Picturing Will Read online

  TWO

  The day after Jody photographed a wedding on an estate east of town she called the housekeeper to see if she could return to rephotograph the grounds. Something about the house—nothing architectural; some nebulous something that seemed to be in the air—had gotten her attention. She was not sure herself what she wanted. She only knew she wanted another opportunity to poke around.

  Though she photographed weddings for a living, her real interest was in the photographs she took for herself. She had gotten good enough, she knew, to start thinking seriously about showing her secret work. Photography had been a fascination at first—nothing she thought she would ever be involved in. Will had been an infant then, and her marriage had just about collapsed. She would buckle Will into a car seat and drive into Washington every week to see photography shows, or to browse through museum bookstores and look at books she couldn’t afford. How vulnerable she must have seemed to anyone who noticed her: a pretty young woman with an infant in a Snugli slumbering on her chest, attention riveted to the book she was examining, as if it could provide her with clues about the rest of her life. Where had the photographers positioned themselves, and why? The photographers’ preoccupations became clear, their level of aggression measurable. In the best photographs, the photographer’s presence was palpable. Though she had revised her thoughts now and was inclined to think just the opposite, she was interested, then, in trying to understand what the photographers revealed about themselves. The risks they took were the ultimate fascination. She had tried to figure out when the photographers thought they were hiding, and to what extent this was true. Sometimes the photographer disappeared as unconvincingly as a child playing hide-and-seek who couldn’t help peeking around the corner to see how the game was going. Other times you couldn’t help thinking that the photographer had orchestrated the moment in order to make a personal statement, which did not express the subject’s feeling at all. Looking at photographs was a little like sleuthing, but in so many cases the mystery transcended anything that could be explained.

  She bought photographs from the Library of Congress.

  Wayne asked her why she wanted pictures on the walls of people she didn’t know.

  She cashed the Christmas check she got from her father and bought a Canon TX.

  Wayne reacted like someone whose cat has proudly brought home a dead mouse.

  She bought a developing tank and practiced prying open a roll of film with her eyes closed, trying to wind it on the reel by her sense of touch.

  As she tipped the tank back and forth, Wayne looked at her as if she were a deaf person shaking maracas that had no seeds inside.

  Memories of those years could overwhelm her when she least expected it. Perhaps the road she was driving on reminded her of the road she and Wayne had lived on. Certainly it was not the sight of the wedding house itself, one of many big houses that had been kept up but not extensively renovated, painted over too many times without having been scraped, the shutters hanging a bit awkwardly. Still, there were nice things about the big white house: leaded-glass windows that ivy would have to be pulled away from when spring came; huge maple trees with gnarled roots that twisted along the ground, and ash trees, recently planted, with slender trunks no thicker than a broom handle.

  Getting out of the car, she stepped on shards of gold crushed in the gravel: the plastic champagne glasses from the day before. Her friend Duncan, who often catered such events, said that pilfering had become such a problem that many of the rich people now relied on plastic for large gatherings.

  Because she thought someone might be watching her approach, she did not stop to photograph the crushed plastic. It was also too obvious a thing to photograph, though she often allowed herself to work her way into feeling something about a place by photographing in a perfunctory way: documenting what was there, then moving on. Seeing the obvious through the viewfinder always sharpened her eye for odd, telling details. Photographing a tree, she would see ants swarm a bit of food on the ground; shooting the side of the house, she would catch the reflection in the window of two trees whose overlapping branches seemed to form the shape of a cross.

  “Do you believe this is the same place where we had all that excitement one day ago?” the housekeeper said, throwing open the door. Jody could tell from her tone of voice that she was truly welcome. Except for the housekeeper’s wiry hair, it might not have been obvious that the woman was black. She wore a black uniform—or an unstylish dress—with a tan down vest. Blue plastic earrings dangled from her ears.

  “You didn’t go on their honeymoon?” Jody said, smiling.

  The woman shook her head. Clearly, she was more than a housekeeper. The day before, she had been sipping champagne and teasing the bride, threatening to slip into the steamer trunk so she could pop out when their ship arrived in Europe.

  Jody walked in, and the housekeeper turned to pour coffee without asking if she wanted any. “He was my second choice,” the housekeeper said, “but I think she did wonderful well for herself.” She handed Jody a mug of coffee. The aroma filled the room. “I want to tell you,” the housekeeper said, “he has got to be some nice boy for me to like him without him having no religious beliefs of any shape or kind. He told me his own parents, out in California, raised him to be an atheist.”

  “Who was your favorite?” Jody said.

  “An Episcopal boy who’s in training to be a doctor. And that has nothing to do with my personal religion, either, which happens to be Baptist. The boy she married just doesn’t have the charm Taylor Tazewell has, but the both of them are kind boys, and I guess that’s what’s important.” The housekeeper smiled. “It’s not one bit of my business,” she said, “but I can’t tell if that ring on your finger is a wedding ring or not.”

