Everything Through Glass
Ondine
The twelve prints hung in a single row on the critique wall, and every one of them was a house at night.
Ondine Kerrigan stood beside them with her hands locked behind her back so no one would see them shake. She had printed the photographs herself, by hand, in the tiny room she called a darkroom, over three weeks of nights. Black and white. Silver gelatin on heavy matte paper. Each one showed the same building from the same stretch of sand: a modern cottage of steel beams and floor-to-ceiling glass, lit from inside like a lantern set down on the edge of the Pacific.
In some frames a big man stood at the stove, his head tipped back in a laugh she could still hear when she looked at it. In others a leaner man sat on the kitchen counter with his bare feet crossed at the ankle, tasting something from a wooden spoon. In one, both of them leaned over the low table, playing cards, while rain ran down the glass between them and the camera.
She had called the series House of Glass. It was the best work she had ever made. It was her final portfolio, the last thing standing between her and a degree from Malibu University.
The seminar room was silent. Six other students sat on stools in a half circle, staring at the wall. December light came through the high windows of the Arts Building, pale and thin. Somewhere outside a leaf blower whined and stopped.
Professor Laurence Weller had not said a word in four minutes.
He walked the length of the wall slowly. He was tall and lean, dressed in black the way he always was: black sweater, black trousers, a plain steel watch. His dark hair was cut close. A thin white scar ran through his left eyebrow, and when he frowned, the way he was frowning now, it made him look like a man who had been in a fight and won.
He stopped in front of the last print. The cottage in fog, the windows gold, the two men inside blurred by the wet glass.
“These are beautiful,” he said.
Ondine let out a breath.
“And they’re cowardly.”
The breath went back in. Somebody on a stool made a small sound and turned it into a cough.
Laurence turned to face her. His eyes were dark brown, almost black in this light, and his voice never rose. On the first day of class he had told them he did not believe in shouting at artists. He believed in telling them the truth quietly and letting the truth do the shouting.
“Twelve frames,” he said. “Twelve frames of a home. Warm light, people you clearly care about, a life worth looking at. And every single one is shot from the outside, through glass, from the dark.” He tilted his head. “Where are you, Ms. Kerrigan?”
“I’m the one holding the camera.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Her face went hot. “It’s a series about looking. About the distance between—”
“I read your artist’s statement. It’s very good. It’s also an excuse.” He said it without cruelty, which was somehow worse. “You live in that house. I’d bet my job on it. And you’ve made yourself a stranger in it on purpose. There isn’t one reflection of you in twelve sheets of glass. Do you know how hard that is? You had to work to stay out of these.”
She had. She remembered every angle she had abandoned because her own shape had appeared faintly in the window, a pale girl with a camera, a ghost she did not want to meet.
“So the photographs fail,” she said, very evenly.
“No. The photographs are the strongest work in this room, and you know it, and your grade will say so.” He looked back at the wall. “But the photographer is still hiding. I’d like to meet her someday.”
Then he moved on to the next student, and that was that.
Grades were due at five o’clock.
Ondine knew this because she had been counting toward it all semester, and because Professor Weller said it to her himself when the room emptied and she stayed behind to take her prints down.
He did not help her. He stood by the window with his arms folded and watched her slide each print into its paper sleeve, and he waited until the last footsteps faded down the hall.
“I was hard on you,” he said.
“You were honest.”
“I was both.” He was quiet for a moment. “Grades go in at five. After that the semester is over, and you’re not my student anymore. You graduate. I go back to being a stranger who happens to admire your eye.”
She looked up. The light had gone gold behind him. He was not smiling.
“But I’m also on the Tidewell committee,” he went on. “I’ll be reading your application on Monday with four other people. So I’ll be careful with you a while longer, Ms. Kerrigan. I’d appreciate it if you’d let me.”
The Tidewell Residency. Four months in New York, February through May, in a print studio inside an old factory, with a stipend and a key and a darkroom bigger than her whole bedroom. She had written the application at three in the morning with her heart in her throat. She had not told anyone she had applied.
