A Small Indiscretion (30 page)

T
HE EXHIBITION WAS
a success. The arc light showcased the Swede’s diamond bulbs beautifully, and both consumers and retailers expressed strong interest. I sketched a version of the light I thought could be made easily, manufactured en masse, shipped and assembled on-site. The Swede was impressed, and we struck a deal. He would manufacture and distribute; I would help market, and take a cut.

He invited me to join him and a colleague for drinks when the show closed Sunday, but I declined. It had been a rewarding two days, but I didn’t want to spend any more of my time in London doing business. I wanted, I suppose, to leave room to linger again in the past. And I wanted to talk to your father. I called him as soon as I was back at the hotel. I told him all about the show, and the deal I’d struck. He did not say he was proud of me, but I could tell he was by the tenderness in his voice. Or maybe that was only him missing me, as I suddenly missed him. He gave me a report on the girls. He told me you’d come for dinner and he’d made steaks and you’d spent the
night. He told me everything was fine, and I should enjoy my last day tomorrow.

I ate by myself in the hotel restaurant. I felt loneliness like I hadn’t felt in years. I felt it in the endless wine list, and in the menu inside its stiff red jacket, and in the indifferent city below me, flickering with light. I lay in the hotel room bed, later, unable to sleep. I wished, quite badly, that I was already home. I wished your father was beside me, so I could press my body against his coolness until the night was put to rest.

O
N THE LAST
full day of my stay, I slept late and had an early lunch. Then I set out walking. Steady rain was falling straight down out of a bland white sky. Water was pooling in the gutters, washing up over curbs.

I came to the former site of the Photographers’ Gallery. I sought it out that afternoon and found it, though I’d decided, before I came to London, that I would not. It was still a gallery, but full of paintings, not photography, and it was now called Oxford Fine Art. I asked the woman working inside if she knew what had become of the photographic gallery that had been in this building in the late eighties. She said it had moved a few years ago, to a new site not far away.

She gave me directions. I walked slowly. I stood outside for a long time, then I went into the gallery and climbed the stairs and found a café. It had natural light, which the old café had not had, but it was as white and sterile as the old café had been. It had black counters against the wall and four round tables and a few benches with white legs and the same black laminate surface.

I ordered a coffee. I spoke to the man working at the counter. He told me they’d been in this site four years. He said he liked the old furniture better, but the wooden tables had been too long for this
room so they’d had to be sold. On one wall was an enormous black-and-white photograph of a single tree. I was not impressed by it, but I sat on a hard white stool and drank my coffee and stared at it anyway.

I closed down memories, one by one, ticking them off like items on a to-do list. The exercise made me tired. Tired to remember that I had tried so hard, back then. Tired of wondering why that photograph of the four of us at the White Cliffs had arrived in my mailbox. Tired of trying to remember that Malcolm was dead. Tired of thinking of the sad past, and of the way I had behaved, and of Patrick.

I finished my coffee. I went to the counter in the print shop and picked up a brochure to take home as a keepsake. Clipped to the brochure was a business card.
THE PHOTOGRAPHERS’ GALLERY
, it read.
OWNER AND CURATOR: PATRICK ARTGAL
.

I stared at the name. It was a different spelling. But could it, might it, still be Patrick?

“Patrick Ardghal?” I said out loud.

The man at the counter looked up. “Do you need to speak to him?” he said. “I believe he’s in his office downstairs.”

There were people behind me, talking about the photographs on the walls. Shadow and color, depth and perspective. There were other voices, too, leaking in from the street, voices full of laughter and boredom and fear. But the only sound I heard, walking back down the wooden stairs, was the sound of my own heart.

I knocked on the door. Patrick himself opened it. He stood for a minute staring at me, then he shouted out, “Annie Black, is it really you?”

What sound then? A gasp as he embraced me, and I discovered that I had long ago given myself permission, if I ever found him again, to find out what would happen next.

T
HE GIRLS ARE FINALLY HOME
from Wisconsin. Your father delivered them this afternoon. I had to bite my lip to keep from crying when they stepped out of the car. They seemed older, and taller, if that was possible in a week’s time. They gave me a quick report of their vacation. Yes, they’d skated on the lake. Yes, there were cousins their age. Yes, they’d had fun.

I didn’t want your father to leave. The sun was out, and I told the girls they could play in the field across the street. It wasn’t really a field. It was a rare undeveloped eighth of an acre in an overdeveloped city in which you used to spend hours, when you were little, searching for pill bugs and bottle caps and broken glass. Clara worked on her cartwheels while Polly looked for flowers.

“Any news about Robbie?” your father asked.

“No,” I said. “Nothing. How about on your end?”

“Nope.”

A silence hung between us. I felt blame inside that silence, so strong it was as if it were physically embodied and resting squarely over my head. To lay blame. It’s a strange expression. To lay it at someone’s feet, like an offering? To lie inside it, suffocating? To fall in a pool of it and drown?

