They weren’t talking and that seemed all right. Throughout the drive, he’d been smiling. Save the satisfaction, she thought. Just look at him reviewing his latest coup. Jean was not going to do any more reviewing in this car. And possibly nowhere else either.
“You are wonderful,” he said into the silence, keeping his eyes on the road. “And a great beauty.”
“Dan,” she said, emboldened, thinking it concession enough that she’d used his name. “That picture. You can’t keep it on your screen.”
“Can’t I?” He glanced at her, stung looking, disappointed, she supposed, that this was all she had to say about his wee surprise, his continuing praise. “Didn’t you like it? You look so lovely. I was going to make you a proper print, on good acidfree rag. Forty-six by sixty—matte, I thought. Gorgeous.”
“It’s not that I don’t like it. Or that I wouldn’t like a print: I don’t want there to be a print. I want you to wipe it.” Jean was speaking slowly and deliberately, as if she was talking someone down from a roof.
“I didn’t shoot your face.”
Jean blushed deeply. She was going to bathe in her shame; she wanted to, forever. “That was thoughtful of you, yes.”
“You could be anyone.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I mean the photograph—it could be anyone, from any time, that’s what’s so good. It could be anyone. Everywoman. Dreamwoman.”
“I know what you mean, Dan.” Jean was patient—she hadn’t praised him and she understood he wanted praise, just as he praised her. “It is pretty. And yes, it could be anyone. Only it’s not anyone. It’s me, Dan. It’s me.” She managed a dry little smile. He wasn’t smiling anymore. Don’t insist. “Look, um,” She started, no idea where she was headed. She wanted to be clear: that was it. Her tone was serious. “It was great—amazing. Thank you. Really.” Did that sound final at all? “I need to get some milk. Why don’t you drop me there, at the newsagents.”
They were just two blocks from the house. Dan obediently and smoothly pulled over. He turned to her and put his hand on her knee. He was going to let her do the talking.
“I guess this is good-bye,” she said. “Oh and uh, I didn’t mention the movie to Mark. Just so you know.”
“Don’t worry. I understand,” he said, making full eye contact, smiling again, confident, wanting to inspire confidence. Just like he must have looked when he first appeared in the office, asking about a job. She could see why Mark hired him, that healthy black hair gushing from his brow. He didn’t have a moment’s trouble looking himself in the eye this morning, she thought. She handed him back the huge cup, smiling more easily now that she was almost free. Dan leaned over and gave her a bright daytime kiss on the corner of her mouth, but not insultingly, as if they hadn’t done what they did. Good. He got the message.
She slipped out and shut the door behind her. When she bent down, he was leaning toward her, his arm hooked around the passenger headrest as if he’d already found a new date. Frowning and smiling at the same time, she gave him the briefest of waves and stepped onto the sidewalk, backing away before he could say anything more. As she walked down the street, she glanced behind her, but he was already gone.
Albert Street, 10:01. Jean, exhausted, hungover, and aching everywhere, headed upstairs to run the bath, and then straight back down again to put the milk away. She saw the machine blinking red: eight messages. Probably all Mark, thinking: Where the hell is she? Or maybe the police, asking her to look in at the station and help with their inquiries. Maybe Vic—no nap yet. Jean filled the coffee machine, right up to the six-cup level, not even bothering to take off her mac. She felt in the pocket for the memory card.
Mark’s digital camera—it was by the front door where he’d been recharging it and then, along with his phone, he’d forgotten to take it with him. He was in a rush, all right, she thought. Was that really only the day before yesterday? Jean could hardly credit it, mounting the stairs slower this time, pulling herself up along the banister. She shut off the bath and returned to the kitchen with the camera. The slot for the memory card was empty: proof enough to Jean that he was hiding it. First, she poured herself a cup of coffee and hit the play button on the message machine.
Message one. 6:22 pee-em! Vikram. For a sweat-inducing moment she remembered that he had a key to this house. Next she heard the chaotic Maya, who’d missed the train. Then Mark, checking in: “Hello, darling! I can hardly believe I’m still here. Who are these people? Who am I? I’ll try you later. Bye! Bye.”
