Stephan knew it was time to lay off, but he couldn’t let go without one last gambit. “It’s not just your business, though, Bill. It’s also your passion, your calling. Am I right?”
Bill clicked the mouse and turned to face him again. “Sure it is,” he said. “But let me tell you, my friend, it’s hard to experience passion when you’re wondering whether your next rent cheque is going to clear.”
As he spoke, the printer leapt into action. After a few preliminary buzzes and squawks – a kind of digital throat clearing – it began to grind out a job. Curious, Stephan placed his hand on the device’s plastic sheath as it worked. There was something about the way it vibrated as it ran that felt cheap to him, makeshift.
“I just don’t know, Bill,” he admitted. “I don’t want to be a naysayer, but it seems like a toy, a gimmick. A cool one, I admit.”
“I kind of agree with you, Stephan,” Bill said. “But look at it this way: back in the early days of photography, Polaroids were mainly considered a low-quality consumer thing. Then the pros started using them for all kinds of artful stuff. Colour film, too. When colour first came out, Stieglitz and that whole group said the colour process was just a cheap way of ‘dyeing’ the shots. They said it wasn’t real photography at all. Only black and white was real to them.”
The printer paused, then casually spat out the finished job, as if saying “meh.” Bill picked it up, gave it a brief appraisal, and handed it over without comment. It was a test page, made up of several images – a generic baby shot, a smiling woman, a field of yellow flowers, a Venice streetscape. The quality was more than passable, Stephan had to admit, but you could tell right away that it wasn’t real film. There was something just a little bit off in the colours, not that the generic test images were helping the cause.
“Well?” Bill asked.
“Not my thing, I guess.”
“So you’ll keep shooting film no matter what happens out there?”
Stephan handed back the print. “I’m sure other people will do great stuff with digital,” he said, sticking to his guns. “But it’s not me. Film photography – that’s my craft, not this other… thing.”
Bill smiled, looking wistful. “Well, I admire your conviction. And don’t worry – I’m still here for you. It’s not like I’m shutting down our old black-and-white darkrooms or selling off my colour processing machines. Not yet, anyway. You’re not the only purist among my loyal clientele, you know.”
“I know, Bill, and I’m grateful. Really.”
“Just remember, the world is never at rest.”
“The river flows on.”
“That’s right. It does.”
* * * * *
His show’s opening was in full swing, the voices of the guests echoing off hardwood and exposed brick as they sipped champagne and jockeyed for conversational pre-eminence. Passersby on Queen Street had a full view of the yellow-lit enclave within which the event was taking place, through floor-to-ceiling front windows. Had he still been a newcomer to the city, Stephan would have felt nothing but annoyance walking past such a scene. Most likely he would have written it off as nothing but a bunch of unbearable phonies basking in their own self-described wonderfulness. But now, at the centre of something, he was content.
His parents had made the trip out from the suburbs, and he found that he was touched by their obvious pride in his success. (His father had even refrained from wearing his old Pepsi jacket, much to Stephan’s relief.) As promised, Pete and Sally had shown up, too. Pete gave Stephan a big whack on the back as his friend welcomed him, then announced that he was Stephan’s muse. (“Muses come in all sizes – and genders.”)
A young art critic from the Telegraph was also among the guests. Stephan took it as a good indication of his rising status, since the Telegraph’s space for arts coverage, let alone photography, had withered away in recent years, and the paper’s editors tended to reserve what space they had left for established names. She cornered him early in the evening for an impromptu interview, asking him about his influences and noting down his thoughts. She was quite cute, as it happened, and he found himself flirting with her a little.
