The Shadow Catcher

by Marianne Wiggins

  ALSO BY MARIANNE WIGGINS

  Novels

  Evidence of Things Unseen

  Almost Heaven

  Eveless Eden

  John Dollar

  Separate Checks

  Went South

  Babe

  Short Stories

  Herself in Love

  Bet They’ll Miss Us When We’re Gone

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  The Shadow Catcher is a work of fiction. Although parts of the novel borrow elements from the lives of Edward S. Curtis and the author, the novel is not intended to be understood as describing real or actual events, or to reflect in any way upon the actual conduct of real people.

  Copyright © 2007 by Marianne Wiggins

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wiggins, Marianne.

  The shadow catcher: a novel / Marianne Wiggins.—1st Simon & Schuster

  hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Curtis, Edward S., 1868–1952—Fiction. 2. Photographers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.I385S53 2007

  813'.54—dc22 2007011842

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6183-5

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-6183-8

  for Lara

  the SHADOW CATCHER

  Let me tell you about the sketch by Leonardo I saw one afternoon in the Queen’s Gallery in London a decade ago, and why I think it haunts me. The Queen’s Gallery is on the west front side of Buckingham Palace, on a street that’s always noisy, full of taxis rushing round the incongruous impediment of a massive residence in the middle of a route to Parliament and Westminster Abbey and, more importantly, a train station named Victoria. The Queen’s Gallery is small, neither well maintained nor adequately lit, and when I went there to see the Royal Collection of Da Vinci drawings, the day was pissing rain and cold and damp, and the room smelled of wet wool seasoned in the lingering aroma of fry-up and vinegar, an atmosphere far removed from the immediacy, muscularity, and sunny beauty of Da Vinci’s subjects. There were drawings of male adolescents, drawings of chubby infants, drawings of rampant horses, toothless women, old men with spiky white hairs on their noses and boils on their chins—and then, in a corner, there was a different kind of sketch, a map. It was drawn in ochre on a sheet of rough, uneven rag approximately the size of ordinary letter paper, the same color as southern California sandstone. I stood in front of it for something like too long because a guard stepped forward ’til I leaned away, still looking at it, mesmerized. Some things you remember for a lifetime; other things, mysteriously, bleed away, or fade to shadow. Sometimes, you try to bring the memory of something back, and can’t. You try to see a face, recapture love, recapture rapture; but it’s gone, that face, that vibrancy. Other images return without your bidding. Almost every night when I’m at home, alone, in bed, before I fall asleep, my mind presents that sketch of Leonardo’s without warning. Onto that inner space where dreams take place, my mind projects its image. I see it, plain as day—a little piece of sandstone-colored paper on which an Italian coastal town is drawn from a perspective high above the ground, so high that no treetop, no cliff, no man-made promontory could have served as Leonardo’s point of view. It’s the view an airplane affords, a view Da Vinci must have drawn from an imaginary self-projection; and judging from the scale of things, he must have been imagining himself ten thousand feet above the ground, or almost two miles up. Commercial airline pilots volunteer this kind of information—altitude and cruising speed—which is how I’ve learned to estimate how high above the ground I am, looking from an airplane window. I’ve learned what the Earth looks like from a great height—but how did Leonardo know? Are we hardwired, as a species, to imagine flying? We take it for granted now, most of us, this point of view, as a second site, because many of us have flown, many of us have been up there, and, even if we haven’t, most of us have seen the pictures of our world as a distant object, beamed to Earth by satellite. We can adopt this point of view as a modern way of looking, but is it modern? What if there’s something in our psyches designed to see things from above? Isn’t it a possibility that, as humans, we were built to dream from heights? That Columbus dreamed of flying to America, dreamed his future landfall from above? That Lewis and Clark, bedding down on rocky ground, flew at night across the Cascade Mountains in their dreams, above sequoias, over the Columbia, toward the valiant coast to the magnificent Pacific? Maybe we are built to reconnoiter from above, survey the Earth from heaven, dream of flying. Maybe it’s the angel in us. Gertrude Stein, the first time she flew, saw in Earth’s crevasses and folds the antecedents of cubism and told Picasso that he’d stolen that artistic vision off the backs of birds. I want to think that Galileo flew, in thought. I want to think that all the peasants in the fields of history dreamed in flight, that all the slaves and all indentured souls whose dust still gathers on this Earth had wings at night, and aspirations swift enough for uplift. I want to believe we’re built for soaring in our thoughts, and out here on the edge, in California, at night, in that fading wakefulness before sleep erases sight, my mind projects that sketch of Leonardo’s, and then, before I realize it, I’m flying in, flying to America, making landfall on this continent, not from over the Pacific, not from Singapore or Australia, Fiji or Hawaii on routes I’ve flown in real airplanes, but I dream I’m coming in across the other ocean, over the Atlantic, like Columbus. Flying in, not as I’ve done from England and Europe in a jumbo jet with Greenland off the starboard side, down the Scotia coast with Halifax below, but flying in and making my first contact off the Carolina coast near the 37th meridian, where the English landed, equidistant from the Catholic French in Canada and the Spanish Jesuits in Florida. I dream I’m flying in across Cape Hatteras, where that little spit of land cricks around Pamlico Sound, where the Tuscarora were. Where the Tuscarora fished and lived and danced and laughed and loved before the measles and the smallpox took them. Here in California, on the edge, at night, after the coyotes end their braying, there’s an hour after midnight when a silence drops into these canyons which persists ’til the first birdsong of morning, and, in that intervening lull, I give myself to flying in, west from Tuscarora marshland over Choctaw sands and Chickasaw meadows—I project myself speeding toward myself—flying, as the eagle flies, over Creek, Catawba, Natchez, Kiowa, Comanche and Plains Apache, Wichita and Zuni, Navajo and Hopi, above the First and Second Mesas, over Acoma and Chaco Canyon, across the Colorado toward the Paiute, Chumash and Morongo, here, where I am in Los Angeles. There are those who say the sound my country makes at night, the sound I hear when flying, the sound my nation exhales as it sleeps, is the sound of prayer, the sound of Jesus Christ arising from the basalt in the Rockies, splitting hearts of granite as he shakes off chains of time and is reborn, and there are those who claim the sound my nation makes at night is the metallic hiss of money in the forge or the sound of slavery’s jism misspent in anger and assimilation, or that the sound my nation makes is the sizzle of cosmetic simulation, the sound the cutting edge of surgical removal makes, the sound of History slipping into coma, cosmic silence, almost total, through which, in my dream of flying, I perceive a hopeful distant note—the sound my country makes—a note so confirming and annunciatory that it seems to bend into itself, bend into its own impending future like an announcing angel comin’ round the mountain, bend the way a shadow bends, conforming t
o the curvature of Earth, wailing gently through the night. That sound is the siren’s sound of the iron road, a haunting whistle. I fly, in my imagination, over the abandoned Plains, the Rockies, and the ghost Mojave—toward myself, toward home—and, turning in my bed, I hear it. Out here on the edge, in California, turning in my bed, the nation at my back, I hear a single note, heralding arrival. The sound of a train whistle. The sound my country makes. And I feel safe.

