The Portrait Was Supposed to Show Me Exactly as I Am — Until I Saw What My Friend Had Softened

PART 3

Three months earlier, I had nearly refused the portrait because of my arms.

Not my face. My arms.

That was the ridiculous truth.

Beth had sent me a message on a Tuesday morning while I was reviewing office move bids at work.

I need one more woman for Second Light. Fifty. Divorced. Not a professional model. Beautiful nose. Please say yes before I have to flatter you harder.

I wrote back, My nose is not available for community service.

She replied with three camera emojis and my least favorite photograph of herself from 1999.

Beth had been taking pictures for most of the years I knew her. We met when I was thirty-two and she photographed the architecture firm’s annual awards dinner. I was the new administrative coordinator with a headset, a clipboard, and a dress I could not sit down in. Beth took a candid of me carrying two table centerpieces at once. I hated the photograph because my mouth was open.

She loved it because I looked busy and alive.

That disagreement became a friendship.

Over the years she photographed my daughter’s high-school graduation, my parents’ fortieth anniversary, three office holiday parties, my fifty-person backyard fortieth birthday, and the family pictures we took before my marriage finally ended.

After the divorce, I became difficult around cameras.

I did not announce that. I simply learned where to stand.

At Tess’s college graduation, I volunteered to hold everyone’s purses while Beth took the family picture. At my niece’s wedding, I was suddenly fascinated by the guest book during the cousins’ photograph. When coworkers raised phones at happy hour, I leaned toward someone else and let their face occupy most of the frame.

I told myself I disliked photographs because every phone camera made people document moments instead of having them.

That explanation had the advantage of sounding intelligent.

The less intelligent explanation was that I had spent twenty-four years seeing myself beside a husband, and after he left I did not know how to look at a picture without searching for evidence that the ending showed on my body.

Had I aged badly?

Did I look relieved or abandoned?

Was my face thinner because I was happier or because I forgot dinner for six months?

Those were stupid questions.

I asked them anyway.

Beth knew some of this.

Not all.

When she came to my house to make her case for Second Light, she brought coffee and a folder of contact prints from the first six women she had photographed.

There was Rita Gomez laughing in a denim shirt with both hands in her pockets. Kendra Wu standing beside a window in a black dress. Noreen Blake in a sleeveless white top with a scar visible at one shoulder from an old orthopedic surgery. None of them looked posed into youth.

“This is what I want,” Beth said. “Women who look like they have already had a life and are still having one.”

“That sounds dangerously close to inspiration.”

“I will throw you out if you say brave.”

I turned over a print of Rita.

“Did you retouch these?”

“Of course I finish them. I am a photographer, not a DMV kiosk.”

“Meaning?”

“Exposure. Color. Temporary things. If somebody has a giant stress zit the day of the sitting, I am not building a monument to it.”

“Wrinkles?”

“Belong to you.”

“Gray hair?”

“Also yours.”

“Neck?”

Beth looked at me over the coffee cup.

“Angela.”

“My neck has become politically active.”

“Your neck is invited.”

I laughed.

That was the conversation I remembered when I agreed.

At the actual session I wore a navy blouse with a low round collar, small silver hoops, and the red reading glasses I bought after my divorce because David had always disliked colored frames.

Beth asked whether the glasses were “a statement.”

“They are readers from the pharmacy.”

“You wore beige glasses for fifteen years.”

“Those were expensive beige glasses.”

“Put the red ones on.”

“I don’t read with them from ten feet away.”

“I don’t care.”

The studio was warm. Beth played old Bonnie Raitt through a speaker and made me sit, stand, turn toward the window, lean against a white wall, and finally stop posing because, according to her, I kept arranging my mouth like I was about to answer an email.

“Think of something that makes you mad,” she said.

“This process.”

“Excellent.”

She took twelve frames.

Then she made the quarter-zip joke about David and I laughed.

Click.

“There,” she said. “That’s you.”

I came around the camera and looked at the small preview.

My neck folded when I turned. My left eye was nearly closed. The silver streak at my temple caught the window light.

I pointed at the screen.

“Do not make me younger.”

Beth snorted.

“God forbid.”

I went home believing we understood each other.

That evening, I had even sent Tess one of the camera previews.

She replied, You look happy.

I saved the message because happy was not the adjective I expected. After the divorce, compliments about photographs had usually sounded like recovery reports: strong, glowing, amazing, good for you. Happy felt less like a grade.

I remembered standing in my bedroom after the session, still wearing the navy blouse, looking at my own reflection and thinking Beth had managed to catch something I could not produce on command. I did not look transformed. I looked occupied by my own life.

That memory mattered now because it reminded me I had not gone into the project begging to be rescued from my age. I had gone in expecting Beth to honor the face I had finally stopped hiding from her camera.

Now, in her studio office three months later, I looked at the final print on her monitor and wondered whether we had understood the same words at all.