“Careful how?” she asked.
He met her eyes. Something moved behind his face, something held down hard.
“Careful,” he said, “in the ways that matter.”
Then he picked up his bag and left her alone with twelve sleeves of glass houses and a pulse she could feel in her fingertips.
She drove home along the coast with the windows down.
The Santa Ana wind had come up in the afternoon, the strange warm wind that blew backward, from the desert to the sea. It smelled of dry sage and hot stone. It pressed the ocean flat and made the palms on the bluffs rattle like paper. In December, in Malibu, it could feel as if summer had come back for one last look.
The Glass Cottage sat on a shelf of rock above the tide pools, at the end of a narrow road. Steel and concrete and glass, all sharp lines, the kind of house people slowed their cars to stare at. An old architect named Mrs. Pinto had designed it forty years ago and still owned it. Fraser and Emilio held the lease. Ondine had answered their ad in August, looking for a room she could afford, and had nearly turned around when she saw the place. Nobody she knew lived in houses like this.
“It’s not as fancy as it looks,” Fraser had told her that first day, grinning down at her from the doorway. “The heating is a crime. The glass sweats. And there’s no privacy anywhere unless you like closets.”
There was one room without glass. A narrow laundry room off the kitchen, with no window at all. She had asked if she could turn it into a darkroom. Emilio had helped her hang the blackout curtain. Fraser had wired the red safelight. By the end of the first week the cottage felt like the only place she had ever lived that wanted her in it.
Which was exactly the problem.
She parked under the concrete carport and sat for a minute with the engine off.
Next door, twenty paces of sand away, the old wooden beach house was lit up warm and messy. Its wraparound deck was crowded with surfboards and a wetsuit hung out to dry. A blonde girl about Ondine’s age sat out there most evenings with a stack of books and a highlighter, bent over her work as if it might run away. Tonight she was there again, alone, her hair pinned up tight, a huge color-coded calendar spread across her knees. Ondine had never learned her name. They waved, sometimes. That was all.
Ondine knew how that looked. Living right beside warmth and keeping your hands in your lap.
She took her portfolio and went inside.
The cottage smelled of garlic and toasted chiles and something sweet. Music played low, an old bolero with a crackly trumpet. Emilio Ibarra stood at the stove in a white T-shirt and jeans, barefoot on the concrete floor, his black hair tied back with a strip of kitchen string. He was humming. He did not turn around, but he knew it was her. He always knew.
“You’re late,” he said. “Did he destroy you?”
“He called my work cowardly.”
Emilio turned then, wooden spoon in hand, his near-black eyes narrowing. He was twenty-nine and the best cook she had ever met, a sous chef at Saltgrass on the pier who talked about his own restaurant the way other people talked about heaven. His knuckles were dotted with small pale burn marks, and his hands were the most beautiful hands she had ever photographed.
“Cowardly,” he repeated. “Do I need to go fight a professor?”
“He also said they were the best in the room.”
“So I fight him gently.” He held out the spoon. “Taste.”
She tasted. Black beans, smoked chile, orange zest, a bitter edge of chocolate underneath. It was so good she closed her eyes.
When she opened them, he was watching her mouth. He looked away first. He always looked away first.
“Where’s Fraser?” she asked.
“Shower. He got off shift at noon and slept like a dead man. He’s been up an hour, singing.” Emilio went back to the pot. “He invited someone for dinner. Wear something that isn’t covered in fixer.”
“Who?”
“His friend. The one he pulled out of the water.”
Ondine knew the story. Everybody who met Fraser MacAvoy heard it within ten minutes. Six years ago, before he joined the county fire department, Fraser had been a lifeguard at Zuma. A man had paddled out alone at dawn on a bad swell, and a rip current had dragged him toward the rocks. Fraser swam out and brought him back with a gash through one eyebrow and seawater in his lungs. They had been best friends ever since. They surfed together at sunrise on Fraser’s days off. Ondine had never met him. Fraser only ever called him Wells.
