Saturday Night II
by Joel Deutsch
“In recognition of your professional background,” Grisha had said about the one-restaurant posting, gallantly, which Irina translated to herself as a diplomatic way of saying in deference to her age, but she was hardly about to argue. Dashing around like that trying to hit three different restaurants early enough in the evening, racing back to Tropicana Photo for the processing and back again to all three in turn, composed and charming, wasn’t her idea of a good job, not at her stage of life, at least.
At the interview, Grisha had had to admit to himself that the trim but undeniably fortysomething woman across the desk from him with the remarkable mouth wasn’t the usual type he preferred to hire. But she had a certain quality, a je ne sais quoi.
Grisha was from St. Petersburg, and liked to think of himself as bearing in his soul some trace of that city’s pre-Revolutionary Francophile heritage.
her portfolio, which contained formal portraiture, street photography, and even a few examples of the kind of architectural abstractions that had been quite the thing in late Brezhnev-era Moscow photography, was nothing to sneeze at, either. So maybe the woman was no spring chicken. but neither was she some dowdy babushka. In fact, she was elegant in a way that eluded most of the young ones, with their grotesque cosmetic piercings and their post adolescent comportment. Not to mention that she wasn’t going to disappear suddenly, just call in with some excuse about having to move to San Jose with her programmer boyfriend or having been accepted to UCLA or beautician school and having no more time to spare for such a job.
So Grisha had said yes, and had proposed they seal their agreement with a shot of lemon-infused Stolichnaya, accompanied by a plate of caviar-filled blini with dollops of sour cream, which the cook could whip up for them, an offer Irina had politely but firmly declined, as he had known she would. He liked that. True, he had managed to get more than one of the previous photographer girls into bed like this; the effort was reflexive. But he rather admired this one’s poise and self-possession.
Besides, there could be a higher price for a seduction like this than what he was accustomed to paying. it was no problem extricating yourself from one of those bimbos, usually, because both of you knew the score. A few extra dollars slipped into the pay envelope, a tasteful but inexpensive piece of jewelry, even a free brake job at the garage he co-owned with a Siberian named Yvgeny. But this woman was, what, probably at least his age, maybe a couple of years older, even if she wore it well. The mother of a teenage son, she had said. And he wasn’t looking for trouble. One marriage, undertaken ill-advisedly back in Petersburg and dissolved with much rancor in their first lean years in a suffocating West Hollywood studio apartment, was enough.
Now his “lifestyle,” as they called it, featured a two-bedroom condo overlooking the park by the fashionable new outdoor mall, a Toyota Highlander with the big engine and smoked glass windows for the trips to Vegas when he could get away, and a premium membership at the authentic <>i>banya down on Pico, where you could get an expert thrashing with oak branches in the sauna to rejuvenate your skin and flush your toxins, where no one stopped you from bringing a few bottles or cans of nice cold beer in to line up beside you on the bench, and where now and then you could even catch sight of Americans celebrities dropping by in the course of some kind of cross-cultural urban safari.
One time Grisha himself, after two intense sweat sessions divided by a heart-stopping plunge in the cold water pool, had walked into the shower room with towel slung over his shoulder and rubber thongs slapping the tile floor to see John Travolta lathering up under the spray, naked as the day he was born and no more taut-bellied or any better preserved in middle age than the rest of them. Which was somehow reassuring, as Grisha’s only image of the star to that moment had been of the slim, dancing Lothario of Saturday Night Fever and Grease, which he’d rented to learn about America and practice his English. There was a newer banya<’i> on Santa Monica Boulevard now, a dazzle of modern design and luxury whose fees were up in the stratosphere of the huge, extravagant Westside health club where a lot of the entertainment industry executives and agents worked out. But that wasn’t for Grisha, at least not yet. One step at a time. He was enjoying the bachelor life complete with all the nice toys, and this was enough. His new restaurant photographer might be intriguing, might be desirable, might be a challenge he could contemplate moving on, if he needed someone, but not now. Not in this stage of his self-propelled American evolution.
