Guilt by Association

by Susan R. Sloan

  “Well, it’s come down to a choice,” the woman announced. “Either I take that exquisite thing home with me, or I move into your shop.”

  Karen chuckled. “I know exactly how you feel. If 1 had the money, it would have gone home with me a long time ago.”

  “That’s just it,” the woman acknowledged. “I can’t afford to buy it, but I can’t resist. You see, my husband just got a big promotion at work, and he’s a Revolutionary War buff, and I thought this would be a really special way to celebrate.”

  “This is certainly special,” agreed Karen.

  “But he’d kill me if he knew how much it cost. So I was wondering if maybe we could work something out.”

  It wasn’t the first time a customer had inquired about the possibility of financing a purchase. Demion Five’s usual policy was to refuse courteously and suggest a lower-priced item. But Karen found herself hesitating because there was something engaging about the woman, and a candidness that showed clearly in her delightfully asymmetrical face—one blue eye being noticeably larger than the other.

  “Would you care for a cup of tea?” she asked. “I always deliberate better over a cup of tea.”

  “I’d love one,” the woman replied.

  “Okay, now, what did you have in mind?” Karen asked when they were settled at a table on the balcony with a pot of Earl Grey and a plate of Ione’s fresh apple-berry muffins between them.

  “My name is Nancy Yanow and I’m a photographer,” the woman began. “At least, I used to be before I became a mom. I worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer one summer and the Reading Times for several years, and I had a pretty good reputation. I won an award for my series on Kent State in 1970. Anyway, I got to cover some pretty exciting stuff. The New York Times bought one of my pictures once. My name was still Nancy Doniger back then.”

  “That sounds exciting,” Karen offered.

  “It was,” Nancy replied wistfully. “Anyway, my kids are both in school, and that leaves me with lots of free time. Newspaper work wouldn’t fit my life now, but I was thinking about maybe going out on my own, you know, into artistic photography. I’ve kept up with my camera and I know quality work is selling these days and I thought that, if you liked the kind of thing I’m doing, we might arrange a trade where I could pay for, say, half of the sculpture and then give you enough of my stuff to cover the other half.”

  It was an intriguing idea, Karen thought. Not that Demion Five wasn’t doing just fine as it was, but adding a new dimension could have benefits.

  “We’ve never had an arrangement like that,” she said slowly, although she knew the idea of bartering would appeal to both Demelza and Ione.

  “Oh,” Nancy sighed.

  “But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t.”

  “Oh?”

  “Of course, I’d have to see your photographs—that is, before I could commit to anything, and I’d have to discuss it with the owners, too.”

  “Of course,” Nancy concurred, her whole face lighting up. “I could bring in some samples tomorrow or the next day if you’re available, or, better yet, you could come up to my place and see just about everything.”

  “Let me check my schedule,” Karen suggested.

  The two women went into the back, where Karen had her tiny cluttered office.

  “If you’re the least bit claustrophobic,” she warned, “I don’t recommend that you come any further.”

  “I’m more curious than claustrophobic,” Nancy said, following her inside. “Besides, this is at least twice as big as my darkroom.”

  Karen flipped through the pages of her appointment book. “The only day I have available this week would be Thursday.”

  “Thursday’s fine,” Nancy replied.

  “It probably makes more sense for me to see everything you have, and I can’t really concentrate that well here, so why don’t I come to you?”

  “Wonderful,” said Nancy. “Come at noon and I’ll make lunch.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Karen assured her.

  “I know,” Nancy declared. “Here, let me give you the address.”

  The brownstone in which the Yanows lived was on West Seventy-eighth, in a quiet little block tucked behind the Museum of Natural History. Nancy was waiting at the front door, opening it against the gusty wind before Karen even had a chance to push the buzzer.

  “Hi,” she said. “Come on in. I’ve got a good fire going and some hot cider to warm you up.”

  “Sounds great,” Karen replied.

