That I had never “tried anything”—this was the phrase that he used—seemed to me to be an obvious point of credit, a spotless record that pointed to more of the same. Of course, the thoughts had disturbed me enough that I had confessed to having them, about a year after my mother died, in the dark after sex in the middle of the night. This was the time he wanted me the most, calling me in from where sleep had taken me, his body my reintroduction to the living world.
I had hoped that if I let the thoughts into the room they would lose some of their power, a kind of blackmail in the way they were invisible to others but kept my life on a leash. I would have two drinks but never three, accept a compliment but never believe it. Though he was warm and soft when I first confided, the separative effect I had wished for, some congratulations I might receive for naming the thing that hunted me, did not take shape. Instead, my husband began looking for cohesion, seeing any dip in my feeling as proof of the roots the thoughts had taken in me. If I was quiet at a dinner somewhere, despite the light being good and the weather lucky, my forehead might as well have been a strip of celluloid projecting the ghastly imperative: k i l l y o u r s e l f. What is it, he would say, his mouth firming up and his eyes losing a little color. For God’s sake, what are you thinking right now. Once, because I had only been remembering a college friend and her peculiar party trick, a dancer who had smoked cigarettes with her toes, I snapped. Strictly of your happiness, I said, holding up my empty wineglass as if to toast.
I was able to contact the photographer only through a friend of mine who taught at the university where she sometimes lectured, and he warned me Sam Baldwin was moody and unlikely to reply. She conducted famous seminars on her own work, performances I’d heard described once as a whole childhood, meaning every possible emotion, meaning each pared to its loudest part. People said she’d lost her wire-frame bifocals sometime in the mid-eighties and since wore her prescription sunglasses, which she removed just to shoot. Good luck, he wrote, and concluded his email with a typo of omission, the question Are you feeling? to which I responded only Yes.
My note to her was brief and included the photo, which had not otherwise been catalogued and was scarce and low resolution online. I explained the situation and asked if she’d mind telling me anything she remembered, about that day or my mother. My phone rang within the hour, while I was observing a pickup game of basketball at West Fourth Street, my fingers threaded through the diamonds of the fence. I like watching the minor parts of the body during moments of leaps and stretches, acts we think of as the jobs of legs and arms. The cut of an ankle as the foot rolls, ball to toes, upward, or the hip bone exposed to sun for the instant, mid-dunk, when the shirt rises up the ribs. I like to be inside the shouting but silent to it. This was something I did that I told no one about, a whole hour unaccounted for, and it was one of the great pleasures I’d experienced since leaving my husband, a certain thought ringing like a bell calling me in: Nobody knows where I am, nobody knows where I am, nobody knows where I am.
After clearing her throat excessively, as if alone in a room, and unwrapping what sounded like three small candies, the photographer asked if I’d like to come by sometime that week. She lived a few blocks from where I stood then, a fact I decided not to mention. It seemed a step had been skipped in resolving the distance between us, but I agreed, my mind still half-tied to a swiveling calf I saw through the fence.
The day came to see her and I could not decide on the appropriate clothes to wear. Finally I decided on a jumpsuit, sienna, linen, which made little about who I was easy to imagine. The building, once industrial, was air-conditioned in the way of a car dealership. She opened the door coughing, rolling her eyes at her body and gesturing with the hand not covering her mouth for me to come in. The apartment was cluttered but not unclean, the feeling being that the stray books in stacks were often removed and referenced. Pointing at my shoes and the straw mat where I should place them, she walked toward two cracked-leather egg chairs that faced one another under a skylight, and I followed. She was not wearing any glasses. She was speaking through the middle of a thought she had begun without me.
“And of course I was so glad it was included in the retrospective,” she was saying. “You know, the pieces of mine that gain some valence, the ones the most reproduced, often aren’t the same I would have chosen. Funny that it wasn’t for so long. I guess a woman taking the thing she wanted, a man doing something for her, was never as interesting as the alternative. Funny that was your mother. I liked her.”
She didn’t hesitate in the transition from the talk of the photo to its subject. The way that she poured the tea, a minor flourish of her wrist, into two Japanese mugs without handles, made me feel vaguely guilty about the way I’d dismissed her work. As it was steeping she got up—distracted by a memory, I believed, ready to pull out some arcana that would help her comment—but then she was drawing something around my shoulders, a knit blue afghan, imperfect, smelling of smoke.
“You’re supposed to ask people if they want to be taken care of, isn’t that right? I’m sorry.” She rolled her eyes again, this time at her instincts. “She came the first time it showed, wearing a pantsuit and pearls. We all loved that. Irony was not valid for her. She thought, Well I’ve got my picture up at a gallery, I better look like a taxpayer.”
Something in my face must have changed, because she put a hand on my knee.
“Did I?” she said. “Is there?”
“I didn’t know she knew.”
The photographer watched me figuring out why this mattered. It was clear she had a way of encouraging a person’s natural state, even becoming a part of it, by goading on any reaction, turning the room to its expression. On the table between us she set a ceramic Kleenex holder, and then she moved about opening the windows to the noise from the street, bringing the heat in and making the throw around my shoulders irrelevant. I couldn’t help believing she was the reason for every feeling I had, the comfort but also the anger. A bay you found lovely to begin with, I thought, a bridge in the afternoon. The color changing with your view of it, the depth uncertain.
