The Silver Age

by Nicholson Gunn

Stephan began to giggle nervously, but restrained his laughter before it gained volume. He could not resist thinking, with uncharacteristic cruelty, that the publicist might in fact be an idiot, and that Jenny Wynne was justified in tearing a strip off her. He emerged from the equipment room just as another kerfuffle was ramping up.

  “Well, it’s not nice,” Jenny Wynne exclaimed, as if on cue. She tore the floppy hat from her head and attempted to toss it, like a Frisbee, across the room. But the hat was so light that it fluttered easily down into a chair, like a butterfly coming in for a landing on a leaf, which defeated the symbolism of the gesture. Her skin was now flushed a healthy, not unattractive, pink.

  Stephan fought hard once again to suppress his laughter, managing just barely to maintain his composure. The moment passed, and he relaxed his hold on himself, then thought again of the floppy hat wobbling uncertainly through the air. Before he could stifle it, a loud bark of laughter escaped his lips.

  She froze, turned towards him in her chair, her neck revolving slowly, as if she was a character in a horror movie possessed by demons.

  “Something seems to be amusing the folks in the peanut gallery,” she called to him. “Maybe you’d like to share your private little joke with us, mister intern person?”

  “I’m sorry?” Stephan asked, trying to sound innocent. “Oh, no no, just a sneeze. Allergy season. Sorry.”

  She fixed him with a hard stare, her mouth twisted in a furious pout.

  “Bless you,” she said.

  The situation was rescued at that moment by the appearance of Helmut, who strode casually through the studio’s main doors, nearly an hour late. He was attired in his usual uniform: black turtleneck, black jeans, black-framed glasses and expensive mock-combat boots in a fine Corinthian leather (black). Aside from a silver stud in one ear, his hair provided the only relief from this monochromatic scheme. Luxuriant and bone-white, it was inevitably coiffed into a state of meticulous disarray. Indeed, the hair was one of Helmut’s obsessions, a kind of talisman. Stephan had seen him primping and teasing it with various gels and pomades in sessions lasting thirty minutes or more before departing for an event. The degree and structure of the messiness needed to be exactly correct; otherwise, Helmut would flatten it all down and start over.

  The publicist jumped to her feet, scattering crumbs, and made the introductions. “Jenny Wynne, Helmut Stumpfl. Mr. Stumpfl, Jenny Wynne. I am Sandra Gertz, publicist. It’s a pleasure to be working with you on this project.”

  Helmut gave the woman a cursory nod, then revolved smoothly away from her, as if the chunky soles of his combat boots contained a system of gimbals, and launched himself at Jenny Wynne.

  “Miss Vynne, I am zo zorry zat ve keep you vaiting. Ve are honoured, really honoured, to have you viz us in our humble studio. You look stunning. The camera will love you, hmn?”

  The most interesting thing about Helmut’s shtick was its 100 per cent success rate. All he had to do was render a few clichés in his Continental accent and it was game over. He could have kept the Queen of England waiting for the better part of an afternoon and would have had her tittering like a school girl five minutes after making his introductions.

  Helmut had Jenny Wynne in the palm of his hand, literally and figuratively, as he manoeuvred her over to the set. Her floppy hat by then returned to her head, where it perched placidly, content to forgive and forget. Mandy, who’d slipped back into the studio in Helmut’s immediate wake, stepped in for a few last touch ups to Jenny’s makeup.

  “Shall ve get started zen, hmn?” Helmut was saying. “Stephan, I am going to need the Hasselblad – anything less vould be too crude an instrument to capture ze full glory of zis ravishing creature.”

  Stephan had the prized camera in hand, but he didn’t move.

  “Vell?” Helmut was saying. “Ve haven’t got all day my young friend. Let’s hop to it, chop chop.”

  Helmut was striding towards him to claim the beautiful steel camera that, even more than his magical hair, was the source of his power. It felt strong and solid in Stephan’s hands, reassuring. He held it out, but as Helmut went to take it from him he hung on for an extra moment.

