The Silver Age

by Nicholson Gunn

  His eyes were tearing up from the onions. She glanced over at him, opened a drawer, and thrust a pair of ski goggles into his hands.

  “Put these on.”

  “Ski goggles?”

  “Trust me, it works.”

  He laughed and pulled the goggles over his head. “What do you think?” he asked. “Do they make me look sexy?”

  He started dancing, as badly as possible, and she giggled so hard that she teared up a little herself. “How seductive,” she said. “You should try wearing them out to the clubs. The ladies will be all over you.”

  “I don’t go to clubs,” he said, gathering her in his arms and kissing her on the lips. “I don’t need to.”

  He watched over her shoulder as she worked. Her arms darted back and forth above the stove, stirring, mixing, seasoning, tasting. Soon, dinner was ready. They laid it out on bone-white plates – three different curries, basmati rice, and a green salad with slices of mango imported from far away. He was normally a dedicated carnivore, but when it came to Natacha’s cooking he was happy to go vegetarian, even if it sometimes left him just a little bit hungry.

  Over dinner, he asked her how her job was going.

  “Oh, don’t get me started,” she said. “The people I work with are super cool, but the government politics drive me so crazy.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, here’s a case we have right now. So this developer wants to build a highrise in a nice residential part of town, mostly houses, and the councillor for the ward decides to fight it.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “But here’s the thing: according to the law, the developer is allowed to do this, and so the province gives them the go ahead. Well, the councillor’s constituents are furious, and he wants to stay in their good books, so he appeals. But the law is totally clear, and the province almost always sides with the developers in these cases. There’s no way we can win, and meanwhile the appeal is going to cost tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars. So not only is the city guaranteed to lose the case, it’s going to cost us all this extra money so this one councillor can pretend he’s the good guy.”

  “Wow. That’s... complicated.”

  It was refreshing to hear about real-life, concrete issues – even if the reality was a little depressing. He was used to a milieu in which everything was theory or aesthetics. On shoots, you talked about how an image looked. Was the lighting right? Did the colours pop? Was the shot “cool” enough? Did it make the subject seem sexy or desirable? It was all surface and no depth.

  After dinner, they flopped on the couch with a last glass of wine. They were both mellowed out by that point – Natacha had exhausted her mild work rant. A compilation of Ella Fitzgerald songs played quietly on the stereo. They were talking less and less, but the silences were comfortable and intimate, not awkward. It occurred to him that his relationship with Natacha had just reached a new stage. On the surface nothing was different, but the mood between them had shifted, grown more relaxed and at the same time more focused.

  He touched her arm and she turned, slowly, and looked at him, her face calm but her eyes fierce. They leaned in and kissed, slow and attentive. After a few minutes, they moved silently to her bedroom, where they carefully undressed each other. She had worn lingerie for him. It was satiny and white, bright against her brown skin. He stroked her cheek, then leaned in and kissed her again, this time on the curve of her neck.

  After finishing, they lay spooning in her bed, on the threshold of sleep. He stroked her arm and she turned to kiss him on the wrist. It amazed him how easy it had all been, how effortless. He’d been stuck in one place for so long. Even when his life and career had been going well, he’d always been just a little bit afraid, waiting for the next disaster. But now he was on a different path, and all he had to do was relax and go with the flow of things. It was so simple. He let his hand slide down around her waist, where it found a natural place to rest, and drifted off to sleep.

  * * * * *

  The winter of 2004 seemed as if it would never end. It snowed, endlessly – hard wet flurries that swam in front of your eyes like film grains in a cheap blow-up. He hunkered down in the warm sanctuary of the darkroom. Natacha hated the cold even more than he did. Her family was from the tropics and weren’t built for such meteorological nonsense, she said.

  On Friday nights he took the subway up to her place. They’d cook dinner together – something hot and spicy, as a rule – then kick back on the couch and watch a movie, often falling asleep half-way through. On Saturday mornings they’d linger over eggs and toast, drinking pots of hot tea and watching cartoons on television. They’d been revisiting the Roadrunner in particular, for the parched desert landscapes and constant sunlight.

  It was a dreary season, but in later years he would look back fondly on those months. It was true that he occasionally caught himself vaguely missing Jenny Wynne, despite all the misery she’d caused him – the false hopes, the sudden disappearances, the casual cruelty – but he was relieved to have finally moved on. It pained him now to think of the ways in which he’d embarrassed himself while under her influence. He had never been a drinker, had never even dabbled in drugs. aside from a little marijuana. The feeling of being out of control had always unsettled him, so it was strange that he’d allowed himself lose it so badly over a mere girlfriend.

  He wondered what his life would have been like if he and Jenny Wynne had never met – almost certainly it would have been better, he decided. Not that he hated her. She had a special quality that in his eyes exempted her from the normal rules of behaviour, and always would.

