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Newly-developed memories smell like vinegar. Jones’ nose itches with it.
Schubert Green’s makeshift theatre-home doesn’t have running water, or gas, but it is a stroke of luck that the one working prop in the whole play is a red lightbulb which hands from the centre overhead bar from a hook clamp and bolt. And so, on dark nights, behind a curtain, Schubert can fashion his sometime-bedroom into a perfectly functioning darkroom. All Jones needed to provide was developer solution (the brown bottles used in the play are filled with tap water). Schubert, in return for an evening’s company, is happy to lend a hand.
“I thought I asked you to research this. For Augie,” Schubert says, hanging another fresh print to dry.
“You did. I took the photographs.” In the red light, Schubert doesn’t quite look real. He’s flat, and half-composed of shadows. “I never learned how to develop.”
“That’s the most important part.” He holds a corner to the wire, next to Augie’s photo of Midge Campbell. “Hand me another clip, will you?”
Schubert is able to make quick work of the prints and, settling down with the easy offer of ‘care for a drink?’, Jones sits across from him. They discover that the edge of the stage, hanging over the orchestra pit, is as good a place as any to toast a glass.
Schubert swills his whisky in a meditative, careful circle, haloing the edge of his glass in a filmy residue. “Polly doesn’t drink, so…” He keeps a fine cellar, stored inside the hollow vending machine labelled ‘CANDY’. “More for me.”
It takes a few hours for the prints to develop. They drink, and they talk, but only a little, choosing rather to fill the time with that comfortable sort of silence that is found only in familiarity. Meanwhile, behind the curtain, Jones’ chemical-past begins to affix itself to paper in the dark.
“Do you remember what they’re of?” Schubert asks, pouring himself another dram. “The pictures, I mean.”
“Some of them.” He finishes his glass. “One of them is graphic. In a… uhh… sexual sense. I know that much. But I think I hope the others shouldn’t be.”
“Ah.” Schubert fills Jones’ empty glass before he can ask. “Only one? That’s a shame.”
Jones rattles a hollow laugh. “I didn’t take them for you.” He catches himself, quirking his eyebrow. “Well, I took them because you told me to, but then I stopped taking them for you.” He barely knows what he means when he adds, suddenly, “I took them for proof of… proof.”
Schubert doesn’t question this, but just brushes the fabric over his knees in a contemplative way that makes Jones feel almost certain that he has understood him.
“How long do they take to dry?”
“A few hours. With any luck, by midnight.”
“I remember this one.”
Schubert holds a photograph between finger and thumb. It was taken outside the Tarkington stage door, opening night. Schubert, centre of the picture, is halfway through a quick turn from Mercedes on one side of him, smoking a cigarette, to Asquith on his other arm, standing with one knee up on the step, the last vestiges of Montana still clinging to him like stubborn desert dust. Schubert’s face, in motion, is a horizontal blur.
“You were telling a joke,” Jones remarks. Mercedes is laughing, having forgiven him for the dress rehearsal fight, smoke puttering from her open mouth. Asquith has one hand clapped on his knee. “I can’t remember now what it was.”
“It’s the only colour they had left, asshole,” Mercedes croaked, blowing smoke purposefully in Schubert’s face.
“Not as hilarious as it was originally,” Schubert says, a smile on his lip, there, but distant. “Something about Mercedes’ glasses?”
A roll of marking tape was bound three, maybe four times around the bridge of Mercedes’ spectacles, thieved from stage management, a haphazard attempt at regaining long-distance vision.
“The tape was green,” Schubert explains, gesturing to the picture with his forefinger. Looking closer, Jones sees the bulge between the lenses, and the wonky sit of the glasses across her face, and he remembers with a smile. “Only colour they had left.”
“We couldn’t use green for the stage marks. When the UFO arrives, you can’t see the tape.”
“We discovered green beings out her eyes. Her new spectacles were,” Schubert sees them in his mind’s eye, “green.”
They sit across from one another in the men’s dressing room. One window opens to the whirring street, and one moth beats against the glass in tiring circles. Jones’ eyes, distant and ever-so tired, gaze back at him from the mirror over Schubert’s shoulder. As Schubert works through the other photographs, Jones is unafraid. If anything, it is a relief to have another observe them, and assure Jones that they are real, and that they really happened at all.
