Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel

by Anna Quindlen

  But the woods started almost at her back door, and because of the miserly little windows and the way the cottage was placed, it was dark inside a good part of the day, her bedroom and the small guest room on the other side of the bathroom plunged into gloom, the living room and kitchen lit briefly at midday and then in shadow the rest of the afternoon. It was a shame she no longer needed a darkroom; the spare bedroom qualified as one with almost no modification. She had set up her printer on a small table there. The room had one electrical outlet, and Rebecca had purchased several extension cords. She had also put her beautiful gold watch in a top bureau drawer (that stuck, even after she rubbed its bottom with a bar of soap) and replaced it with a black rubber digital watch that glowed in the dark. It worked much better and didn’t need to be wound. It was waterproof, too.

  The cottage was not a place you wanted to linger, not like her apartment, with its golden easterly light, the changing shadings of the park outside the living room windows—big windows—its loveliest artwork. She had loved that apartment from the moment she walked into the narrow foyer and saw those windows and the vista before and below her. The idea of selling it was unthinkable, although figuring out how to hold on to it was a constant worry, like a stitch in the side that would not ease. Its worth had appreciated a good deal since she had bought it; it had now become so valuable that she could no longer really afford to live there. Her home, her true home, her beloved home, or, as her accountant called it, her greatest illiquid asset. Most useful to her with someone else living in it. Last night she had even dreamed about the lobby of her apartment building. “Glad to see you again, Miss Winter,” Mike, the daytime doorman, called to her in the dream, and yet the elevator doors never opened.

  “None of your work here?” the Reiki practitioner had said, looking around at the walls, and something about the way she said it told Rebecca that she had told her friends that she was living in Rebecca Winter’s apartment, that she had expected to point this out to guests: that? Yes, it’s a Rebecca Winter. From the Baby Boy series.

  Rebecca never hung her own work in her home. She felt it would be like talking to herself. Which she did a fair amount in the cottage these days. Otherwise she would never speak to anyone.

  Instead of walking along the winding roads she had settled on hiking, which she had discovered was both more difficult and more likely to yield photographic possibilities. She carried her cameras in a nylon backpack. There was a dry wall of stone that she had photographed from a number of angles and that she thought might have possibilities. There was an old paper wasp nest built around the limb of a pine tree that had galvanized her for an entire morning and then when she looked at the pictures afterward on the computer screen they’d amounted to nothing, nothing that made her feel or think or look twice or hard. They were photographs you had to explain, which meant they were a failure.

  The biggest revelation she’d had about her own work had come one night from a nice man, a sociologist—Rebecca knew his first name was Richard, couldn’t remember the last. But she would always remember the only time he’d been invited to dinner and had quoted a Supreme Court justice on pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Peter had waved his hand—“utter sophistry, and so American,” he had said. Everyone had fallen silent since Peter was considered to be the expert at the table, perhaps the world’s greatest expert on medieval erotica, called in the student newspaper Professor Porn. But Rebecca had found the man’s statement, like most very simple things, compelling, and she thought of it often afterward when she looked at her own photographs. She knew it when she saw it. And when she didn’t, she knew that, too.

  In July, on the hottest day of the year, she found the first cross. She had hiked straight up the mountain, winding around trees and outcroppings on the well-worn deer trail, disturbing a spotted fawn and its mother just beneath a stream that burst into a pool below a tumble of rocks. She still found the utter silence of the house at night disconcerting—one night she had awakened to the faraway harangue of an ambulance siren and found herself comforted by the city sound—but in the woods it was not so much that it was quiet as that the few sounds were loud and distinct, not the orchestra tuning-up of the city but individual grace notes. Birdcalls broken into pieces like a piano exercise, a tree branch snapping sharp and then swishing down and thump on the ground, the hiss of water coming off the mountain.

