by Brian Morton
He had no idea whether these photographs would mean anything to anyone else. It turned out that they didn’t—not, at any rate, to anyone who mattered in the wider world. Some of his friends liked them, or said they did. But he couldn’t get them into any of the galleries or magazines that occasionally welcomed his work.
He took his time figuring out his next move. If anyone had asked him, he would have said that he’d persevere. He wouldn’t have considered himself someone who could be thrown off course by a few rejections; he thought he’d developed an immunity to all that.
And then he heard about the job at the paper (“deputy photo editor,” which seemed vaguely humiliating, reminding him of the tin deputy sheriff’s star he used to wear pinned to his pajama top when he played Cowboys and Indians before bed, but which, on the other hand, paid fifty thousand a year, more than twice what he’d ever earned in any year till then), and he thought, What the hell, I’ll apply for it and see what happens. He didn’t think they’d offer it to him, and he didn’t know if he’d take it if they did.
But they did, and he did—and he found, to his amazement, that he liked it. The work was absorbing, it was sort of creative, and it was a little different every day.
It was strange to live like a normal person. It was a blow to his ego, in a way. He’d been telling himself for more than ten years that he simply wasn’t built for the office-going life, yet here he was, not only enduring but enjoying it.
Just as much as he liked the work, he liked the rituals that surrounded it. He liked waking up early; he liked getting coffee from the guy who came around with the cart at break time; he liked standing around bullshitting with the other people who worked there. And he liked getting a regular paycheck. By the standards of friends who’d been solidly in the work world for decades, his salary was measly, but by his own standards, it was unbelievable. He liked having a decent health plan; he liked not having to pay for insulin and syringes.
At first he told himself that he wasn’t going to keep doing it—he was just taking a rest for a few months and putting some money in the bank before going back to the freelance life. And then he wasn’t sure. He agonized for months about whether to keep the job or rededicate himself to taking pictures. You spend a lot of time worrying about what choice you’re going to make, until one day you take a look at your life and realize you’ve already chosen.
Sometimes he felt as if he’d been cured of a disease. It was as if he’d been carrying a parasite—a worm that used to gnaw away in his brain, and that had finally stopped gnawing. When you devote your whole life to taking pictures, it never lets you rest, because whenever you’re not doing it you feel as if you should be doing it, and whenever you’re doing it you feel as if you should be doing it better. Whenever you pick up your camera, you know that if André Kertész or Berenice Abbott could stroll up and take it from your hands, they could produce an unforgettable image of the scene in front of you, no matter how flat and unpromising it looks to you. They could make the moment live forever. The parasite of art, the virus of art, never ceases to gnaw away at your brain, never ceases to torture you with the knowledge that whatever you’re doing could be done more beautifully, more powerfully, more stirringly, more disturbingly, more deeply.
But now he was living in a different world. If he decided to shoot a roll of film on the weekend, he was no longer haunted by impossible standards. And when he chose the photographs that ran in the paper, simple clarity was enough. After years of beating his head against the unbreakable wall of beauty, it was a relief to be living in a world in which it was possible, even easy, to be good enough.
And yet . . . He’d never been able to get rid of the idea, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he was going to make his way back to photography someday, and that these last few years of office-going life would finally turn out to be an invisible seedtime, during which, inside him, new powers and new approaches to his art had been taking form.
About two months ago he’d met someone who owned a gallery in New Jersey, and she’d said she’d like to put up a show of his recent work. In fact, he had no recent work—he hadn’t taken pictures in over a year—but he didn’t tell her that.
The show was still months away, but he was starting to feel more and more excited. He was hoping that it would jump-start his career, jump-start his desire to take pictures again. If he got some good reviews; if he could parlay the show into another, splashier exhibit in Manhattan; if he could get the attention of a younger crowd of curators and gallery owners . . . There was no telling what might happen. People get rediscovered all the time.
When he was young, he took pictures for the sheer love of it, just to bow down before the fleeting loveliness of the world, but that kind of purity had become impossible to sustain. He just didn’t have the strength to get back into photography unless he could be sure of a payoff.
The man he used to be—the man who was Nora’s moral touchstone—would have had nothing but scorn for this. The man he used to be would have said that the very fact that he was cautiously testing the waters proved that he wasn’t serious about art at all.
And he was afraid that this was what Nora would believe. He knew the outlines of Nora’s story; he knew about her struggles. He knew about the way she followed her own aesthetic demon, even when it led her to places where she desperately wanted not to go. Nora was alarmingly pure—as pure as he used to be.
If he’d been approaching his future with a different spirit, he might have told her that the two of them were in the same situation, both of them wanting to rededicate themselves to their calling. But they were animated by such different reasons that he couldn’t say it. It was better to let her believe, for now, that he was the same man he used to be, driven by a pure love of taking pictures. Maybe he’d rediscover it. She wouldn’t have to know he’d ever lost it.
If she knew about all this, he wondered, would she be less interested in me? Would she be here at all?
