Norah watched the photographer choose and flirt, touching a man’s hand, another man’s sleeve, touching herself. She had known women like this one all her life, had grown up with women like this, who were careless in familiar ways, and she knew that sooner or later the carelessness, or what was beneath it, would begin to show, and the photographer would not look very young or pretty anymore.
For the moment, though, it was her world. The exhibit was already famous; the critics had fought it out in all the art publications, bitterly, personally, poisonously, until in the end it couldn’t have been more entertaining if they’d hacked each other to pieces with farm tools too.
Norah looked quickly at the first two photographs— in one, there was flesh open to the bone— and could not look at the rest. She felt them hanging near her in the air, though, and then, without knowing exactly why, she was sick in the way she had been back on the boat. Packard, she noticed, was not affected. He walked into this art gallery as he walked into all art galleries, the way she imagined he would walk into a hospital room— the kind of visitor who begins inventing errands to run as soon as he arrives.
He went past the pictures without any particular reaction, and then ducked into a smaller, less crowded room, where they had set up a bar. He had been to half a dozen of these things now, and could instinctively find the liquor. She went outside and took a pill and smoked a cigarette, calming herself down, and waited. Sorry she’d come, wanting to leave. Half an hour passed, and he did not come out.
She found him still in the smaller room, standing in front of a photograph of a young Negro with a child’s face and an erection, who was sitting barefoot on a tractor. The boy had been posed with his legs in an awkward, unnatural position to show his feet, and there was something patient in his expression, as if the posing were only one indignity among a hundred, another imposition.
Packard was drinking punch, very pleased with something in the picture. Or perhaps pleased with himself.
She looked at the picture again. The boy had a beautiful face, a face that would have been beautiful on a woman too.
There were other photographs in the room, portraits of Negroes taken in the same barn where the blood was spilled first, but they were all unremarkable, one-note and careless, as if the men in them didn’t mean anything at all. She began to reach for Packard’s arm, to ask him what it was about the boy on the tractor, but he turned away as she moved her hand, not seeing her, and walked back into the main room of the exhibit. Happier than he’d been all night.
She looked once more at the picture and then followed him back in. There was no way to know what Packard was thinking.
The photographer was still standing where she had been before, smoke and admirers all around. She was smoking herself now, the hand with the cigarette bent at the wrist, as if she were reaching out the door to check for rain, the elbow beneath it resting against her side. Remarkable, they were saying. She had a remarkable eye. Some of the admirers were as old as the man the photographer had come with. Norah saw that he was distracted, sitting off to the side on a folding chair with a piece of cake on one part of his lap and a glass of punch between his knees. He’d seemed to have forgotten where he was and was saying something, apparently talking to himself.
The photographer checked her reflection in the window and was smoothing her dress over her rump when she suddenly found herself staring up into Miller Packard’s face. She smiled as if this were more like it, as if he were just what she’d been looking for— and maybe he was; she made no secret of it that she was out looking— and gave him a certain encouragement over her shoulder. Packard stepped more in front of her and smiled his two-thirds smile until she was uneasy, and she excused herself and moved slightly away. He moved with her, though, keeping himself right there in front.
She was beginning to wonder now who he was. He did not carry himself like a patron of the arts, and some of the men moved to get out of his way. He did not belong here; the photographer saw that.
“May I help you?” she said. Letting him know she was annoyed.
“I hope so,” he said. There was a long pause. “The thing is, I’d like to know where you got these pictures.”
She looked at him a moment, blinked, as if she didn’t understand. “Excuse me?” He did not repeat the question, though, but continued to stare in a way that was entirely inappropriate in an art gallery. She looked around for help, but no one stepped up to defend her. She hiked her dress a little in front and faced him down. She probably thought she was good at that, facing down the bullies.
“Oh, I see. You’re rude,” she said, and looked quickly down at his wedding ring. “Let me guess. You wife finds it exciting.”
He kept grinning, and in spite of all her admirers and supporters in the gallery, she edged farther away.
“I just want to know where you got the pictures,” he said.
“What you see in the pictures is everywhere; that’s the point,” she said. There was the beginning of panic in her voice now.
Some of the men began talking to each other, or excused themselves to get a drink. A whole pocket of the room had gone quiet. “Just these,” he said. “Just where you took these.”
