I shook my head.
“Can I take a picture?”
“Ah, why not?”
I took a close-up of the turtles layered over one another, crawling over each other. I took a shot of the Russian with his dark beard and the windbreaker unzipped, standing with that box along the river. We walked on and I took a picture of rusting cable with weeds grown around it. Three gutted fish spread out on an old railroad tie, a clump of dried worms, and a curved hook stuck into the oily wood. A photograph of a man with a white bucket in one hand and a fishing pole in the other. The man with his son. The son looking in the bucket, reaching in. I was discontent with all of these photographs. Something sentimental, soft about them. It did not feel true to me. Emily put a hand on my shoulder. I put an arm around her. We stopped and she rested on a railroad tie that made a little bench in the weeds. She could see how I felt.
“Take a picture of me,” she said.
I’d taken very few pictures of her, and none when she wasn’t in her fencing gear. I said I’d try. I took several steps away. I looked at her through the viewfinder but I couldn’t take a portrait like that. It was too close. I walked twenty feet away. I looked through the viewfinder again. I couldn’t do it. I turned and walked far away so she was just a tiny white figure lost among the weeds and rusting machinery. I looked for a long time, judging how I felt about it. I clicked.
70
I went into the station and signed the termination papers and got my last check, and as I was leaving I saw Hock in the loading bay, feeling his pockets for a cigarette.
“Frank,” he called. “Get the fuck over here.”
It had been two months since I’d quit. I shook his hand. He seemed happy to see me.
“So you’re back?” he said.
“For my last check.”
“You signed the papers?”
“I just did.”
“So now you’re sittin home, relaxin, living the good life.”
“Something like that.”
“You see Burnett in there?”
“Fuck no.”
“You’re lucky. He’s collecting.”
“For what?”
“Whatta you think? The kid. Christening or baptism or I don’t know what. Every week it’s some new fuckin thing. Asshole,” he said, but he smiled when he said it. “So you miss it?”
“What?”
“The bus? Hangin out with the boys?”
“No,” I said slowly. “I don’t.”
He nodded. Kept his head turned.
“That’s the way to be. I hear these people sayin they couldn’t quit. That they’d get bored. Dumbfucks, I think. Why’d you do this except for a paycheck?”
For a moment I was quiet and so was he.
“So you still with the girl?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m with her.”
“Well, I’ll give you one thing, Frank. You’re either stupid or you got balls.”
“Most people think the first.”
“How she doin?”
“O.k.”
Something about the way I said it made him look at me.
“She sick?”
“She’s getting skinny,” I said.
“How much she weigh?”
“About ninety.”
His face got hard, impatient.
“Well, it ain’t like you didn’t see this comin, Frank. That’s all I gotta say. I don’t see you got any right to start cryin bout it now.”
“I’m not crying.”
“I know you ain’t. I’m just sayin. You saw this comin.”
Hock threw his cigarette to the side. Immediately he began feeling for another one. An ambulance passed in front of us, silently, but with the lights on.
“You still takin pictures?”
“Not too much.”
“Do me a favor?” he said. “Take a picture of her.”
“I tried that.”
“Yeah, well, try again.”
“I’m not good at taking pictures of people I know.”
“Are you gonna try?”
“They always turn out corny.”
He looked at me like he was pissed off.
“I don’t know if I could do it,” I said.
“Are you gonna fuckin give me a headache?”
“I’m just not sure I can do it.”
“Trust me, Frank. I saw what you did with people on the ambulance who you were with for ten minutes. I hate to think what you can do with her.”
I must have still looked reluctant. He said, “We gonna sit here arguing about it or are you gonna try?”
“I’ll try,” I said.
“Do what you can and send me a copy.”
I said I would. He put a hand on my shoulder.
“Whatever it is, I know it ain’t gonna be boring.”
I walked off. I turned after a minute. I thought of going back and telling him I couldn’t do it. From a distance I saw him standing there looking up at the sky between the hospital and the station. I went on and walked down into the subway.
71
When I arrived home, Emily glanced up and said, “You got it?”
She was talking about the check.
“Yeah, I got it.”
“You sign the papers?”
“Yes.”
She looked at me closely. She saw I was uneasy about something.
“I saw Hock,” I said.
“Who?”
“Gil Hock. Guy you saw that day you were at the station.”
“What’d he want?”
“He asked for a photograph of you,” I said.
I explained how the photography was something between us, and I owed him a favor, but I didn’t have to convince her. She wanted me to take a picture of her. She’d wanted it all along. Not for herself. She wanted me to have done it, and to have the picture of her after she was gone.
