Tiny Little Thing

  “Can I see them?” There was a brief scratch as she lifted the needle away from the record, interrupting an arpeggio in the second movement.

  “I’ll have to develop them first.” He got up and went to the darkroom—a closet, really, the old boxroom where steamer trunks and other bulky clutter used to be kept, perfect for his purposes once he’d hired a plumber to run a pipe in for running water—and there in the utter darkness, as he worked by touch, unspooling the film from the roll, loading it onto the reel, lowering the reel into the film tank, his heart returned to normal. His breathing slowed. He flipped on the lights and went through each methodical step, until the negatives hung drying from the rack and he returned to the living room.

  Tiny had made coffee. She gave him a cup and curled up on the sofa, still wearing his shirt, her long bare legs tucked up beneath her. He wanted to join her, but instead he went to the window and stared down at the sporadic pulse of traffic, the motionless trees. A woman walked by, leading a small and reluctant poodle. He could see the long, straight part of her hair, all the way up here. When he turned to speak to Tiny, her head had fallen back on the sofa, and she was asleep.

  • • •

  Tiny slept quietly, as still as a bird. He tried not to watch her, but as he read his book in the chair across the room, his eyes kept lifting away from the page, as if to reassure himself that she was still breathing. The minutes ticked softly by. He checked his watch, set aside the book, and rose to his feet.

  She must have felt the vibration through the floorboards. Her eyes opened. “What are you doing?”

  “The film should be dry. I’m going to process the negatives.”

  “Can I help? I’ve never seen pictures developed before.”

  “If you like.”

  He headed for the darkroom without looking back.

  He told himself he didn’t want her to follow, but when she stepped inside the room right behind him, he admitted that the warm feeling in his chest was one of elation, not despair. Yes, he was happy she was there. Just her presence, nothing more. What was wrong with that?

  “Close the door,” he said.

  “Oh! Of course.”

  He switched on the red lamp and pulled the film from the drying rack to examine the negatives.

  “I thought this was a darkroom. You know, dark?”

  “The black-and-white paper isn’t sensitive to red light.” He held up the negatives and peered carefully, one eye closed.

  “I see. And you only work in black-and-white?”

  “I like black-and-white. You can fiddle with light and shadow more. You can see things that color obscures.”

  “Like what?”

  “Details.”

  Usually, the process of selecting the right negative to develop was fairly straightforward. In an entire roll of film, he might have two that looked promising. Two that might be worthy of the trouble of printing, if he were lucky. As he scanned the long strip of film, his pulse ratcheted upward. One, two, three. Okay, not four. Five maybe. Six. Oh, God, seven. Eight. She was turned the wrong way in nine, but even there, if he cropped it . . .

  “What’s wrong?” asked Tiny. She stood against the door, hands folded behind her back, in stock-still observation.

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “You’re frowning.”

  “I’m concentrating. They’re all good, actually. They’re amazing.” Forget ten. But eleven and twelve. Fourteen. Sixteen, seventeen. Christ, she was good. “I’ll be up all night.”

  “Um . . . I’m sorry?”

  He turned to her and grinned. Elation again. “Don’t be sorry.”

  “A smile! Finally. I was beginning to think you’d run out of them.”

  He stepped to the cutting counter and picked up the scissors, slicing the negatives into strips of five. “I’ve got a few left in here.”

  “For the photographs, or me?”

  “Both. Now look here. These are the negatives, see?” He held up a strip and beckoned, though in the warm confines of the darkroom she was only a couple of steps away. “I go through these and decide which ones are good enough to print, except in your case, they’re all good.”

  She pushed herself from the door and joined him. “Can you really tell which ones are good? I can hardly see what they are.”

  “I’ve had practice. Look for yourself.”

  She took the strip from his fingers and held it against the red darkroom light. Her eyes narrowed. Cap watched her irises flick from image to image, the little purse of her lips. She came to the end and shook her head. “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”

  “Well, take this one right here, for starters. You’re filling the entire frame, a nice arc to your body, your face half-turned to the camera. You can see a good balance of light and dark areas. Those are some of the things you look for. So you take the negative and move over here, to the enlarger . . .”

  She watched with apparently avid interest as he showed her how to create the image, how to focus and enlarge until it was just right, exactly as it should be, and how to make a test strip on photographic paper, to find the correct exposure. In the red wash of the light, her lips disappeared, and her eyes looked even larger than before, like a young animal’s. The top button of her shirt had come undone, baring a triangle of volcanic skin that pointed downward to the slopes of her breasts. He managed resolutely to ignore the provocation. They moved to the chemical baths.

  “Oh, I see!” she exclaimed, when the test strip emerged from the developer. “Oh, look! There I am!”

  “There you are.” He held up the strip to examine the prints. “I think the second one is about right, don’t you? Ten seconds of exposure, maybe eleven. I want these really light. Almost overexposed. I want to grab the radiance.”

  “Radiant, am I?”

  He sank the test strip into the fixer bath. “You know you are.”

