Francesca sits on an empty paint can and watches the East Village resurrect itself. A man hoses down the sidewalk in front of the 12th Street Deli. Birds fly from window to window. Wrapped in wool jackets and scarves, people bound to jobs and responsibilities like dogs to Frisbees. Frozen leaves scratch against the window. A cold, snow-less day. January 19, 1981.
Francesca lives for these few peaceful minutes in the morning before she speaks to anyone. She will drink water from the rusted tap, think about taking a cold bath in the tub, and have her morning conversation with Mother. The phone is already ringing, blasting through the dusty air of the studio. Francesca walks to the kitchen, shaking her naked body awake. She puts on her flannel robe, picks up the phone and leans back over the counter. Water stains on the ceiling. Pieces of insulation like cotton puffs bursting from one corner of the room.
“Francesca, dear, how are we feeling today?” We, a ridiculous word, a word that means, more than any other, that you are alone. Crazy; manic; last night I clawed at my eyes with my toenails. “Fine, Mother. Good. I’ll shoot today.”
“That’s great, dear!”
During the piano recitals of her childhood, Francesca wore glitter on her hands to make them sparkle. Weeks later she would find specks of silver and gold draining with the water from her newly washed hair or glowing at the end of a Q-tip. Mother’s enthusiasm is like glitter: it’s in bad taste and gets stuck everywhere. Mother’s chirping voice catches in the blades of the broken ceiling fan and drips down the walls. Francesca pulls the receiver from her ear and directs it toward the window. Let the street give the answers.
“Francesca, honey are you there?” The words float to the window and stick. It’s no use. She puts the receiver back to her ear.
“Are you going to throw today, Mother?”
“Don’t be cruel, Francesca. You know I haven’t in years.” A disgrace, your potter’s wheel that sits rotting in the shed.
“So, your father and I are getting in tomorrow around three.”
Her book. Her photographs. The exhibition. Francesca knows she should have an opinion. “We can’t meet here,” she says. “The heat is broken.” Which is true. There is only the space heater that sputters all night and makes her head sweat while her toes go numb. “Let’s meet somewhere else. Café des Artistes, maybe. Before, after, I don’t care.”
“Of course you care, dear. This is your moment.”
Is it? Right now, Francesca’s pictures are being hung in the gallery – installed, made manifest, suspended. They will be lit by special bulbs; women who trail their fingers along the security ropes will wear shoes that cost more than Francesca’s rent. They will look at Francesca’s full hips and small breasts from all angles. They will consider her hair flowing out into an empty field in one photograph, her head turned to the side as if she has just been slapped in another.
Francesca tilts her head back and allows strands of her hair to mix with the dried food stuck to the unwashed dishes. She should call Sloane. She remembers, eyeing the letter that sits, unopened, on the floor. She must be worried about me.
“Francesca? Did you hear me?”
“It’s only a small gallery, Mother. It’s no big deal.”
“Of course it is, dear.”
Rain spins in her mother’s bones, Francesca thinks, and that’s why she ruins everything. She is gloomy and private as mold, only noticeable when she begins to make people sick and they must relocate or risk their health. But Francesca has a strange fondness for mold and dust, so she has some appreciation for the way her mother makes her feel.
“Francesca, are you listening to me?”
The Alternative Museum of New York. She is the lone exhibitor. She will have to mingle with the crowd and smile; there will be no other artists as buffers.
“Of course. I’m still here. Just thinking about the exhibition.”
But what she thinks about is Mother standing in the breakfast nook with the Mexican tile floor, flush now with green and gold light breaking through the forest of evergreens beyond the house. Stop stop wishing for things. “Francesca, will you meet us at the airport?”
Francesca rubs dish soap in her armpits. Tomorrow. She can already see them getting off the plane: her father sunken with the fatigue of a man who obeys his wife in all things; her mother flitting around him like a disturbed insect. She will adjust her blouse and rummage through her purse for something, anything. “I don’t know, Mother, I guess I’ll be nervous. I guess I’ll need some time to get ready.” A firm voice. That ought to do it.
Francesca knows she will have to sign the photography book. It’s a book of prints she sent out on a whim to the same photographer who rejected all of her Italy prints, her best prints. She will sit and smile and sign her name under the worst photos she’s ever taken; the ones they are hanging now. Perhaps this very minute. Francesca bangs her heels against the cabinets. The cheap wood rattles and creaks.
“So I guess you can’t meet us. What a shame. Your father will be disappointed. What is that racket?”
“Well, you know what they say,” she says, keeping her feet still now, trying to keep her voice light. “Working all the time.” Another lie. Ever since she received word about the show, she has left her photographs alone for weeks and months, kneeling before the stacked rolls of unexposed film each morning like some kind of shrine, wanting so badly to see what she has created, knowing it will always be nothing, and if it is nothing, if it is crap, it will be the thing most loved. This is the maddening part. She keeps the photos in the dark to torture them, as a way of controlling their secrets. The energy of a thing wound up in a silent canister, unknown to her, frightens and motivates her; it keeps her oddly grounded.
Francesca turns on the faucet and rinses the soap from her stubbly underarms. She listens to her mother recalculate as the water works its way over the neglected dishes and gurgles in the drain. She says, “Okay, then. Shall I bring you something nice to wear?” Francesca turns off the water. Her poor society mother with artist eyes gone gray from useless chatter over colorful lunch plates for show on garden verandas. For show, everything for show. The show.
“Since I’m naked already in the photographs, I probably don’t need to wear anything special.”