  take fountain

  All writers have these moments—all people do—when Realization forms from air.

  I associate the phenomenon with finding a perfect word, a telling gesture, an insight into character, a crux on which a plot must turn. But that’s because most of my Realizations strike during work and are related to the shape of my profession. My work is strung on moments when I realize something—a novel is, by nature, one long Realization, which is not to say other pursuits aren’t dependent on discovery: sailing is. Cooking is. Playing music is. Sex always is. Loving is a series of discoveries: it starts, significantly, with a Realization: that moment when you know that you’re in love. If writing were as exciting as falling in love, I’d get a lot more written, but most of my Realizations come as pinpoints of light while staring at the dismal tundra of an empty page. Given my average event horizon, most of my ideas don’t have the bursts, the color spectra of world-altering discoveries like Newton’s did, or Galileo’s. Mine are minor stellar occurrences, but strung up as a necklace of small lights, my bright ideas dot the boundaries that define my life. When one occurs, then, it’s a Birth Day, like the birth of a new star far off in the universe.

  Won’t necessitate the reinvention of the calendar.

  But it makes another piece of heaven, all the same.

  So when one of these Realizations struck one day when I was crossing Melrose after lunch with my friend David, I thanked my lucky star(s).

  David likes to go to Angeli’s on Melrose, where, at lunch, only the sound of steam from the espresso maker at the bar enlivens the lacunae in the sullen dialogues between distracted screenwriters, including between me and David. He was well and truly disillusioned with writing for Hollywood that afternoon, as was I, and I was seriously planning to start picketing the studios to CUT THE CRAP and start funding films with socially responsible story lines. Stop being pipelines for product placement, a propaganda machine for consumer consumption. Stop waving guns and tits at everybody. Between the two of us, though, David made the more convincing opponent to the way Hollywood is operating these days, because he’d actually written scripts that had been made into films, whereas all I’d done was write, get the boot, and grouse. His complaints had validity, whereas mine gave off the scent of sour grapes. I had tried to work, and failed. He, at least, had worked with Hitchcock. In another century.

