Troubled Waters (36 page)

Now she inclined her head in a gracious gesture and said, “Thank you. It means a lot when people who know what they're talking about like my work.”

People who know what they're talking about. Nellis Cartwright had just called me “people who know what they're talking about.” I felt a hot rush of pleasure and pride.

“You really like double exposure.”

“Yes. I've been experimenting with multiple exposures. Sometimes double, sometimes triple.”

“How do you do a triple exposure?” My eyes traveled back to the skull-face. I wondered if the model had seen the finished image. If she had, she'd never view her profession the same way again; she'd always be aware that her beauty masked the bony truth of death.

One more layer, one more detail, emerged upon that closer look. Out of one of the hollow eyes, a snake's head peered with beady eyes.

Creepy. Seriously creepy.

“You double-expose in the camera,” she explained, the tiny smile at the corner of her mouth telling me she'd noticed that I'd noticed. “That gives you a double image on the negative. Then you expose a different negative on the paper, and before you print it, you expose the double negative over that. Triple exposure.”

Now I turned toward her. “That must take an enormous amount of control. Preplanning. It doesn't just happen by accident.”

She smiled, revealing tiny, perfect teeth like grains of rice. “It did the first time,” she admitted. “But I found the result so provocative that I decided to play with it a little bit.”

She pointed to a photo on the other side of the room, above one of Jerry's giant speakers. I walked toward it, seeing only a marvelously intricate tree, all twisted and misshapen, the grain revealed by a bleaching wind. As I grew closer, I saw the naked female body in the tree's trunk. What had seemed to be a knot was a breast; what had appeared to be a knothole was the woman's vagina. Her arms were outstretched, merged with bare branches.

It was a disturbing image. Was the woman one with the tree, a wood nymph dancing in the wind, her arm-branches swaying in ecstasy? Or was she trapped inside the wood, screaming for release?

Then I reached the photo itself. The woman's hair was on fire. Flames peered from the tangled branches, rising upward from the woman's forehead, mingling with the long wavy hair that billowed upward into the tree.

Now the truth was clear. Her undulating body was not writhing with pleasure, but with pain. Or did ecstasy and agony coexist, two sides of the same coin?

The tree and the woman were in black-and-white, printed on soft, almost sepia-toned paper, but the fire was almost yellow, almost in color.

“It's a platinum print,” Nellis said. “On handmade Japanese paper. And the flames are hand-colored.”

“What do you call it?”

“I don't know yet. Maybe something neutral, like
Tree: Number Four
.”

“I always liked those surrealist names. You know, the ones that have nothing to do with the picture itself. The ones that raise more questions than they answer.”

“I haven't shown it yet. Maybe I never will.”

“Too personal?”

“Too self-indulgent. Work should be more disciplined. Less—oh, I don't know.” Nellis ran her hands through her white-blond hair. “Less embarrassing, I suppose. I can just imagine what the critics would say if they saw this.”

“You shouldn't worry about critics. Just do what—”

“That's easy for you to say.” Her tentative tone was gone; she was shrill in her indignant protest. “You don't know what it's like to pour your whole soul into your work and have someone come along and dismiss it with a few patronizing words. And don't tell me that doesn't matter, because it does. It means the next gallery isn't going to be as welcoming. It means the next time I apply for a grant, I might not get it. It means I can't support myself without taking some other job that takes me away from my work. So don't tell me to forget about the critics. They're the people who make the difference between my being a working photographer and a—”

“Look, I'm sorry.” I raised my hands in a gesture of concession. “You're right. I don't know anything about being a professional artist. It was the kind of cliché people say all the time, and I just didn't think.”

“Oh, God, I can't believe I lashed out at you like that.” Her lower lip trembled. She raised a shaking hand to her mouth and covered her lips. She drew a ragged breath and said, “God, I can't believe what's happening to me. I'm so on edge all the time. So crazy.”

“That didn't sound crazy. It sounded like perfect sense. I just didn't understand.” It seemed vital to reassure this fragile woman, who was so easily convinced she'd done something wrong.

“What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked, although I had a pretty good idea of what was coming. “I warn you, I know nothing about copyrights or gallery contracts.”

“It's about my divorce.”

Her words confirmed my suspicions. A divorcée taking the first, few, tentative steps toward a separate life outside the marriage. Living in a student-style sublet until she was able to establish herself. Still fragile and uncertain of her own creative abilities after years of put-downs by a supposedly loving spouse.

I'd seen it all before.