“Well. Then just go naked.” A door slams down the hallway.
“Redundant, don’t you think?”
“That isn’t the word I would use to describe you. Francesca.”
Her name. Slow drip of water. Angry horn wailing outside.
“What word would you use?” She realizes that she desperately wants to know. When was the last time she really wanted something from her mother? Second grade. Francesca had asked for permission to paint her room gold, the color of the Tuscany wheat fields just before dusk. Her mother had refused.
“Precocious.”
“You mean extreme.” This will hurt. This is the word used to justify her expulsion from boarding school after it was discovered that for one entire semester, Francesca had been living in her closet and using her dorm room as a studio.
“Maybe you should think about getting a roommate.”
“Or a lover?”
“Or a boyfriend.”
“Or a girlfriend.”
“That’s right. Let’s all just do whatever we like.” The spit of a Zippo lighter. Francesca wants to be different from her mother: she wants to live with the keen eye and lean body of an archer, hyper vigilant to the smallest motion, her eye always on the prize. She hates herself for cashing her parents’ checks that arrive each month in an envelope with her name typed on the outside. As her mother exhales, Francesca imagines her looking out over Boulder’s tree-spotted hills while she curses her difficult daughter, her only daughter, her extreme daughter.
“I’m sorry. I’m just busy.” She knows her mother will respond to these empty apologies, as persistent in their relationship as sunshine on a June day. “Sorry,” she repeats and this time she is. A panic fills her; she is pushing Mother further and further back, stretching the arrow in her bow. She is terrified of the release.
“We’ll see you tomorrow, then. At the Café.” The singsong voice returns. The bow slacks.
When Mother hangs up, the walls breathe out and the rats living inside them begin their daily marathon. Francesca drops a few spoonfuls of Sanka into a cold mug of water and mixes it with her finger. She lights a cigarette and alternates between slurping and sucking. As she crosses the floor to the window, the wood is so cold she’s afraid her feet will stick to it the way tongues attach to freeze-pops in the summer. Stuck. Glued to the floor of her apartment. That might be nice.
Francesca ashes on the floor and touches her knuckles to the icy windowpane. She has painted all but one of the windows red – the color of a Tuscany sunset - and last night she slept well with bloody moonlight on her face. Her camera sits in a shaft of red sun. With her foot she picks up the warm camera by its strap. She dangles it in the air; her foot shakes from the effort of lifting it.
***
The colors of Italy ruined Francesca, like water damage that makes ceilings wave and sweat. She could never duplicate with a camera the experience of color she had in Florence as a child, riding on her father’s shoulders: red blue yellow green bursting from fruit stands; pink orange red blooming from pots that lined the stairway of their rented farmhouse. She remembers garlic and olive oil, red roses and river-wind. She hears the cook’s sandals slap the kitchen floor. Bright light reflects off the copper pots hanging over the stove. When she was given her first camera at the age of six, she knew she would always shoot in black and white; all other representations of color would feel false and half-realized.
Returning to Italy always felt like running toward cool water on a hot day - Francesca could hardly wait. As a teenager, she spent afternoons walking along the pathways through the hills overlooking Florence. She liked to see the city from its highest point where everything was jagged and exposed; where the streets stretched out in uneven patterns, resisting the organized grid of American maps. She found this disorientation honest and comforting. So much more real than the disinterested neatness of Boulder, with its civilized corners and convenient new strip malls.
Florence, Firenze, with its cathedral, anchoring the plaza with bells and ritual, the pinkish-white stones layered like a wedding cake. Nearby there were bridges drenched in sunlight where artists sat, slapping their bare heels against the moss covered bricks. Those same cathedral’s stones burned red in the early evening like the tongues of babies searching for words. After all the leather peddlers and the artists had left the bridges and the plaza, going home to fettuccini alfredo and evening sitcoms and espresso in tiny cups, Francesca would lick those stones. This was the taste of the absence of light.
In the mornings, when the bustle of leather and paintbrush and the smooth flap of Italian syllables returned to the bridge, Francesca was disgusted with the golden light that lit up all the faces and made them beautiful. Light that turned the most uneven skin the color of the rich brocade curtains that hung in the windows of Florentine widows. Anyone would find beauty in this light; it is simply lucky. There is nothing truly special or surprising about its charm. She preferred to search for beauty under the bridges where the beggars lived. She watched light penetrate stacks of dirty beer bottles that marked out their living spaces. Grace was there, in that light, where everything beautiful had to be earned.
***
The exhibit. On Some Disordered Geometrics. Some stupid book of prints she’d soaked in sepia toner – gold, blue, copper and silver colors laid over blueprints of buildings, skeleton structures. But she was no architect. She could see no beauty in these photographs that had made enough fuss to get exhibited. Why these? Why now?
In the 12th Street studio, Francesca’s photographs are stacked neatly along the walls in labeled piles that mean nothing: A, 34, $$, IH. She lights another cigarette and tosses working prints indiscriminately on each pile and trusts the creative process, as she learned to do in art school.
She picks up a photo of Sloane, a print with only one negative. If she knew where it was, Francesca would eat the negative and be done with it. In the photograph, Francesca has just surprised Sloane, whose hand is mid-way to her mouth. Muted light separates the strands of Sloane’s hair and makes large pores visible on her nose. Francesca feels no bitterness looking at this image of her friend; she feels none of the sadness that overtakes her whenever she looks at that letter, flattened as if Sloane herself had pressed it to the floor and slid it beneath the apartment door before walking away.