But it was her father’s voice that dealt her the slap of reality. “Hello, dear. It’s Dad, and it’s pretty late. I hope if you’re not answering you’re out on the town. Listen, sweetheart, give the old man a call, will you? I’ve got some news. Nothing to worry about. Love from Dad.”
She replayed the message, listening for crisis. She looked at the wall clock: much too early to call New York. She felt panic rising to her throat. I’ve been unfaithful and killed my father. The next call was Vic’s. Good girl. And then, not to be left out, Phyllis. “Hi, hon. Listen, could you call me back? Something I want to discuss. Not to worry. Love to Mark and my Vicky. Bye, honey. This is Phyllis.”
This is Phyllis. As if Jean might not know that. What was going on? She thought about those ministrokes her mother had told her about in St. Jacques and wondered if it had been strictly necessary to tell Dan about the biopsy—well, there was nothing strictly necessary about last night, but for some reason she regretted this intimacy as much as all the rest. She had not yet experimented with not regretting anything. Saving that for the bath. Another call, a hang up, and then Mark again, Saturday 11:48 p.m.
“Darling, where the devil are you? Bulgarian documentary after all? You’re probably asleep, you lucky pup. I am absolutely shattered. These sods are very much worse than anticipated, truly appalling. Loads of desperate drinking—drowning my sorrows. I feel absolutely awful. All right, darling. See you tomorrow. Bonne nuit. Schlaffen-sie gut, ja? Lots of love. G’night, my bride. Night.”
Jean pulled Dan’s memory card from her pocket and slipped it into Mark’s camera. First came the picture that was on Dan’s sleek laptop in the flat. She thumbed to the next one, technically the preceding, moving back in time, praying for a Tuscan landscape. He wasn’t lying, he didn’t get her face, but he got pretty well all the rest of her. Hard to see in this tiny window, but it was Jean all right, on her back, a bent arm across her eyes and the sheet down by her knees. Oh no, oh no, oh no. She felt the prickles moving up her neck and across her scalp.
He must have been standing on the bed with his legs either side of her to get this one—her body smack in the center, closer up. She was headless, as if she was a decapitated Greek bust, her arms outstretched off-screen, cruciform. When? Was that how she slept, or had he arranged her? How could she be so asleep? Was she drugged? Though why would he drug her after…and how, for this next one, did he manage to roll her over without waking her? Come to think of it, and these shots confirmed it, he did seem particularly enamored of her backside. Live and learn—a whole new idea of herself she’d have to get around to thinking about.
An earlier photograph showed just the back of her head, shot from above, her hair twisted in a coil down her back like a tornado viewed from a great distance, but, turned around, it looked like a struggling vine, inching upward. Her head was at the bottom, then her shoulders, forming the base of a triangle cropped near the top at the waistline. It looked as if she might be praying. Only she wasn’t. The next one, with her again on all fours, framed the open butterfly of her bottom and waist and shoulders. The music! He’d gotten up to put it on, stirring Brazilian music, and just as he’d instructed she hadn’t moved. Head down like a swayback nag at the trough, her position resigned. Drunk. She was studying the details of each shot, one at a time, attempting to hold at bay the bigger picture: the consequences of these images, now on this camera, but also in Dan’s computer and therefore, if he chose, out in the world.
The next picture of Jean filled the screen: shot from above but also from behind—the contemplative one-eyed point of view, as Dan might say (she’d been amused by his comradely relationship with his cock, whom he’d portrayed as a deluded philosopher-king). Jean contemplated her own raised ass. Well, now she knew how she looked from behind.
At last, it was someone else’s turn. Unable for the moment to think about what she’d seen, she kept looking at the next and the one after, mechanically moving her thumb.
