Thwonk

by Joan Bauer

  The words didn’t register at first.

  “Really?” I cried.

  “Without question.”

  I clung happily to his hand. My eyes filled with tears.

  “I’m sorry, too, Dad. I knew you were hurting, but I couldn’t see beyond my hurt to yours. You were just trying to protect me—I know that now. You spent all those years teaching me photography…I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”

  Dad walked toward my dance prints. Their glory beamed through the darkroom like a searchlight cutting through fog.

  “I bet on you,” he said.

  Well, you know how it is when you’ve been waiting for an important person to give you the nod. Your hope soars into space like a cupid zooming toward the moon. I stood there looking at Dad and we started laughing and connecting because my art was so tied to his that sometimes I couldn’t tell where one of us started and the other began. I can’t remember who started hugging who first, but it was unquestionably the best hug I’d ever had, because it was a hug of all-out acceptance.

  “This does not,” Dad warned, “mean that you just approach this whole thing like some wafty airhead. You have to think about how to support yourself, about how you’re going to make it happen.”

  “I will, Dad.”

  “I wasn’t as consistent with that as I should have been, A.J. Every artist needs something to get them through the lean times.”

  “I have you, Dad.”

  “Always,” he said. “Just get a day job, kid.”

  It was so late, I was beyond caring. Dad and I were at the kitchen table scarfing down steak sandwiches with sautéed peppers.

  Dad patted his mouth with a napkin. “I learned something about myself tonight,” he said. “I finally figured out why I didn’t make it with my art.”

  I stole a Frito off his plate. I’d finished mine. “Why?”

  He leaned back in his chair and smiled sadly. “I wanted to be a filmmaker, A.J., because I liked the thought of it. But I wasn’t good at many of the things you need to be good at. I hated pushing one long project for months and years at a time. I hated the personal and financial sacrifices. I was terrified in the free-lance world every day, wondering if I could earn enough money to live on. The films I really enjoyed doing were the short funny ones, not the long ones with meaning.” He laughed. “You know, advertising is a good place for a guy like me. I get a paycheck. I use my filmmaking to create short, punchy spots. I make people laugh. I’ve got security.” He ate a Frito and frowned. “I’ve also got dancing cereal chunks up to my earlobes. This ChocoChunks account is making me crazy…”

  “You could get another client, Dad.”

  He nodded. “And I’m going to, honey. I need to start working with a product that’s good for people again.”

  Dad cut two gargantuan slices of Mom’s Triple Fudge Blackout Cake and plopped one on my plate. “Which reminds me,” he said, “now that we’re getting really serious”—Dad took out a piece of paper—“I jotted this down while you were gone tonight. Just a few thoughts to remember from your old man.”

  His eyes got soft as he began to read. “I hope, A.J., that as you mature as a photographer, you will always appreciate the constantly changing gift of light. I hope that you will know a community of artists that can sustain you, that your desire for your art will grow stronger, that criticism will make you stretch and go beyond yourself, and that you won’t ever be afraid to put your butt on the line. I wish for you a sensitive soul that cries when things hurt and an eye that sees beneath the surface to the humor hiding in difficult moments. I hope that you take risks and never care about using too much film—toss it off, roll after roll—it will only make you better. Film is impossible to waste. And I hope that your work will always speak to someone about who you are—if you can accomplish that, it will last long after both us are gone.”

  I was overcome. “You wrote that tonight?”

  “Yep.” He folded the paper.

  “It’s beautiful, Dad.”

  “First draft too.”

  I beamed. “But you hadn’t seen the dance shots yet…”

  “Nope. But I’ve seen everything else you’ve ever taken.” He handed me the paper.

  It was early morning, after five. I was sitting on my purple Persian floor pillow still holding the paper Dad had given me. I’d almost memorized it by now. But something else was happening, something appalling. Jonathan was packing up his quiver.

  “You can’t,” I shouted, “be serious!”

  He put the last arrow and two tiny apples inside and laced it shut. “I must leave you, my friend. My work is truly finished now.”