Her book is a fluke, Francesca knows this. How could it be anything else? All of those photographs to all of those places, and all of them rejected. Until now. Just a set of pictures she had taken one night when she was playing around with rulers, working on this idea of constructing a Roman temple using only pictures of herself and other women. And she sent in the prints – out of spite almost, for all of the previous rejections. The success and the surprise deadened her somehow; she felt it lowered the bar to a place she couldn’t bear to go. That thought sits right next to another one: will it be the only success? That would be worse than no success at all.
Francesca lights up the last cigarette in the pack, stabbing the other one out in an empty 120 mm film canister. The photographs are printed: what can this possibly say about what is happening to the world? How can she know who she is without laying herself smooth against a blanket of normalcy and noticing the way that she does not blend? Plaid with plaid. Some things aren’t meant to mix. You don’t put log cabin and wedding ring patterns on the same quilt.
She strokes the warm metal of the camera with her cold fingertips. In preparation to shoot, Francesca begins her morning ritual of checking for freckles. Her mother once told her that freckles are drops of laughter that explode in the air and scatter on your skin. A spit gift. People with freckles are walking jokes, but not all of them are funny because some of them are ugly jokes. After all, it is someone else’s laughter that lands on you; those are someone else’s moments that hang on your skin like dark mirrors. Francesca had many freckles as a child, the dots thick as chains wrapping from shoulder to elbow to wrist and some of the laugh marks were hers. But now her skin is unmottled as alabaster and when she laughs, nothing happens because it does not come from the heart; it’s only mimicry, mostly empty. Fifteen freckles. Her heart gallops. The camera falls to the floor. Only fifteen! It is too cold and the heater is broken. Is it minutes hours days months years that she will remain in this room?
***
At the Rhode Island School of Design, Francesca imagined moving over the streets of Providence as a shape shifter: a rock, then a coin, then a leaf spiraling slowly to land on the back of a dog that would walk the length of Providence, the least creative city in the world, and deposit her in front of the long-ago abandoned Pilgrim Mills dry goods store, where she lived on the fifth floor, entirely rent-free. Providence, with its depressing houses trying so hard to fit vacationers’ postcard notions of what New England should look like: wood fences slicing even white lines in the apple-tart air; groomed orchards; leaves exploding in contrasting shades of the earth. You could feel the strain in the air of people, places and things trying to be anything but what they were meant to be.
There she discovered a love for antique fabrics and nice things like crystal and glass and velvet and candles and pearls and fabrics that draped women in a way that said come and fuck me. Like lace. Francesca loved black lace. She found it and other things in the old pawnshops on North Main Street and sometimes in Brookline in Boston where widows sold their nice, old things when the social security check didn’t cut it.
Francesca took pictures of her naked body, dripping with pearls, standing against a paint-splattered wall; her body was tied up with stiff white lace and hung from a door frame in a crucifixion position; the skeleton of a fish stretched down the length of her spine. She collected fish bowls, mirrors, dead birds, eels, dessert jelly for pictures. For one week, she kept a slab of meat in the corner of her apartment so she could see it decay, watching as it shriveled up to fit the smallest zoomed-in frame.
***
Francesca met Sloane in drawing class. Week after week, models filed in and were paid $4/hour to strip down for the art students. It was always the same boring light, the same old easel. Francesca always sketched quickly, anxious to return to that corner of noon light she was sure would be squaring itself off in her apartment this minute.
“Fuck, that’s a great drawing.” A girl leaned over Francesca’s hands: stringy blond hair framed a long and beautiful neck. Her skin was opal-colored, so transparently white that it had a slightly greenish tint. She held out a charcoal covered hand.
“Sloane Rankin.”
“Francesca Woodman.”
The next model was a short man with a potbelly and a wide grin. “Hi friends! I’m Charlie!” he announced, strutting in front of the twenty easels lined up at the front of the room.
The class laughed self-consciously. Sloane raised her eyes and flipped to a clean sheet on her easel. “If he starts playing with himself, I’m out of here.” They were used to erections, and some models were clearly proud of showing them off. There’d been that awful day when the older female model had not cleaned herself up properly the last time she was in the bathroom and the room smelled vaguely, but noticeably, of shit.
As she sketched him, Francesca realized that Charlie was the least self-conscious model she had ever encountered. His behavior held in it no desire - no ability, really - to shock or transgress. He galloped around the room; he turned around and stared at the wall for long moments, as if he’d forgotten where he was. He made eye contact with the artists - a big no-no for models - but it wasn’t a threatening stare; it was too empty, too lacking, too friendly. It was a strange, slightly perverse joy to capture such a round image on a flat surface.
“Do you know anything about that guy?” Francesca asked Sloane as they packed up their gear. Sloane gave her a confused face; it was considered uncouth and even pointless to discuss the models - they were just bodies, after all.
“Not really. I heard someone say that he had a head injury from the war, which would explain why he acts so…free.”
“Does he model a lot?”
“You’d think so, his movements are so easy, but deliberate, too.”
“Exactly.”
“I like that. He fits in his own skin somehow. It’s unexpected, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Francesca said, tugging at a strand of her hair, “It’s strange to flatten such a three-dimensional man into one.”
“He is certainly not your average freshman at Brown.”
Francesca smiled. “I think he’d look great with a gilt-framed mirror and some lace, maybe standing next to an open window.”
“Sorry?”
“He’s perfect for some photos I’m doing.”
Sloane raised her eyebrows. “Really. Do you actively search out models?”