I bought six or seven rolls of black-and-white and when I returned I found Emily near the back window with the drapes pulled aside and the iron gridwork of the Williamsburg Bridge at mid-distance in the background. It was a cloudy day, with gray, diffuse light. Her arms were as skinny as the handle on a baseball bat. Her face was gaunt, with large, visible lymph nodes. Her teeth looked too big for her mouth. She was wearing dark-blue shorts and a white tank top that had once fit but now hung loosely. She sat on an old wooden chair with a wicker seat. I began taking pictures, of her face, of her hands, of her feet, of the distended veins in her neck, of her bony knees, of her hair. I took a shot of her medicine bottles, of her vitamins, of an emesis basin we kept alongside the bed. A picture of her lying in bed with her eyes closed. With her eyes open. With her looking out the window. And then, finally, a shot of Emily looking directly at the camera, in front of the window, with just a wavy image of the bridge seen through warped glass in the background. In a bubbled portion of the glass, upside-down, there is a tiny reflection of me with the camera. But the photograph is dominated by Emily, and what you see at first is a sickeningly emaciated young woman. Clawed hands cupping each elbow, bony shoulders, a neck with the veins clearly visible, and the head beginning to resemble a skull. But, looking closely, what you notice is her expression, which is not of pain, or of anger, or bitterness, or suffering, but of strength, of dignity, of nobility even. Something that did not surpass the illness but that survived outside it.
I imagined Hock opening the envelope, the image falling out. If Hock looked at it casually he’d think it was just the kind of photograph I always took. But if he looked closely, like I thought he would, I was sure he’d see it was different from any shot I’d ever taken, even opposite. At its heart, I thought, it was a portrait of something beautiful.
72
In the weeks after I took that initial portrait of Emily I went on and took many, many more. I took photographs in almost every conceivable pose—Emily taking a bath, getting dressed, practicing slowly with a foil in the courtyard, resting in the sunlight, sleeping with her bony head on a large, soft pil
low. After I’d taken hundreds of photographs, the two of us worked in the darkroom, making prints of the best shots. We took our time. She helped me. We took out the ten we liked the best. Then we went through my old prints—the pile of two hundred—and we picked ten of these. Stump the cripple, the blind man with the wigs, the prostitute with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a few others. We went back over this collection of twenty photographs and spent a long time developing them, arranging them. When we were done we put them into a portfolio.
73
Emily was trying to walk to the top of the Williamsburg Bridge, but she kept stopping, holding on to the railing with her mittens, breathing with a rasping sound.
“It’ll snow,” she said. “I can smell it.”
She tried to walk a little more. She slowed, panting. I turned my back to her.
“I’ll carry you.”
“Nah.”
“Come on, Em. I’ll carry you.”
She put her arms around my neck. I held her on either side by the thighs with her feet dangling. Several times I had to stop and catch my breath. Then I had her climb back up. At the top, in the very middle, we stood looking out at the East River with the barges going by and the lights just coming on along the FDR. It was four in the afternoon, but getting dark already, the pale yellow sun setting behind the downtown buildings. A low cloud crossed midtown, the FDR, the Brooklyn wharves, and then swept toward us.
“Here it comes. Hey. Snow.”
The first wisps rushed by, and then we were in the cloud, it was dark, and it was snowing. The flakes swirled up, stung our faces, and only three arching lights of the bridge were visible. I kept asking her if she wanted to go down but she didn’t. I took a shot of her as the storm swept through, her face half-veiled by slanting white lines. We were 150 feet over the river, the white lights on the bridge cable glowing, the groaning foghorns of tugboats caught in the storm sounding below us in the invisible river.
74
The man in the park wore two sweatshirts and a knit cap and a pair of sweatpants beneath his jeans. He wore knit gloves with the fingers cut off and the parts of his fingers I could see were dark, dirty, leathery. He was maybe fifty years old. I watched him gathering cans for five or ten minutes and then I walked over and began helping him, snatching a bottle here, a soda can there, tossing what he wanted into the open mouth of his plastic sack. We both pushed the garbage back into the can and I swept up the area with my foot. We went along Houston Street and up into Tompkins Square, going through all the garbage cans along the way, working together until it got dark. Before I left I took a shot of the man with his sack on his shoulder, several close-ups of his hands, and also a portrait of him holding his open hands on his chest, staring proudly into the camera. Afterward I walked on home through the winter twilight. As I turned onto my block I took a picture of the front of the building with the light on. I walked up and let myself in. Emily was on the couch, bent over. I went into the kitchen and heard coughing. When I came out, I told her about the man with the bottles, about his small, dark hands.
“You took pictures?”
“Yeah.”
I told her we’d develop them in the morning.
I made some chicken broth for her and as I did I heard a faint tapping on the windows. It was snowing. I cupped a hand over the glass and peered out into the courtyard. The snow was coming down at an angle, swirling. I walked out to Emily with the cup. That was all she could eat then. Hot broth.
“Take this,” I said.
“Nah, I’m not hungry.”
“Oh, come on, Em.”
“I’ll get sick.”
“You gotta eat something.”
I tipped the spoon and poured the broth onto her tongue. She swallowed. Almost immediately she retched and the broth came back up. It wasn’t even a violent motion. Just a small retraction, like a hiccup, and the watery broth was drooling down her chin.
