I ask him, “Then why aren’t we scared?”
“The answer is simple. The pictures are good and beautiful. They are pictures of you and Myla living your lives, growing up. And the taking of the photographs has become an important part of who you are, of part of that growing up. I wouldn’t take that away from you for a million dollars, unless you didn’t want to be a part of them anymore.”
He stops talking for a minute. “Just having you be in the photographs has helped you learn that you’re in charge of your own bodies. That you are in charge of your own minds. Jane loves you so much that she wants to protect you. I love you so much that I want to protect you, and I think letting you form opinions from your own experience is the best way to do that. So we disagree. But to tell you the truth, I like that Jane loves you so much. I like that Jane makes us think about all this. I bet you do too.”
I nod. He’s right, I do like that about Jane. I think about it then, for a long time. David lets me think. His answer isn’t an answer so much as another bunch of questions. David’s opinion about the pictures is to let me form my own opinion. He closes the book and kisses the top of my head. I have to think about it. He knows I do. So I get him a fresh glass of orange juice so he can correct his papers, and I go out to ride my bike.
CONVERSING WITH SAMUEL went better than Myla had anticipated. Once she sat down beside him on the porch swing, talking was easy. Perhaps it was the comfort of watching Jane’s back as she weeded in the front yard, close enough for reassurance and far enough for privacy. Or perhaps it was Samuel’s mention of Mark’s name, which dredged up in Myla a deep missing that made her feel honest, that relaxed her into the giving of herself. “Mark’s fine,” said Samuel. “He’s just worried about you.” Conversation drifted to innocuous subjects—the coming baseball season, recently published fiction, movies they’d seen—and Myla realized that she did know some of Samuel, even if she didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, all of him.
When Steve got home that evening, Jane stopped her weeding, walking to the side of the house, obviously giving him some kind of explanation and instruction to be discreet. Jane’s sudden stride brought Myla and Samuel out of the hollow of their conversation. Around them, they saw the evening light low and red, and Myla realized she was hungry. Time had flown. Then Steve walked around the corner of the house, up the front steps, and right over to Samuel. He stuck out his hand and chuckled. “Myla’s told us absolutely nothing about you.”
Jane arrived behind him, shaking her head. “Pay no attention to anything he says.” Myla was surprised to catch a glimmer of flirtation in Jane’s exasperation.
“Well, Samuel, is it? The sooner Samuel learns that I’m constantly putting my foot in my mouth, the better off he’ll be. Everyone thinks I’m an idiot.” Steve chuckled again. “Isn’t that right, Jane?”
Jane tossed her hair over her shoulder, creating her own wind tunnel. “I’ve often been impressed by the depths of idiocy you’re capable of reaching.” Myla saw the force of their love, something she’d never much considered. Steve stepped forward and grabbed Jane’s hand, danced her around the front porch. They were alone in that dancing space together, wonderful to watch, until Steve got winded and leaned against the door frame.
“Not as spry as I used to be.” He pointed to Samuel’s suitcase, sitting in the middle of the front walk. “You better bring that inside or everyone’ll think Jane’s finally leaving me.” He wheezed, then pulled the squeaky screen door open. “Well, aren’t you all coming inside? It’s nearly dark. And I’m hungry.”
Soon Myla found herself in the kitchen with Jane, preparing dinner as the men sat in the living room, drinking beer and watching a basketball game. Myla had met a lot of academic women disgusted by such gender division, and she’d always publicly agreed with them, acknowledging that all their careers existed only because their mothers had fought for liberation from apron strings. She’d openly criticized girls her own age who’d given up promising careers for families. But during each of these conversations, she’d had to keep a secret to herself: despite all the political, moral, economic reasons to deplore “women’s work,” she loved it. She loved being in that kitchen with Jane, being ordered around by a recipe-savvy woman. The onions sizzled with lightning intensity. Myla watched Jane’s dexterity with the wooden spoon, ached to be able to arrange a plate so beautifully. She remembered past moments with Jane, moments when it was just Jane’s body she’d watch, when Jane would let go of words and simply move. Now that Myla was herself a woman, she realized she still longed for this ease.
