by Leah Stewart
19
Martin Linklater worked downtown, in the basement of an enormous performing-arts complex. I made a wrong turn looking for the stairs and found myself beneath the high-domed ceiling of an empty theater—rows of red-velvet seats, chandeliers, gilt trim, a blank and waiting stage. A security guard materialized to shoo me out. He pointed me to the stairs, but the basement was a labyrinth. There were people in various stages of costuming scurrying through the halls. I opened one door, and a group of dancers turned their heads—one choreographed movement—to look at me. The office, when I found it, was a comforting return to normalcy, with institutional gray carpeting and plain wooden desks. But Martin wasn’t in it. A girl who appeared to have paid a great deal of money to look frumpy—she wore a shapeless dress and a loose brown scarf in expensive fabrics, plus a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses—directed me to a bench by a pond in the Public Garden, where she said I was sure to find him.
“So you want me to just walk into the park and look for a bench by a pond,” I said.
She sighed. She pulled out the sort of map given to tourists, full of bright drawings and ads for restaurants, and showed me exactly where to go. I must have still looked skeptical, because she said, “I swear you’ll find him. He’ll be sitting on the bench beside a tree with a plaque that says WHITE ASH. He’s a creature of habit. He eats his lunch there at the same time every single day.”
I couldn’t ask her what he looked like, because I had lied and said we were old friends, and so of course she thought I already knew.
It took only a few minutes to walk from the busy city street to the gardens, pretty as a fairy tale, where sunlight shimmered on the water and brightened the green of the trees. I crossed a white bridge that looked like a spot where a lady with a parasol might linger to have her portrait painted. The pond was ringed with majestic trees trailing leaves down to the water, and everywhere there were ducks and Canada geese and people tossing them the crumbs from their lunches. A boat shaped like a swan glided past, dwarfing the real goose that paddled beside it. The scene had the casual incongruity of a dream.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see a man, just slightly shorter than I. He was attractive in a rumpled, boyish way, with wrinkles in his shirt, his hair in messy curls. “I was right,” he said. “You’re Camazon.”
I stared at him. In a dream, strangers are not strangers, but people who know your mind.
“I’m Martin,” he said. “I recognize you from Sonia’s pictures.”
“Oh,” I said. “Hi.” His explanation didn’t make the moment any less strange. It was odd to be recognized by someone who knew me only through Sonia’s descriptions. What pictures had she shown him? What stories had she told? What did he know about me, when I knew so little about him? All at once it bothered me that Sonia was marrying a man I’d never even met. I found myself examining him like he’d been submitted for my approval. He had a sweet, almost pretty, face—big blue eyes, a full bottom lip—made masculine by a square jaw. He was slender but broad-shouldered, and I had the feeling that if I squeezed his arm I’d find his bicep firm. He gave an impression of easy confidence, and he looked at me now with frank curiosity, waiting for me to finish looking at him.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Of what?”
He grinned. “Of me.”
I couldn’t help grinning back, impressed by the way he’d managed to ask for my opinion without any appearance of aggression or insecurity. “You seem like a nice guy,” I said.
“Good,” he said. He looked me over again. “This is so weird. Sonia’s been talking about you a lot lately. But she never said you were coming here.”
I explained, one more time, about the package, how I couldn’t find Sonia, how no one seemed to know where she was.
“Really?” Martin said. “She’s in New York.”
I was so surprised to at last get an answer that I just stared at him.
“She’s at a conference for work,” he said. “Going to seminars on black-and-white versus color, I guess.”
“What?” I said. “For work? But Daisy . . .” I stopped. I was not going to be the one to tell this man his fiancée was a liar. A liar and a cheat, if Suzette was right, and she must have been right—I could think of no reason for Sonia to lie to Martin about her whereabouts if she wasn’t with another man. He was looking at me now with a worried, doubtful expression. “Okay, it all makes sense now,” I said. “I misunderstood.”