“Are you interested?”
“Why do I think this is going to involve Charlie?”
Francesca shrugged. “I could use your help if you’re willing.”
Sloane looked at her, patting her neck softly with her palm. “Sure. Why not?”
The next day, Francesca took three rolls of Charlie standing in front of a mirror, behind a sheet of glass, laughing, twisting, holding up the sketch of himself that Sloane had given him. Finally, Francesca jumped in and Sloane snapped pictures of the two of them, their faces flashes of brightness in the prints, their features untraceable in the noon sun blazing through the east window.
“Why are you always in your own photographs?” Sloane asked as they stood in the dark room. She held up a picture of Francesca with clothespins pinching her thighs and nipples. “I like this one.”
“It’s a matter of convenience,” Francesca held the image up to the small bulb, “I’m always available. I can’t give Charlie, sweet as he is,” she batted her eyes at Sloane, who laughed, “I just can’t give him my food money for the week, every week.”
“No, I wouldn’t recommend that.”
For those two years Francesca lived in the half-light that came in through the dirty, cracked windows, her apartment an enclosed space that was constantly eclipsed by the bodies of people moving through it: Sloane, Charlie, other models, but mostly her own image flattened and reflected with mirrors and clear sheets of glass. Vigilant light.
***
Something is breaking apart: why else would society ladies tamp out expensive cigarettes and stroll into cooled buildings to “discover” her work as if seeing the body of a lover for the first time? Turbulence, changes, a sign of the times. Francesca is afraid: this is what the nuns were talking about in Florence when she was a child. Upheaval is what happens to sinners just before they commit the act that will make them burn.
She hears the blur of voices passing below on 12th Street. She follows one man with her eyes until he turns the corner; she watches a red hat bob in her vision until it, too, disappears. These people going somewhere or meeting someone; they are headed home to apartments with furniture and appliances.
Francesca used to follow the sisters after the last mass, stepping softly in the shadows of their long habits. They touched the long columns of the convent school with their knuckles as if they might collapse at any moment. She found it strange how the architecture of women – their stacked, smooth flesh – so perfectly mirrored the columns. She imagined great cathedrals constructed from living women; she thought that might make her less fearful of God’s plans for the world. She wanted to crawl underneath the nun’s habits. If only one of the nuns would swallow her and she could take pictures of the ground through the hole in the nun’s legs. At the convent school she recorded this image: the disembodied legs of a little girl wearing black Mary-Jane shoes, her feet hovering over her retreating shadow on the ground.
Francesca cradles her camera between her fleshy knees that stay fleshy no matter how little she eats, which isn’t much these days. It doesn’t matter – her body is only half of one. She should be an amputee, she thinks, at least then her mind would match her physical symmetry. She pulls back her dishtowel-brown hair with a rubber band; people call it dishwater, but she thinks it deserves the proper name, these fibers that have done so much drying: paint, piss, sweat, semen, Windex. Last week she dipped her hair into fix and wrung it out all over her last pictures – those parts without fix turned brown, then black, and all but fragments of the image disappeared from the paper.
The light is never right these days. The props she uses – fox furs, black lace, pink pearls, embroidered tablecloths and costume jewelry – do not look as they once did. They are losing their texture and shine. Nothing resonates.
***
In art school, Francesca drew the attention of one of her teachers. He was interested in sending some of her work to a fashion photographer in New York. It was spring; they sat in a red room - Francesca in an oak chair, the teacher behind a huge desk.
“It’s so unexpected. The woman, dressed as a girl, in the posture of a girl.” In the photo, Francesca’s knees were pressed together as she cast a dark, nuclear shadow. It was a shadow already running away; the kind of dark print made by small children in Nagasaki who walked out for recess one day and became a permanent feature of the building, their tiny shadows burned into brick. “What was the genesis of this image, Francesca?”
It’s what I think I’d see with my eye staring out of a nun’s vagina. This was 11:01 a.m. on a morning in Japan near the end of the war. “In convent school we wore Mary-Janes.” A ridiculous comment. She could hear the teacher thinking: she comes from a good family, from money – why does she sound so simple when she speaks? The art teacher blinked at her and scrunched up his pinched nose, as if he were about to sneeze. Francesca felt bumbling, blushing, awkward around all these art intellectuals, even though she had been around intellectuals all her life, could speak three languages, scored high on standardized tests. Why couldn’t she just be one of them? How difficult could it really be? Why was she always rendered stupid by another person’s perceived superiority, by his or her title when she claimed that titles meant nothing to her? She tugged at her hair, put it up in a ponytail, slid the rubber band out and let the hair down again.
“Francesca, you have a lot of potential.” Potential. That horrible word. The man removed his silly glasses. “Take care that you don’t squander it.” As if she had done so already. As if potential were virginity and once lost could never be retrieved. He tapped her portfolio thoughtfully with his glasses.
“Let’s wait on this for now. Why don’t you try taking some more conventional photographs? Using color, perhaps.” His hand swooped in the air, as if he could already trace the arc of Francesca’s career. “I’d like to see those; I might have a better sense of you then.”
“Like landscape shots? Buildings?” Landscapes were popular. Buildings were often impressive, although Francesca preferred those that were about to collapse.
“That would be interesting. You have such an eye for the unfamiliar, the unexpected.”
“Right, I’ll consider it,” she said, digging her nails into her palms.
But she didn’t take landscape shots and nobody would publish her prints. She finally stopped sending them out.