Irina always brought two cameras with her to the restaurant. One was the late-model Nikon digital single lens reflex Dima had given her at her last birthday, which she used for her work.
But then there were the odd things she saw to capture, images beyond the boundaries of her official purpose, images the flattened mega-pixel clarity and lurid color saturation of the digital were all wrong for. A dressed-up little girl, utensils in hand, struggling to manage her serving of smoked salmon and vegetable salad while her father is preoccupied in animated grownup conversation. A waiter stealing a longing look at a pretty bride as he distributes a tray full of entrees around the table. An elderly grandmother staring off into space, tuning out the clamor of conversation and the deafening music, or perhaps just barely able to hear it, her thoughts probably drifting back somewhere decades in the distance and thousands of miles away.
These kinds of shots Irina would sneak with a classic Leica M3 she carried slung over one shoulder like an afterthought. As a backup, she told customers who even noticed it or bothered to ask. Unlike the Nikon, it had no built-in flash, so she cope with the low light situation by using already-fast Kodak Tri-X black and white film that she pushed in processing to double its sensitivity. She’d develop the film at home in the bathroom, with weather-stripping tacked into the door frame to keep out the light and with the soft-white 60 watt bulb in the fixture over the medicine chest replaced by a 25-watt red one. Then she would hang the unfurled film strips to dry like pantyhose from clips tied to the shower curtain rod, set up the enlarger and chemical trays, and make exquisite prints, which she’d mount on ivory matte board and hang on her apartment’s walls.
She’d gotten the Leica at a bargain price from a Newsweek staff photographer she’d met in the course of selling the magazine’s Moscow bureau some of her candid studies of everyday life in the giddy and traumatized early Yeltsin era. The clownish public excesses of the newly rich, the disoriented and dispirited poor, the purple-haired, dog-collared, leather-jacketed punk rockers waiting for the Metro on subway platforms alongside the sleeping drunks. Irina knew she was no Walker Evans, no Cartier-Bresson, no Roman Vishniac, her idols and influences, but she knew where the strength of her vision lay, and it was with the same kind of evidence of life’s tender ephemerality, artfully captured. As the months went by and her living room began to look less like a decorated abode than a gallery with furniture, Irina felt her talent reawakening.
“Hey, Irina. What’s up?” said Kira in English, coming around from behind and sitting down across from her. She was wearing a slinky black number with heels high enough to bring her height close to six feet. “Looks like it’s just about Showtime, huh? Sorry I’m late. I was kind of tied up.”
“Nichivo,” said Irina pleasantly enough, in Russian. No big deal. Kira opened her purse on the table, took out her digital camera, then extracted a mirrored compact, which she flipped open and used to help herself dab away traces of tears and makeup with a tissue. Then she tilted back her head and squirted a couple of drops of Visine in each eye. “How does that look?” she asked Irina, now in Russian also. “Better?”
“Better,” said Irina, noticing a nice gold chain around the girl’s perfect neck that she’d never seen her wear before. “Just fine.”
“Thanks,” said Kira, touching up her mascara now. “Are they finished serving the first course?” She put her cosmetics back into the purse, took out her cell phone, checked it for missed calls or text messages, then stowed it away again, her face betraying nothing.
“Just about,” Irina said. She stood, slid the Leica’s strap over her arm and picked up the Nikon. “Want me to wait while you give them your purse?”
“Please,” said Kira. When she returned from the restaurant’s cloakroom, she was perfectly put together again, smiling the radiant smile that her modeling agent found so entrancing and the Russians found so inscrutably American. Together, amid the din of Russian pop and the clatter of dining, the two women advanced a few feet up the center aisle between the rows of tables, side by side, like mismatched bridesmaids in a wedding procession, then veered off, one to the right and the other to the left, each scanning her first group of diners for photo-ready faces.
To be continued…