Perhaps blame is the way the universe organizes itself around tragedy and loss. Without blame, suffering is random, and that kind of randomness leads to madness.

Polly presented herself in front of us, then dragged us across the dirt to a clump of flowers with bright-yellow blossoms.

“See what I found? See how they face the sun?” Polly said. “That means they’re sunflowers. Sunflowers face the sun all the time in the day even if the sun moves.”

They were not actually sunflowers—they were prince daisies—but I wasn’t going to correct her.

“Where did you learn that?” I asked her.

“From Emme-and-Emme.”

Your father gave me a look.

“That’s weird,” Polly said, bending down. “These two aren’t facing the sun. They’re facing away. They must be sick.”

“Maybe they think there’s another sun,” your father said.

Polly looked up in the sky.

“That would be very bad,” she said. “Because then the sunflowers would keep turning and turning, and they would get a pain.”

I picked her up and held her on my hip. Clara came and stood beside us. The four of us looked up at the single sun in its corner, poking between the clouds. Is that what I did last summer—see two suns in a single sky and forget which way to turn for sustenance? It was dangerous, doing that. It was possible to drop seeds at the wrong time, in the wrong places, failing to grow the expected future. It was possible to rush forward, looking back, and break your neck.

I
SEE THAT
there is nothing left to do but to set down what happened next in London, last August.

Patrick stood in the doorway of his office at the gallery and shouted my name. He lifted me up and embraced me. There was a feeling that no time at all had passed, that I still knew him well, and that he knew me, that we were both still young in spite of our altered exteriors.

He gave me a tour of the gallery. We had a beer in the pub next door. We exchanged personal histories.

He had never married. He had never had children. He had lived with many women, but so far, he hadn’t fancied the few who’d wanted to marry him, and the ones he’d wanted to make a go of it with had unfortunately wised up in the end.

He struck me as fundamentally changed. He seemed humble and modest. I asked him if he’d finally discovered humility.

He laughed. “Hard to support my old bravado in the face of such dismal results.”

He was still taking pictures, but he’d given up trying to make a living from it. He was content running the gallery, trying to discover and nurture the talent of others. At some point, he said, it
would be necessary to move home to Ireland. His father was still alive, but not in good health.

We took a walk beside the Thames. For the first time that week, I didn’t notice the weather, or the time, or the color of the river. I noticed only Patrick. He said we ought to pop into the Tate. There was a new installation by a Polish artist he wanted to see. We’d just make it before the museum closed for the night.

The exhibit was a simple, enormous rectangular structure that took up most of the first floor of the museum. The outside was steel and wood, painted black, and the inside was darkness. The exhibit was called
How It Is
, taken from the Samuel Beckett novel of the same name. Patrick read the placard posted on the wall out loud: “ ‘How shall I move forward? you might ask yourself, as you stand at the threshold, confronted by the darkness ahead.’

“Dramatic, isn’t it?” he said.

“Or melodramatic.”

“Shall we have a go anyway?”

“Why not?”

We entered the structure and were suddenly enveloped in an astonishing darkness. It was darkness like you never find in nature. Darkness like you never find anywhere. Darkness like a gateway into a different world. I walked slowly, taking small, uncertain steps. I could hear strangers floating by us, heading out of the blackness as we headed in. I became dizzy, thinking I had a long way to go to get to the end. But the room was shorter than it seemed, and the end was there before I expected it, a sudden velvet wall at my fingertips.

“Ah, the wall,” Patrick said.

“It’s a little far-fetched, don’t you think,” I said, “calling this art?”

“It depends on your definition of art, I suppose.”

“What’s your definition of art these days?” I asked him.

“Perhaps whatever stands in the world with no other purpose than to move us.”

“Shouldn’t it be more than this emptiness, though? Shouldn’t it be beautiful?”

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be beautiful,” he said. “Everything can’t be beautiful like you.”

It was the first time he had ever told me I was beautiful. We stood touching the velvet wall. We were alone, together, in the dark. I could hear his breath. I could smell him, and the smell was familiar and intoxicating. Then I felt his hand moving over my hand against the velvet wall. Hesitant, like those steps we’d just taken in darkness.

I turned my hand over so that my palm was pressed into his palm. I offered him that encouragement.

Our fingers became entangled, and after that, our lips.

The first kiss.

The first kiss in more than two decades, anyway.

Was it, too, familiar?

It was not. It was as if kissing the same person, Jonathan, for so long had made kissing another set of lips faintly ridiculous. It was like playing truth or dare or spin the bottle. After all the buildup, it was a performance for which I was inadequately prepared. The insistent lips. The darting tongue. The pressure of his hand on the small of my back. Was this all it would be? Was this what I had been waiting all these years to experience again?

But it did not end with the kiss. He ran his finger along the edge of my cheek. He lifted my chin—I don’t know how he found it so easily in the darkness—and kissed me again. This time more intently. He slipped his hand inside my sweater. I let him.