mary Oliver; he read to me Ginsberg. He walked his fingers over my hip bone. Summer’s Cauldron buzzed in the background. I smelled like him; he smelled like me. When it ended, I felt ripped apart.

“But how did you know it would last?” I asked.

She came out from behind the camera holding a remote control that was attached to the camera with a wire. “I guess I didn’t. I guess I made it last because I work at it.” She stood next to me. “Mind if I’m in the photo with you?”

I told her I didn’t mind.

“So, what do you love to do?” she asked me.

I looked at her, not sure what to say.

She told me to look at the camera.

She pushed the button on the remote.

The next day, I bought a frame, and hung the photograph in my bedroom in my mother’s house. I thought about how, after the photographer took our picture, she went around the back of the camera and knelt down. How she cut the paper from the camera and set it on her worktable. We were both silent as we stood at the table like at some kind of altar and watched the image of the two of us appear—that crazy photographer in her oversized glasses and a red poppy dress, doing what she loved, and me, the girl whose father had died, whose heart had been broken, who couldn’t imagine what her future looked like. Then her laughter filled the room. “You see that? You see that?” she said. She was giggling like a kid.

“Hold on to it,” Kwame told me Monday at work, after I told him about the photograph. I asked about his exhibit. He had this smile on his face, this faraway look that made that lump in my stomach reappear. He said he was leaving. He’d given Kevin notice. He was going to do his photography full time now.

A second woman was appointed to the Supreme Court.

The world was moving forward.

I saw Kwame only twice more. Once, just a few months after he’d left the service bureau. I was coming out of Café Algiers in Harvard Square with my friend who was visiting from California. She’d cut her hair and wore short bangs in that 1950s style that had become cool again. I’d always admired the way she could move with the times. She was trying to convince me to move to San Francisco, where, she said, she could get me a job in product marketing at her company that was developing some sort of handheld device. “Good money,” she had said. “Plenty of guys out there, too. And you won’t have to buy anyone a meatball sub.” But I already knew I wouldn’t go to California. I couldn’t see myself out there. I looked up and saw Kwame sail through traffic on his bike, upright, not holding the handlebars, moving like that bike was part of him.

Then I saw him a few years later, in New York. I had left the service bureau for a better-paying job along 128. I was with my fiancé who thought a weekend away with him was what I needed to get me to finally set a date for the wedding.

We passed a gallery on our way to dinner, and I stopped. I knew right away that the oversized images that filled the walls belonged to Kwame. A soldier standing on prosthetic legs. Another missing an arm. I scanned the crowd. There was Kwame buttoned into a suit but still wearing dreadlocks.

“Do you want to go in?” my fiancé asked.

I watched Kwame laughing easily with a group of people. He held a plastic cup of wine. He was in his element. What would I say to him? That I was working in one of those businesses he used to deliver slides to, setting up lunch buffets? That I was engaged to a guy who wanted kids and a house with a wraparound porch but that I hadn’t been able to set a date for our wedding? I certainly wouldn’t tell him that I had sold the photographer’s Polaroid to help pay for my new car.

“I never was much for the blue hour,” the photographer had said to me when I told her about my father’s pictures. “I’ve always preferred working in full light. There’s nowhere to hide.”

“Do you want to go in?” My fiancé asked again. An impatient crease formed between his eyebrows, and he looked at me the way Kevin used to. I looked back at Kwame, surrounded by his portraits, all those stories he had told. He was smiling, and I felt myself smiling, too. And then I was back in her studio. I remembered how she’d pushed the button on the remote, and I heard the click of the shutter flashing open, the mirror flipping up, all those light rays sharpening to a single point. And I thought, maybe it wasn’t too late; maybe everything was still possible.

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