  He knew a little of her exploits in the months since they’d last been together. During the first weeks after it ended, people not especially in the know had continued to ask him for updates about her, as if that were all he was good for. That finally changed when he began to show up at events with Natacha on his arm. Now it was the other way around. People didn’t ask him about her any more – they told him about her. Sometimes it pained him to hear about some outrageous comment she’d made or outlandish person she’d been seen with. In some cases he wondered if the people who told him about her were doing so out of spite, to remind him of what he had lost, of how she had defeated him. As if they cared.

  He could have put a stop to any of these conversations if he’d chosen to, but curiosity always got the better of him. He followed her now the way he might have followed a celebrated sports team from a city he’d once lived in, maintaining a sentimental interest in her exploits. There was something gorgeous about the way she lived her life, he had long believed, as if it were a kind of performance art. She had created a character for herself – interesting and dynamic, if not especially original – acting out the part with undeniable skill and panache.

  Even so, he was mildly irritated when he heard that she was moving overseas. As usual, she had worked out a most favourable deal for herself. She was keeping her column at the Telegraph, and adding to it the role of London culture correspondent. The story of that city’s renaissance had been prevalent in the media for quite some time: the bandwagon awaited. For someone like her, it was a natural fit. It wasn’t jealousy he felt, exactly, when contemplating this news, but yes, yes it was. How many times had they mused about moving abroad? He had always wanted to go to New York rather than London, granted, but it was still the same general idea. She could at least have let him know she was leaving the country.

  Once he’d had time to digest this latest development, however, he saw the foolishness of his pique. Of course it was only natural that she would want to test herself on a larger stage. Her job at the newspaper gave her access to foreign postings that she would have been a fool not to capitalize on. He would surely have done the same thing himself, if the timing had been right and the opportunity there. In his New York dreams he had always imagined the two of them going together, but there was no reason he couldn’t still make it happen without her. And maybe he would, one day,
if Natacha was up for it.

  It did not take Jenny Wynne very long to cause a ruckus in Europe, as detailed in her dispatches. One week she was quaffing bellinis on a billionaire’s super yacht during the Venice Biennale. The next she was back in London covering the BAFTAs. A month later she was splashed across the French papers after writing an op-ed in the Herald Tribune about how French men were, contra stereotypes, hopelessly maladroit at lovemaking. The Gallic tabloids were in paroxysms over the unsettlingly Bardot-like beauty from the North American hinterland who had dared to voice such an insult.

  He couldn’t help but read her article as an implicit tribute to his own masculine charms. After all, if she had found his French counterparts so lacking, then presumably it was because they compared unfavourably with what had come before. There was another thing. If she had been so effortlessly able to make a name for herself abroad, then didn’t that bode well for his own chances, were he ever to decide to follow in her footsteps and make for one of the world’s great cities? He wasn’t a femme fatale, to be sure, but then again he was just as good in his own field as she was in hers, if not better. If she could make it, so could he.

  All of this made it especially frustrating when things began to slow down for his photography business. Early in the new year, he’d assumed his clients were just going through a seasonal hibernation, and that things would pick up on their own as the weather improved. But as the weeks went by and the assignments slowed to a trickle, he realized that the problem was more serious than he’d thought.

  One of the things he’d come to realize as a freelancer was that the market for his services was always in flux. Just when you thought you had the game figured out, the rules would suddenly go out the window and you’d be left trying to figure out how the new game worked. This, he sensed, was one of those times. The world of commerce – not just his little niche but the system as a whole – seemed to be transforming around him through a series of tiny shifts. A single, random example: when he went to withdraw money from the bank one day mid-winter, he found that the instant tellers had all been upgraded. The new design was sleeker, its colours brighter. The buttons felt different under his fingers, more clicky or something, and cooler to the touch. It was silly, but he found such changes vaguely unsettling, as if he’d woken up one morning in a slightly different universe than the one he’d gone to bed in.

  A small part of him wanted to chuck it all and start over. A move to New York might not be in the cards, but there were other possibilities. He could switch careers, become a high-school art teacher, a firefighter, some sort of business man. It wasn’t as if his current career had any deep loyalty to him. On the contrary, even during the good times his clients tended to react with confused amazement whenever he suggested an ambitious project or an increase in his day rate.

  But no, he wasn’t ready to start over from scratch, not after everything he’d invested in being a photographer to date. And so he marshalled his energies and made a big push for new business. First, he put together a list of everyone he knew in the industry, something he’d been meaning to do in a systematic way for a long time. Then he started sending out emails, making phone calls and shopping around his portfolio. He proposed photo essays, art exhibits, advertising assignments, anything and everything he could think of. He stressed the fact that he could produce good work on a modest budget, that he could meet deadlines and get the job done with a minimum of fuss and a complete absence of muss.

  Within a couple of weeks, he had three small assignments for new magazine clients, as well as a job for an agency shooting appetizing shots of people stuffing their mouths with pizza. It wasn’t the most creative work, to be sure, but there was a certain technical challenge in trying to breathe life into such material. More to the point, the money was decent, and there was the possibility of bigger jobs for the same client down the road.

