“We’d be glad to,” the woman was saying. “Maybe you could do the same for us afterwards?”
“Certainly!” Jenny cried, all smiles.
Stephan lifted the strap of his K-1000 over his head and passed the camera over to the man.
“Wow, I haven’t seen one of these babies in years,” the man said, with a whistle. He lifted it a couple of times in his hands, feeling the weight. “These old cameras had a heft to them.”
“Here, I’ll set it up for you,” Stephan offered. He knew the camera so well that he barely had to look down as his fingers snapped the f-stop and aperture into position.
“What brings you to this place?” Jenny asked the woman as the man fiddled with the focus.
“We’re doing some travelling around the province. A second honeymoon, you might say – my husband just retired this spring.”
“How lovely. You’ve picked an idyllic spot.”
“Yes, isn’t it beautiful?” The woman seemed to be waiting for Jenny to offer something about herself and Stephan in return, but she didn’t, and anyway it was time for the photo.
The image would turn out surprisingly well, for a snapshot, as he discovered when he developed the roll a few days later. The leaves on the overhanging trees refracting the sunlight in a thousand directions, creating a stippled effect, like an impressionist painting. The gorge spread out behind them, the last of the morning mist hovering above it, the bridge visible in the distance, an elegant grey-green arc. At the focal point the two of them, Jenny with her arm wrapped tightly around his torso, all smiles. It was just as he’d suspected: they looked exactly like a real couple.
Laters, flyboy
by Jenny Wynne
Oh the times they are a-changin’, doo dee doo dee doo doo dee doo doo dee doo doo.
Of course, the times are always a-changin’, otherwise they’d be standing still, the one thing that time never does (unless you’re watching the latest season of the Sopranos, that is… soooo sloooooow, Tony! Dr. Melfi is going to blow her own head off out of sheer boredom if you don’t start whacking people, stat).
But sometimes the times change more than at other times. I’m not talking about a full-scale revolution – sorry hippie generation, Bob Dylan quote above notwithstanding, this isn’t Woodstock 2.0. Nothing quite so gauche.
What’s this new phase going to look like? To be honest, I have no idea, and frankly I don’t give a hoot (n.b.: apparently all the more common things a person might “not give...” are banned as swears at this fine publication – how quaint). Just let it be new, and fabulous, and not boring. Also not another war, s’il vous plait – been there done that, thank you very much.
I know what you’re saying: “That Jenny Wynne, she may be youthful and cherubic and hella fun, but what does she know about History with a capital haitch?” Well, listen, bub, I’ve been around the block once or twice, and I don’t simply mean when it comes to handsome, successful men.
When I was still in my teens, in the aftermath of George Bush Senior’s Iraq War, I grooved to Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins with the best of them. Next came Geeks bearing Gifts, and the dotcom tide was unleashed. There was much rejoicing and much surfing of free Internet porn. Bubble goes pop. Boo. Next up: September 11, not to mention two ensuing wars. Enough said.
My point being, times change, trends come and go, the worm turns (whatever that bizarre old saying means). Icarus falls from the sky, and ships go sailing blithely on past. Laters, flyboy. Except that for a moment there we did pause, if by pause you mean that we shopped and consumed, stayed calm and complacent, as instructed by the relevant authorities. Even when Junior’s Iraq War the second hit, we just kept on keeping on, same as before (and if those WMDs ever materialize, by the way, then apparently yellow cake is just plain old French vanilla after all).
Frankly, and with all due respect, Tony, this cultural moment we’re in is starting to get a little repetitive. You go around the block one too many times and eventually you get sick of the seeing same old houses over and over again. Maybe the houses get sick of you too. As the great German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin might say, the angel of history shall take wing once again. And unlike loser Icarus that fine lady never touches down for long.
Of course, change can be scary. Renovations can be a pain in the ass, unless you happen to enjoy the services of a certain superb British contractor named Gerald with impeccable taste in fixtures and superhuman pecs to boot (as well as an impeccable boot). But that’s no reason to shrink from the future – especially when the present’s getting so damn tired.
