The Silver Age
Authors: Nicholson Gunn
The Silver Age
a novel
“Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled
with developer instead of immersed in it.”
—John Updike
“Under the iron bridge we kissed, and although I ended up
with sore lips, it just wasn’t like the old days.”
—The Smiths
Contents
Some of the kids Stephan had known growing up lived with
their moms in concrete mid-rise apartment buildings overlooking the expressway,
but his own parents’ marriage was as solid as the family’s yellow-brick
foursquare in a historic part of downtown. His father was regarded as the
second-best chartered accountant in the area, his private practice catering
prosperously to aging local WASPs, while his mother was a kindergarten teacher
at a small public elementary school, universally beloved. They were comfortably
middle class, as were their extended families (certain black-sheep hippie
uncles aside), and Stephan had the luxury of working only sporadically as a
teenager. He undertook such stints primarily to fund the purchase of a new
skateboard, guitar or camera lens when his parents weren’t in the mood to pony
up on his behalf.
In the fall when the skies grew
flat and grey, and the long Canadian winter loomed, Stephan would walk in his
faded red Vans down to the waterfront, which he considered to be the town’s
main redeeming feature (he hated his home town, self-righteously deeming it
hopelessly provincial, conservative and bland). Polluted though it was, Lake
Ontario, on which the town fronted, had a purity that dry-land suburbia could
never approach, and a ferocity that Stephan found alluring. In stormy weather,
the lake’s high waves would hammer down on the breakwalls along the shore,
sending up sprays that glazed tree branches in dark sheaths, which were baked
by the cold and wind into clear ice by the time December rolled around.
* * * * *
On a gusty November afternoon in the early 1990s, Stephan
strapped his camera, a vintage Pentax K1000, over his shoulder and made his way
down to the waterfront. Starting in when he arrived with some shots along the
shoreline, he made pictures of waves the colour of matted steel breaking on the
stony beach, where bits of driftwood lay here and there on the smooth grey
stones. After a few minutes, he moved on to the yacht club, where the sailboats
of local popsicle-stick magnates stood on rickety stilts in the parking lots,
their decks swathed in Smurf-blue tarpaulins that pooled with rainwater.
A little while after that, he came to the town pier, an
arm of grey concrete reaching a couple hundred feet out into the lake at a
height of about six feet above the water’s surface. The pier stood just east of
the mouth of the harbour, forming a barrier against the high waves that rolled
down the long run of the lake in corduroy-neat rows when the wind came up. On
sunny summer days, people would saunter up and down it, sucking on ice-cream or
slushies, but nobody was out on it that day. The waves were too wild. From time
to time a big roller would crest over the windward side of the pier, sending a
slab of black water sloshing across the top. It was the kind of day on which
someone could vanish.
He raised the camera to his eye and took a few shots from
the shore of the concrete pier standing proud and solid amid the frothing
waves. At the tip of the pier there was a small unmanned lighthouse, topped
with a red beacon to warn away any sailors unlucky or foolish enough to be out
in such sketchy weather. He was a young man filled with the bravado of
inexperience: the red light called to him. Wouldn’t it be cool, he thought, to
go out there, take some shots back in towards the shore? The wind seemed to be
dying down a little, and he felt a sudden urge in his belly to do something
foolish.
He approached the base of the pier, took a couple of
tentative steps out onto its concrete surface. The pier felt solid and safe
beneath his feet, which gave him confidence. He ventured out a few more steps,
his breath quickening. A wave exploded against the side of the pier fifty feet
or so ahead, sending up a starburst of spray a good 20 feet across. Then the
wind eased off again, just a little, and seizing the moment he ran out towards
the lighthouse in a full sprint, dodging around puddles of black water, ducking
freezing jets of spray as they leapt around him. His heart thumping in his
chest, he let out a whoop of excitement and fear, and ran faster. He was almost
there.
Then just as he reached the end of the pier, a big wave
bore in on him out of nowhere, seeming to reach out for the soles of his shoes
with grasping fingers. There was a single metal step bolted to the lighthouse’s
concrete base. He hopped up onto it just as a deep trough of dark water sloshed
across the surface of the pier a foot or so below his sneakers. Foam shimmered
up through the gaps in the grated surface of the step as he climbed up onto the
lighthouse’s solid concrete base. For a moment he lay prone, catching his
breath, as cold spray from the big wave soaked into his jeans. Then he gathered
his wits, stood up and looked around.
