Picturing Will (11 page)

Amused? she thought. Ah, he must mean the amusement of eating. The amusement of buying your child’s corduroys. The amusement of paying the electric bill.

“Because Mel has explained to me,” he said, moving his hands as if cutting a deck of cards, “that the intensity of what you do is something no one would want to sustain. I myself go and scream my head off when the Mets play. I certainly do not merely immerse myself in the world of art. The intensity—I keep coming back to that word—the intensity would be too much to cope with.”

Intensity? Did he know what it was like to be home with a child who had a fever and who would not keep the blanket over him and whose only happy moments came when people were crashing their cars into walls on television at ear-splitting volume, because his ears were blocked up and he could hardly hear? Could this man have any idea what her previous week had been like in terms of intensity?

But she did not answer him. She shrugged, considering a minute. She could have said that photographing weddings was not the easy diversionary activity that he supposed. You were part shrink, part philosopher, part stand-up comic. At weddings you moved snooty great-aunts shoulder to shoulder with skeptical children from the first marriage and linked them for all time in one shot. You tried to subtly communicate in any way you could that there was a sure future, that this was the beginning of a trip that would be sunny, a send-off for people who for one day, at least, had the countenance of angels. You assured the mother of the bride that her daughter’s beauty was due to her; you pulled the tick off the top of the dog’s head without comment; you piled napkins in puddles of champagne on the furniture. You tossed rice if you had a free hand and a free minute, danced one dance if asked, and won their hearts by taking picture after picture and by being the last to leave. Then you went away with memories of the day that
would
be larger than life because you had a machine that could do the enlarging, smiling with the assurance that you had zoomed in on details people were too preoccupied, or too nervous, to notice.

Would he understand if she made an analogy?

She told him that after the pictures were taken they were pieces of a puzzle. That in the darkroom they would float for a while, like a rose petal that had fallen into a glass of champagne.

She looked at a spot on the table where no glass was placed. He looked at the same spot.

They were images ruffled by currents, she said. Those slips of paper in the developing fluid.

“Images ruffled by currents,” he said slowly.

Whatever mood he had meant to establish, she had broken it. She looked at the tabletop, secretly proud of herself. Then she looked up and gave him a smile as lovely as she could manage, being sure that it was still tinged with regret.

Haveabud knew that his momentum had been interfered with, but he was really quite captivated with what she was saying. If she could say that when she was at his side—when there were people there who mattered—he felt sure that they would be on Easy Street.

Though any day without his mother, and before he went home to his third wife, was relatively easy.

Such a pretty girl, he thought.

She thought: This man is going to be no problem. I am not ever going to have to seriously discuss photography with him.

A waitress in a black fright wig walked out and gave them the menus Haveabud had declined until his companion arrived. He reflected on the fact that he had called her “my companion,” as opposed to many other things he might have called her. He could have lied and said she was his wife. He could have called her, archly, “the lady” or even, pedantically, “the woman who will be meeting me.” He could have said “my daughter” for laughs, since she was about his age.

As he smiled to himself, he was suddenly struck by the realization that he would not have to worry about his mother’s coming into town for another week. The euphoria of that—the 168 hours contained in a week—lifted his spirits.

Jody ordered chili. He ordered another Heineken, and scrambled eggs, loose, with sausage, a dismissive motion through the air with fingers splayed accompanying his order. (Though Haveabud did not, and would not ever, know the waitress, this particular motion would be recreated for the waitress’s best buddy in acting class later that night, and reported to her psychoanalyst. His fingers would continue to rise in her dreams, and she would confide to her girlfriends that she hoped against hope that he would stop by again and this time take notice of her. He was uptown, upscale, uptight in a way she found irresistible. But none of those thoughts and desires had anything to do with the way she pivoted and affected lack of interest, walking back inside the diner. To Haveabud, she was just a girl whose thin lips led him to suspect that she would give cold kisses.)

“You said last night that you wanted to show my work,” Jody said. She touched the top of the saltshaker, letting her fingers linger.

He nodded, as if this were a foregone conclusion and not their only agreement.

Haveabud said that she must move to New York so he could launch her career. He would put in a call to Scavullo that afternoon. She could attend an important opening with him the next night. But she
must
be in New York. This went without saying, he said, then said it again, even more emphatically.

She looked a little startled, as if she had been strolling along and a stick on the ground had suddenly begun to sing to her.

Haveabud stared as if transfixed. Hypnotize with your insistence. And then—when the person was captured—throw a curve, express a little doubt. What about showing a little wit in her work? Things not quite so … dark.

The feather boa unfurled in her imagination. The early shots of the boa were so much what he wanted, so witty, that it might as well have been there, tickling his chin and provoking a smile. She described the series of photographs: the boa coiled; the tip of the boa dangling from the light table; the boa laid out on the dining-room table so that, against the mahogany, it seemed delicate and lost on so large a surface. The boa wrapped around Mary Vickers’s neck (“a model,” she called her), like a sensual noose.

Haveabud was looking at the multicolored beads on Jody’s shoes, which reminded him of sprinkles on an ice-cream cone: absolutely mesmerizing, when you stopped to examine them.
If
you stopped to examine them. That was the artist’s imperative, of course. Haveabud closed his thumb and first finger tightly against the bridge of his nose, squinting. The French word for beads … what was that word?
Ou sont les beads d’hier?
Fallen, every one, like plates from a Schnabel canvas. The waitress asked if they wanted anything else. Haveabud played rogue, raising his eyebrows and turning to look at Jody as if the question were intentionally loaded with sexual innuendo.

