The Bigger Picture

Irene was enrolled in an art school in the Midwest were she took pictures of meadows and lovers. ‘Lovers’ is too intimate a word for  her bues; Patrick, Rob and Allen. She just fucked them a few times over the course of a few months but they each had a striking physical quality that were to her keen eye as a corner of a wallet poking out of loose pocket to a thief. Patrick played football in high school although he wasn’t so much a player as he was a large mass of meat that intimidated players. He was a creative writing major, and he wrote honest but painfully trite pieces about his father and drunken nights in cars, which, taking from experience, is a common stage for dramas written by young hacks. (Including myself.)

She didn’t like Patrick much. He was startlingly simple from his attire to his Neanderthal -esqe way of eating. (Heaping fork/spoonful’s shoved into his face like a jailed man whom is afraid of having his meal stolen.) She hated how he crowded her when they slept, she especially hated that he lived with his parents and sometimes he, albeit innocently, coerced her into spending the night at his parents house where they slept in the den on a dog hair covered futon. Patrick’s parents loved her, he had not had many girls over during high school and seeing Irene, all dark haired and smirking like a girl in on a joke told to her by the president or the cool girls at the mall, they were happy to accommodate her in hopes that she’d stay with Patrick. After all, Patricks father was a security guard and his mother on disability and the idea of shelling out the tuition to send there son to school for something so nebulous and not financially lucrative as creative writing was a touch pill to swallow, so anything right Patrick did they cherished and smothered. They even had a picture of the two on the refrigerator. Patrick, giant sized and lumbering with his arm Irene who smiled, but a rehearsed smile that masked the distance she wanted from 6’5 Patrick and his simple, bleak family.

She photographed Patrick first. Black and White photo’s of him walking down a crowed city street holding her coffee and his energy drink. She was attracted to him in that moment more than she’d been in all their knowing of each other. With his hands full, his dusty grey hoodie and K-Mart pants it ignited something in her core, in the sticky reaches of her brain and she fell in love not with Patrick but the huge, black and white oaf that showed in the photos.  Patrick could sense a rise in her energy that afternoon. She seemed manic and feral in a way that excited the writer in Patrick and as he watched her hop from angle to angle, snapping a hundred shots a minute he felt, for the first time in their short union like he wasn’t winging it, like he wasn’t a burden but that he was as special to her as she was to him. He smiled awkwardly and hopefully and although the heat from her coffee pained him he’d hold it there for close to 20 minutes as she photographed him. With his hands full he was severally handicapped, unable to write or tie his shoes or open doors and there was something in this perceived inability that rang out as true. That afternoon she gave him only the 2nd blowjob in their 3 months (Swatting his hands away from her hair and face, even forcibly placing them on his rotund hairy stomach with the same intent one would use to scold a puppy.) and called it quits the two days later.

