The Golden Hour

by T. Greenwood

  Here: the man, his dark skin catching the shining lights from the shops. The girl. She couldn’t be any older than eighteen. Blond hair parted down the middle and hanging straight. A tube top, a tight skirt, platform shoes like a child playing dress-up. It was a black-and-white photo, but I swear I could see the blue eye shadow on her heavy eyelids. The sparkle and sheen of her drugstore blush.

  The man was holding onto her arm, his long fingers tight around her luminescent limb, proprietary. Behind them the carnival rides were a beautiful blur of motion and light. And the old man from the earlier photos, the same man with the Italian ice cart, was pushing it past them, but looking right at the couple. The same look, that mild curiosity he’d offered the photographer earlier, now given to this man. Pimp or john, I wondered as his black fingers dug into the milky, freckled flesh of this girl.

  But this time, it was the girl who looked at the camera, at the photographer. And her eyes were imploring.

  Help me, she seemed to say to the camera. To the photographer. To me.

  “Mama?” Avery said, startling me. I’d nearly forgotten she was here. “Will Pilar bring me my fuzzy slippers?”

  Avery had realized not long after we arrived that she’d left her favorite slippers at home. She’d made a list for Pilar of all those important, forgotten things.

  “I’ll remind her,” I said, leaning in close to the photo.

  “I maybe would like to have my night-light too,” she said. At Gus’s she had a night-light shaped like a crescent moon. “Just in case I get scared in the nighttime.”

  “Okay.” I nodded.

  I restlessly searched through the stack of photos from the next packet. They were also taken during what I now gathered must have been a trip to some run-down beach resort. If it was Maine, then Old Orchard Beach maybe? Most of the photos in the second packet were of a seagull. The photographer had seemingly tracked this bird in its flight, as it scavenged the beach. As it soared and swooped along the coastline. One photo caught a little boy chasing the bird, arms flailing. None of the images was spectacular, memorable, though. None of them had that quality of the one of the prostitute. Had it been a fluke? A lucky snap of the shutter?

  But then I got to the last photo and gasped. In it, the seagull had something in its mouth and the boy stood, mouth open in horror. It was another bird, a smaller bird, its neck broken, its wings dragging on the sand. The little boy’s face was filled with anguish even as his mother, in a wide-brimmed hat, reached for him. He could not be touched.

  Epitaphs and Prophecies. I had to Google epitaph—it was one of those words I thought I knew until I tried to remember the definition. Was it one of those phrases or quotes at the beginning of a book? No. That was epigraph. Epigrams were satirical statements. An epithet was a term of contempt. Effigy? Elegy? Eulogy. So many e words I thought I knew.

  But an epitaph is an inscription, something written after someone has died. In memorial. In remembrance. In remembrance, I thought as I studied the terror on the young hooker’s face, the man’s long, dirty nails pressing into her flesh. As the seagull snapped the neck of its young prey. And the world looked on.

  * * *

  When Avery fell asleep that night, I returned to the boxes of film and carefully lifted out each canister, lining them up on my counter in date order. I calculated what it would cost to get all of the photos developed, and sighed. There were forty-eight rolls of film left. That would cost almost five hundred dollars. Five hundred dollars for what, in all likelihood, was mostly washed-out, overexposed or underexposed prints never meant to be seen. But then why had the photographer bothered keeping the rolls of film at all? And were these photos Epitaphs or Prophecies? And what did that even mean? Five hundred dollars. I shook my head.

  I had offered to pay Pilar rent, and she’d scoffed. The idea of living rent-free for four months had seemed like such a gift I hadn’t thought about how quickly my savings would dwindle. Getting some random person’s snapshots developed was not in the budget.

  Still. I picked up the photo I had set aside, the one with the young woman, terror in her eyes, the man gripping her arm, and I felt my heart knock hard in my chest.

  Using the counter for my laptop and a small printer/scanner I’d scored when Gus’s work upgraded, I had set up a makeshift office in the kitchen. I grabbed the photo and put it on the scanner, scanned it in, and pulled it into Photoshop, zooming in so it filled the screen.

