The Silver Age

by Nicholson Gunn

  “Ever since I came back to this city I’ve been thinking about leaving it again,” she said. “Going to Asia or Latin America. I hear Uruguay is just incredible. Perfect beaches, virgin and untouched, stretching to the horizon. I’d get a little apartment in a village by the ocean and live a quiet life there. Working on my novel, eating simply, going for long walks up the coast.”

  Her face lit up, as if a new thought had just occurred to her. “You could come with me,” she said, her voice hushed. “We’d be the perfect companions. I’d write for the travel magazines to pay the bills, you’d do the photography. Like that time we did that story together, at that lovely inn out in wine country. That was so nice, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure it was, while it lasted.”

  It was a teenager’s fantasy. The bohemian travelers, living the dream. It had been a cliché long before he or Jenny Wynne came around. And yet in addition to disgust he felt a ripple of anticipation.

  He chuckled to himself at the sheer idiocy of it.

  “Maybe you think I’m just talking,” she said, catching his tone. “But I’m not.”

  “Okay.”

  “I really felt it, coming back here to the strip tonight. It’s all so contrived now, like a theme park. Did you see that new condo they’re building up the street? That godawful billboard, the model with a gold ribbon across her breasts? There’s marketing for you.”

  “It’s not as if what you and I do is all that different, in the end.”

  “Well, okay, but maybe that’s what I’m saying. It’s over now. It’s time to find something new.”

  Stephan shook his head.

  “Oh, fine then,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I can see you’ve already moved on to bigger and better things without me. I hear you’ve got some new lady friend to curl up with in front of the TV.”

  “Where we were concerned, you were never the one who seemed to have a problem ‘moving on,’ Jenny.”

  “But apparently I haven’t moved on, Stephan, after all this time. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  Was she serious? Or had she simply gone back to her old game, her show of ‘honesty’ merely another card to be played against him? He hesitated, not believing her but feeling as if he was being forced by the situation into behaving as if did.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said. “I want to be with you again. For real this time. No more games.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  He was certain now that she was lying to him, same as ever. It was an amazing thing to watch, like a sleight-of-hand card trick that seemed real no matter how many times you saw it.

  She took a last sip of her drink, set down the empty glass on the table in front of her.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  She slid back her chair and stood. He found himself doing the same, her mirror. Then he was following her through the labyrinth of rooms and hallways that led to the building’s front doors. She moved with speed and agility, and it was all he could do to keep up.

  Their taxi whizzed down College Street, weaving around cars and stray pedestrians. The driver was silent and detached, his eyes in the rearview mirror fixed firmly on the road ahead. Their privacy was total.

  Jenny in the seat next to him, her body pressed up against his, cool and firm. She was wearing a faint perfume, something light and vaguely citric. He could feel her breath against his neck as she leaned in to whisper sentiments of gratitude. He had to work hard to remain still. Everything that had happened to him in the last three years now seemed to have been part of a dark conspiracy that had led him inexorably to this place – like the plot of an old fairy tale, like fate.

  Again, the desire welled up in him to make some kind of a getaway. It still wasn’t too late, was it? At the next stoplight, he could open the door and step out of the cab, bid her a good evening and disappear into the night. There was no reason he couldn’t do such a thing.

  The taxi snaked its way down through the tourist district. On the sidewalks on either side of them, crowds of drunken boys clustered around the entrances of dance clubs, their gym-crafted pecs bulging under tight shirts, silver chains glinting at their necks. The girls stood apart wearing platform heels and little dresses, clutching their cigarettes and shiny handbags, allowing themselves to be looked at. He heard the sound of a bottle smashing somewhere in the darkness. A siren wailed nearby, but faded quickly into the general clamor of the night.

  They paused at a stop sign beside a restaurant. Its kitchen was visible through an open window, circular, like a porthole on a ship. Inside, a chef was bent over a counter, his arms moving rhythmically as he chopped some invisible ingredient. The man was completely bald, his head as smooth and unblemished as a flesh-hued bowling ball. Stephan had a sudden vision of himself throwing a raw egg so that it arced in through the window and smacked the unsuspecting chef on the side of his head. He imagined the yellow yolk oozing down the side of the man’s face.

  He felt a sudden urge to laugh out loud, but it quickly passed, leaving him hollow. The taxi now moved south out of downtown, crossing beneath the railway tracks and then passing under the Gardiner Expressway. The Gardiner loomed over them, pock-marked and crumbling. It looked like a triumphal archway built by a long-forgotten emperor to commemorate some obscene conquest, in which countless thousands had been sacrificed for no good reason.

  It was dark under the expressway, and he could make out the shadows of homeless people among the support pillars, bedding down for the night in fraying sleeping bags. Then they were through, and out into the brightness of the harbor district, with its glass condominium towers and tourist boats festooned with strings of Christmas lights.

  He thought then of Natacha. Her hotel room in Chicago had a beautiful view of Lake Michigan, she’d said. He’d had a text from her earlier in the evening, when he was out with Pete, and all was well on her end. She’d be back in her room by now, hunkered down after a celebratory dinner with her team. None of it was real to him. It was as if she resided in a parallel universe now, with concrete and glass and a lake just like here but with no Stephan.