***
New York City. She watches the fog float off the buildings in the distance and listens to a cathedral doling out ten strokes. It’s like a curse. Leave for five minutes and they’ll forget who you are. A blur. She hates the polluted light here, the way grit organizes itself into layers of colors sick children would paint with if someone would give them “subway piss yellow” and “city pigeon gray” instead of “sky blue” and “lollypop pink.”
The velvety, seductive strokes of the cathedral bells are like steady fingers running up a spine, moving back and forth across the small of a back.
When the shutter of her camera whirs and shuts, Francesca feels that she traverses time. It is more important to travel now more than ever before. She has to go backwards, away from the time of the exhibit. She moves her bones into strange positions and snaps the shutter - elbow to ankle, wrist to thigh - and discovers what angles her mind can make this morning. Will the camera help her move through time zones when she blinks or screams? It does. She is getting there. Back to Italy, back to Rome.
***
“Stupid sons of bitches!” It was a rainy fall day three years ago when Sloane burst through the apartment door to find Francesca, her naked body scribbled with green marker, wearing a Victorian lace collar around her waist and adjusting the shutter speed on her camera. Sloane began to laugh and her portfolio dropped to the ground. Paintings and sketches scattered like square leaves across the floor. “Francesca, they hate my work,” she said. “All two years of it.” Francesca did a leapfrog over a large painting.
“They’re morons. Your stuff is fabulous.”
“Apparently, it’s ‘provincial.’ He looked at me as if I didn’t know what the word meant.” Sloane sunk her chin into her hands. “I’m going to be a part-time waitress for the rest of my fucking life.” She looked up. “And you look ridiculous.”
“What we need,” said Francesca, standing up to direct the camera on Sloane, “is a change of pace. Like Italy.”
“Italy? What?”
“I’m applying for a scholarship.” Francesca snapped a new roll of film into the camera back. “I won’t owe my parents, it’ll be all my doing. And yours. Because if I get it,” Francesca snapped the shutter at the moment Sloane’s head rose, her eyebrows raised, hands suspended between thighs and neck, “I’ll split it with you.”
Francesca won the scholarship with a photo called House #3: Francesca crouched in a dress in the interior corner of the apartment with its crumbling and peeling walls and its fine layer of dirt that never left the floor. “Ready, Sloane. Now!” She moved just as the shutter snapped, so her entire body blurred. Only her foot on the floor was sharp, anchoring her to the floor. She was disappearing into and coming out of the wall behind her at the same time.
Francesca and Sloane rented a cold, dark flat on Campo Dei Fiori, just minutes from the Piazza Navarro. The windows looked out over fountains where superstitious Romans and tourists threw lire over their shoulders and wished for the best. Murky blue pools were watched over by statues of men with stone veins bulging from perfect thighs. They ate plates of thick spaghetti doused in garlic and sweet tomato sauce and treated Marlboro Reds as their daily vitamins.
Francesca could hardly keep film in her camera. The light changed every second: deepening, fading, expanding, shrinking, disappearing. She stood under crumbling arches, her feet in ancient chariot tracks. She walked along narrow streets, past men sleeping in chairs and empty jugs of wine drying in the sun, waiting for the light to be right, her left arm going numb under the weight of the tripod. At noon or a little after, the light centered itself exactly above the uneven sidewalk. Shadows spilled down steps and darkness stacked on darkness; hydrangeas and passion flowers caught fire in one slim shaft of straying light. Standing in light that exact was like tearing it. Her pictures felt violent and reverent all at once.
Crossing the field to the Coliseum in the late morning, the light was a golden shade unrolling gradually; first one story was lit, then the next, then the next, until the whole south side of the Coliseum was ablaze.
She loved the severed beauty of the ruins: columns leaning into one another like grieving parents; cracked stones that no one had moved for hundreds of years, still fearing a strange god’s curse; half-open doors falling from their hinges. She studied the statues’ one-armed gestures, their empty glares; the erased face of Aphrodite and Zeus’ lopped off penis; the way their hair had been forced into waves by the sculptor and would stay that way forever. Likenesses of gods carved into stone or bronze looked regal even when propped up on pedestals in dusty museums or left leg-less in the middle of fields where tourists pissed on them rather than pay a few coins to use the small toilets in a nearby park.
In Rome, Sloane and Francesca developed their photos in the back room of the Maldoror Bookshop where they read and drank coffee, met other artists, practiced Italian and necked with boys whose names they couldn’t remember the next day. There they met Giuseppe, the owner’s son, a slim Italian man with a thin, carefully maintained goatee, and round, chiseled arms squeezed into short sleeves. Soon he was meeting them every day for coffee and one day he let slip that the bookstore was going to have an exhibition in a few months’ time.
“You should do it,” Sloane said, as Giuseppe went to get them espresso.
“Are you sure that’s what he said? Your Italian isn’t that great, you know.”
Sloane punched Francesca’s arm. “I asked him to repeat it, stupid, and I’m learning.” She looked at Giuseppe’s back and he turned around to wave. “My stuff isn’t ready, yours is. Do it.”
“You like him?” Francesca couldn’t believe it; Giuseppe was beautiful, sure, but he did nothing artistic. In fact he did nothing at all, it seemed, except talk to the customers in the bookstore and spend long moments staring at Sloane.
“What’s not to like?” Sloane said, smiling widely as Giuseppe returned with a small cup of espresso balanced in each hand.
In the darkroom, Sloane helped Francesca with her pictures; developer printed their fingers together, so afterwards everything they touched would be a mixture of the two of them. They agitated the print in the developer, their fingers on opposite corners, rocking the slowly appearing image back and forth as a misty, swirling mess gave way to something solid.