  She had become more sure-footed and harder in the two months she’d been here, her arms tanned to the shoulder, her long face freckled and leathery. Jeans hung loosely on her already narrow hips; her metabolism seemed to have shifted, too, the push-push of the city given way to something slower, softer. Most of the clothes she had brought with her were useless, the kinds of things she thought of as casual and utilitarian in New York which here seemed as grand as a gown. When she had gotten the clock and the watch at the Walmart, she’d bought two pairs of cheap jeans, some overalls, a six-pack of men’s T-shirts, and a pair of hiking boots. She’d run out of most of the unguents she’d brought from the city and used some cream on her face she’d found at the supermarket. She rarely looked in the mirror. She had never worn makeup except lipstick to parties, and lip balm protectively.

  “She can’t be bothered to make an effort,” her mother would say to one of the women who came to play bridge. That was how Rebecca’s mother always let her know what she thought, by telling other people while she was around as if she wasn’t there at all. It was as though she had eavesdropped her way invisibly through her formative years. Her mother had a knack for lowering her voice in a way that nevertheless made her words completely audible, like an actress miming discretion: “She’s going to Holyoke. She wasn’t accepted at Radcliffe but apparently at Holyoke you can keep a horse.”

  “Does she ride?”

  “Rebecca? Certainly not.”

  Below the stream there was an open space where a tree had fallen, the trunk splintering and then disintegrating into pale dust. A blanket of low plants with knife-shaped leaves grew around it, and where the plants thinned there was a white cross about three feet high. At its foot was something glittering on the ground, and as Rebecca drew near she saw that it was a small trophy of some kind, with a faux marble base and a girl atop, garishly golden, hoisting what looked to Rebecca like a basketball.

  (It was a volleyball. Rebecca had studied at the Art Students League after school instead of playing team sports.)

  At first she had the angle wrong, looking for the light and losing the image. But after a few minutes she had maneuvered herself to one side, kneeling, squatting, leaning forward. It was as it had been many times before: she could not have said precisely what made the juxtaposition of the simple white cross and the cheap trophy amid the foliage an image that spoke to her. It simply did. Just for a moment it was pure, fine, not about the fact that she had been up in the middle of the night doing the arithmetic, running the numbers, wondering again how she could get to year’s end with something left in her account and a cushion for the year to come. She knew it when she saw it, and she saw it, and her heart sped.

  She considered for a moment whether the image might be more telling if the trophy was standing up—she had no way of knowing that the trophy had originally been placed standing up and had fallen over soon after—but she had never liked what she secretly thought of as messing about with things, though she always described it in lectures as “manipulating reality” because that sounded smarter, more like what people expected to hear. It had become part of her story, what critics called her aesthetic, that she photographed what was there without moving, rearranging, interfering. The cross would have to be photographed the way she had found it, the trophy in whatever fashion it had fallen.

  When she got to her feet she saw that the fawn and its mother were looking at her through the trees, their ears fanned to catch the sound, their nostrils flared to catch the scent. She didn’t even bother to raise her camera. Nature was not her milieu. She looked down at the cross and the trophy.
Maybe, she thought. Maybe not. Maybe. Yes.

  KNEW IT WHEN HE SAW IT

  Two days later Jim Bates came through the same clearing. There was a fresh cut on his hand just below the knuckles; it was taped up like a boxer’s before the gloves went on. He cut his hands so often that he could minister to himself one-handed, although he sometimes had to hold adhesive tape between his teeth. He kept a first aid kit in the back of the truck.

  He was looking up, looking for birds, and so he was almost in front of the cross when he finally saw it. A few stray poplar leaves had fallen on the base of the trophy. The cross was leaning the least little bit because a mole had begun to dig a tunnel beneath: probably no one would notice unless they had seen Rebecca’s photographs, and Jim hadn’t. That was later.

  He looked down and saw what Rebecca hadn’t really noticed until she looked at the photographs on her computer: that in very faint pencil the letters “RIP” had been written at the center of the cross, where the two pieces of wood were crudely nailed together.

