The photos found their way into Mr. Meeloy’s inbox early one Sunday morning. As was customary before church, Mr. Meeloy took his coffee on the elevated back porch, savoring the peace and quiet of his adopted country (celebrating twenty years in 2010!) before his wife and three children jolted awake with mucus gumming their eyes and stomachs demanding their mother’s pork floss and soft-boiled eggs. After taking his time inspecting the yard (the green grass mowed by a neighbor’s son every two weeks, a patch of young daffodils still untouched by deer or rabbits), he settled into the desiccated leather desk chair in front of the computer. The desktop sat on a wooden table near the big screen TV, in what his son and his eldest daughter called the “failed” rec room. “Failed” because no one liked to inhabit it for fear of running into anyone else. Only his wife used the rec room comfortably, playing solitaire and blackjack online until two o’clock in the morning, another way of closing her mind to him in the precious hours between dinner and bedtime.
The subject line of the email bore little resemblance to the photographs contained inside of it. The images were blurry, granular, and abstract, too large to be taken in all at once. The bulk of the first photograph was dark, following the contours of a bedroom wall, a curtained window and a ceiling taken in the half-light of day. Slowly, as the image loaded onto the computer screen, it was overshadowed by the sketch of something pink. Soft and distinctly human. It was like a parody of the porn sites from the early ‘90s. Bite-size pixels winding down line by line to reveal breasts, navel, hip bones, and pubic hair. Spam, Mr. Meeloy thought. Or a celebrity’s leaked photographs. As the images got more and more explicit, he noticed the face was obscured in all of them, a dense black balloon right above the neck (and wasn’t that the whole point of these leaked images, that the individual or individuals involved be easily recognizable?).
Aware of the public nature of his position in the rec room, penetrable from the second-floor landing, Mr. Meeloy registered that he should not be caught scanning these photographs. About to exit out of the screen, he was horrified to recognize, in the final image, a pink stuffed animal in the shape of an elongated feline, a creature from the first Pokémon movie, next to a picture of his wife from her graduate years in Japan. The picture was miniscule but still recognizable, perched in the back corner near the figure’s buttocks. It was the bedroom of his daughter Cornelia and the tan-brown flesh, presented anonymously and on such a grand scale that it rivaled the art in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was most likely hers.
A groan escaped his lips, and he snapped the browser window shut, backing away from the computer screen as if it were made of pulsating hot lava. Years of hard work in an internment camp followed by decades of careful acculturation had done little to prepare him for seeing his teenage daughter’s thin, scantily clad body. It was the body of a rapidly maturing woman. Before he lost his faculties and gave into a feeling of sheer panic, he quickly clocked that the other recipients of the email were undisclosed. The originator was a string of nonsensical numbers and letters, making it highly unlikely that his daughter had meant to distribute the image in the first place.
Breathing deep like his local swimming instructor had trained him, while watching him flail around the shallow end with a kickboard (he was a late swimmer, having just recently acquired the time and the luxury to learn), Mr. Meeloy ran up the stairs to his wife’s bedroom. Ever since Cornelia had started high school and Mr. Meeloy’s snoring had reached a fever pitch, they had started sleeping in separate bedrooms across the hall from one another. The situation was an embarrassment to his kids, who believed that “normal” parents should sleep in the same bed together, but what did they know? His son Regan was languishing at a local community college, Virginie was threatening to study English and Philosophy, and Cornelia, with her dyed blonde hair and studded nose ring, was the worst of them all. Mr. Meeloy had scarcely deigned to criticize their bad habits, including this latest, the email that would end his life.
◆
Upstairs, Virginie lay awake in the unheated third floor bedroom, unable to exert the willpower to pull herself out of bed. Three days had passed since Jon Domenici had asked her out, and she was thrumming with nervous energy. Virginie’s younger sister, Cornelia, was far more experienced when it came to matters of the heart, despite being fourteen and ostensibly still a virgin. Cornelia was what her father, in his old-fashioned, secondhand parlance, would have called “fast” if he had had the words and even Virginie knew for a fact that her sister had given three hand jobs to three different high school boys, all friends of their older brother, by the time she’d entered sixth grade.
Men were always staring at Cornelia and telling her that she looked like that Asian actress from Ally McBeal, the show about lawyers with the weird dancing baby in it. Unlike Virginie, who favored other members of the Hi-Q academic team, Cornelia ran with a dark and popular crowd. There was Jackie, the pastor’s daughter, who loved to give nose piercings at house parties, and Jackie’s cousin, who had gotten pregnant at thirteen and been seen dipping out of reform schools ever since. Jackie’s cousin was beautiful with straight brown hair, stick-thin legs, and large, kohl-lined eyes. Her mom had a stripper pole in the basement, greased and polished for occasional use. The girls had once performed a dance to Destiny’s Child while twirling their legs around it.
Virginie liked to lay in bed until she could hear sounds of her mother in the kitchen. Ever since she had turned eighteen in September, it had been unbearable to be alone with her dad in the same room, in any capacity. Her girlfriends thought that Mr. Meeloy was funny, cute even, in an asexual, old-man kind of way, but all she could think about was his anger and his perfectionism, the way he lost his temper over every little thing. Four years ago, when she first started menstruating, her father had stopped hugging her. “I don’t want strangers to get confused,” he said, citing the case of an immigrant father who had been arrested for adjusting his daughter’s bathing suit at a swimming pool. How could she explain to her friends the paranoia and anxiety that ruled all her father’s decisions?