  He also had a bite on the art photography front. A new gallery on Queen West had expressed its willingness to host a show for him. There wouldn’t be space for it until the fall, but that wasn’t a problem for Stephan because he would need that much time anyway to develop work to show. Perhaps he could revisit his port lands project. If not, he would find a new subject, start fresh. Either way, it was encouraging news.

  April was always a shaky time of year in Ontario, weather-wise. The snow would melt, and winter would seem to be over, but just when you put away your parka another blizzard would come screaming in from the north. This would happen two or three times, as if the snow gods were playing mind games, trying to break your spirit before retreating to the high mountains to wait out the warmer months. By the time the snow was finally gone for good, Stephan’s business was back on its feet. There was no question that he would be able to make rent on his loft and studio for the next couple of months, at least. But his sense of uncertainty remained.

  He was grateful to have Natacha, and for the stability she had introduced to his life. She always did whatever she could to help him, whether by providing emotional support or ensuring that he ate his vegetables. During his relationship with Jenny Wynne, he had frequently come away from encounters with her feeling drained and on edge, but with Natacha he invariably came away calm and comforted. Jenny was empty calories; Natacha was real nourishment. With each passing week he drew closer to her.

  On a Saturday morning in May, they were lying in bed at his place. She had to get back home, prepare for a visit from her family, but they’d stolen a few extra minutes together.

  “I wish you didn’t have to go,” he said. “We could flop around like this for days at a time.”

  “Why don’t you just move in with me, then?” she said.

  He started to laugh, then saw her expression. “Wait a minute, you’re serious? But what about Elise? Or was she just a figment of your imagination as I’ve always suspected?”

  “She is not a figment, buddy,” Natacha said, mock-stern. “But she’s been offered a contract position at the university in Heidelberg where she’s been doing her field research. She’s going to finish up her work here by correspondence and then stay on.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yep.”

  Until that moment, moving in together had not occurred to him as a real possibility, although of course it was a perfectly normal thing. Pete and Sally had lived together for years before getting married.

  “Think it over, okay?” she said. “It’s not just rent. We could go fifty-fifty on utilities, phone bill, Internet, all of that stuff. You could either get rid of your place or find a sublet – you might even make a bit of money on the side.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Plus, you’d have the pleasure of lying in bed with me like this any time you wanted.”

  “What if you got rid of your place and moved in with me?” he asked. “ I mean, it is closer to work for both of us.”

  “The two of us in this place? I mean, it’s a cool bachelor pad, but it’s an open loft, and so little. We’d be at each other’s throats.”

  “I doubt that, but I guess I see your point… although what about Gamblor?”

  “I’m sure she’d adapt. She could even have her own room, if we put her litter box in Elise’s.”

  “Hmmm… she’d like that I bet. What do you think, madam?” he called to his cat.

  Gamblor was on the other side of the room, staring intently at a potted plant of which she was fond. She looked over and meowed, then resumed her staring.

  “I think that was a yes,” Stephan said.

  “And what about you? Do you agree with her?”

  He pulled her closer to him and kissed her. She was so warm in his arms, and her hair smelled like coconut-scented shampoo.

  “So?” she said.

  “So I think I’d better get started on that sublet ad.”

  Chapter 12

  On a Sunday evening late in June he went down to the lab to do some developing. Business had been reasonably good since the worrisome slowdown over the winter, and there w
ere several tasks he needed to get to. He had a couple of advertising jobs lined up at the moment, as well as some personal stuff he thought might work for his planned fall show. He would focus on the latter tonight, he had decided, which meant that he’d be able to do some black-and-white developing by hand, something he always looked forward to.

  Natacha had understood the need for the session, although it had meant cancelling a planned evening of hanging out together, ordering takeout and watching Deadwood at her place. She was never thrilled when he started on one of his jags of working nights, because it put them on opposite schedules. But they’d talked about how evening was his most creative time in the darkroom, how the night’s open-ended quiet freed him up to do his best work. She got it. Besides, it wasn’t as if they weren’t going to have plenty of evenings together once he moved up to her apartment. On the contrary, they’d have all the time in the world.

  He arrived at the lab at around seven, and was pleased to see that most of the darkrooms were free. As he let himself in, he smiled, inhaling the familiar odour of developing chemicals. He was headed for Darkroom Three, but as he walked down the hallway he saw that something wasn’t right. The door to the darkroom was wide open, bright light spilling out into the hall. Next to it, a bunch of equipment that had once resided within was stacked in an untidy pile.

  He found Bill inside, messing around with a bunch of new computer equipment.

  “Stephie! Haven’t seen you around much lately. New lady friend in your life?”

  Stephan blinked. “Yes, actually, but what’s all this?”

  “Welcome to our new server room,” Bill said, gesturing towards a rack of digital gadgetry.