A Widowed Wedding Photographer
‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
For reasons alien to him, everybody trusted Jesse. He had no desire to be anyone’s confidant. And yet this was what he so often became to his clients, until, at fifty-nine, he’d accumulated a glittering treasury of secrets, raw and delicate, as if snatched directly from the diaries and bed-side cabinets of nervous, pacing brides and grooms. Jesse was a blank canvas of sorts — grey, balding, with eyes that never seemed to take you in wholly, as though he only saw the wallpaper behind you, even when his gaze met yours. Perhaps it was this apparent vacancy that encouraged his clients to tell all, giving the impression that no consequences could come of a confession to a man with no face. Telling Jesse a secret was like rehearsing saying it in a mirror. He never condemned nor empathised with his clients’ problems, giving only a ‘Yes, I can see why that might trouble you’ — and sometimes an uncomfortable laugh — when told of cold feet, hidden affairs and unwanted pregnancies. He’d make a godawful priest; he could inflict no guilt. God bless you; go in peace.
It often happened during the first or second appointment, when the engaged couple in question came to Jesse’s house, a few months in advance of their wedding day, to discuss the shots they wanted. One client would disappear into the bathroom for a moment, or step outdoors to take a call, and like that, in a burst of disquieting energy, the remaining groom or bride-to-be would reveal to Jesse their uncertainty as to whether getting married was really worth the bother.
Whitewashed and plain, Jesse’s house could not quite be called a home. The guest room, opposite his office, was used as a studio, for he never had any guests. His living room was essentially a showroom, the walls adorned with images of grinning newlyweds and bridesmaids holding bright bouquets — plus a smaller number of images showcasing his other commercial pursuits — horse races, actors’ headshots, but mostly family portraits.
Jesse kept his own family photographs in his bedroom, which meant his clients often did not know that Jesse had a family at all. His three children were all either away at university or living with their aunt in London. He had two daughters. One was seventeen, with an aptitude for science and a tendency to contort her face uneasily when asked at family gatherings if she had a boyfriend. The other was nineteen. As a small child, she used to cry at Old Hollywood movies. Couldn’t watch Audrey Hepburn throw poor old Cat out of the taxi and into the rain at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s without bawling. Eventually, Jesse’s wife returned the video tape to the store. ‘What’s the point in keeping it if she always cries?’ Now, Jesse entertained the notion that his eldest daughter probably wrote terrible, melancholy poetry in secret, though he never asked. Jesse’s son was the eldest at twenty-six. An extrovert who never gave any hint that the earth could faze him, he had very little career-based ambition, and never returned his father’s calls. He was the spitting image of his father as a young man — fair-haired and inscrutable. Then, there was Jesse’s wife, who had died five years prior in a car accident. The children adored her, as everyone had. She’d been loud. Wide-smiling. Warm. Whether the children ever talked about her still, Jesse didn’t know.
***
One Sunday morning, the sky was grey but bright, and light rain drummed on the roof. A young couple (too young to be getting married, thought Jesse, though he’d never admit this aloud) came to the house to see Jesse’s portfolio. They must have been a similar age to Jesse’s son. He tried to picture his son getting married, but failed to conjure a convincing image.
Looking at the couple, Jesse knew straight away he’d get no secrets out of them. The man was too carefree to have troubles, the woman too closed off to share hers. She looked at the floor a lot, and wore her hair in a bun — women with their hair in buns always struck Jesse as reserved, afraid of unravelling. When her fiancé excused himself to go to the corner shop for some thing or other he’d forgotten, the woman did not erupt into a shaking confession of adultery or 3AM fights, but rather said:
‘I don’t suppose you could take my picture now? I’m just curious to see what it’d look like.’
He went to set up the camera, and asked her to sit on a stool in front of a white backdrop in the studio.
‘Stupid question,’ said Jesse, one eye shut as he peered at her through the lens, ‘but are you looking forward to it?’
‘The wedding? Of course.’
He twisted the lens.
‘Being married, I mean.’
‘No, I give it a year,’ she joked. He half-laughed.
‘You’re married, aren’t you?’ she asked.
She came into focus.
‘I am,’ he said. Not worth going into it, he thought. He asked her to tilt her head a little to the left. They were silent for a moment.
‘You know what really gets me about weddings?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘The children’s table. The children sit in their little formal clothes, some with faces painted like tigers or butterflies, looking out of place. They don’t know each other and don’t know what to say. Some are having fun, but most look completely disillusioned — I don’t know whether I find it funny or upsetting. You can see them realising in real-time that this day that’s supposed to be so magical is really just a drunken crowd dancing that they’re not a part of.’
She looked out of the window as she said this, and pulled a face to suggest that what she’d said embarrassed her. Jesse tried to make a face that would say ‘not to worry’ — that would show he passed no judgement — forgetting that his face gave this impression of its own accord anyway.
Then, without Jesse asking, the woman looked straight into the lens.
‘But what gets me the most is that at these tables of mostly primary school children, there’s nearly always a boy or girl about thirteen years old, wishing they were fucking dead.’
They laughed.
Jesse thought of the way his own children, years ago, when they’d all lived together, had looked on the odd occasion he’d dragged them along to a wedding he was shooting. Their twiddling thumbs. Darting glances. How, as a little girl, his elder daughter always left adults convinced that she hated them, with one-word-answers and a perpetual look of anger that only those close to her knew was in fact deep-rooted, terrible nervousness. How his son would then try to cheer her up, and half of the time succeed. With a joke or invented game, Jesse’s son could sometimes make her forget how she hated dancing in front of people. They’d get up and dance wildly, as if they needed no one’s approval. As if the earth was enough for them, and could stand still for them if they willed it so. Children of the past, thought Jesse. They were placeless. As am I.
Just as he went to take her picture, the woman spoke again.
‘I’ll be twenty-six in a month, but in some ways I think I’m still the thirteen-year-old girl at the children’s table. I know I’ve outgrown my younger self, but half the time I feel like something’s holding me back from just getting up and bloody dancing.’
For reasons he couldn’t pinpoint, her words left him freezing cold. The fear of embarrassment thankfully kept him sealed shut into silence, or else he might have cried, or at the very least said something unprofessional — something vulnerable. One day my children will find people to love and marry, he thought. And they won’t ask me to take the wedding photographs. They will hire someone else. There’s a chance I might not even be invited. I will live and breathe in the hush of my white house, while framed newlyweds whose names I can no longer recall smile on at me. This, Jesse realised, cannot continue. This quiet. This distance.
If the woman noticed Jesse’s shifting mood, she didn’t show it. And yet it was her who had brought about this shift — this all-consuming yet oblivious stranger, with butterfly face paint branded into the back of her memory. He wanted to tell her the story of his life. He wanted to tell her about the time he stole a Coca Cola from the local newsagents as a boy. He wanted to tell her that he’d stopped trying to call his children for months now, but — over the course of the past hour — had realised he had to try again, or else the world would swallow him whole. He wanted to thank her for nothing in particular: God bless you; go in peace.
‘It doesn’t worry me, though,’ said the woman, ‘There’s something about the dancing crowd being older than the girl that makes the day worthwhile for her. She might be bored to death, but there’s something underneath it all that’s so exciting. She feels it in her chest. Because she knows she’s looking into the future; she knows that one day she’ll join them… God, when I get married am I going to dance.’
Anything he said in response would only manage to be a fragment of what he really meant. So he simply smiled, and said, as he pressed the shutter and felt the flash burn around them: ‘Yes.’