  In art school, I had only taken a couple of units of photography, including a class on female photographers: Imogen Cunningham, Diane Arbus, Sally Mann. Cindy Sherman and Mary Ellen Mark. This photo could easily be a part of Mark’s oeuvre. This quiet violence. It, like Mark’s work, felt like the exposure of an open wound.

  I clicked PRINT and watched as a larger version of the snapshot in my hand emerged from the printer. I reached for the roll of blue painter’s tape left over from painting Avery’s room and brought the photo to my studio, where I taped it to the wall.

  I felt an odd, yet familiar, urgency. Like a vague but undeniable itch. An impulse. It had been so long since I’d felt this way, it scared me a little. I studied the prostitute’s face, and she mine.

  My father had found a bunch of my old canvases from high school in the garage and offered them to me before we left New Hampshire. They weren’t in terrific shape, but they were all I had. I chose the largest one, pulled the birches painting off the easel, turning it to face the wall, and propped the blank canvas up. I got out my palette and dug through my stash of paints, trying to recollect the colors. For years, this was how I had seen things: first the image and then the slow deconstruction, my mind breaking down the image not into shapes, but into hues. Some artists focus on the architecture, seeing their vision in shapes: a cylinder here, the smooth oval and rigid rectangle there. But my mind had always perceived what it saw in individual colors. Leaves of green gray illuminated with a cadmium spray of sunlight. Dark woods, birches outlined in dioxazine mauve against an ultramarine sky. And the entrance to those woods, green umber leading to the inevitable bone black. But when I reached for the right brush, the one to begin, I felt paralyzed. Unable, even, to sketch.

  Bone Black

  Black first.

  Then a solitary source of light to illuminate the wreckage.

  The black should be easy, the darkness obvious. But there are too many options: carbon black, antimony black, bloodstone, manganese. Cobalt black, ivory black, galena, mars. There are a thousand shades of dark. An infinity of origins, an endlessness of hues.

  The very first black pigment was made from charcoal. Oil, wood, vine clippings, the pits of fruit partially burned, carbonized, then ground with mortar and pestle. Carbon and ash.

  I imagine what I might burn.

  Bone black was made from the burning of bones. Ivory black from grinding of charred ivory, the tusks and teeth of hunted beasts preserved in Rembrandt’s sitters’ painted cloaks.

  The blackest black known, however, is called Vantablack. The only blacker black is found in the colorless abyss of a black hole. “It’s thinner than a coat of paint and rests on the liminal edge between an imagined thing and an actual one,” artist Anish Kapoor says. It does not yet come in a tube, will not rest on palette or brush.

  This blackest black is made of an arrangement of carbon nano tubes, each one, one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair. Kapoor compares this configuration to a forest of impossibly tall and impossibly thin trees, a forest so dense that when light enters it becomes trapped.

  Here is the black I need, this ruthless forest, this light-sucking dusk.

  Vigil

  A very watched out the window for Pilar all afternoon on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Perched on the sill in a ratty old nightgown she wouldn’t let me throw away, she pressed her face against the glass. She wouldn’t even come to the table for lunch, and so rather than fight it, I made her some cinnamon toast and brought it to her in a napkin. A sippy cup of orange juice. And she kept vig
il.

  Outside, the sky was dark, the clouds overhead ominous. And the waves seemed even more volatile than usual. I wondered if the following months would be as bleak as this, and at what point it would start to seem more cruelty than novelty.

  “Does it snow here?” Avery asked.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Can we go sledding like at Poppy’s?” she asked. “With the silver saucer?”

  “If we can find a hill.” The island was a whopping half mile in diameter. And while there were certainly cliffs, I had yet to see anything resembling a sledable hill.

  * * *

  Pilar showed up just as Avery finished her toast, the floor beneath her sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. “She’s here!” she screamed and jumped down off the back of the couch to run for the door.

