The Portrait Was Supposed to Show Me Exactly as I Am — Until I Saw What My Friend Had Softened
PART 8
I did not touch the frame.
Beth stood between me and it with both hands at her sides.
For a woman who had spent eighteen years telling other people to relax in front of cameras, she suddenly looked like she wanted to leave her own body.
“Is that your portrait?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Can I see it?”
“No.”
The answer was immediate.
I stepped back.
“Okay.”
Beth blinked.
“Okay?”
“You said no.”
She looked almost irritated by the ease of it.
“I thought you were going to make a point.”
“I am capable of growth.”
“Apparently faster than I am.”
She sat on the edge of the worktable.
I waited.
Beth rubbed both palms across her thighs.
“I photographed myself in October,” she said. “Before you.”
“And you hated it.”
“I hated all of them.”
“Because?”
She gave me a look.
“You know why.”
I did not answer for her.
After a moment she said, “Because I looked old.”
The word hung there.
Not older.
Old.
Beth was fifty-two.
She had short blond hair she colored every six weeks, strong shoulders from carrying equipment, and fine lines around her eyes that had deepened after years of squinting through viewfinders. I had never thought of her as old.
That did not matter.
She did.
“What did you do with the pictures?” I asked.
“Retouched them.”
“A lot?”
She laughed once without humor.
“You would have had material for a week.”
“And then?”
“I hated those too.”
“Why?”
“Because I knew what I did.”
She looked toward the backward frame.
“So I pulled myself from the show.”
I sat across from her.
“Was the frame printed before you pulled it?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why it says hold?”
She nodded.
I thought about the phrase she used when she first invited me.
Women who look like they have already had a life and are still having one.
“Why didn’t you just be the photographer?” I asked. “Why promise a self-portrait at all?”
“Because I thought it was important not to stand outside the idea.”
“And then you did.”
“Yes.”
Beth’s eyes filled, which immediately made me want to soften the question.
I did not.
“What does that have to do with our retouching?”
She looked at me.
For several seconds I could see her deciding whether to lie.
Then her shoulders dropped.
“Everything, probably.”
I felt my stomach tighten.
Beth stood and went to the monitor.
She opened a folder I had not seen before.
SELF.
Inside were contact sheets from her own session.
She clicked one.
I did not move closer until she waved me over.
The photograph showed Beth seated on the same wooden stool she used for me. No makeup beyond what she normally wore. Black shirt. Bare forearms. Her face angled toward the window.
She looked like Beth.
She also looked fifty-two.
The skin beneath her chin was softer than I was used to seeing in pictures of her. Her mouth turned down when relaxed. There were two vertical lines between her brows I had never noticed because Beth usually photographed herself smiling or from above.
“This is good,” I said.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not saying brave.”
“I mean don’t tell me what I’m supposed to see.”
I shut my mouth.
Beth opened the edited version.
Her jaw narrowed.
Her neck tightened.
Her eye area lifted.
The blond in her hair brightened.
The result looked like Beth from five or six years earlier after an expensive vacation.
“I couldn’t use either one,” she said.
“So you removed yourself.”
“Yes.”
“And then you started editing us.”
She winced.
“Not because I thought you looked bad.”
“I believe you.”
“Do you?”
“I do now.”
Beth sat again.
“Every time I worked on one of you, I kept thinking about what people would say.”
“People meaning viewers?”
“Viewers. Clients. Other photographers. Women who hate pictures of themselves. Women who say they want honesty until they see it enlarged.”
She looked at the backward frame.
“I wanted the show to make midlife look vivid. Not defeated. Not gray and exhausted and apologetic.”
“Gray is not defeated.”
“I know that intellectually.”
There was the difference.
“Emotionally?”
She gave me a tired smile.
“Emotionally I apparently built an entire exhibit to negotiate with my own face.”
I leaned back.
The anger I had carried all week changed shape.
It did not disappear.
Beth had not altered my portrait because she was ashamed of me.
She had altered it because she was frightened by a future she could see arriving on every woman she photographed.
That explanation made her more human.
It did not make her more entitled.
“You were trying to make us look like aging works,” I said.
“That sounds terrible.”
“Does it sound wrong?”
She thought about it.
“No.”
“And when our actual faces made the answer less tidy, you cleaned up the evidence.”
Beth covered her eyes with both hands.
“You really do manage architects for a living.”
“They trained me to identify scope creep.”
She laughed through her hands.
Then she lowered them.
“What do I do now?”
The question was dangerous because I knew how to answer it.
I knew how to make plans for people when they were tired.
I also knew what the week had been about.
“You decide what you do with your picture,” I said.
“And the show?”
“We decide what happens to ours.”
Beth looked at me for a long moment.
“You’re not going to tell me I have to put my self-portrait in.”
“No.”
“Even though that makes me a hypocrite?”
“It makes you scared. Those are not the same thing.”
Her eyes filled again.
I continued before sympathy could make me generous with something that was not mine to give.
“But your fear doesn’t get to be the editing standard for my face.”
Beth nodded.
This time she did not argue.
