by Shira Nayman
Barnaby led the way, reaching behind with his arm to steer me along. Around us, the ringing silence and clinging green scent of leaves. And a sense of uncanny precision—as if even this woolly terrain, in all its disorder, were part of some larger scheme, left wild as a contrast to the carpetlike lawns and the driveway with its trained canopy of leaves: calculated, somehow, down to the squawking of magpies, the menacing slow circling of hawks, the scramblings of rabbits and squirrels away from their slithering fork-tongued foes.
We walked for some time in silence. And then: something glinting above a thicket in the beam of the new moon. We wove through the dense arbor and there it was, a glass structure the size of a large room with a pagoda-shaped roof. Barnaby pulled a second key from his pocket.
“I didn’t even know this place existed,” I whispered.
“Oscar keeps it a secret,” Barnaby replied, turning the key in the door.
The storm, the one they called Eleanor, took us all by surprise. It plucked the pier from its pylons and dashed it against the rocks, littering the cove with giant splinters. Early July, during one of our midweek visits to Ellis Park, Simon and I had the house virtually to ourselves. On weekends, Oscar had begun to spend more and more time alone in his study, though he still attended to his hostly duties. During the week, he more or less handed the running of the place over to Wallace, emerging from his rooms only briefly in the late evening to share a nightcap. Then, he would smile his wry smile, but he was unable to disguise the gauntness of his cheeks, the black patches beneath his eyes.
It was already dark when we set out, but the lights along the pier and outlining the curve of shoreline across the Sound sufficiently illuminated our way. The first half hour, we walked in silence. The rain began slowly, light sporadic pellets that glanced our clothing and hair. It’s a strange form of company, walking with somebody side by side, and yet sunk airtight in your own mind. For a while I scrounged for something entertaining or amusing to say, but the sight of Simon’s distant, closed face withered my thoughts before they could take hold.
The storm quickly turned muscular, fisting up handfuls of sand, the rain stinging with cold. A scene worthy of a Romantic poet, I thought: morbid and ecstatic. I wondered about the opening in the sheer sandstone face, through which we usually made our way back up the incline toward the house; it had as good as disappeared.
For a brief instant the sky cleared, and behind Simon I saw the giant rise and curl of a wave. In the riot of the storm it was silent, flattening back to the sea with portentous ease. Simon quickened his pace; my arm fell away from his and he gained several yards on me. Beyond him, I spied a moving form, someone stumbling into the storm. I closed the gap between us and grabbed onto Simon’s arm.
“Look!” I shouted, pointing at the unsteady figure just discernible in the wavery wet thickness of the storm. Simon seized my arm, quickening his pace to a run. I glanced up in time to see the slow swivel backward of the man’s face. I registered an oddly mild gaze, eyes somehow unfazed by life’s troubles, before the man realized he had company here, on the stormy beach. He seemed to know me, though I’d never seen him before. He pulled his jacket more tightly about him and broke into a run.
“Hey!” Simon called out. “Come back here!” We set off in pursuit, my arm beginning to ache where Simon had tightened his grip. We continued that way for some minutes; I could feel my legs weakening. I suddenly had no curiosity about the man up ahead; I was aware only of the desire to stop moving. I wrenched my arm free of Simon and stood, watching the man disappear into what must have been an opening in the sandstone wall—our sortie, at last, as well. Simon turned an impatient face toward me.
“Well? Do you want to lose him?” he shouted.
“What if we do?” I shouted back.
Simon shrugged and pushed on ahead. I stood, watching his back, appreciating the grace of his movements, aware of a stark and sorrowful aloneness.
There was nothing dramatic about the evening, a week or so after the storm on the beach, when I stumbled upon Oscar’s darkroom. After dinner, back in the yellow suite, Simon and I had a fight, if one can use that word to describe what went on between us when things went wrong.
Trivial, that was the word Simon had used. Everything here, at Ellis Park. Not that he minded superficiality—after all, we’d both found it amusing, this anthropological mission into the heart of decadent frivolity. But he was accusing me of having become tainted with it, of having become too involved, of having become trivial myself.
