“Not at all. You made us feel welcome. I’d enjoy repaying the favor. If you turn this way . . . yes . . . with the sunset on your face . . .” Coltrane smiled. “It’ll be lovely.”
6
S HE ’ S DYING ,” Coltrane said, driving from the mansion.
“Something’s definitely wrong,” Jennifer said.
In his rearview mirror, Coltrane saw Diane standing in her driveway, her arms crossed on her oversized sweater, forlornly watching them head back toward Benedict Canyon Drive. Then he rounded a corner, and she disappeared.
“Studying her through the camera made it even more obvious,” Coltrane said. “The hollows around her eyes. I don’t think she has any hair under that kerchief. I think she’s bald from chemotherapy. I think getting married on Saturday is her attempt to grab at life.”
Jennifer didn’t say anything for a moment. “Yes. To grab at life.”
It was after dark, around six, when they pulled into the garage beneath Coltrane’s town house in Westwood. Jennifer’s BMW was at the curb.
“Do you want to get something to eat?” she asked.
“What I’d really like to do is go into the darkroom and develop these negatives.”
The photographs of Falcon Lair turned out to be excellent. Most were a close match to the angle Packard had used, but close wouldn’t do it. For the exercise to work, the match had to be perfect. The one with the helicopter in place of the falcon did the trick. All Coltrane had to do was crop it a little and print a slight enlargement of the cropped area so that Falcon Lair was precisely the same size in both photos. Eerily, the helicopter was almost exactly where the falcon had been. By modifying the development period, Coltrane was able to get the same crisp black-and-white definition that Packard had. When he glanced from Packard’s photo to his own, he had the odd sensation that he was looking at time-lapse photography, that both pictures had been taken by the same person, who had made himself wait motionless in one spot for two-thirds of a century. Staring at that relic from the past, he couldn’t help recalling that after Valentino’s death, Buster Keaton had moved into the area and put up an Italian villa. John Gilbert had built a Mediterranean palace. Other movie stars—their names no longer familiar—had built their own mansions. All lost and gone. Only Falcon Lair remained. And would remain as long as Packard’s photo and his own survived.
“It’s a keeper.” Jennifer put an arm around him.
But the photograph of Falcon Lair wasn’t the treasure of the day. That honor went to the image of Diane.
He had done it in color. The glow of sunset chased the wanness from Diane’s cheeks. Her face was raised yearningly, her recessed eyes sad, her gaunt features determined, her frail shoulders braced as she smiled wistfully toward the sunset of her life.
“That I want my name on,” Coltrane said. “Her bravery’s an inspiration.”
“Packard would have been pleased to take that picture,” Jennifer said.
While they worked in the darkroom, they heard the phone ring on three different occasions. Each time, it stopped after four rings, the limit Coltrane had set for the answering machine to engage. “It’s probably more reporters wanting an interview about those war-atrocity photos. I hope my fifteen minutes of notoriety soon stop,” he said.
But after he finished making the prints and went to the living room to press the play button on his answering machine, he frowned when all he heard was mournful classical music.
Jennifer stopped next to him. “The same as on Saturday night?”
Coltrane nodded, troubled. “And this time, we know it wasn’t Packard.”
7
R EPRESSING HIS MISGIVINGS ABOUT THE PHONE CALLS , Coltrane left his apartment the next morning shortly after seven. He brimmed with energy, never having been this enthusiastic about any project. First, a few blocks away, he stopped at a mailbox to drop in an envelope addressed to Diane. Along with three copies of her photograph, the package contained a copy of Packard’s Falcon Lair photograph and Coltrane’s parallel version of it. His note read, “Here are some mementos of our photographic adventure. Enjoy your honeymoon. I wish you every happiness.” He watched the lid close on the mailbox. To grab at life, he thought.
With that, he went to work.
There was a time, he knew, when pepper trees had grown on Hollywood Boulevard, when Beverly Hills had bridle paths, when streetcar tracks occupied the route that freeways now did, when Sherman Oaks, North Hollywood, Burbank, Tarzana, Encino, Van Nuys, and all the other communities in the San Fernando Valley (how Coltrane loved the litany of their names) were distinct villages separated by farmland. Each had a different architecture, English-style cottages in one contrasting with mission-style bungalows in another, Victorians in this area, colonials in that. The distinctness of each area was destroyed as the farmland shrank and the communities merged, although sometimes, driving from community to community, if Coltrane ignored where the borders met and concentrated only on the historical core of each area, he could still see the contrast between one community and another.
Randolph Packard had managed to capture those differences. He recorded a sense of welcoming space, of sun-bathed separateness. As always in his photographs, a detail here and there predicted the impending doom—the tiny figures of surveyors on a field in the background, for example, or a half-completed skeleton of a building on a distant hill. Coltrane brooded about those changes as he took the 405 into the smog-filled valley. He imagined what it must have been like in Packard’s youth to have a clear view of the now-haze-shrouded San Gabriel Mountains. As he followed Packard’s route, trying to see with Packard’s eyes, he had the sensation of going back in time.