And of course, colleagues from the photography and magazine trades had come to drink free alcohol and obscure their jealousy behind subtle digs at his talent (the ultimate compliment). From This City came Amanda, Carol and Nathan – the latter lightly buzzed on artisanal beers and in excellent form, reeling off scandalous anecdotes like a kind of hyper-erudite juke box. And a group from Bullmoose was on hand, including Anne Etherington and Joanne Hendry (despite the publication’s laddish content, it was staffed primarily by soft-spoken females). And Saul Lish, the gentle-hearted stunt journalist, fresh off a stint living in a shack in an infamous local shantytown and now writing up a memoir of the experience.
Of the photography crowd, Penny, of course, was there, wearing black eyeliner that matched that worn by her new beau, Clay. Bill showed up wearing a tuxedo-print T-shirt that did a surprisingly good job of covering his beer belly. He beamed like a proud father throughout the night, thrilled that his darkrooms had played a part in Stephan’s success.
The fashion photographer’s models Eliotte Chalmers, Martina Lubova and Adilene Watson also deigned to appear, but stood together in a corner and furiously turned up their noses at any male who approached within ten feet. And the war photographer Lucas Stull, though walking with a cane due to a gunshot wound in the thigh he’d recently received in the Korangal Valley. Helmut Stumpfl, though invited, did not attend, but sent his new assistant, Stephanie, in his place, a haunted young woman who seemed to be constantly looking over her shoulder, as if expecting Helmut to materialize out of thin air and berate her over some tiny yet devastating photo processing error.
Of general people from the neighbourhood scene, the artisanal brewmeister Vernon Shah was there. His thriving brewery and gastro pub had supplied the event with the trio of artisanal beers that were fueling Nathan’s stories – “Dirty Brunette,” “Yellow Flame” and Framboizzle. And Jenny Wynne’s early publicist Sandra Gertz, who was in the midst rebuilding her client base after a snafu involving an unfortunate email “reply all” error. (She raved throughout the event about how she’d encouraged Stephan early on, while single-handedly putting away a comprehensive selection of hors d’oeuvres.)
Giselle Grice, proprietor of the local all-organic children’s toy store, was in attendance. And Fraunchie Sausalito, the makeup sales associate, who brought his boyfriend, whose name has been lost to history. Former tech investor and collector of native South American curios Jay Ramston, who was said to be dating Uma Thurman, was on hand, minus Uma Thurman. And Jen Bryant, the literary agent, who would disappear from a Balinese beach the following year in the Boxing Day tsunami.
Many guests lingered, others came and went. Neil Wilcox, the bassist from the indie band Pooch Troop, stopped by with a couple of roadies to make brief use of the open bar before roaring off to a gig. And at one point Stephan thought he saw, standing alone in a quiet corner, the man from the industrial area who’d asked for a cigarette the day he’d first stumbled on the place, but it must have been some sort of trick of the light. Most fleetingly of all, Zanta stopped in for a couple of minutes, but quickly became bored, raised his arms and hollered Tada! a couple of times in a half-hearted voice, then hurried out.
The night sped by. It was an official moment of triumph, which was nice but also somehow disconcerting. Maybe it was just that he was used to being behind the lens, rather than in the shot, but he felt a recurring sense of disorientation. Pulled this way and that, he had no time to reflect on any one thing as it happened, and there were moments, as the evening wore on, when he experienced a sudden rush of doubt. He’d be fine one minute, and then suddenly he’d feel as if he were teetering again over that hole in the factory floor he’d almost fallen into.
Because what had it all been for, after all? He had not found a cure for myeloma, or invented a superior wood-fired pizza ov
en. Compared to him, even Janos the phone-spamming moving guy had a useful purpose in life, assuming he wasn’t a crook (a dubious assumption, to be sure). And even if Janos was, in fact, a crook, then at least he might be making out like one, whereas Stephan’s take from this show, the product of months of painstaking work, would inevitably be modest.
Would his feelings have been any different if Jenny Wynne had come? Along with everyone else in Stephan’s Rolodex, she’d received an invitation on a plain white card bearing an austere photo of a low brick smokestack. But he had only spoken with her a handful of times that summer, and had refrained from making any extra effort to reach out ahead of the show.
