by Jessica Lott
“These remembrances were common,” Gerald said. “The father usually kept them.”
“My grandfather must have given them to her, although by rights they should have been passed down to the eldest, and according to Lyuba, her mother was older than mine. I think I should start with her side of the family.”
“Whatever you find, email to me, and I’ll start plugging the information into a tree. The history is out there, we just have to discover it.”
• • •
Back in the car, Rhinehart said, “He’s right. I do need to center my investigation on Ukraine.”
“He seemed sort of knowledgeable, despite the look of that office.”
“He’s one of the best,” Rhinehart said, giving me an amused look out of the corner of his eye.
“Did Lyuba tell you that Marta and your mother were sisters?”
“Like me, she’s trying to piece it together. But if she is my cousin, she can tell me about my grandfather and my other aunts and cousins—maybe even my father since he stayed behind in Ukraine.”
“But wouldn’t this information be in those letters from your mother? Did you ask her about that?”
“I did but she hasn’t replied yet. The mail is very slow going back and forth. Things take forever.”
“What things? Gifts?”
He took his eyes off the road to give me a scolding look. “Nothing expensive. Don’t fault me my generosity.”
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea to jump in with presents. It sends the wrong message. Remember the candidate with the pro-union platform?” Rhinehart had backed him, even stuffing envelopes and stumping, and the guy had turned out to not even have a college degree. The closest he’d gotten to unions was a summer job doing carpentry.
“That was a long time ago, Saint Peter.”
I loved mysteries and had already figured out the process for solving this one. “What you need is for Lyuba to send over those letters your mother wrote her. You can see if you recognize her handwriting and then figure everything out. Have them translated over here. You don’t need her son for that.”
“She’s nervous to send them in case they get lost.”
“How about photocopies then?”
“Tatie, this is Ukraine. They don’t have easy access to modern conveniences.”
Already we had hit a snag. “Something seems off here.”
“I’m sure it will become clear eventually. I’m just beginning the research.”
• • •
We were already on the FDR, which was moving. I rapidly saw the day coming to a close, Rhinehart dropping me off at my building, with me having no clear idea of the meaning of this trip, how he felt about me, or when I would ever see him again. I sat brooding out the window, and he said, “You’re quiet.”
“Can I ask you something?”
I saw him almost imperceptibly tighten up. He suspected I was going to demand an emotional revelation. His eyes still on the road, he said, nonchalantly, “Sure.”
“After you won the Pulitzer—” I was drawing out my sentence, maybe unfairly, but I was also watching him. He seemed frozen, a painting of a man driving a car. “I sent you a letter. Did you ever receive it?”
“Yes. I did.” He gave me a serious look. “It was a beautiful letter. I saved it. I still have it.”
“But you never responded.”
“It was a difficult time,” he said. “The phone kept ringing. I talked and talked about myself until I was thoroughly sick.” He gripped the wheel. “No one prepares you for how terrifying success is. How strong the pressure is to enjoy it. Because if you’re not happy then, during the high point in your life, when will you ever be?”
We were nearing the exit for the Manhattan Bridge. “I started a letter to you many times,” he said. “I just wasn’t able to finish it.”
“And what about before that? When I’d first moved to the city and I wanted to just get a cup of coffee and I called you and you never called me back?”
“Tatie,” he said, shaking his head. “Even you must have felt at the time that wasn’t a good idea.”
• • •
Getting out of the car in front of my building, I said, “I should be able to get you the prints for Harold and Sue this week.” I’d been able to cull about ten shots I thought Sue would find acceptable. I jotted down the numbers of six of them to be made into 8 x 10s—I wasn’t about to show her the contact sheets and have her choose, especially as there were some of Harold that she’d find distressing, his dull eyes and mouth hanging loose like a stroke victim’s.
Rhinehart was standing awkwardly by the car, gazing up at my building. “Would you like to drop them off, maybe come over for dinner at my apartment?”
I was feeling almost physically worn down by my own circling thoughts and confusion. How could he spend an entire day with me and not want to touch me, or even ask me about myself? I was merely a witness to his research. “I’m not sure what I have going on this week,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, carefully. “Would you like help bringing up the bags?”
I shook my head.
“I’ll call you,” he said. “About dinner.”
• • •
In the other two rolls from Chechna’s, the ones for me, there were a few images that were so good I got chills, especially the portraits of Harold that I shot at F16, with a large depth of field, so that all the knickknacks behind him were in sharp relief. A few others were also worth making into prints—one of the living room in which I’d been able to capture the late afternoon sun glinting off the old-fashioned radiator, the dusty collection of vases casting shadows on the dresser, a candid of Sue standing next to my commercial lights, sneaking a look into her compact, and another of Chechna absentmindedly petting one of her porcelain spaniels, the light from the window washing over her hands.