Martin still looked uncertain. “Daisy said she didn’t know where Sonia was?”
“Yeah, but that’s because Avery’s the one who sent her to the conference,” I said. “He didn’t want Daisy to know. I just got the dates mixed up. I thought she was already supposed to be back from that.”
“Oh,” Martin said. “No, she’s still there.” He grinned at me, doubt banished, and I felt furious at Sonia, and at myself, for aiding her in her deceit, just like I’d always done. Before I’d left Suzette, I’d asked her if Sonia had changed. She’d thought about it a moment before saying no, she hadn’t. She was certainly right about that. “That place is so dysfunctional, isn’t it?” Martin said. “I mean, why wouldn’t he want Daisy to know?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he’s totally fucked up.”
I must have spoken with more fervor than I intended, because Martin looked taken aback. “So,” I said, trying to smile, “what has Sonia been telling you about me?”
Sonia had told him about a night she slept over when my parents were out, and we heard on the news that a tornado had been spotted eight miles west of town. We could already see bolts of lightning touching down on the golf course behind my house, and Sonia was terrified. We gathered supplies and made for the hall bathroom, the only windowless room. We’d forgotten the flashlight, so I ran back down the hall to retrieve it. We had turned off all the lamps, and when the lightning flashed outside it was startling and beautiful, an invasion of light. I heard a gust whip around the house and pictured us in the funnel of a tornado, balanced on the wind. In the bathroom Sonia greeted me as though I had braved enemy fire to make it back to the foxhole.
“She said you were really brave,” Martin said. “Even though it turned out to be nothing. She said your parents laughed and laughed when they got home.”
I hated to be laughed at, and in the living room I’d sat on the couch with my arms folded while my father put Rumours on the stereo and began to sing along to “Second Hand News.” He had a good, clear, tenor voice. I liked to hear him sing. But I was still angry. “Come on, Camazon,” my father said. He took my hands, pulled me up, and swung me around.
“You’re my Camazon, you’re my Camazon news,” Sonia harmonized. That was when she adopted my father’s nickname for me, made it seem affectionate instead of mocking. She grabbed my mother’s hands and spun her once, and after a startled moment my mother relaxed and let herself be spun again. Everybody danced.
Sonia hadn’t told Martin that part of the story, the part I most liked to remember.
While Martin talked, we walked along the edge of the pond. Martin had a plastic bag full of stale sandwich bread to feed the birds. He offered me a piece. Soon we had a crowd of ducks and geese around us, heads darting, beaks working, wings flapping in an irritated way as they nudged each other aside. I was in a state of confusion. My feelings about Sonia seemed to change every minute. Why had she told that story to Martin, a story that cast me in the best possible light? Was that the first thing her memory offered her when she thought of me, instead of the sight of my disappearing car? Wasn’t she angry with me at all?
“Watch your hands,” Martin said. “These birds are aggressive.” He ripped off some large chunks of bread and heaved them toward the water, drawing off some of the crowd.
“So when’s your wedding?” I asked.
“Three months,” he said. “Are you going to come?”
“I don’t know.” To change the subject, I asked, “Are you ex
cited?”
“Yeah.” He smiled as if he were just realizing this. “I really am. It took us a while to get to this point, but now that we’re doing it, I don’t know why we waited so long.”
“Why did you?”
He hesitated, staring out at the water, where one duck chased another with a great flapping of wings. “You might understand this, actually,” he said. “I mean, understand Sonia. Maybe not me.”
I waited.
“I’ve never met her mother.” He glanced at me.
“Really?”
“Yeah, and I’ve tried. The very first year we were together, I wanted to go home with her for Christmas. She’s never let me. But she knows my whole family. She knows my second cousins, for Christ’s sake. I’ve never met a single person she’s related to. In fact, you’re the first person I’ve ever heard her talk about from her childhood, and then actually met.” He smiled. “So you can confirm she’s not an alien, or an android, or a spy.”
“As far as I know,” I said.
