Image Decay

by Mark Lisac

  “No? Why not? The past is the past?”

  “Something like that.” He looked at the way her hair brushed her cheeks and thought he would be smart not to drink more than half the wine. “It isn’t so much wanting to bury the past as wondering how much it matters.”

  “The past always matters. We have to know it. Otherwise we are babies in the world, not knowing how to talk or what things mean.”

  “Sure. The issue is how significant any particular past is. Maybe my family was in Sicily for eight hundred years. Maybe they were there for three thousand. In the end we were immigrants, just the way most of the people living here are immigrants. It’s all a story of people moving to someplace new. They remember some things, forget others, build new lives.”

  “I can understand thinking that way,” she said. “My own family has Spanish roots on both sides. But I think it is almost impossible for any Spanish family to have lived in Central America for more than three hundred years and not have had some Mestizo blood introduced into it. In that case, what to remember? And now, why remember it? We were a family with more than three centuries of history and ownership. Now we have moved and become immigrants. We should accept that time has passed but we should not forget.”

  They talked about what they liked to read. Most of his reading was non-fiction. Adela said, “You might like something in the Latin American literary tradition. It is called magic realism. All fiction is magic in its way. This style takes what could be supernatural and makes it seem like the everyday. It is almost like taking fiction and transforming it into non-fiction.”

  “A funny concept to present to a lawyer,” he said. “We’re trained to keep the two strictly apart.”

  “Maybe life is more complicated than that. If you are interested, you could start with Gabriel García Márquez.”

  “I’ve heard the name but I’ve never read anything written by him.” He did not add that his taste in fiction ran to Frederick Manfred Westerns and Agatha Christie mysteries, and she suspected there was something he was not saying. They retreated into the common ground of Shakespeare. George told himself he should memorize lines from at least two of the plays, perhaps even a sonnet, so that he would be able to recite more than “to be or not to be.” The tour of literature—a revelation of how little their reading had in common—ended with a mention that a local theatre would be performing Twelfth Night next month. Neither felt ready to invite the other to see it.

  She brought up Ostroski and the pictures abruptly, without any lead-in: “Do you really think matters are settled? Jack has been worried. He seems less so now, but I won’t believe they will do what he wants until he actually sees the pictures again.”

  “I’m reasonably confident. Not one hundred per cent. They have a lot of incentives to follow through, though. I don’t know how much he’s told you about the agreement.”

  “And you don’t want to talk about it unless I already know. A point in your favour. Jack has told me he will have the right to review the photographs and remove any he does not want published before they are recorded into a computer. He will also receive fifteen thousand dollars to compensate him for what he should have received when he sold the collection.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Why, is there more?”

  “Yes and no, nothing material.” Meaning nothing he wanted to tell her about. “The main point is he gets to set aside photos he does not want the whole world to see. He will have to leave the prints in the archives but he’s satisfied that no one will bother going through the physical prints. Nor will there be much reason for anyone to see the images when they eventually become available by computer. Likely no one will see them until long after he’s dead. He’s decided it won’t matter so much then.”

  “I’m a little surprised. For Jack, if something matters today it will probably matter fifty or a hundred years from now. He seems to think most things in life come and go, but a handful of things are too important for him to view that way.”

  George wondered how far he could pry. He had already told her enough to have built up some trade credits. He suspected that she would not agree there was any bargaining going on. He went ahead hoping that she would feel free to talk.

  “He seems determined not to let some of his pictures be seen by the public but he hasn’t told me what they are.”

  “No?”

  “Do you have any idea what they are?”

  She considered during a long, shallow sip of the French wine she had recommended, and relented.

  “He has told me twice about a woman named Norma Minton. You know he lived a little time in Hollywood in the late 1940s?”

  “He’s told me that. He said he managed to find work as an assistant to a cinematographer in a small studio.”

  “The inevitable happened. He started going out with a young actress named Norma Minton. He said she was not a starlet, although she looked attractive enough that she could have been one. He said she was often the girl in a nightclub or a crowd scene just behind the two stars. I saw one of the movies he mentioned. She was not named in the credits. But if she was the one at a table behind the two stars, she was as attractive as he said. She had to be if she was often chosen to be that visible. Perhaps she was not as strikingly attractive as many of the big stars. Or perhaps she simply was not as good at acting.”

  “Going out. There’s a world of difference between that and a love affair. And another world of difference between a love affair and something so strong that he would do anything to keep his pictures of her private. I assume he did take pictures of her.”

  “Yes, he said he did.”

  “Did he say what kind?”

  “Nothing salacious. Some on the beach at Santa Monica and Malibu. Some studio-style portraits.”

  “He simply wants to keep private things private.”

  “That’s right. Jack has very strong views on such matters.”

  Rabani was informed but not satisfied. He didn’t press her further on the photographs. She didn’t signal obvious reluctance to talk about them further, yet he had a sense that she could suddenly shut down if he miscalculated.