As I said, I have no idea what’s next, but I do know one thing: I’m not going to be sitting back, getting a pedicure and waiting for the memo. No, I’m going to take the bull by the horns, suck the marrow out of life, etc., because that’s what I do best. Mmmmm…. mmmmarrow. (Speaking of which, remember Mmmmarvelous Mmmmmuffins, the mall food court muffin stands from the eighties? So good, right up there with Orange Julius. But I digress.)
I may even be forced to ditch this pop stand, if it comes down to it, get out into the big, wide world, play the prodigal daughter. But don’t worry, kids – I’ll be sure to keep you posted with my latest dispatches from the front lines of the next revolution.
Until then, peace out.
Chapter 10
A week later she was seeing a journeyman film director from Los Angeles, in town for a job on a made-for-TV movie about a New York-based vampire baseball team and its battle for recognition and respect in the big leagues. Stephan made a few discreet inquiries, gathered what information he could, as much out of old habit as genuine anguish. The director was said to be related to William Shatner. Apparently “Uncle Willie,” with his Canadian roots, had helped the director land the vampire baseball gig.
The director began appearing around town with Jenny Wynne on his arm. Amanda from This City had run into them at a dinner party in Riverdale, where a minor kerfuffle had taken place. The hostess that evening had prepared an ironically folksy apple pie for dessert. In a contemptuous tone, the director had declined his slice, on account of the crust containing saturated fats, Amanda said, which it did not. But the man would not be convinced. Also during the dinner, he had claimed to have run afoul of shadowy powers within the motion picture industry, which had arranged his exile to this frozen hinterland. But he was grateful to have come here for one reason, at least, he’d said in the next breath, turning to his date. Jenny Wynne had smiled sweetly at this, then given him an affectionate pinch on the cheek.
“It was pretty sick-making,” Amanda noted, a remark that Stephan appreciated. He wondered what Jenny Wynne could possibly see in such a character. Was she really that shallow?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps the screenplay she’d been tinkering with since Stephan had first gotten to know her had something to do with it. She might have been banking on the Shatner connection to open a few doors.
But soon Jenny Wynne’s relationship with the film director began to sour. At a “festival of ideas” modeled by a local media entrepreneur on the American TED conferences, she appeared at the closing-night party on the arm of the guitarist from Pooch Troop, the celebrated local indie rock band. The director spent much of the evening searching for Jenny Wynne and her new friend in a state of increasing distress. But apparently he’d burned the wrong bridges during his brief stay in the city, and his VIP pass did not entitle him to enter the secret ultra-VIP area (hidden within the party’s regular VIP area) to which Jenny and the guitarist had fled.
A week later, the director was gone. His unit had finished production, and it was reported that he wasn’t likely to return any time soon. People Stephan knew on the film production side were saying the movie might never be finished. One of the key financial backers had pulled out, and the project was now on hold pending alternative funding arrangements, which might or might not ever come together. Jenny Wynne had made a brief appearance at the wrap party at the conclusion of the director’s s
hoot. She had gently wished the man well before leaving for another engagement. (Stephan noted that Pooch Troop was playing a big show that night at Lee’s Palace.) After Jenny Wynne left the party, the director was said to have gotten very drunk indeed. Stephan did not find this last detail particularly surprising.
Stephan was 30 years old now, and increasingly he found himself accepting that his life was moving on to a new phase. He still wasn’t making a large amount of money. Even someone who earned an ordinary middle-class wage – Pete, say – would have been surprised by the modesty of Stephan’s annual income. But the editorial and advertising jobs were steadily coming his way, and he had enough money now to live comfortably. He’d finally paid off the line of credit he’d taken out when he first left Helmut’s, and some modest savings had begun to accrue in his bank account. Progress.