I wasn’t sure what, exactly, had set off Simon’s opprobrium. I’d been in a particularly buoyant mood that evening, and had come into the yellow suite exuberant. I’d seen it in Simon’s face the moment I entered—that barbed closedness. I foolishly thought I could cheer him out of it—in any case, I chatted happily about the evening’s festivities, pretending I hadn’t noticed his mood. I poured myself a drink from the decanter on the lowboy.
“Honestly,” Simon said, “aren’t you sick of all this?”
“It’s really quite harmless. And fun. It gets me away from—”
“From what?” he interrupted, his voice almost sneering, snuffing out my high spirits, which were replaced by a panicky surge of grief.
“I was going to say from my work.”
“Oh, your work,” he responded, the same unpleasant tone in his voice.
Even after all these years, I did not understand the odd weather between Simon and me, the way the warmth would flow and then seize to ice. The way my own being would oscillate as a result—now expansive and hotly alive, now curtailed to a shivering, blank-eyed anomie. What I least understood were Simon’s dissatisfactions; when the weather turned sour, he saw me as all failings and faults. Try as I might to correct these, to find my way back into Simon’s graces, so that his clear, world-seeing eyes might smile again my way, I would end up feeling powerless, in the position of simply having to wait out the downturn.
But here, now, was something new. Not just the shades of unkindness and disregard I had come to dread when these moods settled over Simon. I wondered if he knew—if Simon knew about Barnaby and me. But this did not seem like the pain or anger of a jealous lover. In that moment, it was as if Simon disdained everything about me—including my life’s work. As if I were some sort of deluded amateur, with nothing interesting to say or show, full of posturing and pretension and no different from the fops and frauds he saw peopling Ellis Park.
“Yes, my work,” I repeated slowly, setting my drink down and turning to face him.
There it was, in his face: Simon, my husband, was looking at me with contempt.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered, aware that we were caught in an awful band of misery that led nowhere but back on itself. The yellow walls were pressing in on me; I made my way to the door.
The moment I was outside, my head began to clear. I walked quickly across the stones of the courtyard and out onto the lawn. Above me, the filmy light of invisible stars seeped through a thick bank of cloud. I walked to the bottom of the long driveway and stood for a while examining the fantastic ironwork gates Oscar had shipped from Spain; adorned with netherworld characters and ferocious animallike plant life, they separated Ellis Park from the world. Not yet ready to return to our suite, I followed the driveway around behind the house and climbed the four brick steps to the back entrance. Inside, I proceeded down the dimly lit hallway.
All around me, the sleeping house: and, from some damp space in the bowels of the building, the rumbling of the boiler. Beyond the double doors at the end of the main corridor lay the servants’ quarters. I pushed through the doors and tiptoed past these rooms.
I recalled something that Oscar had mentioned on one of my earliest visits: that he kept a photographic studio in the basement—a darkroom, he had called it. “Silly of me,” he had remarked. “To suppose my hobby would amount to much. Actually, I’ve never used it.” At the time I didn’t give it another thought, content for Ellis Park to be the haven from w
ork Oscar intended it to be. Once, my work had offered me refuge, but in recent years, it had begun to weigh me down; those grim fragments of the world, patched together by my camera, often felt heavy and uncomfortable as a lead apron. On my weekends here, I was happy to escape from darkrooms: sometimes makeshift affairs in motel bathrooms, but principally the maid’s room in our apartment on Riverside Drive, where I had blackened the window with tar paper and corked the walls to block out sound.
But now, tired and unsettled by the encounter with Simon, I found the idea of the privacy of Oscar’s darkroom, if I could find it, soothing. I took the stairs down slowly, aware of the plush feel of the runner against my bare feet. I brushed my hand along the moldings, set midway up the walls; the horizontal spine gave me the feeling of being guided, as if the wall itself were gently leading the way.
