It was fun making new friends after our university got bombed. Marlene was a photographer we knew or anyway came to know, though the consistent glamour of her carriage and dress would at a glance suggest that she was more comfortable in front of the camera than behind it. Honestly, it was almost a little too much. The gold sequins. The ruby on one ring finger and the sapphire on the other. The perfect coiffure. The black Nat Shermans fitted one after another into an actual long-stemmed ivory holder. Who can do laundry in such a getup?
Now given such a public face, one would expect (or at any rate, be vulnerable to such clichéd thinking as to expect) that Marlene would work in fashion, but she was actually an arts photographer (mostly). I came to know this one night when Denver and I were throwing back whiskeys at a dark back table at the Oral School (which had undergone quite a reversal in image and clientele over the course of just a year or so, somehow appearing posh to the eyes of the slicker drinking crowds despite the pock-marked bar and stain-variegation on the floor—perhaps having earned some cultural cachet due to its proximity to the bombed-out campus—and though the tables were crowded now with brokers and closers, the staff still recognized us as the firebomb survivors and, as such, treated us with a veteran’s respect), wearing loosened ties and open blazers so as to blend in with the surrounding Hump Day financiers washing their work- lives away with domestics and Red Bull cocktails (our work days, of course, were just beginning). In his typical mannish love of theatrics, Denver thrilled in this small play of dress- up, in the simplicity of hiding in plain sight, but this was to a degree how I dressed anyway: a little too fancy to be casual and a little too sweated-through to be respectable. Which meant I wasn’t really hidden at all. Most of the abounding douches probably saw me as some kind of an intern, perhaps even Denver’s sweet-cheeked protégé, working for nothing and showing it despite my efforts. It’s possible I assume too much what others assume of me.
But anyway, somewhere around our second round, Marlene appeared and joined us at our corner high top, looking like the singer in a jazz club and parsing the room with just as much sensual grace. While Denver and I carried on with whatever pedantic whiskey ramble we were on, Marlene smoked two cigarettes to bookend her one rye Old Fashioned and barely said a word. Or at least no word I can recall. I remember, her eyes were Cool Hand Luke blue. Just devastating. When she plucked her second Nat Sherman from its ivory stem and dropped it in the ashtray, Denver gulped the rest of his drink, paid their tab, and followed Marlene out the door and into her car: they were heading up to Denver’s lakeside studio to photograph his current series of creep-ass sculptures. But I was used to such abrupt exits. I finished out the night chipping some suit’s front tooth for calling me a dyke, then went back to the office mechanical room where I was squatting those days, cold-water washed my face in the utility sink and got back to frittering over whatever I thought I was making back then.
Marlene never photographed any of my work, if only because I wasn’t producing anything at that point that could meaningfully be caught on film. In truth, I only ever saw her really at work once, when I was lung-sick and crashing on the couch in TC’s studio and she came to document his series of phthalo blue paintings. I remember, the medium itself posed specific challenges to their efforts to document, as each piece was painted on an 8’ x 4’ x 1/4 ” sheet of industrial aluminum I had discovered and TC had reclaimed from a derelict factory amid the sulfurous brown fields ranging alongside the city’s southern-most river. Despite because of—I really don’t understand the refractive and reflective properties of different paints) the uniformly even application of phthalo blue, the sheets each held a distinctive metallic gleam, an aspect TC considered crucial to the actual, individual experience of the paintings but detrimental to photographic documentation. It was a problem Marlene was uniquely suited to solve. But it took time.
Her setup seemed really antiquated to me, but what the hell do I know about cameras and lighting? Pretty much all my experience in the medium has been limited to some form of street photography, none of which I’ve actually conducted myself. Wrapped in a blanket in a sprung wingback chair tucked into the studio’s corner (sick as I was, I did not want to appear completely infirm before the glittery splendor of Marlene), I watched the two of them work, taking note of how TC nimbly set up the panels and adjusted the lights like a homunculus extension of Marlene’s will as she never once cut her cool blue-eyed gaze away from the subject at hand. It somehow struck me as an oddly swift process and also a lot of real labor, less like the goings on of two artists and more like a master technician—a surveyor or architect—and her apprentice diligent at their job. The perfection and execution of the work is what mattered most. Even Marlene’s smoking seemed disciplined in its control and gesture, like some weird monk in meditation. She only dropped her ash when she wanted to. It all stood in such stark opposition to her sparkling black gown, the shimmering tiara in her hair.
Because the sheet metal we’d salvaged from the long-defunct factory was old and ill-kept and exposed to the elements, each panel bore a unique mark of wear and weathering and indelible grime, all of which would show through the layers of phthalo blue. It was these discrete imperfections in the metal’s surface that gave each painting its character: while some read as dyed enlargements of biological samples on a slide, others seemed to contain monochromatic storm systems or the smear of fingerprints ruining a mishandled collodion plate. Some registered as diffuse landscapes. A few somehow even suggested portraiture. All of it the random permutations and wild vagaries of neglect.
