by Lise Haines
I thought of Nitro, how much he would love this work.
Over decades she had taken photographs of people in every social class along with self-portraits, often in mirrors and windows, some of them of her younger self fully nude. As far as I knew, Anna Lily was unknown.
I heard my mother and Lola on the stairs, talking as they climbed. Then our front door opened and closed, and the TV went on with a kids’ show. I put everything back and at the last moment grabbed one box of negatives marked Arlington Racetrack, 2002. I could never steal anyone’s cameras. But if I borrowed a few of her negatives and prints for my own small use and returned them.... I felt far more nervous with her negatives than I did when I’d stolen a two-thousand-dollar pair of shoes. Before I left I made sure everything appeared to be undisturbed.
I gave myself a minute, tiptoed down and walked up the last set of steps, and arrived at my door, where the pain in my head finally blossomed. Once I was inside, Lola rushed to tell me about her day at the Aquarium while my mother said, “You’re home early.”
“I have to lie down,” I said and held up the prescription bag. Mom swung into action and got me a compress and a Coke over ice and asked Lola to start her homework at the kitchen table—she would fix a snack in a minute.
I got on my computer the next morning and discovered in the world of photographs published, shared, pilfered, over saturated, distorted, lost, retrieved, and made to express every sentiment on earth, there was nothing by a photographer named Anna Lily. Not a single image.
I was mulling this over when I realized my mother had placed a new letter from my father on my desk.
Dear Mona,
When I first got to New Jersey, I found a shortcut to work. This took me by a tract of upscale homes without personality and a stretch of manicured park that no one seemed to use. Eventually I got to a long row of estates that made me think I was driving through a Hollywood set. My boss has his home there and his pool, his tennis court and his little stable—most of which he doesn’t use because he goes to clubs for these things. Each day I was left with a feeling that my temporary world, in this 1950s motel room with its hot plate and view of car dealerships, was rather small.
It was the motel owner who suggested another route and something I might do if I was willing to leave earlier. The next week, instead of turning right at the main bridge I went left and this took me by small brick homes built in the 1940s, most of them well kept, the lawns trim. And then the sad places began, the abandoned houses and the ones where people can’t keep their porches repaired, the windows from getting broken, and the nails in place. This is where a line of men wait, hoping to get day labor. And this is where I was instructed to stop.
I went over to a food truck. Later in the day this truck will sell burritos and pulled-pork sandwiches and icy drinks to men and women who work downtown and line up halfway down the block for tasty home cooking. But in the mornings the day laborers, who are mostly homeless and might not eat otherwise, are given a hearty meal. I was welcomed by the owner, who provided all of this food on his own dime with only a small fund his church had set up. And so for forty-five minutes I helped wrap the food and hand each man a meal so generous he could eat some for breakfast and save some for lunch and get through.
Honestly, I think it’s getting me through the days.
I miss all of you deeply. I am sorry that coming home has been delayed so long. Your mother’s probably told you by now that I am still waiting on my commissions. Maybe the boss had to build a new swimming pool this year. I’m sure things will be straightened out soon. Please try not to worry.
Love,
Dad
I began to look for something I might send in return. Some message to let him know how I felt about his rules to live by. He probably had a new home in New Jersey with some girlfriend and her kids. Because once you’ve lied, especially by omission, you can always lie again. It’s like stealing. The difference was, I knew when I stole.
Then I found it. Mom got the paper delivered for free because of her ad sales. They stacked up by the kitchen door until we took a bunch down to the trash. Right there on the top, on the front page, was a full-color photograph of a car accident that had happened on Lake Shore Drive—two cars smashed together as if they had been propelled by anger. Emergency vehicles with their lights, stretchers, bodies in braces, blood on the asphalt. I got one of my digital cameras and shot this image. I downloaded it, cropped it to remove the caption and ran it out on my printer on the kind of paper stock that makes a good postcard. On the back, all I put was my name and address in the upper left-hand corner and his name and address in the To: space. I stamped it and went downstairs and dropped it in the mail.