  When we finally wandered out into the hyper-daylight, pausing, curbside, waiting for the light to change, David said, “Hey. Where are you? You’ve left your face.

  “Are you writing? Christ. Can’t it wait ’til you get home?”

  “Actually,” I confessed, “I was trying to decide if it’s better to take Highland to the 101, or quicker to take Crescent Heights.”

  “George Burns story.”

  I looked at him.

  “George Burns is in a restaurant, and there’s a kid busing tables, just in from, let’s say Nebraska. Recognizes Burns, goes over to his table. ‘Excuse me, Mr. Burns, I’ve admired you all my life,’ he says. ‘I’ve just come to Hollywood from Omaha to be an actor, Mr. Burns, and I wonder if there’s some advice you’d care to give?’ Burns takes a puff on the cigar and—not even looking up—says, “‘Take Fountain.’”

  This is no split-your-sides laughing kind of story, it’s a corny story, but because I understood the punch line, A Realization struck me: I’m an Angelena, subject to the whims of Pacific coastal heat inversions, San Andreas fault temblors, and—more to the point—subject to the traffic. Subject to the unwanted obsession of shaving minutes off the time I spend in traffic, in my car. Shortcuts are printed money—gold—and anyone who drives on Sunset, Hollywood, or Santa Monica Boulevards thinks she’s struck the motherlode when she discovers Fountain running parallel, in between those three other avenues, and she actually believes nobody else has ever thought of taking Fountain, even though every other sentient being in town has made the same discovery years ago.

  Every shortcut in Los Angeles was glutted long before I got here, but I spend my journeys—and time before, and after, too—calculating odds.

  The only remedy is to avoid the freeways whenever other cars are on them, never travel when it’s raining, and never under any circs make an appointment to leave the house at lunchtime or when kindergarten’s letting out or there’s a Lakers’ game or a terrorist alert or some celebrity’s on trial for murdering his wife in Santa Monica.

  I’ve pretty much got it down to a system where no matter where I’m going outside my neighborhood I’m going to need an hour in my car to get there. There are a few exceptions, but even they harbor the potential for delay. I can get to the beach and the Pacific Ocean, to Malibu, in half an hour but only if a massive block of siltstone hasn’t splattered overnight in the roadway off the rock face of the canyon or if Topanga Creek hasn’t made a mess of itself, gorged, like a bulimic, and thrown up. I can get to a back lot at Universal Studios in forty minutes, but only if there are no breakdowns or other minor irritations on the 101. But to get from my house to Beverly Hills or UCLA, USC, LAX, the Burbank Airport or Union Station, I’ve got to plan on being in my car for at least an hour. There’s a bus route a mile and a half from my house that services Ventura Boulevard, and if I were a better human being and lived by my principles vis-à-vis the depletion of this planet’s fossil fuels, I would walk the mile and a half to the bus, as legions of day workers do, but what I do, instead, is I try to limit how many times I use my car. Which is why I hadn’t used my car this week, hadn’t driven since last Friday, four days ago, and why I failed to notice the slow leak in a front tire until I got in the car this morning to go to the Hotel Bel Air for a lunch meeting with my agent and a producer, right on schedule, with what I thought was an hour-plus time to spare, when halfway down my street, I feel the barge tow on the steering. By the time I top the tire up, I’m still on schedule, because I always factor in a five-to ten-minute buffer zone when I plan to wander far (2 or more miles) from home.

  And then I hit the 101.

  Well, hardly “hit” it. I zip up the ramp into a horizontally stacked parking lot, into a line of steaming metal units coupled end to end like discarded boxcars shunted to a siding, waiting for a train to happen.

  And now another Realization dawns:

  Jon, my agent at Creative Artists, has exhausted a quantitative amount of accrued goodwill to land this lunch for me with a woman who’s the head of a star’s production company who claims to have read my work (doubtful) and says she’s interested in developing a project based on a novel I’ve written about the photographer Edward S. Curtis. Most writers who have no film credits to their name (like me), no actual films produced from their screenplays, would probably admit they would have spent the night in the front seat of their car in the parking lot of the Hotel Bel Air to make certain they would be on time for an opportunity like this, unlike me, who gave herself only an hour (and a little +) and who is now going to be very, very late.

  Or maybe not.