He scanned the room again, but there was no sign of her.
* * * * *
In the weeks that followed the opening, the show garnered excellent foot traffic, and the gallery had soon rung up several sales, including a few of the more expensive pieces. Meanwhile, the Telegraph printed its art critic’s glowing review. She praised the work as ground-breaking and identified Stephan as a talented new voice with the potential to enliven the local gallery scene. She also saw fit to describe him as “well spoken” and “handsome.” Not bad at all, he thought. He would have to send her a thank-you note, and maybe he could find a way to make it a little flirtatious.
On a Tuesday afternoon in mid-August, towards the end of his exhibition’s scheduled run, Stephan stopped by the gallery to check in on how things had been going. It was a cool, overcast day, and on his way over to the gallery from his studio he had caught the scent of another autumn, indescribable yet unmistakable, on the air. Upon his arrival, he had a brief word with the proprietor, then stepped back out into the main gallery to give the space his usual once over.
The place was empty except for a couple of solitary walk-ins. A man in a long black coat, his face hidden by a wide-brimmed hat, was shuffling through with a cane in his hand, pausing now and then to give a piece an extra second or two of his time before moving on. And off in a corner at the back of the space, a young woman dressed in pale colours – whites and soft beiges – lingered over a couple of panoramic exterior shots. He watched in silence as she leaned in for a closer view of one of the images, her back to him. Her clothes were simple, cottony, and her hair was gathered in a loose bun.
His eyes widened just a little as he recognized her, but otherwise his face remained impassive. He considered going over, but wound up staying where he was, watching. A minute passed. Then, sensing that she was being watched, she turned suddenly around, saw him. Her face registered surprise for a moment, then broke into a wide grin. She rushed over and gave him a hug, pulling him in tight to her. It felt good, as it always had, the firmness of her embrace.
“So you decided to come to my show after all,” he said, intentionally bland.
She laughed. “Of course I came. I was out of town for your opening, but it worked out in the end because I wanted to see everything for the first time without the distractions of a party. Trust me, Stephan. I was never going to miss this.”
He was dumbfounded. After months of growing distance between them, her failure to appear at the opening of his show had seemed like a quasi-official ending to their story. Yes, he had been disappointed when she didn’t come, but afterwards he’d put the snub out of his mind with relative ease, ready to move on. Now, here she was, behaving as if they’d been close all along.
She asked him to show her around, talk her through a few of the key pieces, and, half in a daze, he obeyed.
“I’m blown away, Steph,” she was telling him. “Honestly, I had tears in my eyes after I first came in, it was so good.”
“That’s nice of you to say.”
“It’s true! Do you know Milan Kundera’s distinction between ‘kitsch’ and ‘shit’? Kitsch is cheesy pop culture, packaged and commodified, with any hint of death edited out, lest it interfere with the consumer’s buying mood. This is the opposite – you’re looking at death and decay and darkness head on.”
“Well, thanks, I guess,” he said, flattered, amused and vaguely irritated all at once. “I can honestly say I’ve never been so happy to hear my work referred to as ‘shit’ before.”
He walked her through the show, filling her in on the backstory of the project, and talking through a few of the cornerstone images, along the way. She listened thoughtfully, asked all the right questions, and at the end of his tour, which he kept short and on-point, she announced that she wanted to buy something.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he protested. “I’m sure I could find something to give you for free – or at least at a discount.” He’d always disliked selling to his friends, especially at full price. It seemed like cheating, somehow, like charity.
But she was insistent, pointing out that it would be unfair to the gallery if she were to do a deal with him on the side for less than full price.
In the end, he conceded. “If you want to give me money, I guess I’ll be okay with that,” he said with a shrug.
