But I’m naked, he wanted to say. Naked and in love. Instead, he took the baby, who reached up to swipe at his nose. Gingerly, he set her on the bed and, keeping one hand on her—hadn’t Miranda said she’d turned over for the first time yesterday?—managed to scoot his clothes close enough so that he could reach down to get them. He was dressed when Miranda called out, “Coffee’s ready.”
“Hear that?” He picked Celeste up in his arms and walked toward the kitchen. “Coffee.”
The table was set with two simple white bowls filled with what appeared to be café au lait. “I didn’t ask you how you liked it,” she said. “Maybe you want sugar?”
“No sugar.” He was waiting for her to say something—anything—about last night. When she didn’t, he felt compelled to add, “And I think you know just how I liked it.”
She laughed and came over to put a hand on his cheek. “I liked it too. Very much.”
Evan could hardly contain his smile as he looked down at the bowl she’d prepared for him; milk had been artfully swirled and a dusting of cinnamon sat on the surface. “It’s perfect.” He looked up again and handed Celeste to Miranda before sitting down.
Miranda balanced Celeste on her lap while she sipped from her own bowl. “You’re pretty good at that,” he said.
“Practice.” She looked sad. “Though it all may end up being for nothing.”
“Don’t say that,” he said. “You can’t afford to let yourself think that way.”
She nodded and took another sip. Then she nudged a plate in his direction. “Scones,” she said.
Evan took a bite; it was flaky, buttery, and moist. He tasted—what?—flecks of orange peel and something sweet and chewy: dried cherries. “Where did you ever get these?” he asked.
“I made them.”
“When?” Was she a magician, or had she gotten up in the middle of night?
“A month or so ago. I froze a batch.”
Evan kept eating until the scone was gone, and he hungrily eyed another.
“Go ahead,” she said.
“But you haven’t had one.”
“I will. I’m just going to get Celeste her breakfast.” And after settling her in the high chair, Miranda got up to prepare her daughter’s meal.
“Have you thought any more about what you plan to do?” He wasn’t sure he should be bringing this up, but it was too big an issue to just ignore. “Are you going to fight to keep her?”
“At first I thought I would do anything; I wouldn’t stop until every option had been exhausted. But I’ve changed my mind.”
“You have?” He put down the scone. “Why?”
“Because her father wants her. And if he wants her, and can make a home for her, then that’s where she belongs.”
Evan didn’t know what to say. Last night she had seemed so fragile, practically melting into his arms. Today she was made of steel.
He watched as she began spooning cereal into Celeste’s mouth. Celeste smacked her lips and smiled; when Miranda turned to reach for a scone, she plunged her hand into the bowl and smeared the gooey stuff all over her face.
“Celeste!” Miranda was laughing; it was good to see her laugh. But then he saw the tears on her cheeks.
After Celeste had been bathed and changed, Evan stood at the door to say good-bye. Miranda had gotten dressed, in something brilliantly red and gauzy; on her feet she wore purple flip-flops. He liked all that color, just the way he liked her skin and that perfume she wore, plum and honeysuckle—he’d seen the bottle sitting on her dresser. “I’ll call you,” he said, dipping his head to kiss her.
“Thank you, Evan—for everything.” She looked so serious, it scared him; he could sense she was heading for a bad fall and he just hoped he’d be able to catch her.
He spent the remainder of the day in his Red Hook loft, catching up on e-mail, doing laundry, and developing film. It was a familiar, and even soothing, process: placing the metal reels into the developing tank, drying and cutting the developed strips of film before slipping them into their glassine envelopes. Then the printing, in rows, onto sheets of eight-by-ten paper, followed by the poring over the tiny black-and-white images with a magnifying glass, a red grease pencil, and a bottle of beer.