  It wasn’t. It was a blue enamel ring with a little strand of gold spiraling delicately through the enamel. Mel had bought it for Will to give her last Mother’s Day. “I’m divorced,” Jody said. “I have a son. Will.” She reached into her bag and brought out her wallet.

  The picture she carried of Will was several years old, a black-and-white Polaroid that had faded, so that now Will’s face was indistinct; it was not obvious that he was smiling. Like all photographers, she cared most about pictures of people she loved that were in no way exceptional as photographs. Maybe there was something special about the day a picture was taken (the first time Mel got Will to climb to the top of the slide and come down without his having to stand next to it, ready to reach for Will if he toppled), or even the day it went into the wallet (Will had cut it small, with Mel’s help, for the card-case of an old wallet she no longer had). The housekeeper’s face lit up, though, as if she had seen an angel.

  “I have two boys and would of had three, but one was taken from me in infancy with pneumonia,” the housekeeper said.

  “I’m very sorry,” Jody said. She looked at the picture of Will. Impossible that he would be taken from her. As impossible as having aborted him to please Wayne. She looked at the ring—her hand, holding the picture. The enamel ring had cost more, she was sure, than the thin silver wedding band Wayne had given her. With the tip of her thumb, she pushed the ring closer to her palm.

  “It’s always easy to think there’s a reason for everything, unless something bad happens to you,” the housekeeper sighed. She offered Jody milk for her coffee. Jody poured some in before she realized what she was doing; she drank her coffee black. She would let the mug warm her hands a few seconds longer, then go outside and pour the coffee on the ground.

  Wayne had done that, years ago: poured all the coffee out of his cup over her tomato seedlings. He had also thrown things: bed pillows, dishes, unlit cigarettes.

  “I’m taking up too much of your time,” Jody said. “I’ll go outside for a few minutes and take a few quick pictures, if that’s all right.”

  The housekeeper shrugged. “The outdoors sure don’t belong to me,” she said, smiling as Jody walked out the door.

  There wer
e times when the smell of the breeze let you know you were going to get a good photograph. A tingle in your fingertips preceded whatever was about to intervene: a breeze, a stream of migrating birds. The best of them were synergistic, or they didn’t work at all except as well-composed arty photographs.

  Earlier that day she had been looking through a book of Atget’s photographs of Paris—in particular, the photographs he took in the 1920s of hotel interiors. The picture of the Hotel de Roquelaure would have seemed a vision of heaven to any parent with a young child whose home was a battlefield of fallen animals, marching monsters, and discarded clothes. Only the black chair sitting to the side of the tall doors reminded you there was life in the hotel. You knew instantly that the chair was covered in velvet. It was not a leather chair, or a chair covered with any other material, but a chair with a fringed velvet seat. That hint of softness humanized the entire picture. The viewer believed there was a possibility of entering that room through the open door, of sitting in a magical chair.

  She set up the tripod and screwed on the camera. Why was she about to take a photograph of the side of a house? Because—unless you were Atget—you had to wait for a mystery if you did not discover one. It was all intuition and patience: A rabbit might appear from under the bush; a meteor might fall.

  She moved the tripod to another location so that when she photographed the house the little ash trees would be in the picture. She leaned over to look through the lens. Until you looked through the lens, you could never be sure. That was when things took on a prominence they didn’t have in life, or when details disappeared. You could find that the picture you thought to take with a wide-angle lens was really better seen in close-up. You could know the routine, use the right exposure, compose perfectly, but still—the photographs that really worked transcended what you expected, however certain the results may have seemed at the time.

  It was a nice shot, but Jody didn’t trust the dimming light, so she bracketed when she took the shot again. Then she let the tripod stand where it was and loaded the Leica. Its lightness was reassuring. With the little Leica in the palm of your hand you suddenly felt more delicate, but at the same time more connected to things, the way you felt when you slipped a ballet slipper on your foot.

  Through the lens of the Leica, the scene was nondescript. Turning a bit to examine the world, though, she found that it was just right for photographing the remains of a bird’s nest wedged between limbs above her head. No broken eggs lay below it. The ground was almost winter-hard. There would be no photograph of eggshells, and there would be no photograph of the crushed plastic in the driveway. At that moment, though, the photograph that would be taken began to exist. A rusty blue pickup started to bump its way into the driveway. She photographed the approach, as documentation. She photographed the man opening the door on the driver’s side and his companion, hopping out the other side. If they saw her, they gave no sign. They walked toward the house, one tall man and one small man with a funny way of walking, never turning to look over their shoulders.

  She waited until they got to the door, then began photographing in earnest. And luck was with her: the wind got in the photograph. A wind blew up, and in an almost palpable way it reinforced the empty space that surrounded the men. Then she moved quickly to stand behind the tripod and photograph the men as the door opened, the lens compressing distance until their truck was no longer a respectable distance from the house but a huge presence, large and threatening. It existed in stark contrast to the branches blowing in the breeze, overwhelming the three small people who stood in the doorway. The housekeeper was squinting against the rush of air. Jody clicked and knew she had the right picture. The photo caption would read: After the Wedding. It would be one of twenty or so pictures she took in the county that winter that, to her surprise, would make people stop dead in their tracks to stare—photographs that revealed what she knew about the world in 1989.