Before him lay the huge tableau of the lake, tossed by
waves that seemed not to roll towards the shore but to leap straight up, as if
in fear of one another. On a clear night, you could sometimes catch the faint
glimmer of the lights of the remote towns of upstate New York on the far shore.
But in conditions like these, visibility was far too limited for that to be
possible, and so he turned to the east, where on the near shore a few dozen
kilometres away the buildings of the closest big city stood above the waves
like emperor penguins huddled together against the cold. They looked tiny from
this distance, fragile.
He raised the camera to his eye, slowly exhaled, and
snapped the shot.
He was 26 years old when he first met Jenny Wynne – a
fine age for a man, it’s been said, the very acme of bachelorhood. It wasn’t
such a bad moment in history to be young, either. The recession of the early
2000s still lingered, but it would be over any day now, everyone knew, and
there remained a sense of opportunity in the air, a sense that the next new
thing was just around the corner. It was still possible to make a name for
yourself, it seemed to all but the most jaded and inert, if only you were smart
enough and ambitious enough and, above all, just a little bit lucky. Of course,
looking back, years later, he might have been wrong about the exact timing of
that first meeting. It was possible that his 27th birthday had already come and
gone. But probably, almost certainly, he was 26.
He’d been working as an
assistant to the photographer Helmut Stumpfl for about two years, in the
vibrant if unromantic Ontario city just up the lake from the suburb where he’d
been raised, on the day he first encountered her. Based on the weather, if
nothing else, he might have sensed that something was afoot that morning. It
was the kind of hyper-ordinary day – sunny with cloudy periods, temperatures
moderate – that in retrospect had clearly been ripe for drama: riotous
protests, bizarre crimes of passion, locust invasions. Instead, an
up-and-coming newspaper lifestyle columnist around his own age, give or take a
year, her hair so blonde that it seemed to glow from within, came by the studio
to have picture taken by the great Helmut.
She had come eagerly, fifteen minutes early for her nine
o’clock appointment, with the beginnings of an entourage in tow – a lone female
publicist of some sort who looked to be even younger and greener than her
client. When Stephan, who’d been out buying some pastries for the shoot, first
laid eyes on her, she was seated in a makeup chair in the studio’s impromptu
styling area, already in costume, awaiting Helmut’s arrival. Stephan’s employer
was by then already nearly half an hour late, he noted, without surprise.
Helmut could be punctual, but only when it suited him.
Jenny Wynne’s costume for the shoot that day consisted of
an imitation eighteenth-century gown worn with a string of fake pearls at the
neck. Mandy Jinks, Helmut’s preferred stylist for this sort of session, had
shaped Ms. Wynne’s golden hair into an enormous pompadour of looping curls. The
style was absurd by modern standards, way over the top, but that didn’t mean it
wasn’t gorgeous, as was Jenny Wynne herself. There was still a girlishness, an
almost pubescent quality, to her features, offset by eyes that seemed, when
they stopped their constant flicking around the room, to record the world with
a strange mixture of hunger, fear and preternatural calm.
When Stephan arrived, Mandy was just stepping out for a
break, her main role in the day’s drama already competed. She’d be on-hand
again during the actual shoot for occasional touch ups, but for the time being
Stephan would be left alone in the studio with Jenny and her handler. He gave
them a brief, shy hello as he entered the studio, discreetly placing the
pastries on the dressing table before quickly moving away. He was still
awkward, sometimes, with strangers, and there wasn’t time for chit chat in any
case. He needed to put the finishing touches on the technical preparations for
the shoot, fine-tuning the positioning of various lights to create the lush,
luxurious effect that was Helmut’s visual signature.
The shot they would be capturing was for Helmut’s latest
pet project, a series of images of local media types and minor political
figures dressed as the protagonists of classic novels – all foreign, mostly
British or American, their authors long dead.
Madam Bovary
,
Pride and
Prejudice
,
The Age of Innocence
. The idea was to do an inventory of
local “people who mattered,” in Helmut’s estimation, and perhaps to gain a
little publicity and goodwill in the process. Helmut might not have been the
most accomplished or cutting-edge photographer on the local scene, but he
seemed to understand its politics as well as anyone. Before coming to the city,
Stephan had assumed, like the naïve child of the suburbs he was, that success
in the field was a simple matter of talent. Watching his employer in action,
however, he had slowly begun to see that there was much more to it than that.
Jenny Wynne, young and untested compared to the other
participants, was actually a stand-in that day for a more established and
powerful columnist at a better newspaper who’d backed out at the last minute.
She, and now Jenny, had been cast as Becky Sharp, the youthful femme fatale
from William Makepeace Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
. The original choice for
the shoot was known for her luxurious mane of black hair, which beautifully
matched the descriptions of Becky Sharp’s hair in the novel, while Jenny
Wynne’s yellow tresses, of course, did not. Stephan, who had struggled through
the book (the first hundred pages, anyway) during an undergraduate English
course, had mentioned this to Helmut, but the latter had let out a single
mirthless “ha” before looking Stephan in the eye, his gaze cool.
“Nobody likes a stickler, kid,” he said.
As he sized her up from across the room, Stephan could
tell that Jenny Wynne was rather ill at ease in the role of Becky Sharp,
notorious seductress. She tried to conceal the fact by engaging her publicist
in an obviously artificial conversation about the local brunch scene, studded
with awkward titters and frequent use of the words “inveterate” and “louche.”
But even Stephan, in those early years not always the quickest to catch on to
social nuances, wasn’t fooled. She was clearly out of her depth.
“Beautiful weather we’ve been having,” Jenny Wynne was
saying, glancing around, speaking to the whole room, as it were. Her eyes
briefly landed on Stephan, seemed to zoom in on him like twin telephoto lenses
before darting away across the studio. (It was, to be sure, an impressive, even
daunting, space, with its high loft ceiling, exposed brick walls, and expanses
of hardwood ornamented here and there with lighting rigs, reflector screens and
other tools of the photographer’s trade.)
“Of course I am more of an evening person myself, ha ha.”
She smirked up at her sidekick. It was the same expression she’d employed in
the author photo that accompanied her newspaper column. It was not ineffective.
“Soooooo….” began the publicist, breaking off as her eyes
landed on the box of pastries that Stephan had left for them, procured from an
excellent Portuguese bakery up the street.
She moved over to the box, eyeing the pastries with
sudden intensity.
“Don’t sweat it Sandra,” Jenny said, game, as the
publicist tore into a custard tart. “I’m sure Helmut will be here any minute.
We’ll just hang tight and everything will fall right into place. Hopefully
sooner rather than later – I’ve got a lunch interview with Jack McDonald, our
editor-in-chief, and he’s going to be plenty pissed off I’m late yet again.”
Stephan crouched behind a lighting rig, making some
inessential adjustments as he watched her. The set consisted mainly of a
painted backdrop, depicting a Rococo-esque scene of aristocratic ladies and
gentlemen cavorting amid formal gardens. Originally, Helmut’s idea for the
shoot had been to place Jenny Wynne at the centre of a busy group photo. She
would be surrounded on all sides by enraptured male models in soldier’s
uniforms of the Napoleonic wars, a concept lifted from an old poster for an
early film version of
Vanity Fair
. But in the end there hadn’t been
money to pay the models’ fees, and so the idea had been scrapped in favour of a
simpler and more conventional arrangement: Jenny Wynne seated alone in front of
the painted backdrop, fanning herself and making coquettish eyes at the camera.
One of Stephan’s legs was beginning to cramp, but he knew
that if he stood up he would call attention to himself, which he was reluctant
to do given both his shyness and the subtle note of tension that had begun to
seep into the room. On the other hand, to crawl out of view seemed cowardly,
and so he stayed where he was, absently massaging a calf as he continued to
look on. He had not previously realized how young she was. Of course, he had
known on some level she was around his own age, but to see her in the flesh
like this drove the point home. It made her seem almost like him, as if they
were equals, which clearly wasn’t the case. She was the bejewelled princess, up
on her gilded throne; he a mere stable boy.