The impetus to date Jon Domenici had spawned several weeks earlier, during a field trip to Veterans Square in downtown Media, Pennsylvania. In AP U.S. History with Mr. Rockafellow, the class was nearing the end of its curriculum on the 1960s and ‘70—Watergate and the Vietnam War. Mr. Rockafellow was a former Catholic turned hippie who insisted that one of the more interesting elements of American history had happened right here, in their own Delaware County. On March 8th, 1971, while the whole world watched Muhammad Ali square off against Joe Frazier in the Fight of the Century, an activist group known as the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI had broken into a bureau field office in Media and stolen over 1,000 classified documents. In the fallout of the burglary, journalists disclosed the existence of COINTELPRO, a secret intelligence program aimed at surveilling and discrediting civil rights activists like Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, and Assata Shakur.
Knowing that graduation was near, Virginie had yawned her way through history class until Mr. Rockafellow had split them into pairs and forced them to work on a ten-minute presentation, each regarding a different individual targeted by COINTELPRO. She and Jon Domenici were assigned to cover the American actress, Jean Seberg.
“She’s hot,” Jon said. They had been printing out articles at the school library. Virginie rolled her eyes, but secretly she had agreed. Even with hair like a boy’s, Seberg was beautiful in the way that her sister and Jackie’s cousin were beautiful. It was obvious and tough to deny.
They had decided to watch Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, the film that made Seberg famous, at Jon Domenici’s house, in the large, half-finished basement where his dad kept a foosball table and a second entertainment system. Virginie marveled at the privacy that Jon had. It was a luxury that she and her siblings, who could count on their parents bursting through closed doors at any second of the day, were not afforded. Jon had made Orville’s popcorn, another item that was contraband in the Meeloy household, and sprinkled Old Bay seasoning over it.
The actor in the film looked a little bit like Jon, with the same hotheadedness, except the actor was taller and had nicer, fuller lips. Her favorite scene was the one with Seberg and the actor sitting in bed, just talking. Seberg’s character clutched a teddy bear with a bow around its neck. “Do you prefer my eyes, my mouth, or my shoulders?” she asked the actor. “If you had to choose?”
Virginie had recognized her own need to have someone’s desire for her named and catalogued. There was a long pause before the actor kissed his hand and laid it on Seberg’s shoulder. Even in his tenderness, there was a sense that his movements were thoughtless, arbitrary. Being in relationship with a man seemed like a constant game of cat-and-mouse. Tiring and faintly erotic.
It was strange to watch actors on screen who were clearly dead in real-life. Virginie read that Seberg had died in Paris, in the summer. Her body was found in the backseat of her car with a bottle of sleeping pills beside her. Virginie wondered why a famous actress would kill herself in her car when she had a big, comfortable apartment to do it in. The act did smell like something clandestine and nefarious, a government cover-up.
Seberg and the actor talked in circles around each other, but they had good chemistry. When the actor ran out of a car to flip another woman’s skirt, Jon laughed and put his hand on Virginie’s knee. Teenage boys were so predictable but so was she. Even when she felt the need to pee pushing at her bladder, she continued to allow Jon to rub his thumb against her thigh until the movie was over.
When she had asked her older brother about Jon during one of their weekly phone calls, he made a pfft sound through the front of his lips. “That clown?” he asked. He and Jon were both C-average students who liked to perform tricks at the local skate park. They had even shared some of the same girlfriends, although Jon had trouble keeping them. “You’re better off single,” he declared. Her brother wasn’t a huge fan, it seemed.
In the silence that followed the end of the movie, Jon leaned forward and blinked at her with dark, wettish eyes. Her thoughts were still on the final scene. What did the actor mean when he said that Seberg disgusted him? Was it because she loved him and still turned him in to the police? She tilted her face towards Jon, an opening, and the kiss that followed was soft and surprisingly complex. His lips tasted like salt and crab seasoning.
On a field trip the next day, Mr. Rockafellow gave the students an hour to find lunch before heading back to the high school. The boys had joked about walking over to a local brewery and buying a growler of beer, but Virginie stuck with her girlfriends at Sbarro, dabbing her cheese slice with napkins to soak up the grease. It was the week before spring break and the streets of Media were teeming with adults, moving from one professional task to another. Eventually, the two groups converged outside of a coffee shop and when Jon caught her eye, he smiled.
He wasn’t Virginie’s type, not really. Not because he was unattractive (he was very attractive) but because of the certainty that they had very little in common. Virginie was headed to Ithaca after graduation while Jon planned to stay close to home. He loved his parents and his big, Italian American family. He was satisfied going to punk shows and hanging out in the Wawa parking lot with the other boys, afterschool. Boys who smoked weed and shunned their futures.
Virginie, who was named after her father’s obsession with all things old and foreign, had been destined for greater things. If she studied English, it was so that she could change the course of the entire discipline. Or, at the very least, get into a top five law school. Her own wants and needs were outside the parameters of discussion. All of this led to a certain ambivalence in her day-to-day life. What did it matter what she had thought, said, felt, or done? None of it would change the course of her life as her parents had outlined it for her.
