The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  An instructor at Pratt had once quoted Balzac to her: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” In her heart, she knew that behind every good picture she’d taken there was an invasion. Certainly she should’ve asked their permission. Usually, she would have. In the rest of her life, she tried to be a decent, sensitive person. But damn, that was going to be a good shot. She could already see where it would hang in her show in the spring. Maybe a little Walker Evans in the composition, but it told its own story. It said, This is what it’s about. It said, You go until you can’t take it anymore, and then you keep going. It said, You walk over mountains, hang over the sides of boats, crawl across the desert with your kidneys shriveling up like chestnuts, and have yourself sewn into the upholstery of vans smuggling you across the border because that’s what a man does. He endures. He persists. So here they were, still hustling, still squeezing one another’s arms for encouragement and trying to scrape together a few crumpled dollars to send home.

  All right, fine. She’d ask their permission so her conscience could take five and stop bothering her. She stepped down off the crate and hoisted the canvas camera bag up onto her shoulder. Two cameras dangled from straps around her neck, the old Leica M6 and the beloved Canon. She was a small woman with a lithe gamine body, delicate wrists, and slender ankles, but she’d gotten used to lugging heavy pieces of equipment long ago. Nowadays, she was traveling lighter, stuffing her black-and-white cartridges into the pockets of her red barn jacket.

  She moved out from behind the Dumpster and started up the block, feeling the full warmth of the autumn sun on her face. “Hola!” she called out, flicking long straight raven-black hair over her shoulder.

  The Aztec warrior with the Beatle mop stared down the block at her, moving his eyes from her face down to her camera and then back up again. It was always interesting to see what her subjects would react to first—the woman or the camera.

  “Que pasa?” She drew closer, trying to look small and nonthreatening.

  A few of the men regarded her curiously. Others slipped right to the back of the crowd, clearly not wanting the immigration authorities to see their photographs.

  “You make a nice picture today?” The Aztec mop top smiled knowingly.

  “Oh, you saw me?” She fiddled with the f-stop in embarrassment.

  “I see you out here before. Why you want to take our picture?”

  At close range, he had a young man’s face with an older man’s experience imprinted on it. A short brow, an Indian nose, Eskimo eyes with fine lines fanning out around them, windburned cheeks. A good photographic subject. Especially with the incongruous “Vassar” printed across the front of his sweatshirt.

  “Perdón,” she said. “Mi español es muy patético.”

  “Is okay. I know English very good.”

  “I’m a professional photographer.” She glanced down at the Leica, making sure its lens cap was off as well. “My name’s Lynn Schulman.”

  “Jorge.” He stopped and corrected himself. “George.”

  He offered his hand with a polite little bow. She saw agitation spreading among the men behind him as the sun cleared the rooftops and the possibility of finding work faded.

  “Where you from?” she asked.

  “Guatemala.”

  “Well, George from Guatemala, I’m doing sort of a special project,” she said. “I’m just going around town, taking pictures of different scenes.”

  His chin drew back into the rest of his face as he struggled to understand her. It seemed so self-indulgent to explain that she was putting together a gallery retrospective, featuring pictures of her hometown then and now.

  “See, I’m from Riverside,” she said. “This is my hometown. I was born here.”

  “Ah.” He seemed to be looking at her through a smudged bulletproof partition.

  “The textile factory where my grandfather used to work was right here. I used to ride past it on my bike all the time …”

  Just keep talking. Find a way to connect. She’d long ago realized that her greatest gift as a photographer was her own responsiveness, the way people liked to see themselves in her eyes.

  “See, I took all these photographs when I was a young girl growing up here,” she said. “And now I’ve moved back, so I want to take a whole new series. To show the passing of time …”

  She sensed that she was losing him. A boy of about seventeen, with almond eyes and ebony hair as long and straight as hers, came over and started striking beefcake poses, showing off big brown muscles in an American-flag T-shirt with the sleeves slashed off. She left her cameras dangling around her neck.

  “You know, if you don’t catch these things, they’re gone forever.” She stayed after him, riffing for all she was worth. “I mean, people forget, or their memories play tricks on them. A picture is at least something you can hold on to. Comprende?”

  George turned his eyes into sideways dime slots, trying to find a reason to go along with her.

  “I mean, I took this picture a few years ago of my kids on the World Trade Center observation deck, when they were about eleven and seven. And now that’s all I have left. Of them as little kids and the towers.”

  “Oh.” He rubbed the end of his nose and looked around shyly, gradually lowering the partition. “You know, I have a friend who works in this big building when it come down,” he said quietly.

  “Yeah?”

  “He works in a restaurant at the top and …” He spread his hands, seeing no reason to explain.

  “He was working in the kitchen at Windows on the World?”

  She remembered going out to dinner there with Barry about twenty months ago when Ross Olson first offered him the job at Retrogenesis.

  He moved a little closer to her. “He never have no papers.”

  “You’re telling me he’s buried under all that rubble, and no one knows he’s there?”

  “Jes.”