Jody was thinking of the flash storm that had hit the week before, soaking a wedding tent as it was being erected. Early in the morning, she had walked east to the photo district to drop off the negatives at the lab, so she could pick up contact sheets at the end of her meeting with Haveabud. She suspected that if she presented the contact sheets to him as amusing, he would see them as amusing; if she said they were sad photographs, he would see them as that.

Haveabud asked the waitress for the bill. As Jody looked away, Haveabud suddenly wondered whether his wife might be having an affair. She rarely cooked anymore—more interesting things to do in the afternoon? Instead, they ate roasted chickens she had delivered to the apartment, along with asparagus-tip salad that cost the same per pound as gold.

Two men pulled out chairs at the adjacent table and sat down. One carried a beat-up violin case with a peeling peace sign stuck to it. The other had eyeglass frames with a false nose and bushy eyebrows pushed to the top of his head. Bushy Brows swatted at his companion and told him to lighten up. “Telling me to lighten up when you’re in one of your manic periods is like telling me to raise my hands above my head as the roller coaster dips down,” the man with the violin case said.

“Do you think they have Bosco?” Bushy Brows said.

“What in the name of
God
would make you think they might have Bosco?”

“So,” Haveabud said. “Scavullo. Any time better for you than another?”

“I have to go home tomorrow,” Jody said. “A friend is taking care of my son.”

“Aaaaaaah, the son,” Haveabud said, letting her know by his use of the article that the child was interchangeable with an object: the chair, the phone, the stove.

She shrugged, palms up.

What a pretty woman, Haveabud thought. Nice hands. Pretty shoes. Someone’s mother. Why couldn’t he have been dealt such a mother?

The waitress gave him his change. He said, “That’s a private detective double-parked over there. My companion is Sherry Lansing, wearing a wig.”

In his daybook, Haveabud wrote: “Lunch re Scav shot $28.40,” adding twenty cents for good luck. Particularities—that is, lies that were very particular—were in Haveabud’s experience quite likely to convince people.

Haveabud decided he would take Jody up on her offer to accompany her to the photo lab, where contact sheets of the rained-out wedding awaited them. Even Jody could not have imagined the perfect effect of the rain-splashed filter, like a glossy membrane over everything: women clustered under an overhang, hands lifted to their faces in dismay; the chaos made by men first erecting, then abandoning, the tent. It was unclear whether rain or tears glistened on some faces, but the surprise—the shock of the sudden downpour—was there. Ultimately, one rained-out wedding hardly mattered, and because she was so sure of that, Jody decided she would play devil’s advocate and pitch the photographs to Haveabud as serious business.

As his mother and Haveabud sat on the front step of a brownstone, looking at small rectangular images, Will was in Virginia, staring at a peanut butter sandwich Mary Vickers had served him. He had peeled the top piece off, to compare with Wag the number of banana slices each had been allocated.

Haveabud’s lips, smacking with pleasure as he surveyed the photographs, were echoed across the miles by the sticky lips of two small boys who had been told to place the bread back on the sandwich instantly and to begin eating before Mary Vickers went stark raving mad.

B
efore the child can tell time, the wristwatch with painted hands is not a joke but quite acceptable. Later, he may wish to have a real watch so he can turn back the hands and make the hour earlier and not have to go to bed, or turn the hands ahead so the visit to the circus will come sooner. At first, there is no hostility to clocks. Like a puppy soothed by the regularity of a sound, the child may be consoled or oblivious—but in any case, the sound of seconds ticking away will not correspond to anything real. He may see it as something that fascinates adults: that disc on the wall that is watched so closely when a visitor hasn’t arrived, when the bread has taken too long to rise, when many other people are ahead of you in the pediatrician’s waiting room
.

What is time? As the child experiences it, it makes no sense at all. Children have little or no sense of what goes on behind the scenes, so when things happen, they seem to just happen suddenly. Imagine how strange the world would seem if you were too young to know gray
clouds meant rain, too inexperienced to realize that the dog coming toward you could run faster than you could get away. Adults become angry when they have to slam on the brakes, unhappy even if the weather report has been unreliable
.

Considered from the child’s perspective, life is always speeding up or going too slowly. The best ideas come at bedtime. The circus ends too soon. String beans take forever to eat. Cartoons aren’t satirical exaggerations but normative presentations of everyday situations. The child also will suddenly crash into a wall, unable to correctly judge speed versus distance
.

In cartoons, people drop off cliffs
.

The child wakes up on the floor, tangled in covers, having toppled—who knows how?—from the bed
.

In cartoons, beasts roar and devour people.

Turn a corner in a city, and a gang of pink-haired punks hurtles in front of the child
.

In cartoons, buildings suddenly explode
.

Remember that the child also sees TV news
.

What if your world was a comedy routine gone out of control? What if you experienced the world as a dwarf? What if people saw in you a potential troublemaker simply because you were present? What if half the questions you were asked were rhetorical and the other half inordinately complicated? What if you lacked the ability to judge whether people were drunk or sober, and if your plans for the following day were changed when another person announced a change of plans? What if you lived in one house and suddenly moved to another? What if you had mysterious fevers?

Consider a typical day in the life of a child: