The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

by Rebecca Miller

  ‘I found a book,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, great,’ said Pippa.

  ‘A real cash cow,’ he said.

  ‘Since when do you say “cash cow”?’

  ‘I never found one before, so I never said it.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘War. Romance. Bad weather.’

  ‘Is it good?’

  ‘It’s a certain kind of good. It’s lowbrow for highbrows. Or highbrow for lowbrows. It’s perfect summer reading for people who own multimillion-dollar beach homes.’

  ‘That used to be us.’

  ‘Not us,’ he said.

  Pippa brought the glass into the kitchen. It was so strange, she thought. The closer Herb got to death, the more he thought about money.

  Grace

  Grace’s jolt into the rarefied world of reportage photographers was unforeseen by everyone in the family, especially Grace. In college, she majored in Spanish with a minor in photography. The summer after she graduated, Ben took off to backpack through Europe with his girlfriend, Stephanie, also a future lawyer. Though the twins had gone to different colleges, Grace had assumed that, when they both graduated, she and Ben would live together – at least for a summer, to recapture the gleeful conspiracy of their life at home. But Ben felt he ought to grow up, become a man, be sane, not frolic around with his sister. So off he went to Europe with Stephanie, that loyal hound. Grace knew that Ben loved Stephie for what she wasn’t (neurotic, blunt, alluring, hilarious) as much as for what she was (constant, sweet, accommodating yet intelligent – a sort of modern-day Olivia de Havilland in Gone with the Wind). In essence, she knew her brother had chosen a girl as unlike herself as possible.

  So, after graduation, uninterested in rooming with any of her college friends who were swarming into Brooklyn, Grace rented herself a one-bedroom apartment in Spanish Harlem with high, arched windows and mucus yellow linoleum on the floors, hoping to improve her Spanish and think about what to do next. She had enough money from her parents to avoid a job, for the summer anyway, if she lived frugally. She spent the first two weeks wandering around the neighborhood, picking through tag sale items laid out on the street: used communion dresses, worn paperbacks, the occasional comb – and eating rice and beans with fried plantains at the counter of her local restaurant while reading biographies of Lee Miller and Lawrence of Arabia. She furnished her apartment with two beanbag chairs (one maraschino red, one Fanta orange) and an ornate white wrought-iron bedstead. She didn’t talk much to anyone. She enjoyed this removal from her surroundings even as she was immersed in them. She felt mute and contented, loaded with potential, yet entirely unproductive.

  She came to know every nook and cranny of her block; the dusty windows of the Assembly of God meetinghouse on the second floor of number 1125, the musty used bookstore in the basement of 1130, the botanica on the corner, which advertised cures for lovesickness, homesickness, and ‘most ailments of the soul and body.’ The bodega on the corner of 120th Street was run by a puffy-eyed, garrulous Dominican man and his taciturn grandson, a melancholic who moped behind the counter, his haunted, dark eyes, wasted face, and pointed goatee making him look like a figure out of an El Greco painting. The same five old men sat on folding chairs outside the bodega every day watching pedestrians, making bets on everything from the racetrack to who was going to step on a particularly large crack in the sidewalk as they passed by. Young women and girls walked proudly down the street in tight clothes, glossy hair scraped back from their exhausted faces, pushing strollers with babies or toddlers lolling inside. The wizened, high-haired lady who ran the Laundromat stood outside smoking and chatting with her neighbors when she wasn’t folding sheets inside the picture window.

  Grace came to think of that stretch of pavement on Lexington between East 120th and East 122nd streets as a world of its own. Though some people on the block had come to recognize Grace and said hello when they passed her or when she walked into their shops, she still felt relatively invisible. She was not a part of the life of the block; she was an accepted observer. Looking at her, you couldn’t say she blended in, particularly. She had wild, blond hair that fell in angry ringlets around a pointed, intelligent face. Her body was tall, thin, and athletic, her breasts small and compact. Men always noticed her but rarely approached her; there was something mannish in her movements. From behind, with her slim hips and muscular shoulders, her relaxed posture, she could have been mistaken for a long-haired boy.