He had a talent for metaphors. He could tell his own story.
After that his letters stopped.
Richard
I found a bare-bones motel in Newark owned by a man named Leon. He was in his late forties, never shaved with accuracy, and each day he wore a different T-shirt from an ’80s rock band. Down in his office he had thirty-three glass tanks filled with snakes. He told me the number before I thought to count them.
I put in a clean effort at work each day and always stayed late. When I got back to my room I threw something in the microwave and looked at the traffic going by the dealerships and the pancake house across the road. Sometimes I’d put on my sweats or shorts and go for a run out on the side streets—I’d have to drive to find those. Liz had packed a copy of Siddhartha in my suitcase, by a writer named Hesse.
The Buddha on the cover kept an eye on my screwed-up life from the bedside table without breaking his gaze. The long unemployment, my family back in Chicago, the house gone. He probably didn’t miss a thing. When Liz pushed a book my way I assumed she was sending a message of one type or another, so I began to read Siddhartha. It’s a little flowery but here’s how it starts:
In the shade of the house, in the sunshine of the riverbank near the boats, in the shade of the Sal-wood forest, in the shade of the fig tree is where Siddhartha grew up, the handsome son of the Brahman, the young falcon, together with his friend Govinda, son of a Brahman.
I liked that he was a falcon. You have to respect the raptors. They’re unapologetic about their jobs. They have a fearlessness, something that helps in my line of work. The more I read, the more I thought Liz wanted me to see this rotten business of being so far away as a journey, not a punishment.
Going downstairs to stretch my legs, I saw Leon in his office, lights blazing. He was up feeding his snakes. Mona had sent me a disturbing postcard that had come that day and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Two cars in a terrible collision on the Drive. I had gone right out and bought a pack of cigarettes after work and started smoking again.
I seized on this opportunity to have a conversation. The bell rang over the door as I stepped inside.
“Hey,” he said.
I returned his greeting, and then I looked at the rafting brochures, the parasailing adventures, the hot-air-balloon rides. From the corner of my eye I saw Leon watch me, and I stopped. I wasn’t sure what to say. He went back to the business at hand and dangled a squirming white mouse with red eyes by its tail as he opened the top of the first boa constrictor’s tank.
“Do you have a hard time feeding them live things?”
“My last girlfriend asked me that. She was on the Christian side, so I said, ‘Your god does it all the time. Storms, floods, earthquakes—gobbling up people right and left.’”
“I’m not sure I …”
Suddenly the boa struck and coiled around the mouse. I saw a back leg twitch, the other precisely pinned. Awful way to go.
“So you think of yourself as a god?” I said, hoping he recognized my humor.
“You’ll have to ask the ladies,” he deadpanned.
I had run into a woman a couple of nights earlier when she was getting out of a Lexus and I came down for ice. She rang the office bell and Leon let her in with a kiss on the mouth of some du
ration. She wore a black raincoat and flip-flops as if she had rushed out of her house to be with him. I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover she wore a shorty nightgown beneath her coat or nothing at all.
“Each one of my snakes is named for an ex-wife or girlfriend. Hedy, she’s my boa. She likes it when I call her Hedy Lamarr, the way my girlfriend did.”
In the months I had roomed there I had seen a dozen women come and go in succession, and maybe there were more snakes crowded into the tanks.
“You’re a romantic,” I said.
Leon laughed. Then he asked how things were going back home, and I told him something about Liz and the girls. It wasn’t exactly that I couldn’t open up to someone at work, but the guys there had been together for a long time, and they thought of me as the boss’s friend because the boss had taken me out to his country club three or four times. But the new golf clubs he’d pressed me to buy sat unused in my room.
“Describe your wife,” Leon said, “as if I’m a chauffeur picking her up at an airport.”
I didn’t go on and on but I did mention the way she tied her hair up in a ponytail, the fine hairs at the back of her neck curling without effort. “Sometimes I’ll see her in the backyard looking over a new sculpture, her hands fixed on her hips, her spine nice and straight, the light filtering through the tall elms to rest on her shoulders. It’s a beautiful thing to see her like that, to see just how alive she becomes.” I finally had to stop.
Leon couldn’t believe how long Liz and I had been together and that I had only been with one woman. I think he saw me differently then. Not the lonely man passing through but someone who had roots. Balled up roots, I admit, but eager to be planted in solid ground again as soon as she was ready to join me.
“I met someone recently,” he said.
“It looks like you’re running out of room for tanks.”
“This one’s different. I’m trying not to screw it up. Maybe you’d be willing to offer some advice,” he said and dropped another mouse to Hedy. “Hey, why don’t you come over for dinner tomorrow night?”
“Don’t you think she’d rather see you alone?”
“No, no, Sybil’s the social type. Always likes to have people around.”
“I should probably work,” I said.
“On a Saturday night? I’ll meet you over there. Around eight.” He drew a map. I folded it and put it in my pocket.
The next night I showered and shaved and put on a pair of chinos and pressed my shirt on the bed with the iron Leon loaned me. I saw him drive off on his motorcycle and I noted the high school kid sitting in the office minding the front desk when I left.
I parked on the street. There was room in the drive at his girlfriend’s but I wasn’t planning on sticking around too late. I recognized the woman in the raincoat when she came to the door, only she wore jeans and a light top now. It fluttered with her movements in a nice way. She looked as put together as her house. From the entryway you could see all the way to the back where giant picture windows and sliding doors looked onto a pool glowing with submerged lighting. The first thing I thought when she took me into the living room to introduce me, Liz would love this place. Just the artwork alone. I recognized a couple of the artists, though I couldn’t call up their names, and a set of chairs was from that designer Aalto who did the chaise lounge Liz inherited from her grandmother.
Leon stood by the empty fireplace with a drink in his hand, elbow on the mantle. He had shaved down to a fine stubble and his hair was pulled back. Wearing a pressed white dress shirt, he was transformed from the wastrel owner of a rundown motel to the lord of the manor. Sybil introduced David Fong and his wife, Amanda—two young retirees from the high tech world who had moved back to New Jersey to care for Amanda’s declining mother. Sybil and Amanda had gone to one of those Ivy schools together. I had the sense that Edie, a lean woman with large green eyes and a soft bob, had been invited at the last minute, or I had, to fill out the table. I pegged her for a shy woman who might have trouble making conversation over dinner despite her boldness in not wearing a bra.
“This place is remarkable,” I said after Leon handed me a glass of chilled wine, saying it was a Chardonnay he liked from the Russian River in California.
“Show him around while I get the hors d’oeuvres set up,” Sybil said to Leon.
There were five bedrooms and seven bathrooms, and as he took me through I realized the closet off the main bedroom was larger than both my daughters’ bedrooms put together. I’m not sure why he wanted to show me this but he treated me like a potential buyer who wants to look inside every space. There was a game room, a wine cellar, and a viewing theater in the basement. We took seats in the four rows of highly padded chairs that swiveled and rocked back and forth. A large screen rose and lowered, Leon at the controls.
“How did you and Sybil meet?”
“She’s on the board of a lion rescue organization. I went to this event a few weeks ago and that was it.”
“What on earth am I giving you advice for?” I asked.
“The problem is, I’ve lost all my hesitancy. Like we’re listening to ‘Eight Days a Week’ on a loop, and I know eventually we’ll have to face the fact that there are only seven. I haven’t met her kids. They’re grown but none of them live in the area. I don’t know if she has to have all this luxury to be happy. I don’t know. Don’t you ever get frightened when things look too good?”
I wanted to say that that wouldn’t worry me right now. “What about her ex?”