This last part was the most tedious, especially when he knew that it all could have been accomplished so much more easily and efficiently with images enlarged and splashed all over his twenty-seven-inch iMac screen. But digital was digital and analog was analog; the two could not be compared. Evan had no case against digital; for commercial work, it was the perfect vehicle. What he was doing on his own time was different, and he was willing to put up with the inconvenience to get what he wanted. The thousand and one subtle tonalities that existed between the poles of black and white, for instance, or the way light could not only illuminate form but also create meaning. It was after midnight when he went to bed, leaving two empty beer bottles beside the pile of marked-up contact sheets and the worn-down nub of the grease pencil.
The next day, Evan met Audrey for their standing first-Sunday-of-the-month brunch date. Because the day was so beautiful—a surprisingly cool morning for late July, with a breeze coming off the water—they bought food at Fairway and rode their bikes along the path that snaked past IKEA before settling on a bench to eat. Sun glinted off the water—he’d just learned it was the Erie Basin—and overhead, a few opportunistic gulls circled.
“So I spent the night with her.” He unwrapped his egg and cheese on a roll; it looked good, but he was thinking of that orange-and-cherry inflected scone. “Miranda.”
“And that’s all you’re going to say? It’s not like you to be withholding, Evan. Not like you at all.” Audrey began eating her bagel; on the bench beside her, a container of coffee wafted a wisp of steam.
“It was pretty amazing.”
“She’s that into you?” Audrey gave him a probing look.
“I’m that into her.” Damn, she knew him so well.
“That’s a start.” Audrey blew on her coffee. “But it’s got to work both ways, Ev. You know that.”
Yeah, he did know that. But it was his weakness—virtue?—to be the one who always wanted more from the relationship. How did that line from Auden go? If equal affection cannot be/let the more loving one be me. Besides, that had not always been true: Margo, the woman he’d spent a good part of his twenties with, was a case in point. “She’s into me too. It’s just that it’s complicated.”
Audrey raised a pierced eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He filled her in on how Celeste’s father had surfaced and was planning to claim the baby.
“That’s going to be rough,” said Audrey. “Are you sure she’s ready for a relationship at this point?”
“She’s going to need someone. I want to be there for her.”
“Evan. Will you listen to yourself? That is not a good basis for getting together with someone.”
“Oh no? I think it’s an excellent basis, in fact. Shows my true colors. And hers.”
Audrey wadded up the foil from her bagel and stuffed it into her empty coffee cup. “Is this by any chance about the baby?”
“What are you talking about?” He knew damn well what she was talking about though. Knew and did not like it a bit.
“Since you’re not about to be fathering any kids yourself, you want to latch onto this woman who has one. You have to admit it’s pretty convenient—a ready-made family.”
“You’ve got it all wrong. It’s not like that.” He stood and pitched his wrapper and hers into a nearby trash can. “Now, can we get back on those bikes and ride?”
Audrey stood too and, shading her eyes against the sun, looked up at him. “When you change the subject like that, I know it means I’m right.”
“Whatever,” he said, and draping his arm across her shoulder, propelled
her toward their waiting bicycles.
Later that evening, after a dinner of mediocre take-out food, Evan went into the darkroom to make work prints, expertly pouring the developer, stop bath, and fixing agent into the stainless-steel trays. Then he set up the first negative in the carrier and slid it into the enlarger. The safelight, a lambent, golden moon, hung in a corner of the darkroom. He made the exposures on the Ilford enlarging paper he bought in bulk, put the exposed paper into a lightproof box so he could develop the sheets all together when the exposures were done. Each roll of film had thirty-six exposures; he was lucky if he found two or three decent pictures on a roll. Tonight, the five rolls had yielded fourteen pictures, which seemed like pretty terrible odds. But he liked to tell people it was like playing baseball: for every home run that sent the fans into a frenzy, Rodriguez or Jeter had to hit dozens of pop-ups, foul balls, and fly outs.
As he worked, he remembered Margo. It was funny how he hadn’t thought of her in such a long time, and yet since his conversation with Audrey this morning, she’d been on his mind all day. She was a sweet woman: mild to the point of meekness, her plumpness a cause of constant concern—to her, not to him.