“I didn’t know he was real,” she said. “I thought he was a legend you two made up.”
“Two years Fraser has been begging him to come to dinner. Tonight he finally said yes.” Emilio shrugged. “Some kind of professor. Smart. Too serious. Fraser says he needs to eat more and think less.”
Something cold touched the back of Ondine’s neck. A gash through one eyebrow.
“A professor of what?”
Before Emilio could answer, the shower shut off upstairs and the doorbell rang.
“Get that, would you?” Fraser shouted from the landing, cheerful and loud. “It’s Wells! Tell him he’s late! He’s always late!”
Ondine walked to the door. Her feet felt very far away from the rest of her. The front door was the only door in the Glass Cottage made of wood, solid and heavy, and she had to lean back to pull it open.
He stood on the step in the warm wind, holding a bottle of wine, still in black.
Laurence Weller looked at her. She watched him understand everything in a single second: the house, the windows, the twelve prints, the two men inside the frames.
“Ms. Kerrigan,” he said quietly.
Behind her, Fraser came thundering down the stairs. “Wells! You came!”
Laurence did not look away from her. He lifted his wrist and glanced once at the steel watch. Six forty.
“Grades went in at five,” he said, very low, for her alone. “I checked twice.”
The Tasting Game
Emilio
Emilio Ibarra had cooked for a lot of tense tables. He had fed divorcing couples on the pier, brothers who had not spoken in ten years, a film producer who sent back the same fish three times. He knew what it sounded like when people were trying too hard not to look at each other.
It sounded exactly like his own kitchen tonight.
“So you two know each other,” Fraser said, delighted, pouring wine. He had come down the stairs with wet hair and a clean shirt, all six foot four of him, and wrapped Laurence in a hug that lifted the smaller man off his heels. Now he sat at the head of the long concrete table with his sleeves pushed up, the compass rose tattooed on his right forearm flexing as he poured. “How? Wells never leaves campus. He doesn’t know anybody.”
“Ms. Kerrigan was in my seminar,” Laurence said.
“Ondine,” Fraser said. “Her name’s Ondine. You’re in my house, Wells. Nobody’s Ms. anything in my house.”
“Ondine,” Laurence said.
He said it carefully, as if the word were a glass he did not want to drop. Across the table, Ondine reached for her water and did not drink it.
Emilio set down the bowl of black beans and the platter of grilled shrimp with lime and chile, and he watched.
He had been watching her since August. That was the honest truth, and he did not like it much. She had come to the door with one duffel bag, an old film camera around her neck, and a dark braid down her back, and she had looked at the house the way hungry people looked at a bakery window. Brown eyes. Freckles across her nose that got darker in the sun. A small shiny scar on the inside of her left wrist that she touched when she was nervous. She was twenty-three, and she photographed everything, and she never, ever let anyone photograph her.
For four months Emilio had made her coffee every morning and pretended it meant nothing. For four months Fraser had carried her heavy bags of chemicals in from the car and fixed the safelight twice and pretended the same.
Neither of them was very good at pretending.
“So, Wells,” Fraser said, “how bad were you to her today?”
“Bad,” Ondine said.
“Honest,” Laurence said.
“He said I was hiding,” Ondine told Fraser. “In my own photographs.”
Fraser laughed his big laugh, the one that sounded like a toolbox falling down stairs. “Well. You are, though.”
“Fraser.”
“What? You are. You take our picture every day. You’ve got four hundred pictures of Emilio’s hands. You don’t have one of yourself.” He pointed his fork at Laurence. “He’s right. I hate it when he’s right. He’s right about once a month and he never lets it go.”
Laurence’s mouth moved. It was nearly a smile. Emilio saw Ondine see it, and saw her look down at her plate fast, as if she had touched a hot pan.
Ah, Emilio thought. So that’s how it is.
He was surprised to find that it did not make him angry. It made him curious. It made him want to see what she looked like when she stopped looking down.
After dinner, the wind was still blowing warm against the glass, and Fraser said the thing Emilio had known he would say.
“Tasting game.”