  When she didn’t reply, he looked over his shoulder. She stood with her back against the cutting board, her fingers curled around the edge of the counter. It was hard to tell in this light, but she might have been crying. Or else holding the tears back. Suffocating in them.

  He said, “Can you give me a hand over here? Rinse this off in the last tub?”

  “All right.”

  She took the test strip from him and plunged it into the rinse bath with the tongs, tilting her face downward so he couldn’t see her expression. He stepped back to the enlarger and opened the box of photo paper. From behind him came a careful sniff, a woman gathering her composure.

  “What are you doing now?” she asked.

  “Making a print.”

  “I think this is rinsed off. What should I do with it?”

  Without turning his head, he said, “Grab one of the clothespins and hang it on the line above your head.”

  A pause. “I can’t quite reach.”

  “Oh. Sorry about that.”

  He reached above her, careful not to touch so much as the edge of her shirt, the tender curve of her ear, and clipped the test strip to the drying line.

  “Caspian . . .”

  He returned to the enlarger, made a final adjustment. “Count with me,” he said, and opened the aperture. “One . . . two . . . three . . .”

  She joined in softly. “Four . . . five . . . six . . .”

  Seven. Eight. Nine.

  Her voice was breathy, full of exercise and emotion. Before him, her image soldered invisibly to the photographic paper, her body stretched into a promising white curve, elastic control, sexy as all burning hell.

  Ten. Eleven.

  He closed the aperture and handed her the paper. “Now put it in the developer.”

  “I really don’t—”

  “Go ahead. It’s your picture. Just hold it by the very edges with the tongs.”

  She to
ok it from his hand. “All right. But you have to tell me when to take it out.”

  She dipped the paper into the developing bath. Cap stood nearby, just close enough to feel her without touching her. Above her collar, her dark hair escaped from his handkerchief to lie in wisps against her long red-tinged neck.

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see.”

  She closed her eyes. “When do I take the photograph out?”

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “But I haven’t been counting.”

  “I have.” He reached around her and closed his hand about her wrist. Next to the tongs, her image materialized like a ghost on the white paper.

  “Caspian?”

  “Keep your eyes closed.” He was counting in his head, holding on to his sanity in the slow tick of numbers. Her bones were light in his hands, her body stiff. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Her anxious metacarpals shifted beneath his fingertips. “Shh,” he said.

  Twenty-nine. Thirty.

  “Now take it out,” he said, guiding her hand, “and dip it in the fixer.” He nudged her sideways within the cage of his arms and pressed again with his fingertips, quite gently, and she followed him downward until the photo was fully immersed in the fixing solution. “Eyes still closed?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m amazed.”

  “Well, I trust you. Besides”—she laughed, a shallow laugh—“it’s fun, really. Like when my sisters and I would blindfold each other and stick our hands in all sorts of disgusting messes from the kitchen to guess what they were. Vivian once put my fingers in a bowl of macaroni and cheese and told me it was brains. I almost believed her.”

  “You have a strange idea of fun, you and your sisters.”

  “Why? What do boys do?”

  “Cowboys and Indians. Stickball.” He lifted her hand with the tongs out of the fixing bath. “Now the rinse.”

  They moved like dancers to the last tray, which was equipped with running water to clean all the chemicals away from the photograph. He set aside the tongs and moved her hands about in the tray, showing her how to rinse the paper thoroughly, but mostly to enjoy the gentle sway of their fingers in the water, the way her shoulders had now relaxed into his ribs, just above his heart.

  “Can I open my eyes now?”

  “Almost.” He lifted her hands, until the photograph hovered dripping before her face, and then he released her. “Now.”

  She gasped, a wondrous little intake of air.

  “That’s you. Look how strong you are. How beautiful. Look at your arms, the way they’re curved. That muscle there, in your calf. Your fearless eyes. Your mouth.”

  “It doesn’t look like me.”

  “Yes, it does. It looks exactly like you. The real you. The true Tiny. Radiant. The way I picture you, when you’re not in front of me.”

  She shook her head.

  “So you have to promise me, love, that whatever you do with yourself in this life, whoever you do it with, you won’t stop this. All right?” He tugged the picture from her fingers and hung it up above her head with a clothespin, next to the test strip. “You won’t stop dancing.”

  “Caspian,” she whispered.

  He looked down.

  She stared right back up at him, a few inches away, bathed in red. Her eyes brimmed, luminous, about to spill over. She lifted her hands and cradled his face, and before he could react to this unexpected caress, before he could even bring his own hands down from the drying line to grab her waist or her shoulders, to pull the handkerchief from her hair and anchor his fingers in her, she dragged him to her lips and kissed him.

  She kissed hard but not deep, as if she were afraid of opening him up, of opening herself up. The tip of her nose brushed the tip of his nose, and her breath tasted like coffee. His hands hovered around the back of her head, at the place where her hair curled away from the handkerchief, slippery as old silk, radiant with the warmth of her scalp. He tried gently to open her mouth a little more, but she pulled away and dropped her fingers away from his face.

  “Come back here,” he said, reaching for her. Soft in his head. Hard as stone down below.