  “I’m sorry, Helmut,” he said, in a voice so low it was almost a whisper. His insides were boiling. “I think I need to go.”

  He loosened his grip on the camera, allowing Helmut to take it, ever so gently, into his own hands.

  “You need to...”

  “I guess I’m quitting,” he said, scratching the back of his neck, eyes on the floor. “I’m really sorry, Helmut.”

  Helmut started to speak, but Stephan didn’t catch what he had to say, because he was already hurrying away through the studio’s front door.

  Out on the street, the sun beaming into his eyes as he walked, the reality of what he’d just done began to dawn on him. Helmut, to be sure, wasn’t the nicest boss he’d ever had, far from it – he was precise and demanding, yet stingy with compliments and reluctant to share his tricks and secrets. But Helmut had up to now been Stephan’s main source of steady income, which had been paying the rent (if barely) as Stephan developed himself as a photographer. Not only that, the job had given him access to his employer’s darkroom, his developer chemicals, his vast collection of cameras and lenses. If things didn’t work out, it would be far from easy to find his way back into a similar setup. None of it mattered. Jenny Wynne had gotten to him, without even lifting a finger. It was the strangest thing, and in the moment he’d had no choice but to do something extreme.

  Anyway, it was too late to worry about any of that now.

  Chapter 2

  Two years passed before he saw Jenny Wynne again, not that he was keeping track of the interval. He was too busy with his work to give her a second thought, or to notice much of anything at all besides the task at hand. He needed to stay focused on practical matters, and above all on financial survival, if he wanted to prove that his decision to go out on his own had not been a terrible mistake. One event early on gave him hope. A week after Stephan had resigned from Helmut’s employment, his former boss had called him up to ask if he was sure that he didn’t want to reconsider his decision to leave. More politely this time, Stephan said no thank you – he was resolved by that point to forge ahead on his own – but he was grateful for the call all the same. It was the best praise Helmut had ever given him.

  His life over the course of the next several months was a solitary one. To earn a few dollars while he got his own thing up and running, he found work as an industrial temp, pulling shifts at a tropical-fruit warehouse, an oil-drum manufacturer, and (less exhausting but most hallucinatory) a gummy-bear plant. On his days off, he would head out into the field, shooting every imaginable subject, from every conceivable angle, using every possible camera setting. Nights he spent at the lab, working at the colour film machines or in the black-and-white darkrooms. Through a slow process of trial and error, he fine-tuned his skills, building up a mental encyclopedia of techniques and tricks. When he looked back on his earlier work now, he shook his head in embarrassment. It was a good sign: he was getting better.

  He was operating on little sleep, and even less external encouragement, particularly of the financial variety. He learned to live simply, to forego the high-pitched distractions of cable television. He came to appreciate the varied nuances of chicken, spicy beef and shrimp-flavoured ramen noodles. The people he had gone to university with were working their way up the corporate ladder, or articling at law firms, or selling shitty condominiums to the hordes of twentysomethings who at the time were making their way to the city, lured by vague dreams of urbane sophistication. The media were reporting that the economy was gaining steam with every passing week. Which meant that editorial budgets were flush and that banks were willing to lend real money to upstart creative types on the strength of a confident pitch.

  He took out a $15,000 line of credit from a local bank branch and went into business as a freelance photographer specializing in magazine projec
ts. Such an individual naturally required a suitably bohemian studio, and after a brief search, he lucked into one. It was offered to him at a surprisingly affordable rent, thanks to the desperation of the young, ill-equipped landlord for tenants to occupy his heavily mortgaged new acquisition: a beautiful yet decrepit red-brick Romanesque theatre at the corner of Queen and Dovercourt. Stephan’s space was in the attic, and featured a sloping roof with skylights, white walls, and a hatch in the middle of the floor. The hatch provided access to a reinforced steel bar from which a burlesque trapeze artist, who occasionally performed on the stage directly below, hung her rigging.

  It was just the right kind of pretentiously authentic detail that potential clients loved to hear when they came in to see him. He signed up on the spot.

  He began to get work. His first-ever client was a publication known as Canine Lover magazine, which engaged him to shoot candid portraits of prize Bassets and Shar-Peis. He decided to make the most of it. On his first shoot for the publication, he tried an avant-garde approach, photographing a trio of greyhounds as if they were high-fashion models in a Chanel advertisement, shot by Karl Lagerfeld, in Vogue Paris. The client was appalled, asked him what drugs he’d been smoking, and threatened to fire him on the spot. But he begged for, and was ultimately granted, a stay of execution. He had learned his lesson, and on the re-shoot swallowed his pride and tried something straightforward. The client was thrilled this time, offered him a follow-up assignment with a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, some sort of platinum medallist, that resembled a tiny, incredibly stupid human.

  Other clients followed, eventually allowing him to hire a couple of human models who, like Stephan himself, were only just finding their professional footing. He put together his own demo shoots, paying for them out of pocket, and the results were heartening. He’d always secretly told himself that he was better than Helmut could ever have admitted, but deep down, he realized, he had never fully believed it. Now he began to suspect that he had been right all along. He filled his book with new shots, shopped it around, and sure enough the new clients continued to join his roster one after another.

  Meanwhile, he was studying the way in which certain leading photographers in the United Kingdom at that time were working. Their style was uncomplicated, almost austere, the polar opposite of Helmut’s lush nineties romanticism. It was a departure from the local way of doing things, but the moment was right for a new approach, he sensed. The city’s editors and art directors had seen what was happening internationally, and they wanted in on the action. They also wanted to safeguard their budgets, which inclined them to work with a young, relatively inexperienced and thus inexpensive, photographer. Soon they were offering Stephan occasional feature assignments, and were often willing to give him a modest degree of artistic freedom in carrying them out.

  Of course there were challenges along the way. That second fall: the September 11 attacks in the United States. For a brief, nauseating moment it seemed as if the world might be changed forever – it was the end of irony, the death of inane distractions such as lifestyle magazines. Except of course it wasn’t. For a few disjointed weeks the world stood at attention, a period during which Stephan watched the news while contemplating what sort of grown-up thing he might now do with his life. Then everyone seemed to shrug their shoulders and go back to work. Nothing had changed, after all. The word had come down from above: the best thing to do was to carry on as if nothing had happened, an approach that people seemed more than happy to adopt. By November, Canine Lover was deluging his inbox with proposals for new assignments.

  There was no big break, no definitive moment at which Stephan’s fortunes were suddenly made, and yet everything was coming together for him. Less that two years after he’d gone out on his own, he was already one of a handful of top young editorial photographers in the city. The art directors at the major local magazines knew who he was, and spoke of him as someone with great things in his future. They even told him that he would be good enough to try his skill internationally, in New York or London, when the time came for that, assuming he wanted it badly enough.

  At the beginning of 2002 he had hired a part-time assistant, a sad-eyed young woman by the name of Penny. She was in her early 20s and still a student, around the age Stephan had been when he’d first come to the city. He had arrived here just a few years ago, by way of four years of university in the province’s hinterlands, but already that felt to him like ancient history. Penny came in to the studio twice a week, and whenever he was in the midst of a big shoot and needed the extra help. He couldn’t afford to pay her any more than Helmut had previously paid him, but he did his best to be good-tempered and fair with her, and to encourage her to pursue her own projects, thinking with self-satisfied disapproval of Helmut’s indifference to his own development. Penny made it clear that she was available to him in a non-work sense as well as a professional one, but he wasn’t about to get sidetracked on a dalliance. There simply wasn’t time.

  In the spring of 2002, when Stephan was 28, he was nominated for a National Magazine Award – quite an honour for someone his age. The nomination was for a photo essay he’d composed, a survey of the strange little forlorn sitting rooms that local architects had placed in the foyers of high-rise apartment buildings for a time during the sixties. An invitation to the magazine awards gala was included in the envelope with the notice of his nomination. Printed on a fine creamy paper, its calligraphic script rendered in silver ink, it resembled an invitation to a fancy, if slightly unfashionable, wedding.