  THREE

  In the late afternoon, the sun moving toward the west struck the globe of the ceiling light, sending prisms of color against the walls, mottling the furniture, and electrifying the edges of the big silver mirror. Jody’s camera equipment was pushed against the back wall. A tangle of cords was piled up in the corner, making her think of blacksnakes stunned in their crawl. Will liked to put his rubber snakes in among the cords. Sometimes he would wind them more neatly and place his collection of windup toys in the corral. Often, when Jody began to pull out the cords, she would topple Godzilla, or a family of apes in graduated sizes. Ah, she thought, staring at her improvised home studio, what a noble profession. She had put on hip-waders to walk into the lake amid lily pads in order to photograph one wedding couple setting sail in a canoe. She had loaned her size-eight shoes to a bride whose heel began to wobble just as she was about to walk down the aisle and had photographed the ceremony in her stocking feet. In the beginning, when she had almost no money and hadn’t believed in her heart of hearts that she could support herself and Will by taking photographs, she had bargained with one groom’s father for a weekly supply of baked goods in lieu of a fee. At least half a dozen times before she met Mel she had wished that she was marrying the man the bride was marrying. She routinely lied in admiring wedding rings that were no more attractive than pebbles. Camera raised, she would close her eyes for a few seconds and pray that the marriage taking place would last, however unlikely it might seem at the moment—that it wouldn’t become some dreary statistic of failure down the road. She often went home with blossoms stuck in her hair and rice in her shoes. She had also gone home and wept, unaccountably.

  Right now, Will was at his Friday-afternoon hobby class. So far, he had made fourteen ashtrays (she did not smoke) as well as a dozen tiny human forms with arms outstretched so that they resembled Mel’s favorite corkscrew. Mel thought that whatever Will produced was a work of genius. Mel had also been presented with several ashtrays and had been told at great length about the ones that broke during firing. The ashtrays were lined up on Mel’s desk at work (when they were in New York last, he had taken Will to see them), and he assured Will that everyone at the gallery admired them greatly. It made Jody feel a little bad that she stored so many things Will gave her in the corner cabinet, but really, what was she supposed to do with so many presents?

  Duncan knocked on the door. He had come to borrow her vacuum. Duncan was twenty-eight and young for his years. Mel was sure that he had a crush on her. He asked her opinion of cameras he would never buy, stood very tall when she complimented his cooking, and was always available to baby-sit if a sitter canceled at the last minute. Will assumed that Mel could follow up in teaching him ballet steps that Duncan had been showing him. He was entranced when Duncan snipped flowers from their stems and tucked the blossoms on trays of food he prepared, and he didn’t see why his mother wouldn’t adorn their dinner with sprigs of lilac. Duncan was always cheerful—and so hopeful—that even Mel occasionally made fun of him behind his back, rolling his eyes and posturing the way Duncan did when he was being praised.

  “Are you sure?” Duncan said, standing in the hallway. “If you need it to clean up—”

  “It gives me the perfect excuse not to vacuum,” Jody said. “Take it. Keep it as long as you want.”

  “Well,” Duncan said, reaching into the deep pocket of his sheepskin coat and bringing out a little rectangle wrapped in foil. He thrust it toward her, the same way Will gave her something he was shy about handing over.

  “Brandy walnut cake,” Duncan said. “It’s an improvement on the cake I made with hazelnut flour that you liked so much.”

  “Oh, thank you,” she said. “It isn’t necessary to give me something just because you’re borrowing the vacuum, though.”

  “Not because it’s necessary. Because you’re one of my best testers.”

  “Thank you,” she said again. She opened the door of the hall closet. He rushed forward and took out the vacuum. Previously, he had borrowed books, blankets, vases, and her slide projector. Sin
ce he was a caterer, he could hardly borrow a cup of sugar. When he returned the things, he always brought her something in return for the favor: beeswax candles, tulip bulbs, a brass stirring spoon.

  “Babette’s Feast is playing at the movies this week,” he said. “Have you seen it? I was wondering if—”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Actually, I have seen it.”

  “Who’s baby-sitting on Halloween?” he said.

  “Will’s going to a party.”

  He nodded. “I was supposed to cater that Halloween party you’re photographing, but the guy canceled.”

  “He canceled the party?”

  “No. The food. He must be using somebody cheaper. I got the feeling he didn’t like my prices.”

  She shrugged. “Then he’s a creep,” she said. “Your prices are fair. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m catering quite a few things on Halloween,” he said. “He invited me to come to the party anyway, but I don’t think I’m going to go.” He looked at the vacuum. “Well,” he said, “I ought to be going.”

  “Thanks for the cake,” she said. Didn’t he realize that she was anxious for him to leave? “Maybe I’ll see you if you decide to go to the party.”

  He nodded. “You might want to put the cake in the refrigerator if you’re not going to eat it right away,” he said.

  “I will,” she said. “Thanks again.”