The Cage by Audrey Shulman Page A

onto the camera. Unfortunately she liked coffee. Each morning she made it quite strong using a melior, a ritual that helped her to wake up. He said that any awakening must come from within. Something about the weight with which he uttered advice like that made her see it as a country sampler stitched with little roses and hung on the wall. She knew this wasn’t how he’d want her to hear his words.
    When he was around in the morning she’d try to wait until he left to have her coffee, but sometimes he’d stay until lunch and then she’d pull the melior out in front of him. Once he asked how it felt to be addicted. Vocabulary about addictive behavior was quite popular at the time, from chemical dependency to dependent relationships. Several of her friends had confessed to her their addictions and she had felt insensitive and slightly left out that she had no confessions to give in return. She began to wonder if coffee would be acceptable.
    â€œIt’s like seeing you drink ground glass,” he explained. She smiled shyly at his caring, his protection, but each time she took a sip, he’d look away. She began to enjoy her coffee less and less.
    For a week she experimented by not drinking caffeine to see if her photos actually did benefit. She couldn’t see much of a difference. She wondered if it took longer than a week to work the impurities out of her soul.
    He started to give advice about her work each time they met at her studio. He would state the criticism with his face turned a little away from the photograph so his eyes were narrowed and looking out from the side, the crow’s-feet showing, the same pose he favored in the posters advertising his shows. She never ceased to revel in the physical size of his work, blown up to ten feet tall and fifteen feet wide, grainy and hard. Sometimes he nailed wood boards onto the pictures, dusted them with dirt, glued on telephone wiring that curved in and out. The vegetables looked quite alien, like the insides of machines. The critics loved his combinationof photography and sculpture. She thought he couldn’t have mistakes in pictures that big.
    One day over lunch, he asked if she didn’t sometimes tire of photographing only animals.
    She had been raising a tofu curry sandwich to her lips. She put the sandwich back down. “What?” she asked.
    â€œYou only photograph animals,” he said. “You must get tired of it. If you do that well with animals, you could say so many more things with a greater subject matter, with something more than …” He thought for a moment, puckered his lips out, and then laughed as he said, “Bambis and Thumpers.”
    She had tried to laugh at his joke. A drop of soyonnaise had clung to his upper lip. She’d leaned forward and wiped the drop away with her napkin, touching his lips with her other hand and then running her fingers down his chin, as though she could stop his voice, his words. She’d given up coffee almost entirely except sometimes in the afternoon if she still felt sleepy.
    â€œOh,” she said, “I guess it would be nice if I had a larger scope, but animals are the only things that fascinate me enough to make the photos good.”
    â€œMaybe,” he said, “you should try harder.”
    They had a long discussion on the subject. In arguments like this he was methodical and earnest, tracking each statement down to its logical conclusion. He would maintain that IF she had a limited subject matter, and IF she thought itwould be better to photograph more things than animals, THEN she should try harder to increase her scope.
    She wasn’t as logical in her debates. For her the conversation wasn’t the only thing going on. While they discussed the scope of her work, she noticed that when he made a point he held his hands cupped out toward her as though physically offering her something. She noticed that his eyes hardly ever rested on her, but