“Some of these are extraordinary.” Later they sat on the floor of the flat, folding white cheese inside thick slices of bread. Sloane was holding up the photos to the light. Please, Francesca thought, please don’t ever look into that space in my heart that mistrusts, that judges.
Francesca showed Sloane her favorite falling-down fountains in the center of parks, the flaking walls in the oldest part of the city, and the hidden sun-drenched plazas tucked in the middle of neighborhoods. Sloane always remembered the most beautiful part of their walks - the perfect square of color, the sweetest storefront. She painted their sad flat with frescos that made the walls leap with light, leaving one dirty wall and crumbling space for Francesca’s pictures. “I don’t know if you’re in the right business, Francesca,” Sloane said, watching Francesca load her film with dusty fingers, “you’ve got to be careful with the negatives around dust.”
“A little bit of mess never hurt a good photo.”
Francesca was constantly being halved: under bridges, on the water; pierced by the shadow of a cathedral spire. But she had yet to take any pictures that truly pleased her.
One chilly winter afternoon Francesca found an open ruin of a temple off the main tourist circuit on the Via Degli Ausoni. She looked around for people and then piled her clothes in one corner and crept naked around one wall, positioning the camera on a flat rock and waiting.
She saw it before it hit her: the huge sheet of light that moved like an angry hand over the columns of the temple. The warmth crawled over her chilly skin and moved inside it. There was a light rain falling in her eyes but the sky was a perfect dyed-egg blue. Sun started at her feet and moved up her thighs. Then the rain became another movement: Francesca’s vision began to divide itself, one eye advancing up the length of a column while another was counting the rocks in the dirt. Another eye could see behind her back. She was a prism. She was the light. And she moved like it, too, setting and re-setting the shutter again and again, moving quickly from camera to pose, pose to camera.
She threw her arms back and her chest forward, back arched in orgasm or in flight or in death, half of her face already in darkness. In the frame her breasts were like mountains being forced apart, shifted. Snap, shut, whir. For a full hour tiny pieces of reflected light were slicing her eyelids.
Real rain began to fall. Her bare feet slid over the stones as she ran back to the flat, her wet clothes pasted haphazardly to her back.
“Jesus Christ, what have you been doing?” Sloane was standing in the hallway with Giuseppe. Francesca adjusted the sleeve of her shirt and smoothed her ruffled hair.
Giuseppe grabbed a sheet from Sloane’s bed and wrapped it around Francesca. “Blue are your lips, Francesca!”
Francesca backed away from the two of them, rubbing the sheet over her arms. “I...I was just taking some shots.”
“In this downpour, Francesca.” Giuseppe flipped the question to a statement. Francesca shuddered, felt the moment shattering. All the waiting in the cold felt so useless. Why did she feel like this? Empty. Silent.
Sloane tried to catch Francesca’s gaze. “We were about to make some dinner. Do you want some?”
“No, I’m beat. I’ll talk to you later?” She scampered up the stairs and listened carefully to the muted voices below before she heard the heavy wooden door of the flat swing shut.
Francesca’s vision stayed split for hours. She called the photos her Angel Series. For the rest of her time in Rome she imagined her body as the meeting place of minds and angels; a body that needed fragile wings or other things folded over all its portals, to block any wisdom from running out: she used wool mittens, thick tape, and torn fabrics.
At night she listened to the muffled giggles of Sloane and Giuseppe on the terrace and ripped stockings for her photographs. Selfish, selfish, selfish, she thought, why am I so selfish?
The Maldoror Bookshop agreed to exhibit her photographs. Francesca hung the pictures herself and Sloane rolled out invitations by hand on an old roller press. After she finished hanging her work, Francesca walked home with the thick invitation in her hand. On Via Vezzoni she held it up to the sky and watched the way sunlight moved through the winding letters and scrolled them across the bodies of pigeons rising in flight.
The exhibition was a nightmare. Each time she looked at Giuseppe and Sloane they were touching hands behind their backs while looking at a photograph, or their eyes were meeting over the crowd of people Francesca was navigating alone. Each time she smiled, took a drink, or laughed, she felt barbed wire at the back of her throat. She was so preoccupied with watching her friends that she spit out curt replies to people’s honest inquiries. Direct compliments and vague criticism incited the same anxiety in her; it was like a machine revving up beneath her, ready to take off at any moment. She drank too much and spilled wine on her black dress; no one could see the stain, but she smelled like a drunk and she felt like a fraud.
The most popular photograph at the exhibit was one of Francesca’s backside draped in leather garter belts. She took it in the middle of the day, with the curtain blowing over her bare back. Black nylons and sheer stockings hung from the ceiling, pointed at Francesca’s back like unsuspecting weapons.
“Francesca, say something to those people.” Sloane was next to her, her hand on her arm. She gestured over her shoulder. “Right there. They’ve been standing in front of that one for fifteen minutes.”
“Right,” Francesca said, slowly walking over. But she couldn’t. She could see that Giuseppe and Sloane were watching her and she wanted them to, she thought, but now she felt nervous and incapable. Sweat spread across her neck and scalp. All she managed to say to the tall man with a curled up mustache and his petite wife was the equivalent of “and?” in Italian. Stupid.
It was amazing. Her photos were up and she couldn’t bear it.
Francesca found Sloane walking out of the toilet. “Sloane, I don’t know what to do.”