  “Put some shoes on,” I hollered after her, but she ignored me and bounded through the door out into that dreary day, barefoot.

  Pilar’s rental car was loaded down with suitcases and a bunch of shopping bags she’d apparently gotten in town after arriving at the airport. She looked like a bag lady hobbling up the drive as Avery ran to greet her.

  She looked different than the last time I’d seen her, in that way people do when you’re used to seeing them every day then suddenly don’t. Her mangled bangs had already grown out and been trimmed in a straighter line. All of her looked a bit more put together, as a matter of fact. The silver hoop she usually wore in her nose was replaced with a much more subdued diamond stud. Her glasses were new too, not of the thrift store caliber she’d been wearing. They looked expensive. Something about these minor changes was a bit disconcerting, disorienting even, but it was still Pilar. And I couldn’t believe how happy I was to see another adult. She was here.

  “Here,” she said, off-loading three bags and her suitcase and running back to the car for more groceries and toiletries and one paper bag that seemed to be moving.

  “Lobsters!” she said. “For dinner tonight.”

  I hugged her, smelling the same old stinky patchouli smell of her, and wanted to cry in relief. I smiled and helped her carry everything into the house.

  “How long do you have the rental car?” I asked.

  “Oh, as long as I need it,” she said, shrugging. She squatted down next to Avery. “Show me your room?”

  I followed behind them as they navigated the stairs.

  “Crap,” Pilar said. “I forgot how bad these were. You can’t live with stairs like this. One of you will break your neck!”

  “It’s not a big deal,” I said. “We’re careful.” I had taught Avery how to go down the stairs on her tush, the way she’d first learned to go down the stairs at my parents’ house when she was a toddler.

  “Well, I’m calling somebody today. There’s got to be someone on the island who can shore these up, at least until I can get a contractor out here.”

  Pilar stood in the doorway to Avery’s room and covered her mouth with her hand.

  I had wanted her to do this. I had imagined her reaction. In a way, this room was as much for Pilar as it had been for Avery. I’d been buying this moment with every stroke of my brush.

  I had painted the floors, as per Avery’s request, a cerulean blue; cirrus clouds floated across the floor in delicate wisps. The violet walls and forest green crown molding and ceiling were like something out of a dream. I’d brought a plain white comforter from home, which, in this room, became the clean white puff of a cloud.

  Pilar oohed and ahhed as Avery showed her every corner of the room.

  “Here’s the best part,” I said, going to the window and pulling down the blackout roller shade I’d installed so Avery didn’t get up at the crack of dawn every morning. “Close the door, Av.”

  The room was now in total darkness, except for the constellation of stars on the floor. I’d meticulously painted the Milky Way in glow-in-the-dark paint. It was wonderfully, deliciously disorienting to be in this room at night. Like being transported into space.

  “It’s like The Little Prince,” Pilar said, just as I knew she would. “I love it. Avery, I want to live here with you. Can I come live here with you?”

  * * *

  That night we gorged ourselves on lobsters, went through two bottles of wine. Pilar had brought enough lobsters for us to each have three. But Avery was too afraid to try them, and it suddenly felt wasteful, six lobsters giving their lives for us.

  “We can get the meat out, freeze it,” Pilar said, reading my mind.

  I nodded.

  After dinner we lay on the two lumpy couches in the living room, our stomachs distended from the overindulgence. Avery fell asleep with her head on my lap while Pilar and I stayed up talking; she hadn’t wanted to go upstairs and miss out on any of the conversation.

  “So you don’t know who owned the house before?” I asked.

  “It was in probate for years. Why?” she asked, digging into the wheel of Brie she’d brought and a box of Ritz Crackers.

  “I found something,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  For just a moment I hesitated. The film, the girl in the photo. The boy staring in horror at the seagull. I hadn’t told a soul about them. It was like some odd secret, and for some reason, it felt like I was breaking a promise. My stomach turned.

  “In the basement,” I continued.

  “Like a body or something?” she said, eyes wide. “Spill.”