8
T HE TRAILER COURT WAS IN G LENDALE —drab rows of dilapidated mobile homes, overflowing Dumpster bins at the end of each row, gravel in front of each trailer, no grass anywhere, no trees, just a few flower boxes here and there, spindly marigolds and geraniums drooping over their rims. Coltrane drove down to the third row and turned left, passing an elderly man wearing suspenders over a T-shirt and carrying a basket of laundry toward a clothesline at the side of his trailer.
Halfway along, Coltrane reached a small playground, stopped the car, got out, and approached the playground’s rusted waist-high chain-link fence. The swings and the teeter-totter were tarnished and unpainted. The ground was like concrete. A thin black woman pushed a young boy in a swing. The woman’s dark hair hung in half a dozen braids. She wore sandals, wrinkled shorts, and a red pullover, which, although faded, was the only bright spot in the trailer court. As the boy stretched his legs to give more force to his upward momentum, the soles of his running shoes were visible—and their holes.
The woman narrowed her eyes toward Coltrane, then returned her attention to the boy.
“Hi,” Coltrane said.
She didn’t answer.
“I used to live here,” he said.
The woman stayed silent.
“Every once in a while, when I’m in the neighborhood, I come back.”
The woman shrugged.
“My mother used to push me in those swings,” Coltrane said.
“You want something?”
“I’d like to take your picture.”
“Why?” The woman tensed.
“Somebody once took a picture of me and my mother exactly where you’re standing. I’d like to feel what the photographer felt. I’d like to try to take the same picture.”
The woman looked baffled.
“Go back to what you were doing. I won’t bother you. I’ll just take one picture and leave.”
The woman’s gaze faltered as she struggled with her suspicion. At last, after another shrug, she returned her attention to the boy and started pushing him again.
Coltrane selected a fast shutter speed to avoid blur, then peered through his viewfinder. Knowing that Packard’s camera was too awkward for this situation, he was using his Nikon. Through the viewfinder, in miniature but somehow intensified, the woma
n pushed. The boy went up in the air, then swung back down. The woman gave another push, her body leaning into the motion. The boy looked up, as if his goal were the sky. As he veered back down, Coltrane adjusted the focus. He readied his finger on the shutter button. There wasn’t any question about the position he wanted them to be in. He had studied that position thousands of times in the photograph that had made him want to be a photographer.
In Sightings, a book that Packard had written about photography, the master had devoted a chapter to his theory of anticipation.
Once you see the elements of the image you want, it’s too late to release the camera’s shutter. By the time you do, those elements will have changed. In that instant, clouds will have shifted, smiles will have weakened, branches will have been nudged by a breeze. It is the nature of life for things to be in motion, even if they do not appear to be, and the only way to capture the precise positioning of your subject as you desire it is to study your subject until you understand its dynamic—and then to anticipate what your subject will do. The photographer’s task is to project into the future in order to make the present timeless.
Do it now, Coltrane thought. He pressed the shutter button, and in the ensuing millisecond, as the camera clicked, the woman and the boy achieved perfect balance. Through the viewfinder, time seemed suspended. Coltrane sighed and lowered the camera. The boy reached the limit of his upward glide, hovered, and began to descend. Time began again.
“Thanks,” Coltrane said. “What’s your name and address? I’ll send you a couple of prints.”
“Do I look that stupid? You think I’m gonna tell you my name and address?”
Coltrane’s spirit sank.
He turned from the playground and studied the trailer behind him. The three concrete steps to its entrance were cracked. The screen had been torn from the bent aluminum door. One of the windows had cardboard in it.
He crossed the gravel lane. The bent door creaked when he opened it. The metal door behind it shuddered when he knocked. He waited, not hearing any sound. He knocked a second time but still didn’t get a response. When he knocked a third time, he started to worry, only to see the door open and a stooped, wrinkled black woman with short silver hair frown out at him.
“You.” The woman clutched a tattered housecoat to her chest. “Where you been? Ain’t seen you in a couple of months.”
“I was away on several business trips—out of the country.”
“Got to thinkin’ somethin’ had happened to you.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, it did. Is this a convenient time?”
“The same as before?”
“Yes.”
“Get it over with.”
Entering, Coltrane smelled ancient cooking odors. He faced an oblong living room filled with tattered furniture. To the left, a fold-down card table had a jigsaw puzzle on it. Farther to the left, a counter separated the living room from the murky kitchen.
It seemed barely yesterday that he and his mother had stood where he now stood, the door open behind him, sunlight gleaming in, when his father had turned from playing solitaire at the kitchen counter and raised the gun toward his mother’s face.
Coltrane heard the shot slam his ears. He gaped at his mother falling, at the blood around her on the floor. He stared down for the longest time.
Finally, he raised his head and turned to the elderly woman. “Thank you.”
“What do you get out of this?”
“I’m not sure.” Coltrane gave the woman three hundred dollars.
“Real generous this time.”
“Well, I’m going through some changes. I might not be back.”
9
S CHOLARS ANALYZING P ACKARD ’ S CONTRIBUTION TO photography had documented the location of each house in his series, but Coltrane never knew what he was going to find when he reached each address. Some of the houses no longer existed, variously replaced by an apartment building, a four-lane street, and a supermarket. Others had been renovated, their facades altered to the point where they weren’t recognizable. A few had been maintained. Most had decayed. But if finding them wasn’t difficult, locating the spot from which Packard had photographed them turned out to be almost as arduous as figuring out the vantage point from which he had photographed Falcon Lair.