I hoped to sequence these with a few I’d taken of Marty in his office. I also had some strong shots of Shani in the salon. She’d borrowed some props from the theater to make her role as hairdresser look more authentic. She also felt she needed an elaborate hairstyle, and had woven her own hair and extensions around a support so that it looked like a beehive, a couple of braided tendrils venturing out. She put on the smock and gloves she used for coloring and stood next to her chair, one hand resting on it, and looked into the camera with an open expression, then defiant, then amused, as if she had a secret with herself. In another pose she was sitting in the chair in a long black dress, legs crossed, staring out the front door of the shop with a restrained, expectant expression.
• • •
I felt I’d taken this idea as far as I could, and I was longing to do something more experimental and surreal. When I was younger I’d had a recurring dream that still had a powerful grip on my memory. I was sitting in an enormous bed, amazed and frightened, watching large-winged birds fly around the room. I thought I might be able to re-create the vision by layering separate images on top of each other, which I’d never done before. I needed to photograph the birds first. Hallie volunteered to take me to a sanctuary that she donated to—there were falcons there.
She picked me up wearing oversized dark sunglasses and red lipstick, a 1950s seductress sent out on a kill. She claimed to visit the refuge often, but I couldn’t picture it. She didn’t even have the proper footwear. We picked our way through the muddy puddles, past the high grunting of Canadian geese, and back into the scrubby woods, both cooler and darker, where the birds’ cages were. Downy underfeathers were stuck in the fence links. “Be prepared,” Hallie told me. “This is going to break your heart.”
I had some trouble locating the red-tailed hawk; he was watching me with quizzical, geometric movements of his head from a swing made of PVC pipe, an old carpet wrapped around it. A staff member let us inside, and then went back to scrubbing down a neighboring cage. I checked the light meter—it was darker here than I’d expected. I loaded the 800 film, set up the tripod, and shot part of a roll. A
s I looked up from the camera, he flew at me, and I had to move quickly to capture it. That majestic ease birds have in their own bodies. He landed, and with his big-shouldered, old man’s gait, lumbered over to his dog dish of water. His naked legs, in their feathered shorts, looked human.
“What’s wrong with him? He doesn’t seem maimed.” He looked up warily. I was suddenly conscious of the screeching and huffing of birds in other cages.
“He had a broken wing, and he’s healed, but it’s difficult to reintroduce them into the wild. You have to reteach them how to hunt.” We left the cage and walked down the wood chip path. Behind us, the hawk cried, a high-pitched scream that faded off at the end, sounding more prey than predator.
As I was photographing a blind seagull, Hallie asked whether I was sleeping with Rhinehart.
“Of course not. I would have told you.”
“The machinery doesn’t work?”
“I have no idea—I haven’t tested it.”
“But you want to.”
I did. The annoyance I’d felt after our trip upstate had vanished by the next day. But I wanted him to want me, too, and I suspected I would have gotten a clearer sign if the desire was mutual. I told her he’d invited me over to his house for dinner. “Maybe something will happen then.”
“I’d give it the green light, except then you’re going to get attached, and I’m not sure he’s changed all that much. It seems like he’s still really into his own thing. If anything, his issues probably have solidified.”
“But I’ve changed. I don’t think it would bother me as much now. I’m more independent.”
Hallie was shaking her head. “It always feels like that before you have sex. Are you dating other people? You’ve got to balance it out.”
“No. But if someone came along I would.”
Hallie snorted. “Came along. At your age! Who’s going to just show up? You have to work at these things.”
“Love happens. It always has before when I’m least expecting it.”
“After you hit thirty that magic rule doesn’t apply.” She took a Ziploc bag of dried corn from her handbag and spread it on the ground for the ducks. “Don’t you want to get married?”
“I’m not sure. It’s not the only possible relationship model.”
“Name another.”
“Common law partners. Sisters who live together. Grandmothers who raise children. Women who set up families with each other.”
“Lesbians. That’s a domestic partnership—same thing as marriage. They need to make that legal everywhere.”
“No, I mean straight women.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You must’ve read that in a novel or something. No one we know does it.”
I couldn’t remember where I read it, although it may have been in a bell hooks essay.
Hallie went on, “I couldn’t stand to have a woman breathing down my neck all the time. We’re trained to notice any change in patterns. Even I do it. With Adán. I think he may be considering having an affair.”
I was skeptical. “How do you know?”
“Things he says. It’s like he’s comparing me to someone and can’t decide who’s better. He says to me the other day, ‘You have a nice nose, actually.’ Actually! As if someone had claimed otherwise.”
“That’s not evidence. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“There are other things, too, that I don’t want to say.”
Sexual things? We watched the ducks walk across the yard. Hallie was biting on her cuticle, and I was worried she was going to tell me her eating disorder had come back; she always claimed it was a signal that something was happening beneath the surface of her life, like people who can tell a storm is approaching because of an aching knee. Her bulimia had gotten very bad in college, around the time her father was coming for a visit with the woman, Margie, whom he would eventually marry. Hallie was binging and taking laxatives. She was forced to tell me after she overdosed on them and had an accident in her bed. We went to the school counseling center after that, but she still got weird about food sometimes when she was stressed, refusing to eat carbohydrates or doing juice fasts.