  “Oh, how awful.” She pawed the air between them uselessly. It was like a cruel cosmic joke: let a man make it across thousands of miles of roiling seas and burning sand, let him struggle and make it to the pinnacle of one of the tallest buildings in the world, and then bring it all crashing down on top of him.

  “Doesn’t he have a family back home that wants to find him?” she asked.

  He turned his palms up and stooped his shoulders. “Qué más da!”

  What’s the difference? She fingered the auto focus, not knowing how to respond. These were guys who probably went for years without seeing their families. They knew plenty about the nature of impermanence before the Towers came down.

  “So, okay, maybe you make a nice picture of me.” He suddenly straightened up.

  The abrupt shift caught her off guard. She watched him smooth down his hair, fold his arms across his chest, and stare defiantly right into her camera. And then she understood. His friend was dead, but he wasn’t. So now he was demanding to have the indisputable fact of his existence recorded, to make sure no one would ever forget.

  “Maybe you make another picture so I can send it home to my family,” he said.

  “Good deal.” She nodded, getting the camera ready and making sure she had enough film to shoot at least a full roll with him.

  “And then maybe you take a picture of me working at your house.” A sly grin appeared. “You have a lawn?”

  “Oh, I see how this works.”

  She took out her Minolta light meter and tried to get a good reading, vaguely aware of a traffic cop blowing a whistle somewhere behind her.

  “Okay. Please don’t look right at the camera when I take your picture.”

  She started to change the lens on the Leica to a thirty-five, noticing that morning light was beginning to refract on the windows of Starbucks. She crouched down, wondering if it would be too corny to shoot from the exact same angle she used on the dilapidated exterior of her grandfather’s factory twenty-five years ago so she could juxtapose the images on the gallery wall.

 
But then George was gone, and there was a whirlwind of movement outside the frame. She looked around to see several men scattering down the street like billiard balls, chased by a cop on a bicycle. A second cop followed, looking very much like an overgrown boy in a shiny plastic helmet, snug blue Lycra shorts, and a short-sleeved uniform shirt. He quickly rode ahead and cut off George and the other stragglers, using his bike as a roadblock. Lynn stayed in her crouch, clicking off shot after shot as if she was still working for the Daily News.

  “Hey, hey,” the cop called over to her. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  She kept shooting, finding it difficult to take orders seriously from a man in tight shorts and white socks.

  “Excuse me, miss. Will you please put that camera down?” She got a shot of him dismounting, hairy white-guy legs against a background of gleaming silver spokes.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, finally lowering the camera.

  “We need to talk to some of these gentlemen.”

  She saw George mutter something to the boy in the American-flag muscle shirt.

  “Is this some kind of INS roundup?”

  “No,” said the cop, whom she recognized as the same guy who checked her ID at the Total Fitness Gym on South Warren Avenue three afternoons a week. “They may have some information that could be helpful to us in an investigation.”

  “Oh.”

  She saw a white van with tinted windows rush past the corner on its way to the train station, and her heart did a little stutter as she registered the fact that it said “Office of the Westchester County Medical Examiner” on the side.

  “What happened?” she asked the cop. “Did somebody have a heart attack or something?”

  “Uhhhh, ma’am, we’re really not supposed to be giving out information like that.”

  She walked to the corner and looked down the block, seeing a couple of ME’s assistants in navy windbreakers jump out of the van by the station’s parking lot entrance.

  “Well, it looks like something is going on.”

  She started jogging toward the station, drawn on by the sight of the men throwing open the back of the van and readying it for a body, feeling the ineluctable pull of an image forming down the street.

  “Miss, they really don’t want people getting in the way,” the cop called after her. “Miss?”

  “Okay. Thank you! Bye!”

  She gave George a quick wave over her shoulder as she hurried on with her camera bag, knowing if she waited too long the picture would be gone. “Que le vaya bien.”

  All right, so this is life. No matter how minutely you plan, the shadow always moves. The light always shifts. The face always changes expression a quarter-second before you click the shutter.

  The cameras thumped against her chest as she ran across the street to the station. She used to be better at these little bursts of change. Okay, so she hadn’t meant to get pregnant at twenty-five, when her career as a photographer was just taking off and she was about to make the long leap from splash-and-splatters in the Daily News to a contract with the New York Times Magazine. Fine, she’d scaled back to occasional catalog work and freelance quickies so she could be with Hannah and then Clay and not have to endure the painful separations that torture other working moms. All right, once they got older, she’d meant to start hustling jobs again, but then things got complicated. So you learn to improvise and compromise. You move to the suburbs because it’s better to be close to Mom when she’s sick and cheaper than paying for private schools in the city. You learn to go with the flow, budget ambition, work when you can, and stop on a dime when somebody needs a ride to the doctor or to piano lessons.

  But just in the last two weeks, she’d lost some of that elasticity. As soon as she saw the buildings collapse, she froze, not daring to move from the phone until Barry called to say he was all right. Even now, she found herself tensing up for no good reason and wanting time to stand still. No, not just stand still. She wanted it to go backward. She wanted Mr. DiGamba’s dry cleaning back on the corner of River and Prospect. She wanted the old bowling alley back around the corner, where the new police station had taken its place. She wanted the high school teachers she sometimes ran into at the mall to be the age they were when she was a sophomore.