  “Your work isn’t finished! I’m still a social wreck! The only male who nuzzles me is Stieglitz!”

  Stieglitz heard his name and tried to climb into my lap.

  “It is the only way, my friend. I cannot stay with you in this form forever.”

  “What if I crash and burn?” This was likely.

  “I have great faith that you will not.”

  He turned to face me, his eyes warm and kind. “Your emotion is your strength,” he said. “To feel things deeply is a precious gift.”

  “I won’t…see you again?”

  He smiled. “You will see me often, Allison Jean McCreary, but differently.”

  “I don’t want you any different!”

  He fixed me with a mythological stare. There was no stopping him.

  “I want to know what happened, Jonathan…with you and that other teenager…”

  His little eyes grew old and sad. He sat next to me on the pillow. “I will tell you, my friend, since our time is drawing to a close.” He shut his eyes, seeking strength. “I could not make her trust me.”

  “Why not?”

  “She so wanted to be loved, she was so afraid of being alone, that she was willing to stay in a false relationship with a young man who brought her unending sorrow. She would not trust her feelings. She would not trust me.” He fingered his quiver. “I was brash and impatient with her. I left her too early in the process. I planned to come back and teach her a lesson, but I left before true trust had grown between us. When I returned, she had no foundation from which to believe in me or herself. My words rang hollow. She turned away.”

  “That’s so sad…”

  Jonathan sighed.

  “But you left me, too, Jonathan. You were really impatient at times—no offense. I was ready to puree you in the blender…”

  “I was,” he agreed. “I am learning each day and trying to better myself. Impatience is a profound failing.”

  Tell me about it.

  “Thankfully, beneath the anger, my friend, you believed.” He fluttered up and hopped into my hand. “She could never believe enough to let go, and so the time of her Visitation ended. I had to leave her with the fulfillment of her wish.”

  I shuddered at the thought.

  He patted his quiver gravely. “The choices we make can have lasting consequences.” Jonathan looked around my studio, studying every corner, like he was trying to memorize it. Then he turned to face me and held up his hands. “But I have righted the wrong with your Visitation,” he declared with power. “Thank you, my friend. I have found peace.”

  I gulped. “You should be celebrating, Jonathan…”

  He smiled and extended his dinky hand. I took it. It was like the smallest baby’s hand ever. “I will continue to carry that young woman as I will continue to carry you, Allison Jean McCreary—in my heart.” His little hand fluttered by his heart and rested there, laying claim to what was inside.

  “I’ll carry you, too, Jonathan.” I was crying now.

  Dawn broke across the sky flooding my studio with early morning light.

  “It is time, my friend.”

  I hung on.

  “I wish I could have taken your picture, Jonathan…”

  He shook his tiny head. “Some pictures are meant to live only in the heart, my friend.”

  The warm, fami
liar ooze started trickling through me. I had to let him go.

  “All right,” I said finally, “how does this work? Do you whoosh off on a rainbow, do we flag down a limo?”

  He smiled like a little angel and flew to the black still-life pedestal. “Someday, Allison Jean McCreary, you will tell others what you have seen.”

  I cried all the harder; Stieglitz jumped up to comfort me. I whispered “Thank you” as Jonathan folded his wings, raised his puny hands to the ceiling, and began twirling like a top. He closed his eyes, threw back his tiny head, and like a photograph stilling a whirling moment in time, he was instantly transformed back into a Coney Island cupid doll with a tacky little sash and stuffing spilling from his cheek. He flopped down, a tiny love soldier who’d been wounded in battle.

  The growing light illuminated his essence.

  Then the cupid doll leaned a little to the left as Stieglitz and I sat silently and pondered the miracle.

  EPILOGUE

  I had just arranged Trish Beckman on the small wire chair on my front porch in the definitive psychological statement. I uncrossed her legs, tilted her head to the left, and checked my light-meter readings for shadows. This portrait was my birthday present to Trish, who was low on cash and needed something emotional to give to her parents on their twenty-first wedding anniversary. Trish maintained that no one could take her picture decently except me. This was true.