  “Ah, hell,” Jim said. “Ah, hell.” He pulled the cross loose from the ground, put it under one arm, picked up the trophy, and reopened the cut on his hand, so that it began to bleed a bit through the bandage. He started down the slope of the mountain a little too fast, his boot heels sliding from time to time in the damp moss. “Ah, hell,” he repeated, “ah, hell,” so that finally it sounded like one word, like a sound of discovery and distress, like an animal call.

  SO HERE’S THE DEAL

  The photographs of the stone wall were good. Rebecca suspected that they might be better in color; the stones were pale gray, nearly black, rust-colored, brown with veins of ocher, a tumble of muted and complementary shades. But Rebecca didn’t work in color. Once she had given in to market pressure and hand-tinted a series of photographs of Ben’s action figures. Lavender soldiers, apple-green robots, a wizard with a pale orange robe. They weren’t bright colors, more like a faint watercolor wash, and they had all sold the night of the show. People liked color. Rebecca found it distracting and never used it again.

  All her clothes were black and gray and white. One of the most painful memories of her childhood involved the bar mitzvah of the son of a business associate of her father, and a screaming pink dress from B. Altman her mother had purchased two sizes bigger than Rebecca wore so that she would get plenty of use from it. Her mother was certain Rebecca had gotten a grease stain from a piece of chicken Kiev on the skirt so she would never have to wear it again. For once, her mother was right.

  The photographs of the stone wall were promising, but it was the photograph of the cross that she looked at again and again, that she put up on the wall of the back bedroom so that when she looked up there it was. The walls were rough cedar shakes, pocked and splintered, so damaged they were impervious to more, so she’d put the rough copy of one of the photographs up with pushpins. There was something about it—the simple strong graphic of the white cross, the pathos of the triumphant athlete holding a ball aloft and yet askew.

  She was sure it was good, and then she wasn’t. Once a day she checked her bank balance, and she wasn’t certain if the photograph was really good or she just hoped it was because she needed the money so much. She’d been offered a visiting artist’s post at an art school in Savannah several years before, and she’d barely bothered to think about it. Now she sent TG a message to see if they had filled it for the next year. “Bad economy no gig,” TG had had her assistant respond. Even TG’s hostile aphorisms had been downgraded, in her case, to minion delivery.

  The bill from the nursing home was due. Rebecca moved it to the corner of the dining table, which she was using as a desk. She had found a smooth oval stone to use as a paperweight, and she put it on the bill, which sat atop other bills. She wondered how long she could continue to pay them, with no money coming in. She wondered if she should contact a real estate agent in the city about selling her apartment. She left the cottage.

  The second cross was set into a swale of what looked like wheat at the point where the forest thinned on a butte overlooking a winding road below. Rebecca had to angle herself because the blue leather-bound book propped up at the foot of the cross was surrounded by a feathery corona of yellowish grasses. Its pages were flat; it must have been put there recently or the dew would have begun to disfigure it. The sun caught the gold embossed seal in one corner. “Central Valley High School,” it said. This time the “RIP” was clearer, pen instead of pencil. Rebecca took some shots, backed up, took some at a distance, came in close again. She suddenly thought that the original cross, the one with the trophy, might look different now, perhaps more weathered, and she tried to find her way back to the clearing where she’d seen it. She was pretty sure she had found the right place, but nothing was there. She hiked for another thirty minutes, circling back, but the more she looked the more she was certain that the cross and the trophy were gone. For some reason it made her angry, not just for the sake of her photographs—although she had to admit that that was part of it, she’d thought of doing a progression as the cross weathered and the foliage changed—but because someone had put the things there together, intentionally, and someone had taken them away.

