§ Journalist

Miriam

by Georgette Freeman

Obviously, they were not locals. Looking out of place in The Bubble Café, he was trying out an apparently new camera at their table. You know the type: thinning hair, thinning legs, a growing gut, and a monstrously long lens on a film-type camera. “No,” he said to the woman in front of him, a wife most likely, “turn you head to the left,” and then reached across the table and with a one-handed grip of her chin, posed her to his satisfaction.

And it was right there, at the point of his manhandling of his woman’s head, that Miriam leaned across our table and said quietly, apropos of what was going on in front of us, “You know I never let him near me with a camera.” Knowing only that she was long divorced and had a grown son, I egged her on with “Really?”

“Yes,” she replied, ”I wouldn’t let my husband photograph me. Because, either through the lens or in a print, he would come to see that I never was going to be the person he wanted, let alone a beauty. And you know, sometimes I was sure he needed control of me, if not command, and sure as god, I wasn’t going to be possessed by anyone else again.” She added, “My boy had an excuse.”

Miriam went on, “I often watched my husband early in the marriage in the company of other women and for a long time I could see that he just didn’t have that same sense of abandon as when he was with me. But over time, all that changed and when I saw he could sweet-talk anyone into a photo session, often away from the house, and I couldn’t get him to put down the camera, I took my son with me and left him."

“When we were married, I’d rather it be his dick between us. I could reason with the dick. However, there is no reasoning with a camera, the lens is pitiless.” Earbuds back in and returning to her Apple Air, she added, “Guys invented photography.”

Copyright © 2014 by Georgette Freeman. All rights reserved.

Looking to dignify her hand, Georgette Freeman is a student of calligraphy,
as well as a journalist and photographer, book artist, and a retired SEC examiner.

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