It rained most of that Saturday and they dug out some old board games, Clue and Scrabble and even Twister, and listened to a stack of Sinatra albums. Finally, when the sun appeared, they piled into the wood-sided station wagon and drove into town to buy oysters; Rye had a shucking knife with his initials on it. He paid for everything, tossing his money onto the counter like a gambler buying chips. Back at the house, as the windows grew dark, they drank iced Stoli and smoked his mother’s stale Pall Malls in the small, outdated kitchen, the cabinets warped from the sea air. Opening the oysters, Rye cut himself, and some of the blood ran into one of the shells. Nobody noticed, but Julian chose that one. He swallowed the oyster whole, like a wad of phlegm, relishing its metallic taste.
After they ate, they climbed down the rickety stairs to the beach. The wind was cool off the water, and they were all a little drunk and shivering. They dug a pit and built a bonfire and circled around it like some kind of a cult, silently watching the flames. Magda was standing across from him, the firelight coating her bare arms, her neck. She had the hard, irreverent beauty of a goddess, he thought, and found he could look at nothing else. She met his eyes over the flames in what seemed to Julian a signal of collusion, for they were interlopers here, kindred by their middle-class roots. But the moment didn’t last. She took Rye’s arm and draped it around her shoulders, securing their underhanded alliance at least for the weekend.
They stayed up late, watching a monster movie on the old TV set, drinking whatever was left in the liquor cabinet. At some point, like thieves, Rye and Magda crept upstairs. He could still remember watching her slim, pale calves as they disappeared into the darkness. A little later, Marty and Lars drifted off to their room. He knew he wouldn’t sleep and stayed up with Ava, smoking too many cigarettes. They were both pretty drunk and he could tell that, like him, she was suspicious of the prospect of true contentment. They lay on the musty couch together with her feet near his head and his feet near hers, and she told him how their mother had died recently and the place wasn’t the same without her, and she kept thinking any minute her mother would be coming downstairs to tell her to go to bed, and how without any parents she felt all alone in the world, aside from her brother, who was usually too busy for her, and he said that even though his mother was still alive, he, too, felt alone, and they both fell asleep listening to the roar of the ocean, and when he woke up the next morning she was gone and she’d covered him with a blanket. He knew he’d never forget that kindness.
A photograph is a kind of death, Sartre said, a moment, taken like a prisoner, never to be again. Was the photographer, in essence, a coroner of time? They were reading the best minds on the subject, Szarkowski and Sontag and Berger and Barthes, and would gather nightly at The F-Stop to drink and argue the medium’s purpose and their role as photographers: Were they merely documenting the mundane evidence of life, or was a photograph the result of some inferred context? Were they looking out a window or looking into a mirror, as Szarkowski suggested?
In those days, they were still shooting film, mostly black-and-white, which was easier to process than color and cheaper and stood apart with its built-in austerity from ordinary snapshot photos. Julian was using the same SLR he’d had for years, a Canon AE-1, but Adler had acquired an arsenal of used equipment, including an old R. H. Phillips 4 x 5 view camera that he’d lug around the neighborhood on its tripod, persuading people to let him take their picture. While everybody else was home sleeping, he’d be up all night in the darkroom, producing luminous Cibachrome prints—a janitor, a busboy, a street preacher, various panhandlers, including a blind woman (an homage to Paul Strand), grifters, hookers, working people of all variety—packing all the pathos of a Dickens novel into one startling shot. He had a painterly hankering for saturated colors—the egg-yolk yellow of a waitress’s polyester uniform or the weedy brown of a mechanic’s coveralls—and bestowed his subjects with a dignity they seldom experienced in real life. When Rye put up his photos, a solemn reverence would descend on the room.
Julian didn’t make portraits. He didn’t like people in his shots. Instead, he was drawn to empty lots, condemned buildings. To him, there was a silent poetry in the sky over a vacant city park or the rubble of a razed building. Or a parking lot at dusk, the chorus of streetlamps, the empty carts inert as cows in a field. His images, he felt, were pure, almost religious—not that he was or ever had been at all religious; in fact, for all intents and purposes, he was agnostic—but, uncannily, he believed there was an aspect of God in his work. He didn’t know why this was. It certainly wasn’t deserved. For one thing, he was the product of a mixed marriage. As a result, his parents had forsaken religion and, unlike his friends growing up, he had not been forced to endure Sunday school. When people asked about his faith, he’d developed his own excuses for not taking part. Mostly, he didn’t feel he belonged. Whenever he found himself inside a church or a temple, he felt like an outsider. He couldn’t get beyond the rhetoric. He didn’t feel the presence of God. At the very minimum, God as a concept seemed pretty far-fetched. But when he took a photograph of some barren place, some sad and lonesome aftermath that reflected the indignities of man, the routine apathy displayed in the lurid destruction of a city playground, for instance, the resulting image seemed to shimmer with some unseen light, the promise of another dimension beyond what Julian could perceive with his own eyes, as if God were playing a trick on him. It wasn’t anything he talked about, but it caused a certain amount of private confusion, and sometimes when he was very drunk and behaving badly, courting the very edge of civility, he would feel a yearning to repent.
