The Biscuit Shot

My name is Niko Bigshot, I'm forty-eight years old, and in October of last year I did something stupid and wonderful at the same time. I decided to learn boudoir photography off YouTube videos, in the spare bedroom of our house in Jasper Bluff, so I could surprise my wife Mattie for our twenty-second anniversary. Mattie had turned forty-five the previous fall, and I'd been married to her since she was twenty-three, which means I had known her nearly my whole adult life and had somehow stopped looking at her the way I used to.

I want to back up a little and explain how a man gets to that point.

I do graphic design for Hollis Printing, the shop on Main Street next to the diner. Business cards, menus, funeral programs, the newsletter for the church-supper hall. It's steady work and I'm good at it, but after twenty-two years of drawing other people's coupons I felt like a pencil that had been sharpened down to the eraser. Our marriage wasn't bad. Let me be plain about that, because Mattie will probably read this someday and I don't want her thinking I was miserable. We were fine. We were so fine it was like a room where the furniture never moves and you stop noticing the room at all.

She ran her antique booth down at the corner of the flea market lot, three days a week, with Carl helping out, and came home smelling like other people's attics. We ate dinner at six-thirty. We watched whatever she picked. On Sundays we had breakfast with our neighbor Alan Lindstrom, who owns the feed and grain store and has never married, and Alan would talk about fertilizer while Mattie held my hand on the table like it was a habit and not a message.

Somewhere in September I caught myself looking at a photo of her from before we met. She had been a glamour photographer at twenty-two and twenty-three, before I knew her, the kind who shot calendar girls and pageant winners out of a rented studio in the city. There was a picture of her at twenty-two or so, standing next to one of her models with a light meter around her neck, and she looked like a person I had never met. Confident. Hungry, almost. I sat there at the kitchen table with my coffee going cold and thought, I want that woman to look at me like she looks at that camera. And then a dumber thought arrived right behind it, the kind of thought that only shows up in a man who has been comfortable too long.

I would learn to take beautiful pictures of her. Boudoir pictures. Lingerie, soft light, the works. I would book the hall at the church for our anniversary, no, better, I would do it at home, and I would present her with a framed print of herself looking like a woman out of her own old portfolio, and she would be so surprised and so flattered that the whole marriage would catch fire again. That was the plan. It had maybe three holes in it, and I could only see one of them at the time, which was that I did not know the first thing about photography beyond cropping a photo of a raffle ticket.

So I started watching videos. There's a whole universe of men on the internet who will teach you lighting for free, and I watched them every night after Mattie went to bed. I took notes in a legal pad like I was studying for a permit exam. Rembrandt lighting. Butterfly lighting. The rule of thirds, which turned out to have nothing to do with pie. I bought two softbox lights off a site I half trusted, a used tripod from a guy in a parking lot two towns over, and a backdrop stand that wobbled like a bad table. The spare bedroom, which had been holding Mattie's overflow of antique inventory, got cleared out, and I did not explain why. That was one of the holes. I just started moving boxes out and moving equipment in and telling her it was for a project at work.

The mannequin came from her own booth. It was a headless dress form from the forties, the kind with the faint stays of an old corset built into it, and I bought it off her for twenty dollars, cash, which she found so funny she told Alan about it at Sunday breakfast. I set it up in the spare room in front of the backdrop and put a slip on it, one of the vintage slips from her inventory, pale pink, and I dragged my softboxes around the floor for a week trying to make it look like the women in the videos.

Here is what nobody tells you about lighting. It is very hard. The videos made it look like you set one light at forty-five degrees and magic falls out of the sky. In practice my mannequin looked like it was being interrogated. I had a harsh white stripe down the fabric and a shadow like a bruise behind it, and the slip, which I now know was the wrong fabric entirely, ate every bit of softness I tried to give it. I stood there in that room night after night, forty-eight years old, in my socks, adjusting a light stand a half inch at a time and muttering to myself, and I honestly believed I was getting away with it.

Then came the Tuesday.

Mattie was supposed to be at the booth until five. It was about four when I had the spare room lit in what I thought was my best setup yet, the warm key light on the left, the fill bounced off a white poster board I had taped to a kitchen chair. I was flat on my knees in front of the tripod, squinting through the viewfinder at a headless dress form in a pink slip, when the door behind me opened and I heard my wife of twenty-two years start to laugh.

Not a polite laugh. A real one, the kind that comes out in pieces and won't stop, and she had to put her hand on the door frame.

"Well," she said, wiping her eyes, "I leave the man alone for one afternoon and he's courting the dress form."

I stayed on my knees. There was nowhere to go. I had the camera still in my hands, pointed at the evidence, and my whole plan, the anniversary, the print, the framed surprise, all of it was lying there in pieces on the floor of that room like the backdrop stand I kept knocking over.

"Happy almost anniversary," I said, because I couldn't think of anything better.

She came into the room and looked around, and I watched her face while she did it, and something happened there that I didn't understand until later. Her laugh went away, but not into anger. It went into something quieter. She looked at the softboxes, and the tripod, and the legal pad on the dresser with its crooked notes, and then at the mannequin in the pink slip, and when she looked at me her eyes had gone soft in a way I hadn't seen in years.

"You bought these lights yourself?" she said. "You set this up yourself?"

