Flat Water Tuesday by Ron Irwin

even the hardest, deepest massage and fall asleep like a cat at the end.
    I went back to sleep for just a few more minutes. Carolyn dragged me out of bed two hours later. She put on more coffee and we pulled the croissants out of the fridge that I hadn’t touched the day before, and I consumed them sitting on one of the stools that hid under the long, stainless counter sweeping into the living area of the loft. Carolyn drank black coffee with sweetener.
    She didn’t need the rigorous diet. She was a woman of beautiful planes, defined by the sweep of her hips, her sharp, high cheekbones and her swept back blond hair. Carolyn had her own toxins. Too much coffee. An on-again, off-again cigarette compulsion. Wine.
    She wanted to go over the script for the shark piece with me so that she could start editing the digitized footage, chopping and changing on the editing suite. She needed my input about which of the many tapes had the footage we’d be using. I had a fairly good script already that indicated where the footage should go in, but it was a laborious process nonetheless and would consume all of her time for weeks to come. I trusted her work implicitly and so did National Geographic . We were cutting what they would refer to as a “fat” piece so their editors could do further work and provide professional narration, although I would wind up doing a scratch track—a primitive recording dubbed into the tape—that would give the channel something to work with when they removed my voice and put in their own narrator’s.
    I had worked with Carolyn for years like this. In fact, we had met because I needed somebody with an editing studio in the U.S. to handle my work once the channel stopped taking raw footage from me and started commissioning finished pieces. Much of my work was not profitable for her—her real money came from editing corporate videos. I met her at the New York Documentary Center on Maiden Lane during a conference I had attended just for the hell of it. She had been handing out cards and we’d fallen into a conversation after sitting through a presentation by the wife of some Hollywood director who’d helped fund the place. That was five years ago. When Carolyn had learned what I did she immediately offered to do some editing for me, I could name the price. She’d made the offer over beers at a Front Street microbrewery under the Brooklyn Bridge that everyone had repaired to by the late afternoon and by that night we were having dinner at an Italian restaurant nearby, which was a long, drunken, romantic stroll uptown.
    I remembered walking next to her and feeling her hand inches from mine. She was talking about her work, I suppose. When she finally brushed my hand with hers, my heart ground its gears and I was lost.
    Sitting in front of her edit suite, the script spread out in front of us, I watched her carefully sip her coffee, set the mug down, start zipping through the material on screen. Carolyn and I in one sense had nothing in common. Even while she worked from home she was dressed fashionably by my standards. The filmers I worked with, including myself I guess, were a scruffy looking bunch. Carolyn worked with corporate clients and her place was what I once bitterly described to her as “executive-pseudo-artistic.” But I secretly loved having access to this cavern of space at the bottom of the city. I liked the repolished wooden floors, the iron studs in the walls and the naked steel pillars and girders, the wide warehouse windows. Even the freight elevator was charming in its dirty, utilitarian way. She had put in a kitchen near the living area and upgraded the bathroom. The fixtures were flagrantly expensive—brushed stainless steel German faucets and spouts that she had installed after an entire year of saving. She had found oversize, white modular couches to stand on a massive afghan rug, and pedestals and floating shelves displayed the masks and statues I had brought her from Africa,