  She went back to the other cross, put down her camera on a flat rock, and circled the area, squinting at the ground. A yearbook often had the owner’s name embossed on the cover in gold leaf, but this one didn’t. The two pieces of the cross were held together with a short nail, and the centering wasn’t exact, so that one side of the crossbar extended farther than the other. The first time she’d just taken the photographs, but now she studied the tableau. It was a bit like one of those roadside shrines that appeared along the interstate when some teenager—it was always a teenager—crashed his car into a tree and died behind the wheel. But those crosses were always annotated—name, date—and surrounded by tributes, flowers, stuffed animals. This felt different.

  She picked up her camera, took a few more photographs, then hiked up the side of the butte to see if there was any point in shooting it from above. The vegetation hid the yearbook from view, and so she kept climbing, her pack heavy, a damp spot spreading at the center of her spine. When she brushed her hair back with her hand it was as warm as tin. The slope was getting steeper, and she had to push hard to continue.

  She found herself doing math in her mind, the math she did almost every day. Fifty-eight hundred for subletting the apartment, minus 1000 for renting the cottage; 1400 for the maintenance on the apartment, 1900 for her part of the nursing home charges, 1000 for her father’s rent at the apartment near the nursing home. It left 500 a month to live on no matter how, or how often, she added it up. She hoped the old tires on her car held out. She hoped none of her cameras needed repair. She hoped she could produce some new work, some good work, that her work would come back into fashion and start to sell. “Look at Jane Ann Bettison,” Dorothea had said when she told her she was subletting her apartment. “She was huge, then nothing, then suddenly the secondary market went crazy and she was huge again.”

  “Jane Ann Bettison died last year.”

  “Granted, but she was flush when she died.”

  Rebecca leveled off on the crest of the mountain, or at least the first crest. All through July she had vowed to reach the top, but it was like a mirage, or solvency, always much farther away than it looked. She peered through a break in the trees but there was more and more mountain, ever upward. Overhead she saw movement, and a bald eagle bisected the patch of sky. The shock of recognition was powerful; he looked exactly like money. He banked slightly and from inside a huge maple ahead she saw a gun pointed at him and she broke into a run, her backpack bumping between her shoulder blades.

  “What are you doing?” she shouted as the bird wheeled and disappeared. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Ah, hell,” said a voice from deep within the branches of the tree.

  She looked up, saw the soles of hiking boots over the edge of a platform above her and the
n a flushed truculent face. “Jim Bates,” she said aloud.

  “Ms. Winter,” he said, making the s in the term of address sound like a bee buzzing, more Southern manners than political correctness.

  “I’ve always understood it’s illegal to shoot a bald eagle,” she said. “If it’s not it certainly should be.”

  He shimmied down the tree trunk, the big gun held on a bandolier strap that cut across his chest. Beneath it a T-shirt the green of midsummer leaves had the letters SWS on its front. Under his arms the green was the darker shade of the deeper forest. He shook her hand formally but the line of his mouth was hard.

  “It’s illegal to shoot a bald eagle, and even if it wasn’t I’m the last guy you’d find doing it. This isn’t a gun. It’s a tracking device. It reads the chips in the bands the State Wildlife Service puts on the big birds. That bird you just saw is the male of a pair that have a nest about a half mile that way. The scientists like to keep track of his habits. I work for them on weekends.”

  Rebecca breathed in, then finally said, “I’m sorry. I’ve interfered with your work.”

  Jim Bates shrugged. The line of his mouth had relaxed. “He’ll be back. He always is.”

  “The same bird in the same location?”

  He nodded. “They mate for life,” he said. “Unlike people.”

  “Can you show me where the nest is?”

  “I’d rather not, to be honest. I try not to disturb them at home. I don’t really need to do that. I usually log each of them when they’re out looking for food for their babies. He’s out now, she’s home. He’ll bring something back, she’ll go out.” He looked down at her. She was on the tall side, but he was taller and bigger, a block of a man. She wondered if his pink skin faded with the winter light. She began to try to apologize when he held up a hand and put the other on her shoulder, turning her slightly and pointing up. The eagle was flying above them, a limp squirrel hanging from his talons. His profile was an etching, the white head, the golden beak, the pale eye.