The Vanishing Point

by Elizabeth Brundage

  He takes the dogs and walks out across the pasture. Pal, the black Lab, stays close, while Rudy, his yellow cousin, canters up ahead, scavenging the long, rippling field. The sky is white. It gives nothing.

  In the afternoon, he works in his studio, readying his work for submission. The trip is a blur to him now, the streets of Tokyo, the delicate, prescribed behavior of its citizens, unlike Americans, tramping through the continent like drunks at a party, oblivious, uncouth.

  Here on the farm, he can forget the world out there. But the newspaper revives his conscience like too many smelling salts: the warming oceans, the diminishing planet. The government with its partisan schemes.

  The world has changed; it continues to change.

  He can feel something coming. A knowing anguish has settled in his bones.

  He makes a fire in the living room, a cold room full of windows, the floors bare. Just this old couch, two faded wing chairs. The shelves crammed with books. It’s always a little cold this time of year, the fragile windowpanes thrumming in the wind. He has grown used to the sound after all these years. The walls are white, the room bright with winter sunlight. And there are framed photographs—not his, the ones he has collected over time—Abbott and Kertész, three small Atgets, Adams’s Moonrise. They’re all of them dead now. Just as one day he will be dead, his pictures hanging on some stranger’s wall.

  He checks his phone again, but there’s nothing more from Magda. Simone appears in the doorway in her Muck boots and wool coat. He looks up, stranded in the moment, and puts down his phone. Work, he says.

  She nods. She knows when he’s lying to her. We’re going out to walk. Do you want to come?

  I’ve got all these emails to answer.

  She nods again, says nothing.

  He watches her through the window as she sets out. The dogs bark happily, circling her legs, and she laughs and runs, and they follow her. She stalks the icy grass, limber as a pony, her unbrushed hair a nutty gray like the old split-rail fence. The atmosphere in the house changes when she’s not inside it. The quiet lies over everything like dust. A quiet that becomes increasingly louder. He doesn’t think he can live without her. And yet he knows, come morning, he’ll be ready to go, their separateness a habit.

  He opens his laptop and googles Magda Pasternak. There are a few by that name, but none that seem to fit. He remembers an old file of early work on his desktop and looks there. Sure enough. It’s the picture he took of her in her mother’s kitchen. That first time they’d been alone together.

  She’s been right here ever since, only a click away.

  He rarely shoots in black-and-white anymore but he recalls his earnest attempt to emulate Kertész’s picture of his wife, Elizabeth, the shallow depth of field, the soft gray tones, the intimacy between the photographer and his subject. He studies the photograph critically, her face, her dark eyes, the light, and sees only its flaws. But not her. No. She is astonishing.

  It was a row house on Salmon Street in the old Polish neighborhood. Her mother was still at work. She’d led him up the narrow staircase. The walls were painted a cornmeal yellow, the hallways stacked floor to ceiling with books—anatomy, philosophy, poetry. Her mother worked for a textbook company. They sat in the small kitchen and shared a bottle of beer, drinking out of juice glasses, talking about their favorite photographers, his Robert Frank, hers Koudelka—she liked his gypsies best, running her hands down each page as if caressing the faces.

  She had the trace of a Polish accent. As she was showing him around, he could only think of touching her, holding her. Let me take your picture, he said. The light is nice now.

  All right.

  Maybe sit by the window.

  She moved the old wooden chair by the window. Here?

  He nodded.

  This chair is a little broken, she said. Most of our furniture came from the church. When we first came to the U.S.

  How old were you?

  Three. I’ve been here my whole life, basically. But really, I don’t feel American.

  No? Why not?

  It’s hard to explain. You have to feel it in here. Inside. He watched her light a cigarette and blow out the smoke. Like you belong, you know? Like you’re really free.

  You don’t?

  She shook her head. What is freedom?

  He shrugged. You can do anything.

  No—there is no such thing. Where are you from?

  Here mostly. But my father’s work took us to Morocco; he was an engineer.

  So you are rich?

  I’m not my father. Anyway, he’s dead.

  Mine, too.

  What did he do?

  He worked for an amusement company, fixing the machines. Pinball, Skee-Ball. Do you know those games?

  Sure.

  He would drive around in his truck. In Poland he was a doctor.

  She put out her cigarette. What do you think about your picture?

  I have a beautiful subject.

  Beautiful pictures are boring.

  They don’t have to be, he said.

  Here, let me try something—

  She pulled off her sweater, then very slowly unbuttoned her blouse.

  Magda—

  For you, she said. A little gift.

  You don’t have to—

  But then she unhooked her bra and it was too late. Better? We will be like Stieglitz and O’Keeffe.

  It was safer behind the viewfinder. He brought the camera up to his eye and peered at her. The flat gray light fell across her neck and chest and the curve of her shoulder, and there was the slightest shine on her lips. He could see the clouds behind her and the rooftops of the neighboring row houses and the green spires of the church, and he took a few shots and set down his camera, and she rose, and they stood facing each other like wrestlers about to compete. He staggered toward her, and she clutched him, and they shuffled through the narrow hallway, backward and forward and backward, circling, kissing, into her bedroom and onto her hard little bed. He could still remember how they clung to each other, as if during their lovemaking they’d been transported into another realm, free of gravity, with no beginning and no end.