  Stephan was not a fixture of any particular scene or set. He was happiest when he was alone, squirreled away in the dark room. Still, there were business reasons to attend such a function – as his time with Helmut had taught him. He could catch up with a few of his editorial clients, who would perhaps introduce him to potential new ones. And who knew? It might even be fun. He’d been so focused on getting somewhere in recent months that he’d done little else but work. Now that his efforts were beginning to pay off, wasn’t it time to enjoy the fruits of his labours? As he fingered the prominent grain of the paper (while standing in his underwear by the front door of his basement apartment), his eyes landed on the phrase “your presence is cordially requested.” It had a nice ring to it. Yes, he would be going.

  He confirmed his attendance, then went out and purchased an inexpensive but fashionably cut black suit (it was about time he owned a suit). On the appointed evening, early in June, he made his way down to College Park, where the event was being held, in an old Art Deco theatre that had recently been restored to its former oak-panelled glory after decades of neglect and decay. Striding in through the front doors, a little nervous but with a strong sense of anticipation, he felt as if he were walking onto the set of a golden-age Hollywood film.

  The cocktail party portion of the evening was held in the theatre’s ample foyer, which was hung with crystal chandeliers and lined with ceiling-high mirrors in ornate gold-leaf frames. The mirrors reflected the figures of the guests as they mingled, imbibing free drinks and nibbling from tables of hors d’oeuvres, at the centre of which burbled white and dark chocolate fountains, at the time a new innovation. The crowd was a diverse one – all sorts of over-educated white folks were on hand. There were older, more serious people, the senior editors, writers and art directors, and younger, more frivolous ones, the assistant editors, interns and freelancers. (As a general rule, the two groups avoided one another out of mutual fear.) Stephan even spotted Helmut’s giant, silver-crowned skull at the far end of the room, and made a mental note to keep his distance.

  He soon found himself drinking champagne with a circle of four editors from This City, the publication that had run his award-nominated photo essay. There was Nathan MacGregor, a bookish gay man in a tweed three-piece suit, who appeared to be getting discretely hammered. Amanda Ellis was a junior copy editor with a dark bob and boyish freckles, and Joan Carpenter was an older, charmingly foul-mouthed newspaper veteran who’d made
the switch to magazines after she’d burnt out on the daily crime beat. Finally there was Sandra Blankton, an associate editor and the daughter of a locally esteemed journalist who was known to be a long-time drinking partner of This City’s editor in chief.

  One moment Stephan had the sense of being a fake, an unwanted party-crasher who had stolen the invitation of some legitimate guest and would soon be found out and ejected from the premises. In the next he was impressed by the superiority he felt towards the entire scene. There was Ms. Blankton, for example, whom everybody said didn’t have enough real talent to adequately edit a takeout flier. At that moment, Ms. Blankton was holding forth, at considerable length, on the offensiveness of some obscure Eastern European novelist whose work she considered objectionable. As her discourse crescendoed, a passing woman stumbled and bumped against her, splashing most of her glass of champagne onto Ms. Blankton’s floral-print dress. A few drops landed on Stephan’s cheek, a sudden pinprick sensation of cold against his skin.

  “Oopsie,” the woman said.

  Ms. Blankton wobbled on her heels, then stumbled backwards, bumping against Nathan and in turn splashing herself, again, with champagne from her own glass.

  She looked around in astonishment, as if she’d just been slapped across the face.

  “Look what you’ve done,” she said, her eyes bulging in cartoonish rage.

  “Oh, how clumsy of me. I do apologize, although I wouldn’t worry too much about that dress if I were you.”

  Ms. Blankton glared helplessly at her tormentor, a response to this remark eluding her, then turned and stalked off towards the ladies’ room. Meanwhile, the culprit made no move to flee, but stood calmly before them, her gaze roving from face to face. Her eyes lingered on Stephan for a moment, as if she was photographing him with a hidden camera for future reference.