Gordon sprinkled some food into the fish tank.  The flakes slowly spiraled, pink and yellow and orange, but the guppies had no interest.

“Is that new?” Bitsy asked, “Cute!”

Gordon leaned down and looked through the fish tank across the room at her and smiled.  She was murky and distorted in the water. The fish tank was a new acquisition.  He thought the bubbling filter would soothe people, making a white noise for them if they were nervous.  Of course he had a CD player as some models liked to bring their own music. But recently a young client had brought Britney Spears.  It’s vintage…  she had told him- and he felt old.  The music started as he took the shots, “…hit me baby one more time…”  This had always been a confusing song for him. Hit you with what? he wondered, His fist?  His penis?  Four fingers of scotch?

“Guppies?” Bitsy added.

Gordon nodded.  He had bought the tank and full kit with five guppies at the local pet shop.  He  wanted an odd number, he didn’t know why, it had just seemed right.  Not six? The clerk had prodded, but Gordon held firm at five.

“Oh yeah, I have those for Ava.” Bitsy said and re-arranged a tassel. She was referring to her daughter, who was ten and thankfully not at this particular photo shoot.

Gordon waited patiently while she powdered her bosom and reapplied her lipstick. She had wanted to take a break, the lights had been melting the sticky tape off her pasties and if there is one thing a good burlesquer knows, it’s ‘no nipple’.

The photo shoot resumed and Bitsy went into full performance mode, biting her finger, looking coyly out of the corner of her eyes, the usual fare. She was dressed in typical Betty Paige regalia.  Pink silk tassels, a pair of lacy pants, heavy make up, stockings and a forties hair style.  She was an old pro.  Gordon found shooting her was easy and more like having lunch with an old friend than anything else.  She needed some new shots for her promotional cards, Bitsy Bamm Bears All.  And anyone worth their tits in this town knew that Gordon was the man to do it.  He finished off the roll of film and waved at her.

“We’re done!” He firmly set his camera on a long worktable- partly to remind himself that this was work and partly to remind Bitsy.

“Oh thank GOD!” Bitsy said with a little too much enthusiasm. She peeled off her tassels and placed them carefully into a plastic bag.

Gordon made himself busy, shutting off the lights, moving the umbrellas to the side and generally not looking at her.   He found it interesting how people reacted after a shoot.  Some  would immediately head for the bathroom to get back into their street clothes, to get “out” of character.  Bitsy was one who would dress right in front of him.  They had known each other for years, perhaps even flirted at one time the possibility of getting together. But hadn’t.  He  turned back to the fish tank.

“Sheesh!  Boy with a new toy!” Bitsy laughed.

Gordon stared at the guppies swimming in alignment to and fro.  He thought of his grandmother’s tank years ago.  She had kept guppies as well. When he was ten his grandfather had come home with a small statue for the tank, it was a mermaid made out of white plaster and of course, being a mermaid- topless.  Gordon had been mesmerized as his grandfather dropped it into the tank.  It slowly drifted to the bottom onto the pink gravel and Gordon did not move from his spot for a good hour. Later, he would stand in front of the tank until his grandmother would come into the dining room and swat at him with her big wooden spoon.  “Get away, get away!” she would gripe. And then turn mournfully to her husband, “You’re creating a degenerate.”

Gordon didn’t care.  He loved to stare at the mermaid’s milky white breasts, even when they started to become green with algae.  He loved her flowing hair which curled around her hips and the way she smiled, as if it were perfectly normal that she had no shirt on and was half fish.    It was the first thing he did when he came home from school, feed the fish.  Finally, right before he turned eleven his grandmother could not take it any more and when he came home from school and ran to the  tank, the mermaid was gone.  His Grandmother peered around the corner, “Sorry sweetie, I cleaned the tank today, and I broke her, your girlfriend.”  she did sound genuinely sorry, but Gordon could not quite forgive her for it.  He had so little, couldn’t she spare the mermaid as his one pleasure in this dismal existence otherwise known as Brooklyn?   He had trudged to his room, not quite believing it.

He had gone to live with his grandparents from birth.  His mother and father had died “in childbirth” he had been told.  Later, when he was older, the awful truth came out.  His parents had been living in Asbury Park, New Jersey when his mother had gone into labor with him. His father, so distracted by the coming of his first child, had ignored a train signal and driven their car right into the path of an oncoming train.  He died instantly.  His mother was thrown from the car, and in an ironic moment, onto the steps of Jersey Shore Medical Center, which sat directly across from the train station. Gordon was born on a gurney being wheeled down a hall, via emergency c- section as his mother died by an EMT with a pocket knife.  As an adult he wondered if his obsession with breasts had been a result of never being breastfed, and even went to see a therapist about it.  But it was a useless endeavor.  As he lay on the therapist’s couch and gazed at the afternoon light playing a pattern on the ceiling, she had asked him, “Do you feel feminine?” at which point he decided therapy was way too complicated for him and never went back.

Now as Bitsy packed up her burlesque garb, and came to give him a kiss goodbye.  “Plans later?” she asked.

He nodded absently.  She grabbed his face between her hands, “Do you have plans later Gordon?” she asked louder.