HE WENT BACK TO THE BEDROOM and watched her sleep. She was a small woman who slept big: with her arms and legs flung out as if she were making angels in the snow, she took up the entire bed. He thought of taking her picture, but he didn’t. He’d never taken Nora’s picture, and he didn’t think he ever would. She was the great uncapturable.
In novels and songs, people often sit up watching their lovers sleep. But in real life, it was kind of boring. So he didn’t stay there very long; he went into the living room and lay down on the couch.
14
WHEN NORA WOKE UP, ISAAC had already left for work. He’d left her a note telling her to help herself to breakfast. She found some leftover Chinese food in his fridge, ate a cold veggie egg roll and two scallion pancakes, and tossed a few darts at a dartboard on his kitchen wall. She felt virtuous about the fact that she’d cut short their encounter, but also sad.
She would have liked to hang around his house and do some snooping, but she had too many things to do that day.
Waiting at the bus stop, she copyedited an article for a journal of cardiology. Nora wasn’t a hypochondriac—she usually felt like the healthiest person in the room—but when she read about a disease, she often spent an hour or two thinking she had it. According to the article she was reading now, open-heart surgery, even when it went without a hitch, could have delayed complications, the most disturbing of which was subtle mental impairment. Evidently this was such a frequent occurrence that doctors had given it a nickname: “pump head.” She spent the ride to the city certain that she herself was destined, someday, to end up suffering from pump head. For a few minutes she was convinced she had pump head already, until she remembered that she hadn’t actually had open-heart surgery.
She went home and listened to the messages on her phone machine. There was another message from Benjamin, who’d returned from his conference that morning. He was calling to remind her that they were getting together later that night, and to say that he’d be able to tape the Daytime Emmys for Billie.
&
nbsp; She copyedited an article about lupus, briefly contracted lupus herself, and then sat down to write. She was just about done with the Richard Buckner article, but she didn’t turn to it immediately. As on every other day, she began her writing session by trying to write fiction and seeing if anything would come.
Today, for the first time in almost a year, something did come. She couldn’t believe it. It was hard to keep herself in her seat—she was so excited she wanted to leap around the room.
It wasn’t a story; maybe it was only a character. Maybe it wasn’t even a character; maybe it was just a name. But at least she had a name.
She was writing about someone named Gabriel. She didn’t know where he had come from; he’d just turned up. The only things she could sense about him at first were that he was older than she was, he was unpretentious, and he was a good listener. She didn’t know what he looked like or what he did for a living. But she thought she had the seed of a story. She had a picture in her mind of him meeting a woman at a train station. Nora didn’t know much about him, didn’t know anything about the woman. But she wanted to find out.
She couldn’t write for long, because she had to meet Billie, who was having her operation later that day. But she didn’t need to write for a long time. She’d finally stumbled into the beginning of a story, and that was enough for one day.
Nora took the subway downtown and met Billie at her apartment.
“How are you doing?” Nora said.
“I’m not scared. I trust the doctor. Dr. Buffalo.”
Buffalino was his name. “It’s nice to have a surgeon you can trust,” Nora said.
“I like it that he takes the time to explain things. I wish he could be my regular doctor. I can’t really talk to Dr. Cyclops.”
Billie’s internist was named Skyler. For a while she’d referred to him as Dr. Skylab; after she grew familiar with his habit of rushing into the room and dashing back out before you had a chance to ask him any questions, he had become Dr. Cyclone; and finally, for no particular reason, he became Dr. Cyclops.
Billie was putting things into her overnight bag: toothbrush, toothpaste, liquid soap, shampoo, lipstick, a pocket-sized photo album, a novel with an Oprah’s Book Club seal, and a little book of puzzles and jumbles.
“You’ll be able to tape my show for me?”
“Already taken care of.”
She didn’t tell Billie that it was Benjamin who was doing the taping. She knew Billie would be embarrassed at the thought of Benjamin, the professor, knowing that she watched the Daytime Emmys.
Billie was silent.
“What is it?” Nora said.
“You’re nice to me,” Billie said.
Edwin was standing by the door, meowing. Billie let him out into the hall and waited patiently at the door until he came back in.
“He has dandruff. He likes to go outside and scratch his back on the banister.”
Billie’s apartment smelled heavily of cat. Nora tried to ignore this. To be more precise, she tried not to let the smell lead her to the all-too-obvious equation: older woman with cats equals sadness.
One of our tasks in life, Nora was thinking, is to peel away the cliches. TV and movies had touched upon every conceivable situation, and had banalized them all, so that it was difficult to see things clearly. Every situation you encountered had a cliché stuck to it, a label—so that Billie’s cats, for example, weren’t just cats; they were symbols of how sad it was for an older woman to be living alone.
It was sad that the cats were her closest companions. But there was more to Billie’s life than that. She’d brought joy into the lives of many people: into Nora’s life, into Nelson’s, into the lives of the children she’d worked with at the hospital. She had a thick file of letters and cards, from the children and their parents, telling her how much she’d meant to them.
So her life hadn’t been so sad. The only sad thing was that she’d ended up alone and uncared for. She had no one to care for her except Nora.
Billie handed Nora a set of her house keys.
“You remember what to feed the little aardvarks?”