  The talk shifted to family. She told him she lived with “the man in my life.” He accepted that without showing surprise. She quickly explained, “My brother Roberto lives with me in a rented duplex. He works in construction when jobs are available.”

  “I have a brother too, an older brother. His name is Alex. He lives a simple life. You could say he mixes handyman work with literary pursuits.... Tell me about New York and your time at Columbia.”

  She brightened. “Ah, New York. A city of much energy. I was excited to learn about architectural preservation, its possibilities and techniques. I loved both Central Park and Gramercy Park. One is so huge and public. The other is intimate. It is set into the city like an inlay on a wooden table.”

  As he listened, he felt she had brought her own energy to the school and the city. Adela did not burst with a frantic need to talk or establish her personality in a kind of competition with whomever she was with. Nor did she radiate a warm sympathetic glow. It took some time for George to realize what impression she was making on him. He dealt with many people. Some put up fronts to hide their chicaneries and weaknesses. Some seemed barely to exist, functioning as little more than faces and an ability to repeat verbal conventions. Adela was part of the world with him. She was present as he was. She was real. That did not mean that he would get to see more of her.

  “It’s funny to talk about the importance of the past in this city,” she said. “I told you that I could not find work in historical preservation here. The people who build here seem to believe in tearing down the past. Everything must be renewed as quickly as possible. But the new construction hardly matters because it is as subject as the old buildings to being replaced someday not too far in the future. It’s as if architecture here means no more than keeping up with the latest fashion in hairstyles or hemlines. I spent two weeks in Chicago b
efore coming here. They are starting to restore their historic buildings. Here, history is something to be wiped out, as if one is ashamed of it. Nothing is built to last, which suggests nothing has any real meaning apart from temporary usefulness. Yet society and politics here are oddly based on the opposite impulse. Nothing changes in political and social life here. No, perhaps that is too categorical. Sometimes things change. But that is usually ten or twenty years after the advisability of change has become apparent.”

  He agreed about the contradictory mindsets: “They probably apply across the entire province. I suppose that creates an atmosphere of drabness. Rather funny when you think how bright and clear the air is here, especially in winter. But I don’t know how much it matters in the long run. I know a guy who lost most of his past. He was in an accident and had a brain injury. He still has an active mind and tries to create things. But he can’t remember his interest in them for more than a few weeks. Then he’s off trying to write something else. That seems a little bit like the constant building and demolition and fresh building that goes on here. Maybe it means he will never finish creating anything. I don’t know what it means about the importance of his ideas. To me, as long as he is grappling with the world and trying to establish his own understanding of it, he is alive.”

  “Does he talk to you about his ideas?”

  “Yes, as far as I know, all of them.”

  “Do you ever try to follow up on them yourself?”

  “No. He knows more about them than I do. But I don’t worry about that. If he could finish one of his books, that would be a real achievement. I don’t think it’s necessary, though. As long as he talks about them—even if he never writes a word and tells me for only a few minutes what he is thinking about—he has created something simply by communicating. He doesn’t have to finish his books or see them published. How many books survive in the public’s mind anyway?”

  “You sound like you feel close to this person.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  The way I already feel close to you, he thought, even if we never see each other again.

  10.

  THE TREE TRUNKS WERE SHINING BRIGHTLY. THEY HAD taken on the radiance and sharp definition that had struck Ostroski during his first winter in the city. He had been gazing at lines of trees during the colder months every year since. He could not remember when he realized it was a trick of light. The old studio cinematographers could have come up with the same effect; they probably had more times than he remembered.

  The sun travelled an arc low on the horizon as winter approached and then again as it receded. If you faced the sun when you were walking or driving you always had to shield your eyes. But with the sun behind you on a bright day, the low angle of light changed how trees and buildings looked. The surface reflections made everything more vivid. Everything seemed floodlit. When the sun was at its brightest, trees and hedges shone with a glow that seemed to emanate from inside them. At the same time, the light effect produced more clearly defined shadows around the bright forms. The combined effect made the sunlit areas explode into a person’s field of vision. Objects seemed more true than in summer. They claimed attention. Their brightness was on the borderline of being painful.

  Why do truth and pain always seem to go together, Ostroski wondered. He let the thought go. He was not given to worrying about questions that he suspected he would not be able to answer.

  His shop window looked different in the mid-autumn light, too. He could see the dust and the streaks left by the last washing. He opened the door, walked in and closed it, and flipped the small hanging sign to read “Open” on the outside. He hung his faded tan jacket on a hook in the inner room and started a pot of coffee. He looked at the Ansel Adams calendar and reminded himself to order more Ilford film. He wondered if he should order a red filter as well, or if he was likely to have one come in with an old camera. He took the broom and swept the front of the shop. Then he poured his first coffee of the day, picked up a magazine, and sat on the stool behind the counter, waiting for Adela to show up for her shift.