  Her chest moved quickly. “Thank you. Thank you for this.”

  “Tiny—”

  He reached again, but she moved too fast. She cracked open the door of the darkroom and slipped through in a flash, shutting it behind her, and he needed to follow her, he needed to take her back and make her stay, but what right did he have to her? None.

  What right did he have to stop her going? Not the slightest.

  Only the longing in his chest, the longing in his belly, the longing in his balls. And that was his problem, not hers.

  He reached for the next negative and fit it into the enlarger, and when he heard the front door open and close a moment later, he knew she was gone.

  Tiny, 1966

  It seems I’m in disgrace,” I tell the man seated beside me.

  Mr. Hardcastle’s thumbs press into the steering wheel, until the nail beds turn white. “Of course not. We just think it might be best if you spent a little more time at the Cape before returning to the campaign.”

  “But I’m perfectly fine.”

  The radio, humming a pleasant background scenario of careless woodwinds, finds a patch of static. Mr. Hardcastle leans forward and fiddles with the knob, until at last he gives up and switches it off entirely. “Of course you are.”

  “You’re speaking to me as if I’m a child. Or a lunatic.”

  “We understand it’s been difficult—”

  “But a Hardcastle wife is expected to keep her mouth shut, isn’t she? Not to discuss any uncomfortable truths.”

  He strikes a fist against the steering wheel. “The press, Tiny! You should know better than to say things like that in front of a reporter. I don’t know what’s come over you.”

  “I was upset. I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “That’s no excuse. Your personal feelings are irrelevant.”

  His anger blisters the air. I turn my head to the half-open window and attempt to relieve the sting in my eyeballs. To peel the frustration from the lining of my throat.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I spoke sharply just now. I understand you’re not yourself.”

  The trees pass by, the long straight stretch of highway leading into the shore. A layer of clouds has spread overhead, sagging with heat. I can smell the impending shore, the grassy rot of the salt marsh. “It’s not the baby,” I say.

  “We quite understand how desperately you wanted this child, Tiny . . .”

  “It’s not the baby!” I shout out the window.

  Mr. Hardcastle presses a button near his door handle, and the glass draws silently up, shutting off the salty draft in an instant. He leans forward and switches on the air-conditioning. “I see.”

  “No, you don’t. I’ve had it, do you understand? I’ve had it with working so hard to get things right, not putting a foot wrong, smiling for the cameras and pretending to have the perfect marriage—oh the hypocrisy—while we all pretend Frank isn’t sleeping with other women—”

  “You believe Frank is sleeping with other women?”

  “You know it’s true. He always has.”

  The car in front of us, a ten-year-old Buick sedan the color of new lichen, draws closer and closer, foot by foot, until we’re so close that the brilliant chrome of the rear bumper hurts my eyes. Until I can sketch the outline of the driver through the glass, and the pair of dice dangling from his rearview mirror. He glances into it, sees our looming reflection, and panics. The brake lights flash on, red and bright against the chrome. I shove my right foot against the floorboard and strangle the gasp in my chest.

  At the last instant, Mr. Hardcastle pulls to the left and overtakes the Buick.


  “Frank loves you,” he says.

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  The thumbs are drumming now. The car’s accelerating, the engine droning heavily. “Tiny, the wife of a politician, of any great man, has to understand how the world works. A leader naturally attracts followers. It doesn’t mean he loves you any less. You’re the woman he comes home to, the bulwark, the virtuous center around which his life revolves. Actually”—he gathers strength from some inner reservoir of self-righteousness—“you should count yourself lucky he doesn’t do it more often. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories about Jack Kennedy. The psychology of leadership almost requires that—”

  “That he gets into bed with his campaign staffers? That he’s habitually and cheerfully unfaithful to his wife?”

  “It’s not infidelity, Tiny. Infidelity is when a wife strays from her husband.”

  “What?”

  He explains calmly: “Because a woman takes a lover when she’s in love. Her heart’s involved. Frank’s heart isn’t involved with this . . . this girl, or any other. It’s just physical release. A boost to the ego, every man needs that. His heart is all yours. You know that. He needs you, Tiny. He loves you.”

  I lean forward and wrap my gloved hands around my knees, almost unable to breathe. The engine roars at the pace of my heart, hurtling down the highway toward the Atlantic, passing cars like an ocean liner passing a fleet of fishing smacks.

  Mr. Hardcastle continues. “If you were to stray, now. That would present a more serious problem. Your loyalties divided, your emotions committed elsewhere, outside the family. To say nothing of the question of parentage, if you were to have a child. An unforgivable breach. I speak hypothetically, of course, to illustrate the point.”

  “So Caesar’s wife must be beyond suspicion, while Caesar can sin all he likes?”

  “Men are different, Tiny.”

  “People are different, Mr. Hardcastle.”

  The pistons call out as Mr. Hardcastle pulls around another car, eighty miles an hour at least. I grip the door handle. The pavement rushes by, the blurred and bony trees, like a movie reel run through the projector at high speed.