“No,” said Laurence.
“Yes,” said Fraser. “Every new guest plays. House rule. Emilio makes five spoons, you wear the blindfold, you guess what’s in them. If you get all five, you never have to do the dishes here again.”
“Nobody gets all five,” Emilio said.
“I got three once,” Fraser said proudly.
“You got two and a half. You said orange for a tangerine.”
“It’s a small orange!”
Emilio went to the kitchen and began to build the spoons. He did it the way he did everything at work, fast and clean. Blood orange with smoked salt. A sliver of pear with black pepper. Mezcal and lime. Toasted pumpkin seed with chile. Dark chocolate with a single grain of coffee. He folded a black linen napkin into a long band and brought it back on the tray.
Fraser went first, because Fraser always went first. He got the orange, called the pear an apple, called the mezcal “something that wants to kill me,” and laughed so hard at himself that Ondine laughed too, her head back, her braid swinging.
Laurence went second, and it was unbearable. He sat very straight with the black band over his eyes and named every spoon in quiet, exact words. Blood orange, not navel. Smoked salt, probably Maldon. Pear, black pepper, freshly cracked. Mezcal, not tequila, a little smoky. Pumpkin seed, chile de árbol. He paused only at the last one.
“Chocolate,” he said. “Seventy percent. And one coffee bean, which is cheating.”
Fraser threw a napkin at him. “Unbelievable.”
“Five for five,” Emilio said, a little stunned. “No dishes for you. Ever.”
Laurence pulled off the blindfold and smoothed it flat on the table. He looked at Ondine. “Your turn.”
“She doesn’t have to,” Fraser said quickly.
Emilio looked at her. She hated not seeing. He knew that about her. She sat with her back to walls. She took the chair facing the door. When the power had gone out in October, she had stood in the dark kitchen holding her camera like a flashlight that did not work.
“You don’t like this kind of thing,” he said gently.
“I know.” She held out her hand for the band. “That’s why I want to.”
He made fresh spoons. When he came back, he stood behind her chair and held the folded linen up where she could see it.
“If you want it off,” he said, “you say so. Or you pull it. You don’t need a reason.”
“I know.” Her voice was very small. Then, steadier: “Yes. Go ahead.”
He laid the band over her eyes and tied it at the back of her head, loosely, above the braid. His knuckles brushed the warm nape of her neck. She shivered. He felt it go through her into his hands.
“Too tight?”
“No.”
The room changed. Emilio had seen it happen before, with other guests, but never like this. Ondine sat very still in the chair, her hands open on her knees, her lips parted. Without her eyes she seemed younger and older at the same time. Fraser had stopped smiling. Laurence had gone so quiet he might have left.
Emilio lifted the first spoon to her mouth. “Open.”
She opened. He fed her the blood orange. She chewed slowly, and her whole face listened.
“Orange,” she said. “Red. Blood orange. And salt. Smoky.”
“Good.” It came out lower than he meant.
Then Laurence spoke, and his voice in the quiet room was like a hand placed flat on a table.
“Before the next one. Tell me what you hear.”
She tilted her head. “The fridge. The ocean. The wind on the glass. Fraser, breathing through his nose like a bull.”
Fraser made an offended noise, and she smiled.
“Emilio’s humming. He doesn’t know he’s doing it.” Another pause. “And you.”
“Me?”
“You’re not breathing at all.”
Fraser laughed out loud. Laurence did not. Emilio watched the professor’s hand close slowly on the edge of the table.
She named the pear and the pepper. She named the mezcal, and coughed, and Fraser rubbed her back with one huge hand in slow circles until she stopped, and she leaned into it, just slightly, the way a cat leans into a doorframe. She missed the pumpkin seed and called it sunflower and swore softly, which made all three of them smile. She got the chocolate. She got the coffee bean and called it cheating, exactly as Laurence had.
“One more,” she said. “There’s a sixth. I can smell something.”
There was no sixth spoon. Emilio looked at Fraser. Fraser looked back, his amber eyes very dark.