While she was thinking these thoughts, Jon got a mischievous look on his face and raced ahead of the group. At the next crosswalk, Virginie could see him pause behind a young woman chatting loudly on her cell phone before lifting her skirt with a flutter of his wrist. The rest of the boys burst out into laughter. He turned to smile directly at her. A private joke.
“Gross,” Virginie’s friend had said. They watched as the woman laughed good-naturedly, and Jon allowed her to give him a playful slap on the cheek for penance. A wolf whistle came from the crowd. “It’s only because he looks like that, that he can get away with that kind of shit.”
“Looks like what?” Virginie asked.
“Oh, you know,” her friend said and raised her eyebrows. “Like a textbook sociopath.”
◆
Mrs. Meeloy inspected the photographs on the computer while her husband hovered inches behind her, his breath with its coffee funk wafting over her ear and into her nasal cavity. “Quick, before the kids wake up,” he said, but Mrs. Meeloy gave him an impatient wave of her hand. None of the kids would wake up until they heard breakfast sounds in the kitchen, and who knew if Cornelia was even home this early on a Sunday. She took a deep breath. Unlike her husband, Mrs. Meeloy liked to indulge Cornelia’s wilder tendencies. At least one Meeloy was living life as it had been given to her.
She recognized her younger daughter’s bedroom and the damning evidence presented by the stuffed animal, the family photograph, and the small body clad in lacy, black underwear. The body had pert breasts, smooth skin, and a small paunch above the belly. A shiver ran through her.
“What are we going to do about this?” her husband asked, and she wished for the third time this morning that she had never followed him downstairs.
“Are you sure it’s her?” she asked, feigning nonchalance. “The face is blacked out.”
“Probably because the sender knows that it’s illegal,” her husband said, darkly.
“It could be Virginie.”
“Stop being funny,” he replied. “It’s clearly Cornelia’s bedroom.”
“Okay,” Mrs. Meeloy said. “Well, I still think we should talk to the girls before we do anything else, like call the police.”
“The police?” Mr. Meeloy had a deep-seated hatred for authority, carried over from the old country.
“Yes, the police,” she sighed, debating whether she should explain the importance of cybersecurity or the intricacies of getting the authorities and the school involved. Although her English was far worse than her husband’s, and her allegiance to their adopted country far less obvious, she still took to other cultures with an agility Mr. Meeloy lacked. Assimilation had to do with the act of paying attention, a quality that her husband seemed to have lost over the years.
He hadn’t been this way when she first married him. At twenty-six, he had been president of his class at Zhejiang University, a handsome, older man studying the Classics while she read for Japanese literature. They both hated the Maoists, for different reasons, and they both longed for a bigger, more expansive sort of life than cheap breakfasts at the canteen and bike rides along Soviet-style apartment complexes. Now, she would give almost anything to drink soybean milk over a plastic tray but back then, she was smitten with his ideas about the future. His sense of humor and lightheartedness amused her, as when he crept up to her classroom door and meowed like a cat while she taught undergraduate students the basics of kanji.
Twenty some years in the States had eroded the divide between her old life and the new. Her younger sisters now boasted about their husbands’ promotions amongst government ranks and the influx of money flooding Ningbo. Outdoor shopping malls offered a distraction from the inequality between the city and the farmland, the specter of forced retirement.
Mr. Meeloy, who taught at the local university, had insisted that she stop working once he made enough money to support the family and, as his wife, she’d dutifully complied, handing in her resignation letter at a neighboring preschool where she watched over small children. She knew that his insistence had something to do with his waning sense of importance, the wearing down of his individuality in the face of academia. To comfort herself, she had adopted a slew of new hobbies—learning online solitaire, volunteering with the Chinese Evangelical church, and her most enduring activity—figure drawing at the house of one of her husband’s colleagues, Rick Morales.
Rick was a Korean War vet and a former freedom fighter. A decade of teaching History of Art and Architecture to undergraduates had made him comfortable in the presence of students from all different backgrounds and cultures. He was as patient as he was kind, and his lessons attuned to her abilities to the same extent that Mr. Meeloy was oblivious of them.
He taught class out of a two-story garage converted into an artist’s studio. The first time Mrs. Meeloy saw a naked body in Rick’s studio it was Hank’s, an old white man with loose skin under his legs and arms. Her nervousness at the sight of a naked man who was not Mr. Meeloy manifested itself in a burst of giggles, but one glance around the room told her that her laughter was immature, unbecoming.
Rick treated each artist, each artist’s model, indeed, every man, woman, and child who crossed the threshold of his studio with solemn respect. The other students in Mrs. Meeloy’s class were younger than she was, high school graduates and newlyweds building their portfolios for continuing ed classes. Only Mrs. Meeloy was of a similar generation, although Rick liked to joke that they were as culturally distinct as Margaret Mead and her study of the Samoans. In this configuration, he noted, Mrs. Meeloy was clearly Margaret Mead.