  Nancy led the way up a flight of stairs. “We have the top two floors,” she explained gratuitously. “My brother’s got the bottom two.”

  “Did you flip a coin?”

  “No,” Nancy chuckled. “It’s my brother’s house. We rent from him.”

  The upper duplex was spectacular, with heavy beamed ceilings and hardwood floors and window walls overlooking a garden in back. The top floor was divided into thirds, with two bedrooms at one end, a master suite at the other, and a large playroom in between. Downstairs, each room opened naturally into the next—kitchen into dining room into living room into study. The darkroom was a closet off the kitchen that had most likely started out as a pantry.

  The furniture was a hodgepodge of styles and periods. Oriental carpets were scattered throughout and Navajo throws were draped over the sofas. Most of the exposed brick walls were lined with shelves that were in turn crammed with books, but several framed photographs were hung here and there for dramatic effect. One was a portrait of an ancient woman with a youthful twinkle in her eye. Another high-lighted a solemn little boy with a big tear on his cheek. A third captured a boy and a girl sharing an apple.

  “Did you do these?” Karen asked.

  “Uh-huh,” came the reply.

  “They’re great.”

  Nancy beamed. “I did them when I was in my people phase. Now I’m in my place phase.”

  “I can’t wait to see more.”

  “I thought we’d eat first, if that’s all right,” Nancy suggested. She ushered Karen into the kitchen, where wood blended into tile and the tile gave way to wood again.

  “I thought my apartment was impressive,” Karen observed. “But what you’ve done here is… well, it’s incredible.”

  “I wish I could take the credit,” Nancy said.

  “Your brother did all this?”

  “We knew from the time he was six that he was meant to be an architect. He could do the most fantastic things with Lincoln Logs.”

  “From the looks of it, you were right.”

  “He lost his wife to cancer three years ago,” Nancy confided. “He got through it by taking on this place. He gutted the building practically to the foundation and rebuilt from there.”

  The lunch, which more closely resembled a banquet, was delicious. The two women chatted throughout the meal like old friends rather than potential business colleagues. Somewhere between the crab bisque and the baked salmon, Karen learned that Nancy’s husband Joe was the sales manager for a large industrial products firm and that her son Roger was in the second grade and her daughter Emily in the first.

  “It sounds like you have a great family,” Karen said.

  “Are you married?” Nancy asked.

  “No,” came the reply.

  “Are you interested?”

  “I was once,” Karen replied, and for an instant the mask slipped. “But it didn’t work out, and I don’t really think about it much anymore.”

  A little smile fluttered around Nancy’s mouth. “Well, you just never know when you might stumble over the right opportunity again, now do you?” she murmured.

  She led Karen into the study and sat her down on an overstuffed sofa. Then she hefted a large black portfolio onto an oak coffee table and flipped it open. Faces of every age and emotion stared up at Karen, each with a tale to tell, speaking silent volumes, even in black and white. Karen picked one up. In it, an old man sat on a bench staring into space with an expression of such em
ptiness that Karen felt her eyes moisten.

  “He looks like he’s waiting to die,” she whispered.

  “He was,” Nancy said. “His wife had just died. They’d been married for sixty-three years. They used to go to the park every afternoon so she could feed the pigeons. Hundreds of pigeons would wait for them at that bench. He told me that the day after she died he went to the park because he knew the pigeons would be waiting, but when he got there, they were gone. It was as if they knew.”

  Karen looked into the old man’s face, into his eyes. Even if Nancy hadn’t told her the story, she felt she would have known it.

  In the next picture, a little boy had slipped on a jungle gym at a playground and was dangling precariously. Above him, a teenage boy reached out a helping hand. The teenager was black. Karen saw both fear and relief in the little boy’s eyes as he grasped for the helping hand. She needed no explanation for that story.

  “Hollywood may think it invented talking pictures,” she murmured, “but these are the real thing.”