  A few years later, when the Met had miraculously decided to do an exhibition of his portraits, the young curator Henry Cline chose her photograph as the starting point, declaring it a pivotal marker in his career, one that had ultimately secured his fate.

  He wonders if she’d even gone to see it. He tries to imagine her standing there, looking at herself. They had stumbled into a brief affair—it had surprised them both—and he’d left without so much as a goodbye.

  Again he studies the photograph. Her dark eyes seem to taunt him, as if she has caught him in the act of wanting her again.

  He hears the dogs barking.

  A chime sounds on his phone: I need to see you, she writes. Can we meet?

  Simone raps on the window, alarming him, and cries, Look what Rudy did!

  Rye looks up and sees Rudy at the window, wagging proudly, a dead rabbit in his mouth. Simone shakes her head and smiles, and he feels a sudden pressure in his chest, the love he has for her, and the guilt he endures for denying it. Guilty for all the things he has done to compromise their love, and for the thing he is about to do now.

  Of course, he types back. Where and when?

  Much later, he wakes on the couch. The room is dark now. He can hear the howling wind, and he can feel the cold air seeping through the windowpanes. His eyes are closed. He listens to the old house with its creaking floors as Simone comes and goes across the boards, picking up, putting down. She tiptoes in to check on him. He wants to be left alone. But she dotes on him. Covering him with an old quilt. Stoking the fire. Even the glorious smell of her cooking doesn’t cheer him. Maybe it’s the jet lag making him feel like this, as if there’s been a sort of death. But it’s not that, he knows. It’s her, Magda. Haunting him like a ghost.

  In the beginning, he’d been naive enough to believe his work could make a di
fference. That he could present a version of the truth, his own, that would stir something in people. Maybe even change the world, one photograph at a time. It didn’t take him long to figure out that truth was as various as light itself. It shifted and brightened depending on the circumstances. There was the man in the palace and the man in the cardboard box, and while they might have the same criteria for happiness—shelter, safety, a modicum of privacy—their realities couldn’t be further apart. The truth was fluid. The truth shall make you free, the Bible said. But if the truth was different for everyone, freedom was equally as elusive.

  His early pictures were pure, unedited. He missed that.

  People on the street, in bus stations and factories, on farms. You saw hope in their eyes, courage. You saw deliverance.

  He’d made his own money. But he’d been around money all his life. He was raised with a certain sensibility. His parents had been educated, adventurous, charitable. His father was a builder of bridges. He used to say that a bridge was an apt metaphor for life; you had to get from one side to the other, you had to conquer your fear of heights. You couldn’t depend on abstractions. You had to engineer your own destiny. You could trust the reliable logic of physics, the exclusive equation of design. His father sometimes took him to the site of a new bridge, where a hundred men were working. He’d witness the amassed collaborators, the survey crew, the engineers, the masons, and even at the age of seven or eight, he marveled at the scheme of metal that whipped across the water like the tail of a diplodocus, shimmering in the sunlight.

  They had a sprawling house in Marrakech, its paint white as sugar, with a tall front gate through which you could see mosaic floors and archways and numerous potted plants. His mother was famous for her parties. The rooms crowded with diplomats and entrepreneurs, artists, eccentrics. As a child, he’d wander below the eye level of the adults. He remembered the scent of clove cigarettes, the naked shoulders of the women, the air crammed with words, the charged momentum of a good story—and the sudden burst of laughter that followed.

  From the time he was a boy, his mother encouraged him to engage with strangers. As a result, he had no fear of people, which had served him well in his work. She’d send him out into the streets with his father, through the dust and clatter of the street vendors, his father’s gait hunched and labored as if his pockets were full of heavy stones. His first camera was an Olympus, a gift on his fourteenth birthday. Like some sudden preposterous deformity, it rarely left his hand. He photographed everything he saw: the rippling tents of the market, his mother’s Sphinx-like Weimaraners, the peacocks his father raised from birth. For high school, they sent him to boarding school in Massachusetts. It was like going back in time, the historic village, once a frontier settlement, the yellow leaves of autumn, the green fields; he came to respect history, the simple practical beauty of the buildings, the spiritual pull of nature. His years at Columbia were a blur of drugs and guilt and protest. The summer he graduated, he drove out west to Yosemite in a used VW bus, alone with his camera and his ambition, intent on finding the views Carleton Watkins had made famous in the 1860s, some of the most notable platinum prints of landscapes in existence. He’d wanted to do that: to make images that had the power to inspire and to change.