She had invited Cornelia and Virginie to join her but they both politely declined. After the first few weeks, she discovered that she had an aptitude for drawing hands and noses. She liked studying the smaller parts of a person’s body. When she lingered at the end of class one week, Rick offered her a glass of water and showed her to his study where the work of former students hung on wood-paneled walls. A radio played classical music in the background. Mrs. Meeloy gravitated towards a bookcase in the corner, its shelves filled with artist monographs.
Rick loved Vermeer and Rembrandt. In their solo art history sessions, he pointed out depictions of the human form, mostly women, from Botticelli’s Venus to de Kooning’s Woman I. He had talked about the preparatory sketches, the under layer of each painting, and each artist’s individual technique. Mrs. Meeloy ran her finger down the page of each silky reproduction, inhaling the scent of printed ink.
Rick was a widower, but he was not alone. Mrs. Meeloy met his girlfriend, a waitress from the city, one night after class. As they entered Rick’s house, the woman sat propped up at the kitchen table with a hand on her protruding belly, nursing a cup of tea. Mrs. Meeloy recognized her as one of Rick’s models from several months back. She had been seated on a large pedestal draped with blue fabric and an arrangement of fruit. Her pubic hair was very prominent. There were sketches of the woman in Mrs. Meeloy’s artist pad at that very moment. The pad sat propped up in the studio, waiting for her to collect it before she made her way home.
Rick waved hello to his girlfriend and then went into the study, where they spent a good half hour going over Manet’s portrait of Olympia. It was the painting of a young, white woman, her body naked and propped up on pillows. Mrs. Meeloy thought that the woman looked uncomfortable, with her hand positioned over her crotch and her legs crossed to keep herself covered.
She traced the ends of the woman’s legs to her tiny feet, which were clothed in delicate slippers. The bow around her neck accentuated the artificiality of the set, like the flourishes that Rick put up around his models to provide depth and variety to his student’s sketches.
The only part of the painting that appeared welcoming was the portrait of the woman’s black maid, her body open and tilted towards Olympia, offering an enormous bouquet wrapped in white paper. She liked the woman’s pink dress. It had a soft white collar and voluptuous sleeves, cascading downwards like the tiers of a wedding cake.
“Who is she?” Mrs. Meeloy asked.
“Ah,” he said. He leaned a bit closer to the catalog and reached for a pair of reading glasses in his breast pocket. “She is Laure.”
He flipped the pages of the catalog, back to one of Manet’s earlier works. “Here she is again,” he said, pointing to the woman in the corner of Manet’s Children in the Tuileries Garden. “Notice how she’s wearing the same outfit?”
Mrs. Meeloy stared at the pink dress. “But who is she?”
Rick shook his head. “A model,” he said. “Probably from the Caribbean.”
He rifled to another section of the book where there was an image of a note written in Manet’s hand. “All we really have is a record of her address,” he said, pointing to the text. “Laure tres belle negresse 11 rue de Vintimille 3e.”
Mrs. Meeloy clucked her tongue in disappointment. “Let’s go back,” she said, and Rick obediently turned the page to Olympia. This time, as she studied the painting, she thought she recognized something supple in the woman’s stance. She imagined her body bending the same way⎯in service to her husband and the rest of her family.
She loved her children, but she found it hard to reconcile their passion for Kraft cheese and Top Forty hits with her preference for Kenny G and Southern Dynasty soap operas. They had cried for her attention when they were young but as they got older, they enjoyed talking down to her when they felt irritated or upset. They blamed her for life’s inconveniences, and she had taken to licking her wounds in private rather than trying to convince them otherwise.
The isolation weighed on her, threatening to remake her with its density. Sometimes, she wondered if it was possible to exorcise her isolation onto the page, to sever it from her body and birth it into something different. Mrs. Meeloy put her hand on a corner of the bouquet as if to support its weight and reflected on the cruelty of the naked woman in her small, child’s body, allowing the burden of beauty to flourish in someone else’s hands. Laure, the artist’s model, was forever caught in the act of offering up an armful of flowers to a woman who would never, ever take them.
◆
“Send me something ;),” Jon texted Virginie a few days after the field trip. The message came at six in the morning, the first missive of its kind, and Virginie couldn’t decide whether this was sweet or absolutely psychotic.
She lay in bed, listening to the birdsong outside her window, before getting up and padding over to the corner to inspect her closet. There had been an incident a few years back where a girl in Cornelia’s grade had sent explicit photos to her then-boyfriend. After the two broke-up, the ex distributed the photos to the entire high school lacrosse team. The girl was so upset that she stopped coming to class and her parents moved her to a school in a different county. They never filed charges for harassment.
The girl was not particularly popular or nice, so it didn’t feel like a total loss at the time, but as Virginie perused her underwear drawer, she found newfound sympathy for her plight. She had never seen the photographs, but she had heard others describe the girl’s earnest, puckered face, and the freckles scattered across her gigantic chest. What was meant to be private and sexy had been turned into a farce, a public joke.
In the drawer, there was cotton underwear reserved for period days and an ill-advised foray into thongs, purchased from Mandee, with the Playboy bunny logo branded on top. Virginie sighed. None of it was acceptable. Her eye wandered over to the pixie blonde wig borrowed from a friend for her AP U.S. History presentation. She had pictured the scene of Seberg in her underwear, flirting with Michel the gangster. The wheel of power was constantly churning. What was it that Jon liked about her, really? What could he gather about her based on her hair, her eyes, her mouth, her looks?
