The Luzern Photograph

by William Bayer

  Inspiration: it came upon me suddenly this afternoon, and now, hours later, I’m still at work, deep into the flow, hitting the computer keys, writing and organizing my notes, thinking up scenes then sketching them out, working out different ways to tell the story of myself and Chantal Desforges, the strange woman whose loft I now occupy and whose personality and obsessions take up so much space in my head.

  I photocopy the best of the many images of the Luzern photograph from Chantal’s books, place it beside my computer so I can stare at it as I work.

  Gazing at it now I ask myself: what did Chantal see in this strange image that would explain her many efforts to decipher it? What was she trying to say when she went to so much trouble to reenact it? Was her obsession with Lou Salomé a form of madness? Was it connected in some way to her own violent death? These are the issues I want to explore.

  I’m certain this new piece won’t be like any other I’ve created. I don’t envision it as a monologue, rather as a grand theatrical experience, a full-length play with other actors beside myself performing a multitude of roles. It will be about three women whose lives are interwoven: Tess Berenson, seeker/performer; Chantal Desforges, dominatrix/victim; and Lou Salomé, writer/psychoanalyst/role-model.

  I work late into the night. Whenever I get stuck I simply gaze at the Luzern photograph and a new stream of ideas cascades through my brain. So many notions, so many scenes – I can barely keep up with them. Some I like; many I reject. My focus narrows. I lose track of time. When the phone rings a little after eleven it jolts me as if from a reverie.

  It’s Scarpaci. He just got home after a long day. He wouldn’t call so late, he says, if I hadn’t told him I rarely go to bed before midnight.

  ‘How’s the writing going?’

  ‘It’s flowing.’

  ‘Good. Listen, Tess, I’ve been thinking about your little show-down with Kurt. Once he realized you knew about his barter relationship with Chantal, he couldn’t bear having you around. He probably thought, knowing about his submissive side, you wouldn’t respect him. Isn’t respect what martial arts is all about, the disciple’s respect for the sensei?’

  Scarpaci’s probably right. That could explain what happened. But, I tell him, understanding why Kurt dismissed me doesn’t make it any easier to forgive him.

  ‘Let it go. He’s not that important to you.’ He pauses. ‘Josh came by this afternoon to give me his drawing of the other guy. He seemed a lot more relaxed than the other day. When I asked him why Chantal matched them up, he said he thought it was because they were the same height and had the same build. He also said he’d never seen her so controlling as she was the afternoon she set up that shot.’

  Jerry calls. He wants to take me to lunch at Chez Panisse.

  ‘I want to be clear,’ he says. ‘I’m not trying to woo you back. You were brave to leave. I got pretty nasty about it and lashed out. You left because you felt over-powered. I get that.’

  ‘More like over-controlled,’ I correct him.

  ‘Fine. I’m difficult. I admit it. But seeing you the other night I realized how talented you are. As for those cracks I made about your Hollis grant – that was unforgiveable. Please consider my request that we have lunch a prelude to a sincere apology. I don’t want you to despise me.’

  I give in. We make a date for Friday. He offers to fetch me, but I tell him I’ll meet him at the restaurant. I don’t want him asking to see my loft and going pouty on me when I refuse.

  Over dinner at a small family-owned Sicilian place in Temescal, Scarpaci proposes that whenever we spend the night together we do so at his place instead of mine.

  ‘It wouldn’t be good if Josh spotted us. He’s still very much a person of interest. He knew Chantal well. He monitored her sessions. He was conveniently away when she moved out. Beyond all that he’s a forger, which tells me he’s a habitual liar.’

  As the waitress sets down our pasta dishes, Scarpaci accesses an image on his phone then hands it to me: Josh’s drawing of the second man in Chantal’s strange chariot photograph.

  ‘Hey, I know this guy!’ Scarpaci, surprised, puts down his fork. ‘His name’s Carl Draper. He rang my buzzer a few weeks ago. I met him for coffee, then we had lunch. He’s an architect from New York. Told me he was one of Chantal’s regulars. When he found her phone disconnected and her website down, he came over to the Buckley to see if she was still there.’

  I describe our meeting and how after lunch he asked to come upstairs.

