A Division of the Light

by Christopher Burns

  “There’s a phone number,” he said.

  “Ah.”

  “Do you think she wants me to call?”

  Gregory wondered why he should ask Cassie for approval. When she was not present he did not need her opinion. Often he did not even consider what she might think, however sensible her advice. It was only when they were together in the same room, or talking on the phone, that he felt compelled to ask his daughter what she thought. He had continued to do this despite his intermittent decisions to stop. Gregory was sure this had something to do with Ruth’s early death. His wife had left guilt behind her as well as memories; it colored her wake like a dark stain.

  “You must realize that it’s an invitation,” Cassie answered, reaching up to touch the beads on the necklace that she had inherited from her mother.

  Gregory looked again at the message and then reversed the card to study the Weston photograph. It had been taken almost ninety years ago. The curved shell chambers looked like barriers engineered to protect an invisible center.

  “Why not ring her now, and get it over with?”

  Gregory nodded but faltered.

  “Dad, would you rather make that call when I wasn’t here?”

  “Of course not.”

  For the moment, at least, he had nothing to hide.

  Alice answered after a few rings. Usually Gregory began speaking as soon as he could, but for an unexpected moment, no more than a second or two, he was silent. He could hear a background of amorphous murmur, as if a hand had been cupped to his ear.

  “It’s Gregory Pharaoh.”

  After a pause, Alice spoke. “Yes.”

  “I just thought I’d let you know that the money arrived safely. Thanks.”

  This time the pause was slightly longer. “It seemed easier to send cash and not a check. Was that all right?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. How are you feeling? I mean, after what happened?”

  “Not bad. You saw how shaken up I was.”

  “Right. Maybe there are people with you. Can you tell me anything else?”

  “I’m still bruised but I’ll get over it. It was upsetting and embarrassing but it wasn’t a disaster.”

  “The credit cards?”

  “The bank people blocked them before they could be used, so things could have been worse. Now I have replacements. And a new mobile that I’m talking on now. There were store cards as well. I’d forgotten about those.”

  “I didn’t think about them, either.”

  For a few moments Alice did not speak. Silence vibrated between them.

  “Are you at work?” Gregory asked.

  “Yes, I’m here now.”

  “Good,” he said lamely.

  “I know why you rang.”

  “I told you why.”

  “That was just an excuse.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes. You rang because you want to see me again.”

  As if by reflex Gregory looked across at Cassie, but she was pretending not to listen. Her face was pallid in the glow from the computer screen.

  “You were badly shaken up,” Gregory said. “I’d be interested to find out what you remember.” He cleared his throat and went on. “Maybe we could meet up sometime?”

  The response was immediate, as if Alice had been poised to make it.

  “I live with someone. I’ve lived with him for a while.”

  Gregory had not expected to be told that. In the background the office conversations were fragmentary and indistinct, like noises through an adjoining wall.

  “Right,” he answered, “OK.”

  “I just wanted to make that clear.”

  “It’s clear. But it doesn’t change things.”

  Another slight delay; again Gregory detected a sense of calculation. He was not certain if he had been refused.

  “I have to go now,” Alice said; “I’m busy.”

  “I understand.”

  “I was right, wasn’t I? About why you called?”

  Unexpectedly Gregory felt that he should rush out a confession. If Cassie had not been present then he could have been foolish enough to do it, even if he was unsure if it would be true.

  Passion, Gregory thought, was no guarantor of truth. Like a younger and more impulsive man, he could have told Alice that he could not stop thinking of her. If he had told her such things, then maybe she would have ridiculed his fixation. It was even possible that he could ridicule it himself. Gregory was puzzled by his own feelings. He felt suspended, unequal, and faced with choices he was strangely cautious about making.

  There was only one certain way of tempting Alice to meet him, and that was to admit that he had taken photographs as she lay sprawled on the ground. And yet he could not tell her that in a telephone conversation. Only if they were face to face would he be able to persuade her of his good faith. Over a telephone he would come across as exploitative and sinister.

  “You were right,” he agreed.

  He believed he heard a small exhalation of breath. What she said next took him by surprise.

  “I could meet you by the river. On my lunch-break, near to where I work. But not until Friday.”

  Gregory was already consulting his diary. He was free. If he had not been, he would have made sure that he was.

  “I could get there by about ten past one,” Alice said. “I couldn’t stay for very long. I have to be back by two.”

  “Tell me where exactly and I’ll be there.”

  It took less than half a minute to agree a place. As soon as they had done so, Alice repeated that she was busy and hung up.

  Gregory leaned back in his chair. The postcard was still in his hand. Now that he had gone to the trouble of arranging a rendezvous, he wondered if he should keep it.

  “Well,” said Cassie, not looking up, “something must be happening.”

  “She doesn’t know I took photographs while she was on the ground.”

  “You didn’t tell her?”

  Gregory stared into the seashell whorls and was silent.