She seemed to guess what I was thinking. “Not that. I’ve been crying!”
“Really?” She hadn’t even cried at her mother’s funeral. I remembered her staring angrily at the coffin.
“It’s starting to freak me out. Usually it’s in the car. I’ll be going along, doing my thing, and then all of a sudden I’m screaming and pounding on the steering wheel like a maniac.” She gripped my arm. “It’s crazy, right? The other day, I was on the way to the post office, and I had to pull over because I couldn’t see the road I was crying so hard.”
“What are you upset about? Adán?”
“I don’t know.”
I was concerned but trying not to show it, as I could already sense her regretting telling me. It was a thing with her, she couldn’t stand to have anyone feel sorry for her. Usually the less I asked, the more she’d reveal, which required an annoying passivity on my part.
“It’s fucked up, I know, but there’s something kind of exciting about suspecting him. I’ve gotten sort of addicted to it. And it feels real, like I’m on to something.” We walked back to the rutted lot. Her silver Jaguar, parked between a beat-up Toyota and the staff pickup truck, glimmered like a giant fish.
“Maybe you need to be putting this energy somewhere else. Working.”
“Doing what? PR? I’d have to start at the bottom again. And I’d make so little compared to Adán. No, I had those career dreams once, but I had to let them go.”
“You talk as if you married into the royal family. Lots of women work.”
“Not the women I know. Not women with money.” I was about to tell her that those women were also raising children, but she was on to some story about a career woman who had been “sold out by ’80s feminism,” had decided to work her way up the corporate ladder instead of getting married, and now found herself in her late forties, expected to work like a man for much less money, while fighting for attention in a city that was obsessed with youth and looks. “Now, to the younger men she’s a cougar, and the older men don’t give a shit about how she’s independent.”
“That’s one really cynical example.”
“It’s real. I know other women who it happened to. And anyway, it’s not like I do nothing. I have the fund-raising work for PETA. Hey”—she pulled on me—“why don’t you come back to the house and talk to Adán, draw him out. Tell me if I’m crazy.”
I refused.
“I’m not asking you to extract a confession. Just get him talking and see if you can read anything in his attitude.”
“That’s so awkward. He’s going to know what’s up.”
“But you’re so good at these things. Just come over for a drink. He likes you, you’re such an audience. Don’t let him talk too much about Spain. He’s nuts on that topic, lately.” She was leaning against her car, smiling at me. I recognized that expression. She knew, like when we were kids, that I’d just give in.
• • •
It was midday, loose shadows across the lawn. Inside the quiet expanse of steel and blond wood were six bedrooms hidden off hallways and sliding doors, a built-in speaker system, soft imported carpet. As if still outside, we walked through stretches of sun that poured in from floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the marsh. When she was in college, Hallie would always burn through her allowance weeks before the end of the semester, and she never wanted to ask her dad for more money. There was one time she was so broke we’d shared my meal card. Her favorite dish was baked ziti, and when it was my turn to go to the dining hall, I’d take along a handful of Ziploc bags to fill up on the all-you-can-eat buffet and smuggle them back under my coat. “Don’t forget the parmie,” she’d say, waving. Coming back across the campus in the early winter dark, trees casting shadows on the snow, I could see her waiting, backlit in the window, smoking a cigarette.
• • •
He spread his arms when he saw me. “A visit! You are never here. Mi mujer always is at your house.”
“Not that much since I moved to Brooklyn.”
“I don’t do Brooklyn,” said Hallie. “What do you want to drink?”
I asked for seltzer, and she told Adán to make us both martinis. “So,” he said to me, “I hear you are with an older man now. A professor.”
It always annoyed me how much couples gossiped, how unwittingly exposed you were when you sat down with one of them. Later they would discuss your reactions and postulate that you were lying, or still attached, or who would be good for you instead. I switched the topic to the injured birds we’d seen, how they shuffled around the cages like mammals. “I want to go back and shoot them as the sun’s setting. When the light is more melancholy.”
“Light is very important to a photographer.” Adán had a way of saying things so that they were both statements and questions.
“Especially late afternoon light at certain times of the year. It’s my favorite.”
He took both my hands in his. They were dry and slightly warm, as if he’d been holding them up in front of a fire. “Go to Spain and visit Madrid and then after go to a little town in the north. Its name is Collbató. There I have some family, the little part that is Catalan, and you can stay with them in their house and make pictures. The light is like nothing you have seen. September it is best because the sky is very, very blue, more blue than water.”
“Is this close to Barcelona?” I said, thinking of Laura and her gallery recommendations, which led me to wonder whether Rhinehart was upset about the separation. Or if he even had any contact with her.
Adán nodded. “Only an hour away but it is very different looking. All around there is not much, just farms for the olives, and also the tree for almonds, so the dirt, it is very dry and with many rocks, you know, but a beautiful pink color, like the sun has rubbed his face in it.”