Read Online Black & White by Dani Shapiro - Free Book Online

old-fashioned yellowy light. Ruth always looked most beautiful when she was in this state. Clara didn’t have the words for what the state was, exactly. But it seemed to her to be something akin to bursting. Bursting with what, she wasn’t sure.
    In the courtyard, the lighting was set up, two tall pole lamps and the silver reflector disk. Ruth had brought down a thick wool blanket, even though it wasn’t cold out. She wrapped it around Clara.
    “Let’s get you undressed,” she said. The blanket was itchy. Clara remembered they had used it for a picnic in Central Park earlier in the summer.
    As Clara stepped out of her pajama bottoms, Ruth glanced up at the sky.
    “Look, sweetheart,” she whispered. “Look at the moon.”
    “It’s a full moon!” Clara said, her clear voice piercing the silence of the night. “I see the man there—the man in the moon!”
    “Ssshh,” said Ruth. “We don’t want to wake people up.”
    Where was the doorman? Ruth must have asked him to stay inside his booth. Maybe she gave him a tip, the same way she sometimes did when he hailed them a taxi on Broadway.
    “Okay, Clara. Let’s climb into the fountain,” said Ruth.
    “But we’re not allowed,” said Clara.
    “Just for tonight.”
    Clara climbed up on the edge of the fountain and dipped her toe into the two inches of water inside the stone basin. It wasn’t too cold. The water was still, because the fountain part had been turned off for the night. Beneath the green-black glassy surface of the water, hundreds of copper pennies, nickels, dimes, even quarters gleamed like stars.
    Ruth quickly approached her with the light meter, holding it up to Clara’s bare chest. She then adjusted the aperture on her camera. Clara knew better than to talk right now. She felt the heat of the lights on her body. Her mother was crouching, aiming the camera up at her, squinting through the lens.
    “Hold your arms up in the air, Clara. Like you’re a part of the fountain. Like you’re reaching for the moon.”
    Click. Ruth checked the light meter again. Click, click, click.
     
     
     
    Rico and Brian are holding Clara in the Fountain in the puddle of light cast on the gallery wall. The photograph slips a little, and they right it; their arms are getting tired.
    “Perfection,” says Kubovy. “I’m seeing it—the whole gallery, with just these eight extraordinary images.”
    “I don’t know,” says Ruth. She is standing in front of Clara, partly blocking Clara’s view of her own naked body, pale and shiny as marble, arms flung wide in the moonlight.
    “Ruth, please—listen. Listen to me. This is your introduction. Your debut. No one knows you yet. Artists can spend their entire lifetimes recovering from the wrong first impression.”
    “Mommy?”
    Ruth doesn’t turn around. She folds her arms, cocks her head. She is lost in another world, the world she goes to when she’s inside her pictures. Sometimes Clara imagines that they are together in that black-and-white world, that the place inside the pictures is the real one and this—all this is just a rehearsal. A setup. Like the way she and her mother stage the pictures before they actually get made.
    “Mommy?”
    Clara has to pee really badly. She doesn’t know where the bathroom is. She looks around, but all the doors look the same. They don’t even have knobs.
    “All right, Kubovy.” Ruth sighs. “I hope you’re right.”
    “I know I’m right.”
    Kubovy walks back over to the rolling cart of crates and begins to open the next one, cursing as he nicks his finger on a staple.
    “Let’s start to sort out the placement,” he says. “I think—”
    “Mommy!”
    Clara crosses her legs hard. She feels a tiny bit of urine wet her panties. She never wets her panties. But now, out it comes. Down the side of her leg. Pooling around her bottom.
    Ruth wheels around. Clara is sitting in a puddle on the floor.
    “Oh, no!”
    “I’m sorry, Mommy.” Clara begins to cry. She