Nora closed her eyes, to remember. “Louie and Edwin get the chicken and seafood combo. Dolly gets the gourmet tuna fish.”
“And you have to make sure she eats.”
“I know,” Nora said. “You have to feed her with a spoon.”
Billie was having her operation at Mount Sinai. They didn’t have to be there until the late afternoon, so they decided to take the subway up to Central Park West and walk across the park.
There was a hot-dog cart in front of the Museum of Natural History, just across from the park. “I think it’s time for a snack,” Billie said. She walked to the cart—she walked slowly, with her heavy body bent forward. Billie, who used to be a dancer. She ordered a pretzel and a Diet Coke. “How’s business?” she said to the vendor, a guy in his twenties, as he passed her a large soft pretzel with a pair of tongs. “Are things going swimmingly today?” She liked to flirt—she always had; but whereas, years ago, when she made these light remarks, people would respond eagerly—men and women alike used to glow with pleasure when she paid attention to them—now they usually ignored her. The guy didn’t even bother answering. Nora felt like slapping him. She felt like saying, “A few years ago, if this woman had smiled at you, you would have fallen over yourself, you little shit.”
Across the street, just inside the park, there was a huge sealed tent. The museum was sponsoring a special outdoor exhibit: the World of Butterflies.
They went inside. The space, about the size of a football field, was filled with plants and climbing vines and man-sized trees, and, everywhere, butterflies: thousands of brightly colored butterflies, resting on every surface, fluttering in the air with a nervous grace. Fluttering, freckled, stippled, swimming slowly in the air—it was too much beauty to take in.
There was a contingent of New York City schoolchildren in the tent, but instead of being the kind of insane mob Nora usually encountered when she saw kids on class trips—the girls taunting one another, the boys crazily chasing one another, punching—they seemed filled with a sort of awed solemnity. The butterfly world had transformed them into philosophers.
A large and brilliant blue butterfly approached her—dancing toward her and backing away at the same time—and she was filled, not only with joy, but with gratitude. The sheer trustfulness of the people who’d put this exhibit together nearly brought tears to her eyes—their faith that the young people who visited this tent wouldn’t be inclined to maul the butterflies, to tear their wings off; their faith that the experience itself would be civilizing.
Some of the butterflies seemed to float through the air without moving their wings. It was like being in a summer shower, a shower of pure beauty. It was like being in some Utopian jungle, the tenderest and calmest jungle that could possibly be.
They left the exhibit and walked through the park. They walked around the reservoir, a part of the park that Billie loved. It was a sparkling day; braids of sunlight rippled across the water.
At Mount Sinai, they waited for two hours until Billie was given a room. The other bed was empty, which was nice. The first thing she did was take out her photo album and put it on the night table. It unfolded accordion-style, so you could look at all the pictures at once. There was a picture of Billie’s parents—Nora’s grandparents; one of Nora with her mother—Nora, at the age of three, standing on Margaret’s lectern at the University of Chicago; one of the cats—all three of them sandwiched together on the couch, sleeping; and one of Billie with Nelson, more than twenty years ago, in a paddle boat, laughing.
“Home sweet home,” Billie said.
Nora looked around the bare room. “There’s just one more thing this room needs,” Nora said. She took a bottle of bubbles from her bag—she’d bought it in a party store on Broadway that morning. She opened the bottle, dipped the wand in the liquid, held the wand in front of her lips, and blew. Ten or fifteen bubble
s shot up toward the ceiling and settled slowly in the air: glistening, iridescent, slippery, circling, trembling, wavery, gone.
Nora gave her the bottle and Billie, with a soft breath, sent four small bubbles into the air.
“You’re good to me,” she said.
“You’re easy to be good to.”
WHILE NORA WAS IN THE waiting room, a nurse came in to tell her she had a phone call. She took the call at the nurses’ station. It was Isaac.
“I was just calling to find out how Billie’s doing.”
Nora told him that she was still in surgery.
“How did you find me? How’d you get the number here?”
“You don’t spend the night with a hotel detective without picking up a thing or two,” he said.
She stayed at the hospital until Dr. Buffalo came out to tell her that the operation was over, that everything had gone smoothly, and that they wouldn’t know the results for a few days. Billie was in the recovery room; she was under sedation, and would probably just sleep all night.
After leaving the hospital, Nora took the subway downtown to meet Benjamin.
She was meeting him at a restaurant where a group of writers he knew got together for dinner once a month. After that the two of them were going to a book party near Battery Park City.
While she rode the subway, her arm began to throb. It was hard to understand why no one else was aware of it. It seemed to be calling out.
Three different doctors had told her that she needed an operation: her bones had knitted together in the wrong way, and they needed to be broken again and reset. She didn’t want to go through an operation, and anyway she had no faith that just one operation would do the trick. She had tried physical therapy, acupuncture, acupressure, yoga, Swedish massage, Chinese herbal medicine, magnets, and prescription painkillers (some of them made the pain go away, but they made her stupid), and nothing helped. So she’d finally decided just to live with the pain. The only problem was that it sometimes affected her mood. Pain can make you less generous, less patient.