“Jesus,” Sloane said, switching her wine glass to the opposite hand. “Why can’t you just mingle?”
“I don’t want to.”
Sloane brushed her arm as if sweeping off some dust; the wine in her glass swirled right up to the edge but didn’t spill. Her cheeks were bright red and she swayed a bit on her high heels. “Giuseppe thinks you don’t like him.”
“He’s right.”
“Please don’t tell me that’s what you really feel.” Sloane’s hair blocked her face and she waved her hand as a burst of laughter erupted from the other room – strange; it was as if her hand moved in time to the laughter.
Francesca put her hand on Sloane’s arm. “I won’t. I’m sorry. He’s great. I’m sorry.”
It hadn’t been a rejection actually, because Francesca wasn’t completely sure that’s what she wanted it to be. Or what she had really wanted to say. But it had been something.
“That’s the worst one,” Francesca said afterwards, staring at one of the prints and downing another glass of wine, feeling her words slur. “Why did everybody love that one?”
“Shut up,” said Sloane, refilling both of their wine glasses with an unsteady hand. “You were a hit.”
***
Francesca scoots her butt on to the windowsill. Remembering that night makes her long for fresh air. That night had been the beginning of a history of fucking up, she knew. Sloane made all the right choices, she thinks, and I made all the wrong ones.
The last time they’d seen each other, it was for coffee near Washington Square Park. Thick lines of students shuffled past, looking hungover and depressed.
“You’d be great at it, Francesca,” Sloane said, one hand resting on her neck, the other twisting her coffee cup around in its saucer. Sloane was teaching at a university extension school at night and answering phones for a law firm during the day. One of their clients was a wedding photographer looking for an assistant. “Just think of all the fabrics.” A pigeon hopped around Sloane’s chair. Francesca pulled at her hair.
“You’ll go bald if you keep doing that.” Sloane slurped her coffee.
“You’ve got your hand on your neck, which means you’re nervous.”
“And? Now it’s off.” Sloane kept her hand in the air as she took another sip of coffee.
“It means you’re nervous. I know you. You think they won’t take me.”
“It’s a tic, Francesca, not a sign of inner turmoil or a reflection of my thoughts about you. Relax. And you’re not exactly getting excited about this job.”
“You’re worried.”
“And you’re crazy not to take any opportunity that comes your way. Don’t you think if you got a job and had somewhere to go it might motivate you, inspire you?”
“Does answering phones inspire you?”
“At least I’m not taking money from my parents.” Sloane pushed her chair back and crossed her legs.
“It’s just so…far from what I want.”
“What can I tell you Francesca.” Sloane gripped Francesca’s arm. “I’m not trying to be hard on you, but we’ve been back for nearly a year, and I…I don’t want to hang out in Italian restaurants just to hear the accents or go over every stone of Italy…”
As Sloane talked, Francesca stared at two children in a buggy as their mother pushed past. It made her sick, those small searching things. They look like bloated animals struggling past cages made of dolls and pink blankets. She looked down at her hands as Sloane kept talking. Why can’t I see color and beauty in the world? Why is everything reduced to its black and white still?
“Listen, your stuff is extraordinary, but maybe the world isn’t ready. Why not try to stay doing what you love until they are? Have some faith,” Sloane said.
“I guess I’d rather have some photos I’m proud of, a friend I love, than keep trying and failing.”
“I guess I’d like to see you grow up.” Sloane blinked and stared into her coffee cup. “Francesca, someone will take those photographs. Just think of this job as biding your time until they do.”
Francesca patted Sloane’s hands: beautiful Sloane with her nurturing heart and sparkling eyes and thin skin that burned so easily. How is it that someone so delicate is so much stronger than me?
“Guess I’d better build my resume before I go bald,” Francesca said.
“Excellent plan.” Sloane squeezed her arm. “I don’t want to worry about you.”
But Francesca never took the interview. Instead, she applied for unpaid summer residencies she knew she could get, making the obligatory call home each month, citing the needed amount.
Sloane got a job as the director of children’s art classes at a private school in Boston. They made plans to have dinner the week before she left, but Francesca never showed. She left a message on Sloane’s answering machine I’m working but it was never returned. Francesca didn’t hear anything from her friend before she left New York for Stanwood.
***
At Stanwood in Washington, Francesca woke to shadows of vines dividing her body into irregular blocks of light and strangled shadows near her mouth as if she had drooled leaves. Often she could not move for fully ten minutes and simply breathed plumes of air into the camera lens, as if she could resurrect sensation like Frankenstein’s monster. She moved the bed around but the shadows always found her.
“You are both subject and object at once. Wonderful.” The teacher was looking at one of the Angel Series – a nude Francesca stood in the corner of the room by the door, her face hidden by strips of cloth, black and sheer as if for burial. A standing death.
“It’s not me in the photograph.” Those chubby knees and ill-muscled calves could be anyone’s.
“It’s a comment on the presence of women in the world.”
“It’s a comment on the world.”
The man shook his head and his jowls moved like rivers of fat. “You are breaking with tradition, Francesca. It is dazzling and self-conscious. Brave.”
“Why does discovery have to mean a breaking of something else?”
“That’s art.”
“You mean religion.”
“It’s your art. Are you religious?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Of course not.”
“You can’t break something that’s already broken.”
He shrugged. “If we’ve been imaged, we’re already flattened.” He had a big nose and a face like a prism; his profile cast shadows in all directions. She was getting agitated; the world seemed to be going in two ways at once.
“You can if you go to the source. You are that source,” he said.