Midway along the hallway, I tried the handle of a door. Locked. The door beside it: also locked. At the very end, a door yielded; I took one step into the space, sensing, in the blackness, its vastness. I felt on the wall by the door for a switch and, when I found it, flipped it on. Soft light, thrown out by a lamp on a metal countertop, revealed a large, clean space: three stainless steel sinks stood beside long metal shelves that were stacked neatly with bottles and jars.
I made a slow circuit of the room. In the far corner, a heavy black curtain reached from ceiling to floor. The fabric gave off the same burnt-wood odor I remembered from the yards of blackout cloth I had cut and sewn and fixed to my windows in London. I drew it aside to discover a cubicle designed for developing photographs: two sinks with shiny metal pans, and thick wires overhead holding clusters of padded wooden pegs. I turned back to the main part of the studio. There was a bank of switches on the wall beside me; I flicked them all up at once. A low hum, and then a fluorescent blast. The force of it imparted a disconcerting sense of agency to the space, as if the room itself had widened a set of mindless chill eyes and taken two giant steps toward me.
But there was something missing. I ran my hand across the smooth metal countertop. Beneath it was a large drawer, equipped with a lock and key. I opened a cabinet, and surveyed the containers and bottles. I lifted a jar and shook it; inside, the liquid gently swished. A ghostlike realm of plenty, I thought. Then it clicked: no seeping acid odor, that was the problem.
I recalled a time, long ago, when I had coaxed a medical student friend to let me accompany him to the dissection room, where he would arrive before classes to clock up extra study time. I was not put off by the acrid-sweet formaldehyde in the laboratory; it was not so different from the silver chloride and bromide washes I used in my work. He’d pulled instruments from his bag and set to work on an elderly man. I leaned over my friend’s shoulder and focused my lens on the blank mask with its rawhide lips and rickety teeth. How apt, I remember thinking, that this world, too, like that other silently peopled universe I inhabited, with its own vivid forms of lifelessness, should give off similarly corrosive fumes.
Not in Oscar’s darkroom, though: nothing to burn tears to the eyes. Only the mustiness of windows kept closed for too long, the empty stillness of an unused room. So different from the green room which, I now realized, I had not set foot in since the last of our storytelling evenings. Always the signs, there, of life: an empty tumbler stained at the rim, reading glasses forgotten on a lowboy beneath a series of botanical prints, a vase of carnations with one headless stem, which made you think of the bloom affixed, somewhere in the house, on the lapel of a guest.
My mind drifted back to those strange evenings in that room, to the story I told about my work in the South. I saw again the woman and child in the wretched room, both of them imbued with the frightful aliveness of Pompeians, preserved in the midst of some vibrantly quotidian act. Each detail was uncannily precise: a fly on the lacerated mattress, its tiny shadow bulging slightly on a coil of stuffing; on the table, a small shank of lamb, the fuzzy dark edges suggesting it has turned.
Describing this scene in the green room that night, I had been aware of the intimate, glassy space of the viewfinder, and of the way the room beyond the camera had looked both larger and smaller than it actually was, clearer in its details and yet reassuringly remote.
I felt overtaken by a hankering for that time—how many years ago was that?—when the photographs offered themselves to me, the world responsive and yielding both, like a lover.
And then, there he was, the little boy standing before the ruins of his house—beyond my camera, and yet for a brief moment also trapped in the glass of the viewfinder—silent, head bowed, his foot toying with a piece of rubble.
“He managed to get to the cellar,” the rescue worker had whispered, pausing in his work. “It saved his life.”
My camera was raised; I’d been readying for the shot. It was an exquisite composition, I could see that. The skies had obliged with curiously subtle pyrotechnics: ashy gray streaked with bright metallic shades I’d never before seen, ancient and otherworldly. But for his barely moving foot, the boy was utterly still. I wondered about the charred block his foot found so irresistible, whether it was a burnt toy, or a remnant from some piece of furniture as familiar to him, as inevitable and indestructible, as the hand of his mother, or his father’s voice: the base of a nightstand, perhaps, the top of a bedpost, or a piece from the wing of a piano he’d spent countless hours practicing. Or maybe it was nothing he recognized at all, a piece of detritus as meaningless as a spent coal in a grate.
