He felt a sense of deja vu shooting her now. It seemed to him almost as if fate had decided that this was something he needed to do. His approach this time was the antithesis of Helmut’s tack back in 2000: informal and candid as opposed to stuffily contrived. The difference was in part self-conscious, in part a matter of taste.
He was attuned for serendipity, for Easter eggs of real emotion and grace, and he kept finding them. In their meetings to date, their conversations had flowed as if they’d been reading from a script. Now their physical interactions on opposite sides of the lens seemed to have been blocked by an unseen director.
At one point, now deep in the labyrinth of alleyways, they found a swing, someone’s idea of a joke, or of art. It was just like one of the swings in the playground of his primary school – a black rubber seat shaped like a band-aid held aloft by steel chains. In this case, however, the chains were anchored not to the traditional A-frame but to a steel pole wedged between the brick walls of the abutting buildings, four stories up. It was quite the contraption, and didn’t look entirely safe, but before he could voice this observation she had already hopped onto it and was gliding elegantly through the null space of the alleyway.
“Give me a push, dammit!” she cried, her voice a delighted squeal. He obeyed this directive, careful to put his hands on the small of her back and not lower down, lest he bring the beautiful, shimmering moment to a sudden, terrible end. Then he stepped back and snapped a couple of shots in quick succession as she whizzed past him, narrowly missing a steel garbage can with her foot.
“I want to go higher,” she shouted, pumping her legs for altitude. “As high as it’ll fucking go!”
He continued snapping pictures, image after image, killing off a roll and hastily loading another, laughing in unison with her as she soared through the air right there in front of him.
It went without saying that most of the setups they concocted wouldn’t make it anywhere near the pages of the Telegraph – although one of them might pass muster as the author photo for her collection of columns. But it didn’t much matter to him. He was having too much fun to much care, and the photos were good: spontaneous and alive with energy, just as he had hoped. That energy, it was clear, owed more than a little to the rapport they had quickly established. They had clicked so easily at the magazine awards, and the attraction he’d felt – which she seemed also to feel – was still there, an electric crackle that rippled in the air between them.
In the lab, he was energized, more excited than he had been about a project in months, which was a good thing, because the scope of the work had swollen (by his choice, to be fair, not her demand). There were black and white shots that would require hand developing, and colour images to process and correct in order to get the effect he was looking for. They met a couple of times in cafés to discuss the contact sheets, select the best shots for printing. And once, ever so casually, she brought him over to her condo, a steel and glass box on Harbourfront, appointed with modernist furniture and colourful abstract prints, so that they could spread out a bunch of shots on her oak dining table. Whatever the setting, their ideas and opinions always seemed to gel, as if they’d been working together like this for years.
When the prints were finished, they met at another café so that he could hand them off to her. He found her there waiting for him at a table by the front window. He sat down and, with a proud smile, slid the folder of prints across to her. She pulled it towards herself, opened it, and began to leaf through the shots, impassive. He watched her face, surprised by how eager he was for her approval. Slowly, her expression softened, the edges of her eyes crinkling, the corners of her lips rising in their little curlicues. As a photographer for hire, he’d learned how to read his clients’ body language for signs of approval. This, he could see, was the real thing.
She looked up at him. “These are absolutely amazing, Stephan – better than I had any right to hope.” She was grinning.
“Thanks.”
Preparing the final prints, he’d been more nervous than he would have been for a regular job. But now it had all worked out just as he’d hoped – another victory, as if preordained. He had accomplished the task, completed the mission she’d set for him.
“We should celebrate,” she said. “I’ll take you out somewhere fun next week, buy you a drink.”
“That really isn’t necessary, Jenny. I’m just happy you like the work.”
“I’m sorry, but I must insist.”
He raised his hands in good-natured acquiescence as she reached into her purse and wrote out a cheque on the spot for his fee.
At her suggestion, they met for their drinks at a lounge in the Annex, a few blocks south and west of Stephan’s apartment. The feel of the place was typical of the neighbourhood: all colourful rugs, plush sofas and orange-shaded lamps – 90’s-style neo-bohemian chic. It was three-quarters full when they arrived, far from dead, but not particularly lively either. A DJ was spinning vinyl records near the back, low-key funk music with an eerie, lolloping rhythm. Stephan’s recent interactions with Jenny Wynne had been day-lit, business-focused – even when they’d met at her condo’s dining-room table. Now the mood was shifting. Did that mean the terms of their relationship were shifting, too?
Getting ready to go out at the beginning of the evening, he’d sensed that this entire project they’d just completed had been, among other things, a kind of test. She’d seen something in him at the magazine awards, and had singled him out for further study. It was hard to say what that something might have been. As a journalist, Jenny Wynne was a spotter of trends, constantly on the lookout for the next new thing. Stephan was still relatively new to the business, but he had already established himself as a talent on the rise – perhaps she thought he was on his way to even grander things. Or maybe it was simpler than that. He was a successful, eligible straight guy in an industry dominated by women and gay men. That alone made him a rare and, therefore, desirable commodity.