Why did it matter? I had wanted to believe the photo was taken not of my mother but from her, a thing she would not have given freely. I had wanted to see it as an exception. I asked the questions I did next without totally asking them, maybe so I could convince myself later that the photographer had told me things I never needed to know. Sitting back in the chair with her tea held halfway up her body, the photographer mentioned that my mother had been the girlfriend of a friend of a friend.
“I remember loving the way her face and body reacted separately. It was like the body would tell the face what was happening and the face would say, Are you sure? She had her days-of-the-week underwear soaking in the bathroom sink, which broke my fucking heart.”
When she said this, what came to mind immediately was another photo of hers, one of the most famous. The soiled pale pink, the shallow basin of water the hue of disintegrating leaves, the elastic losing its threading. W E D N E S D A Y. On the mirror above are phone numbers in eyeliner, a long-antennaed cockroach crawling over fives and sevens. I was waiting for her to expand upon this, to attach her memory to the abbreviated public record of it, but it never came. It was as if she had seen as much as I had, could speculate about the lives behind the torn faces in her work no better than anyone else. If she knew she was not sharing an anecdote but referencing a canonized image, she gave no indication.
The silence that ensued was like a change in weather, something that rendered us powerless in a way it was hard to take personally. I would ask nothing further about the woman in the photo, the splay of her knees, the delicate bloom of a bruise on her inner elbow, just visible in the way she gripped the man’s hair, and the photographer would ask nothing at all about the rest of my mother’s life, not even her name. “I’d love to shoot you sometime,” she said, after the disappointing moment had turned over, and I said only, “Thank you,” a response as
vague as it was insincere.
When she closed the door behind me it was easy to believe that it had never opened, that the apartment was unknown to me. In the jerking elevator down I sent my father two texts, one the photo of my mother, and the next a part of it I had zoomed in on and cropped, the distinctive split of her left eyebrow. I understood how the conversation would go, and I was using a tack I knew would aggrieve him, preempting his protest. I walked along Sixth Avenue and into the first movie I found, an Australian art-house thriller. A middle-aged couple wearing the colors of hard candy had kidnapped a teenage girl, a blonde in shorts that crossed her ass at a mean diagonal. The camera loved the wet line of her teeth, wanted to move all the way down them and into her throat. It was scoreless, the sounds of her torture offscreen the subdued soundtrack to what happened on-, where the husband or wife persisted with the domestic, pouring budget cereal into plastic bowls, filling the water trays of their twin Dobermans. In scenes across town we saw the pale back of a mother’s neck, the fallen elbows, while she looked through her daughter’s possessions for a sign of what had driven her away. The handheld shots suggested a state of watching from another room, without the desire to enter or the resources to leave.
When the movie let out I saw that my father hadn’t responded to my texts, so I sent two more, words this time, What do you think? and then, Well??? They did not show up as delivered. The evening was dark enough that it felt physical, a deepening of color that came with a smell and a taste. I had never known my father to turn his phone off, and in fact would have imagined he did not know how. He spent most of his truant feeling on it, revisiting the photos of cracks in the wall to be caulked, tapping at the weather icons of cities he’d visited once a long time ago.
An email from the photographer appeared as I stood in front of the theater, in view of the basketball courts that were empty now. Devoid of people they looked liquid, interruptions of pure space that did and wanted nothing. The email referenced neither the minimal conversation we’d had nor the complicated one we’d avoided. I’d like to shoot you sometime, she had written. When can I? A gun shop, I thought, where you bantered a little outside your politics with the owner, some bald man with ideas about a woman’s instincts for self-preservation, who congratulated your investment in personal safety.
I could tell by the way my skin felt, inadequate for the task of holding in everything it had to, that I was going to call my husband. Like anybody about to break a law, I felt a thrill at the decision I’d made—that, however briefly, the rules did not apply, that I was free from the forces that had circumscribed me. With each ring of the phone I imagined the different places he might be, at the counter of our neighborhood Italian restaurant with the long, mirrored bar, in bed with a girl who laughed at everything, on line at the airport with his rolling titanium suitcase. That he did not pick up did not surprise me, but that there was no response to my transgression saddened me. I wanted to hear his voice snap at the line I had crossed, to know what he thought was selfish about the thing I needed. I called him once more that evening, and sent my father three more question marks. I did not respond to the email from the photographer. My mother wrote at eight thirty, asking if I was feeling alone. There were many people nearby, young, single, possibly naked.
In bed at night I thought of the last hour of my marriage, which had unspooled, in predictable irony, the morning after a wedding. I had arrived to the breakfast first, at the Hudson Valley farmhouse turned rustic inn, to the row of carefully distressed tables along the porch. My husband had stayed in the room to shower and shave. Waiting for him with another couple, acquaintances who coordinated their clothing and spoke one another’s names so often it seemed part of a prenuptial agreement, I looked out at the spread of hills, a green that was nearly uniform. When he appeared I watched him walk toward and then past me, forsaking the seat on my left for one at the empty table next to it. Embarrassed for me before I became embarrassed for myself, the couple exchanged a look. They straightened their silverware. They spoke one another’s names.