  “Now for talking places,” Nancy said, lifting another portfolio onto the table. Inside, Karen saw New York City as she had never seen it before—a block of empty shops on the Upper West Side with boarded-up windows that even the rats had abandoned, an elite block of Park Avenue on garbage day, the Queensboro Bridge coming out of the dawn, Broadway during a blackout, the Empire State Building in a snowstorm, a Lower East Side tenement house burning out of control, a foggy shadow of the Staten Island Ferry.

  “Look,” Karen said when she had seen everything, “I don’t claim to be an art critic, or know anything at all about design or composition, but if these are half as good as my instincts tell me they are, you and your husband are going to own a John Micheloni sculpture that I would give my eyeteeth for.”

  “You really like them?” Nancy breathed.

  “Not only do I like them, I think they’re going to raise the level of Demion Five at least one notch.”

  “You know, you’re the first outside person I’ve actually shown any of these to. Joe kept telling me they were good, but of course he’s not exactly what you’d call objective.”

  “Nancy, they are good,” Karen asserted. “Really good— and not even your delicious lunch would make me say that if I didn’t mean it.”

  The photographer grinned. “I was so nervous the other day when I approached you. At first, I was just going to ask if you would do some sort of payment schedule for me. But once we started talking, well, you were so nice, and I just had this feeling that you’d understand what I was trying to do here.”

  “I want you to bring both portfolios into the shop first thing Monday morning,” Karen instructed. “Can you do that?”

  “Of course I can.”

  “I’ll have the owners there and maybe a couple of other people and we’ll see what the reaction is.”

  “I’ll be there,” promised Nancy. “And if this deal works out, if I get Paul Revere, I promise you can have all the visiting rights you want.”

  three

  By the time the bitter winds of March had given way to the gentle rains of April, limited-edition photographs were a fixture at Demion Five. By the time spring flowers had begun to blossom beneath the May sun, Paul Revere had become the focal point of the Yanow living room, and Nancy was as good as her word—Karen had become a regular visitor at Seventy-eighth Street.

  The two women spoke daily on the telephone, met for lunch, and spent Saturday afternoons together. Karen had to go all the way back to her girlhood, to the lazy weekends she had spent with Jill, to find a time when she had enjoyed as close a friend.

  On the first Saturday in August, Nancy arrived at the town house on Sixty-third Street at ten o’clock in the morning.

  “You’re two hours early,” Karen protested when she opened the door wrapped in her terry-cloth bathrobe, her hair soaking wet. “I just got out of the shower.”

  “Joe’s taking the kids to the beach,” said Nancy by way of apology. “He dropped me off on the way.”

  “Well, have a seat,” Karen told her. “There’s fresh coffee. I’ll be ready in half an hour.”

  Nancy poured herself a cup and took it into the living room. She loved the serenity of Karen’s apartment, the muted browns and stark whites, the brief flashes of color, the simplicity of the furniture, the quiet. It was easy to relax here, where there was never a need to worry about tripping over toys or sitting on something sticky. Fastidious Karen, Nancy thought with a smile. You could eat off her floor, you could see your reflection in the polished surfaces of her wood, and there was never a thing out of place.

  Except, this morning, there was a scarred wooden box that had been left open on top of the desk. Nancy was not by nature a snoopy person. It was the incongruity of the box that drew her attention. She peeked inside. On top was a page covered with Karen’s neat, precise handwriting. Nancy couldn’t resist—she picked it up and started to read.

  The death of a dream

  is surrounded by pain,

  emptiness,

  regret,

  guilt.

  The tragedy of life

  is filled with opportunity,

  unrecognized,

  ignored,

  lost.

  Fascinated, Nancy picked up the next page.

  Half an hour later, Karen appeared in navy-blue slacks and a flowing white blouse, her hair smartly fluffed.

  “As long as we have some extra time,” she was saying, “I thought we could—”

  The words died in her throat as she saw Nancy with the wooden box on her lap and the thought pages beside her.