  One night late, a bottle shattered in the street and woke Grace up. A man called out in Spanish; another man answered. Their arguing voices echoed in the cavernous apartment. Grace walked barefoot across the linoleum, trying to make out what was being said. A young woman was pleading; she had tears in her voice. Grace stood inches away from the windowsill, so she could not be seen, and peered down into the street. The three protagonists of the fight were leaning against two cars parked a few yards away from each other. She recognized the El Greco grandson of the bodega owner. She had never seen him so animated. He was flailing his arms, gesturing, calling the other man, an older, stocky fellow with his feet planted very far apart, ‘a liar and a fool’ in Spanish. A slight girl of around fifteen, whom Grace had seen pushing her baby up and down the block, was hanging on to the grandson’s arm, trying to pull him away. Several onlookers had gathered in a semicircle to watch the proceedings.

  Grace stood transfixed by this dangerous and real drama unfolding below, as though in a box at the theater. For a long time, the two men were in a stalemate, the El Greco grandson shrieking hysterically at the thickset stranger, the girl alternately trying to calm him down and yelling at him to shut up, the stranger walking up to the pair menacingly, then returning to the hood of his car, only to be pelted with a new round of insults from the El Greco grandson. In spite of this posturing, the stranger didn’t seem very committed to the argument; he even looked around him a few times, as if for a more comfortable seat. But finally, the grandson said something that got his goat. Grace didn’t catch the meaning, but whatever it was, it was the last straw. The stranger charged the grandson, flinging the girl aside like a doll, and laid the boy flat with one punch. Then he walked away, shaking his head. A few people gathered around the grandson, who sat up slowly and, shaking off their solicitude, limped away in the opposite direction.

  The next morning Grace woke up thinking about the Minolta her parents had given her for graduation. She took the camera out of its case and loaded it with film. That was the morning she began to photograph in earnest. She spent the next two months documenting every waking hour of her block. The people already knew her, so they tolerated her lens poking at them, even invited her into their apartments occasionally. She photographed everything, everyone she could – the Assembly of God Sunday service, the affable bodega owner, the El Greco grandson, the old men sitting outside the bodega, the Laundromat lady. She built her portfolio up image by image, photographing day and night as if pursued. The resulting stack of pictures showed obsessive commitment and a sharp eye. She got an appointment with the editor of the Hartford Courant, a paper she had heard was open to hiring young photographers. They took her on. She spent the fall and winter chasing fire trucks and photographing orange tape stretched around suburban houses where murders had occurred; by the following summer, she was on a plane bound for Louisiana to cover Hurricane Katrina for the Courant with a senior colleague. She slept just a few hours a night for the entire two weeks; there wasn’t a moment of that tragedy she wanted to miss. The trip was oddly blessed for her; images of horror and hopelessness spiked with humor seemed to cohere inside her lens again and again. She couldn’t seem to help being at the right place at the right time. The pictures she brought back were surreal: three children wearing rubber Halloween masks of George Washington, Elvis Presley, and Chucky discover the corpse of an aged man in an alley; a shivering dog stands perched on an island of garbage, surrounded by floating dolls; a big woman dances around in the remains of her decimated livin
g room, wallpaper hanging from the walls like shreds of skin. Grace returned to the Courant a star. Within two years she was on the staff of Getty Images, touching down in Kabul.

  Grace was perplexed by what seemed to others to be talent yet felt to her like something else. Her luck was uncanny to her. It was as though she herself was creating the images, dreaming them onto the emulsion. It was, perhaps, the way she was able to forget herself, to disappear, to become transparent when she photographed, that made it so hard for her to take credit for her own work. Sometimes, she was swallowed up by the experience so completely that she could not remember having taken the pictures at all. Yet she had, of course, and anything paranormal about her new chosen profession was, she knew, adolescent hokum she would never have shared with a soul, except her twin, whom she treated with the brutal frankness, the mocking acuity she reserved for her own internal life.

  Ben was, for Grace, an extension of her self. Some of what she was doing by working so hard, she knew, or rather saw dimly in some back room of her mind like a mouse one perceives scurrying along a wall out of the corner of one’s eye, was getting away from Ben by surpassing him. Their relationship was absolutely perfect. It was so perfect, in fact, that Grace needed no one else. She had not, as the psychotherapist she saw for a few months in college, Dr Sarah Kreutzfeldt, put it, ‘individuated completely.’ Grace’s chief complaint, when she first availed herself of the University Health Services, was that she couldn’t fall in love. She thought there must be something wrong with her. There had been one obvious opportunity: an intelligent, interesting, funny boy with sparkling eyes and a caved-in, question mark-shaped torso. She kept teetering on the brink of love with him, and even spent blissful hours in the zone of extreme fondness. But all it took was one flabby joke, a botched allusion, a moment of strained sincerity, and she felt a leaden seal forming in her gut, cutting her off from the suddenly former object of her affection as swiftly as a pair of scissors severing two sausage links. Back to square one.