“When was this taken?”
Schubert shows him a self-portrait. It’s much like that Augie takes of himself - with shrapnel. But Jones’ shrapnel is on the inside.
“I can’t remember taking that one.”
“I’m hearing you, here. Here. Breathing in the dark.” Jones spoke to the mirror. With any luck, Conrad would show himself in his own eyes looking back at him. If he really was in there, he’d hear it. “I don’t think I want to try to understand Augie anymore.”
Unlike Augie, the location of Jones’ injury leaves him vulnerable to an internal bleed. He lies to Schubert. He remembers exactly taking this one.
Just as he remembers taking the next one, which Schubert takes from the pack, gives a blinking look, and passes discreetly to Jones, apologising. Jones knows what he will see before he sees it; he saw it a hundred times before.
One detail he can hardly remember now is how he had convinced him to pose for the photograph in the first place. He is sure Schubert is wondering the same thing. But, lo and behold, his fingertips pass feather-light over a square of flat, cool photograph paper, and he tricks his senses into imagining that the rendered form of Conrad’s thigh is warm and capable.
Conrad plucked his dressing gown from behind the door.
“Don’t. Please. You’ll spoil the picture.”
He hesitated, turning back to his lover, spread so elegantly in the drapery, passing his new toy camera between his hands.
“I’m cold,” he returns.
“You’re hot.” Conrad groans. “Take your jacket away. I want to see your co—”
“I don’t think Schubert gave you that camera for you to start peddling smut.”
“I think Schubert would like nothing more. Turn to the side. Ugh. Your profile makes me weak.”
Conrad stands in profile. His left foot is hooked in the bedsheet he is halfway to detangling himself from. His fringe is cowlicked into a peak above his forehead. He is still glossy from his and Jones’ sweat. There is a particular shade of grey on the high of Conrad’s cheekbone that Jones recognises as the curious shade of pink Conrad turned when they made love. He had refused to drop the dressing gown.
Jones’ fingertips feel numb in a way that might be mistaken for warmth. Closing his eyes for a brief moment, the paper metamorphoses into Conrad’s skin.
Schubert catches him with his eyes closed, distracts him with the next photograph.
“Who took this?”
Jones opens his eyes, sees himself, and is momentarily startled to discover a photograph that he himself didn’t take.
“I don’t know.”
“Someone stole your camera.”
In the photograph, Jones stands in the very same dressing room which, now, he sits in. The window is propped open, just as now it is. There are bouquets of flowers wedged against the mirror. He must be halfway through his metamorphosis; there are shades of Augie beneath his eyes, tensing in his shoulders.
“I guess someone must’ve.”
Schubert lends Jones a folder to take the prints home in. He takes his own out of it: a picture of him and Polly on their wedding day, the day Clark was born and barely the length of Schubert’s forearm, and another that he hasn’t seen in years.
“Here.”
Schubert passes Jones a yellowing photograph, small and slightly dog-eared, showing white creases like raised scar tissue. One fissure runs from the top corner and down through a familiar cheek.
“How old is he here?”
“Twenty-eight.”
He’s outside. Jones so rarely got to see Conrad outside. And the sun is bright enough to leave him squinting.
He barely saw a single summer with him in it.
“Where are you?”
“Wyoming. He took me out to the family ranch one summer, where he grew up.”
Conrad had spoken with Jones once about taking him out there. His gut twists in an angry jealousy that they never made it.
Conrad, in the photograph, is clean-shaven, wearing a loose shirt, sitting on a fence. He smiles so unbelievably easily. It is a smile that Jones thought was his alone.
“Were you…?”
“Us? No… I mean, almost. It’s not that I hadn’t thought about it. When he invited me out to Wyoming, I went there with the express intention of getting laid. But as soon as I got out there, it was pretty clear we wouldn’t. We never really worked that way. We both knew that much.”
He’s impossibly beautiful. Jones can’t help but wonder whether Schubert harbours the sort of broken heart that he’d never known.
“I did think he was gorgeous, though. When I first met him.”
“I wish I’d known him then,” Jones says. Then he gasps. It’s instinct, like he’s all out of breath.
“Keep it,” Schubert insists when Jones attempts to pass the photograph back.
“No…”
“It’s more yours than mine. He is.”