you. If you are no longer angry, look up and let the sky speak for us. Take your photographs so that clarity comes from your anger. At the very least, one good picture should emerge from the black mist that marks your mourning for everything you left behind. All that you missed, the funerals of your parents, your brother’s homecoming, the rapid decline of the tenements, how your neighborhood vanished into a ghost town, will be captured somewhere in the roll of film you carry in your pocket. That is one thing I can be sure of.
– Whatever happens, no matter how long I have to sit in the studio or sand down and creosote the fence? Whether I have to help James birth his dairy cows, or shell a bucket of peas for Vishni, I must take one good photograph a day. Just one. I’m not greedy, Anna. I only want one to lead to another and then the next. It’s like crossing the mountain river when we go fishing. You take the pass one stone at a time.
Where did those photographs go? Developed at the drug-store and then placed in a box at the bottom of your wardrobe. Sifting and poring. The bad photographs bundled together and burned with the trash. The examples deemed good sometimes shown to me and Vishni, most often not. You were not secretive but your photos were a private undertaking; something you started over the last few years to make sense of the practice I had committed you to, when you were probably too young to understand what it truly meant. Your interest in photography began shortly after we last saw Ben, a Halloween party high up East, when Provincetown’s tourists had long since returned to the city and the cobwebs you had sprayed in all corners, combined with the creaky walnut floors, gave his house a feeling of the Marie Celeste. We were a party of eleven almost groping in the dark for other signs of life, the spirits of those who had lived and partied here during that long summer. You and Ben talked alone for much of the night, or that is, Ben spoke to you. Your faces were mostly serious, none of the fooling around that Vishni and I were so used to. His mouth so close to your ear, your neck craning into his, you were a hair’s breadth from a kiss. When he remembered his manners as the host, you flicked through the monographs in the upstairs room he used as an office. I found you crouched over his albums, oversized books the size of table tops, filled with giclée prints from artists he was interested in. You were looking at photographs of crumbling diners and abandoned gas stations deep in the country; of families of hobos dressed in found hippy clothes riding the freight trains. The gloss from the prints reflected in your eyes and back onto each plastic sheath that held them.
– They’re amazing. Why has he never shown us this stuff before?
– Probably because we never asked.
– All this time it’s been sitting in his house. All this time.
In your wonderment you soaked everything up, as you used to do when you first saw my paintings. You still had interest in those, but not the sense of wonder as now overtook you with Ben’s photographs. I knew, because something similar had happened to me many years before. I saw a Modigliani portrait hanging in an alcove of a Chicago museum during a college trip and I felt my mind unlock. It has felt as if the last three years has been a slow period of unlocking, of opening yourself up to new possibilities and closing your mind to me. I do not say this from a sense of jealousy. I have often lain awake wondering how this life would ever nourish you, how sitting like a statue day in and out could ever be enough. I took you at your word when you said it was; took heart in how fast your legs ran around the meadow; how rosy your cheeks had become from eating good home-cooked food; the pride you had in being known and respected among the community, whatever they may have thought of me; but most of all because of the trust you had in my hands as they posed you and the nodded appreciation at the end of each day when you saw the progress made on the canvas; how even my stolid snail’s pace still felt like some form of magic. You have spoiled me over the years with your patience and blind faith; whether this was something I encouraged in you or that simply lay inert in your personality, waiting to be drawn out. Either way, it has made me fat and somewhat complacent. I was like a suburban wife who believed she was enough for her husband; that he would never stray elsewhere. Now I am suspicious, mistrustful, as she might be after being wronged; bitterness staining her tongue. You have given yourself up so readily and for so long, I don’t know how else to be. Your face is puffy with all the secrets you hold, the lining around the eyes tight as you hold them all in. When I am cleaning up I sometimes catch you out of the corner of my eye, staring at the paintings as if you want to burn them. Who planted the seed for that, Ben or I? I move as you do, by stealth, forcing lightness into my heavy legs as I tiptoe across the floorboards so as not to wake those below. The room is dark but never completely black. Black is for those who refuse to see color, even the red of their eyelids as they close. The hook on the back of your door where the camera used to hang is unadorned. I feel it as I push it open, hearing nothing knock against the wood on the other side. For most of the day I had been caught up thinking about your clothes, forgetting that if you left carrying your camera you would have all you need. So much about today has been about remembering and forgetting. The rigor of the studio shields me from the worst of it. Only at night do I lapse. Even as I open your wardrobe and pat my hands along its varnished floor, I know that my fingertips will find no resistance; that your slim box of photographs will be gone. The only picture left in the room should be where it always was, in a frame on your dresser. There were never any paintings here, only this. Still feeling my way, I pat up and around until I find it, hoping that this will have been taken too; that there is room for this one photograph in a stack of many. But as I stand by the window and shake the frame open, I see that it is still there, a happiness you no longer wish to remember; of us in our evening finery taken at the reception in London.
I WATCH THE DARKNESS fade shivering on the porch, wrapped in two of the thickest blankets we saved for winter. I think of the bachelor party they threw for the farmer’s son not so many years ago: how the lot of you raised hell over three towns and the outskirts of the city before a chastened return on the first morning train. I remember hearing of you all stumbling down Main Street at sunrise; an army of penitents. And then a memory of you alone, walking with uncertainty through the meadow toward the house. You were benignly drunk, the strengthening sunlight pushing through your greasy hair and making an angel of you. How you slept where I am sitting now, on a love seat no bigger than a cot, because you did not want to wake the house. It is foolish of me to expect you to reappear in the same way, as night rescinds and morning beckons, but I do so. Like a young woman I rehearse how I am going to look and what to say. In reality, of course, we will have nothing to say to each other. A look will pass between us, something that can reassure the other that there is no animosity, and then only sleep, from which your cheerfulness will return.
– You should have seen the size of them. Twenty in all, and of a height to make our farm-bred boys look minute. Fed on bad manners and smog, thighs for arms from all the lifting on the docks. Put one of them next to one of us and we looked as unstable as a skittle. And boy were they ready to knock us down! Didn’t like the look of us or the way we spoke. That we could be drunk and still be mindful of our manners. They weren’t used to so many smiling faces in that miserable place. I can’t recall how we even ended up there, save the neon sign calling us, with its promise of beer and can-can girls. The only thing that saved us getting a beating outside that bar was that our legs were not solid like hams. We could run faster. One of us – I can’t remember who, but it could have been me just as easily as the next man – tipped up a table to give us a head start, and we piled through that tiny door and out into the street as quick as we could. We were like anchovies being pulled from a jar; as ungainly. The air was salty, thick with our sweat. The sound of glasses and bottles masked their threats toward us for a merciful few seconds. And in one of those, at least, they were cut silent, the sudden move surprising them more than they could articulate. They had not banked on Hicksville country mice using their wits. We ran through the docks, fast in our pack, pounding hard until our feet were sore and chests fit to bursting with effort. Their voices carried past the few warehouses but their feet didn’t follow. They didn’t have the energy for it, not when there was still beer to drink, and stony-faced women to heckle. Which reminds me, the neon did not live up to its promise. These were definitely not girls. Faces and necks crisscrossed with lines, powder and lipstick thickly lodged in every crevice; breasts and bellies sagging from bearing children; eyes as dark and hard as flint. They were nothing like the girls we were thinking of, which was a sign of our ignorance of what such a bar should be like.