“Smell what?” Emilio asked.
She breathed in. “You. Orange peel and chile and the soap you use at work.” She turned her head slightly to the right. “Fraser. Smoke. Always smoke, even after a shower. And cedar.”
Then she turned her head toward the end of the table, where Laurence sat.
“And you smell like a darkroom,” she said slowly. “Like fixer. Nobody smells like fixer unless they print.” She frowned under the blindfold. “You told us in September you hadn’t made a photograph in ten years.”
The silence stretched. Laurence’s face, Emilio thought, looked like a door that had been kicked open.
“I print,” Laurence said at last. “At night. Nobody knows that.”
“Now three people do,” she said.
Emilio did not decide to do it. His hands decided. He reached for the little jar of sage honey on the counter and the bowl of flaky salt beside it, and he came back to her chair.
“There’s a sixth,” he said quietly. “It’s different. Can I?”
Her lips parted. “Yes.”
He dipped his thumb in the honey, touched it to the salt, and held it to her lower lip.
She did not hesitate. She took his thumb into her mouth, warm and soft, and her tongue moved once over the honey, slowly, and then she let him go.
Emilio could not breathe. Across the table, Fraser had gone still as a stone. At the far end, Laurence had shut his eyes.
“Honey,” Ondine whispered. “Salt. And you.”
Then she reached up and pulled the blindfold down around her neck.
She looked at the three of them, one by one. Emilio did not know what she saw on their faces. He knew what was on his own.
Laurence stood up so suddenly his chair scraped the concrete.
“Thank you for dinner,” he said to Emilio, with complete courtesy. “It was the best meal I’ve had in years.” He turned to Fraser. “Dawn, Sunday. Usual spot.” He looked at Ondine for one long second, and said nothing.
Then he was gone, and the heavy wooden door shut behind him, and the warm wind sighed against the glass.
Later, when the dishes were done and Ondine had gone upstairs, Emilio found Fraser on the concrete patio, leaning on the low granite wall at the edge of the property, watching the black water.
Next door, the beach house had gone dark except for one lamp. Far down the coast, a pale smear of orange glowed on a ridge where some brush was burning, small and far away, the kind of fire the wind made every December.
“You’re not on call?” Emilio asked.
“Not till Monday. Somebody else’s fire.” Fraser did not look away from the ocean. “Wells looked at her like she was the last match in a blackout.”
“So do you.”
Fraser finally turned his head. “So do you, brother.”
They had known each other eight years. They had shared a truck, a lease, a kitchen, and once, in a terrible year, a hospital waiting room. Emilio had never once been afraid of Fraser. He was not afraid now.
“I’m not going to fight you for her,” Emilio said.
“Good. You’d lose.”
“I’d win. You’re slow.”
Fraser grinned, and then the grin went away. “I don’t want to fight anybody. I don’t want her to have to pick, either. She’s spent her whole life picking the outside of things.”
“So what do we do?”
Fraser took a long breath of the warm, smoky air. “We tell her the truth. Both of us want her. Neither of us needs her to choose. If she wants one of us, the other steps back and stays her friend and means it. If she wants both—”
“Then she has both,” Emilio said. He was surprised how easy it was to say.
“And Wells?”
“Wells has to say it himself.”
The patio door slid open behind them. Ondine stood there in an old sweatshirt and bare feet, her braid half undone, her phone in her hand. The screen lit her face blue.
“He sent me a message,” she said.
She turned the phone around so they could both read it.
On Monday morning I’m withdrawing from the Tidewell committee. It costs me nothing that matters. If you tell me not to, I won’t. L.
Fraser let out a low whistle. Emilio looked at her face. It was not frightened. It was something much more dangerous than frightened.
“What are you going to tell him?” Emilio asked.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll answer him tomorrow.”
She stepped out onto the warm concrete and slid the door shut behind her. The wind lifted the loose dark hair around her face. She looked at Fraser, and then at Emilio, and she did not look away first.
“Tonight,” Ondine said, “I have a question for you two.”
