Free Into the Great Wide Open by Kevin Canty Page A

“What’s that?” he asked.
    “That’s how I took these,” she said. “It’s this kind of bulb thing that you squeeze and the air trips the shutter, very rinky-dink but it works. I did it with my foot.”
    In a rush, nervous. Kenny saw why. In one picture, she stood like Venus on the half shell; in another, like a soldier, legs apart; in one that she quickly shuffled back into the pile, not quite before he could see it, she sat back on her haunches like a Vietnamese woman, two white calves and her vagina clearly visible between them, her head resting sideways across the tops of her knees like she was resting. No two of them felt alike, although the lighting, the room, the body were all the same. Different small feelings: secrets, some of them not polite. No mistaking these for art. Kenny didn’t have any problem paying attention to these. Part of it was seeing her naked but there was another excitement besides: she was telling things she shouldn’t say. Something she was working out, alone. These photographs were
evidence
. Also the grainy black-and-white, the mask, thesurprising dark mass of hair—all reminded him of his first dirty pictures, a deck of pornographic playing cards, found in his father’s bedside drawer. Dirty black-and-white; a world unknown, suspected but unplumbed. As she was. “What’s the deal with the mask?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said. She wouldn’t look at him. “I wanted to see what I looked like, I guess. I couldn’t do it with my eyes open.”
    “I don’t get it.”
    “It was just something I did one day,” she said. “I shouldn’t have showed them to you, I didn’t mean them for anyone …”
    “No,” he said. “I mean, thank you. Thank you for showing these to me, it’s like you trust me. I’m just trying to think of what to say.”
    And it felt like one of those moments—grace, the Holy Spirit—when something told him the right thing to say, and he said it, and it worked. Her shoulders relaxed under his hand and, still not turning her head, not looking up at him, she reached her own hand behind and touched his wrist, a soft, affectionate caress; like they had been married, for years and years. Wet snowflakes batted against the glass, like moths, a tiny sound.
    “You don’t have to say anything about them,” she said. “You don’t even have to think anything about them, that’s the thing about pictures. They just exist. The eye sees them, that’s it.”
    Kenny was instantly suspicious but now was not the time to start a war. He said, “I don’t know why but I like these better than the others.”
    “There is a naked girl in these,” Junie said.
    Kenny decided to quit while he was ahead; there was peace between them, restfulness.
    “Can I put these away now?” she asked.
    “Sure.”
    And she didn’t look at him again until the pictures were safely back in their envelopes, the envelopes stacked together in a filedrawer under the desk, and the drawer closed. The room seemed dull without them; too brown, too natural. Junie was black-and-white, the thing that stood out. She sat on the bed, and Kenny sat next to her. He put his arm around her waist and she tried to put her arm around his shoulders but they got crossed up and banged their elbows together. “Ow!” Junie said.
    “What are we supposed to be doing?” Kenny asked.
    “What do you mean? What does my mother think we’re doing?”
    “Whatever,” Kenny said.
    “She doesn’t care. She’s downstairs doing good with Jinx Logan. That’s her hobby, or maybe her vice—doing good. She just can’t help herself.”
    The bitterness made her seem like a child, unattractive; but there was something else, a restlessness that Kenny recognized. What? He couldn’t name it, couldn’t pin it down. There had to be more, that was all; there had to be more than this. He closed his eyes and saw gardens, topiary shrubs, statues standing in pools of water; he saw a park, springtime, felt the