At the end of September, 2003, when Jenny’s affair with the director was in full swing, Stephan had left his basement apartment in the Annex and moved into a loft-style condominium in a converted fudge factory a couple of blocks north of his studio. The space had high ceilings, exposed brick walls and huge floor-to-ceiling windows. The footprint was tiny, sure, but it wasn’t as if a bachelor like him needed a huge amount of floor space. (Gamblor, for her part, took to the space immediately.)
When he wasn’t working, he’d wander up and down Queen West and marvel at the changes taking place there. More and more of the strange old shops that had once dominated the strip – a dealer in Swedish mangles, a wholesale Greek-column emporium – were being replaced by galleries, modernist furniture stores and self-consciously named brunch joints. A respected local film director, who’d once been nominated for a foreign-picture Academy Award, had opened a cinema and bar just up the block from Stephan’s studio that served white wine and martinis, and screened Truffaut and Antonioni retrospectives.
An old hand in the neighbourhood, at least compared to the recent wave of arrivals, he received regular invitations to openings, readings and shows, and could have had a full social calendar. But he had never had many social aspirations, and was put off by the idea of becoming a ubiquitous denizen of the district scene, always on hand for the latest happening or entertainment.
His dream of moving to New York was on the back burner for now, despite his fear that he was beginning to outgrow the local photography market. The city was not an obvious place for a person like him to realize his full potential, he’d come to believe, any more than the Caribbean was a natural breeding ground for champion bobsledders. But all the same he was comfortable. Through endurance and hard work he had built up a solid client roster. He had a comfortable condo, and dozens of contacts, whereas in New York he knew nobody, literally nobody. One day he would make the leap, perhaps, but for now he was content with what he had, at least on the work side of things.
He’d been looking forward to the fall that year, as usual, counting on the chill air to fill him with his old nervous energy and a corresponding desire to delve into new projects, but the feeling never hit him.
Partly it was the weather.
It rained. Endlessly. Not a cleansing rain to wash the streets clean, or a soothing rain playing percussion on the windows as you sat inside, cozy and dry, and watched trashy TV. It was a dreary, dirty rain that seemed to leave everything it touched sodden and toxic. But it was more than just the weather: he felt that fall that he had lost his bearings, as if something had gone awry with his internal compass. Finding himself slipping into a funk, he started in on a new project, in a bid to recharge. As a follow-up to his abandoned buildings show, he would shoot a new series in and around the city’s commercial port. The once-busy port district, located on an artificial peninsula at the mouth of the Don River, had fallen into disuse in recent decades. There had been talk of redeveloping the entire area into a new neighbourhood of condos and shops, and he wanted to capture the place on film before that happened.
On his first visit to the port he attacked the project whole-heartedly. He worked for hours that day and shot off several rolls of film. He photographed a rusted lake freighter as it was unloaded by a rickety crane. He photographed seagulls fighting over a pizza crust at the end of an abandoned pier. He shot the port’s empty turning basin, a forlorn rectangle of stagnant brown water at the north end of the district. It went quite well, even if the material wasn’t exactly uplifting. But his second and third visits were less successful, and he began to sense that he was already running out of material, not to mention inspiration. There simply wasn’t as much worth shooting here, he soon concluded, as there had been at his previous location. Moreover, he worried that he was repeating himself, rehashing ideas that he’d already worked through in the previous project. And so after his third visit to the port he put the idea on hold, leaving most of his film tucked away at the back of a drawer, undeveloped and more or less forgotten.
He drifted back into his funk. There was a base level of work that needed doing (finishing assignments, sending out invoices) if he wanted to keep his business on track. With a concerted effort of will, he forced himself to deal with such tasks. The rest of his time he spent lolling around his new condominium, rearranging the furniture with the television on in the background, looping BBC World Service updates on Iraq. The news there was of bombings and unrest outside the Green Zone; the recent calm was giving way to something more fractured and ominous, and commentators were, tentatively, beginning to use the word “insurgency” to describe the situation.