  The taxi pulled up in front of Jenny Wynne’s building.

  “Home again, home again, jiggidy jig,” she said. There was a cartoonish half moon in the sky, and under its reflected light the building’s mirrored windows glinted blandly, giving away no secrets. He was startled by how frail her building looked under the moonlight, how provisional – as if at the first puff of wind off the lake it would collapse into a heap of jagged shards. It had always struck him as vaguely odd that she lived in this area. Of course, it was close to the offices of the Telegraph, where she worked, but he’d have thought she might have chosen College Street, or Yorkville, or the Annex, somewhere with at least a veneer of community.

  She paid the taxi driver with a single crisp twenty.

  “Please, keep the change.”

  The driver gave thanks with a silent nod. Jenny opened her door and got out, then bent down to look in at Stephan, smiling. Her smile was so, so beautiful. It seemed to promise him anything he wanted – all he had to do was to smile back.

  He did smile back, bitterly.

  This was it. He could reach across the seats and in a single smooth motion pull the door shut in her face. Then he would order the driver to take him uptown, back to quiet side streets and solid brick houses, the artificial fire looping smokelessly in the hearth.

  Instead, he popped open his own door and stepped out into the cool, clear night.

  Chapter 15

  She kept him around for nearly two months that time. The first few weeks after he’d moved into her condo were bliss, one of the happiest interludes he’d had with her, and he began to think it might actually work out. Maybe the thrill of winning him away from another woman, someone he’d built a serious relationship with, had somehow helped to sustain her interest. It even occurred to him once or twice that she might actually have come to
love him.

  But soon her behavior began to change. She became frequently irritable, accused him of cluttering up her condo with his junk, even though most of his possessions were gathering dust in a locker in the basement. All mention of Uruguay had long since been dropped. When she asked him to leave, the reason she gave was guilt over what had happened. She had realized that by taking him away from Natacha, she was acting in complicity with patriarchal structures of authority, something she could not abide given her feminist core values.

  One part of him was strangely amused, another livid, a third forgiving – she was Jenny Wynne after all. The normal rules of human conduct didn’t quite apply. Regarding Natacha his emotions were less conflicted: he was entirely at fault, and deeply sorry for his betrayal of her. Natacha herself could not have agreed more. When he told her what had happened she had used many choice phrases, in a fairly loud voice, then thrown a silver replica of the Chicago Sears Tower (or whatever it was now called) at his head. Fortunately, she missed, although the adjacent drywall had suffered a nasty gouge.

  In late July, he started making preparations for his departure from the city. He sold off his remaining possessions, summarily fired his clients, visited with his parents out in the suburbs to fill them in, and said goodbye to his remaining friends. (Pete was not among them. He was so angry about what Stephan had done to Natacha that he refused to answer his phone or respond to email.)

  On his last full day in town, Stephan stopped by Bill’s place to drop off his key. It was a sunny summer day, but the place was packed with customers – digital people making high resolution prints, a class of Photoshop cadets in the newly converted lounge, and even a few film purists skulking in the remaining darkrooms.

  “It’s really turning around,” Bill said, beaming. He seemed, unthinkably, to have lost a few pounds. “I was sure I was a goner, but we’re catching on with a new crowd. Still, we’ll miss you, Stephie – don’t forget about us once you’re a bigshot down in the States.”

  He flew out the next morning. As his plane arced up over Lake Ontario, vaulting its huge expanses in a single, effortless stride, he remembered again that the date was August 2, 2005: his thirtieth birthday. At least he would always remember it.

  So: New York.

  There was a logic to it all under the circumstances. Since he’d pretty much blown up his old life, he might as well take the opportunity to start over from scratch. Or to put it another way: if he was going to go down, he might as well go down swinging. Of course he’d been considering such a move for years, but now that he was actually going through with it he felt little joy. He had no immediate prospects in the city, and few concrete ideas about how to break in there.

  He’d been in New York for three aimless weeks, holed up in a month-to-month room at the Hotel 17, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. He’d been channel surfing on his room’s tiny television when the news reports started coming in. Following the hurricane’s second landfall, New Orleans’ levees were beginning to breach, its Lower Ninth Ward already half underwater. Stephan had never been a hard news photographer, rarely taken more than a casual interest in current events. But within five minutes he was at an Internet café, emailing editors, scrambling for a way to get down there. Somehow he knew that this was it. His moment had finally come.

  It was a thrilling, nauseating trip. Katrina was a disaster for hundreds of thousands of people, but for him, perversely, it was a winning lottery ticket. Several of his shots of the destroyed city appeared in major American magazines and newspapers. His recent life reversals had rendered him philosophical in the face of danger, and his past photography of abandoned factories and warehouses provided him the visual toolkit he needed to do the work. He knew the bitter poetry of decaying timbers and shattered bricks. His images were more vivid and real-seeming than the things themselves.

