The job trailed on the end of a somewhat dispiriting second tour of duty in Los Angeles this Spring, though for my own reasons I was not anxious for the trip to be over. My three-and-a-half-year relationship had sputtered out in a terse series of phonecalls a few days prior, and while my initial reaction to getting dumped had been an unstable mixture of guilt and exhileration, the knowledge that the next morning would find me on a bus, alone, headed back to face my former boyfriend in the apartment we shared had begun to weigh on my mind.
The photographer, Daniel, picked me up from the Emperor of Rome’s house at 8. His mother let Daniel in as I was finishing my tea. As soon as we were in the car, Daniel became the first person to whom I had to explain my sudden change of station in life; two weeks earlier, at the casting, he’d mentioned heading to New York and, thus prompted, I’d nattered on about my then-boyfriend’s and my then-imminent intentions of moving to Brooklyn together. Our apartment search. Our opinions of moving companies. Our cat.
Daniel eyed the Emperor and his mother as they stood on their porch in the early light. “Well, it was probably for the best,” he said, carefully.
What is it about heartbreak that seems to attract other broken hearts, like iron filings coalescing around a magnet? For weeks, I could barely last ten minutes at a party or a job without being introduced to someone going through a divorce, or someone whose partner had simply cheated and left, or someone who had just been dumped, via voicemail, by a boyfriend of two years. Maybe, like Joan Didion once wrote about the Washington, D.C., political class, the newly heartbroken simply operate on a frequency pitched beyond the range of normal human hearing; maybe we find each other in the same, ineluctable way bats triangulate the positions of trees in the dark.
On this job, it was the makeup artist. Musician, younger woman. Six years.
The clients were a married couple who clearly had the kind of sweetly enviable union where each partner’s every gesture speaks to their fundamental solidity and comfort as a couple. She used to run a vintage store and styled each photo from the back of a van crammed with shoes, hats, scarves and hosiery; she would dress me in their lovely clothes, then add Givenchy sunglasses whose lenses she’d had retinted, strands of Bakelite beads, or a massive leather frame bag. He, a music producer, talked quietly with the digital tech and smiled his approval as Daniel’s take emerged onscreen.
I started the day well enough, fortified with Starbucks and the self-belief that a smart little outfit can help confer, but during every break I felt a bit of my energy dissipate. I kept thinking of the moment when I’d turn the key in its lock, of what I would find in the apartment was was no longer really mine, and of how the day insisted on ending and becoming the next.
It was when people started asking me if I was all right that I knew I was doing the job for which I’d been hired capably, at best, and the knowledge my professionalism was visibly faltering — confirmation that against all my hopes, the fractures inside me had an external complement — was crushing.
When we finished the shoot, the light was failing, and I was cold from wearing the resort clothes in the brisk sea air. Daniel suggested the team get Thai food back in Silverlake or somewhere, but it didn’t happen. The makeup artist hugged me good bye. “You’ll get through this,” she said, sternly.
Two months later, I was anxious, in all senses of the word, to see the pictures.
A few years ago, there was a period in my life when I found myself unable to write — not an essay, not a newspaper article, not a two-pages-doublespaced, just-prove-you-read-it book response — without first sitting, for an hour or two, in front of a blinking cursor and letting tears dribble off my cheeks. I developed this curious behaviour partly because by this point, Peter and I already lived together, and I knew my pathetic, paralysed display would like as not earn a fresh pot of tea and a hand on my shoulder, but I did it mostly because I had not then learned how to begin writing without first having either an end in mind or a head full of purest fear. Rubbing as close to my deadline as possible would bring the fear, and crying was the best method I had of stalling in hopes of an end materialising. During this time, I produced work I still count among my best, but there is none of it that I can today read without first taking a deep breath and pursing my lips. I am still in some measure afraid to face the raw vein of emotion the writing, for whatever reason, tapped.
I didn’t think it a possibility, when I got back into modeling, that there would ever be photographs that could instill in me the same fear, the same desire to hold the paper at a safe angle.
Now these are among the images I show prospective clients daily.
All images by Daniel Bernauer.