Ah, here was the landscape. So the great northern Mapplethorpe could also do holiday snaps. A ski trip evidently, the classic white peak rising off darkly melting lower slopes, scenic alpine shot, could be the Matterhorn. That black oval in the middle, maybe it was a cable car. She clicked on. The next shot was of a pale girl in profile, sticking her tongue out. Oh dear, sweetheart or chalet girl? At least it wasn’t Maya, whom Jean had vaguely been expecting. Her skin was fluorescent, her red pigtails glowed. On the end of her tongue was a big white blob—more snow. She was sheathed in a figure-hugging dark strapless dress, and her hands were also dark, black or brown, as if in long evening gloves. Jean was getting impatient. She clicked on.
In the next one, the same girl was laughing with her eyes closed and her shoulders raised—oh my God, it was Shirley from the pub, from the office. The ends of her pigtails were now dark. Jean looked closely, but it was hard to see, her arms and hands and shoulders were all brown, like she’d been dipped. The next one was just plain Shirley, white as a star, fully frontal, inanely smiling. Her breasts looked even bigger without the fluffy pink sweater, without the brown dress. And there was something off about them—not just that one was marginally more enormous than the other. Seemed he’d done something with the color setting and given her bright red nipples, or maybe they’d been messily colored over with lipstick. She was afraid the next picture would be of a mouth with that lipstick on it, and she was miserable, right back where she’d been with Giovana. It hadn’t felt like that with Dan.
But the next shot was Shirley again, marshmallow white, overexposed, and bending her head, hair part like a line of chalk. There was something between her breasts. A banana? Oh, Christ. This was the making, or the unmaking, of an ice-cream sundae, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, and Maraschino nipples. What was she going to do?
Jean thought of the moment when she read the first letter from Giovana and of her resolve to tell Mark, of how that resolve vanished before she got the chance. While he was locked in the can. She forced herself to think of the months lost in her “researches,” a torturous exercise whatever spin you wanted to put on it, and so aging, as if she had voluntarily assumed his extra years. And the entire unfinished episode—the long, infecting soak in his dirty water—might have been avoided if she’d just called him on it right then, that morning on the terrace.
No bath, no breakfast, no nap—she was going to call Dan, now.
His machine began answering before a breathless voice interrupted. “’Lo?”
Jean couldn’t help imagining he was with someone else, what else would wind him on a Sunday morning? The thought gave her fury a boost. “I should call the police,” she said, not quite sure where that came from.
“Whoa! Why would you want to go and do that? Didn’t you have a good time, Mrs. Hubbard?”
“I had a good time, Dan. I had a very good time. Just out of curiosity, was that your idea, or did my husband suggest it? Sponsoring a little cheer—spreading the wealth. Where is he this weekend anyway, do you want to tell me that? Come on, Dan, surely no secrets between us now.”
“Whoa again—what’s all this?” It was his turn to talk someone down off a roof. “I spoke to him from his Schloss not an hour ago—seriously bad weather, apparently—hasn’t he called you? And as for last night, I thought it was your idea actually—and what a very good one it was, too. Come on now, Jean, you’re not really cheesed off about my little wake-up card, are you? A thank-you card. I didn’t mean any harm. You look…mesmerizing. You are, you know.”
She couldn’t stop herself asking, “Why are you so out of breath?”
“Believe it or not, I just dashed across the flat to answer the phone—some nutter calling me just as I was beginning a lovely kip. Not so fit, you see. False advertising.”
This wasn’t going as she’d planned. He had to be stopped. “How could you do that?”
“Aw, Jean. If you want to come back and shoot some different ones, why, hmm, checking my diary here, it seems I am available, yes, puzzlingly so.”
“How could you do that to Shirley?”
“Ah, Shirley. Bit greedy, our Shirl. But we aim to please.”
“You’re an animal,” Jean said humorlessly, pressing her lips together when she’d spat out the words, her throat constricting.
“So they tell me. Hubbard—Mr. Hubbard, that is—he especially likes to say that, though I have to admit, until now I always took it as a compliment.”
“I want those pictures off your computer.”
“Sounds as though you’ve already got them off my computer, Mrs. H. Come on, Jean, it was all in good fun. And Shirley, she’s a big lass. And I don’t just mean—”
“That’s enough. Don’t you ever take a break?”
“Actually, I was trying to, but this mad lady from the islands called me wanting my head. As it were.”
