by Caryl Rivers
And he would smile, and they would talk of Chartres and Notre Dame, and her hand would rest lightly on his as they spoke of the great rose window, and how magnificent it had looked in his photos. Their eyes would meet, and she would put her small white-gloved hand in his, and they would go down the stairs to the stateroom paneled in rare Brazilian wood, with a single perfect Matisse hanging over the bed. She would ever so delicately slip out of the white silk gown she was wearing, and when they were both naked she would take his chin in both her gloved hands, and look deeply into his eyes. Gently, gently, her gloved fingers would travel down his well-muscled body (when he was a rich photographer, he would work out), down, down, murmuring in French all the while. And then, when she came to a strategic place, she would sigh and whisper, “C’est admirable!” He would kiss her marble breasts, and they would make passionate but tasteful love — the little nips of course — under the Matisse, and she would say that he was an artist, but not only with his camera. Back on deck, the wind would play gently with her hair, and she would rest her hand ever so gently on his arm as they talked some more about cathedrals.
He picked up another picture of her, at a musicale at the White House. That gave him another idea. Lincoln Center, and he would be looking out at the lights of the city and she would be there, whispering, “Your photographs of the Great Masters. What feeling!” He had a whole bagful of elegant settings for her, always properly tasteful. He was not, after all, a slob. She was not meant for sweaty grappling or crotchless panties and peekaboo bras from Frederick’s of Hollywood. He was certain that she wore only delicate silk panties with lace edges, and that she would drop dead on the spot from the sheer bad taste of no-crotch panties or black polyester garter belts.
Milt Beerman looked up and called out to him. “Did you do the Puppy of the Week yet, Jay?”
The spell was broken. He was not in Lincoln Center or the White House, her gloved white hands on his quivering body, but in Belvedere, Maryland, being asked about a task that demeaned his talent. He groaned.
“Oh, Christ, the fucking puppy.”
“I got to have the puppy on Wednesday. You always forget the goddamn puppy.”
“Can’t we use the extra I did last week? The one with the schlong?”
“Let me see it.”
Jay passed him the print.
“My God, that’s obscene, that animal is bigger than I am.”
“They call it the ladies’ special down at the animal shelter.”
“Airbrush out the schlong and we’ll use it.”
“Airbrush it? It’s only a dog!”
“We are a family newspaper. We do not use dog schlongs.”
Jay rolled his eyes upwards, “What am I doing here, what? Life, come and take me away from all this!” It was difficult to maintain his fantasy as the puppy’s prick disappeared under the careful application of the airbrush. He could hardly imagine her coming up to him, elegant in her Chanel suit, and whispering, “The dog with the enormous penis — truly a work of art. I shall hang it in the East Room.”
Going to the White House leavened his mood, of course. Astronauts could get him to Life a lot faster than oversized puppy genitals. And he had to admit that showing off a bit for a female colleague wasn’t bad for his ego either.
He looked over at her now. She was sitting forward in her seat, her hand on the dash. She had eyes, he noticed, very much like Jacqueline’s, wide set and with heavy lashes.
“How long have you been on Cityside, anyhow?” he asked.
“Seven months.”
“Covered any fatals?”
She shook her head.
“Scared?”
She looked at him, then looked away. “I can handle it.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.” He said it gently, and she caught the note of understanding in his voice. She leaned back against the seat and sighed.
“Yeah, I’m scared. I’m scared a lot in this job. It’s still pretty new, a lot of it.”
“This is easy. A lot of guys glamorize it, make it seem tough. The cops or the fireman have all the information you need. Then you throw in some color stuff. That’s it. I’ve even written these things, and I can’t write for shit.”
The land stretched out now, green and forested on either side. Jay increased the pressure of his foot, and the car lurched ahead. His palms were moist, and he could feel the wheel growing slippery under his hands. He wiped first one, then the other, on the edge of his seat. He felt the excitement rising in his throat. Something unexpected and perhaps awful had happened and they were rushing towards it. He looked at the young woman sitting beside him. Her hand gripped the dashboard, and her breathing was fast and shallow. He pressed even harder on the accelerator, and the car fairly flew along the highway. “Hang on,” he said, and he laughed, and she laughed too, a high, nervous laugh that spoke not of humor but of exhilaration.
“We could waste a lot of time looking for this thing,” he said. “There are a lot of roads that go back in the woods.”
“There’s a little store and gas station up ahead.”
Jay spotted the store and pulled into it. “We’re from the Blade,” he said to the man who ambled out. “We’re looking for the plane that went down.”
“I heard it. Sounded like the engine cut out. One of the county fire trucks went by a few minutes ago. Took the dirt road up ahead.”
Jay gunned the engine, and the Chevy was back on the road. They found the dirt road, which was narrow and rutted from the spring rains. Jay drove slowly, impatient but afraid of getting bogged down in the mud. Finally he spotted the rear end of the fire engine, blocking the road. There was a green Ford parked behind it. Jay frowned when he saw the car.
“Oh fuck. Phillips.”
He pulled the car up behind the Ford. As he climbed out, a man wearing a hunting jacket with two cameras slung across his chest like bandoliers emerged from the bush.