A half an hour later, on the unmade bed that looked like an envelope torn open, I mentioned the chair I had saved. I used the word divorce. My husband accused me of looking for symbols where there were none, and then I was blithe, as I’d rarely been in our time together, packing up my weekend bag, checking in the morning light for what might have been forgotten.
In the studio apartment where I’d moved to be alone, I woke the next morning to a call from my father, the fourth in a row. In the background there was the sound of wind or water, in his voice a kind of directness that would have frightened me as a child. He asked if I’d had my coffee yet, and said he would wait while I made it, asking nothing after that, none of the little questions that buttoned our conversations together: hot enough for you, how’s the city so nice they named it twice. I told him I’d need to put the phone down a minute, and if he’d rather I could call him back, but he said he was happy to stay on the line. As I boiled water and dumped yesterday’s grounds from the French press, I kept looking at the phone where I’d set it on my small, high table, in the shadow of a copper bowl where I’d floated white carnations in water, worried that whatever he had to say would change given how long he had to wait.
When I finally settled on the stool I put him on speaker, wanting, in some childish way, for his voice to fill the room. I could imagine his exculpations: that she had been one in a million, full of surprises, and this was just another, bitter a pill as it was to swallow. So long as he accepted the most critical fact of it, I was prepared to give him every sympathy. I would offer never to bring it up again.
“First, I want to apologize,” he said. “I never expected this to come up, and I guess I thought I might be able to push it back down.”
“Of course you didn’t,” I said. “How could you have expected it?”
That I had spoken did not seem to matter. I had the sense, for the first time in my life, of what my father was like alone, fearful because he was brittle, unhappy because he was fearful, determined because he was unhappy.
“She never told you about that time in her life, and I believed that was her choice and her right.”
I looked for his voice on the petals in the water, in the crystals of salt I kept in a low ceramic platter.
“Are you saying you knew about the photo?”
“I didn’t know specifically about the photo, but I knew about the circumstances surrounding it. When I met your mother she was nine months clean and I was six, and she still had some New York on her. Crosswalks were invisible. If somebody said how are you, her shoulders went up. She’d done it cold turkey, no program, no rehab, nothing. That impressed the hell out of me.”
“But she drank,” I said. “What about the sauvignon blanc at dinner? Aren’t addicts supposed to—”
This question, as with all others I asked in the brief remainder of the phone call, my father answered in as few words as possible, denying me any real information. My voice spiked and flew and his refused to meet it. In dismissing my catechism, he was returning her to the place where dead people live, her mysteries as irrelevant now as her peanut allergy or pilled lilac robe. I wanted to believe that another conversation was happening inside the one I could hear, that maybe, in allowing my mother her life, protecting it from my revisionist inquiries, he was reminding me of the rights I had, the questions about who I was or how I suffered for which there were no categorical answers. By the time my father said goodbye, the noise had grown around him, busy, total, and I said, vaguely irritated, “Where are you going, anyway?”
“I’m going to the goddamn game,” he answered, knit so deep into his living that he did not think to tell me which.
I responded to the photographer sometime in the surreal afternoon that followed, a time in which all my thoughts felt half-lit, things that had belonged to someone else and which I held up to test for an emotion I’d know when I found it. There were certain memories of my husband I had never revisite
d, a night I had let a moth into the bedroom and he had been viciously annoyed. I had been reading, but he insisted we turn out all the lights and reopen all the windows, tempt it with the glow of the street, and while we lay waiting for the thing to fly out of the room I could feel his palms pressing on the mattress, taut against sleep or comfort. I did not cry out in satisfaction at its exit, as he did, and I could tell my silence bothered him, even though the sheets were clean and soft, even though the smell in our home was of spring. I’m open to being photographed, I wrote to the photographer, so long as I’m asleep.
A field, I thought then. A yellow caned chair. A room up some stairs that was empty.
WENDELL BERRY
The Great Interruption: The Story of a Famous Story of Old Port William and How It Ceased To Be Told (1935–1978)
from Threepenny Review
Billy Gibbs was as lively a boy, no doubt, as he could have been made by a strong body, excellent health, an active mind, and an alert sense of humor much like that of his father, Grover Gibbs. Like about all the Port William boys of his time, his life was not as leisurely as he wished it to be. From the time he grew from the intelligence of a coonhound to that of a fairly biddable border collie, his parents, who were often in need of help, found work for him to do. This occasioned his next significant intellectual advance: recognition of the advantages of making himself hard to find. For the next several years, however, his parents, Beulah and Grover, were better at finding him than he was at hiding. From the time of their marriage in 1920 until Beulah inherited her parents’ little farm in 1948, they were tenant farmers, and Billy was always under some pressure to earn his keep. Needing to work, for a boy of sound faculties, naturally increases the attractiveness of not working, and Billy’s mind was perfectly sound.
The Best American Short Stories 2019 Page 6