retreating,” he said, piling the prints into a box. Maybe they were beautiful, but he knew then as he does now that they’re also empty.
He watches as one wedding print in particular floats in the developer tray, watches as the whites become shapes defined by shadows. A picture of the bride at the altar, her face occupying the right third of the frame. Her eyebrows are knitted and a tear is frozen in place halfway down her cheek. She is the kind of beautiful that men take home to their mothers. The kind of beautiful that, sometimes, is easy to forget.
In the corner of the window, a small black blur.
He drops the next print into the tray. Here it is: a full frame of Val standing in the window, watching the wedding from the outside. As he looks closer, he sees that the corners of her mouth are turned down, that her head is tilted just so. Her eyes droop at the edges and she seems in danger of fading away, her face slightly more distinct than the background or the panes in the window. He sees it clearly now, the look that he has seen hundreds of times before on the faces of bridesmaids, grandparents, mothers. It’s that moment when you are about to lose control, when you know the tears are coming and you are still, fruitlessly, trying to hold them in. He hangs her story on the line, touches the edges gingerly.
The hot sand stings the bottoms of his feet. He has rolled up his jeans as high as they will go, and they are now bunched around his knees, collecting sweat and sand. Val walks ahead of him, gracefully avoiding the splinters from driftwood. She unfolds a Mexican blanket and arranges it in front of a large, bleached-white log. Squinting into the sun, she lights a cigarette.
Danny settles onto the blanket and empties the sand out of his shoes. When he looks up again, Val has taken off her shirt and skirt and is standing in a black swimsuit, the neck cut low, almost to her waist. Her cleavage is tanned brown, with freckles dotting the space between her breasts. She stands straight, one long leg in front of the other, and surveys the beach, challenging the other people to look at her, admire the lines of her body. When an elderly man behind them, dressed in walking shorts and a Panama hat, stares at her and then stumbles on the path, Val smiles brightly and sits down, her back against the log.
“You see?” she says. “I’ve never let myself go.” She smoothes down a wrinkle in her swimsuit. “I’ve been dying to wear this. It just came in at the store.”
Danny nods before closing his eyes. The light glows red through his eyelids. “What store?”
“I didn’t tell you? I work at the big department store downtown. Selling lingerie. I guess you can say I have a lot of experience with underwear.” Her laugh, loud and ringing, spills out into the air around them. Danny wonders if the sound waves will ripple across the ocean and tickle the ears of someone in Japan.
Staring at the sandflies hopping around the blanket, Val says in a matter-of-fact voice, “You’re alone, aren’t you, honey? Why?”
It’s a question that people ask him all the time, but it’s a surprise nonetheless. His body feels jolted and goose-bumped; his spine tingles. He looks out at the beach and ocean, at the buoys bobbing in the distance. Val stretches and digs her red-painted toes into the sand.
“Well? Out with it. I don’t have much patience these days.” Val lets out an exaggerated cough and lightly pounds her chest.
Danny tells her of the evening he first met Frank, how everyone else in the restaurant receded into the dark. The falling-in-love part was quick and complete. No questions. No doubts.
“How long were you together?” Val asks, rubbing tanning lotion on her legs.
“Eight months.”
“And then what?”
After months of spending nights in Frank’s apartment (because Frank couldn’t bring his dog, Barton, over to Danny’s, even though Danny offered to sneak him up in a suitcase), there came a time when things began to descend and spin until Danny seemed to be tripping over his own feet wherever he went.
At first, it was little things. Frank not answering when Danny asked him a question, and looking out the window. On a Friday afternoon, Frank would announce that he was spending the weekend at his parents’ so Barton could