  I had given the photo session total thought, at first envisioning Trish painted black and blue in an avant-garde expression of psychotherapy with shades of Andy Warhol, but that is not the stuff that adorns family rooms. I opted for the classic, purposeful head shot that chokes parents up. I said the session had to be outside even though it was the end of March because Trish’s cheek color peaked outdoors, giving her a ruddy air, an excellent statement for a budding therapist who will spend the next forty years inside on an upholstered chair listening to the world’s problems.

  I had gotten down on one knee for a Bigger Than Life Perspective when Trish recrossed her legs and said, “You’ve changed, A.J., do you know that?”

  I raised my new Nikon that my father had given me for my eighteenth birthday, said I knew I had, and clicked.

  “I mean,” she continued as I moved to get her right side, “ever since the dance you’ve connected with yourself.”

  “Public humiliation does wonders for the soul,” I said, kneeling now for another shot.

  Trish’s eyes grew moist and far away. She almost rose an inch taller in the chair. I clicked.

  “It’s like this presence is with you,” she said. “I can’t explain it.”

  I said, “Don’t cross your legs,” and shot her straight on, catching her head tilted just slightly in empathic listening. I grinned because I knew I had gotten a great one.

  Dad had said the same thing to me.

  It was right after he got off the ChocoChunks account and was put in charge of the new campaign at Gibbons natural yogurt, a product to be proud of that would make the world a better place and had annual sales meetings in Hawaii. “Something about you is put together now,” he mused. “I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  Mom zeroed in on it too, right after she declared the unthinkable—that she was bone-tired sick of working so hard and had decided to take Sundays and Mondays off (possible retail suicide) and hire a part-time baker. “Being eighteen certainly agrees with you,” she said. “But I think it’s more than that.”

  It was.

  Not that turning eighteen isn’t a huge change in an individual’s international scope, flooding the brain waves with cosmic wisdom. It was that I was alive to things as I’d never been before. My senses were heightened. I laughed more; I cried more. My camera sizzled in my hands. I took nothing at face value—there was always more to see—I watched life, studied it, from a new plane. I was hungry for truth.

  I was experimenting feverishly with early morning light, getting up before dawn to set up at ponds, the beach, to catch the first streaks of dawn flashing across the sky. I appreciated the morning so much more now. It was the time of day when life seemed to shout the most promise and I wanted to capture as much of it as I could. I found a family of ducks nesting one morning by the Crestport River and I squatted there in the high grass for hours, holding my Nikon, my thigh muscles spasming, waiting for the stupid mother duck to get it together and do something momentous. She pushed her babies into the water like a drill sergeant taming new recruits and I caught every moment.

  I’d also developed a keen appreciation for things that flit. Insects, birds—I was fascinated by wings of any size—I burned off rolls of film getting some absolute knockout shots while trying to capture the miracle of flight.

  It’s funny the things you remember.

  I could see Jonathan so clearly at times—his dinky expressions, his bow and arrow, his epic irritation when he’d really had it with me—then at other times my memory would fade and I’d look at the cupid doll on the still-life pedestal and ask myself if any of it really happened. I’d pick up the doll and shake it and shout “I know you’re in there, Jonathan!” And I’d lug him around with me in my ace camera bag fully expecting him to burst through the stuffing anytime, leading a tall, gangly male who would love me forever so I wouldn’t have to be hurled into the dating oblivion of the summer before college, also known as the Black Hole.

  Stieglitz missed Jonathan too, and once dragged the doll off for two entire days without my permission. I went ballistic searching for the cupid, finally finding him underneath the basement steps on Stieglitz’s stash of half-eaten bones and mangy slippers, lying there like a small dead thing. I scooped the doll up.

  “Bad dog!” I screeched at Stieglitz, who whined pathetically, convicted of his sin. Stieglitz climbed into my lap and pawed the doll gently.

