“Trouble?”
“You’ve been suffering lately, haven’t you, Jon?”
“ ‘Acquainted with grief.’ I believe that’s the phrase.”
“You know about loss.”
“Does this have something to do with Lee?”
“In a way. She had an abortion, Jon. This morning.”
“This morning? A couple of days after getting married?”
“She made the appointment sometime last week.”
“Why? And why now?”
“It’s complicated, Jon. For one thing, she’s a little older than I thought. Forty-five. The rest, I’m not sure I understand. She wanted to marry me first, to show me that she loved me and that she wasn’t just marrying me because of the baby.”
I wasn’t sure I followed the logic of that. “She could have married you after she had it done.”
“Yes. But maybe she thought I wouldn’t have wanted to marry her then.”
“Would you have?”
“I don’t know. Not that I don’t love her. But it’s the abortion. Doesn’t that make it something like marrying a murderer?”
“I don’t think so, Harry. You didn’t marry the doctor.”
“I hope you’re not trying to be witty, Jonathan.”
Our switch in roles was confusing me. I wasn’t used to being less serious than Harry. “Sorry, Harry. I don’t know what I’m trying to do. I don’t know what I think about abortion.”
“I just keep thinking my child has been killed for no good reason.”
“I guess so. But it’s not that simple. Lee must have had some reason other than her own safety.”
“Yes. But she can’t make me understand it. She says things about stonemasons and Bach.”
I remembered that Lee had said that kind of thing to me—and had also mentioned abortion—on the day Sara disappeared. I asked Harry if Lee had said anything about Joanne and the portraits.
“Yes. I think that suddenly the whole supernatural business started to outrage her. It’s as if she didn’t want to have children if they could attract ghosts. But it wasn’t ghosts per se—they just represented the quirks that we’re heir to, I think.”
“Why didn’t she talk to us about it—to Sara or Joanne, or even to me? Quirks aren’t all bad. Joanne was a lot happier when she had her quirks, I think.”
“The specters are gone?”
“So Joanne says. They disappeared along with Sara.”
“Then there won’t be any more spectral portraits?”
“No, Harry. Even if I could get some, I wouldn’t want to.”
“Then the ones we have are even more valuable than we thought.”
I was glad that Harry’s business sense hadn’t completely deserted him in his troubles. I was sure he was planning to raise the price tags on the prints. Maybe that’s why we pay so much attention to business; it takes our minds off loss and quirks. At any rate, it seemed to work that way with Harry. He paused, and then—his voice edging up a little closer to its usual alto range—he said, “You’re a balm and a tonic, Jonathan.” (I was no longer Jon.) “You’re a sage and a gent. I’m going to take your advice.”
“Anytime, Harry.” I wasn’t sure what advice he supposed I had given him. “Give my best to Lee,” I said. But Harry had already broken the connection. I imagined him heading for his office and searching his wheel of phone numbers for the one that would make us both rich, and me famous.
As it turned out, that’s exactly what happened. Three weeks later, four of the Spectral Portraits (now made official with initial capitals) appeared in a magazine that was usually described as influential and was ordinarily devoted to a style of writing that combined indifference with hysteria. However, the magazine’s editors printed the portraits without any text except (in small type in the lower-right corner of the two-page spread): Photographs by Jonathan Brewster.
From the day the pictures were published, my life began to seem like one of those sequences in a 1930s B movie that shows days being mysteriously torn off a calendar while confusing, superimposed images fade and cross-fade in the foreground. The sound track seemed to consist entirely of the amplified ringing of a telephone.
The Spectral Portraits became that summer’s international fad—the silly-time topic that substituting reporters and interviewers settled on to fill in the time until the vacationing deep thinkers returned to the job. There were two big questions that were asked about the pictures: whether they were fake, and who the people were (substantial and otherwise) who appeared in them. Harry and I refused to answer the questions (those we could have answered). I refused as a matter of principle (the principle of the sacredness of the inexplicable), and Harry refused on the grounds of sales strategy. Inquisitive and inquisitorial people began to follow me around, whining in my ears and stinging my eyes with electronic flashes. Joanne became the princess of the preschoolers, and I was about to take her out of school, when Ms. Abraham sent a message to me telling me that Joanne’s celebrity was upsetting the school’s routine. Since Joanne was enjoying the attention, I indulged in a little simple spite and decided to let her stay in the place a few more weeks until they adjourned for the season.
The opening of the show in Bill Freedman’s gallery was a little decadent for my tastes, but Harry and Bill were delighted with the proceedings. At one point I saw them consulting a laconic young man who looked as if he had spent his youth in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf (Saudi Arabia, as it turned out), and when their little conference ended and the young man headed for the exit, Harry and Bill spent what must have been a full five minutes giggling and shaking hands with each other. I didn’t begrudge them their ecstasies, but for my part, I wasn’t feeling too jolly.