She had fairly worshipped Evan and deferred to his taste about music, movies, books, politics—pretty much everything. He’d found it flattering it first, but it soon grew tiring and finally annoying. He didn’t want a woman who didn’t know what she wanted, and he thought it was kinder to end things between them than to allow annoyance to turn into contempt.
Now came the part Evan liked best: immersing the exposed sheets into the developer and watching the images coalesce before his eyes. Here was Celeste with oatmeal coating her cheeks; here she was in the park with Miranda. He studied the pictures, noting a gesture he liked here, a visual echo there. The final work print he pulled from the fixative was the one he’d taken of Miranda last night while she slept. He’d gotten up to go to the bathroom, and when he returned to bed, he was struck by how the streetlight, filtered through a lace curtain, had made a pattern on her body. Her naked shoulder and the top of her ample breasts were imprinted with a delicate scrim of lace flowers; he thought the effect was pure magic and he’d groped through the unfamiliar apartment in search of his camera. But maybe she wouldn’t like that he’d taken the photo of her without her consent, and he decided he would not show it to her—at least not yet.
When he emerged from the darkroom into the light, he had that sensation, familiar by now, of having been away a long time; it always took him a few minutes to reorient. Although the loft had air-conditioning, he put it on only when the temperature climbed into three digits, so on this temperate evening, the windows were open to the soft summer night. He wandered over to one and eased himself out onto the fire escape, his urban, workingman’s version of a terrace. Seated on the metal slats, he tried calling Miranda but she did not answer. Tomorrow she would give the lawyer her decision, so he left what he hoped was an encouraging message and put the phone away. He went to sleep with his face pressed into the T-shirt he’d worn to her place; it still held the traces of that intoxicating fragrance she’d been wearing.
The next morning, Evan was up by six and out the door before seven. There was a big shoot in Chelsea for a mail-order catalog—despite the day’s heat, the models were tricked out in ski parkas, snow boots, mittens, and mufflers—followed by still another shoot all the way uptown, in Fort Tryon Park, with the Cloisters as the backdrop. But the mail-order shoot ran over because of some technical problems. Then the traffic going uptown was horrendous, so he was late to the second shoot, which nearly got him fired from the job on the spot. He probably shouldn’t have agreed to the two shoots in a single day, but he knew work came when it came, not when he asked for it, so he had said yes. It was after seven when he finally made it back to Red Hook. He was totally fried and wanted nothing more than a meal in front of the game, to have a beer, and go to bed. Too tired to even consult a take-out menu, he’d pull something from the stockpile in the freezer and nuke it. Then he remembered: Miranda. She must have called the lawyer by now; what had happened? He really needed to know.
But for the second time, she didn’t answer. Evan collected his mail and trudged upstairs. What mystery dish would the freezer yield? Maybe some leftover pizza or a taco if he was lucky. Leaving his camera bag and the mail on the table, he inspected the offerings. And look. There was a whole package of frozen dumplings—score.
While he waited for them to heat, he began to flip through the Metro magazine that was in the heap. He turned to the last page, to read the “Soul of the City” column written by Geneva Bales. She had featured Miranda and Celeste in that column a while back. Miranda had shown it to him. And look—there was another baby’s picture in the column this week. No, wait. Not another baby. It was Celeste. Celeste! What the hell was going on? The timer on the microwave pinged, but he paid it no attention as his eyes scanned the words on the page in front of him.
LOST AND FOUND
Some months ago, I reported on a most startling incident that happened in our fair city. A newborn was found in a subway station in Coney Island and the Good Samaritan who found her, Miranda Berenzweig, had begun adoption proceedings. I covered their early days together, the mother and child who’d come together by chance and were building a new life in tandem. But now, in a series of events far too unbelievable to have ever been invented, I learned that my story provided the clue that led the baby’s father—her real and true parent—to come forth to claim her; it is his remarkable and tragic tale that I want to tell this week. . . .