  She arrived half an hour later with her usual sunny “Good morning, Jack.” She quickly followed that by telling him something far less sunny. He appreciated her matter-of-fact attitude. He could not have abided a show of concern or pointless anxiety.

  “You’re sure?” he asked. “I know you’re sure or you wouldn’t be telling me, but is the person who gave you this reliable?”

  “It’s second-hand but it came from someone who is reliable. The person it came from originally is in a position to know. Please don’t tell that to anyone.”

  He thanked her and forced himself to keep his temper down. Late in the afternoon, after Adela had left, he sat in the shop with Rabani.

  “The son of a bitch is reneging,” he said. “He’s getting his staff to go looking through the collection before they let me get to it. I don’t know what he has in mind but he’s playing some kind of game. It has to end by tomorrow morning, or I’ll make my move.”

  “Let’s see what we can do to keep things on track first, Jack. From what you’ve told me it would take a long time to go through all the pictures anyway.”

  “That’s right, it would. But they could stumble on something the first day just as easily as not seeing anything important for a couple of weeks. Or they could just keep a few days ahead of me through the whole collection.”

  Rabani weighed his options and decided he had to take a risk: “I have to know more about what’s going on, Jack. You know I had dinner with Adela the other night?”

  “She told me. Said you were interesting. Congratulations.”

  “She mentioned something about a Norma Minton. Are there pictures of her that you don’t want made public?”

  Ostroski leaned back in his chair and pursed out his lips while considering his lawyer. He delayed answering for only a few seconds.

  “Norma was a fun-loving girl. We had some good times. Having fun in L.A. was easier back when the city was smaller. I don’t know whether it would have led to anything. Probably not. I got drafted for Korea. She ended up marrying a sound engineer at Paramount. I haven’t heard anything about her in nearly forty years. She wouldn’t be all that old so I assume the both of them are still alive. She doesn’t deserve to have private pictures of her put on display in some sort of public art collection. They aren’t art. They’re just old pictures. They got taken along with the rest of the collection because I had them stored away with the others. Haven’t tried to look for them in years, decades now.”

  “Just ordinary snapshots?”

  “You mean: was she dressed in all of them? In most of them. There were a couple of tit shots. She wanted to see what she looked like. Like I said, she was fun-loving.”

  “That doesn’t sound like something they’d be eager to put on display here.”

  “Not in a gallery. This Internet thing, whatever it is, sounds like something else. For all I know they’d make all the pictures available without even someone choosing what should be public and what shouldn’t.”

  “I take it that’s what Becker has ordered to be done. Someone will be looking through the entire collection and making notes on what’s there, trying to bring some order to what’s currently a random collection packed in boxes.”

  “That’s government for you. Spend a lot of money making lists.”

  Rabani didn’t like that answer. He thought it was too indirect.

  “Jack, if those pictures were so important to you, why did you keep them in with all the others? Why didn’t you take them out?”

  “I never expected them to haul away the whole collection as fast as they did. Anyway it would have taken me just as long to go through them all as it will whoever gets stuck with the job now. Sorting out the prints will be bad enough. Trying to check all the negatives would be a lot worse.”

  “You just dumped what was really important to you in with the other material and never marked it in any way?”

  “That�
�s what I did.... Yeah. I can see you’re going to be like a dog gnawing on a bone with this. The truth is I didn’t want to give up those pictures but I didn’t want to see them again either. I don’t know. Maybe I thought keeping a record somewhere would help me keep straight what happened. If I got rid of the pictures, all that would have been left would have been the memories. Then I would never have known for sure what was real and what I imagined. Throwing out recorded images won’t wipe out what you remember. It’s all still there but then your mind starts playing tricks. Maybe I just did what felt right. Maybe I just didn’t want to make a decision.”

  Rabani watched Ostroski carefully throughout the explanation. He thought he saw the right amount of frustration and puzzlement. There was just enough lift at the corners of Ostroski’s mouth, just enough crinkling of the eyes, to say his client saw the situation as part of the world’s ongoing joke on poor individual humans. That satisfied Rabani. He wanted to see that his client remained the same person and was not putting on an act.

  There remained the question of what to do about Becker’s apparent determination not to give up full control of the collection.

  Ostroski said, “I have a few pictures that are specials. I keep them around here. I’m counting on them. They’re nice pictures of hounds—valuable, not as money but as influence.”

  Rabani was exasperated at the sudden turn into obscure references: “Why would old photographs of dogs be important to anyone, even to a dog enthusiast like Becker?”

  “They aren’t just any dogs,” Ostroski told him. “Becker knows his dogs, I’ll give him that. He wouldn’t want these put on public view. If they don’t play ball, the papers will get hold of them. Not right away but sooner or later. Tell Becker the pictures are all going public if I haven’t heard in twenty-four hours that he’s going to live up to the deal. I want to start going through the collection immediately.”