  “You’ll have to confess,” Cassie advised.

  “I know how to do the right thing.”

  “That hasn’t always been true.”

  “It will be this time.”

  To close the subject Gregory handed over some prints he had made of the girl who saw visions, her family and the priest. He liked the photographs of Little Maria. Posed in her soiled confirmation dress, her imagination seized by the miraculous, she stared numbly into his camera.

  Cassie examined the prints with an expert eye and asked several questions. Gregory answered truthfully, even repeating with a laugh what Little Maria had told him, but he made no mention of having slept with Carla.

  Picture editors had already selected the images they wanted, but these were not the ones that Gregory would have chosen for a planned second exhibition of his work. In the newspaper his portraits from the visitation site would be embedded in a journalist’s text and printed with explanatory captions. But for his gallery exhibition Gregory would strip personal and social contexts from each of the prints. They would be hung as pure images. The intense young girl with the bony features and the white confirmation dress with a dirty hem would stare out at the viewer in a challenge to interpretation. She would be neither visionary nor pawn, but just an arrangement of gradations in tone, abstracted and mysterious, her meanings kept hidden from the inquiring eye.

  Gregory liked that. He wanted his work to be lifted free from its origins and valued for its compositional qualities alone. If ever he chose to include images of Alice, no one would know who she was or how and why they were taken. Viewers would not even be sure what had happened or what would have happened afterward; they would be denied a narrative. Such uncertainties would give a mysterious edge to his other work, too.

  Gregory kept photographs of all his lovers, photographs that Cassie had often seen. Their bodies were of as much aesthetic interest to him as their faces. For one particular session, with
one particular lover, he had paid homage to the 1950s work of Bill Brandt and posed her nude against a bank of pebbles, so that her form and texture became as abstracted, sculpted and inert as an object worn smooth by an ocean. All that was some years ago, and the woman in question had liked the results. She had especially liked walking round Gregory’s first exhibition and overhearing comments by visitors who stood in admiration before the huge prints without realizing that the owner of such smooth flesh was standing beside them. Another lover had eagerly posed naked and with her legs apart, head and limbs cropped from the shot so that her torso replicated Stieglitz’s 1918 study of Georgia O’Keeffe. Gregory was no longer surprised at what some women would do when asked.

  Not all of his lovers had been like this. Some had been repulsed by the thought of appearing so nakedly and for the eyes of others. One had consented only to having those parts of her body photographed that would normally be visible on a public beach. But whatever their choices, and however he had portrayed them, all of Gregory’s women had been fascinated by the pictorial traces left by their predecessors.

  They were still there in his files, all of them, but when he turned to the records Gregory seldom thought of the times they had shared. His women had become their own representations. Their lives had been frozen into motionless and unchanging moments; those brief instances were all that was required. He had given each of his lovers their instant, and in doing so he had also given them eternity. And that was something that he believed he could also give to Alice Fell.

  At first it seemed that she intended they should progress side by side along the busy embankment like court officials discussing a case. Gregory realized that if they continued walking like this then Alice would always be looking ahead and he would have to turn intermittently to study her profile, so he was relieved when she agreed that they should stop at the nearest riverside café. Until that moment they had done little but self-consciously exchange small talk, as if their first encounter had been so unusually dramatic that it was difficult to adjust to the everyday.

  They sat opposite each other. Gregory studied the contours of her face, the shape of her neck, the cut of her hair. Within a few minutes he was an expert in the way that Alice turned her head, the angle of her gaze, the way she sometimes composed herself by linking her hands together on the tabletop. Everything about her was discreet. The fact that she lived with someone else, and apparently had done so for some time, was only a minor irritant to his intention.

  “Pharaoh,” she said after a while, “that can’t be your real name.”

  “You think it’s unusual?” he asked.

  It was the first time he had clearly seen her eyes. Now there was no indication of distress; instead they were guarded. The irises were dark with a hint of gold. He wanted to photograph her with a sudden flash to catch those eyes when they had widened in a dusky light.

  Aware of the intensity of his appraisal, Alice turned away to look across the gray river to the far bank. Boats moved along the water and yellow cranes straddled a building whose metallic outer shell glinted like mercury.

  “It sounds artificial,” she said. “As if you chose it for effect.”

  “I didn’t have to make a choice,” Gregory lied. “I was born with it.”

  She did not ask more, but he repeated a story he had told many times to others.

  “Pharaoh’s a name passed down from the mystery plays. The same person acted the same character year after year, and after that his son took over, and then his son after him. The name of the character became attached to the family.”

  Alice did not admit that she knew a little about mystery plays; she had once been in love with a man who was an expert in theatrical history.

  “And your ancestors always played the Pharaoh—aloof, sensual and cruel. Is that something to be pleased about?”

  “Why not? The public must have been satisfied that they acted that part better than others could.”

  “But the people who acted Jesus and God can’t have inherited their names. Those must have been far too holy.”