She remembered witnessing this quality in Ruth too, in the moment just before Ruth would crouch behind the camera, gathering the dark-cloth to her shoulders. Her eyes would look different. She’d use words, but they weren’t conversation, they were words from another part of her body, words to service her eyes: “Shift left. Eyes here. Blink. Now.” It had seemed such an easy way to be, such a comfortable solution. Myla wondered if she’d lost all capacity to practice such grace.
That night they ate well and sat at the table long after they’d finished devouring everything on it. Steve and Samuel seemed to have hit it off famously. It helped Myla to watch the younger man befriend her father’s closest friend. Myla imagined her father with such a man, imagined how David would have handled Samuel’s sudden appearance. She forced herself to believe that he would have been as jovial as this other father figure, but had to admit to herself that David, always caught up in his mind, probably would have been oblivious. He’d demonstrated none of the formalities of manliness that Steve had. It was good to consider David this way, realistically, without the tragedy of life washing over all her memories. And remembering her father like this made the reality of his notebook all the more compelling. She wanted to know what Steve had figured out.
As they contemplated dessert, Steve leaned back in his chair and undid the top button of his pants. Myla saw her chance, saw the possibility to ask. But she knew she’d have to divulge the few truths she had about her father’s notebook to Samuel, to a man who only days before had defamed her father to a roomful of people. She looked at Samuel as he leaned his elbows on the table, asking Jane about her curriculum, and realized that telling him about David’s notebook was a chance she’d have to take if she were going to get to know Steve’s mind right now. At this moment, waiting any longer for a private audience with him seemed excruciating. Besides, Samuel had been on his best behavior all afternoon. So Myla led the conversation in her own direction, hooking in the details of Marcus Berger and the mysterious envelope, catching Samuel’s eye, willing him through her honesty to understand that her father, a brilliant scholar, was to be taken seriously. “And that leads us to Steve, who’s been looking at the notebook and interpreting—”
Steve grunted. “I was afraid of this.”
“Have you looked at it yet?” Myla asked.
“Of course I’ve looked at it,” he said, a wave of darkness passing across his face.
“So what does it mean?” She couldn’t help asking the most basic question.
“I’m afraid you have a rather high estimation of my mental abilities, Myla. To assume I—”
“Okay, okay,” said Myla. “Be humble if you must.” She turned back to Samuel. “He’s much more of an intellectual than he gives himself credit for. Am I right, Jane?” Jane nodded, smiling. “Tell us, Steve,” said Myla. “Tell us what you figured out.”
Steve shook his head. “See, here it is, Myla, I don’t want you to get your hopes up about all this—”
“Just tell me,” said Myla. “I know you understand my father’s brain. I know you’ve picked something up, even just one tiny thing, and that thing’s going to help us.”
But Steve rumbled, “No no no. I will not let this go on. No misplaced reverence.”
“It isn’t misplaced, Steve. It’s the truth. I came to you. I came here for your help because I knew you’d be the only person who could help me. The only person in the worl
d.” Myla put her hand on Steve’s, but he didn’t reciprocate the touch. Suddenly Myla read him, understood what he’d been trying to say; it was almost as though his frustration was pumping into her through her fingers. Then he spoke.
“The truth, Myles, is that I have no idea what the hell your father’s talking about. Not a clue.” To himself, he muttered, “Dammit.” Then he looked down the table and bellowed at Jane. “Impossible to try to get a point across in this family when everyone keeps talking over you. I’ve been trying to tell you that I looked at the notebook—spent hours with it, in fact—and I’m no closer to understanding it than I was in the first place. So much for my intellectual abilities.”
Jane spoke first. “There’s no reason to raise your voice. No one’s expecting anything of you except your opinion. Right, Myla?”
Myla could feel her face warming. She could feel tears burning her eyes. She nodded her head and managed, “Of course not,” even though she knew that what she’d been expecting was answers. She’d expected Steve to tell her what the hell the notebook meant. And now she was alone again, alone with her father’s indiscernible thoughts and no one to help her interpret them.
Steve understood. “I’m sorry,” he said after a while. “I told you, I’m a math guy. I loved your dad like a brother, and I was good at nodding along whenever he’d posit one of his theories, but even then I wasn’t privy to his mind.” He pulled his napkin from his lap and folded it on the table. Then he pushed back his chair and stood. He looked for a minute as if he had something to say, then he shook his head. He gathered the dishes from the table and walked to the kitchen.
Myla put her head in her hands. She wished she could help her physical response, her sickened disappointment, if only to spare Steve’s feelings. But she needed a moment to gather herself before she could go to him and absolve him of his responsibility.
Samuel leaned toward her across the table. “You said the notebook was full of words, like brainstorming?”
Myla had all but forgotten Samuel’s presence. She glimpsed him through her fingers, realizing she’d let him in on something dangerous. She’d proved his point for him: not only would he believe her father was a bad man, he’d also think him an indecipherable scholar. Myla couldn’t speak. She nodded.
“Could I see it?” he asked.
Jane cleared her throat. “I’ll get it from Steve,” she said, excusing herself from the table, while Myla hid herself from everyone’s eyes. He was in this far. He might as well rip her father’s notebook apart as well.
Fifteen minutes later, they were all gathered on the couch in the living room. Samuel had called them to him, and now he was flipping through the notebook with rapid excitement. “Your father was doing some pretty sophisticated thinking about response theory. I’m almost sure of it.”
“Response theory?” Jane asked.
“See, I’ve been forcing David Freedberg’s The Power of Images down my students’ throats, which, as we all know, doesn’t guarantee that I know anything about his thesis. But his basic assumption is that image alone exerts enormous power over the human psyche. Even if we’re not aware of the mechanism.” Samuel paused, then looked at Myla and smiled. “Myla sat in on one of the lectures when we were talking about this idea. Basically, it posits that certain physical responses, uncontrollable by the mind, are unleashed when humans see certain things depicted.”
“Okay.” Steve smirked. “And in plain English?”
Samuel smiled. “This isn’t a revolutionary theory; in fact, people have believed it since the first man drew a painting on a cave wall. Here’s an example: we know that when people eat off a yellow plate, they eat faster and they eat more. The conclusion we draw is—”
Jane spoke. “That yellow does something to human brains to make them think they’re hungry.”
“Right. Now, the thing is that even in the last ten years” —here Samuel hesitated—“since David’s death, scientists have been hooking people up to electrodes and seeing what part of the brain responds to yellow. But it looks to me like there isn’t much science in his notes. The words he’s written down: Jesus in the frescoes, oh, and Vermeer over here, well, they seem to be highlighting an artistic point of view. Maybe he’s trying to get at specific ways in art that response theory works.”
Myla was nodding. “Welcome to Myla’s Childhood 101: An Overview of David Wolfe’s Scintillating Bedtime Stories.” Everyone laughed at the touch of sarcasm in her voice, and Myla felt herself flush with possibility. She put her hand on Steve’s shoulder.
Samuel was eager to continue. “So it seems your father was suggesting that just looking at a picture can make people believe or act in specific ways that they’d never consciously admit.”
Steve turned to Myla, patting the hand she’d placed on him. “Nabbed a good one, I see. One who can help you in your research.”
“In my research?” said Myla. “I thought this was our project.”
Steve shook his head. “Some help I’ve been. Okay, yes, I’ll get you into the library—the woman at the front desk owes me a favor, and no, Jane, not that kind of favor—but after that, you’re on your own. Except that you’ve got Samuel here.”
Samuel coughed.
“Samuel,” Steve beamed, “you should know, before you tackle this project, the exact pedigree of the brain you’ll be trying to unearth. Myla’s dad loved art. It was the guiding philosophy of his life. David believed art was the most powerful force on earth. He once told me that image was the closest we could get to God.” This surprised Myla. She’d never once heard David mention God. Steve continued, “So I guess the good news here, if we choose to trust this Samuel person, is that the notebook may be the precursor to a bigger enterprise. Does that seem in the realm of possibility?”
“Sure,” said Samuel. “Are we looking for something bigger?”
“My father may have written a book,” explained Myla. “We all expected to find it somewhere among his things, but it never emerged.”
Steve continued Myla’s thought. “Perhaps this notebook encodes a shorthand for bigger ideas filed away somewhere. Imagine that each word is a tab on a file folder. Each word calls up a whole file of ideas that David held in his head. So what we’ve got to do is figure out what those files consisted of.”
But Myla wanted more. “What about the diagrams in the notebook? The brainstorming that it looks like he’s doing?”
Samuel was all professor: “They read to me like different ways of getting at the same question. The problem is, I don’t know what that question is, so it’s hard to figure out how David’s trying to answer it.”
Steve was getting excited too. “Here’s the deal, though: no one thought about art the way your father did. According to Samuel, the notebook gives us hints about what David’s connecting to what. And maybe, probably, those things are so unusual that we’ll detect a pattern. And perhaps within that pattern, we’ll find ourselves an argument.” He touched Myla on the arm. “Your father was a professor, sure, and there were lots of things about him that made him good at that—diligence, love of the job, intelligence. But there was something else in him, something huge, that made it fun to hear him talk about art. Art was his breath.
“One day—I’ll never forget—I came home from school and you guys were over at the house. It was the mid-eighties, so you girls must have been about fifteen and ten. You were upstairs with Emma. Jane came and met me at the front door, looking white as a sheet, and said, ‘I think you’d better go outside.’ I found David on the back porch with a glass of lemonade. And he looked devastated. I’d seen him looking like that only once before. When your mother died.
“I’m scared, so I pull up a chair. I ask what’s happened, and he looks at me and says, ‘Didn’t you hear? Didn’t you hear the news?’ I shake my head no and prepare for the worst. He says, ‘Rembrandt’s Danaë. Some man in Russia attacked her. With a knife. With acid.’
“It was a painting, Myla. A painting. And you’d have t
hought that someone he loved had died. I admired him for that personal love. Nothing mathematic ever made me feel that way.”
It was delicious to hear Steve speak about her father like this, especially after seeing him so devastated, so distant, earlier in the evening. “That’s the kind of man your father was,” he went on. “He was extraordinary. And it’s too bad you have only me to tell you that. Because you’re a hell of a lot more like him than you think.”
Myla was whirling with possibility, watching Steve believe again in David’s words. She was shocked by Samuel’s presence, amazed by his sudden insertion into the very heart of her family. Amazed that he’d helped. She was elated, rising, in the promise of what he was offering: an interpretation of the notebook that had, on first glance, been full of foreign concepts.
But she felt the need to tell Steve and Jane one more thing. “We’d stopped talking, you know. At the end.” She paused. “David and I.” Myla looked up, and all eyes were on her. “I was so angry, so angry. And of course I thought both of us were doomed to live forever.” Her eyes were dry.
“Sweetheart, your dad understood. Trust me.” Steve spoke with authority. “I’m a dad. Silence is hard, but it’s still a kind of speech. And now you have this.” Steve touched the notebook. “He’s still talking.”
I ASK EMMA, “REMEMBER how I used to paint you?”
She looks up from her drawing. “No,” she says.
“How I used to paint your face.”
That makes her laugh. She asks me, “What would you paint?”
“Oh, dog faces, or rabbit faces. I used face paint after I got in trouble once for using markers.”
That makes Emma laugh more. Then I say, “So I’ve been thinking. We were little kids then, and we did one kind of painting. But now I’m eight. I want to try a new kind of painting. I used to paint you, but now I want to paint you.”
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