“I’m sorry, Frank.”
I put the cup on the table. I waited for her to reach for it. She didn’t. After a while I said, “You want to hear a story?”
“That’d be nice.”
I read her a short story about two brothers—“Sonny’s Blues.” It took maybe an hour to read it and through the whole thing she just leaned back, listening. When I was finished she said, “That was a good story, Frank. I liked it.”
“What’d you like?”
“I liked the way the one brother thinks about the other.”
I put the book on the table next to the cup. We sat there. She closed her eyes and lay back. She opened them after a while.
“You want to sleep?” I asked her.
“Nah.”
“Come to bed.”
She seemed ashamed.
“I can’t get up, Frank.”
“Aw come on.”
“I can’t. Really. I tried.”
“Try again.”
She tried but just sort of half-raised and then fell back.
“You got here this morning.”
“Well, I can’t now. I’m sorry.”
“Em.”
“I’m really sorry, Frank.”
I got up. I walked to the wall and put my head against it. Then I came back. I squatted down and looked at her. She was crying a little and I was crying a little.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault, Em. Jesus.”
She kept looking over at the phone. I knew what she was saying, and I even think there was relief in it finally happening. She hadn’t been sure she’d be strong enough to make it to that point. Now she had, and there was a kind of letting go. She was ready. I began to get up, but she held me and pulled me in and whispered, “Thank you, Frank, thank you.”
“For what?”
“Thank you,” she said again.
And then I went to call.
75
There was ice going by in floating clumps on the Hudson. Ice was backed up for a half-mile behind the piers. The icy water slowly rose and filled the hollows in the rocks and then receded and poured out. I was pacing. After an hour I saw Norman coming from way down the long pier. It was a minute or two before he reached me.
“How is she?” he asked me.
“She’s dying.”
He looked like he wanted to hug me or something, but we never did that.
“You need anything, Frank?”
“I’m o.k.”
“They treating you well?”
“They let me stay. They let me do whatever I want. I guess they figure—”
“Are you sleeping?”
“On the chairs.”
“You eating?”
“Not too much.”
“Take care of yourself. It won’t help her if you’re sick.”
“Yeah, I know. Not that it’d matter,” I added.
We walked back to the hospital together. I didn’t have anything to say to him, but I was glad he was there. We took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor and walked into the unit. Emily was so much skinnier than when Norman had last seen her. I thought he’d be surprised, but he was a doctor and he hid it well. He shook her hand and talked to her casually about the day we’d fenced together, about the photographs he’d seen. When he was through, he bent down and kissed her cheek and said, “I’ll see you when you get better.” She held his hand a moment. Then Norman and I walked outside and stood near a window with a view of a concrete courtyard. Birds angling by in the square of sky overhead. He looked really stern, and I thought he was about to say something critical. He reached out and gripped my shoulder and held it for a moment.
“You’re doing all right,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“You’ve stayed with her. You’ve helped her. You’ve done a good thing.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“You’re a fuckup, Frank. You’re a mess. But you’ve been good to her. You can be proud of that.”
I realized he was complimenting me. That was so outside
our normal range of interaction that I didn’t know what to say. He saw I was uncomfortable, and after a moment he let his hand slide off. Down the hallway the elevator had opened and closed several times. “You need anything. Medication, money . . .” I told him I was o.k. He shook my hand, then got on the elevator. I was left alone in the hallway.
76
It was a day later, around four o’clock in the afternoon. Emily had been sleeping most of the day but was now awake. They had the monitor on her and two IVs dripping, but she’d taken the oxygen off and she looked very weak.
“You’ve seen people die?” she asked me.
“Yeah. I’ve seen it. A lot of times.”
“What happens?”
“Nothing happens. They just stop breathing.”
“Do you see anything?”
“Like the soul parting? Some shadow rising up?”
“Yeah. That.”
“Maybe you have to believe it to see.”
“I believe it.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. I think I’ll keep on living,” she said. “I think I’ll stay around you. And if you need help, I’ll come to you.”
I wasn’t sure if she was kidding or not. She was mildly sedated and I thought maybe it was the drugs. She closed her eyes and slept for a while and I sat back on the chair. When I glanced over, she was watching me.
“What’ll you do after?” she asked me.
“I won’t do anything,” I said. “I’ll probably go back to being the way I was.”
“Are you worried about it?”
“I’m not looking forward to it, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“It won’t happen,” she said.
I lowered my head.
“I was never a very good person. I wasn’t before, and I’m not now. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to take pictures.”
“You will.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m not sure of many things. I’m sure of that.”
77
For seven days straight I didn’t leave the hospital except to take a shower, and sometimes to sleep for an hour or two. Bit by bit Emily improved, and I was wildly, unrealistically optimistic. On the seventh day, Emily was so strong she was able to stand. They’d taken one of the IVs out. She sat on the edge of the bed with her feet dangling.
Safelight Page 15