“Anyway. That may sound like a weird reason. But at first it made me feel like she didn’t take our relationship seriously. She didn’t think of me as permanent, so why should I meet her family? And then later, when I picked up on certain things about her mother, I started to feel like it was something out of . . . what’s the book where the man is tricked into marrying the girl that’s going to go crazy, because they never let him meet her crazy mother?”
“Jane Eyre.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Not that I thought she was going to go crazy. Just that I started to feel like she was hiding this huge part of herself from me.”
“I understand that,” I said. “She was.”
“Yeah.” He took out the last piece of bread, ripped it in two, and gave half to me. Then he wadded up the bag and stuffed it in his pocket.
“And you don’t care anymore?” I asked.
He shook his head. “You never have all of a person, right? So what I have of her is enough. I mean, she’s mine, you know? She’s still mine.”
I thought of Will’s mouth moving down my neck. I thought of him asking me to stay. I thought of Owen telling me he loved me after he’d been inside the naked body of my best friend. I let my hand drop and a goose nipped it. I brought my fingers to my mouth.
“I’m going to marry her,” Martin said.
On the train I stared at my reflection in the dark window and tried not to picture Martin’s trusting face. But I couldn’t keep myself from identifying with him, from imagining again and again what he would feel when he found that trust betrayed. I tried to convince myself that maybe I’d been telling the truth about Avery—maybe he had sent Sonia to a conference neither of them had told Daisy about. It was possible, but I didn’t believe it. Martin didn’t know where Sonia was staying in New York, and for some reason, he said, she kept calling when he was out. I heard again the girl in his office telling me he was a creature of habit, that he did the same things at the same time every day.
There was only one explanation for Sonia’s absence, for her lies, and that was another man. Either she was with him now or she’d been seeing him and had fled to nurse her guilt, to escape his desires, or her own. What if that other man was Will? I let my mind go too far in this direction, imagining that the whole time I’d been with him Sonia had been there, sequestered in a room I’d failed to see. I didn’t believe in this picture, but still I couldn’t banish it from my mind. After all, I hadn’t believed Sonia would sleep with Owen, not even in the first few moments after she told me she did.
If only Suzette had known the other man’s name. If only I’d found a note from him in Sonia’s apartment, or a picture of a stranger in a hotel room. The train passed over a bridge; white sails dotted across the sparkling water below, and suddenly I remembered Sonia’s photos, waiting at the shop in Harvard Square. Maybe, whoever he was, she had taken a picture of him.
The same clerk was behind the counter at the camera shop. He said he’d been wondering about Sonia, that she usually picked up her pictures the day he called to say they were ready. I said she was in New York, visiting galleries, and when I said it I tried to believe it. Sonia was there, walking hand in hand with some man who was not Will.
There were two rolls, one color, one black-and-white. I sat near the chess players outside the Au Bon Pain and looked at them. The color roll was taken right there in Harvard Square. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, sitting on the low brick wall near the newsstand. The girl was laughing, leaning forward, blurry, the boy looking at her like she was the only other person on earth. Two college students, heads together over a book. A white mother with her Asian baby. An old couple eating ice-cream cones. Two children—twins, it took me a moment to realize—staring directly into the camera. One smiled, one did not. Photo after photo of people I assumed were strangers, almost all of them in close-up.
Most of the black-and-white pictures were equally disappointing. I flipped through them quickly—trees in snow, bare twigs encased in ice. A few were in such close-up that the branches lost their meaning as things, became jagged black lines across a white background. The next two pictures were of Sonia. In both she was reflected in a three-way mirror. In the first she held the camera at her waist. Her two profiled reflections seemed to be staring, with disapproval, at the one facing out. Full on, her expression looked at once angry and hopeless. In the last photo she held the camera up so that the bright white flash obscured her face. It was as if she had studied her own face, and then decided to erase it.
And then, at last, there were two pictures of a man.