Evan read the column from start to finish; then he read it again. There was a reference to the baby’s mother; according to Geneva, she had “died under tragic circumstances,” though what those circumstances were was not described. But the rest of it—what the fuck?
Miranda had told him that Geneva Bales had been sensitive and respectful throughout the whole process of writing the piece. So why had she written this? Was she using Miranda and Celeste in some weird way, to further some impossible-to-decipher plan of her own? What kind of person was she anyway?
Ignoring the cooling dumplings that sat in the microwave, Evan tried Miranda again. The phone rang once, twice—Jesus, he really hoped it didn’t go to voice mail this time—and then she picked up. “Listen,” he said. “There’s something you need to know.”
Miranda listened to what Evan had to say; she did not interrupt him and she did not offer any comment. Finally he had to ask, “So what do you think?”
“About Geneva? I don’t have any clue about why she would do a complete turnaround like that.”
“I just don’t get it,” he said.
“Neither do I. But I can’t even think about her, or her motives, now. I’m going to lose Celeste. Don’t you see? Jared Masters is going to take her away from me.”
THIRTEEN
Hot, sweaty, and above all frustrated, Jared unknotted his tie and threw it on his bed, where it landed on top of the two other ties, shirt, and now-wrinkled seersucker jacket he’d already had on—and rejected. He’d changed three times; what was wrong with him? It wasn’t like he had to impress anyone. The DNA test had conclusively proved that the baby girl was his, and the background check had gone smoothly. Now he was on his way to bring her home.
He looked at the pile of clothes on his bed with disgust. The weather report said the high today would be ninety-two. He didn’t have to wear a tie at all. No jacket either. He glanced down at his crisply pressed blue shirt and khakis; he looked fine. He was fine. Just nervous, that was all.
When the results of the DNA test had confirmed his paternity, he’d kind of freaked out. Yes, he wanted to see his little girl and do right by her, but was he up to the job? He couldn’t ask his black friends—Gabe or Tyrell, Shawn or Darius—because he knew they would have told him he was an idiot to have even asked for the test in the first place. A single dude raising a kid on his own—why?
And he was ashamed to ask the white friends he knew from his prep school or college days; he did not want them to think he was conforming to some racial stereotype, fathering a child he knew nothing about.
But he’d decided to ask Athena, whose opinion he really did respect. And if he went through with this, he’d need her to cut him some slack at work too. So for all kinds of reasons, he realized it would be good to have a sit-down with his boss.
Jared had pulled some strings to book a table at Ambrose, one of Harlem’s hippest new restaurants, ordered a very expensive bottle of wine that wasn’t even on the wine list, and launched into the story. Athena sat quietly sipping from her glass until he’d come to the part about the test results.
“You’re one hundred percent sure that she’s yours?”
Jared nodded; he still wasn’t sure whether he was elated or devastated by the news.
“And her mother was that skinny little blonde you used to bring around?”
He nodded again; he’d brought Caroline to Athena’s holiday party one year, and she’d met him at the office a few times.
“I could tell she was trouble,” said Athena. “From the get-go.”
Jared shifted miserably in his seat. Why had he thought Athena could help him? She’d been jealous of Caroline. He could have predicted that one. But he didn’t have anywhere else to turn, so he took a tentative sip of his own wine—not as good as it should have been given what it cost—and waited.
“I don’t see you as dad material,” Athena said. “Not at all.”
“So you think I should let this white woman keep her?”
“Her mother was a white woman,” Athena said. “You have a thing for white women, remember?” She drained her glass, and he quickly moved to refill it. “But if she’d been around, you’d be raising this kid together, and there would be some kind of balance. If you leave her with . . .”
“Miranda,” he supplied.
“She’ll grow up with a white mom and only a white mom, and she won’t have any balance. It will be one-sided. Lopsided. She won’t know who she is, where she came from. Not really.”
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