“Get Up Close” by Natalie Rogers

Bill and Marie led me into the bedroom and gave me a Polaroid camera. The bed was dressed with a floral comforter. Raggedy Ann dolls filled the wood shelves lining the walls. The dolls belonged to Bill’s wife. She was at work. Bill and Marie had been fucking, while his wife was at work, for five years.

“All you’d have to do is take pictures,” Bill said.

Outside, thick, gray clouds pushed into the Valley. They sagged toward the power lines.

“Then why don’t you just set up a tripod?” I said.

“I want close-ups,” Marie said. “And yes. The idea of someone watching turns me on. Does that make you uncomfortable?”

“Not at all,” I said.

She gripped my shoulder and looked at me. Marie had a habit of punctuating her statements by placing a hand on my shoulder, or my cheek, which made me feel as though she was always on the brink of declaring her love for me. I wasn’t in love with her myself, but I liked that sort of attention.

“You’re the only person we’d ever ask,” she said.

“Why?”

I had only met them a year earlier, at a teacher’s conference in Orange County. All three of us taught sixth-grade English.

“You’re the only friend we have who doesn’t judge us,” Bill said. “People are open minded about drugs. They’re even open minded about murder. But when it comes to adultery, we’re still living by Moses.”

“Right and wrong doesn’t interest me,” I said.

I walked around the room, taking shots of the empty bed. I took a shot of the clouds outside, and another of Bill and Marie. I snapped the pictures quickly and flung them across the floral comforter with what I felt was the boldness of a pornographer. I took a shot of those dolls. I waved the photograph in the air and watched the ghostly forms darken into a row of Raggedy Anns. They had black circles for eyes and red triangles for noses. Their mouths were thin, red slits. Smile lines ran from the corners of their mouths up to their cheeks.

No wonder Bill had stopped sleeping with his wife. Talk about killing the mood. I knew that I would never be able to have sex with those dolls hovering over me, and I knew that my boyfriend wouldn’t be able to either.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “Let’s get started.”

They told me to sleep on it, and if I was still interested, to come back the following afternoon. I swept the pictures off the bed and handed them to Bill, but I stuffed the photograph of the dolls into the pocket of my jeans.

Bill pulled a paper shredder out from under the desk and fed the photographs into the machine. I watched it eat the picture of Bill and Marie. Bill said that this is what they did with all their pictures and letters, and this is what they would do with the photographs I took the next day. They had to destroy all evidence of their love.

At home, I found Chris lying on the couch in his underwear. He was on the phone. He didn’t look at me. I pushed his legs over to make room, and I sat down next to him. Rain rushed down the window overlooking the street. I could still make out the sky, the lawn, the sidewalk. But the rain blurred their edges, turning the world into a loose, watery thing.

“How big was it?” Chris said into the receiver. “More than five pounds?”

I heard a woman’s voice on the other end.

“Holey Moley,” he said.

“Tell your mom I say hi,” I said.

He cupped his hand over the receiver. “It’s Sally.”

I bounded into the bathroom and drew a bath. Every night, no matter what, we took a bath together. It was our hobby. I sat on the toilet seat and listened to the hot water pound into the tub.

Sally was his ex. She lived across the country, on the East Coast. When Chris went back East, to visit family, he saw Sally.

I never stayed in contact with my exes. After breaking up with me, my first ex sent me the lyrics to a song, the only words of which were, “stay away.” The next ex was more tactful. When I called him up, he told me that staying in touch would only hurt him, because he was still in love with me. This explanation enraged me because it was not original. I couldn’t believe that I had wasted two years on someone who would succumb to a cliché in a moment of crisis. I told him that and he hung up on me.

So I thought it was admirable that Chris was on such good terms with his ex, this Sally. But it was the third time that I’d come home that week to find him on the phone with her.

I had never met Sally, but I knew what she looked like. She was a skinny white girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. And she had boobs. Sally had huge bulbous boobs that hung off her torso like giant tumors.

When Chris first moved in with me, he’d left a box of photo albums in the living room before tucking them away in a closet. There was a whole album dedicated to Sally: Chris and Sally posing in cap and gown at their college graduation. Chris and Sally playing fetch with their German Sheppard. Chris and Sally wrestling on the beach in their swimsuits, their bodies pressed hard against each other, arms and legs interlocked.

Now I pulled the photograph of the Raggedy Ann dolls out of my pocket. I looked at their arms hanging limply by their sides. I looked at the their big frozen smiles. They smiled like lunatics. They smiled like people who thought that the best way to get through life was just to grin and bear it. If this was the attitude that Bill’s wife took towards her marriage, she deserved what she got.

I threw off my clothes and stomped into the living room. I stood over the couch, naked. I balled my hands into fists and pressed them to my hips.

