So when I get home I dump the dirty container into the sink and start setting up the lights and the shades like Elba had shown me, laughing, during our first shoot. I’d learned then that, like me, she was working her way through school. We joked about how I’d build houses for us and she’d paint all over them, inside and outside and between the walls, murals hearkening back to Egyptian tombs and The Last Judgment.  She started coming over every week; within a month it was almost every day. Living just two floors apart made it easy. At first I’d just used a point-and-shoot camera but one day Elba brought over her dad’s old Hasselblad. I always handled it carefully because when Elba was still in diapers her father had left one day to go to a job interview and never come back. His car was found abandoned by the river that led out to sea, the driver’s side door gaping like a poorly hinged maw, and over time Elba’s mother had convinced herself that her husband had been murdered. The Hasselblad was one of the few things they still had.

The film ready, I carefully extract my newest prize from my backpack, a small piece of a verdant puce, wishing I had the know-how to engineer a contraption that would plop it perfectly on her head when she walked into the apartment. Elba had been up-state for a few weeks visiting her sick mother and I wanted a way to surprise her, to clear the shroud I knew would cloak her face.

It starts to rain and I remember that she likes the sound of it so I leave the window open. I throw some tofu pups on the skillet and open the fridge, pulling out some crème brulée minus the brulée and a bottle of dessert wine. It’s from the island of Elba, a sweet red, Aleatico Passito, and is every bit as intoxicating as Elba herself. I take a quick shower to wash off the salted sweat from nailing shingles for eight hours. I make sure to clean underneath the foreskin and put on clean underwear and as I’m sliding the gently charred tofu pups onto a plate I hear her knocking and singing at me through the door so I open it and she is very pleased with the hat, very pleased. We shoot for about half an hour but we haven’t seen each other in nearly two weeks and before long we’ve put aside the hats and all other clothes to speak of and she’s telling me the pose she’s in is called happy baby and there is a downpour and I don’t know if she’s trying to be ironic but I’m glad for her, don’t know how Napoleon tore himself away after only three hundred days but would be damned if he hadn’t, and when I close my eyes I feel the spray of sea in my face and can’t help but give in, mindlessly, ears throbbing with the steaming rain.