At his final critique, it was Rye Adler who spoke up, as if they’d all decided beforehand. In his vague, roundabout analysis he seemed to suggest that Julian’s photographs were vacuous. Your work has no soul was how he put it, delivered with such earnest gravity that no other student dared refute it. Not even Brodsky, who only gazed at Julian with brutal indifference, as if condemning him to a life in exile.
In his final collection of prints, Julian had tried to emulate Atget’s Paris—the mystery of a lonesome staircase, an unpopulated alleyway, an abandoned dinner table—but no one detected the comparison.
You’re an impartial observer, Rye concluded. There’s nothing at stake for you. I don’t know how to feel when I look at one of your pictures.
Why do you need to feel anything? Julian asked.
Rye looked at him cautiously but did not reply.
As they filed out of the room, Julian stood there with his hands in his pockets, staring at the floor. He felt like a failure. That’s when Magda came up to him and put her hand on his shoulder. Don’t listen to them, she said. It’s not what’s there that matters. It’s about everything that’s not.
He clung to those words, even though nobody really cared what the women thought.
Over the years, he reflected on that single afternoon, the flat gray light of the studio, the rain streaming down the windows, the faces of the other students watching as Adler’s comments took effect like a dangerous drug, disabling some essential organ, a death sentence conferred in a single, impulsive moment.
When the program ended, Julian moved to New York and rented a gloomy one-bedroom apartment in a rent-controlled, prewar building on Riverside Drive. Intent on working for the magazines, he made the rounds with his portfolio. Editors would stare at his pictures, glumly, and say nothing. None of them seemed to understand what he was trying to do. Eventually, when he ran out of money, he took a job as a junior account executive at a small advertising firm known for pharmaceutical marketing. As the new hire, he got stuck with all the boring accounts nobody wanted. He didn’t mind. He liked the routine, working alongside the pros, the long hours, the sense of importance he felt when he’d finally leave the office late at night and sit alone at his kitchen table, drinking a cold beer. And he liked the money. He appreciated the fact that he didn’t have to be a creative genius. It was good work, and he was good at it. For the first t
ime in his life, he actually felt useful, like he had a purpose. Every now and then he’d run into someone from the workshop and they’d grab lunch and commiserate over their struggles, agreeing that things hadn’t exactly turned out as they’d planned. It was on one such occasion, sharing a table with Marty Fine at a deli near his office, that he learned Adler was on assignment for National Geographic, thus knighted by industry royalty. As Marty droned on, Julian sat there, gritting his teeth. A few weeks later, idly turning the pages of the yellow-bordered magazine in his therapist’s waiting room, he came upon an article about a cholera outbreak in Somalia, the result of tainted water, with two startling photographs credited to Adler of children orphaned during the crisis, with eyes that confronted you and demanded your attention. Eyes that had seen too much. They stared out at Julian with inalienable longing. He found he couldn’t stay for his appointment. He had to leave. He had to get out. He walked along the park, reproaching himself for wasting his life. Adler was putting himself out there. He was doing important work. And what was Julian doing? Selling stool softeners! He didn’t have the connections, was the problem. Adler knew people. And Julian didn’t know anyone, at least no one who mattered.
In a morass of self-loathing, he walked thirty, maybe forty, blocks before he realized there were tears streaming down his face.
Soon after, there was no escaping the evidence of Rye’s success. It seemed like every distinguished magazine in the country had a shot or two of his, and he was described at certain parties as the eye of a generation.
Adler wasn’t just getting paid. He had made it.
On the day of the memorial, he woke at dawn, the sky pale as newsprint. He glanced out at the neighboring buildings. Most of the windows were still dark. The trucks were just rolling in to make their deliveries and the streets were relatively empty. His head ached. He had drunk too much the night before. He filled a glass with tap water and swallowed a couple aspirin. He took his time getting ready, putting on a good suit, buffing the tips of his shoes with a shoe brush. You never knew in life, he thought vaguely, when it would all end.
He looked around the apartment, the sullen arithmetic of the furnishings. It resembled a suite in an airport hotel, impersonal and forlorn, and it occurred to him that his marriage was the exhausting trip he was recovering from, stuck in this in-between, this ascetic cubicle of regret. You couldn’t go back, he understood that now. You had to press on. You had to forge ahead.
He pulled on his overcoat and walked down to Penn Station in the wind. The station was crowded with commuters, and his train was delayed. He bought a cup of coffee and an egg sandwich and stood at the counter, trying to ignore his increasing ambivalence about making the trip upstate. He knew he had to do it, to show his face. It would be awkward, yes, but it was necessary. It could not be avoided.
When he finally boarded the train, he sat by the window in the nearly empty car, aware of his obscure reflection in the dark glass. The train moved slowly out of the tunnel into the suddenly sharp light of the city. They passed the old yellow-brick tenements with their small windows lined up like the holes on a punch card. Finally the river appeared, the brown marshes, the occasional hawk. The river was black, the sky dull and white. As the train moved upstate, the distant Catskills took on a shuddering majesty. Old, once elegant homes stood along the shore. The melancholic view pleased him and, as the train gained in speed, conveyed the convoluted abstraction of a dream.