  Maybe, as so often happens, this will start to thin for no apparent reason and I can still get there on time. This valley, the San Fernando, holds several million people at this very moment, of which at least a hundred thousand are with me on this highway; stalled. Passengers on plates. 240 billion years ago the west coast of America was somewhere slightly west of what is now Las Vegas and Vegas was the city by a sea. The coastline ran north/northeast from the Mojave Desert past Las Vegas, past our national Nuclear Test Site, into Utah. The great American craton floated uneventfully on the great North American plate, and everything w
ithin eyesight from where I sit, here, moldering in traffic, was at the bottom of an ocean, until wham. Two tectonic plates collided, pushing up these coastal ranges in crescendo—the Los Padres, Verdugas, Santa Monicas, San Gabriels, San Bernadinos, Panamints—climaxing in the Sierra Nevadas. From where I sit right now looking east toward the Verdugas, the San Andreas fault is ahead of me, its two opposing sides making better surface time than I am. I and my fellow stalled commuters sit on the Pacific Plate, drifting, even while we sit here, two inches a year toward San Francisco. Between us and the San Andreas there are three other major faults—the Elsinore, San Jacinto, and Glen Helen—but it’s the San Andreas fault that defines California more than any other natural feature, more than the half domes at Yosemite or the fumaroles above Mt. Shasta or the beaches at Big Sur. San Andreas is right lateral, which means no matter which of its two sides you’re on, the other one is moving to the right. San Francisco, up the coast to my left four hundred miles, is on the North American plate, along with Fargo, North Dakota; Albany, New York; and Tampa, Florida. L.A. is on the Pacific plate, drifting north. In two hundred million years, L.A. will pass the Golden Gate and Nob Hill, L.A. on the western side, San Fran on the east, which is more than any two seemingly immobile masses will be doing soon in any of the eight lanes on the 101.

  And now: I’m very very late.

  Lunch will start in twenty minutes whether I’m there or not, and there’s nothing I can do about it, except to try to wait it out to the next exit and get off the highway onto ordinary (I hope) less congested surface streets.

  One of the draws of living in the West is the lure of these dramatic landscapes, the pull of these wide-open spaces evoking narratives of ancient geologic time, narratives of passage, disappearance, death; persistence. Up to my right on the Mulholland ridge above Tarzana, there’s a scenic overview where you can park your car and sit on a bench and look out across the whole San Fernando Valley. Seven miles wide, at its widest, and twenty miles long, the valley’s like an island surrounded not by water, but by mountains, and I like to sit up on the Mulholland ridge and imagine what it looked like five hundred years ago before the Spanish came. I put my thumb up the way actors playing painters do, to crop the foreground, blot out the bank buildings at Sepulveda, the rides at Universal, the black glass Blue Cross/Blue Shield headquarters in Canoga Park, and I try to imagine what this place looked like before the horse. Before the train. Before the car. That’s the game The West invites, the game everybody plays out West: pretending we can see the past, here, in the present. Pretending we can call down the impossible, invalidate the present, and convince ourselves we’re in another time, another century. The West—true West—attaches to you like a shadow. I don’t think this happens in the East—I don’t think the landscape summons an imagined past the way the land does here. I don’t think people in Manhattan, Boston or Atlanta turn a corner, see an eighteenth-century graveyard and make an easy leap into imagining the past. In European cities, yes, you can come around a corner and intersect another century, stand in a limestone sanctuary and imagine you are seeing light through stained glass the way it looked six hundred years ago, but in the west, at the cities’ edges, there is the very real encroachment of the older Eden, the original one, the land in its unaltered state. You can see it from the windows of your car without leaving L.A. County. Drive out to Red Rock Canyon or the Vasquez Rocks or take a hike up Mt. Calabasas and you’re in the wild, in another time, entirely. There are places, here, in the valley, where you can go, where there’s not a building or another person within sight. Unlike the crowded basin beyond the mountains to my right, there are streets here that expire into dust beside an old adobe, but everywhere you’ll go within the confines of this valley, you will feel its thirst. The mountains block the cool marine air from the coast and pose a permanent rain shadow. Streams form in winter, but they rapidly evaporate in spring and by summer they are rock-strewn baked arroyos. Two stubborn narrow ones join in Canoga Park behind the high school football stands and it is there, in a concrete crib, that the Los Angeles River shapes its unlikely identity. It’s nothing, really—in any other town east of the Rockies it would be a joke, the kind of miserable low velocity ditch into which any city with a decent river would toss junk. Real L.A. is on the other side of the mountains to my right, and just like the L.A. River I need to find a way through their walls if I’m going to get to Bel Air at all, but because the faults tend north/northeast along the present coast, the coastal ranges follow that direction, slicing L.A. County’s loaf into individually prepackaged servings. If you’re on the 101 heading east—or not heading, as I am—and you want to get off the freeway and take surface streets from the valley side of the Santa Monicas over the hills to the other side, to the basinette of the real L.A., you can’t just zigzag, you can’t just improvise, you have to follow the geology, you have to take either the canyons or the passes, and, from west to east, you have only these six choices: