by Blake Nelson
I went back into my palatial mansion.
34
The next day I drove to the airport and picked up my mom. She was quiet on the ride home. I helped her carry her bags in and went up to my room.
A moment later she yelled up the stairs, “Gavin! Can you come back down here please!”
I came back down the stairs.
“What is this?” she said. She was standing in the middle of the living room with her arms crossed.
“What is what?”
“This,” she said, waving one hand in the air. “It reeks like cigarette smoke in here,” she said.
“Oh . . .”
She beckoned me further into the room and pointed out a tiny Mexican salsa bowl that had been pushed under the sofa. It had several of Kai’s cigarette butts in it.
“Oh, sorry about that,” I said.
“I can’t have you smoking, Gavin,” my mother said, suddenly on the verge of tears. “Do you understand that? Not now. Not with everything else that is happening.”
“I don’t smoke, Mom. Some friends came over. Kai and Antoinette.”
She shook her head. I couldn’t tell if she believed me or not. It didn’t seem to matter. She snatched up the salsa dish, marched into the kitchen, and threw it into the garbage.
I went back upstairs.
• • •
My mother worked for a small advertising agency before she met my dad. This was in San Francisco, during her first years out of college. One of our photo albums was dedicated to this period, my mother’s life in the early nineties. As a little kid I loved these pictures. Mom sitting on the fire escape of her apartment. Mom in black dresses and Doc Martens. Mom on a scooter or drinking cocktails after work at the trendy offices of the Echo Advertising Agency.
At one time she was engaged to one of the founders of Echo, Peter Frohnmeyer. He was very good-looking and fashionable. Apparently he was from a wealthy San Francisco family. There were lots of pictures of the two of them: at the beach, at a big New Year’s party, on a boat. It was quite a life, judging from the pictures. It always looked like my mother was having a great time.
But then my dad had appeared on the scene. My tough-guy, no-bullshit dad. I never learned the exact story of how he stole her away from Peter Frohnmeyer. The most Russell and I were ever told was what a great victory it was for our dad. One of his many successes.
In another photo album there were three or four pictures of my dad at around the same time. He had moved to San Francisco too. He was supposedly very poor when he was in law school and yet a year later he was somehow driving a convertible. He looked pretty good in these pictures, with all his hair and less flab in his face. But it’s obvious from the most casual photos that he was the more serious person. A certain grim determination was visible in his face, even in the old Kodak pictures. Whatever he did to get my mother away from Frohnmeyer, I’m sure that was part of it. Frohnmeyer looked like a pampered rich kid in his pictures. My dad looked like a bulldog.
So that’s what happened. My mother married the poor lawyer, had two kids, and soon found herself in Oregon. Which makes you wonder what would have happened if she’d stayed with Frohnmeyer in San Francisco. She would have gone to a lot more cocktail parties, that’s for sure. And probably had more fun. She would have had a totally different life.
• • •
Back at school, Krista remained with Tyler Young through the spring. Fortunately, she was in the freshman/sophomore wing, so I didn’t see her very often. The couple times I did, she was bouncing around like she does. I heard she’d made the girls tennis team. So that was good for her.
Claude and Petra were together now too. The rumors had been true. How exactly it went down was still a mystery. Claude wouldn’t say much, even to me.
“She just got more and more impossible,” was all he really said about Hanna. When asked about Petra, he would be vague. “We’re hanging out,” he would say. If people pressed him on it, he would admit that it was now more than friends. And then he’d shrug. And people would be satisfied. He was Claude, after all. People assumed he knew what he was doing.
There was still something he wasn’t saying. That was my impression. Something else had happened. I was sure of it. But I had my own problems: getting dumped by Krista, my dad walking out, the weirdness of my new home life. Besides that, I had to figure out college or art school or whatever I was going to do after high school. And it wasn’t like when Russell was in this position. There wasn’t the four of us sitting around the kitchen table, thinking through all his options. It was just me sitting at the kitchen table now. I was an army of one.
35
Then one night I came home and there was a Mercedes in our driveway. It was the Coupe, like my dad’s, but instead of navy blue it was dark red. I parked in the street so it could pull out. As I walked up the driveway, I stopped to look inside. It had leather seats, a wood dash, all the extras.
But whose was it? I went inside and found out. It was Henry Oswald’s, my dad’s best friend. He was sitting at our kitchen table drinking coffee. My mother sat diagonally across from him. She also held a coffee mug. She averted her eyes when I walked in.
“Hello, Gavin,” said Henry Oswald. He stood up and shook my hand. It was the first time I’d seen him since my father left.
“Hello,” I said back.
He pulled on the front of his pants and sat down again. “Thought I’d swing by and check on you two.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“It’s going okay,” I said.
“How’s school?”
I shrugged. “Okay.”
Henry smiled. “You’re a junior, right? Are you thinking about colleges yet?”
“Not that much.”
My mother glared at me. “Gavin, can you at least make a little effort?”
“What?” I said. “It’s the truth.”
My mother went back to staring into her coffee cup.
“I’m thinking of going to art school,” I told Mr. Oswald.
He gave me a quizzical look. My mother also looked up with surprise. “Art school?” he said.
“For photography.”
Henry Oswald considered this and began to nod. “Okay,” he said.
My mother said nothing.
“I haven’t looked into it yet,” I said.
“That’s funny,” said Henry. “My brother went to art school. My brother, William. He lives in Seattle.” He turned to my mother. “He studied painting and graphic design. At Cal Arts.”
My mother seemed encouraged by this news. I also perked up. “Did he like it?” I asked.
“Art school? Are you kidding?” Henry Oswald chuckled. “He loved it. What’s not to love? You sit around talking about art. He said they used to run around naked in the desert. Some of his classmates became famous artists.”
This was interesting news.
“How are your grades?” asked Henry Oswald.
“Not that great,” I admitted.
“Well, it’s art school,” he said. “You don’t have to be smart. You have to be . . . you know . . . wacky.”
I nodded. My mother nodded.
“What sort of photography are you interested in?” asked Henry.
“All kinds. The classic stuff.”
“Do you have anything you can show people?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I have some stuff.”
“Well, send me something. And I’ll send it to my brother. We can see what he thinks.”
“Okay,” I said.
Later, when he was gone, my mother rinsed out the coffee mugs.
“Art school, Gavin?” she said to me over her shoulder. “When did you get this idea?”
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while.”
She put the mugs in the dish rack to dry. “Why didn’t you tell someone?”
“Who was I going to tell?”
• • •
&nbs
p; The next day I drove downtown and took my laptop into Passport Photos. I told Richie what had happened.
“Cal Arts?” he said. “No shit. And this guy can help you?”
“His brother went there. But I gotta pick out my best stuff to send him.”
I opened my laptop, and Richie went over my photos with me. Despite his dislike for art schools, he understood the difference between what a place like Cal Arts would want versus a professional portfolio like he had. We went through my best photos one by one. They were mostly imitations of Robert Frank and the other photographers of the past. But as Richie said, at least I was copying the right people.
When we’d picked out my best ten pictures, Richie said his usual piece about art school. “Listen. I got nothing against it. All I’m saying is, you don’t have to do it. The great photographers, they saw life a certain way. And they knew how to capture that through the lens. You can’t teach that.”
“Still, though,” I said. “Would you go to Cal Arts? If you could?”
“If I was you? In your situation?” He thought about it. “I might go. I’d go for the chicks, to be perfectly honest, and the parties and all that. I mean, I’m sure it’s fun. But I’ve found my own way. That’s what happens. Everyone finds their own way.”
Later, after we’d closed the shop, I walked through the rain to my car. I was planning on driving home, but I felt inspired by all the photography talk. So I got out the Canon. There wouldn’t be much to shoot on a night like this. But I put on my rain poncho and tucked my camera under it. And I went for a walk.
• • •
I spent several more days thinking about the pictures we’d picked out to send to Henry Oswald’s brother. They were okay, but I felt like I needed something else. My pictures were all style. And not even original style. I needed a subject. I needed something to shoot that I had some connection to, something that affected me in some way. Something I was afraid of, or thrilled by, or had a real opinion about.
So I called Antoinette. I asked her if I could come over and take her picture. She seemed surprised by this request. At first she hesitated. She said she was having her period and she looked like shit. I said it didn’t matter.
I drove over in the RAV4. I knocked on the door. Her mother opened it and invited me in. I remembered her from the day Marcus committed suicide. She looked older, I thought. Not that you can tell with adults. But I could sort of tell.
Antoinette came down the stairs. And then her stepfather appeared from the kitchen. This was “Bald Mike.” So then the four of us stood in their living room, talking. I was shown a picture of Marcus, the brother who killed himself. There were also pictures of Antoinette’s father, in his uniform, and her other brother, Paul. He was older than Marcus and had been in the military when Marcus died. He was still in the military. In South Korea.
Mrs. Renwick was tall and had a tight, narrow face. She watched me very closely. She couldn’t figure out what exactly to say to me. Bald Mike said nothing. He wore glasses and had white tufts of hair on the side of his head. After about ten minutes of this, Antoinette brought me upstairs.
We went in her room. It was pretty small. Their house in general was smaller and more modest than my other friends’.
She closed the door. There was an open book, facedown on the bed.
“So what sort of pictures did you want to take?” said Antoinette.
I blushed slightly. “I need pictures of a person.”
“What do you need it for?”
“To maybe go to art school.”
“Art school?” she said, her expression turning serious. “Okay. Do I need to be, like, naked?”
“No,” I said. “I was just thinking your face.”
“Okay,” she said. “Can I wash it at least?”
“Sure.”
She went into the hall, to the bathroom. I heard the water turn on. I took a seat on her bed. I looked around her room. There was a lot of stuff on the walls: pictures, postcards, posters. It was too much to absorb all at once. So I took pictures of it.
Beside her desk was a bookcase. Probably every book in it was something I needed to know about but didn’t. The Tibetan Book of the Dead was one of the titles I noticed. That sounded important. I lifted my camera and took a picture of the bookcase. Maybe someday I could use that photo as a reading list.
• • •
Antoinette came back in the room. “Okay,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”
I didn’t know. I looked around. “Maybe sit on the bed?” I told her.
She sat on the bed. I pulled a chair over, turned it backward, and sat on it, using the back of it to prop up my elbows. The Canon felt good to me by now. It was like an old friend. But something was wrong as I framed her in the viewfinder. She didn’t look right. She looked nervous and confused and like she didn’t trust me. Not me as a person, me as a photographer.
I checked the light, then focused and squeezed off about twenty shots. They weren’t good. I stopped shooting. I wasn’t doing this right. I was too nervous.
I tried some different things. I moved back a few feet. I tried standing on the chair and shooting down. I tried looking up from the floor.
She could tell it wasn’t working. “Is there something you want me to do?” she asked.
“Uh . . . ,” I said, checking my settings. “Maybe move around a little?”
Antoinette took a deep breath. She relaxed herself in some way. She started to focus herself on the camera, not by looking at it, but by inviting it to her in some way.
She looked to the side, and then further to the side. She pulled some of her hair into her face. It still wasn’t great. But I stayed with it. I started moving closer, getting in tight on her face. I got so close I could see her pores, the wisps of pale mustache above her lip, a large mole hidden inside her thick eyebrow. I went for a straight-ahead view: her eyes in the center. Her oily forehead above. Her lips below. Antoinette was not what you’d call pretty. But her face was so full. It had everything in it. It was a thing you could look at, and study, and think about for a long time, if you wanted to.
I was in love with her, I guess, is what I’m trying to say. I was in love with her.
36
Thock . . . Claude’s backhand sizzled across the net.
Thock . . . I smacked it back.
Thock . . . He hit an arcing topspin to my backhand.
Thock . . . I chopped it low and crosscourt and came to the net.
Thock . . . He blasted the ball right at my chest.
Thock . . . I jumped aside and managed to block it. The ball hit the top of the net, skittered along the tape for a moment, and then rolled over onto Claude’s side.
“Oh, come on!” shouted Claude, running for it, and then giving up.
After the set, we sat side by side on the bench. He toweled off his face. “You know you could still get on the team,” Claude said to me. “Coach Kemp would love to have you.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“I wish you would,” said Claude. “We got nobody this year. I’ll have to carry the team.”
“You’ve always carried the team,” I said.
Claude didn’t respond. He reversed the towel and wiped down the grip of his racquet. He’d been doing that since we were doubles partners in the twelve and unders.
“Krista made girls varsity,” he said.
“Yeah, I heard.”
“She good?”
“For someone who hasn’t played much,” I said. “She’s a natural athlete.”
“So I hear,” said Claude, smiling for a moment.
We gathered our stuff. “How’s Petra?” I asked.
“She’s okay.”
“What’s it like? Getting back together with an old girlfriend?”
“It’s all right. I mean, we’ve known each other so long.”
“Is that good or bad?”
He shrugged. “Both.”
We got our tennis bags and heade
d off the court.
“The thing about ex-girlfriends,” he said as we walked toward our cars, “you miss them. You have all these great memories. But it’s the good parts you’re remembering. When you get back together, those parts are already over. You’re starting in the middle.”
I nodded. I always listened closely to Claude about girl stuff. He generally knew what he was talking about.
“What about Hanna?” I finally said. “Would you get back with her?”
Claude made a noncommittal sound under his breath.
“Why did you guys even break up?” I said.
Claude had not talked to me about this. He hadn’t talked to anyone about this. “That I cannot tell you,” he said in a low voice.
“You can’t tell me or you won’t tell me?” I said.
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “Because I don’t know.”
“Wait. So you guys didn’t talk? When you broke up?” I couldn’t imagine this. Hanna breaking up with someone without long discussions and drama? It was unthinkable. “Is she okay?” I asked. “Hanna, I mean?”
Claude became deathly silent.
“Jesus,” I said.
He opened the trunk of his car and threw his stuff inside.
“Like I said, we could use you on the tennis team,” he said. He slammed the trunk down. He was trying to be casual and smooth, the old Claude, but I could see the tension in his face.
“Seriously, Claude, is Hanna okay?” I asked.
He stared across the parking lot for a moment, then shook his head. “I honestly don’t know.”
• • •
It was my mother who told me to go see Mrs. Fogarty, the college counselor at my school. She must have talked more to Henry Oswald about me going to art school. Whatever it was, if my mother was taking the idea seriously, that meant I could too.
“I think I want to go to art school,” I told Mrs. Fogarty, sitting in her small office. She was older, about fifty. She looked like a librarian. I had met with her a couple of times over the years. She knew me as a tennis player and a B-minus student with a rich lawyer dad. I’m sure in her mind I was University of Oregon material all the way.