Snapshot (Draft 3)

Heroin addicts were my usual victims. I only photographed tortured souls: drug addicts, Nam veterans, the New York homeless. The blissful rich didn’t interest me; their high-held noses weren’t worthy of my art. But that was before she glided into my lens and made me realize I’d been seeing the world upside down.

Crystal was a Park Avenue debutant. At first glance she gleamed like a diamond in the pavement, at second a pearl, and at third a mere pebble blending into the mass of darkness. I begrudgingly walked into the Park flat two years ago to the day, egged on by a simple necessity for money, to take Crystal’s official debutant portrait. I had imagined that when I entered her room she’d be sprawled across a chaise like a Marilyn Monroe with the world at her fingertips. But instead, when Crystal pulled the door ajar I found an anxious little girl inside the folds of fabric and karats of gold. Her bones stuck out of her bare shoulders like rusty nails in a picket fence. Her hair was as dark as the cast-iron rim of her mirror and her skin as washed out as a worn seashell. Her evening gown clung loosely to her frail figure, overpowering the simple character that lay beneath it. That’s not to say she wasn’t beautiful. Crystal took my and every man’s breath away like a balloon takes in helium. But it was in that moment of doubt when Crystal opened her door to the unexpected that I realized my freedom fluttered in front of me, a two-way fork was at stake. A flaring red banner to the right cautioned me not to open my lens, not to push that button. A withering human crystal led to the left.

So I snapped the photo: human temptation is victorious. Orpheus turns back to Eurydice. Odysseus falls to the Sirens. I succumb to Crystal. Once I took the first picture I couldn’t stop, her insecurity was an oil field of potential. Every angle I aggressively zoomed, clicked, flashed. I was the paparazzi; she was my starlet. But unlike my high addicts and battered veterans who sprawled themselves in front of my camera pretending to open their ensnared souls to redemption, Crystal shied away from my lens, keeping her heart for herself. In doing so she gave a photographer all he could ever want. A stream of insecurity so bountiful it is almost tangible to the everyday man. To the heroin addict. To the Nam veteran.

Two years later I have my own Park flat. I’m living the life I swore to never lead. I have money but remain unloved and unknown. See, after I shot Crystal I ran to my darkroom, developed my pictures in a frenzy equal to that of my addicts to a needle and veterans to pain killers. And the product was beyond my greatest dreams; there was a single photo that set my roaring heart to ice. That melted my vacant soul to liquid. It was the first picture on the roll, the exact moment of doubt when she opened the mahogany portal to heaven and hell. It was this photo that set me onto the track of the fifth floor of Park and the life of Orpheus. Crystal’s picture went on exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art. It was my pride and joy. It brought me money. Self fulfillment. Nothing else.

It’s a Sunday morning when I open the New York Times as my coffee brews, to see my very own masterpiece gazing up at me. My eyes flitter over the headline, “Suicide in MoMA” as a gasp escapes my increasingly dry mouth.

Crystal Waldgrave, 20, found dead Saturday in front of Portrait of a Debutant (photograph by William Laird). The source of death remains unknown but overdose of painkillers is greatly suspected; autopsy scheduled for Wednesday. Ms. Waldgrave shared an uncanny resemblance to the young woman in the photo, sparking beliefs of an unhappy, drug induced young woman thinking she was the famous debutant in the picture and when, realizing she was not, decided to put an end to her life.

I blandly stare out across the block to Crystal’s old flat. I had thought she was an addict of ambiguity, a veteran of social oppression. But no. Crystal Waldgrave wasn’t a diamond in the rough; she was just another addict of the high, a veteran of life. In the end she only wanted attention and attention she got.

I tore up the picture my selfish hands had crafted and tossed it out my open window, angry tears falling with it like a million painkillers cascading down a throat. I began to watch them plummet and then freedom fluttered in front of me once again: I picked the flaring red banner. I turned right. And I went back to bed.