  “Stop!” she cried instinctively. “Those are private.”

  “I’m dreadfully sorry!” Nancy was both startled and embarrassed. “I didn’t realize … I saw the box sitting there, and my curiosity just got the best of me. I didn’t think.”

  Karen gathered up the papers and stuffed them back in the box and then shoved the box into one of the desk drawers.

  “They’re nothing important,” she said woodenly. “Just a bunch of silly doodlings.”

  “They are important,” Nancy contradicted her. “And I had no right to read them without your permission.”

  There was a long and distinctly awkward pause.

  “I suppose you’re wondering what that stuff was all about,” Karen said finally.

  Nancy’s uneven blue eyes reflected nothing but genuine caring. “Not if you don’t want to tell me,” she said.

  “It was a long time ago,” Karen murmured, looking down the tunnel of years. “I was very naive and I made a terrible mistake, and I had to pay the price.” She let out a shaky breath. “Some mistakes you can simply shrug off because you know you won’t ever make them again, but there are others that… well, I’ve had to learn to live with what happened. I don’t talk about it very much. The notes and things—nobody was ever supposed to see them—they help.”

  Nancy heard the sigh and felt the pain. “I’m so sorry,” she apologized. “I never meant to intrude.”

  Karen shrugged. “Well, it’s over and done.”

  “But since I did,” Nancy continued, “I want to tell you something. The things I read—they were very good.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Karen shrugged. “They’re nothing.”

  “You’re wrong—and you ought to do something with them.”

  “Perhaps I should wallpaper my bathroom.”

  “Perhaps you should publish them.”

  Karen laughed outright. “Who’d publish my nonsense?”

  “Literary publications take poetry all the time, and most of it is written by people who are working through problems, just like you. I’ve read stuff in periodicals that isn’t half as good as yours. You had one poem in there about winter that actually gave me chills on an eighty-degree day in August.”

  “Look, I appreciate the compliment, but my stuff is just for me,” Karen said with finality, now mortified that she had made such an issue of it. �
�So let’s pretend you never saw any of it and we can forget it and be on our way, okay? As long as we have time, I want to stop at the cleaner’s.”

  Only Nancy did not forget. In fact, an idea that had been lurking around the edges of her mind for some time began to come into full focus.

  “I want to say something,” she said two weeks later, when they were enjoying a late lunch, “and I don’t want you to say a word until you’ve heard me out.”

  “Okay,” came the casual reply.

  “I’m doing well, right? I mean, my photographs are selling, right?”

  “Right,” Karen said.

  “Well, I was thinking, if my prints are popular—how about a book?”

  “A book of photographs?”

  “Exactly. You see, I’ve had this idea for a while now, and it’s something I can’t really do with a single print. I want to do a whole year in Manhattan, all four seasons, and how the city changes with each one. Different perspectives, all tied into the calendar. The man who sits on a bench three hundred and sixty-five afternoons a year—how do the seasons affect him? The mother who pushes a baby carriage around every morning—what difference do the seasons make to her? How is a river affected, or a park, or a schoolyard? What do you think?”

  “I think it’s good,” Karen replied, the wheels beginning to turn. “A book, if it’s priced right, could be a real hit. We could sell it right out of the shop.”

  “There’s just one hitch,” Nancy said.

  “What?”

  “Well, the book I’m imagining needs to have more than just photographs in it. It needs to have words. Words that will tie everything together, you know, the way illustrations enhance stories. I want to ‘illustrate’ my photographs with words. But I don’t want to use any stuff that’s already been written. I want ideas that are just as fresh and original as my pictures. Only I wouldn’t know how to do that myself.”

  “Then find someone,” Karen responded without hesitation. “It’s such a good idea, I don’t know how anyone could turn you down.”

  “That’s what I hoped,” Nancy said with a Cheshire cat grin that spread all over her face.