Actually, in the days preceding the opening, I had been in a relatively good mood. I had spent less time than usual brooding about Sara’s disappearance, and I had even begun to take occasional pleasure in the thought that I had become a celebrity. But as I circulated in the crowd during the opening I became afflicted by another motion-picture effect—the sort of thing in which you see a noisy, crowded room that becomes illogically deserted for a few seconds and then returns to normal. In the little periods when the gallery seemed deserted, I was aware only of the portraits—or, actually, of Sara’s image in the portraits. I wanted her to be there with me. Sometime during the evening, I realized that I had not kept one of the portraits for myself. At that point in the imaginary movie, the room seemed deserted for a longer time, and the camera panned slowly along the walls of the gallery, showing the portraits in close-up: Sara with left eyebrow raised slightly; Sara on the verge of a smile; Sara looking with satisfaction at Joanne; Sara with lascivious sidelong glance, partially obscured by the angel’s wing.
When the crowd flashed back into the room, I pushed my way through them and went to the lascivious portrait. I took it down from the wall, put it under my arm, and started to leave the gallery. A Pinkerton man at the other side of the room began to shout and make his way toward me. Harry, who had been watching me, stopped the guard and said a few words to him, then gave me an odd, grave salute. I left, hailed a taxi, and headed home, grateful for the relative quiet and darkness, and daubing at my wet eyes with the cuffs of my shirt.
Joanne was still awake when I got to the apartment. She and Nanny Joy, both wearing flowered pajamas, were dancing to a brisk-tempoed number by a freespirited jazz band of the 1930s—Fletcher Henderson or Jimmy Lunceford, I supposed. Joy had her eyes closed, trucking or lindying, and Joanne was mimicking the dance, having one kind of good time and probably trying to imagine another, more grown-up kind. I watched them for a few minutes and thought of joining in, but decided against it.
I went into the kitchen and made some coffee. I propped Sara’s portrait up against a food-processing machine that I don’t think had ever been used—one of my dead-end enthusi
asms. I sipped coffee and stared at the photograph. Would my enthusiasm for Sara ever vanish entirely? It didn’t seem likely that it would—no more likely than it was that I would ever see her again. I had made a few more attempts to play Philip Marlowe. I had talked to her landlord, to some people at the musicians’ union, and to a few more of her acquaintances, but no one seemed to know anything about her background. I had thought of hiring a real private investigator, but out of some kind of fear I didn’t fully understand, I decided against it. I would be patient instead.
As I sat brooding, my daughter came jitterbugging into the kitchen. She was singing “Miss Brown to You,” and my gloom couldn’t stand up to that. When Joanne’s little performance was finished, she climbed onto my lap and let her body go limp. I asked her whether she was tired.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m so tired I want to crawl inside you and go to sleep, Daddy. Would you like that?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m going to close my mouth so you don’t crawl inside when I’m not looking.” I closed my mouth.
“I could crawl inside somewhere else.”
I kept my mouth closed.
“You know where I could crawl in?” Joanne asked.
I shook my head.
“I could crawl inside your penis.”
My mouth dropped open. After I regained control of it, I said, “Who’s been talking to you about penises?”
“Ms. Abraham. She told us about putting penises into vaginas and having babies.”
“Oh, did she now?”
“Did she tell a fib?”
I calmed down a bit. I supposed I was being an old grouch. “No,” I said. “She wasn’t telling a fib.” But fib or no fib, it seemed to me that Ms. Abraham could have found other things to talk about. “What else is happening at school?” I asked Joanne.
“Nobody likes me because I see ghosts.”
“But you don’t see ghosts anymore, do you?”
“No.”
“I thought everyone liked your ghosts.”
“Not now. Except the man.”
“Which man?”
“The man who asks me about Miss Coleridge. Can I have some Chinese noodles, please?”
Joanne liked chow mein noodles—the wide, flat kind. I got some out of the cupboard and waited for her to go through her little ritual of putting them into her mouth one at a time and sucking them until they were soggy—something I found hard to understand, since for me their only attraction was their crispness. But I was more concerned with the inquisitive man—a reporter, I supposed—than I was with the noodles. I asked Joanne what she had told the man about Sara.
“That she’s a nice lady and she plays the harp and she knows about Colnee and she is going to be my new mother.” Joanne put a noodle into her mouth and let it marinate for a few seconds, but then she began to gag, and she spit it out.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “Did it go down the wrong way?”
Joanne shook her head. “It tastes wrong.”
I took her in my arms. “What do you mean, it tastes wrong?”
“It looks right, but it tastes wrong.”
I tried one, and it tasted the way chow mein noodles always taste. Then I remembered Nanny Joy mentioning the day before that Joanne hadn’t been eating enough lately. I raised the sleeves of Joanne’s pajama jacket and looked at her arms. She had never been what you would call a pudgy child, but I was sure that her arms were thinner than usual. “You’re just tired, sweetie,” I said. It didn’t do me much good to see my daughter wasting away or to hear about obnoxious reporters following her around. And I decided that maybe it was time for us to get out of town for a while. I put Joanne to bed and telephoned Harry. I knew he would still be at the gallery, but I thought I would leave a message with his answering machine and see if he knew of a place where Joanne and I could spend the summer.