“Bath’s ready,” I said.

He pressed his hand over the receiver. “I’ll meet you in there,” he said.

“Now or never,” I said.

In the tub, I sat with my back against the yellow tiled wall. He sat at the other end, with his head slanted around the faucet. Chris had blue eyes that bulged slightly from their sockets, and he had long arms and long legs. He looked sort of like a bug, like a giant mosquito. I had never dated anyone who looked like a bug before. I thought it was sexy.

“Why did Sally call?” I said.

“She caught a fish today,” he said. “She always calls when she catches something.”

“Why?”

“That’s just what we do.”

“What else do you do?”

He grinned. “Look at you, all jealous.”

“Answer the question.”

“We fish. We hunt.  In the winter, we ski.”

He worked a bar of soap over his hands. There was grease deep in the wrinkles around his knuckles, and there was grease under his fingernails. There was no way around it. He could wash his hands all day, and they’d still be dirty.

“I’m going to take pictures of Bill and Marie tomorrow,” I said. “Pictures of them fucking.”

“I bet you’ll love that. You get to be a part of the excitement, but from a safe distance.”

“Don’t you think it’s immoral? Hypocritical? That I expect you to be faithful to me, and at the same time, help them cheat?”

“Tell me what you want.”

I watched him shampoo his hair. When he was done he scooped the suds off his head and rubbed it into his beard. Then he sank beneath the surface of the water and it clouded over. I could see his belly and his shins jutting out of the water, but I couldn’t see his face. I grabbed his hands and pulled him back up.

“Let’s keep things simple,” I said. “I won’t take the pictures, if you stop talking to Sally.”

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I love Sally.”

I started to stand, but he pushed me back down. The bathwater sloshed around the tub, spilling into the drain beneath the faucet. The pipes moaned. Chris wrapped his dirty hands around my feet. He held me there.

“Listen to me,” he said. “She’s like a sister.”

“You better say something original,” I said.

“I’m in love with you.”

“What. Does. That. Even. Mean?” I punctuated each word by slapping my hands against the water. It felt good, so I kept going. I slapped harder and harder. I sent waves through the bathtub. The water leapt over the edge and smacked onto the floor. I brewed a terrible storm. The tub was an ocean. I was God. God was furious.

Later that night, while Chris slept on the couch, I stood by the bedroom window, watching the rain. The rain pummeled the street, as if it were trying to force its way through the cement and into the earth. But the cement didn’t crack. It didn’t give.

I watched puddles form on the sidewalk. I watched the rain flood the corner. If it rained long enough, the Valley would fill up, and then we could all move away and start over. Next time, I wouldn’t get involved with any dirty photographs. I wouldn’t get involved with any three-somes or two-somes or exes. I wouldn’t get involved with anyone.

I picked up the photograph of the dolls. They smiled at me from their wooden throne, dressed in their hats and play-clothes. Their arms hung open, ready to hug.

Bill’s wife probably kept the dolls close to her bed because she was lonely. Maybe she knew about his affair. Or maybe she didn’t know about the affair, but she was lonely anyway, because she was one of those unlucky people who are unsatisfied with life no matter how good or bad they have it. Or maybe she was generally content with her life and only experienced momentary flashes of sadness that vanished as soon as she hugged a doll.

I tiptoed to the living room and watched Chris sleep on the couch. His arms were wrapped around a pillow. He couldn’t fall asleep without one. It could be any pillow. It could even be a sweater or a sleeping bag. As long as he had something in his arms, he slept soundly. I took the pillow from him and his eyes squinted open. I lay down and pressed my back to his belly.

“You’re a difficult person,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“You think everything is about you.”

“I know.”

“I can’t change you. You’re never going to change.”

“I know. What should we do?”

I listened to the sound of the rain hitting the roof.

“We just have to see it through,” he said.

He wrapped his long bug arms around me then, and we slept that way until morning.

The next day, I went to Bill’s house. They took off their clothes, and I took the pictures as those Raggedy Anns grinned above us. I stood by the bed and snapped a picture of Marie as she masturbated on the floral comforter.

“Don’t be afraid,” Bill said. “Move closer.”

So I crawled into bed and took a picture of Marie straddling Bill’s head, hovering over the tip of his outstretched tongue. I moved closer. I took a shot of Marie rocking her hips into his lips, while she looked straight into the camera. She placed a hand on my shoulder. And then she pinned me to the bed and pulled off my pants as Bill knelt over us, snapping the pictures. I gathered them into my hands and pressed them to my chest.

I couldn’t wait to show Chris.

Natalie Rogers’s work has previously appeared in Word Riot and The Reed College Creative Review. In 2006, she was awarded a summer fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Last fall, Rogers graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University.