He dozed off for a few minutes, and when he woke, the train was pulling into Hudson, an old-fashioned depot stuck in time. He stepped off the train and watched it pull away. He stood there, looking in both directions, up and down the track. A few men were waiting by their cabs, smoking. Julian nodded at one, and the driver opened the back door. He was an Indian, with dark, kind eyes that seemed to glitter in the early light. They drove up the main street, passing brightly lit storefronts. The wind came in gusts, ruffling the awnings, swirling scraps of litter. People on the sidewalks had to shield their eyes. One woman put her hands to her face as the wind disrupted her hair.
Rain is coming, the driver said in a delicate accent.
It sure looks like it, Julian said.
The driver let him off at an old grange on the outskirts of town. You could see the fields stretching behind it. A small plaque identified the building as a Reconstructionist synagogue. Inside it was dim and dank, the wood floor scuffed, the old pews from a church. A lectern served as the bimah, and the eternal light was a flickering candle suspended by macramé ropes. He surveyed the small crowd, surprised there weren’t more people. Other than him, not a single person from the workshop. Well, that didn’t necessarily surprise him. He assumed Adler had left those people behind. He had risen to another stratosphere, Julian thought. One reserved for a privileged few.
A damp draft circulated, and like the others, Julian kept on his coat. He took a yarmulke from a wooden box and fondled it into place on his head, then sat in a pew by the door. As the rabbi approached the bimah, the room filled with a sudden darkness. In the clerestory windows he could see the wild treetops and the slowly moving black clouds. He looked over at the empty space beside him and imagined Rye sitting right there, winking at him. The thought made him shudder.
He scanned the rows of heads and saw Simone up front, sitting with her daughter, the Somalian child they’d adopted as a toddler who was now in her twenties. Julian had always found it puzzling that, with all the gorgeous women at Rye’s disposal, he’d chosen a rather unassuming wife, the sort who disdains the usual feminine trappings for political reasons. He supposed Simone had an earthy attractiveness; her hair was starting to gray and she wore very little makeup. He imagined she was the kind of woman who could assemble a great meal with only a few ingredients. Or the person you’d think to call in an emergency. Unlike Julian’s impulsive wife, she had stayed the course. She was an academic, he knew, a poet. A few years back, he’d seen a piece on the two of them in the magazine section with pictures taken on their farm—the old country house, the big green field, the dogs—a lifestyle, it seemed to him, of reckless indulgence. He’d burned the article after he read it.
The rabbi read in Hebrew, then translated the 23rd Psalm. Just now it seemed to be very apropos—the one line in particular: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies…
Wasn’t that the truth. Even back then, there were people who wanted to knock you down. The world really hadn’t changed all that much. They were all still wandering the desert, taking what they could, trying to survive.
Simone’s daughter rose and approached the bimah. She had a small, heart-shaped face. Unhurriedly, she unfolded a piece of paper, then traced her thin fingertips along the page.
Rye was a great and unusual man, she said. He was my father, and my best friend.
She told the story of how Adler had found her alone in a makeshift tent with her dead parents. She had memories of indescribable hunger. You went into another place, she said. It was abstract and consuming. Even now she could summon that terror.
Rye saved my life, she said. He nurtured my existence. And I will never forget him.
She began to cry and stepped into her mother’s waiting arms. They parted, and Simone took her place at the bimah. In a low, halting voice she spoke about Rye’s work, his dedication to excellence, his high ethical standards, et cetera, et cetera. Julian was getting bored.
She paused a moment, staring out at them, tears rolling down her cheeks. He was an adventurer, she said. That’s how he saw life. And he never stopped looking for his people. He never stopped telling their stories.
Overcome, she stumbled, and the rabbi took her by the arm and ushered her back to her seat. The group watched as he comforted her, reassuring her in whispers that scratched the silence. A few rows ahead of him, a cell phone vibrated, and a young woman with short auburn hair and a shiny black raincoat rose and liberated herself from the pew, stepping over knees and feet, mumbling apologies. She started down the aisl
e, moving with the purposeful devotion of an employee. As she pushed through the door, a draft rippled across his back and a momentary brightness filled the room. He could smell the perfume that lingered in her wake. Tea rose.
Please rise for the Kaddish, the rabbi said.
When the service ended, everyone stood around for several minutes, blinking like people who’d come out of the dark after a tedious movie. Some began to file out, while others hovered around Simone, offering their condolences. He didn’t feel ready to see her.
He stepped outside into the drizzling cold. The girl with the auburn hair was standing under an overhang, smoking. Below her raincoat he could see the wrinkled hem of her skirt, thick gray tights and clunky black boots she’d likely found in a consignment shop. Something about her sad eyes and knobby knees gave him hope. She resembled the St. Pius girls he often saw on his lunch hour who clustered at the chain-link fence in their uniforms and rumpled knee socks, sneaking cigarettes.
The Vanishing Point Page 2