Recently, Virginie had decided to rent another film⎯Godard’s Contempt starring Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot as struggling husband-and-wife. The film took place in Italy and traced the marriage as it fell apart. In one of the opening scenes, Brigitte lay in bed with her bare back and her legs exposed to the camera. She asked her husband:
–Can you see my feet in the mirror?
-Yes.
-Do you think they’re pretty?
-Yes. Very pretty.
She went on to trace her butt, her breasts, and her entire body. “So, you love me totally?” Brigitte asked at the end.
“Yes,” her husband replied.
It was an echo of the scene with Seberg and the teddy bear in Breathless. Movies helped Virginie make sense of her life. She had imagined asking Jon which body part of hers he liked best:
–And my shoulders. You like them?
-Yes.
-I don’t think they’re round enough.
-I do.
Virginie struggled with her feelings and with what she truly wanted. What were Jon’s true intentions and how much was she willing to reveal to ensure his affections? Heart pounding, she sat down at her desk and contemplated her next move. Perhaps it would be enough to wait until a reasonable hour to reply with, “You first.”
◆
Mrs. Meeloy had begged off to go to Rick’s and then to the grocery store, leaving Mr. Meeloy the space of two hours to confront his daughters about the photographs. So much for putting up a unified front. They had argued about it while Mrs. Meeloy boiled eggs and prepared rice porridge, but in the end, his wife won out. After finishing his breakfast, his son, who was home for spring break, absconded to the local skate park. As he rolled down the driveway, Mr. Meeloy longed to follow behind him.
Cornelia was home after all and in a foul mood, by all appearances (Was it just Mr. Meeloy’s imagination that she took after his wife more and more every day?).
“What?” she said as she sat with her arms crossed in front of him, sweet but sensitive Virginie sitting stiffly by her side. Cornelia’s eyes were puffy as if she’d already been crying. Did her emotions have anything to do with what he was about to confront her with?
“Now, it’s, uh, come to your mother’s attention, and my own, that some photos have been distributed…,” Mr. Meeloy started. He could feel his neck getting red as he struggled to find the words.
“Photos of what?” Virginie asked. Despite her surly appearance, Mr. Meeloy knew that he would miss her when she was gone next year. She had been distracted recently but still, he couldn’t help but pin his hopes on his brainy middle child. Virginie had scored a 760 in math and a 780 on her written SAT. He imagined her with a prestigious humanities degree, followed by graduate school in Germany, a world-class dissertation. Following in her father’s footsteps. He smiled internally at the thought of it.
Cornelia snorted, bringing him back to the present. “You mean, like, nudie pics?” she asked.
Stay calm, Mr. Meeloy consoled himself.
“Yes. They are photos of a, uh…compromising nature.”
“Okay, can we see them?” Cornelia asked.
Mr. Meeloy felt an itch in his throat. “No,” he said. “Better that you don’t.”
“Then how do you know it’s one of us?” This came from Virginie.
“Because,” he said. “It’s, uh, pretty clear. From the features of the bedroom.”
“Bullshit,” Cornelia muttered, but she didn’t seem quite as shocked as Mr. Meeloy expected her to be. Was she just proud to take Virginie down with her?
“You can’t just accuse us of something like that and not show us any evidence,” Virginie said.
“As hard as this might be to believe, I don’t want to look at nude photographs of underage girls with my teenage daughters,” he replied, proud of his comeback.
Mr. Meeloy studied each of his daughter’s faces for evidence of guilt or some sort of tell. If this was the old days, he would have forced them to sign their own confessions, regardless of the truth or the validity of his claims. The struggle sessions had taught him that truth didn’t matter as much as belief. Politics relegated you to the right side of history and belief made the fervor of history come alive. Sometimes it was simply enough to impose that fervor onto someone else, whether by persuasion or by force.
To his surprise, it was Virginie who started tearing up first. “This is so ridiculous,” she said, not even attempting to stem the flow of water running down her face. “I’m a fucking adult.”
“I understand that,” Mr. Meeloy said. “But you still live under my roof. And I’m worried about what this could do to you, to your future, if your identity came out.”
“It wasn’t me,” she protested. He could see Cornelia shift uncomfortably beside her, debating whether to reach out a hand and soothe her.
“Why did you take it in Cornelia’s bedroom?” he asked.
“Does it matter?” Cornelia asked. “God, Dad, you’re such a fucking asshole.”
Virginie’s sobbing continued, and Mr. Meeloy could feel his reserve starting to break. Cornelia reached over and began to rub her sister’s back. Now they were in allegiance against him.
“Look,” he said. “The face in the images is blacked out so it will be very hard to tell who is in the photos. But your mother’s picture is in the background. Someone might recognize it. And I still need to punish you for doing something so stupid and risky.”
“Why not punish the asshole who sent them?” Virginie’s sobbing continued while Cornelia murmured something into her ear.
Mr. Meeloy clicked his tongue in response. “I’m just trying to get the facts. And no matter what, it was wrong to take them in the first place.” He noticed that Cornelia made no move to confess.
“Cornelia,” he said. “Was it you?”