“Yes, I do.” he mumbled and lied and she knew.  As her heels clicked down the hall  he wondered if it had been a mistake to buy the fish tank.  The haunting memories of youth now being on full display in his living room slash studio were making him depressed.  As Bitsy shut the door behind her Gordon stared at the tank, trying to conjure up his lost mermaid.  In Brooklyn there was the yearly Mermaid Parade along the boardwalk, which Gordon and his grandfather had gone to religiously. It was how he began taking photos.  His  grandfather had  become too ill when Gordon was in his twenties to make the walk to the boardwalk and Gordon began taking photos for him.  He developed them over his grandmas kitchen sink, with towels taped onto the windows and explicit instructions to everyone to “Keep out!”  He saw that a lot more was revealed  in the photos than on the boardwalk, and  his profession began.  He still did  the occasional head shot for an actor or an album cover for a band, but the bulk of his clientele were the burlesquers.  The women who were unlike strippers in so many ways, including physically.  He had been to his share of modern strip clubs, the fancy ones with well oiled and tanned bodies.  Super thin women with hard rock breasts and no pubic hair, doing the same grinding dance over and over again and trying to get in his lap.  He always felt out of place, they were not appealing to him.  Sure he got a hard on, but it was a frustrating, fleeting, animalistic one.  He wanted to be seduced, to be teased and led on, that’s where burlesque came in.  They did tease you, even though you knew there was no possibility for sex.  And most importantly a burlesquer had a talent, a hook, perhaps she ate fire, or hula hooped or read you Proust as she slowly peeled off a long velvet glove. There was something cerebral about a burlesque strip tease that did not translate to the repetative tiring,  grinding of a typical strip club.

Gordon’s phone beeped angrily at him.  He had turned the volume down when he was with a client but had not figured out how to mute the annoying beeping that accompanied a message.  He pushed the play button, it was Steve, a writer he had met at White Elephant Burlesque.  Steve had been bugging him on writing a book on the old strip tease art.  Gordon was intrigued but not sold.  He had a fulfilling life.  He made enough to pay his bills, mainly by beautiful women paying him to take their picture, he wasn’t sure what more a book could bring.  But he kept in touch with  Steve who occasionally sent old negatives he had found or rescued from a historical society.  Gordon would develop them in his little apartment and sent the pictures back to Steve.  He wasn’t sure if he was helping Steve write a book or assuage his obsession with strippers. He deleted the message without listening to it.  He was probably calling about the negatives he had sent last week.  Gordon had only developed them today and was in no mood to be nagged.

He searched his desk for an envelope and opened the small door to his dark room to get the photos.  They had been of a burlesquer from the sixties.  A dark haired beauty with full hips and breasts.  The kind who dressed in peacock feathers and thick full boas that covered just what was necessary.  There had been something haunting and Slavic about her eyes, grey and slightly slanting down, evidence of her Mongolian roots, that had struck Gordon.  Maybe that’s why he had deleted the message – he was not quite ready to give her up.  The negatives had come in a white envelope and Gordon tugged random papers out of his in-box looking for it.  It finally fell into his hands, addressed to Gordon Treynovicth and marked fragile.  He pulled a thin piece of paper out that he had ignored earlier. Steve’s haphazard handwriting marked it:  “Found these at a barn sale in Vermont, she has the same last name as you, weird!”  Gordon let the paper slip out of his hands.  He had not known that when he had torn the envelope open to develop the negatives.

Yes, his last name was Treynovicth, and it was not a common name.  His grandfather used to tell him, “If you meet another Treynovitch, you meet family!”  Was the woman in the photos a distant relative?   He went back into the darkroom to retrieve the negatives and held them up to the afternoon light.  There,  in the narrow margin of the negative were the words, Martina Treynovitch… his mother’s name.

Gordon let the negative fall from his hands and sat down abruptly on the floor of his apartment.  The cool wood seeped through his thin jeans and chilled him.  Not possible.  He thought, no way. He looked slowly up at the apartment around him, the makeshift studio, the tank, the loneliness and desire that permeated from every fiber of the place and felt sick.  He forced himself to retrieve her photo from the stack in his “completed” pile and sat with it, on his couch this time, armed with a glass of whiskey.  The image of Martina  seemed to jump in his hands, leap out and talk to him, look how alive I was, how real and beautiful…still alive if not for you. Had she been happy?  Having Lithuanian grandparents was no gauge of this, they seemed to live on the misery of themselves and other people.  His grandmother practically went into a swoon upon hearing of a death or a near death or a dismal health prognosis.  He peered earnestly into the eyes of his dead, two dimensional black and white mother.  Were you happy?  He willed the question with his mind.  The image did not speak, but remained an unmoved still of a scantily clad twenty year old, whose legs were splayed seductively over the arm of a couch.  Gordon put the photo down, not wanting to touch it. She stared at him from the table, her own milky breasts reminiscent of the broken mermaid he had missed so much as a child. There was a moment, brief and near yielding that he thought he should call the therapist who had asked him if he had felt femminine.  But it passed.

Instead, he reached for his cell phone and dialed Bitsy, “I’m free,” he told her voice mail, “I am very, very free to do something later with you.”

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