  “I suppose so,” Gregory agreed.

  He could see no circumstance in which he would ever confess to Alice that her suspicion was correct. The name Gregory Pharaoh was on all his documents, but in more than thirty years he had never revealed the truth to anyone other than his wife and daughter. Even his former business partner had not known.

  Gregory had not been born with the names he used. As a child and as a youth, he had answered to George Farrar. In adolescence he had become convinced that those names were like shackles, and that they had to be transmuted into something distinctive, unforgettable, even grandiose. Soon after becoming a photographer he had discarded his birth names, and now they lay broken and unused in the abandoned museum of his past. For decades he had never thought of himself as a Farrar; he was always a Pharaoh.

  “In your line of business it must be an advantage to have an unusual name,” Alice suggested.

  “So they say.”

  “And are you an unusual person?”

  She looked hard at him across the scuffed table with its coffee cups. Even in a setting such as this her face called out for a lens to be focused on it.

  “Of course I am,” he answered. “And so are you.”

  She dismissed the compliment with a smile. “You must use flattery as easily as you use focal lengths.”

  Gregory refused to be nettled. “Tell me what happened after you got home,” he asked.

  She ignored this. “I telephoned your office last week. A woman answered.”

  “That would have been Cassie—my daughter Cassandra. She works for me.”

  “You’re married?”

  “I used to be.”

  “I would have felt better if you still were.”

  “I couldn’t be. She died. It was quite a long time ago.”

  Alice nodded, but did not offer any sympathy for his loss.

  Gregory thought again of Ruth, of the way he had obsessively, meticulously recorded her decline, so much so that she had eventually cried out in humiliation and despair, so much so that an adolescent Cassie had become furious and tried to slap him and he had let her. None of that had stopped him. Despite her distress he had photographed his wife’s last moments, and he had photographed her corpse. If he could have, he would have followed her coffin into the furnace.

  “After you got home,” he repeated.

  In some detail Alice described the protocols she had followed for the credit card and store card companies. Gregory hardly listened, but never looked away.

  “And your partner?” he asked. “What did he say?”

  “Did I tell you it was a he?”

  “You did. Why, would you prefer to remain that mysterious?”

  “I don’t like to give too much away. Not on a first meeting.”

  “I’m pleased we both agree that we should meet again.”

  “You know I didn’t mean that.”

  “You won’t tell me what he said?”

  Alice looked across the river again. “Thomas was very concerned. He thought I should see a doctor just in case.”

  “And did you? See a doctor?”

  “No.”

  Gregory wanted to put his fingers to the side of her neck and lift her hair. He thought of the feel of her skin beneath his fingers.

  “No lasting harm done, then,” he said quietly.

  “I recover well. It’s a gift.”

  A haughty dark-haired woman paraded along the path with a small groomed terrier on the end of a lead. The sound of her heels clicked across their meeting like a stitch. Suddenly Gregory imagined the woman naked, aloof and unconcerned, still holding the lead, the dog still trotting beside her as in a Helmut Newton composition.

  “You’re thinking about a complete stranger,” Alice said.

  “I was thinking about pictorial values, that was all,” he replied with a light touch of protest, but he thought it would be unwise to study the woman as sh
e walked away. “I think about pictures most of the time,” he added, as if this were an intriguing confession.

  “So you have your camera with you now—in that bag?”

  “Not the one I had that day. That was a second-generation EOS 5D: a favorite, even though it’s a few years old. But I always carry something, just in case.”

  “And you were thinking of pictures when I was robbed?”

  Gregory wondered if this was the moment to be truthful. Alice’s eyes were wide and unblinking. He suddenly became aware of the drop in temperature that happens near water.

  “It’s like a reflex. It’s built into me.”

  “So you took photographs as I was hit?”

  “I took photographs as you were falling. My reactions were as quick as that.”

  The seconds dragged by as if held back by weights.

  “You didn’t mention that before.”

  “I wasn’t sure what they would look like. The 5D is built for portrait work and not action shots. And there was high contrast because of the building shadow. And the depth of field was shallow.”

  “I think, Mr. Pharaoh, that someone like you would always be very sure what your photographs would look like.”

  “If I were a paparazzo, maybe. But I’m studio, not street.”

  Although Alice appeared resentful, Gregory believed that it must disguise an interest, possibly even a fascination.

  “How many did you take?”

  “A few,” he answered, although he had taken a dozen. “Five or six. I’m not a Cartier-Bresson who walks round with a Leica in the crook of his arm so that he can work surreptitiously. Although by chance I did photograph what he would have called a decisive moment.”

  Gregory waited to see if she showed signs of recognition of the phrase. She did not. He became convinced that Alice must have chosen the Weston postcard purely because it had pleased her, and that her knowledge of photography was not as great as he had at first hoped. She had not failed a test, but he had found out a little more about her.

  “Are you pleased with the ones that you took?”