She looked at him with eyes that reminded him of his own. Bright and clear, the dark pupil blending in with the iris. “Children with brown eyes are scary!” a female colleague had joked to him once. “How can you tell when they’re concussed?” It was one of the stupidest things he had ever heard in his life.
“Bite me,” Cornelia said.
“Are you going to let your sister take the blame for it?”
She pulled her body closer to Virginie. “If you’re so convinced that it was me, why did you bring both of us here in the first place? Why not just punish me?”
“Leave her alone,” Virginie said.
Mr. Meeloy began pinching the bridge of his nose. The only thing that had saved him from despair these past few years was his reliance on the church. The potlucks, the Friday night bible groups. It was nice to lose himself in the crowd, to count himself one in a mass of worshippers.
The congregation at West Chester Chinese Evangelical rivaled the size of the white, Presbyterian church across the street, and the busy social calendar reminded him of his university days. He could build houses for the poor or go on mission trips to Shanghai, to Abidjan, and to the Poconos. He liked reading about God, who was sometimes benevolent, sometimes wrathful. His children often claimed he acted the same way.
For a moment, he stared out at the lawn and the swaths of grass he had been enjoying just hours before. Do not let anything spoil this for you, he thought. Last night had been almost peaceful. Sometimes he woke up from nightmares where he was back in the labor camp outside of Hangzhou, nursing his frostbite and watching the visage of the men and women who had never made it out.
Virginie’s sobs brought him back to the living room. His wife, his daughters, and his only son. How would he teach them how to live?
“So,” he said. “Is no one going to take responsibility for this?”
Mr. Meeloy was met with silence.
There was a time when Cornelia had been his favorite. She was the youngest, the wildest of his three children, the one most likely to twist an ankle or to get a concussion. Once, on a skiing trip to Blue Mountain with the church, Cornelia had lost her balance and skid butt-first into a clump of trees. Mr. Meeloy had been at work, moderating an academic symposium, when he received the frantic phone call from a chaperone, the mother of one of her friends.
In the hospital room, she had looked so small, with cuts on her face and a cannula wrapped around her nose. It had taken all his strength not to cry when he saw her. Time had changed her, but he had to believe that she would return and make peace with him again.
Cornelia, his prodigal daughter. He would do anything to protect her. It was obscene, the amount of love he had for his family.
◆
If her husband had ever been nervous about Mrs. Meeloy spending time at another man’s house, he never showed it. Perhaps he believed that Rick’s being a colleague somehow neutered him, rendered him harmless. Or perhaps he had faith in Mrs. Meeloy’s loyalty and her God-fearing nature. It was a combination of pride and stubbornness, she thought, that led him to underestimate her ability to act, to do real damage. His blindness contributed to her feeling of lassitude.
As she steered her car through the back roads of Brandywine Valley, she reflected on the events of the last few weeks. When she had first experimented with her daughter’s digital camera, she had done so with trepidation. Her intention had been to create a series of photographs of her own body to draw from. Something about the image of Laure’s servitude had struck a nerve, revealing something oppositional in her nature.
What did Laure think of Manet’s rendering? How would she have chosen to paint herself?
In Cornelia’s bedroom, she had shed her clothing little by little. First, the cashmere sweater and the ironed slacks. Then, the socks purchased in bulk from a department store. She removed all her jewelry—the tiny gold, cross necklace, and the modest wedding ring. Faced with the fact of her 57-year-old body, she felt defiant. It was a beautiful image.
After taking the photographs, she had meant to email the images to herself but in her haste to cover up her tracks, wiping her daughter’s memory card and making sure that the items in her bedroom were set back in the right place, she must have missed a digit in the email address and released the photographs to a stranger. It was both a disturbance and a miracle that they had decided to anonymize her face. How typical that her husband had failed to recognize her body, even with all the evidence laid out in front of him.
Mrs. Meeloy did feel bad about forcing her daughters to take the blame. So guilty, in fact, that she could not face confronting them alongside her husband. Faced with their tears and her husband’s cajoling, it would have been impossible not to tell the truth and then what would they think? They would call her selfish, naïve, cruel, and they would be right. She had done this without thinking about them, or about anybody else for that matter.
There was a time when she had dreamed that her daughters would grow up to become her confidantes, that they would transform into women she could trade jokes and secrets with, but life had conspired to keep them apart. Everyone said that teenagers were tough, but it was more than just that. Sometimes she suspected that her children lumped her in with the preschoolers she used to teach. Fun for a walk or a short afternoon of play, but too proximal to an earlier stage of development to be taken seriously. Virginie, who had inherited her father’s rigidity and his desire to fit in, was especially critical.
She remembered a time when Virginie was teased by the other girls at school for wearing too much eye makeup, for letting her feminine calculation show. Mrs. Meeloy had attempted to help. “You look better with a clean face,” she said, smoothing the hair from her daughter’s forehead and rubbing her mascara off with a warm towel. “Pretty. More natural.”
“I hate the way I look,” Virginie sobbed, her face puckering into a fresh round of tears. “And the real reason I’m ugly is because of you!” To be a parent was to constantly expose oneself to new stratums of defenselessness.