She clenched her teeth. “Look Dan, I’m sorry I got a little upset. I’m sure you meant no harm. But you can’t do that. Really, I’m asking you. Pretty please. Do you promise to delete them all?”
“You’re the boss.”
His wife, actually. Would he ever give it up? She was searching for a lighter tone, but what was the point? Dan would do what Dan would do.
“Look,” she said. “I enjoyed last night more than you know. Well, I think you do know. All this other stuff just spoils it for me—it really freaks me out.”
“Don’t worry, Jean. I am not out to get you. It was heaven, and I think you’re great. In fact, I was going to have a kip and then call you and ask you out for lunch…”
“Are you listening to me? That’s it. Let it go. If you’re any kind of friend, just let it go.”
“Such a waste, that’s all I can say to that. Listen, you are not to worry. Yes, I will wipe the pictures. Regretfully but fully. I promise.”
Jean didn’t know why, but she believed him. “So, I guess we won’t need to speak about this again,” she said with overkill. “Anyway I’m going back to St. Jacques next week. Soon as I get my results.”
Desperate last shot: cancer. Please comply with my dying wish. There was a thoughtful silence from Dan. Had he already forgotten? Or was he derailed by aesthetic, even professional, contemplation of her titless torso? Maybe this was supposed to be a grave silence? If that’s what you’re after, Jean thought, you can forget it. You’re not made for solemnity, Dan. Just to nail it, she added, “Mark is so fond of you. Like a son—or a naughty little brother I guess.”
“Well, I’m fond of him,” Dan said without a hint of irony. “Though not quite so fond as I am of you.”
Jean, in the bath with her hair piled high and pinned by a toothbrush, looked down at her body, all of it submerged except the two islands floating in this clear green sea, a lone survivor at the center of each. At least they had each other for company—for now. The biopsy spot was sore, sorer than the other sore spots. But sore was okay with Jean.
Closing her eyes she thought of Dan’s tongue power-coating his handful of female flesh, nipples not so solitary then, and a shiver ran through her—not like last night’s exquisite tremors and quivers, but the shakes of a rapidly advancing disease, one mocked by her oblivion-seeking, late-night self. She wanted to test for other, nonbodily bruises—a moral or spiritual biopsy—but how did you do that?
Isolation: this seemed the most likely immediate outcome of her having crossed the border with Dan, barring anything truly horrible from him. She supposed she’d know just how isolated sh
e was as soon as she saw Mark, if there was a new veil between them. Even more than pictures of herself on the office laptops, this was the consequence she most feared: her own revulsion for her world, for all that she had. Auto-eviction. But fear was a poison. Jean thought of those hugging machines they use on cows before they’re led off to slaughter. Nothing to do with animal welfare—fear is toxic, makes the meat taste foul.
She watched the concentric ripples on the water’s surface made by a toe that looked out like a periscope and then changed its mind. Had Dan made her feel any better about Mark’s excursion, compared, say, with all her busybodying around the Internet? Yes, he had. The impulse to strike out on any independent path had to be strengthening, if not exactly cheering. But why feel better about jumping onto a sinking ship? She thought of a small, hard, embroidered pillow, one of those decorative fortune cookies Phyllis collected, which said IF YOU EVER LEAVE ME I’M GOING WITH YOU.
Still, last night hadn’t felt related to Mark and her marriage. And not even to Mark and Giovana. Maybe this was just Jean on the brink of forty-six and it didn’t mean anything. Or maybe this was her true personality coming through, the way alcoholism showed in some people around thirty-five. Jean the philobat, on the pattern of acrobat, the type that prefers to cope alone with difficult, uncertain situations. Though of course she hadn’t been alone.
She had to expect that nothing would ever be the same again. But to her intermittent great sadness, nothing ever was. In fact, the whole night was a kind of exercise in nostalgia. Hungry kisses—remember those? Well, they were still there—even more amazing, they were available to her and she’d remembered how it all went. As if she’d stepped straight back into a beloved entertainment from an earlier time, like square dancing.
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