  “Oh, Stieglitz, I miss him too!”

  We sat there for the longest time, fully expecting another Visitation because we needed it so badly. But we got nothing for our efforts. Not one measly flit.

  Dad was working out his funny spots for Gibbons natural yogurt, having great fun creating yogurt containers that could hit baseballs out of the park and sing opera—“real naturals,” as the slogan went. Dad played arias through the house as he bonded to his yogurt vision, free from the shackles of children’s breakfast cereal.

  Mom was working hard to Rest, but change comes hard to middle-aged people. The first Sunday morning she took off, Mom got up early and made Dad and me German apple pancakes instead of sleeping in. Around ten she entered Blind Panic, convinced that all her customers would flee to other markets when they caught wind of the part-time baker. Mom threw on her sunglasses and drove slowly past all the nearby gourmet markets, straining to see if any of her customers had gone AWOL. After a month of this, when she realized her business wasn’t headed for the toilet, Mom learned to sleep until six on Sunday morning. Her goal was to snooze until nine and not make breakfast. Sonia suggested we hide her car keys on Saturday nights just in case.

  Peter and Julia had broken up twice since the dance. The last time she threw a lime Sno-Kone in his face after he whistled at a St. Ignatius cheerleader in epic lust. I got a stop-action shot of the throw in midhurl. It was anybody’s bet if they’d make the prom.

  My King of Hearts Dance shots hung in the Student Center, shouting a warning to all who drew near to look beneath the surface of life’s experiences to the truth below. I was hot at work on what could become the definitive statement on senior year—“Overcoming Inertia,” a photographic study of tired students getting up from their desks. Carl Yolanta posed for me, although there was nothing inert about him. I liked the way he looked when his shoulders slumped and he pushed his glasses down on his nose. I liked the way he looked in general—he had kind brown eyes, soft brown hair, and an excellent neck. He’s a consummate backpacker—really into the earth. When he told me he was a morning person, I laughed and said I was becoming one too. We took an early morning walk in the woods last Sa
turday, hiked down to the narrow part of the Crestport River, stood in the high grass, and fed breadcrumbs to the squirrels. Then Carl said the nicest thing to me: “I’ve wanted to get to know you for a long time, A.J., because I always liked your photographs. You can tell a lot about a person by the pictures they take.”

  I smiled supremely all the way to and from Trish’s, having just presented her with two searing eight-by-ten portraits of herself, guaranteed to make her parents cough up extra spending money when she left for college. She and Tucker were becoming quite the item, and Trish was in psychological heaven probing the deep recesses of Tucker’s wounded inner child. I didn’t feel any sense of urgency to tell her what Carl had said. I just drove home, massively content. Trish and I would always be there for one another no matter what. That was the unspoken pledge between us.

  Pilling Pond had melted. When it froze again, I’d be at college. I got accepted at NYU and Rhode Island Institute of Design, two superb arts colleges, in the same week. Isn’t that just like the educational system, to throw in a multiple-choice test when they think you’re not looking?

  But I was ready.

  Amid the tumult and the pain I’d discovered a secret: People can misunderstand your vision, they can try to change it, but if you’ve got the fire, they can’t douse the flame.

  Truth is a funny thing—once you get used to it, it usually sets you up for more. I was sitting at Pilling Pond right by the TULIPS RESTING/DO NOT DISTURB sign, my Nikon in my lap. The overhead clouds had just parted for the warming sun when I felt a dripping in my heart, and the familiar warm ooze washed over me, laying claim to what was inside. I was propelled up by the sheer power of it and raced down the street as Stieglitz careened ecstatically at my side. I tore past the Crestport Savings and Loan, tore past a little kid who was making a historic mudball, adding brown muck to it, thrilling as the weapon grew bigger in his hands. Not every photographer would kneel down on a dirty street in March to get a shot, but when you’re going for the essence of a thing, you’ve got to shoot it right, no matter what. I shot the kid From Below to heighten the moment and got up quickly when he turned to me, brought his arm back, grinning…