  She blamed Ben for it all – smart, funny, endearing, infuriating Ben. No one would ever make her laugh so much; no one could peer at the world with the same good-natured, even loving derision. After a couple of weeks of looking at this same observation from different angles, her sessions with Dr Kreutzfeldt were drying up. Grace was embarrassed by the triviality of her problem. She chided herself for even initiating the therapy, but now she felt obliged to keep it up. She began to resent Dr Kreutzfeldt. She became sullen and uncommunicative during the sessions, staring out the window at the students walking from the library to the dorms, the dorms to the math building.

  This behavior piqued Sarah Kreutzfeldt’s interest. She had always sensed some subterranean explosion in the girl, a mine going off so far inside her that even she was unaware of it. When Grace first stomped into her office, she was surprised. This girl did not seem like Larken material. A very small university, Larken catered to the privileged painters, writers, critics, poets, and performance artists of the future. The teaching was not so much rigorous as expansive, the teachers stretching their courses to the point of deformity in order to encompass the whimsy of the students. Terms like participatory and student-centered took top billing in the school brochure. Most of the students had a vague, haunted look, like possums disturbed from their burrows in the middle of the day. They walked through campus slowly, in a haze of half-digested ideas, each convinced of his or her own inherent flair. By contrast, Grace had a sharp, intense countenance. Her eyes were very focused; her walk was a march. She seemed hyperawake.

  Dr Kreutzfeldt knew there was something besides her twin at work in this girl’s psyche. She wasn’t sick; she was stuck. There was some knot in her that needed to be loosened. Not sure where to begin, Dr Kreutzfeldt started with the obvious: the parents. Grace shrugged and spoke of Herb with affection, Pippa with a mix of regret and disdain. This mother was clearly a doormat, Dr Kreutzfeldt thought, internally shaking her head. She never would understand some women. The kids grow up, and then what? Yet she sensed strong emotion in Grace when she talked about her mother. Her cheeks flushed, she looked away. Kreutzfeldt sensed an emotional morass obscured by irony cool as a blanket of metal filings. Something had happened with the mother.

  Over the weeks, gently, shifting her weight slightly in her armchair, her attractive, full face tilted slightly as she spoke, Dr Kreutzfeldt guided Grace back, again and again, to what she saw as a kind of crossroads of character. For the first few years of her life, Grace had been extremely close to her mother. She remembered screaming when Pippa went out to dinner, craving her smell, her embrace, treasuring the time they spent together playing on the beach or just staring out the window. Yet by the time Grace was eight or nine, a vast, arid divide had opened up between them. Dr Kreutzfeldt kept returning to the period she had come to refer to as ‘the turning point’ in Grace’s relationship with her mother, hoping that some illuminating memory would spring from the girl’s mind. But there was nothing. And then one day, out of nowhere it seemed, after a long silence, Grace looked out the window and said softly, ‘I don’t think my mother likes me very much.’

  Dr Kreutzfeldt was taken aback. ‘But she seems to be almost slavishly devoted to you,’ she said.

  ‘She is,’ said Grace. ‘But there’s a part of her that she always held back. Not with Ben. Just with me.’

  ‘And you are angry with her for rejecting you,’ offered Dr Kreutzfeldt.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Grace with a slight sneer. And then, turning, half-laughing, she said in her mocking tone, ‘Am I cured now?’

  *

  Pippa stared out the window of Herb’s Mercedes and thought about Grace. It had been three months since she’d been to see them, before her trip to Afghanistan, her second in a year. Pippa had butterflies in her stomach. She always did, these days, when she was going to see her daughter. Seeing Ben was like putting on your favorite old pair of jeans. Seeing Grace was like … like bumping into someone you had a crush on. No, Pippa thought, that can’t be it. And yet it was, a little.