  ‘Claimed he wanted to see the loft again because he’d had such intense experiences there. “For old times’ sake,” he said. I was kind of spooked by that. His request didn’t make sense. Needless to say I didn’t let him in.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know how to reach him?’

  ‘He gave me his business card. It’s somewhere in the loft.’

  Scarpaci digs into his pasta norma. ‘If you don’t mind, Tess, we’ll drive back there after dinner. If you find his card tomorrow I’ll track him down.’

  Later, at his apartment, Scarpaci shows me photos of his family, parents, brothers, sisters. I notice an old-world formality. There isn’t one image in which anyone cracks a smile.

  ‘You all look so grave,’ I tell him. ‘Like you didn’t have much fun.’

  ‘We were a gloomy family. I think there’s still some of that gloom in me.’

  Later, in bed, after we make love, I tell him again that it was his aura of rue I first found attractive.

  ‘Oh damn, I thought it was my body!’ he says.

  He turns serious, asks if he can share a dream. ‘Don’t know where this came from,’ he begins. ‘We were together in Sicily. Not one of the tourist places like Taormina, but in a hill town in the middle of the island, the kind of town my grandparents came from. We were staying at an inn. It was off season and we were the only guests. We took long hikes in the forest. I could feel the stony ground beneath my feet, could smell the soil and the aroma of wild thyme. The innkeeper hunted game birds. His wife roasted them. We feasted on them after sunset in the deserted dining room accompanied by a dark local wine. Later we made love with moonlight pouring in through the window. It was an idyll, as different from the streets of East Oakland as any place on earth. Like I said, I don’t know where that dream came from but I think it means I’m falling for you, Tess.’

  This morning on my way through the lobby, Clarence beckons to me from the concierge’s podium.

  ‘There’s this guy lingering around. I’ve spotted him across the street. I think he may be stalking you, Tess.’ He describes a tall white guy wearing a green hoodie. ‘Like he’s trying to conceal his face,’ he says.

  ‘Jake the homeless guy on Fourteenth muttered something about “beware the man in green”.’

  ‘Must be the same guy. Keep an eye out. There’re some weird characters around.’

  He’s right, most of them potheads hanging around the marijuana dispensaries. But is someone in a green hoodie really stalking me?

  I’m annoyed as I climb the stairs to the second-floor café at Chez Panisse, certain Jerry will be late, employing one of the passive-aggressive moves which, I remind myself, I no longer need endure. But when I enter I spot him waiting for me at a small window table overlooking Shattuck Avenue.

  He rises as I approach, then acts disappointed when I sit without allowing him to buzz my cheek.

  An unpropitious start, I think, as we scan the menu, order, then stare at one another in silence.

  I speak first. ‘Don’t you hate the whole meeting-with-the-ex-over-lunch concept?’ I ask. ‘Not over drinks or a quick coffee. It’s always fucking lunch!’

  He raises an eyebrow. ‘Lunch works because it’s a narrow timeframe. And sometimes when it goes well it can lead to an amorous post-affair matinee.’

  ‘And if it goes poorly, one party or the other can throw in her napkin and walk.’ I meet his eyes. ‘I’m going to make this easy for you, Jerry. I have no interest in seeing you grovel. Your apo
logy is accepted. Which is not to say that what you said that awful day didn’t hurt. If I think about it, it still does. So I don’t think about it.’

  ‘I appreciate that, Tess.’ He clears his throat. ‘I told you how much I loved Recital. You left your heart on the field of battle. You totally commanded the room.’

  ‘Thanks. What made you decide to lead the applause?’

  ‘I felt the power of what you’d done and wanted to acknowledge it. I was also afraid some of the ninnies there would start to boo.’

  ‘That would’ve been OK, another form of acknowledgment.’

  ‘I thought you deserved better.’

  When the food comes and we start to eat, he asks me what I’m working on. He smiles as I describe my project.

  ‘Why the grin, Jerry?’

  ‘I brought you something that may help.’ He extracts an envelope from his jacket, passes it across the table. ‘I translated those letters for you.’

  I open the envelope. Each of Eva’s letters is stapled to a translation. ‘This is great. And I’m surprised. You said you didn’t have time to write them out.’

