Darkroom

Anjali left me alone in the apartment so I could collect my things. I’d lived with her for almost four years at this point. The breakup was amicable: she told me I was impeding her productivity and I told her she was as heartless as Sputnik. Then we called each other things so regrettable that we had no choice other than to apologize for them, and afterwards we made love on the carpet for what she called “the absolute very last time, so help me god.” She left immediately afterward, claiming she couldn’t be around me for one more second lest she landslide back into complacency. I was to pack up my things and never speak to her again. My pride was too great to argue.

It’s said that in New York City, high rents force lovers to move in together faster than they otherwise might. I wish I could say my and Anjali’s love transcended such conveniences—it did, and I can—but I would be lying if I didn’t admit I fell in love with her apartment almost as much as I loved her. The exposed brick; the non-working fireplace with its wrought-iron grate; the casement window overlooking a lamppost-and-tree-lined street. Her parents—a divorce attorney and a neurosurgeon—had split the mortgage with her, and it showed. At least, its potential did: I saw it immediately, the first night she invited me over, despite the refuse scattered everywhere: empty take-out boxes, laundry, receipts, plastic shoppings bags—I beheld this all, saw through the clutter, and watched my life with Anjali unfurl like a film reel. I could clean this place up. I could nest here. This has always been my greatest talent: finding beauty in mess. That’s why I was a photographer.

For four years, this was what I did: cleaned the apartment, regularly enough that the patterns in the wood grain became as recognizable to me as the lines on my palm. I worked mostly on weekends, shooting weddings and the occasional bar mitzvah. On Monday mornings, I dropped my film rolls off at the lab downtown. While I waited for them to develop, I laid waste to dust and grime in our apartment.  When I wasn’t cleaning our apartment, I was cleaning up my work: scrubbing out the accidental grimace, the eye roll, the spilled wine, the drunken come-on—only once the imperfections had been cut out could the reel be sent out for development.

Meanwhile, Anjali, a software developer, often stayed late at the office, writing code, putting out fires, winning the admiration of her peers and superiors. When she got home, I had dinner simmering on a scrubbed-clean stovetop. Yes, it was all very domestic of me, effeminate you might even say, but believe me, I proved my masculinity in other ways.

For example, with my minimalistic belongings: everything I owned fit in one suitcase. There wasn’t much: clothing, toiletries, the coffee machine, various bits of photography equipment. I parked my suitcase by the door, then stole one last adoring glance at my home for the past four years. I frowned. It was… kind of dirty. The emotional labor of our breakup had left me too drained to uphold my standard cleaning ritual, nor fight back against the torrent of detritus Anjali generated in her normal course of living. And how much dirtier it would get from here on out, without my scrupulous attention!

I decided I would do Anjali one last parting favor: I would give her apartment the best god-damn deep clean of its entire pre-war existence. Anjali would return to find her apartment spotless, a reminder of what she had given up--in this sense, the favor was also a fuck you.

I really outdid myself. I cleaned behind the fridge. I got down on my hands and knees with a sponge and bucket of soapy water (no space for extravagances like mops in New York) and scrubbed the floors. As I cleaned, I thought about the dissolution of my own parents’ relationship.

My mother was a potter with an artist’s temperament, my father, a quiet mechanical engineer. When they fought, my mother screamed while my father absorbed her rage as silently and impotently as a kitchen sponge. Then one night—I must have been seven or eight—I was sitting at the kitchen table when they got into it. I was playing with my father’s sturdy metal Pentax, trying to block out their fight, when I heard a crash and looked up: my father had thrown one of my mother’s prized ceramic bowls across the room, sending it shattering against the exposed brick. I didn’t know who was more shocked, me or my mother. We never knew he had it in him. Then my father left for hours, and my mom shut herself in her bedroom, and I, with my Pentax, snapped a picture of the shards of ceramic scattered about the carpet. There was beauty to it—beauty in the mess. That’s when I decided to become a photographer.

I was almost done with the floors when I began to wonder: had I ever once scrubbed under the rugs? No—and how disgusting the floors underneath them must be by now! I was appalled with myself. I peeled back a corner of rug, and when I saw what it had been hiding, the sponge fell from my hand and I gasped.

“Anjali, what in the—”

But of course, she wasn’t there, and so I could not ask her: did you know you have a trap-door hidden under your rug?

It was like a stage door, almost: very flat, blending in almost seamlessly with the floor boards. My fingers found a narrow groove and I pulled. Part of me was sure the door wouldn’t open: for how could I have been unaware of such a thing right under my feet, in a space I knew so intimately? But it gave, and I looked down in wonder.

Every lover keeps buried secrets. Anjali’s were piles of winter clothes. I pulled two puffer jackets out of the hole in the floor and cursed her for keeping this additional storage space all to herself. Under the jackets I found an extra sheet set, under that a feather blanket, roller blades, cardboard boxes—I felt like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat—and under those, a second door that, when pulled, revealed a ladder. I climbed down.

I had entered a kind of crawl space with ceilings so low that I couldn’t stand up straight—which I discovered only after trying to. Cursing, rubbing the back of my head, I groped the wall for some kind of light switch. A familiar, chemical smell filled my nose—under any other context, I would have recognized it instantly. I felt a hanging metal pull-chain and pulled. The crawl space filled with red light. I blinked twice. “What in the hell—”

Empty film canisters and black plastic trays littered the floor. Balls of paper towels rolled about like tumbleweeds. A drying line hanging on the low walls revealed prints of photographs I recognized—ones I’d taken. It was a darkroom. Anjali was hiding a darkroom right beneath my feet, and in it, she was developing my photographs.

How can I explain what I felt then? Every possible emotion: wonder; disbelief; anger; betrayal; jealousy; awe. To think, I had been walking ten blocks to get my filmed developed on 7th for three bucks a roll when I could have been doing them at home for free! Half-walking, half-crawling towards the wall, I took in the hanging prints: in one, wedding guests congo-lined across a dance floor while hidden in the corner—and unbeknownst to me at the time—a groom held his bride’s hair back while she puked into a potted plant. In the next, a maid-of-honor held up a champagne flute at the end of her toast while her sister’s new husband stared at her longingly. As a photographer, there’s what you see when you’re behind the lens, and then there’s what you see after. I don’t know how or when, but Anjali had gone through my filing cabinet and right underneath my feet, developed all the wedding photos I’d discarded—the rejects. What had she seen in them, I wondered? Some harbinger of future trouble that I had been totally blind to?

In the middle of the room, I spied a consumer-grade enlarger sitting on a folding plastic table. I flipped the power switch and the lamp hummed to life, projecting the negative onto the easel below. Even before the image came into focus, I recognized the image: my mother. I must have taken this photo, oh—over two decades ago. She was standing in front of the bookshelf in our living room, trying to arrange the pieces of the pot my father had destroyed to maximally aesthetic effect. My father, standing behind her, was crossing his arms and shaking his head. A second later, he would turn to me and snatch the camera from my hands. Didn’t I know that certain things weren’t meant to be captured on film? But something about the scene had called to me, even then—a story in an image. Beauty in mess.

Now I stared at the glowing, blown up image of my childhood and longed to know, so desperately: what had Anjali thought when she’d seen this photograph? But I couldn't ask, because she’d left and asked me never to contact her again.

So instead I did the only thing I knew how to do: I cleaned the darkroom. I scrubbed its acrid floors. Then I crawled up the ladder and replaced the cardboard boxes, the roller blades, the feather blanket, the puffer coats, and folded the rug back over the door. You would never even know I had been down there—unless you knew where to look.