Rob was next. He rode a dirt bike and worked in the kitchen of a restaurant. He had neck tattoos and a bun that was a millennial girls wet dream.  Rob was a certified babe, scruffy face, gruff voice, but short  dressing in all black. A son of the dark emo days, he sledded the CDs for Otis Redding albums and rolled cigarettes and talked about net neutrality and never said ‘bitch’ or ‘cunt’ or ‘faggot’ (Anymore.) Most women who gush but Irene, was in many regards gorgeous. Ample chest, full lips, no notable ass but thighs that were as classically feminine as they were genderless and ideal, as if a unisex prosthetic. And her eyes, seemed to see exoskeletons in color. She never seemed intimidated, never bowed or broken she could when a staring contest with Medusa. Rob had girls but never on the caliber of Irene. They met at a house party and kissed on the balcony. Irene left intentionally before they could exchange numbers but a few weeks later popped in his restaurant ‘casually’ with a few friends. Rob played it cool and Irene’s friends swooned and blushed and giggle and had immoral thought but Irene played coy. They met that night and Rob spent $250 on diner and drinks and cabs and ubers and a caricature drawn by a man claiming to be blind who need to molest their faces in order to perfect his sketch. They didn’t fuck that night because Irene was too drunk but in the morning they had a slow sort of sex that looked like a caterpillar walking up a mirror on his reflection. The sun painted Rob’s blue room and although she didn’t particularly like that his ‘bed’ was two mattresses stacked on the floor, she felt inspired looking at his naked tattooed, fit form, rolling cigarettes and talking shit about the bands his friends were in. She excused herself from his apartment but came back 10 minutes later with a disposable camera. He was making breakfast, Irene made Rob stop, go back in his room, and take his clothes off. He asked her if she’d take her clothes off too and she did. And Rob stared and her naked body, her pubic hair was dark and matted and looked irresistible tucked between her thighs. Her naked form made Rob hard, so they fucked but not just to fuck but to get rid of the pesky hard on. Because Irene had bought the camera to take photos of him soft and naked and dressed down and preforming cool or hip or mysterious. She had him continue making breakfast; eggs and sausage patties and hash browns. She wished she could make scratch and sniff prints of these photos.

She wanted photos of his tattoos and little pink prick and hair in a messy albeit still, painfully, amazing bun. She wanted a vulnerable Rob, she photographed him until the camera was full and they fucked again but never spoke. Not Rob’s choice.

Allen was third. He was comedian and he was a friend of a friend of a friend. Allen had ease dropped a conversation Irene and her friend Harley were having at a bar about a girl they disliked named Nicole.

“Anyone named Nicole is problematic.” He said. They looked at him. His short hair and glasses and sheepish eyes, his uneven mustache, and a smile that said ‘I’m an alright person. Alright is powerful word because its nether good nor bad, alright is layered and complex. Alright is storied and deep and needs inspection. Alright is neither day nor night, buts its dawn and dusk. In many ways alright is the most realistic condition we can ask for.” That night Allen’s shaky charm and the sentence; ‘If you’re going to have a threesome, we might as well have it with a black guy.” Whispered by a drunken Harley, lead the three of them to Harley apartment for a threesome that wasn’t nearly as cool as pornography has lead the masses to believe. The next morning Harley rushed to work, leaving Irene and Allen alone. It was awkward, they needed Harley, they needed that third energy from when their own became too reactionary and not proactive enough. They stumbled through conversation before Allen cut his losses and went home.

Days later Irene ran into him after class and they, feeling energized and maybe a little hopeful, had coffee and talked and it was good. Irene found Allen attractive in a sort of plant on a window seal type of way, as if she knew that in the right dirt he’d grow into something timeless and iconic but instead he was homogenized and put in a cheap thrift store pot. Allen thought Irene talked like a movie character, as if the greatest minds from stage, screen, prose, poetry, politics and music’s crafted her words. He wanted to be better for her, to work hard and open veins and build inverted pyramids all to prove his worth to her. He though of Harley, who was more conventionally pretty, but Irene was the one he loved, he could tell from the moment she turned her head to meet his brown eyes; Her hair whipped back and it made a sort of ‘stage curtain pulling back’ affect.  They began dating and Allen’s ex girlfriend scoffed at his new white girlfriend and one time Patrick saw the two holding hands and felt small and alone. It may have been love but they were on shaky ground. Allen didn’t have a job and thus felt inadequate and Irene’s affection needed gusts of unbridled confidence like fires need air and kindle and eventually they became strangers. Irene never photographed him personally, but she had did have several pictures of the two of them others had taken on Facebook. She grabbed her camera, a Canon ESOS 5D she’d saved 3 months paychecks for, and she pulled up all the images from her and Allen’s 7 months and took pictures of all of them from her computer screen. Then she edited them, almost like mixing paint, the images became liquid a distorted, one could make out and hand her or a leg there but for the most part it was a conglomeration of photos superimposed on one another like candle wax melted together.