Rye, she thought. Oh, Rye.
Last chance?
Mute, she hung up. It was like she’d ripped open the air into another dimension, hearing his life on the other side.
She gave birth that first snowfall. Julian was right by her side. They named him after her father—Theo—and he had rosy cheeks and broad little shoulders and the clearest blue eyes you’ve ever seen. Rye’s eyes, she knew.
But she told Julian, He looks just like you.
If she’d learned anything from her mother, it was how to survive. A perfect life wasn’t an option; it wasn’t an expectation. You did the best you could. If you had to tell a lie once in a while, God would forgive you. You were grateful for what you had and didn’t question it. Like her mother, she accepted her life as it was, unconditionally. In the quiet of her hospital bed she held her baby to her chest and gazed out at the snow-covered treetops, knowing that Theo was the only thing that mattered now, raising him right, giving him the best life that she could. Her work—the person who made her pictures, the person inside her who saw everything that was wrong and beautiful and true—would have to wait.
And it waited.
It waited while the snow fell and she nursed her baby and rocked him in the old rocking chair, and it waited while he cut his first teeth and had his first fever and cried all night, and it waited while she bundled him up in a snowsuit and walked him all around the city, saying cat and dog and cookie and taxi, and it waited while she read to him, or sang to him, or sat on the floor and built towers with him, while she cleaned the kitchen or wiped up another mess or gave him a bath. It waited while she started him on cereal and boiled carrots or peas or squash and pureed them in batches to pour into glass jars, while she collected toys or did the laundry or took him to nursery school or Suzuki, where they’d made pretend violins, or exercised at the gym with all the other mothers or had lunch, standing over the kitchen counter, or picked him up and took him to the playground or to someone’s house for a playdate, where she sat politely in another mother’s kitchen, someone with an MBA or a doctorate and countless other achievements who was now, by choice, in this wind tunnel of pause, raising her child, and they’d drink tea or lemonade or sometimes, though rarely, white wine. It waited while she figured out what to make for dinner and took him to the market and set him in the cart and rolled the cart all through the store, buying ingredients for a recipe she’d been wanting to try, and it waited while she cooked the meal and served it to Julian, drinking a little wine together just to feel like adults, and it waited while she lay in bed beside him, too exhausted for sex, just listening to him breathe. Always her work was right there, the countless shots she took inside her head. There was so much beauty. She saw beauty wherever she looked. Even in the ugliness she saw beauty. She’d hold her camera in her hands and feel the rush of happiness come back to her. It was her phantom limb.
When Theo entered first grade, she started doing weddings.
What for? Julian asked.
I want to work.
You don’t need money.
It’s not about the money.
Like all the other Brodsky snobs, he thought she was wasting her time. She didn’t care what he thought, or anybody else, for that matter. It was work, and she was damned good at it.
Before long, she had a fully booked schedule: weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, Communions, baptisms, baby namings, graduations, and once she photographed a woman who was turning one hundred. There were anniversary parties, couples who’d been together for sixty years or more, and it was on these occasions, focusing on these older faces, that she witnessed a kind of love she did not have with her own husband, a love she feared she’d never have, deep and rare and true. All true things are equal, she’d tell herself, repeating Stieglitz’s famous words like a prayer.
How to show devotion in two sets of entwined hands, or the sacred connection to something greater than one’s self in the face of a boy reading from the Torah? She thought of Salgado’s famous photograph of Brazilian children on the day of their first Communion, dressed like angels.
After all those years of Catholic school, she’d become numb to God. However, she was not altogether agnostic. She wanted to believe. But something kept her from it. Maybe her own guilt. Maybe she felt she didn’t deserve God.
Still, sometimes in bed at night, she’d pray.
And now all this time in churches, temples, commemorating the occasions that supposedly gave life meaning. The landmarks of existence! During a service, she would watch the people, how they gazed so thoughtfully, and when it was finally over, when the couples were united in marriage, or when the boys and girls had completed the requirements to become a bat or bar mitzvah, or when a baby had been consecrated unto God, everyone stood and meandered out, their faces soft with joy, as if their faith in humanity, in life itself, had been restored.
Her pictures served as proof that people had a great capacity for goodness, that they could be kind, and reverent, and generous even when the rest of the world seemed full of darkness and tragedy. With pride, her clients displayed their photo albums on coffee tables in their living rooms. They’d flip through them from time to time, trying to remember the taste of the cake, the happy rush of conversation circulating the tables, the bride’s spectacular gown, the flowers, the marvelous food, the love that shone in people’s eyes, the hours of suspended joy.
She was a time thief. She captured it. Time was a butterfly pinned to a board.
It was time people wanted to save. Before it all ran out.
Her work was her dignity. It defined her. She took her own photographs whenever she could. She was inspired by other women photographers: Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Nan Goldin, Corrine Day—and so many others. Their photographs whispered to her during her darkest moments, when she felt like there was no point, when she wanted to give up. They said: Keep going. Don’t stop. Raise your voice!