“She lost her husband five years ago. Attacked by a lion when they were helping to tag a pride.”
Maybe this is what happens to the rich. Their little passions tear them apart. Liz likes to make fun of the fact that they all want their kids to take ballet and painting and learn a musical instrument and act in a million school plays and concerts but they’re up in arms if their kids grow up and want to do these things as careers. But that wasn’t the subject at hand, and Leon seemed sincere in trying to sort things out.
“I know when I met my wife, I thought the world would split in two if I couldn’t be with her. Everything else … the rest didn’t matter though maybe it should have,” I said.
He patted me on the back, like we were beginning to understand something together, even if we weren’t entirely. “Let’s get you topped off,” he said, and we returned to the living room. It had been a long time since I’d seen such a spread. Liz and I used to have big potlucks with our friends at the house, back when we could supply all the wine, the juice and stuff for the kids, the coffees and desserts, the liqueurs she liked to serve at the end of the night—when things were the way they were supposed to be.
This whole business—the house, the art, the lap pool—I knew this was what Liz had imagined for herself. It’s what her parents and grandparents had seen for her. The bright wrap. The things I wished I could give her.
After we talked about pool filtration systems—Sybil wasn’t sure she was happy with hers—and munched some of those hors d’oeuvres Edie and I were asked to sit next to each other at the table. It wasn’t long before our conversation became more of the intimate, whispered kind than talk of the public business at hand. I didn’t think I was the cause, but maybe I lost track. In any case she seemed eager to draw me in. I watched Leon and Sybil as they entertained, the conversation dipping between endangered species, conservation, new forms of media, how these areas overlapped or might, kids, travel. I kept up where I could.
Too early into the evening I had begun to see them as potential clients, and that made me think about the commissions I wasn’t getting paid at work, and maybe I drank a little to stop those thoughts. It’s possible I had a forlorn look, like a guy who needs to be rescued, because suddenly Edie reached under the table and put a hand on my leg. Not down by the knee but up high as if she were about to slip something inside my pocket. She was talking about this course she was doing on meditation and breathing techniques, and she had a particular, maybe you�
��d say expensive glow. Her eyes appeared to soften each time she engaged me. Several times she grabbed my leg when I laughed.
I could tell Edie was one of those women who have regular facials and massages, get waxed and have filler injections, do Pilates and long workouts with personal trainers. They have their therapists to absorb the shock of life—every fold and quirk and fear her heart and mind could ever hold—so that she will never know a moment alone or unchartered, so that she will be kept at a consistent temperature like the wine down in Sybil’s cellar. She was on one side of a wall and I was on another, and I knew the sound thing was to keep it that way.
I reached down and put my hand over hers to gently remove it, but she turned her hand inside mine and squeezed my palm as if she had been waiting for some kind of gesture from me and took this to be it. I eased my hand out and picked up my knife and fork like there was an urgency to cutting the small potatoes on my plate. She smiled and coughed into her napkin, thinking, I guess, that we had set something in motion. Then she leaned in close to my ear.
I felt each word separately, the way her breath worked against me, when she said, “Do you feel anything about Buddhism?”
I almost laughed because I didn’t understand how a question like this could seem so intimate and uncanny instead of annoying. Happy for this small piece of good fortune, I said, “I’ve been reading Siddhartha.”
“I read Siddhartha floating in an inner tube in the Bahamas,” she said. “The whole world opened up.”
“I’ve been thinking about what it says about journeys.”
The minute this was out of my mouth I wondered if I had betrayed Liz, if she would be hurt by my telling something I could attribute only to her.
“Yes, yes, exactly,” Edie said.
So we talked for a while about journeys. I didn’t go into my family’s trials, my lost job, and so on, but I did let myself get a little philosophical the way Uncle Sor sometimes got and maybe for him it was about trying to fit in as well. I probably came off sounding lofty, and maybe I made up a thing or two in that way you have to embellish if you want to have any kind of stake in honesty.