  He remembered that first morning at Yosemite, when he’d set out alone, trudging through the cold shadows up the trail to Glacier Point, eager to see with his own eyes the views Watkins had captured of Half Dome. It was a strenuous climb, and he could only imagine the difficulty Watkins must have had getting up to the point with all his equipment, including an 18 x 22 inch–plate camera that likely weighed a hundred pounds, which he’d had specially built for the expedition, not to mention the heavy glass plates he needed in order to make the exposures. When he reached the top, Rye discovered a much different plateau than Watkins had set his tripod on over a hundred years ago. Instead of raw land, there were a snack bar and restrooms and a platform built as a lookout. But it didn’t diminish the magnitude of the view, the triangular rock jutting into blue sky like the bow of an ark. Standing there alone, with all his senses fully engaged, he realized how small he was. How inferior to the splendor of nature.

  Instinct made you a good photographer. It was like the scent an animal followed. You followed the light, looking for your shot. There was something sacred in it. And you knew it when you saw it. It was just there. Waiting for you.

  You had to teach yourself how to see. How to see people and the lives they led.

  All that summer, he was alone, which was all right with him. He drove around in his van, taking pictures of the people he met. It was a kind of campaign, to set down his vision of the world. There were all kinds of people out on the road. Travelers. Families. Drifters. The drifters had the most beautiful names. They could have been anything else, but they chose this life. They chose to drift. Some wouldn’t tell him their names or where they’d come from or where they were going. Some of them didn’t know. They wanted to remain anonymous, that’s how they put it. That phrase had stayed with him a long time.

  Along the interstate he found cheap motels with big neon signs and soda machines, squat ten-room establishments where you could see the canyons reflected in the picture windows. The sunlight woke him in bed, a golden light on the white sheets, his naked hands. He shot the people getting into their cars or standing outside, marveling at the sunrise, the open plains, their windbreakers ruffling in the desert wind. Even in July it was cool at daybreak, the wind a shimmer of light. He remembered this one woman squinting in the brightness as she smoked her first cigarette, the red canyons in the distance, the pale green of her top.

  That summer he learned there was something intoxicating about transience, when you are in between, moving from one place to another, unscheduled, open to the day before you, open to the land, unafraid of the passing of time. The beauty of the land washes over you. It forgives you. It says: Start here. Begin.

  All that open space could change you. It had changed him.

  Some of those pictures were in his show at Brodsky. It occurs to him now that it was the night Simone and Magda had met.

  Who’s that girl?

  He told her Magda was a fellow student.

  She wants something from you, she said.

  What does she want?

  Simone shook her head, as if there would be no stopping her. Everything.

  Simone

  It used to be good here.

  They lived off a desolate road where no other houses were visible, only fields and trees. Their driveway ran a mile into obscurity. You came upon the house like something in a dream, an early Dutch Colonial, circa 1670, built of stones, with original twelve-over-twelve windows and dormers and a wooden roof. From upstairs you could see the creek and the grassy hill that ran down to it, and the orchard with its twisted black trees. Their home had a quiet beauty, the wide pine boards covered with Turkish kilims, the primitive antiques, the paintings by newer artists—large, bold canvases—and sculptures, a few of them significant, the metal one in the field that turned slowly in the wind, and the things they’d carried back from trips, artifacts of their life together. It’s what you did in a marriage—built a life—or at least collected evidence that you had one.

  They lived a secluded life. On occasion people from the city would make the trip to see them—Rye didn’t do house calls, as he called them—although they seldom came anymore. Even from the very beginning, he was a loner. She always made excuses for him—he was exhausted, jet-lagged, overscheduled. But in truth he wasn’t good at friendship. He wasn’t really interested in people, even though he spent the majority of his time photographing them with the invasive precision of a surgeon. She was the one to make the calls, to send the invitations, to organize the parties—this was back when they still had friends, when relationships were easier and a little reckless. They’d arrive in taxis from the train. Many were poets, a few actors. The rare photographer—most were too competitive, or too needy; those who could
tolerate Rye’s success were critics, academics. With their weekend bags at their feet, they’d stand looking up at the house. There is something about an old house that inspires reverence; it has withstood the vagaries of history—the regimes, the controversies, the brutal changes—and has endured, with its unyielding stature and design—the lath and plaster, walls thick as cinder blocks, the archways and floors, the windows—for centuries, a home that allows for beauty and light, a celebration of trees and open space, peace. They’d have dinner out in the garden at a long table laid with cloth, some block print from India, and ornate, mismatched china and unpolished silver, all from a consortium of dead relatives, and sit in half-broken chairs with failing cane seats, and in the glow of candlelight they drank wine retrieved from the damp cellar, good wines, the heavy green bottles powdered with dust, and smoked for the simple pleasure of smoking, and if they drank too much, which was often the case, they sang. They sang the songs of their youth, their voices lifting in unison to the sky, and sometimes someone or another would rise from his chair and recite one of the old poets that nobody read anymore, Yeats or Milton or Dickinson or maybe even Neruda, and they would discuss and argue and drink a bit more, then shuffle finally to their rooms and their waiting beds, their heads filled with the promise of new ideas, and fall asleep in the hours before sunrise, only to forget them by the next morning.

  They hadn’t had any guests out here for a couple years. Nobody seemed to have the time. She didn’t hear from people all that much anymore. It seemed to her a commentary on society. Nobody needed to go out. From the confines of your little world you could present the brightest colors of your existence, like an ad for the product you were selling, your very own happily-ever-after.