Still, it was wrong to let her daughters shoulder the blame and maybe one day she would tell them the truth, when they were better equipped to understand. People were resilient. She reassured herself with the fact that they were both young and would be out of the house soon. For all his faults, she knew that Mr. Meeloy would not be too harsh.
The houses alongside Route 1 were plastered with cartoon eggs and Easter bunnies for the holidays. Driving to Rick’s house had been a lie, but she did have an hour to kill.
Mrs. Meeloy parked her car behind Rick’s Oldsmobile and walked up to the front door. His house looked a lot like hers, down to the bird feeders and the tiny American flags. The doorbell rang a few times before a pregnant figure came to the door.
“Hello?” his girlfriend said as she unlatched the storm door. It was quiet and dark in the house behind her. Mrs. Meeloy waited as the woman studied her, taking in her coat and her dirty tennis shoes. “Hey, I know you,” she said. “You’re one of Rick’s students, right?”
Mrs. Meeloy gave a tentative smile. “Yes, hi,” she said. “Is Rick home?”
“He went out for a walk,” the girlfriend said, pausing for a beat. “But come on in, I’ll get you some coffee.”
She pushed the door open gingerly and Mrs. Meeloy entered the sights and smells of Rick’s familiar kitchen. There was a crochet project sitting on the table alongside a plate of half-eaten toast.
Mrs. Meeloy took her jacket off and hung it on the back of her chair. “I’m so sorry to interrupt you,” she said. “I was just in the neighborhood.”
The girlfriend nodded with her back to the table. “It’s okay, he should be home soon.”
Mrs. Meeloy patted her hair and listened to the sound of a neighbor’s dog cut through the silence. “How far along?” she asked, indicating to the other woman’s stomach.
“Seven months,” the girlfriend said, pouring a mug of coffee from a pot by the sink. “Do you have any kids?”
“Three,” Mrs. Meeloy said. She smiled as she reflected on this. “Almost grown. My youngest is fourteen.”
The woman set the mug in front of her and took her chair by the window. She settled in with a sigh and looked out at the neighbor’s dog. “My feet are swollen,” she said. “And my whole body hurts. My mom never told me it would be this tough.”
Mrs. Meeloy nodded sympathetically.
“Rick tells me that you guys have been studying portraits together,” she said. “Manet. I like those paintings.”
“Me too,” Mrs. Meeloy said.
“My favorite is the one he did of Baudelaire’s girlfriend. Have you seen it? She’s sitting on this bed in a poofy white dress. I think she must have been half-blind when he painted it.”
Mrs. Meeloy shook her head.
“It’s sad about those models though,” the girlfriend continued. “I worry that they get forgotten about as soon as they leave the sitting room.”
Mrs. Meeloy nodded. “I’ve been trying to draw myself,” she said. “I took some pictures, but I just couldn’t get the posture right. Too sexy.”
The woman laughed. She drummed her fingers on the table, and Mrs. Meeloy saw that her nails were perfectly rounded, the crescent moons highlighted in white. “You would make for an amazing portrait,” she said, studying Mrs. Meeloy’s face. Her glance reminded her of something soft, like bees walking across a flower.
“You should sit for class sometime,” she said. “Have Rick and the students draw you.”
Mrs. Meeloy blushed.
“Oh, come on! Really! You could work from his sketches.” The woman looked excited. “We can wait until Rick gets home and suggest it to him. I’m sure he’d go for it.”
Mrs. Meeloy smiled. There was something in the woman’s demeanor that reminded her of her daughters at their best, swept up in a new idea.
“You’re very kind,” she said. “Really. But I think I’d rather learn how to draw myself.” She paused as she considered this. “It’s important to me.”
“I understand,” the woman said. “I bet he could teach you that too. I’m Carrie, by the way,” she said, extending one of her well-manicured hands. “It’s really nice to meet you.”
“Rose,” she said, reciting her first name. “Rose Meeloy. It’s nice to meet you too.”
◆
Mr. Meeloy retreated into his bedroom to call his wife. The confrontation with his daughters had been a failure, and he wondered if they should take further action to prevent the photos from being identified. People had been thrown into jail for much less. The specter of punishment was never far from his mind.
The phone rang several times before Mrs. Meeloy picked up. “Hello?” she said. Her voice was muffled on the other side.
“Rose,” he hissed. “Where are you? Disciplining them was a disaster.”
He heard his wife sigh, and he imagined her massaging her elbow, the way she did when she was tired of him.
“I’m at Rick’s,” she said. “But I’m coming home now. We’re just finishing up here, right?” He heard Rick and his girlfriend call out a greeting in the background.
“Good,” he said. “I wish you had been here to help me. Neither of them confessed.” He paused for a moment. “You know I’m no good at these things.”
“I know,” she said and sighed again. He knew that his peevishness exhausted her.
There had been a time, right when they had first moved to the States, when Mr. Meeloy was sure that Rose would leave him. They were living in a rundown apartment building in Buffalo, New York where the winters were relentless with wind and snow. At his urging, Rose got a job nannying for a white family across town, and she was having a hard time acclimating to the food, the isolation. When their first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, she spent days huddled in bed, eyes glued to daytime television piping through the screen.