“Hi, kid,” he said. “I was hoping you wouldn’t get here.”
He was a heavyset man, unshaven as usual. “I got some great stuff. One with the guy’s eyes hanging out of the sockets. The Enquirer will use that kind of stuff.”
He looked at Mary, who had climbed out of the car and was digging into her pocket looking for a notebook. Phillips grinned at Jay and made little kissing noises with his mouth, sotto voce. “Getting some of that, kid? Nice pussy.”
Jay ignored him. “Which way?”
Phillips pointed to a narrow path, and Jay motioned to Mary to follow him.
“Who’s that?”
“Phillips. He’s a freelance. A death specialist. He gets to all the fatals before everybody else.”
“Nice.”
“He’s got a police radio in his car. Not that he needs it. He’s a vulture. He can smell it in the air when somebody is going to die.”
They walked in silence, brushing away the branches that overhung the path. That old turd, Phillips. The sight of him had spoiled the excitement. Phillips was the nightmare phantasm of his own future, what he might become if Life didn’t get him. He saw himself, old and unshaven, driving from fatal to fatal, keeping gory photos from accident scenes in his file cabinet so he could take them out at times to show to ugly, sodden women so he could bang them.
“Death makes broads horny,” Philips had confided to him.
He shivered. Another lousy accident scene, that was all it was. The deaths he photographed were senseless and stupid, there was no drama to them. Some kid smashed into a tree going seventy, crumpled and ugly and mottled with blood; the woman drowned in the boating accident, brown water dribbling out of her mouth. Not like Capa’s picture of the Spanish soldier, head thrown back, at the moment of the bullet’s impact. He no longer wanted to see what was ahead. Jesus H. Christ, would he have to spend the rest of his life schlepping around taking pictures of corpses?
He walked along, smelling the damp earth and the molding vegetation. At the edge of a small rav
ine he saw a policeman, his slicker buttoned against the chill. The man looked at Mary.
“I wouldn’t go down there, Miss.”
“I’m from the Blade. I’m a reporter.” There was an edge to her voice, the same tone she had used when she said, “I can handle it.”
The trooper shrugged. “It’s not pretty.”
“It never is,” she said, her voice flat and world-weary.
They climbed down the edge of the ravine, and Jay stopped to let Mary come very close to him. “It’s never pretty?” he said.
She grinned. “Barbara Stanwyck. I forget the movie. How was it?”
“Could have fooled me.”
As they neared the bottom of the ravine, they could see the wreck through the trees. It was a single-engined, blue-and-white Cessna. Only the tail section was intact; the front of the plane was folded up against a tree like an accordion. On the ground near the plane lay the body of a man, and firemen were hacking at the wreck with axes, trying to get a second body out.
Jay moved to the bottom of the ravine, next to the body that lay face up on the ground. Someone, perhaps wishing for a hint of dignity, had draped a large white handkerchief across the face, through which the blood had seeped. Jay raised his camera, then lowered it, thinking of Phillips and his file cabinet. When the body had been removed from the wreck, the man’s pants had snagged on a piece of metal, and a section of the pants were torn away. The brand name on the waistband of his shorts, Jockey, was clearly visible. His stomach, covered with thick black hair, bulged above the waistband.
Jay stared at the blue, distended letters. Make a statement out of that, Cartier-Bresson. Find a moment of truth in flab and elastic, Capa. He looked up to the tops of the trees, where the sky above was pure and clean, and then he looked down again at the corpse.
“Want to see what you are, buddy? Take a look. This is what you are.”
Corpses always talked to him; the woman who drowned, bloated with water, her eyes vacant; the kid in the MG, his head dangling out of the car. “Want to see what you are?”
“Shut up,” he said to the corpse.
“What?” said the fireman next to him.
“Nothing,” Jay said. “Hey, cover him up, will you?”
Then he noticed that Mary had moved beside him. She was looking down at the body. Her pretty pink shoes were soaked and caked with mud, and her pink dress under the khaki raincoat made her seem impossibly vulnerable and out of place. He watched her pale face; it remained impassive. She might have been looking at a pile of leaves. But he noticed that one small vein, above her eye, twitched and then was still. She watched as the firemen covered the body, then walked over to talk to the fire chief.
Jay turned to the wreck and saw the firemen were removing the second body. It was a bloody mess, and Jay turned away, no longer wanting to see it. When they finished, he turned to the wreckage and began to shoot. Wedged in the hashed and bloodied metal of the cockpit was a wicker luncheon hamper, and in the hamper were three sandwiches folded into pink napkins, neatly, the way a woman would fold them. The pink-wrapped sandwiches brought the pity into his throat, and he gagged on it. The bodies hadn’t done it, but the pink sandwiches had.
He walked back to the center of the clearing, where the second body had been laid out next to the first. A fireman standing next to him reached into his slicker and pulled out a sandwich.
“Shit, peanut butter. I picked up the wrong one.”
He looked at Jay. “You like peanut butter?”
Jay shook his head, and the man turned to Mary. “How about you?”
“No, thank you.”
“What the hell.” He shrugged, and he walked over to the chief, munching on the sandwich.
“Oh barf,” Mary whispered to Jay. “He’s eating.”