He was a good-looking, older man, probably in his sixties, with facial features so large and craggily handsome they made me think of Mount Rushmore. These photos were also close-ups, but I could see enough of the background to think they were taken in the same place as the tree pictures. I knew from something in the man’s expression that he was not a stranger. I held one of the shots of him next to one of Sonia to make them a pair. Daisy had called Avery “Lord of the Jungle.” I had a hunch that I was looking at him.
Suzette had talked about how much Avery liked Sonia. Daisy had said he found Sonia enchanting. Maybe she was gone because she’d fled an affair with her boss, a married man, or maybe she’d run away with him. I imagined her on a beach, wearing a bikini, while the man from the picture gave her an indulgent smile. I felt now that I didn’t want to find her. I just wanted to know that she was really gone.
Daisy was in her office, listening to Exile on Main Street at a high volume. “Well, hey,” she said, turning the music down.
I handed her the picture of Mount Rushmore man. “This is Avery,” she said, surprised. “Did Sonia take this?”
I said she did.
“It looks like his house,” Daisy said. “I was there once, for a fund-raiser, but that was before Sonia’s time. I don’t know why she would have been out there.”
“You said he liked her.”
“Well, sure,” she said. “But they’re not friends.” She handed back the picture and swung from side to side in her chair, frowning. “He’s got a book of photos coming out. Maybe he wanted her to take the jacket picture.”
“Maybe he knows where she is.”
Daisy let out a long breath. “I doubt it. Usually he doesn’t concern himself with the doings of the little people. He’s got bigger fish to fry. Hey, I forgot to tell you the other day that he was a friend of your Oliver.”
“Really? How did he know him?”
“I’m not sure. But that’s why we did that article.” She looked around and then pulled a magazine from the shelf behind her and handed it to me.
I looked at the cover. “The Past Is Memory: An Interview with Historian Oliver Doucet.” I’d read the article before. I didn’t want to read it again now. I asked Daisy if she thought Avery was at home.
“I know he is. I just got off the phone with him.” She rolled her eyes. “Chewed my ass, as usual.”
“Can you t
ell me how to get there?” I said.
Before I left, Daisy asked, “So what happened in Gloucester?”
My hand on Will’s bare stomach. His fingers in my mouth. “A friend of Sonia’s lives there,” I said. “But he doesn’t know where she is.”
“I’m glad you found the right place,” Daisy said. “After you left I realized I should’ve mentioned that the address could be wrong. I was worried about you driving all over a strange town at night. Thought you might end up in the sea.”
“You know about that? Sonia and numbers?”
“Well, sure.” She gave me a funny look. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“That was her biggest secret, when I knew her.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Daisy said. “She told me she used to hide it. I always thought, ‘Honey, how could you hide something like that?’ ”
“I helped her,” I said. “I was her accomplice. So what happened?”
“I don’t know. She was a little shy about it at first. We thought it was kind of cute. It is kind of cute—you know, when she asks you what bills to give the pizza delivery guy.” She eyed me. “You look stunned.”
All that time, practicing so that my handwriting would be hers. The bad grades I took for her sake. Copying out my math homework for her, and then, in college, doing her homework outright. Making lists for her, with all her friends’ phone numbers written out in words. The way she would summon me to the darkroom, saying, “Cameron, I want you to take a look at this,” and then, once we were alone, she’d whisper, “I can’t see the numbers today,” and I’d line up the measurements so she could make a print. We’d look at the print together, alone under the red lights with everybody else shut out, and I’d say, “Perfect.”
“Camazon,” she’d say, “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
That week when she wouldn’t speak to me, when I stood there helpless in the hall, watching her walk away.
20
Avery lived in Wellesley, in a white house with black shutters, set back in the shadow of dark trees. A woman in workout clothes opened the door. She had a taut, muscular body—only the lines on her face suggested that she was middle-aged. She wiped her forehead with a towel slung over her shoulder and looked from the package under my arm to me. She didn’t speak, just waited.