  ‘I figured these letters were important to you or you wouldn’t have asked me for help. Think of it as my small way to show good will.’

  ‘Thanks again.’

  Our eyes engage. This time he’s the first to speak. ‘I recognized several of your friends in the back row the other night. Rex and a few others. But there were some I never saw before. The older lady in the sloppy muumuu – was that the famous Dr Maude?’ I nod. ‘I noticed her checking me out, probably wondering whether I’m as monstrous as described.’ I laugh. ‘There were also two guys who weren’t exactly dressed to kill.’ He crinkles his nose. ‘One of them was wearing a watch cap.’

  ‘Don’t be a snob, Jerry. That was Josh. He’s a painter.’

  ‘And the observant one with the lean and hungry look – he was definitely taking you in.’

  ‘He’s a cop.’

  ‘I won’t ask if you’re dating one of them.’

  ‘I wouldn’t tell you if you did. And I’m not going to ask about your personal life.’

  He looks closely at me as we finish dessert. ‘It was so good at first, wasn’t it? And the sex was really great. We started out so well then it went bad.’ He shakes his head. Do I detect moisture in his eyes?

  ‘Just the way things go, Jerry. Think of it as entropy.’

  ‘Entropy – yeah, kinda the story of my life,’ he says as he hands his credit card to the waiter.

  The letters from Gräfin Eva to Chantal are more passionate than Jerry led me to believe. I feel a deep longing in them, nostalgia for a shared past. They’re filled with memories of extensive explorations on foot in Vienna as she and Chantal sought to retrace the daily routes of famous long-deceased city residents. There are references to L, F, and H. Knowing Chantal’s interests I have no trouble identifying these as Lou, Freud, and Hitler.

  I bring out the map with marked routes folded into Chantal’s old Baedeker guide. The same three letters in different colored inks mark various locations in the city. Clearly these were places where the three characters once lived and worked. Did Chantal and Eva spend their free time roaming Vienna in search of intersecting paths?

  There are tasteful references to love-making. Eva writes of missing the warmth of Chantal’s body against hers in the night.

  There are also references to clients, some of whom, Eva writes, still ask for Chantal:

  ‘Remember that old Nazi from Berlin, the one who loved to scrub the kitchen floor to please his Jewish mistresses? How we made him think he’d fallen into a Mossad honeytrap? And the guy who made a fetish of polishing my Biedermeier daybed, the one I use for “psychoanalysis”?’

  Eva, as if trying to evoke nostalgia in Chantal, conjures up images of the changing seasons in Vienna: leaves falling in autumn in the Prater, shrubs budding in spring in the Volksgarten. She remembers the glee with which the two of them played out the famous Ferris wheel scene from the movie The Third Man.

  ‘We were the only ones in the compartment. The Riesenrad turned. We giggled our way through the dialog, you as Holly Martins, me as Harry Lime. At the bottom you told me I made a fine Orson Welles. I told you your Joseph Cotten imitation could use some work!’

  She writes of their visits to famous cemeteries: the Zentralfriedhof, where they placed a single lily on the grave of Hitler’s niece, Geli Raubal, and the Hietzinger, where they knelt in awe before the grave of Gustav Klimt.

  ‘I miss you so very much,’ Eva writes. ‘Will you come back to me one day? I often dream you have.’

  I’m moved by Eva’s letters and struck by the fact that she chooses to write to Chantal on light blue paper in dark blue ink.

  I go to my computer, access her website. The text is in German but there’s an English version accessible by clicking on a British flag icon.

  On the HOME page she’s posted a quote from Nietzsche: ‘Without cruelty there is no festival.’

  On the BIO page there she is, the Gräfin, a middle-aged woman staring out with a subtle expression of scorn. She looks to be quite the butch with her short iron-gray hair and no-nonsense eyes. There’s an alertness about her, a suggestion of serious intelligence.

  On the SPECIALTIES page in addition to the usual list I find the following intriguing options: ‘Dominant Therapy in the Viennese Tradition’; ‘Freudian Fantasies Fulfilled’; ‘Nietzschean Psychodrama’; ‘German-Jewish Dynamics’; and my favorite: ‘Kneel before the Gräfin, confess, take your punishment, and be absolved.’