  “I found some film. A whole bunch of undeveloped rolls.”

  “That’s strange,” she said.

  She was wearing the pajamas I had given her for Christmas the year before, the red flannel ones with the black Scottie dogs all over them. She looked ten instead of thirty-three.

  “I actually sent a couple of rolls off to get developed.”

  “Cool,” she said. “What are they pictures of?”

  I knew words wouldn’t do justice to that one photo.

  “Are they naked pictures?” she asked, one perfectly plucked eyebrow rising upward.

  And I thought of the woman, how exposed she was. His dark fingers pressing into her milky flesh.

  “No,” I said, forcing a laugh. “Just snapshots. Vacation pictures.”

  “Huh,” she said. “They must have belonged to whoever owned the house.”

  “Maybe,” I said, feeling strangely relieved she wasn’t demanding to see the photos.

  “Are you going to get the rest developed?”

  I shrugged again. I knew financially it wasn’t possible, but I never brought up money with Pilar anymore.

  It used to be we shared our poverty. We lamented together. As students, we stood in line at the food bank on Saturday mornings and got the dusty castoffs from other people’s cupboards, the stale generic Froot Loops and dented cans of wax beans and sweet corn. We used the one bank that offered five dollars if you had to wait longer than five minutes in line, telling the little old ladies in front of us to take their time. We maxed out our credit cards on cash advances to pay the rent. Got our furniture and clothes and books from thrift stores and Dumpsters. But things were different now, whether we wanted them to be or not.

  “When is Gus coming?” Pilar asked.

  “Next weekend, I hope.”

  “And when are you going to take him back?” she asked.

  “When are you going to stop asking that question?”

  “When you’re back together. This is the stupidest breakup in the history of breakups. Just so you know.”

  I sighed. I looked toward the window, but instead of seeing the ocean, I only saw myself reflected back.

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk about Gus anymore.”

  Pilar reached out for my hand. I studied the familiar, ropey veins on the back of her hand, the collection of silver rings, a large lapis lazuli stone nestled into a new one.

  “Let me see what you’re working on,” she said, leaping to her feet and brushing the Ritz Cracker crumbs off of her.

  We went to the dini
ng room, where I had set up shop. It was a primitive studio, but Pilar noticed the windows right away.

  “This is the room I would have picked too,” she said. She walked around the perimeter, her fingers grazing the rolling metal cart I’d found in the basement where I kept all of my paints, touched the tips of the brushes. She looked up and saw the photo I’d blown up.

  “Whose is this? Diane Arbus?” she asked.

  It both surprised me and didn’t surprise me at all she thought a professional had taken it. I thought about the film, about all of those rolls, like tiny eggs in a nest waiting to be hatched.

  “It’s from one of the rolls I found,” I said.

  “Wow! It’s incredible,” she said. “There’s this beautiful violence to it. It could be an Arbus. Wait, she was sixties not seventies, right? Maybe Mary Ellen Mark?” She nodded. “Wow.”

  I shrugged.

  She reached into her pocket for her phone and held it up to the photo.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, heat rising to my ears. The photo suddenly felt strangely private.

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just so cool. Imagine what other photos there might be.”

  I felt queasy.

  “Now show me what you’re working on,” she said, squeezing my hand.

  I thought about that blank canvas, the one I’d stared at for hours the other night. Recalled that crippling hesitation, that fear, which followed the first rush of creative energy. And I wondered if that impulse would ever return.

  I motioned toward the birches, shaking my head.

  “This one is good, Wynnie. Really good,” she lied.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think Ginger will like it.”

  Giving Thanks

  “So who lives next door?” I asked. “In the mansion?”

  “I don’t know,” Pilar said.

  It was Wednesday, and we were busy in the kitchen prepping everything for Thanksgiving dinner the next day. She and I had gone through this ritual dozens of times. While she rolled out dough for the pies at the kitchen table, I made the stuffing, Avery’s favorite broccoli and cheese casserole, the sweet potatoes.