They chatted over drinks in a quiet corner of the room, bending towards each other across a coffee table strewn with vintage magazines: ancient copies of Esquire featuring tweedy sportsmen in fly-fishing gear, a Life magazine from the 1940s, its cover dominated by a blonde model’s head and satin-clad shoulders, next to the caption “War and Fashions.” Now he was sure of it – the way she was looking into his eyes and nowhere else, her own eyes seeming not even to blink. The way she smiled when he spoke and then tossed her hair, still smiling, her unblinking eyes wider than ever now. Then her phone blooped, killing the moment with an incoming text message. She snatched the device up off the coffee table, read it with an irritated sigh, shaking her head, then thumbed out a curt response, pressed send.
“So where were we?” she asked, refocussing.
“You were just telling me about your new book of photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue.”
“Right, so the thing I found so amazing was…”
Her phone blooped again, the LCD screen lighting up in the same instant, its colour a harsh, alien blue. This time, she gave the message only a cursory look, her brow furrowing, then set the phone back down without bothering to reply. But it blooped again, a few moments later, and then again, before she’d even finished reading the third message.
“Everything okay?” Stephan asked, tamping down his annoyance. “Did you forget to file this week’s column? Breaking news in the lifestyle sector?”
She shook her head, looking down. “I wish,” she said, turning off the phone and putting it away in her purse, her head bowed. Was she upset? She seemed actually to be ruffled, he realized with surprise.
“Seriously, everything okay?”
“Yes, everything’s fine.” She shook her head. “I was seeing somebody, but we broke up. He doesn’t seem to have fully grasped that, however.”
Stephan’s mind raced, calibrating the significance of this fresh intelligence. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, finally.
“Don’t be. He had it
coming.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t mean to be coy, but I’m not terribly keen to get into the details of my unfortunate love life just now.”
“Fair enough.”
“Honestly, it was any number of things – his tiresome railings about American politics, his overly practiced cunnilingus technique – but I’ll tell you what. The last straw was that I was over at his place a few nights ago and happened to discover his complete collection of Murphy Brown DVDs, hidden away in a secret corner of his entertainment unit. You know Murphy Brown, that early nineties TV sit-com starring Candice Bergen?”
“Murphy Brown, yeah, that’s… somehow vaguely disturbing.” He paused, mulled. “On the other hand, it’s not as if he was a racist cop or something. Are you sure you weren’t too hard on him?”
She fixed him with a stern look, and he saw that he’d offended her. Then she cracked up.
“Let me explain,” she said, gasping.
“I’m all ears.”
“Okay, so this guy thought he was the ultimate connoisseur of everything, right? If we went out for dinner, he’d insist on ordering some very special bottle of French wine to go with the meal. If he bought a messenger bag, it had to be a limited edition one crafted from the recycled cowlings of Communist-era Slovakian produce trucks.”
“Wait a minute, I think I know that guy. Actually I know five of that guy.”
“They’re everywhere these days, but here’s the thing – when I saw those tapes something I’d half realized all along suddenly hit me full on. Deep down he was just a simple fellow from the suburbs who’d built up this whole fake persona for himself, because he wanted people to think he was cool or whatever, and not because he actually liked any of the stuff he claimed to be into. Finding those DVDs, it was like stumbling onto his secret bestiality porn stash. It was… hideous, actually.”
“Maybe he was just afraid of what you’d think if you found out who he really was.”
“Maybe he was. But he might have had more luck in the long run if he’d been honest with me up front. I’ve been crazy about all kinds of guys. I don’t care if someone is obsessed with bad sitcoms – we all need our junk food. But I do care if someone’s pretending to be something they aren’t. An imposter.”
She stared across the table at him, suddenly intent. He met her gaze head on.
“So is that what you’re asking me, then? Am I an imposter?”
“Not exactly,” she said, paused. Her face was thoughtful. “I guess what I’m asking you is this: are you sincere about what you’re doing?”
Her phrasing of the question gave him confidence in the answer.
“Yes,” he said. “I am. In fact, I think I might be one of the most sincere people in the entire city, for whatever that’s worth. Maybe not much.”
There was a pause, as she took this in. Then she smiled at him, almost sweetly, that smirking attitude of hers replaced in a heartbeat by something that could almost be called innocent.
Chapter 5
On a Saturday morning in early August, Pete called Stephan to ask a favour: he wanted his friend’s opinion on a house he and Sally were thinking of buying, and was hoping to drive out together to have a look. Stephan had been planning to spend the day in the darkroom, catching up on some printing he’d let slide, but he wanted to help Pete out. His friend didn’t ask him for much, after all. Plus, the forecast was for a gorgeous day, sunny and fresh. The summer of 2002 was not long for the world, and it made sense to get outside while he could. He had plans that evening, with Jenny Wynne as it happened, and felt his usual twinge of guilt for not working when deadlines loomed – but so be it. The lab would still be there tomorrow, and nobody would die if he missed a deadline by a day or two.
As they drove along Richmond Street in Pete’s black Volkswagen Golf, Stephan reached his hand out the window and let it glide along on the breeze, like a kite. Pete glanced over.
“Watch it, there, sonny,” he said. “Or that thing’ll get lopped off on a signpost.”