“A true gourmet,” he said.
There was a crashing noise in the brush, and two firemen walked into the clearing, carrying two shiny, rectangular green bags. They unfolded the bags, and with the help of the other men slid the bodies into the bags and fastened the metal catches at the tops. Jay followed them, shooting, as they loaded the bags onto stretchers and started to move up the slope. Mary fell into step beside Jay.
“You got enough?” he asked her.
She nodded. “Yes, I’ve got it.”
They walked behind the men with the stretchers, an impromptu procession. There was no sound except the heavy breathing of the firemen and their boots in the mud.
“Joe,” said the man at the head of the stretcher, “you bowling tonight?”
“Dunno. My back’s been botherin’ me. This shit won’t help.”
“We didn’t have enough guys against Frederick last week.”
“Well, maybe I will.”
Jay turned to Mary. “Idents?”
“De Lucca and Wilder. Out of a private airport in Richmond.”
On the way back to the paper, they were both subdued as they drove past stretches of woods and farmland. He was acutely conscious of her body beside his, of her breathing and a warm human smell that was at once sweet and musky. He wanted to touch her. He didn’t know why. Maybe just because she was alive.
“Well,” he said, “that’s it. Now you know.”
“It wasn’t what I expected.”
“How so?”
“I didn’t have any trouble looking at them. I was afraid I was going to feel like throwing up, but I didn’t. It was the bags. Bags are for — groceries.”
“Yeah, it’s crummy. Not like the movies. No violins.”
“One minute those guys were alive, and the next minute they were in a … a goddamn bag. I had this feeling we ought to be doing something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. But I was taking notes and the cops were doing their thing, and the firemen were talking about bowling — and here these two guys were, dead. It was all so routine. Is it always this way.”
“More or less.”
“Do you get used to it?”
“The guys around it all the time, I guess they do. At National Airport once, I saw a guy walking around with a box full of pieces of people. Just pieces. Christ, I had nightmares for months, but this guy, he was just walking around, putting stuff in his box. Hey, an elbow. …”
She sighed and was silent for a minute. “It ought to be important. I mean, you only get to do it once.”
“That’s an interesting way of putting it. I don’t want to do it at all.”
“But we have to, don’t we? I mean, this morning, there was Kennedy and the astronauts and it was like they were going to live forever and so were we, but, but”— she paused and her brow furrowed. “I feel like this curtain was pulled back, and I just saw death straight on. There’s no curtain anymore. It looked back at me.” She laughed nervously. “I guess it’s just a ‘first fatal’ thing. But, my God, the bags. The bags. Does it scare you, Jay?”
He looked at her. Her eyes were an even brown, intense as two points of light. He was tempted, for a minute, to lie to her, to enlist the grim reaper as a partner in deception. He wanted to be older, wiser, to impress her. He wanted to be a man who could stare death down. But those brown eyes would not accept a lie.
He exhaled and told the truth.
“Scares the shit out of me.”
He walked along the beachfront, feeling the coolness of the salt-laden air on his face and the still warm sand between his toes. He had been with his father. It was unsettling. The old man could not speak, or walk; he was imprisoned in a body that no longer worked. Even that iron will could not make it work. He shivered. Better if they had let him slip away, when they had the chance. The man who had been so huge, who had been able to bluff or buy or bully his way into whatever he wanted, should not have been brought so low.
He looked out at the sea, which had always called to him, mysterious, restless, unforgiving. He thought of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” one of his favorites.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done.
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
That should be left him, that one more noble thing.
He had never imagined his father could be powerless, because he had always been able to do everything, fix everything. There were threads of love and fear, gratitude and resentment between them. As the second son, he had been shielded from the driving glare of his father’s ambition by his older brother’s perfection, allowed, to some degree, to think, to read, to explore, to fail, free from those relentless dreams.
If he had been given to introspection, and he was not — in a family where children jostled for position like racehorses at the rail, too much self-examination was regarded with suspicion — he might have been candid about the facts of his own creation. It was in part his father’s doing. The father’s ambition was born of an ache so great and deep that only a son’s uncontested triumph could assuage it. One night, the father had waited, alone in his room at Harvard, a popular young man, friendly with everyone, confident that the knock on the door would come, and he would be told of his selection to the most prestigious eating club in the Yard. All around him he heard the footsteps and the laughter and the sound of celebration. He waited, as the minutes ticked into hours. Joseph P. Kennedy, American, with none of the muck of Wexford on his shoes, waited for the knock on the door that would never come.
The older son was sent hurtling into the world, a missile that would at last, finally, heal the wound, but he died in a reckless bid for heroism, frozen forever in first place in his father’s heart.
“I’m shadow boxing in a match the shadow is always going to sin,” the second son told a friend. But he picked up the fallen standard, dutifully, and walked into adulthood shaped by his father’s dreams and his own formidable will. It was, after all, particularly American for men and women to invent themselves. They inherited a land hacked out of the wilderness, where there were no edges and no rules. A young man from the tenements of New York had become the Western outlaw Billy the Kid, and another sickly young man turned himself into a Rough Rider, and the son of an East Boston barkeep became the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.