  He’d shot on a digital body, one of the new Canon 5Ds, a rental. The need to get his images quickly out of the shattered city meant that film was out of the question. He made the transition to digital overnight, literally, with barely a second thought. It was like tearing off a bandage, the pain sharp but brief. There was, he quickly learned, much to like about digital. As with most things in life, there were pros as well as cons.

  Over the next seven years, he spun his New Orleans success into assignments with Reuters, the Times, The New Yorker. He travelled to Detroit to shoot the city’s slow-motion collapse and to Washington to photograph the inauguration of President Obama. His images were nominated for several awards, and the recognition led in turn to a teaching gig at Columbia, a limited-run coffee table book with Phaeton, and a retrospective show at the Aperture Foundation.

  As for his personal life, it barely existed. There were a few girlfriends, sure, but they came and went like ghosts. His life was full enough with work alone; there wasn’t room in it for much else. Occasionally, on a Sunday afternoon, this made him wistful, but it wasn’t something that kept him awake at night. Some people were meant to be fathers and providers: the goofy beer-bellied dads, fumbling with their yard-care products. Pete was one of those. His kids were beautiful, with Sally’s deep brown eyes, as Stephan learned once his old friend had softened up enough to add him on Facebook. Aside from family visits – he went back to Ontario once or twice a year, to see his parents – such interactions provided his only regular contact with his old life, which suited him fine.

  He loved his work, and was grateful he still had some in the wake of the global financial crisis. At times he felt as if he’d arrived in the Promised Land just as the old dreams were crumbling to dust, but then again he’d always had a thing for decay. He covered the fallout from the recession, photographing abandoned housing developments in Florida and Nevada. He covered the brief sad flourishing of the Occupy Movement on Wall Street, just across the Brooklyn Bridge from the Carroll Gardens apartment in which he’d settled down.

  There was always something happening. You had to stay focussed on the ongoing moment or it would slip right past you.

  * * * * *

  On a cold, overcast afternoon in the winter of 2012, Stephan ran into Nathan McGregor on the Avenue of the Americas, or Sixth Avenue, as the locals, among which he had begun tentatively to number himself, still called it. He had been on his way home from the offices of the publisher of his new book, his head down to shield his face from the freezing wind. He only looked up when he heard a distant voice calling his name, in an accent that sounded ever-so-slightly foreign to his ear.

  He recognized his old colleague immediately, even though it had been seven years since they’d last been in contact. Nathan was dressed in his familiar WASPish manner, in a camel coat and tweed pants, a tartan scarf like an ascot at his neck. He looked healthier than Stephan remembered, his skin pink and scrubbed.

  They shook hands, smiling sideways at each other in their old, fond, way.

  “What brings you to New York, Nathan?”

  “Work, dear Stephan, always work. I’m taking an extra couple of days, though – enough time for some shopping, a gallery or two, a little sightseeing.”

  “We could have a drink.” Stephan found that he was eager to hear whatever it was that Nathan had to say.

  “What about tomorrow? I’ve a dinner this evening.”

  “I’m heading out of town tomorrow morning, unfortunately. I have to give a talk at at an art college in D.C.”

  “How glamorous the life of a renowned New York photojournalist must be.”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, how about a quick coffee right now?” Nathan said, and Stephan recalled his old colleague’s warmth. “I was going to stop in at the Frick, sit for a little while in the Garden Court, but I suppose it can wait.”

  “I won’t keep you long. Scout’s honour.”

  The place they settled on after a quick search was nothing special – just a generic café of the type you’d find in any Western city – but it was clean and warm and there were open tables here and there.
Even as the recession’s aftermath lingered elsewhere, New York was still New York, and finding a parking spot or a free table amounted to a small victory. Stephan ordered a scotch, to warm his insides, but Nathan stuck with a cup of green tea.

  “I’ve cleaned up my act,” he said, sounding apologetic. “As you may recall, I became a little dissipated there for a while.”

  Stephan waved the notion away. “And work’s going well?”

  Nathan shrugged. “Well enough, I’d say. I switched over to book publishing a few years back. It’s probably the one field worse off than magazines right now, but I love it. That’s why I’m down here. I’m seeing a few people about U.S. rights to a couple of lovely little novels I helped edit.”

  “Fantastic, Nathan!”

  “I don’t need to ask you how you’ve been doing,” Nathan said with a mock-jealous glare.

  They talked about the old days, Stephan probing for news about former colleagues and Nathan demonstrating his old zest for gossip in response. Sandra Blankton, Jenny Wynne’s old nemesis, had been made editor-in-chief of This City, which did not surprise Stephan very much. This was how the world worked. Sandra’s first order of business at the magazine upon ascending to her new role had been to purge the ranks, and the team – Nathan included – had been scattered. Not a single member of the old guard remained in place, Nathan lamented. Amanda Ellis had gone on to become some sort of content specialist at Yahoo. Joan Carpenter had died of cancer – she’d received the diagnosis shortly after she’d been packaged out. Various others had moved on, moved away.

  “It’s a different time now, Stephan,” Nathan said, blinking. “You got out at a good moment.”