The news reminded him of how trivial his own petty problems were in the grand scheme of things. He fed Gamblor and refilled her water dish. He ordered pizza for dinner. He went to bed early and slept in late. He tried not to think too much.
* * * * *
On a Saturday evening in early November, Stephan took a streetcar out to Pete and Sally’s place for a small party in honour of Pete’s 30th birthday. It had been a grey, mellow fall day – good photography weather. Now, dusk was beginning to descend. The leaves on the trees around the Regent Park housing projects, their branches bare of leaves, cast long shadows across empty lawns. As the streetcar mounted the Queen Street Bridge, taking him once again across the Don River, he looked up in time to glimpse the iron sign that hung above the roadway at the bridge’s peak. It was part of an art installation, Pete had told him, commissioned as part of a neighbourhood revitalization program. “The river I step in is not the river I stand in,” it read. Stephan knew this was true, and that his own life’s river had been far too stagnant of late.
Sally greeted him at the door with a hug and a peck on the cheek.
“That’s the first good kiss I’ve had in quite a while,” he admitted, chuckling.
“I find that hard to believe,” Sally said. “Handsome young man about town like yourself.”
“I think this should have been for you,” Stephan said, handing over a small gift-wrapped parcel. “Just don’t tell Pete I gave his birthday present to someone nicer.”
It was a waterfront print, one of the few he’d actually gotten around to finishing. He’d amused himself while gift-wrapping it by imagining that it would someday be a collector’s item, one of the only extant prints from the great Stephan Stern’s lost waterfront series.
“Pete’s just over here,” Sally said, guiding him into the living room, where the party was already well underway. The room was full – people laughing, drinking, telling stories, debating. Stephan spotted a couple of old friends of Pete’s he vaguely knew, and would be happy to catch up with, but first he went over to the birthday boy, who was standing in a circle of people near the back of the living room.
“There he is!” Pete said, with a lopsided grin, as Stephan approached. “I was beginning to think you weren’t going to make it.”
They shook hands – Pete didn’t hesitate to break out the old secret handshake in public – and then hugged, as Stephan wished his friend well. Pete then introduced him to a few of the people he’d just been speaking with. Jane was a museum curator, Craig d
id PR for the Ministry of the Environment. A web designer and a couple of teachers rounded out the group. They weren’t all that different from the people Stephan worked with, but they were different enough. A few were older and some were already parents. In fact, there were several kids at the party, babies and young toddlers, something he wasn’t used to. He liked the energy that the kids brought, though – silly and carefree. They lightened the mood. One little girl even took a brief ride around the living room on Pete’s labradoodle, Echo.
At times it seemed to Stephan that everyone in the world was basically the same, and that their differing paths were a matter of chance. In his own case, for example, a precise series of events in his life had led him towards photography. His favourite uncle, a film editor from the UK, had given him his first good camera as a Christmas gift just as he was entering his teens. A couple of years later, he had stumbled upon the photography club at his high school. At university, he’d won a minor award in a magazine photo contest just when his interest might have otherwise flagged. If any one of these things had not occurred, he might easily have wound up doing something totally different with his life. He could have been a musician or accountant or tree surgeon. Or maybe that was all nonsense, and he would have found his way to where he was now by some other path.
He hung out in Pete’s kitchen for a while, listening to a group of the parents talking in arcane detail about neighbourhood daycares, like rocket scientists discussing the relative merits of solid and liquid fuel engines. His attention wandering, he slid open the glass back door and stepped out onto the deck to get some air. There were a handful of people already outside – stalwart smokers for the most part. The night was chilly, but the air seemed fresh and clean, for a change. He took a big draught of it into his lungs, and then slowly exhaled, his chest relaxing. The house wasn’t far from downtown, but it seemed somehow bucolic and healthful out here in the backyard, as if it were in the middle of the countryside rather than the midst of a metropolis.
The Silver Age Page 13