“In the first place,” she said, speaking more to the men who had stayed than to him, “I don’t take photographs; I make them.” She was frightened, though, and couldn’t keep it out of her voice.
“That’s cool,” somebody said. “That’s cool.”
“Did you make them do that?” he said, and pointed in the direction of the dead men on the wall. The photographer glanced again in the direction of the man who had brought her, but he was lost in his thoughts, his lips moving, his hands absently brushing cake crumbs off his pants.
“Has it occurred to you,” she said, sounding like it occurred to everyone, “that every time you define art, you diminish it?”
Norah saw the photographer was back on familiar footing. She could talk about art. “That every time you discuss a piece, it limits the connections?” And then, when Packard only continued to look at her in that way that made her want to cover herself up, she said, “Everything you need to know is right there in the photographs.”
“Miss,” he said, changing everything except the tone of his own voice, “there is nothing in these fucking pictures I need to know except where they were taken.” She stared at him a moment, checking his clothes again, his shoes, his wedding ring, as if there might be some mistake, and then suddenly her face turned ugly and she began to cry.
The man set his cake dish on the floor and stood up. He moved to her slowly, excusing himself as he walked by Packard, and then held her as she wept, held her in a tired, mechanical way, as if he were still thinking about something else, or perhaps it was just that he was used to her weeping.
“He’s ruining everything,” she said into his coat.
The man looked at Packard, patting her on the back. “At the golf course,” the man said, “Paradise Developments. It’s out about three miles east of Griffith Park.”
“That was nice,” she said to him on the way home. Everything she had on felt too tight. She hadn’t been embarrassed by what Packard had done as much as surprised. She was surprised he’d spoken to the photographer at all. She reminded herself that with Packard, you were never sure what was next.
He was running the engine hard through the gears—“driving happy,” he called it. “This is perfect,” he said, “perfect.”
And she felt perfect herself for a few minutes and didn’t ask what he meant.
24
PARADISE DEVELOPMENTS
M
ONDAY MORNING, MR. COOPER COME IN at nine o’clock with a twitch he develop sometime over the weekend. He assembled the staff in front of the barn, nervous as the Rosenbergs in the chair, and when they all collected in one place, he fired everybody, Whitey to Lester. Didn’t said the word
fired
— he called it “laid off”— but they all knew what it was. Everybody but Lester, who thought Mr. Cooper wanted them all to laid down, and so he did.
The bank had cut off the funds, Mr. Cooper said, and there wasn’t any funds to pay nobody until the loan was restructured, so the only fair thing to do was suspend operations. Then he also gave his word of honor that they would all get every penny they had coming, that he just needed a little time to work out the details. That was when even Lester knew they was shit out of luck.
Why this would happen to him, he said, after all the years he been a successful businessman, he didn’t know, and he scratched his head and looked around the place for an answer.
He said, “It’s still the idea of a lifetime,” but the way he said it, he knew whatever else it was, it was come and gone.
A hot, dry wind blowed in hard from the desert every afternoon for a week, and from what Train could tell, the fire beneath the ground seem to be following it west now, across the whole back nine and up into the lots themselves, where the bulldozers were parked.
The course was strangely sunlit that morning, and quiet— there was no carpenters pounding on the houses they been framing, and the bulldozers all gone quiet. Train guessed the last of Mr. Cooper’s money had went out their exhaust.
And then, a few minutes after Mr. Cooper left, there was a noise, something as vulgar as the bulldozers themselfs. Most of the crew was trudging up toward the street by now, carrying their lunch pails, moving heavy, like they was climbing a ladder. Train and Plural hadn’t left yet, and Train followed the noise around the barn and saw Whitey out back, leaning her weight with one hand against a tree, blowing breakfast. She looked up at him, red-eyed and evil and a line of drool hanging off her bottom lip, and Train thought, Even Jesus don’t lay hands on that.
Plural, who ain’t seen Whitey and could eat— Train guessed there was some advantage to everything, even gone blind— Plural helped himself to a sandwich in the office, and they walked out to the street to catch a bus.
As they got to the gate, though, a Cadillac pulled to the curb and stopped. It stopped and they stopped too. It took Train a little while to remember the man’s name was Mr. Packard, but he knew him as soon as he saw the car. The Mile Away Man.
Mr. Packard opened the door and got out, wearing a suit that shined like leaves in the late sunlight. He seemed relieved to found him. “Mr. Walk,” he said. “Good to see you.”