Although he wasn’t the target audience per se, he had
dipped into her newspaper column on numerous occasions. She was one of a new
breed of lifestyle columnist that had first sprung up in the late 1990s, the
spawn of television shows like Sex and the City and the rise of specialty cable
television channels. Her topics of choice – movies, restaurants, cultural
trends – were grabby, even if the logic of her arguments was sometimes elusive,
and Stephan had lingered more than once over that accompanying author head
shot. He recalled one of her recent pieces, a discourse on bikini waxing, and
watching her as he mused on this his mind wandered in an inappropriate
direction.
He leapt to his feet, startled by his own train of
thought. Jenny Wynne perked up.
“Sandra,” she said in a stage whisper that echoed
throughout the studio. “Maybe we should ask that intern fellow who’s been
hiding over there if something’s gone awry.”
The publicist, her mouth stuffed, nodded vigorously and
gave an enthusiastic thumbs up before reaching for another pastry.
“Sure, I can do it,” Jenny said.
Stephan had begun walking towards the equipment room,
pretending obliviousness.
“Excuse me, mister intern person?” she called.
He stopped, turned. “Sorry?”
Stephan’s title was in fact “assistant,” not intern, but
he thought better of trying to correct her.
“Do you know where Helmut is?”
“You’re his first shoot this morning. I’m sure he’ll be
here any minute.”
“I see.”
She paused, taking this in. In fact, Stephan suspected
Helmut might be a little while yet. He’d noticed over the years that his
employer seemed to make a point of being late from time to time, for certain
jobs. It was, Stephan had come to suspect, a way to impress upon his clients,
notably the less powerful ones, the privilege of working with the great Helmut,
a busy man forever being pulled this way and that by the many supplicants for
his attention. It was one of Helmut’s many little tricks, and from what Stephan
had seen it worked – despite its potential to create discomfort for the
master’s minions during his extended absences.
For a moment, Jenny Wynne seemed confused. She pulled a
cellphone out of a tiny brown purse, dashed off a hasty text.
“It’s her first-ever photo session and we’re not really
sure how this is supposed to work,” the publicist offered. “We thought there
would be more… hand holding.”
She was silenced by a look from Jenny Wynne that might
have implied a threat of violence.
“I’m just going to step into the equipment room to take
care of a few things,” Stephan said, edging away. “I’ll be back in a minute if
you need anything.”
In the safe haven of the equipment room, Stephan began
reorganizing a box of power cables, carefully looping each cable up over his
elbow and tightly down between his thumb and forefinger. As he worked he gazed
up at the downtown skyline through a side window. It loomed over him, seeming
to shimmer a little in the harsh sunlight.
The city was not New York or Paris, he understood – the
locals themselves frequently said so, with a strange note of satisfaction in
their voices. But its steel and glass towers, lakeside location, and
multicultural population lent it an at times daunting energy and vigor, at
least in comparison to the rather whitebread suburban realm Stephan had
previously known. Certainly people like Jenny Wynne were not particularly
common in his home town.
After a few more minutes, an angry murmur arose from the
far end of the studio.
“...well, Sandra, you were the one... set this up...
taking the slightest interest in fixing the...”
Stephan began to giggle nervously, but restrained his
laughter before it gained volume. He could not resist thinking, with
uncharacteristic cruelty, that the publicist might in fact be an idiot, and
that Jenny Wynne was justified in tearing a strip off her. He emerged from the
equipment room just as another kerfuffle was ramping up.
“Well, it’s not nice,” Jenny Wynne exclaimed, as if on
cue. She tore the floppy hat from her head and attempted to toss it, like a
Frisbee, across the room. But the hat was so light that it fluttered easily
down into a chair, like a butterfly coming in for a landing on a leaf, which
defeated the symbolism of the gesture. Her skin was now flushed a healthy, not
unattractive, pink.
Stephan fought hard once again to suppress his laughter,
managing just barely to maintain his composure. The moment passed, and he
relaxed his hold on himself, then thought again of the floppy hat wobbling
uncertainly through the air. Before he could stifle it, a loud bark of laughter
escaped his lips.
She froze, turned towards him in her chair, her neck
revolving slowly, as if she was a character in a horror movie possessed by
demons.
“Something seems to be amusing the folks in the peanut
gallery,” she called to him. “Maybe you’d like to share your private little
joke with us, mister intern person?”
“I’m sorry?” Stephan asked, trying to sound innocent.
“Oh, no no, just a sneeze. Allergy season. Sorry.”
She fixed him with a hard stare, her mouth twisted in a
furious pout.