She’d go out into the streets and find her subjects. Women doing what women do on an ordinary day. The woman at the Fairway, molesting the cantaloupes to find the ripest one, the look of ambivalence on her face, or the young lawyer on the playground after work in her rumpled suit, standing in the grass in her stockings, handing her fussy toddler a juice box, or the new mother, dozing in the shade of a park bench, with her baby sleeping on her chest. Or the woman just like her, sitting at a window in a café, drinking a glass of wine, content to be alone, a dreamy expression on her face, the rain streaming down the pane of glass.
Dorothea Lange once said, I am trying to get lost again.
When Magda first heard those words, she cried. Because she understood that feeling, that insistent need, very deeply, and she knew it in her own work.
You have to disappear in order to make good work.
You have to leave your life, to let go of it completely.
You have to travel far into the woods, alone, and be willing to lose your way.
You have to be willing to be forgotten.
Magda understood what it meant to be caught in between the life you always wanted and the life you had. It was, she knew, a common predicament for a young mother, finding herself doing what everyone said was more important, and while she was not ungrateful—she had all the requirements of a comfortable existence—she could feel the darkness unfurling its black flag.
Part Three
Act Natural
The most beautiful and simplest reflex of all is the spontaneous desire to preserve a moment of joy destined to disappear.
—Robert Doisneau, Master Photographers
Theo
Like that time she took him to the Met, his very first visit, he was maybe five, to see the photograph. He remembered all the steps, how she’d held his hand as they climbed, counting, counting, following the backs of people’s legs, the stockings and trousers, the hems of coats, until they reached the top and shuffled through the narrow door into the balmy hush of the lobby with its towering ceilings and archways. They rode up in the elev
ator, her hand sweaty. She looked down at him and smiled, her earrings dangling, and he could tell it was an important day, that she was going to show him something that mattered to her. He remembers the long hallway, like the kind in dreams, where you can’t get to the end, and she was hurrying, her shoes clickety-clacking, her hand a little slippery as she pulled him along. They came to a big room with pictures of people in frames on the walls, and the first one you saw was of his mother with her big dark eyes. She wasn’t wearing any clothes.
Mommy, you’re naked!
It was just for the photograph, she told him, and picked him up so he could see. She held him and kissed his cheek and her eyes were glittery. A very important man took that picture, she said.
After the museum, she took him out for ice cream. He got a chocolate sundae. He could still almost remember the taste of it, how sweet it was, and how, even though he didn’t really want it, he ate the whole thing.
Maybe that was the day he’d become an addict, he thought. Long before he’d started shooting heroin. Or maybe it was back in middle school, when he was still kind of chunky and the kids sometimes made fun of him. They’d moved out of the city that year into this big house in the suburbs so he could go to the public school and have more space to quote, unquote run around. Sixth grade was pretty rough, and he felt bad about himself because he was bigger than the other kids and always really sweaty and he didn’t think the teachers liked him and his grades were just okay, but then in seventh his voice changed and he started smoking a little pot with some of the older kids and people respected him because he knew things and was an only child and basically his parents treated him like an adult, plus they had money and his father was in advertising and his mother was pretty hot for a mom and they drove nice cars. So nobody cared that he was kind of overweight and no good at sports, and the coach usually let him sit on the bench instead of going onto the field and messing up. Theo wondered if the coach was trying to save him the embarrassment or just wanted their team to win. He didn’t mind it so much, but it pissed off his dad, and this one time when the coach didn’t put him in, he went up to him after the game, fuming, and threatened to call the principal or even the superintendent. In the car on the way home, his dad reasoned, ever so gently, that Theo lacked the appropriate coordination (since he was a little overweight), and that’s why the coach didn’t let him play, which of course Theo already knew, but somehow hearing him say it out loud made everything a lot worse, and then he offered to get him a coach, like somebody to work with him in private to improve his skills, and Theo thought that just sounded weird and told him so. To be honest, Theo found soccer incredibly stupid. The whole enterprise was stupid, the kids trying to be so great, and the parents in the bleachers who were all pretty creepy, the bossy mothers sucking up to the coach, and the dads shouting Let’s go! or Bring it home! or some other crap. Beyond the bleachers you could see the edge of the field and the little white houses lined up on School Street with their chain-link fences and Virgin Mary statues and the German shepherd who never stopped barking and the guy who had a mental disorder who sat out on a lawn chair counting cars, and then you looked back at the kids in their soccer uniforms and it all just seemed to say something about the world and how uneven things were between the people who had money, like the spoiled brats in his school, and the ones who didn’t.
Around that time, his mother took him to see someone because she thought he was depressed. People called her Dr. M, and she was supposedly good with teenagers. She had a nose ring and looked pretty dykey, and he had zero interest in talking to her about anything remotely related to his life, but when he looked at his mother’s worried face, her eyes flitting around the room like flies, landing for a second on his face, then flying off again, he went along with it. They all sat down on worn, dirty couches, and his mother sort of crumpled into her chair like a horse in a chair, if you can picture that, her legs kind of jagged and crossed, and her eyes already teary, and this so-called doctor asked Theo what was wrong, and he shrugged and said nothing, but tears were streaming down his face, and his nose was running, and he kept saying, Nothing, nothing’s wrong, but the tears kept coming, and it occurred to him that maybe he really was depressed. Dr. M kept her cool, watching him like he was a lab monkey and jotting down notes, and Theo looked right back at her, conducting an evaluation of his own, noting the barbed-wire tattoo around her wrist, the multiple piercings, her putty-colored pallor, and wondered how happy she was. It seemed to him that people were way too preoccupied with being happy all the time, and obviously no one liked seeing somebody cry, especially a boy. They sat there, staring, waiting for him to divulge some grotesque horror, when a little buzzer sounded, indicating that her next patient was there. On the way home, they filled the prescription; it felt like the goody bag after the birthday party of a kid you hate.