“Come on, dad, get your head out of your ass.”
“That’s it – one more outburst from you and I’m pulling this car over.”
They whizzed across the threshold of the Eastern Avenue Bridge, giggling like children. As the car crested the structure, Stephan turned to gaze down on the trusses of the Old Eastern Avenue Bridge, which had been closed for decades but never demolished. Its entrances on either side of the Don River were blocked off by chain link fences, but they looked as if they could be scaled easily enough. He made a mental note to come back here some time and shoot it, and then they were across the river and into a neighbourhood of junk shops and ancient clothing stores, anchored by a strip club, Jilly’s, that had been there so long it had acquired the status of a heritage site.
Block by block, the passing street-scape grew tidier and more prosperous. And somewhere along the way the car crossed the invisible frontier of the true inner city. They hadn’t entered the suburbs yet, but they weren’t downtown anymore, either. A couple of minutes later, Pete pulled onto a narrow side street lined with brick- and siding-clad semi-detached houses. There was a black Lexus sedan parked half-way down the block, next to which stood a thirty-something black guy, trim and fit. Dressed in a light-grey suit that fitted him liked a suit of armor, he was talking on an aluminum-coloured cell phone that glinted in the sunlight like jewellery.
“That’s my agent, Sherwin,” Pete said. “And that’s the house!” He jabbed his finger towards a two-storey structure of white-painted brick, its front yard a small rock garden.
“Looks... great,” Stephan said, groping for a supportive response. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the place – it looked quite nice, actually – but he seemed to lack the vocabulary for this sort of occasion. It was outside his sphere of experience.
They parked and walked over to where Sherwin was standing.
“Peter, how are you doing?” the agent said, his tone affable, as they approached.
“Sherwin, good to see you. This is Stephan, an old friend with a good eye.”
Sherwin’s handshake was firm, his gaze direct but not too intense as he slid Stephan a business card (minimalist contemporary font, matted card stock). In Stephan’s limited experience with agents, he’d often been weirdly impressed by them. Their slickness, their cool and calculating approach to beautiful objects, intrigued him.
Sherwin made a few initial remarks about the house as they went in, then discreetly left them to their own devices – at which point Pete, who had already been through a couple of times, took over the tour. In each room, he pointed out details that he treasured – original cast-iron heating registers, intricate crown mouldings. The house was late Victorian, with high ceilings and hardwood floors throughout. Its kitchen had been redone in the 1980s, as was obvious from its beige veneers and wood-strip handles. It was ugly, Pete noted, but the ugliness was cosmetic. Kitchens could always be redone, down the road, once there was a little more cash at hand.
There were three smallish bedrooms upstairs, and a bathroom with cracked tile floors and blue walls, dominated by a massive old claw-foot tub. The current owners had already moved out, and the place was completely empty of furnishings, giving it an abandoned quality that Stephan rather liked – he regretted not bringing along his camera. Light streamed into the empty rooms through naked windows, tornados of dust aswirl in the bright air. The house lacked the modern amenities and sheer square footage of the suburban redoubts Stephan had known growing up, with their custom kitchens and vast main-floor rec rooms. But it had character, an advantage that was not trivial.
They stepped through a sliding door into a modest strip of backyard. It was situated on the crest of a low hillside that sloped off to the west, where the downtown skyline loomed on the horizon. The towers were close enough to look large and domineering, but the property was far enough away from them – and from most of the more fashionable parts of town – that it was still relatively aff
ordable, at least for the time being.
“So what do you think?” Pete asked. “You like, you like?”
“Yes, I do,” Stephan said. “I like it a lot. And if you guys are still thinking of having kids and all that, then you’re going to need the space, right?”
“You sure it’s not too... sleepy out here?”
“Not at all.”
Pete eyed him. “Is that really what you think?” he asked.
“It is. In fact, I have to say I’m feeling a little jealous right now.”
“Jealous, you say?” Pete grinned. “Well, okay, then. Jealous works.”
“So are you two are going to, uh, put in an offer?”
“We’re thinking yes. But I wanted a second opinion.”
“Well then, I’d say go for it.”
After they’d finished up at the house, and said their goodbyes to Sherwin, Pete insisted on taking Stephan out to a family restaurant on nearby Queen Street East for coconut-cream pie. Coming from Pete, this was about as heartfelt a thanks as you could get, and Stephan was glad he’d skipped work for his friend.
They arrived a little after lunch time. Mid-day sunlight was slanting into the main dining room through floor-to-ceiling front windows, imparting a warm yellow glow to the scene – well-fed tradesmen in coveralls silently devouring plates of spaghetti and meatballs, blue-haired grannies trading stories of their salad days over pots of strong tea, young married couples, apple-cheeked kids in tow. A duo of twenty-something male waiters, one white and one Asian, hurried to and from the open grill at the back of the room, where steaks the size of LP records sizzled under a stern-faced chef’s watchful eye.
“So thanks again for your help with that,” Pete said as they slid into a brown vinyl booth, patched here and there with silver-grey duct tape. He grinned. “I’m so glad you liked the place.”
The Silver Age Page 6