  Herb had chosen the Gotham Bar and Grill so he could have a decent meal. The kids had loved to go there around Christmas when they were little. It was absurdly expensive, but there was something reassuring about the heavy cloth on the tables, the superfluous busboys, the quiet conversations, the fine silk and wool of the customers’ suits. It felt like going back in time. Herb and Pippa were early, as they always were, and Pippa was teasingly trying to distance the bread basket from Herb’s big hands. She saw Grace through the window as she approached. She had cut her wild blond hair short. It looked like underbrush. Her nose looked sharper somehow, a little beakish, Pippa thought, as Grace shoved the heavy door open with too much force, walked up the steps, and stood raking the room with her cool gaze. Pippa waved at her, and Grace approached with long strides, unwinding a scarlet silk scarf from around her neck. Herb stood up and hugged Grace hard. Grace then leaned across the table and brushed Pippa’s cheek with her lips.

  ‘Am I late?’ she asked.

  ‘I had time to eat all the bread,’ said Herb.

  ‘Your hair looks wonderful,’ said Pippa.

  ‘Thanks,’ Grace said, running her hand through the light blond mop.

  ‘So. Tell us,’ said Herb.

  ‘Oh, Dad, give me a second. Ben said to start without him. He’s stuck in the library. He’ll be here as soon as he can.’

  ‘It must be that paper,’ said Herb.

  ‘Yes. That paper,’ said Grace, making loving fun of her brother. ‘Can I have lamb chops, please? I’m starving.’ They ordered for themselves and for Ben, then Grace put her portfolio on the table.

  ‘These are just work prints, but anyway it gives you an idea …’ She set the pile of photographs in front of Herb. Pippa had to look at them upside down. As Herb finished examining each picture, he slid it over to her. In one, a little boy bent over another, prone child, as if protecting her, his face pinched with fright. In another, a man pushed a bicycle
, his large, dark, haunted eyes staring into the camera. The front wall of the house behind him had been entirely torn off; on the second floor, a bed, chair, and mirror were arranged like a stage set, open to the world.

  ‘Were you alone when you took these?’ Pippa asked. She could feel Grace bristle.

  ‘No, I hitched a ride with Giles Oppenheim.’ Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Oppenheim was a legend among war photographers.

  ‘How did you manage that?’ asked Herb.

  ‘It’s pretty common, people look out for each other there.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got courage, we know that much,’ said Herb. He was nearly exploding with pride, and Grace knew it.

  ‘These are the best yet,’ said Pippa.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Grace, little red spots appearing on her pale cheeks.

  Ben arrived, pleased to have his lunch laid out for him. ‘Has she told you about the bomb?’ he asked, pleasantly.

  ‘Ben,’ said Grace.

  ‘What bomb?’ asked Pippa.

  ‘She was with that Oppenheim fellow, and the translator, and they heard a bomb go off down the street, and Oppenheim tried to drag her left, but she ran down an alley to the right, and he and the translator followed her, and a van exploded right where he was trying to take her; if they had gone left they would have been pulverized. So now she thinks it’s destiny.’

  Ben was lighthearted in his delivery, but he was furious with his sister, who was becoming, he felt, dangerously, arrogantly brave. Herb and Pippa just sat there, taking in the story. Pippa felt sweat coming up on her brow, a wave of nausea.

  Grace looked at Ben, her face set. ‘Can’t you ever just not say something?’

  ‘Well, it seemed kind of important,’ said Ben.

  ‘Just use your common sense,’ said Herb quietly. ‘That’s all I ask.’ Then, turning to Ben: ‘So when are you going to let me read this famous paper?’ Ben began to talk about his course work. Grace listened to their conversation in a distanced way, her chin resting on her fist, and Pippa observed her daughter. In spite of the camaraderie Grace seemed to have with her colleagues in the field, Pippa sensed a growing remoteness in her that she found alarming. It seemed to be harder and harder for Grace to return from her photographic odysseys. She was entering other, mirror worlds so violent and intense that the West must seem cold, trivial, and meaningless in comparison. Grace was sealed inside her own experiences, unable to relay what she had seen and felt; the photographs bore mute witness to stories Pippa would have loved to hear every detail of, but she didn’t dare ask for fear of the silent rebuff she knew she’d get from her daughter in return for meddling. And to think – such a short time ago, Grace had been a little girl! Within this severe young woman, Pippa could discern, flashing in and out like an image in a hologram, Grace’s former, child selves. It was so lonely, knowing things about her children that they no longer remembered. Layers of experience eroded from their minds but petrified in her own. As often happened when she saw Grace, Pippa remembered a day which, she had come to believe, had changed her daughter’s life.