As it turned out, taking meds made him more popular with his friends because they were taking them too. Prozac, Lexapro, Wellbutrin. Everybody was on something to make them less depressed, and why shouldn’t they be depressed, his mother liked to announce, pacing around the kitchen with all the cabinets open and the TV blaring, with the world full of gunslinging freaks and a melting planet. He’d take his pill at dinnertime, pushing the tablet far back on his tongue and drinking a lot of water, and his mother would smile at him like it was some kind of panacea (one of his SAT words), and now she didn’t have to worry so much because the pill was working to fix the problem, when in fact there really wasn’t any problem except that Theo was his own person and not really interested in doing the things everybody else was doing but wasn’t smart enough or articulate enough to put that into words. Once he swallowed the pill, he thought about it breaking down and pictured these little white angels floating through his bloodstream, and he tried to believe it was making him feel better, but it really didn’t, when he was totally honest with himself, change anything, and it actually made him more anxious because he’d heard that one of the side effects was weight gain, and that was about the last thing he needed. He would look in the mirror and compare himself to some of the other boys in his class who already had six-packs and hard shoulders, when he was soft and still had his baby fat and a sort of round chin and was really hungry all the time and wanted Doritos with melted Velveeta all over them. His mother wasn’t the most ambitious cook and mostly fed him pasta, and he’d shake out half the container of Parmesan cheese on top and drink a huge glass of milk, then go down to the basement to play Call of Duty until it was time to do his homework, which was generally some form of moronic busywork, and go to bed.
After a while, it started becoming clear to him that everybody was super-medicated and in any house on any street, there was somebody taking some kind of antidepressant, and that became normal, and being somebody who didn’t take drugs was actually kind of strange, and when he looks back at his life and tries to analyze how he got here to this awful fucked-up place, he doesn’t really think it’s his fault. And maybe he refuses to take responsibility for it because he is a product of his upbringing and maybe even of the times. Because everybody enabled his addiction. His parents and their fucked-up marriage enabled him. The blank, sort of dazed expression on his mother’s face as she’d remove his father’s place setting from the table after he’d text to tell her something had come up at work and he wasn’t coming home. The stupid politicians on TV enabled him, with their blue and red ties like athletic pinnies, arguing endlessly about the misdeeds of others while systematically indulging their own interests, and all these people in other countries roaming around in black and white robes with explosives strapped to their bodies, and the assault weapons and the bombs and the fucking wackos killing people or hacking into the Internet—all that enabled him. And the movies he’d see with his friends on the weekends at the cineplex, where he always went to Five Guys beforehand and ate two mega-burgers with fries, then during the movie these strange sugary pecans that came in a paper cone, not because they tasted good but because his pare
nts would never allow him to consume so many calories in such a short period of time, like, probably enough to feed a small village in Africa somewhere, and in the movie on the screen everything was at total fucking stake, and the world was going to end, and only one guy could fix it. Those, too, enabled him. And his father driving off every morning at, like, six a.m. in his Beemer to the train station so he could spend the day coming up with new ways to screw over the American consumer, and the first call he made was to his assistant, who was also his girlfriend, and his mother standing at the counter, waiting for the coffee in her silk bathrobe with her skinny shoulders, looking like at any minute she might start crying. How the first thing he’d do when he got to his homeroom was look at the black, twitching hands on the clock, and it was the last thing he did at the end of the day when the bell started ringing. Time passed ever so slowly, and none of it mattered; the whole day was, like, pretty pointless. There was no escape from the tedium of life; that was the first lesson he’d understood as an adult. Time fucking had you. It fucking had you. It was your master, and you were its ignorant slave.
His mother tried. She wanted to be a good mom. She had a hot temper, and when she was angry or disappointed, she’d start speaking in Polish, and nobody knew what she was saying. She was demanding and impatient and expected a lot. Not just of him, of Julian too. Like all the times she made Julian pick him up from practice, and he’d come straight from the train, and you could smell the beer he’d drunk on his breath. They’d drive home through the village when all the stores were closed and all you saw were the big dark windows and the blotches of the streetlamps on the lonely sidewalks, and Julian would be talking to someone on the phone, someone who was obviously more interesting to him, more necessary, than Theo. Then they’d all have dinner together, and Julian would try to ask him about his day, but it was so obvious to Theo that he wasn’t the slightest bit interested and was doing it only to avoid talking to his mother or breaking into another argument about how fucked-up a husband he was and what a lousy father he’d turned out to be.
The Vanishing Point Page 11