Afterwards, he wondered if Jenny had orchestrated the purchase for effect. She may have wanted to acknowledge, at least implicitly, that she had let him down in recent months. The notion bothered him a little. After all, wasn’t it patronizing of her to presume that his good will could be bought back so easily? Although in that case it might also be a sign that she had realized she needed to treat him better. There was something else: the print she wound up purchasing was one he had taken in that strange little inner courtyard, the one he’d almost broken his neck getting to. Stacks of rubber tubing, shot from below, framed against rising brick walls and a square of sky streaked with wispy clouds. He hadn’t mentioned the fact to anyone, but it was secretly his favourite piece in the entire show.
Chapter 9
A week later they met for lunch at a run-down sushi joint on Baldwin Street, in an area of quiet cafés with dusty chalkboard menus and hardwood floors so worn they looked as if they had been sandblasted.
“I used to come here back when I was at the university,” Jenny said, sliding in across from him in a booth near the back of the room. “You could get a bento box for four bucks. It was their Thursday special.”
The place was still quite inexpensive, which was a relief. Stephan was just getting back into financial shape in the aftermath of his big project. All the money spent and billable time lost.
She was dressed casually again, as she had been in the gallery, in jeans and a light jacket to ward off the chill that had crept into the air in the last couple of days.
“Thanks for doing this with me,” she said. “I know it’s silly, but I wanted to tell you again how much I love my new photograph, how much it means to me that you let me have that one in particular. It’s hanging in my living room, over the couch. It looks absolutely gorgeous.”
“Thanks,” he said, his eyes on the laminated menu. The praise stressed him out, as it had always done. “So you found a frame for it, then?”
“It’s black, austere. You’ll approve.”
He hadn’t been over to her place in months, but she said it like he dropped by all the time.
“Are you calling me boring?” he joked.
“Never, Steph. More like solid, manly, ha ha ha.”
Of course she had chosen a tasteful, minimalist frame. He could visualize how it looked on her wall, opposite the neo-modernist sideboard from Crate and Barrel.
“Manly. That works.”
The restaurant might have been nondescript, but the food was delicious. The fish was fresh, the tempura crisp and light, the broth alive with complex flavours. Sushi was comfort food – simple and reliable. Like bacon and eggs, or fish and chips, except more-or-less good for you. The dishes, quality aside, were the same dishes he’d had at dozens of other places he’d been to since he first came to the city. Even if he couldn’t remember individual meals he felt a sense of wellbeing as he refilled their cups with hot green tea.
He asked her how work was treating her, so they wouldn’t have to talk about h
is show again – he was officially sick of it.
“Same old, same old,” she said. “This week’s column was on genital plastic surgery as an exciting new form of self expression.”
“How’d that go over?”
“It was a big hit!” Her smile was full of mischief. “Tons of comments on the on-line version – most of them from people ridiculing my prose. The outrage. You’d think I’d published false intelligence on weapons of mass destruction or something. My dad was most bemused, but the managing editor was over the moon. There’s nothing like a little controversy to sell a few newspapers.”
“Another feather in your cap, then. Congratulations.”
“Was that a dis?” she asked, pretending to be hurt.
“Not really. Well, maybe a little. But you were just teasing me a minute ago, now, weren’t you?”
“Fair enough, but I still want to say that not all of us can be artistic geniuses.”
He rolled his eyes. “You could be whatever you wanted to be. That’s why you’re not actually offended right now. You’re totally at peace with what you’re doing. You love it.”
She looked at him coolly for a moment before breaking into giggles. “There may be a grain or two of truth in that.”
After lunch they strolled up to the university campus. It was a crisp, clear afternoon, and there was a breeze rolling in off the lake, rustling the canopies of the young maples lining Beverley. In a week’s time a deluge of undergraduates would pour forth across the campus, but for now all was quiet. They had the inner courtyard of University College entirely to themselves, a wooded garden cradled by mock-medieval stone walls.
They sat together on an ornate iron bench bearing the name of some wealthy donor on a bronze plaque.
The Silver Age Page 11