Mr. Meeloy could have taken time off to be with her, but he was too scared of jeopardizing his position at the school, of breaking some unknown rule that would send them both back home. It was a relief to be secluded in his office, a haven where he could submit himself to his books and to his papers. He had left her alone, to grieve by herself.
One night he came home from the office to find the apartment door open, the television screen tuned to static. His mind raced with nightmare scenarios. Rose had been kidnapped; she had tried to hurt herself and been taken to the hospital by a stranger; she had finally given up on him. He raced down to the parking lot and drove erratically through the snow-covered streets for hours, trying to find her. He stopped at local Chinese restaurants and specialty markets but none of the salesclerks had seen her.
When he returned home, he walked inside to find her sitting at the kitchen table in her coat and mittens, staring at a photograph of herself. It was the one of her as a young woman dressed in full kimono, taken the year she left Japan to be with him.
“I think I made a mistake,” she said, stroking the wood of the picture frame. She looked up at him, her eyes full of pain. “When did you stop appreciating me?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he knelt beside her and pressed her head into his neck as she cried. He stroked her hair, absorbing the condensation on her coat and bringing heat to her hands and forehead. The next week, he stayed home from work and fed her broth, comfort food.
Her body was familiar to him, but he had allowed it to sink into the background instead of giving it the position that it deserved. Rose had always been trim, girlish. Fit for her age. Men stared at her in parking lots and fast-food restaurants. It made him feel both lucky and concerned to be seen standing next to her. The slow realization of what the anonymous photos meant spread from the crown of his head to the bottom of his torso.
“What are you thinking about?” his wife asked, pulling him back into the moment.
He cleared his throat as he thought about what to say. “I’m sorry,” he said into the phone.
“For what?” she asked.
“For never stopping to think that it might have been you.”
◆
The rest of the afternoon passed by slowly, alternating between states of boredom and wistfulness. It was a feeling that Virginie would come to associate with early spring. The sense that the world was standing on the precipice of irrepressible change. Soon, this episode would be a blip in her memory, a funny anecdote to tell the girls at freshman orientation. Virginie felt almost bad for her father. Towards the end of the confrontation, he had looked so old in his sweatpants and Polo t-shirt. Deflated. She was 99% sure it had been Cornelia or one of Cornelia’s friends. At the end of the day, she couldn’t blame her sister for not wanting to take the fall for it.
She opened her phone to the last text message from Jon, a reply to her own message from a few days ago, about not wanting to take things too fast. “I’m flattered,” she wrote. “But I’m not ready to do that, sorry.”
“That’s okay,” he wrote back a few hours later. When Virginie didn’t respond, he wrote to her again. “Look, I’m sorry for making you feel weird.”
It was an acceptable answer, but Virginie was still contemplating how to position her response. For now, there was the added irony of her father’s confrontation to factor in. It was uncanny, but Virginie wouldn’t put it past him to have sensed their text conversation and staged an intervention, like the drunk driving skits that Mothers Against Drunk Driving put on every year, complete with crushed car and shattered glass.
The presentation on Seberg last week had gone well. Jon and Virginie had reenacted parts of Breathless, replacing the French cops with the American FBI, to hoots and whistles from the rest of the class. Even though Virginie wasn’t sure where things stood with Jon, one of the things that Seberg’s life had taught her was that beauty got you noticed but it didn’t guarantee you anything else⎯love, safety, or respect. Maybe it was enough for her to take things slow, to feel things out. Virginie pulled out her phone to craft a new message. “You won’t believe what just happened to me…”
Her mother came home from running errands all morning. Virginie noted that she seemed lighter, more cheerful than usual. In penance, her father made rice cakes with bamboo shoots for dinner. As was their parents’ nature, the issue of the photographs was never brought up again. Cornelia made a half-hearted attempt to find the photos on the family’s desktop computer but gave up as soon as one of her friends called to make plans.
Her mother called Virginie into the living room after dinner to show her the sketches from her life drawing class. There were portraits of ordinary men and women in various poses, both nude and draped in pieces of fabric. It was funny to imagine the figures living on in her mother’s sketchbook, pinned in a moment in time. Funnier still to think about her mother laboring over them in her private life, separate from the rest of the family.
“These are good, Mom,” Virginie said, giving her mother a smile.
Mrs. Meeloy smiled back. “Thanks, sweetie.” She paused as she put away her materials. “Do you think you could help me with something?” she asked.
Together, they dragged the full-length mirror from her brother’s old bedroom into a corner of the garage where her mother had set-up a chair and a wooden easel alongside it. “Your brother said he didn’t need this,” she said. “And I’m planning to draw myself.” She sat in the chair and pointed to her reflection in the mirror. “See?” she continued. She twisted back-and-forth to show all the different angles that she could bend into.
“That’s great, Mom,” Virginie laughed. “I’m happy for you. I’m sure it’ll turn out great.”
That night, her mother remained the only one willing to use the rec room, playing solitaire on the ancient desktop as everyone else went to bed. Virginie finished washing the dishes and tidied up the textbooks scattered across the table. “Good night, Mom,” she said, kissing her mother on the forehead. She looked pretty, sitting alone in the glow of the computer screen.
“Stay if you want,” her mother replied. “I think I’m about to win.”
Together, they watched as Rose maneuvered her final card into place and sent the stacks bouncing across the screen.