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

PART 5

That night I went looking for evidence against myself.

It was not difficult to find.

My phone held eleven years of photographs Beth had taken or improved for me. Birthday dinners. Office parties. Tess’s graduation. A weekend in Nashville when six of us wore matching black shirts because Deirdre believed irony could make matching shirts acceptable.

I searched our message thread for the word photo.

There were hundreds of results.

Can you send me the good one?

Can you make my face less red?

Please tell me you got one where my eyes are open.

Use your magic on this before I put it on the dating app.

That last message was mine, sent fourteen months after the divorce.

Beth had replied, Define magic.

I wrote, The kind where I still look like me but on a day when I drank water and had excellent parents.

She sent back a laughing emoji and a photograph I used for nearly a year.

I opened the original and the finished file side by side.

She had softened my under-eye shadows, evened my skin, brightened my teeth, and reduced a crease between my brows.

I had loved it.

More accurately, I had loved what happened after I posted it.

You look amazing.

Divorce agrees with you.

Fifty is going to be scared of you.

I had been forty-eight.

At the time those comments felt like proof that my life had not collapsed visibly. David could leave, and I could still produce a face that told everyone I was thriving.

That realization did not make Beth’s gallery choices acceptable.

It made my anger less clean.

The next morning I called her.

“I owe you one thing,” I said.

“Good morning to you too.”

“I have asked you to edit me before.”

Beth was quiet.

“Yes.”

“Many times.”

“Yes.”

“You could sound less delighted.”

“I am not delighted. I am relieved we’re discussing the same history.”

I paced my office with the door closed.

“That history is not permission for this project.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Angela, I have spent two days thinking about it. Yes.”

Her voice sounded tired.

I stopped pacing.

“Rita called me.”

“Of course she did.”

“She said she would have liked to be asked.”

“I am sending everyone original proofs.”

“Because I complained?”

“Because you were right that I should have been clearer.”

It was the closest Beth had come to saying I was right, which should have satisfied me more than it did.

“Can I see the full contact sheets?” I asked.

“Yours?”

“Mine first.”

“Yes.”

“Today?”

She sighed. “Come at four.”

I arrived at 4:03 with coffee for both of us because anger did not cancel caffeine.

Beth had printed six contact sheets from my session. Each page held thirty small frames.

We spread them across the long worktable in the studio.

There I was making every face I had forgotten humans made when a camera was between clicks. Eyes closed. Mouth crooked. Chin tucked. One eyebrow raised. Hands caught halfway to the stool.

“This is cruel,” I said.

Beth smiled. “This is photography.”

I pointed at a frame where I seemed to be sneezing.

“Destroy that.”

“See? Control issues.”

“Basic national security.”

We both laughed, and for a moment the fight loosened.

Then I found the frame Beth had used.

The little box around it was marked in red pencil.

“Why this one?”

“Because you forgot about me.”

“I was laughing at you.”

“Exactly.”

She was right about the frame. I could see why she chose it. There was movement in my face, a private joke breaking through the controlled smile I usually gave cameras.

“I like this picture,” I said.

Beth looked surprised.

“The original?”

“Yes.”

“Even the neck?”

I looked at her.

“Do not make me regret emotional growth.”

She smiled.

We went through the rest of the sheet.

I chose three frames I would have been willing to show. One was the laughing portrait. One had the red glasses low on my nose while I looked down at a book Beth had placed in my hands. The third was quieter: me facing the window, silver streak bright, mouth closed.

“That one makes me look tired,” I said.

“You were tired. You had worked all day.”

“Rude.”

“True.”

I kept looking at it.

“I don’t hate it.”

“You don’t have to love every truthful photograph.”

The sentence came from Beth without effort.

I turned toward her.

“Then why did you fix the truthful one until you thought I would?”

Her face closed.

We had reached the edge again.

Beth gathered two empty coffee cups and carried them to the counter.

“Because when I send women pictures they don’t like, they don’t say, ‘Thank you for the truth.’ They say, ‘Can you soften this? Can you fix that? Why do I look old?'”

“Did I say that at this sitting?”

“No.”

“Did Rita?”

“No.”

“Then whose voice were you answering?”

Beth rinsed the cups longer than necessary.

She did not answer.

I left the studio knowing more about my own part in the pattern.

Before I reached my car, Beth called after me from the studio door.

“Angela.”

I turned.

“I really was trying to make you look good.”

I believed her, which made the sentence harder rather than easier.

“I know,” I said. “Next time ask me what good means.”

She nodded once.

I drove home with that exchange in my head. Intent had become the most overworked defense in the English language. Beth had meant care. I had experienced control. Both facts fit in the same car.

I also knew it was not the whole pattern.