In the following two weeks, each of Coltrane’s setups—in locations as various as Arcadia, Whitley Heights, Silver Lake, and Venice—turned out to have a story behind it, some as poignant as his meeting with Diane, others comic or repulsive or ennobling, and in two cases violent. In Culver City, he lugged the view camera, its tripod, and its bags of equipment to the top of a warehouse that had not existed when Packard took his photos. In Gardena, he paid for permission to shoot from an upstairs bedroom window of an eighty-year-old widow’s house. Other places, he photographed from an alley, a school yard, the side of a freeway, and the back of a pickup truck. He escaped a pack of vicious dogs. He saved the life of a drug addict who had overdosed in a drainage ditch. He talked his way out of a confrontation with a street gang. He met a blind novelist, a one-armed songwriter, and an aging actor who had once played a policeman on an ensemble TV show and was now an insurance salesman. He took pictures of everything.
Some nights, he got home too late to call Jennifer. Other nights, he had so much work to do in the darkroom that he kept the conversation short. “I’ll tell you all about it when I’m finished. I’m afraid I’ll jinx this if I talk about it or interrupt it. I haven’t felt this involved in an awfully long time. The project’ll be done soon. Then we’ll go away for a couple of days. Up to Carmel. Anyplace you like.”
Each night, when he checked his answering machine, there was always at least one hang-up call and that strange mournful music.
FOUR
1
I N A CITY OF IMITATION , the house was unique. Designed by Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright, it had been constructed in 1931 for a movie producer whose films were unoriginal but who knew enough to let an original-minded architect do his job. In an area prone to earthquakes, it was made from reinforced concrete. Its staggered three stories created a castle effect. Glinting windows dominated the upper rooms, which were flanked by shrub and flower-filled terraces. Pounded copper sheets displaying pre-Columbian designs that resembled arrowheads led up each corner and along the parapets.
In Packard’s photograph of it. But Coltrane had no idea if the house still existed. Using his Thomas Guide and information from one of Packard’s biographies, he approached the area via a densely built, narrow, tree-lined street that curved up one of the numerous hills near the Hollywood Reservoir. Doubt made him uneasy, but as he crested the hill, peering over and down toward the middle of the congested area across from him, he felt his heart beat faster when he recognized what he was looking for.
His breath was taken away. This was one case where Packard’s photograph didn’t do justice to its subject. For one thing, the house had a presence, a solidity, an immediacy that the photograph, even using tricks of perspective and shadows, only hinted at. For another, Packard’s photograph had been in black and white, leaving Coltrane unprepared for the greenish blue of the hammered copper trim along the corners, or for the coral tint of its stucco and the red and yellow of the flowers on the terraces.
After so much effort trying to find the sites from which Packard had photographed the other houses, he had chanced upon the exact spot he needed for this house on his first try. He couldn’t get over it. Excitement swelling in him, he got out of his Blazer, opened the back hatch, and arranged his equipment. Waiting for a truck to pass, he set up the view camera in the street (he was amazed by how efficiently he was now able to handle it), made the necessary adjustments to match the image with the perspective in Packard’s photo, inserted an eight-by-ten-inch negative, and took the picture.
His chest relaxed with satisfaction. To make sure there hadn’t been a mechanical failure, he decided to take a dozen more exposures, but basically he had gotten th
e job done—and there wasn’t any need to find details that commented on the difference between the past and the present, because in this case there wasn’t any difference. Although the neighborhood had become overgrown, the house had been maintained exactly as it had once looked in Packard’s photograph. It was as beautiful as ever.
A horn sounded behind him. He waved for a station wagon to squeeze around him, then redirected his attention to the house below him. After retrieving the exposed negative, he decided to check that the camera hadn’t shifted slightly, and he stooped to peer beneath the black cloth, concentrating on the upside-down image on the focusing plate.
Movement caught his attention—someone coming out of the house’s front door, a portly man carrying a large cardboard box to a Mercedes sedan, then returning to the house. The man wore a green sport coat and had a distinctive rolling gait.
No. Coltrane frowned. It can’t be.
2
H E WAS WAITING AT THE M ERCEDES when Duncan Reynolds again came out of the front door, carrying another cardboard box. As heavy as the last time Coltrane had seen him, his face as ruddy, Duncan set down the box beside an azalea, closed the door behind him, picked up the box again, and only then noticed Coltrane at the curb.
Duncan hesitated, concealing his surprise, then walked down a sloping concrete path to the street. “I don’t suppose I need to ask what you’re doing in the neighborhood.”
“Want some help?”
“Why not? Since you’re here.” Duncan, his eyes a little bloodshot, surrendered the box and unlocked the Mercedes’s trunk.
When Coltrane set the box inside next to three others, he got a look past an open flap, seeing binders of sleeve-protected photographs and negatives.
Coltrane stepped back from the car. “So we know why I’m in the neighborhood. . . .”
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