But Lee answered the phone. Neither she nor Harry had been willing to give up their own apartments, and they now lived alternately in the two places, according to some sort of schedule I didn’t understand. Since having her abortion, Lee seemed to be as gabby and energetic as ever, but once in a while you would find her staring at the floor, looking as though her tongue had just discovered a hole in one of her teeth.
“Lee? Is Harry there?”
“Of course not, Jonathan. This is the transcendent evening of his life, or of his business life, anyway—I think I furnished him with something avocationally comparable once. But I couldn’t compete tonight. Harry had no idea I was in the vicinity, so I departed it—the vicinity, that is. As you did, I noticed. And here we are. Are we the losers, Jonathan?”
“We have each other, Lee.”
“And you have Joanne.”
I ignored the hint of remorse that had shown up in Lee’s voice. “That’s why I’m calling,” I said. “Joanne’s getting a little more attention than I think is good for her. And I’m feeling besieged myself. I thought maybe we should get away for a while. But I don’t know much about getaways.”
“Nantucket,” Lee said.
“Is that on Long Island?”
“Not exactly, dear. But it does have islandlike qualities. It’s in the Atlantic, about thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts—it’s a base for a preppy crowd that is looking for quaintness. But, fortunately for you, I’m one of that crowd. I own a cottage there. Clapboards and roses—if my renters haven’t absconded with them—so why don’t you use it? Send me a picture. I haven’t seen it in years—not since I stopped confusing charm with happiness—and I haven’t rented it this year. Stay for the summer if you like. Maybe Harry and I will come out for a weekend. I’ll send you the key if you’re interested.”
“I’m interested.”
“Excellent. Take some sound equipment. Listen to some music. It’s the best thing in the world, Jonathan.” Lee paused for about a second, which for her was a dramatic interval. When she continued, the remorseful tone was back. “God, I envy you,” she said. “You’ve got the time and the temperament to make something truly hellish out of your lost love. You’re a fortunate man.”
I didn’t know how much mockery Lee intended—probably none at all. “I’m fortunate to have generous friends, anyway,” I said. “Thanks for the cottage and the advice, Lee.”
“I’ve hardly begun with advice, dear. But I have some contracts to look over, and someone at the gallery forced a capsule on me that seems to have been some sort of a downer. I’m unraveling, I’m afraid.”
“Get some sleep, Lee, and tell Harry I’ll call him at the office tomorrow. And thanks again.”
Lee hadn’t quite finished unraveling, though. “You must keep in mind, Jonathan, that we don’t live by photography and music alone. See if you can’t arrange to do a bit of screwing in the dunes. Chastity is bad for the prostate. Night-night.”
Joanne and I left for Nantucket two days later. Lee’s cottage was basically sound, but it needed some repairs. So, for the first couple of weeks I devoted myself to carpentry. While I was at it I built a new camera and tried my luck at photographing the scrubby landscape of the island. My luck wasn’t good. I didn’t even try to photograph the sea—which was too featureless and relentless for me to be comfortable with. I could hear the surf at night, and I decided that I didn’t like things that don’t sleep or go dormant once in a while.
But Harry sent me a few clients, and I photographed them outdoors under a canopy I built to diffuse the light. By using a couple of reflectors I soon got lighting that pretty well matched the conditions in my studio. The only difference was that the backgrounds were a little more exotic than in my indoor shots. But I soon managed to get the effect of painted backdrops, and I began to like the work I was doing.
My subjects were mostly summer visitors—some of them people I had photographe
d before in the city. I was interested in how they seemed less distinctive in their informal clothes, which allowed them to reveal more body but less sense of purpose. I soon began to encourage them to wear the most formal outfit they had available. One young lady didn’t care much about the suggestion and insisted on wearing nothing at all. She also invited me to spend some time with her on the dunes by moonlight. I remembered Lee’s suggestion that I seek out some female companionship, but I also remembered my love for Sara Coleridge. I decided I would be faithful to Sara—on the theory, I think, that my faithfulness might increase the chances that Sara would change her mind and return to me.
Joanne thought the sea was about as nice as anything else she had seen. She made some friends among the children of neighbors, and she spent most of the day away from me. At dusk she would return to me exhausted and, I was relieved to find, hungry enough to eat even my cooking. She was intrigued by the outdoor grill at the cottage, and she insisted on having broiled meat almost every night. But it was hardly worth the trouble to build a fire, because she also insisted on having the meat extremely rare. In fact, when we had ground beef, she would nibble little chunks of it raw while we were waiting for the charcoal to heat up. And when we had steaks, she would only let me cook them enough to take the chill off them. When the steak was on her plate, I would cut it into bite-sized chunks for her and try not to watch as she took pieces of bread and soaked up the blood that covered the bottom of the plate. It was an unpleasant sight, but she ate heartily and gained back the weight she had lost in the city.
I suppose it occurred to me at some point that Joanne’s interest in red meat had actually begun while she was seeing her friend Colnee and while we were both seeing Sara. But I didn’t read any significance into that, and if I had found it significant, I’m sure it would have seemed simple and innocent. I don’t know if I was a better person than I am now, but there is no doubt that I was a more innocent person.
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