  On the CONTACT page I find an email address. I draft a note to her, then redraft it several times. In case Eva isn’t aware Chantal was killed, I phrase this disturbing news with care.

  Dear Gräfin Eva:

  I hope this email doesn’t come as an intrusion. I’m an American performance artist who recently took over the loft in downtown Oakland previously occupied by Chantal Desforges. I only knew her slightly, but I have heard a lot about her from her former business partner, Lynx, whom you met when you visited here last year. Lynx told me you and Chantal were close friends.

  I don’t know if you’ve heard the sad news concerning Chantal. In the event you haven’t, I am sorry that you are hearing this from a stranger. Chantal died some weeks back after hurriedly vacating her loft. It’s still unclear exactly what happened to her or why.

  After I took over the loft, I learned a good deal about her from Lynx and also from the artist, Josh Garske, who painted her and who lives in the building. I was even able to find many books that belonged to her, and in several of them I found letters from you. I’d like to return these personal letters and also learn more about Chantal if you’re willing to share some of your memories.

  This may seem odd coming from a person who didn’t know Chantal at all well during her lifetime, but I have become intrigued by her life, her work, and her interest in a number of matters reflected in her notes in books from her rather esoteric library. I have also been in touch with an Oakland police detective who’s investigating events surrounding her death. If there’s anything you’d care to tell me that might be relevant to his investigation, I would be happy to pass it on or put you into direct contact with him.

  Please let me know if you are willing to talk about Chantal. If you are not, I will fully understand. I am hoping we might speak on the phone, or at least exchange emails. In the meantime please accept my condolences on the death of your friend.

  Sincerely yours,

  Tess Berenson

  I send the email with trepidation. I believe that if I were in her position such an email would give me pause. Although I’m hopeful my careful phrasing will inspire confidence, I know it’s quite possible the Gräfin won’t respond.

  ‘Don’t look! Green man’s a block behind!’ Jake mutters through his teeth as I run past him on Harrison Street.

  I continue jogging down to Alice, then, breaking from my routine, cut across a parking lot to Thirt
eenth, continue down to Jackson, turn right, and head into Chinatown. When I get to Ninth Street I dodge into Madison Park. I feel safe here. There’re people around, moms with strollers, old men chatting in Chinese. I stop under a tree, turn, and wait.

  Half a minute later I see him loping down Jackson looking both ways wondering where I am. I’m tempted to step out and yell, ‘Yoohoo!’ but decide I’ll do better taking him by surprise.

  When he stops out of breath, bends, and places his hands on his knees, I rush up to him and stick my phone video camera in his face.

  ‘Hey you!’ I yell. ‘Why’re you tracking me?’

  ‘Huh?’ He pretends to look panicked.

  ‘Pull down the hood and show yourself,’ I demand, still shooting him. Then before he can answer: ‘Hey, I know you! You’re what’s-his-name, Dick—’

  ‘Mike,’ he corrects.

  ‘Yeah, Mike from the Vertigo.’ I gaze hard at him. ‘Stalking me? I don’t like that.’

  ‘Sorry … sorry …’ he mumbles, trying to turn away from my camera-phone. He’s clearly embarrassed, but not, I think, embarrassed enough.

  ‘How’d you find me?’

  He lowers his eyes. ‘Private detective,’ he mutters.

  ‘You didn’t get it that my little seduction number was just a paid performance?’

  ‘I just thought … if you got to know me a little you might consider …’

  ‘Going out with you? No way, Mike! Rex told you that.’

  ‘I know … I know … I just couldn’t get you out of my head.’

  ‘I suppose I should take that as a validation of my acting skills, but frankly I’m damn annoyed. You hired a private detective to find out my name and address, and then started following me. I’d think a high-tech whiz would have better things to do.’

  ‘Please … I didn’t mean …’

  ‘I think you did. So here’s the deal. If I see you following me again, I’ll introduce you to a real detective I know. Believe me, you won’t like that. I’ll also file a civil harassment suit. Hearing me, Mike?’

  ‘I’m hearing you,’ he says meekly.