How could she be conscious of herself when the source of her irrational fears could not be located? When she looked under beds in the middle of the night after being in the house all day, her own breath hot on her chest? When she could only live in one room apartments because she needed to have full view of all possible entrances and exits? She was the source of her own fear, and what did that tell her about her future?
“It’s meant to show the edges of things,” Francesca said.
“That’s fine, but what’s at the center. Where is the heat in your photographs?”
“The what?”
“You might experiment with color.”
“I do. With black and white.”
“Is it just that you’re not interested in color?”
“I’m interested in the relationships people have with space.”
“Or is just that you’re afraid of true presence?”
“I’m afraid of being unoriginal.” And closets and demons and darkness and summer storms.
“Then you will always shoot these juvenile dramas.”
“And art students will always tell you to fuck off.”
That was a bad summer. And then there was last summer. She was a woman-fellow at McDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where trees outnumbered people and those people who lived there sounded like they were trying to talk, sneeze and smile at the same time. It made her suspicious. She burned everything she shot there.
***
The unread letter from Sloane. The phone bill, the check from her parents, the unopened letter. I need some air. The city feels warm with the frenzy of afternoon activity: people leaving work early for long weekends, doctor’s appointments, art gallery openings. Francesca walks along the streets of her neighborhood, buying fruit at corner stands and letting her fingers trail over the newspaper headlines. She stares at the photographs that look so sturdy and argumentative, with everything in focus. Tomorrow they will be forgotten. I don’t want to be framed. She wants a stepping-stone in the summer and in the winter, a block of unmeltable ice that will shuttle her across frozen rivers that break up in the heat of the sun.
The sky is dampening the light. Darkness lurks at the periphery of things. Francesca turns around in the direction of home. Each cry of a bird tugs at her ear. She fingers the fruit in her coat pocket and throws it in the trash. The trees have disappeared from the corners of her vision; they will not return. She walks quickly, weaving her way back to the apartment, back to safety. The sky presses its steel hands against buildings.
Sometimes she forces herself to pick through parts of Central Park at night, pushing back fear with her hands and a bounce flash, relying on the moans of prostitutes with businessmen, the rattle of cans moving over concrete in the light wind – I am not alone I am not alone - these sounds create the safety lattice that she walks on. If the park did not have this under-existence, these safe-sounds, she might have been killed or raped by now. Maybe she has been.
***
Her mother’s reaction to Francesca’s favorite photo: Francesca, her face hidden, her body dressed in an antique black dress unbuttoned to the waist. Between her breasts is an imaginary wound that drips down her stomach, the brush still in her hand.
“Francesca, this is…this is hard. To look at.”
“I took that in Rome.” A pencil thin shaft of light drew a line through her mother’s pursed lips.
“Tell me what it means.”
“It’s art, Mother. You can interpret it however you like. You know that.”
“Right.” Her mother was leaning on her arms on the windowsill, looking down at all the signs of life teeming below. “Right.”
***
Back in her apartment, Francesca opens the window to a dark sky. How long has it been dark? City lights electrify the air – images are illuminated and snatched back just as quickly, as in a lightning storm. Shouts pool into corners where middle-of-the-night deals are being made. A light snow is quilting the city blocks together down there. A bookend to her first favorite moment of the day: the day is finally over. But tonight it does not feel sufficient. There is no peace. She lights candles to banish the dark. Then she thinks the candles make her too obvious and so she gets on her knees and blows them out. She sits under the window. Uneven footsteps outside. Last call at the bar.
I will slip from the picture, while everything is still in focus.
The gallery has named her exhibition In Preparation for Being an Angel. She thinks it’s ridiculous that people should be reminded of her when they ring tiny little bells or when the sound of a bell slices rivers into pieces of light. To be prepared is to stand at the edge of things, your desires dusting your feet; to prepare is to let those desires stretch up into your bones and spin you around in the direction of the precipice.
One night, long before Francesca discovered Italy, when she was still a small child, she ran through fields of columbine and aspen at the lip of their house outside Boulder, on a Colorado night when the sky and the air both tinkled with light. Francesca’s mother commented on how bright the stars were and began to sing the ridiculous twinkle twinkle little star – to amuse her – but Francesca was already somewhere else. She saw the candles beneath the earth, their wicks lit again and again. Those candles would burn her feet and take them. The stars were eating up the earth – they weren’t nice little twinkling things at all. They were like hungry snakes that look thin as eyelashes from a distance, but up close are so big they make the air around them crack, crushing atmospheres and air. She began to run; in her mind she saw her straight, white, upright body divided in half by the moonlight. This halving was a memory of the body that would never leave her. Her first self-portrait.
She ran until she was out of breath, and at the end of the dirt path that opened up into more fields, many already marked and plotted for subdivisions and suburban communities, she moved her forearm up and down against an aspen tree until it bled. I am half of a whole I am only a half. And stars. Stars are pinning her to the earth’s core. She feels the wind on her legs as she steps out on the lip of the ledge. And now the moment is real.
***
The last Francesca Woodman photograph, printed by Sloane Rankin, will be her most famous: Francesca’s elbow is bent at a strange angle as if she has tried to do a push-up and failed. The only way to protect oneself is to coil and create a cave where your voice echoes in your belly when you stare at your feet and scream. The other arm is on the ground, hand up-turned in anticipation like a beggar. Near the curve of her arm, an eel rests, coiled, in a basket. Francesca’s head blurs with the ground, her face the ironed surface of the moon.
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