It was not the kind of shot one comes upon often; I could feel the rising thrill of a real find.
Now, I had one last look around the studio, then turned off the lights and took my leave. Back along the corridor, up one flight, and through the servants’ quarters. I moved quickly through the main section of the house. It felt good to be back among these familiar rooms. I gained the stairway and took the stairs two at a time.
Entering our suite, I kicked off my shoes and headed across the room, glancing at Simon, who was not asleep as I expected but at the desk, reading. I walked through the French doors and fumbled at the lamp switch. Opening the armoire, I pulled aside the clothing, removed my portfolio, and withdrew its contents. I went through the contact sheets, one by one, each a barrage of images; it felt like being yelled at insistently by a riled crowd.
“Marilyn?” I could hear Simon calling from the next room. “Marilyn, is everything all right?”
I nodded, yes, everything was all right, as if expecting that Simon could see my silent reply through Oscar’s solid, wallpapered walls.
I hastily gathered up the contact sheets and stuffed them back into the leather case. Without bothering to put on my shoes, I slipped back through the bedroom, avoiding Simon for the third time that evening.
“I’ll be back soon,” I mumbled. I could feel his eyes following me as I walked toward the door.
Back downstairs, the route to the studio was already charged and familiar, inevitable and compelling as a memory.
I stashed the proof sheets in the empty drawer, the one that locked, then hid the key in the developing cubicle and again took leave of the studio. Morning was upon the house; the servants would soon be up.
Deep into the writing of his book, Simon became increasingly distant, and less interested than ever in Ellis Park. This suited me. In the past three weeks, Simon had come up only once—the night, as it happened, that I discovered the darkroom—and then, his presence had felt like an intrusion. In Simon’s absence, I was able to sneak out late at night to the glass house without fear of discovery.
Barnaby and I were, of course, discreet, though at first I anguished that some guest or other might figure out what was going on and let something slip that would find its way back to Simon. As time passed, however, I realized that whatever I might think of Oscar’s medley of acquaintances and guests, there was a compact about the place as sturdy as the redbrick itself. That there was a mutual granting of impunity from the rules of our everyday lives, as if we were masked participants at a Re
naissance ball: that no one would be likely to stand in the way of this wayward freedom—the freedom to remake oneself, to be, within the confines of Ellis Park, whomsoever one wanted to be.
That first evening, after the little glass structure had magically appeared before us in the woods, Barnaby had retrieved a number of Japanese screens from where they were stacked against one wall and arranged them around the room to afford us privacy. From a box made of knotty Moroccan root wood, he’d withdrawn a handful of candles, which he set on the floor in little glass holders at intervals around the octagonalshaped structure. Once lit, the candles threw a wavery light out into the night.
“Won’t somebody see us?” I whispered.
“Nobody comes into the woods at night. Besides, there are the screens.”
“But the light …”
“I told you, it’s a secret,” Barnaby whispered back. “We’re the only ones, besides Oscar, who know it’s here.”
I scarcely knew what I was getting into with Barnaby, but strangely I didn’t seem to care, an attitude that was aided by the development in myself of a perplexing new habit of memory. From the early-morning hour, in which Barnaby and I took a sometimes calm, sometimes frantic leave of each other, until the next time we met again by the shed at the end of the vegetable garden, it was as if Barnaby, or, I should say, the Barnaby of our trysts, simply ceased to exist. When I saw him during the day—at meal times, on outings, in the library or the ground-floor sitting room—I had no vivid sense of the long slow hours in the glass house, the moonlight pouring in and washing us both a luminous white. It was not that I forgot: more a matter of being overtaken by the busy, innocuous day life of Ellis Park in which no purpose seemed possible beyond the current round of drinks, the next meal, the plan for a ride into town. Everything else took on a two-dimensional quality, so if I happened to think of the glass house, what came to mind was the image of two stick figures walking stiffly among papier-mâché trees, entering a box made of plastic squares, and lying down together, wooden and inert. I knew there was something absurd about the schism that had rent the day, for me, from the night, but I couldn’t help treating it with a certain respect.
