This Must Be the Place: A Novel by Kate Racculia

chorus of “Like a Prayer” wafting over the whine of dormitory water pipes, Arthur had crawled out of her single dorm-issue bed, grabbed his camera, and gone on photo safari in her underwear drawer. They had only been together for half a week—the single dorm-issue bed had seen first and second base and was steadily rounding on third—but, in accordance with the whole Beatrice package, Arthur had expected her underwear drawer to be the undergarment equivalent of the Taj Mahal.
    The few pieces he’d already seen had suggested as much, but they proved the exception, not the rule. His first thought upon seeing the perfectly folded rows of clean white and cream panties and matching bras—with a few garishly lacy pieces jammed together in the corner like an aberrant splotch of plumage—was that he had opened her roommate’s underwear drawer by mistake. But no. Beatrice the busty voice major had a single; she had no roommate. What she did have—a compulsively tidy drawer of cotton underpants and full-coverage beige bras—flustered Arthur but didn’t stop him from snapping two dozen hastily composed photos before Beatrice, dripping and humming, returned.
    It wasn’t until he developed the film that he understood what he’d felt standing over Beatrice’s underwear drawer, which, in the fantasies that occupied the majority of his waking life, had once existed as a teeming mass of black and red lace and strings and straps whose purpose and function he had yearned to explore as a conquistador yearns for undiscovered country. It was a more sophisticated and wholly unexpected emotion that took Arthur as he pinned the dripping photographs up to dry. They weren’t the most beautifully composed shots he’d ever taken, but he had aced the assignment: none of them looked like underwear.
    They looked like snowy fields. Freshly pressed hospital linen. Blank canvas. Scoops of silken ice cream. And the twinge of disappointment Arthur thought he should have felt at discovering the full-coverage cotton girl lurking beneath Beatrice’s cabaret exterior vanished. What took its place was a genuine tenderness and another kind of intrigue—for another person, a real person with the capacity to surprise him, not merely live up to his wildest fantasies and expectations. He got anA-plus on the assignment and maintained his artistic integrity (and girlfriend) by refusing to reveal the original subject of the pictures.
    The photos turned out to be stronger than Arthur’s relationship with Beatrice, which combusted in less than a month over irreconcilable differences (Arthur thought it was perfectly reasonable to prefer a midnight show of
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
to a kegger at the fraternity that required every pledge class to kill a chicken, and Beatrice disagreed). When he brought his portfolio home over spring break and his father saw the pictures of Beatrice’s underpants—and the A-plus they had earned his son—he clapped Arthur on the back. His parents framed two of them and no one ever suspected they were anything more salacious than fitted sheets. If he could trick his parents into decorating their family room with pictures of his girlfriend’s panties, then truly he had found his calling.
    Which only made the opinion widely held among his art-department friends harder to refute: that he was batshit crazy for wanting to move to Hollywood—which he did, batshit crazy or not, two and a half years after graduation. He knew as well as they did that all the serious photographic art was going on in New York City. Didn’t he want to take serious pictures, and make serious art, in a city that was
closer
? And didn’t he know that Los Angeles, choking on paparazzi, was where good photography went to die? He had shrugged off their disbelief with the assurance that he knew exactly what he was getting into; of course he didn’t want to spend his life hounding celebrities for blurry money shots, but he wanted to be a portrait