“These are amazing.”
“Here.” He handed her the stack of photos of the band.
As Sandra went through them, she could see the difference in the photos—there was a progression in their confidence and in their music, and it was evident in the photos. It was as though Rick captured something that they hadn’t even seen in themselves; his documentation of them almost breathed life into them as a unit. Sandra wasn’t so sure they’d have seen themselves this way if not for Rick.
She looked up at him, the glow of the room highlighting the whites of his eyes. “You really captured us.”
“You think?”
“I do. You captured us as even we don’t see us. Does that make sense?”
“True reality? It’s an illusion. We never see ourselves truthfully, but this camera comes close. Sometimes it shows us things we don’t want to see.” He pointed to the photo of Ezra and Lily in what appeared to be an intimate moment coming out of the Shack’s bathroom, Hugh nowhere in sight. Rick took the photo and tore it up. “Hugh tells Kim that your family doesn’t support your music career.” He was placing another set of photos to dry. “That’s bullshit. You can write music, you know.”
Sandra hadn’t remembered sharing much about her family with Hugh. That he’d shared it with Kim felt like a small betrayal. She was oddly silent.
He looked up from the trays of solution when she didn’t respond. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” said Rick.
“You didn’t,” Sandra lied. “They want a normal life for me, that’s all.”
“But you are normal.” He folded his arms and leaned against the wall. “You’re talented. They should be thrilled.”
Sandra nearly snorted. “You should have seen the looks on their faces when my piano teacher called them after my second lesson. They were expecting some fat-fingered version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and what they got was the beginning of a Grieg piece.” Sandra was still thumbing through the photo stack Rick had taken at the Shack. What she was beginning to notice was that she was the focal point of all of the photos. She looked through them a second time just to make sure.
“You’re a fucking virtuoso. They should have been happy.”
“I’m hardly a virtuoso. My parents didn’t want a freak for a kid. I never went back for another lesson. I think the teacher called them for a year.”
“That’s awful.”
“After that, playing the piano is all I wanted to do, but they sold it.”
“They sold your piano?”
She laughed. “Yes, they encouraged me to try the flute instead.”
“How was that?”
“Oh, I was terrible so the flute stayed.” She smiled at the recollection. “But every chance I got, I’d stay after school and I’d find the piano in the auditorium and I’d play.”
“I never had normal,” offered Rick. “When I see Kim and Hugh with their father, I realize that I feel like an outsider to a normal life.”
“But Hugh hates his father.”
Rick laughed. “Hugh is a spoiled child who doesn’t know how good he has it. Hugh’s just upset that his father remarried. Kim is, too, but she’s working through it. My mother fed us by working a bunch of low-wage factory jobs and the kindness of the boyfriends she brought home. Maybe that’s why I view life through a lens. It’s a barrier of sorts. Everyone is over there.” He held his arm out. “I’m over here. I’m a voyeur, viewing life from a safe distance, trying to capture a moment. That’s really what we’re doing here right now. We’re living in a moment in time like we’ll never see again and I just want to capture it all. I swear I was a painter or something in a past life, like I didn’t get enough of it—chronicling life. Do I sound crazy?”
Sandra hadn’t known any of this about Rick’s childhood.
“I can tell if someone will live or die,” Sandra blurted. She had no idea why she felt the need to tell him this. “Is that weird?” She looked down at the photos—three of them of her. He shifted, an awareness of her that he didn’t seem to have before.
“I would say it was strange except I saw you the other night with Ezra.”
She looked down at the photos and fanned them out. The confession had made her bold. “These are all of me.”
He hadn’t stopped staring at her. “I know.”
It was the simplicity of the statement—no denial on his part—that gave the room a strange electricity.
“Why?”
He didn’t answer. The silence forced a tension that seemed to draw them together. He reached out to touch her hand, and she didn’t pull away.
With Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul” playing on his radio, he pulled her to him, lifted her chin, and kissed her. His lips and hands felt so foreign to her, and yet he was so familiar. And even though it was her first kiss with him—what should have been a beginning between them—there was also a profound sense of loss that she couldn’t shake.
The next day Rick suggested that the band head down in the early evening to the bed of the LA River and take some publicity photos for posters. The stark concrete of the covered river was a perfect backdrop. Rick moved them around getting the right shot. With the angles of the covered river, he could put them on different heights. He had them sitting in one set and standing in another. There was a heightened awareness she and Rick had of each other, but they kept their distance.
It wasn’t until the weeks dragged on and she saw him sitting next to Kim in the living room or taking photos of the band that her desire for him was cemented. She was now more attuned to his stories. There was a vulnerability in his eyes that Kim, with the confidence of a child raised by a millionaire, didn’t sense. They were both damaged creatures—Sandra and Rick. Hugh and Kim were just pretending.
But there was one more photo that would become the photo. Kim and Sandra tagged along with a backstage shoot at the Hollywood Bowl on an empty evening. A piano had been set up for a performance and Sandra had sat down to play; the Bowl was empty except for the cleaning crew.
Rick had gone backstage to take a photo of a jazz pianist who’d been practicing, leaving Kim and Sandra alone on the empty stage.
“I don’t know where Hugh gets it,” said Kim.
“What?”
“The desire to perform.” Kim shook her head. “I don’t know how you do it.”
Sandra sat down in front of this instrument—a Mason & Hamlin—and set her fingers over the keys. “Let’s pretend you’re on stage.”
Kim slid in the seat beside her.
“Are you terrified now?”
Kim laughed looking out at the blackness. “No. The seats are mostly empty.”
For Sandra, the grand piano was where she excelled, and when her fingers hit the keys it was as if something played through her. Never had she hit her runs with such marked precision; never had the delicate notes been so carefully plucked. So mesmerizing was
the performance that the cleaning crew sat down in the front row to watch. Sandra ran through Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Beethoven, Debussy and Satie with fury, her hands pounding down with surety.