"Every bit of it. It was supposed to be a surprise. I was going to take pictures of you. Nice ones. The kind you used to take." I shrugged like an idiot. "I didn't know you'd be home early. You're never home early."

"Carl closed the booth early. His hip." She said it absently, the way you say a thing when your mind is somewhere else. Then she walked over to my light, the harsh one, and moved it with one hand, up and back, without even measuring, and the interrogating stripe on the slip turned into something gentle and round and real. I stared at it. I had spent a week fighting that shadow.

"Key light's too close and too low," she said. "And that slip is nylon. It photographs like a garbage bag. Come here, I'll show you."

And that was when the second hole in my plan showed itself, the one I'd never seen coming. I had planned to impress her. I had not planned for her to know more about this than I ever would.

"You used to do this," I said, and it came out like a question even though it wasn't one.

"Twenty-two, twenty-three. Before you." She was already pulling the kitchen chair over, already turning my camera around in her hands, checking my settings and making a face at them. "Nobody ever asked me to teach them. Isn't that funny. Twenty-two years in this town and nobody ever asked."

She looked at me over the top of the camera, and I got the feeling, for the first time in a long time, that she was actually seeing me.

"So," she said. "Do you want the lesson or not?"

She didn't wait for me to answer, which was smart, because my answer would have come out strangled. She put the camera back in my hands and stepped past me into the middle of the room, and suddenly my studio, my little rigged-up operation with the wobbly stand and the poster board taped to a kitchen chair, had a professional in it. I don't mean that as a figure of speech. Her posture changed. Her chin came up. She looked at the light the way you'd look at a horse you were thinking of buying.

"Okay," she said. "First lesson. Faces. Forget the slip for a minute, forget everything. Light on a face is the whole ballgame."

She stood where the dress form was and told me to put the key at forty-five degrees, up high, and watch what the shadow of her nose did. I moved it. She said closer. I moved it closer. She said no, now too flat, back up, and I moved it back and she said that's it, hold it right there, and I did, standing there with the light stand in one hand as a man would hold a leash for a dog that knew more than he did.

The thing she showed me was simple and it wasn't. You turn the light until the shadow from the nose just kisses the corner of the mouth, she said, not past it, not short of it. Too far and you get a skull. Too near and you get a driver's license photo. Somewhere in the middle there's a spot where the shadow makes the cheekbone look like the only interesting thing in the room, and when she found it, standing there in her cardigan with her reading glasses pushed up on her head, I saw it happen. It was like watching her put on a different face without moving a muscle.

"There," she said. "See it?"

"I see it."

"You don't, yet. But you will."

She came over to stand beside me, close, closer than she'd stood next to me in a while, close enough that her arm brushed mine when she reached out and tilted the camera screen toward us. She smelled like the lavender hand lotion she's used since I met her. She pointed at the screen and then at her own face and back again, walking me through it, and I understood about a third of what she said and watched the rest. I'll admit that freely. My wife was talking about light and all I could think about was that I had not stood this close to her on a Tuesday afternoon in years.

Then she got cocky about it, or maybe I got cocky, hard to say whose fault it was. I told her I thought I had the composition figured out. I'd been reading about it all week, the rule of thirds, negative space, all the terms, and I threw a few of them at her to prove I wasn't a total beginner. She listened with this little smile, the one that means she's about to enjoy herself at your expense, and then she said, "Composition. Well. Let's see some composition, hotshot."

She went into the spare bedroom closet, the one with her overflow from the booth, and came out with a robe. I knew the robe. It was silk, ivory, some kind of sample or prop she'd picked up at the flea market lot years ago and hung on to, and I had honestly never thought twice about it hanging there among the lamps and the hat boxes. She slipped it on over her clothes and tied it loosely and stepped back into the light, and something in the room changed temperature.

"Where do you want me?" she said. "You're the photographer."

I looked through the viewfinder because looking at her directly felt like too much all at once. Through the lens it was safer, and also not safe at all. She tilted her chin the way I'd seen her do in that old photograph on the dresser, the one from when she was twenty-two with the light meter around her neck, and my hands were not steady. I moved her a foot left. She let me. I asked her to turn her shoulder toward the camera and she did it slowly, watching me the whole time over the top of the robe's collar.

"Lower the key a hair," she said, in her teaching voice, and then, in her other voice, the one she used at the dinner table when she wanted to make me drop my fork, "and tell me if I still photograph like a garbage bag."

"You don't," I said.

"What's that? Speak up, the light's loud."

"You absolutely do not."

She laughed and turned, and when she turned the belt she'd tied came loose in her hand, and one strap of the robe slid down off her right shoulder and just stayed there. She didn't fix it. That was the part I couldn't get over, later, that she just let it sit there on her arm like it had every right, and the skin of her shoulder came into the light, and she had positioned herself, I realized, exactly where the key light would make that shoulder glow while the rest of her fell into soft shadow. Forty-five degrees. Nose shadow kissing the corner of the mouth. She was teaching me even now, and teaching me with her collarbone, which seemed like a conflict of interest but I wasn't going to file a motion about it.

I took the picture. I don't even remember pressing the shutter, but I must have, because it was there on the screen afterward and it was, and I say this as the man who took