In those years I knew Marlene—while I gradually transitioned out of the crust-punk squatter lifestyle and into something a bit more stable if not equally squalid—she and I were almost never alone together. I’m not sure I could even repeat a single one of our conversations. Each time I try, all I see are those impossible Paul Newman eyes cutting through the smoke-thick atmosphere of a bar or a house party. How is it that it always seemed like we were locking eyes in silent concord amid all the raucous macho boys who made up our social circle? How did her gaze seem to contain so much knowledge, convey so much meaning? And did any of this ever actually happen beyond the arena of my fantasizing mind?
Only once did Marlene and I ever make arrangements to meet out, just the two of us, which proved to be the first of only two times I ever saw her in the full light of day. We met for coffee on a Tuesday or something at some anonymous kind of cafeteria—I remember, in her black high heels and pencil skirt, she was the most conservative I’d ever seen her—and even though she’d contacted me, had something she wanted to discuss with me, I couldn’t tell you what we talked about or if we talked about anything at all. I remember at one point she was asked by a busboy to put out her cigarette and her singular look of shame as she tabbed out her smoke in a saucer, remember how the whole time, she kept her blue eyes low.
I wonder now how possible it is that this is all she really wanted to show me: that she was vulnerable. That she was capable of being shamed.
It was nearly a year before I saw Marlene alone once more. Again, it was daytime. Again, she called me. Most of our boys by then had in their own ways dissolved into the teeming anonymity of the world, snatching opportunities in safer cities or rural outposts where no one knew their true names, or otherwise caught in crossfires or mortar barrages during any number of brief and unexplained upsurges of violence between the city and whomever that day had a complaint and means of making it heard. But I suspect that even if TC and Denver and the rest of them had hung around, I still would have been the one to whom Marlene reached out. From opposite ends, we’d arrived at the same place. I walked to her apartment and knocked on the door and she answered in some kind of worn-out silk nightgown, threadbare and dirty. Her skin was skim-milk blue. And she was bony. There was even a faint Prussian shadow of stubble coarsening her sharp chin and cheeks. That, more than anything, is how I knew she was sick.
This was the last time I’d ever see Marlene. You’d think I’d remember what we talked about. We drank Nescafé at her small Formica table and smoked cigarettes and I guess had to have said something. But what I remember are her walls, whitewashed and mostly bare but for a couple poster-sized prints of her photographs, children playing in vacant lots or alleys or rooftops or tenement basements. Her apartment was one big room with a bed and a table and a kitchenette and almost everything else dedicated to her photography. I remember, her old- looking camera—positioned before a light-diffusing neutral drop—dominated the room like a throne or altar, the capturing mechanism she worked through her devastating blue eyes. The air smelled of vetiver but also of something sour underneath. The Formica was blue and pocked. The chairs were of matching leather and chrome. But I cannot remember one word we said. When I first arrived, I administered a shot into her left arm because she was too shaky to hit the vein herself, and I could not say then or now if I was shooting her medicine or dope or if at that point there was even a distinction. I withdrew the syringe and in a moment her wavering hands calmed. Then she boiled water in an electric kettle that sang “Twinkle Twinkle” when it reached temperature and we had our Nescafé.
Before I left, Marlene had me stand in the lacuna between her camera and the neutral backdrop on the far wall. Then she took my picture. There was a particular sort of intimacy in that, knowing her eyes were on me in a different way, that she was looking at me through the tool of her perfection, her most rarefied self. She was seeing me as best she could and maybe seeing me at my best as well. It made everything in me feel afloat. It’s possible I reflected that buoyancy in my pose. Then the camera clicked, and it was done. At her door, she held me in our silent goodbye and immediately I was aware that this was the only time we’d ever touched. I could feel her heart unsteadily working behind the brittle weave of her breastbones, feel her hot breath on my ear. But of course, that one photograph was our real intimacy.
A few months later, I heard that Marlene’s family had claimed her body and buried her in a suit behind their church somewhere in Pennsylvania. The name ground into her tombstone was Marcus. I’m sure, in their zeal for appropriateness and correction, her family trimmed away every curl and lock of her gorgeous golden hair, sculpting what was left into a pomade part. In all I’ve seen and all I’ve experienced, this might be the greatest act of violence I can recall. The people who claimed to love her most, in her most vulnerable stripping her of her identity and hiding her in the grave of a boy.
I suppose it’s too obvious to say I never saw that one portrait she took, never saw how Marlene’s eyes really saw who I was and am.
About the author: Douglas W. Milliken is a queer composer, artist, and writer who, drawing from personal experience, examines intersecting themes of addiction, mental health, sexuality, poverty, and trauma. The author of three novels—To Sleep as Animals, Our Shadows’ Voice, and Enclosure Architect (forthcoming)—the family history Any Less You (forthcoming), and the collection Blue of the World, he is also a founding member of the post-jazz chamber septet The Plaster Cramp, as well as the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and honors from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, Glimmer Train, and RA & Pin Drop Studios, among others. He lives with his partner in Saco, Maine.
See more of his work on his website, and connect with him on Instagram.