  She passed another young cop directing traffic in front of the train station, ignoring his calls for her to stop. When did they start hiring people who weren’t even born when “My Sharona” was a hit?

  Two burly ME’s assistants were just coming down the steps from the platform, carrying a stretcher with a white sheet belted over the unmistakable shape of a body.

  She froze just outside the parking lot entrance. The outline under the sheet was too short for a full-grown adult. Not Barry or any of their friends who take the train. But then her hand went up to her throat, and she found herself praying that it wasn’t a dead child.

  “Hey, lady, no pictures.”

  A brutish commanding voice snapped her to attention. She looked around, seeing rows of Explorers and Navigators with parking permits and flags in the windows, shiny expensive machines with no one to operate them.

  “I said get the fuck outa here.” A glowering man in a yellow sports shirt was coming down the steps after the body, a gold detective’s shield twisting and untwisting on a chain around his neck. “There’s no press allowed.”

  “I’m not press.” She put a hand over her Canon. “And I wasn’t taking any pictures.”

  “Oh, shit, what are you doing here?”

  Something in Michael Fallon’s face seemed to draw back, gather force, and then come out again. Lynn found herself stepping away a little, as if she were too close to a swinging door.

  The last real conversation they’d had was probably twenty-five years ago. She was caught between relief at seeing him up close after months of ducking behind cars in the Stop & Shop parking lot and dread at hearing what he finally had to say.

  Time had been more than fair to him. The short military buzz cut that looked so jarring and defiant in the seventies was actually fashionable these days. His face had lost some of the roundness that led boys to call him Baby Huey behind his back. Instead, there were more of the contours that made some girls privately admit that yes, the man certainly had his angles. But the wary blue eyes had receded even deeper under the ridge of his brow. Hobo eyes, she used to think. Like he was watching life from inside a boxcar.

  “I was just taking pictures of the guys around the corner, and I came over when I saw all this commotion.” She looked back down the block, wondering what had become of George and the other day laborers. “So, what’s going on?”

  “Ah, bunch of crap,” he said, settling into a voice a half-octave deeper than she remembered. “We think somebody might have fallen off a boat and drowned around here. Just our luck she washed up onto the bank.”

  “Getting kind of late in the year to be boating, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s been warm. I still haven’t pulled my dinghy out of the water.”

  They both watched as the men carefully started to load the stretcher into the back of the van.

  “So this is something, running into you like this.”

  “Isn’t it?” he said lightly, as if it had only been two weeks.

  “I’d heard you’d moved to Arizona a few years ago.”

  “Yeah, I tried highway patrol in Scottsdale, but I never really took to it. Hard to get used to the desert after you grow up next to the river. Big fish in a small pond, that’s what I like.”

  “Sure.” She started to fuss with her lens and then stopped herself.

  “So how you been? When did you get back?”

  “It’s been—what?—about a year and a half.” She hesitated, not quite believing that he didn’t know already. “We’d been in San Francisco for a while with my husband’s work. And then my mother’s MS flared up again, so we started spending more and more time back here until finally we just decided to stay because we found a hou
se we liked.”

  “Well, you know what they say about Riverside: ‘Once you drink the water, you can never really leave.’”

  He looked at her without speaking for a few seconds, just enough to remind her of their old staring contests.

  “How is your mother anyway?”

  “She died just after Christmas. Her heart.” She nodded to Harold Baltimore, who was walking by, talking on his cell phone. “I’m surprised you didn’t know. The chief handled all the funeral arrangements.”

  “No one tells me anything. I would’ve sent you a Mass card or something.”

  He raised his eyebrows, and two deep lines crossed the wide desert expanse of his forehead. Like Barry, he was a big man. That was what had first attracted her. Large hands, big chest, broad shoulders, strong legs. She used to joke with her friends that Michelangelo looked at a block of marble and saw David, but she looked at Michael Fallon and saw a block of marble. It was hard to believe she’d once felt so small, safe, and protected next to him.

  “I was sorry to hear about your brother too,” she said. “I should’ve tried to get in touch myself.”

  “I’m sure you had a lot going on.”

  That little extra bit of tension slid under the surface like a snake going under a rug. Was she supplying all the awkwardness here or was he helping? After all these years, it was hard to tell where one thing ended and another began.

  “So, what’s up with you?” he said. “I see you’re still taking pictures.”

  He curled his lip slightly at the Leica and the Canon hanging between her breasts.

  “Yeah, I’m just starting to take it up seriously again.” She touched the cameras self-consciously. “I’ve been on the Mommy Track awhile.”

  “Hmmm.” He grunted as men carefully guided the body into the back of the van.

  They moved with accelerated somber efficiency, squatting and changing positions with pinched expressions, as though they were working in a snowstorm. They were doing things a little too quickly to be handling a mere drowning victim, Lynn noticed. She thought of raising the Canon to get a couple of quick shots, but realized that given her history with Michael, he would take it as an intolerable provocation.