I'd seen it, but I'd done my level best not to represent it. In the past, I'd have slipped Nellis Cartwright one of Kate Avelard's business cards.

After talking to Kate in the Heights, that no longer seemed like a good idea.

“Give me a general idea,” I said. I pulled out one of the director's chair barstools and sat down.

She took the other one, but she perched instead of sitting. As if she couldn't let herself relax even in this space she considered home. “First of all, you have to know who my husband is. Was.”

Something vague tickled the corner of my brain. I did know who Nellis Cartwright of the Witkin Gallery had been married to; I just couldn't—

“Grant Eddington.” She said the name as though it alone would tell me everything I needed to know.

And it did.

Grant Eddington was a critic. No—Grant Eddington was
the
critic. The one whose thumb up or down meant that multi-million-dollar musicals either ran for five years or closed in five days. The one whose scathing reviews sent seasoned actors running back to Hollywood in tears. The one who'd stated in print that his wife's artistic ambitions were as pathetic as Zelda Fitzgerald's.

No wonder Nellis didn't take praise easily. She wasn't used to it.

“You know how he is,” the cool blond said. “He either loves or hates—and he's so much better at hating.”

“So when he decided the marriage was over, it was over with a capital—”

“Oh, yes. I came home one afternoon and found a note asking me to move out by midnight. And when I tried to talk about it, he refused and said if I wasn't gone by then, I'd lose the right to any possible settlement.”

Her perfect lips curled. “When I tried to pay for my room at the Plaza with a credit card, I found that none of them worked anymore. Grant made a preemptive strike against all our assets, leaving me with nothing. I had to go to court every month to beg for enough to live on. I—” Her voice choked. She raised a shaking hand to her mouth and said, “Oh, God, I'm sorry. I'll try to pull myself—”

“Hey, don't worry about it. But I have to ask—if the divorce is final, what do you think a lawyer can do for you at this stage?”

“He screwed me out of what I should have had,” Nellis said, her tone hardening like nail polish. It hadn't occurred to me that a woman who knew how to apply lip-liner could also swear.

“But you did agree to some kind of settlement, right? I mean, this divorce is a done deal, not something that's still pending in court, right?”

She nodded. “But now I find out all kinds of things I didn't know before. He's got money he kept hidden from me.”

“So you're alleging fraud?”

“I guess so,” she said, the uncertainty returning to her tone.

“It's a long shot,” I said. “You have to understand that courts don't like overturning decrees they've already made. But,” I went on, “I could at least read the settlement decree, talk to an accountant, check the figures. Then we could talk some more about maybe reopening the settlement—if it looks as though you have a case.”

Her thanks were far more profuse than my actual commitment warranted.

I took my leave and went back down to the Morning Glory.

“What I need,” I said, slipping into the stool nearest the old-fashioned cash register, “is a forensic accountant.”

“What you need,” Dorinda said with her maddening cheerfulness, “is a nice glass of chilled tamarind juice.” She pushed burnt-orange liquid at me. I gave it a tentative sip, grimaced at the sour taste, and put my coffee mug on the counter for a refill.

“Spider,” she said firmly.

“Where?” I jumped off the stool and looked around, then remembered.

“You mean your new boyfriend Spider?” I was annoyed at myself for overreacting and convinced that this time Dorinda had gone around the bend. “I said I needed an accountant, not a musician.”

“You're in luck, Cass. He's both.” She pushed keys on the cash register and the door flew open with a clang. She reached into the drawer, lifting the heavy money clip, and fished out a card, which she handed across the counter.

It was plain white pasteboard and proclaimed in dark, raised letters:
SPIDER TANNENBAUM, BLUES ACCOUNTANT.

“You
are
kidding. I mean, this can't be—”

“He's an accountant by day and a bluesman at night.”

“Then I'd better call him during the day.”

CHAPTER THREE

“Now we turn on the safe-light,” I said, then realized my companion wouldn't know what that meant. “You can't expose photographs in regular light, so this is a special bulb that lets us see what we're doing without ruining the prints.”

Three long days had passed since I'd argued Keith's appeal; I was hoping the court would come down with a decision before the Jewish New Year, which always managed to close the courts for at least a week.

I needed something to take my mind off the obsessive thoughts I kept having about the decision. It had been too long since I'd put up my blackout curtain, donned my acid-stained “Photographers Do It in the Dark” T-shirt, and turned my kitchen into a darkroom. Today I was doing it in the dark with Marvella's fourteen-year-old son, Oliver, who wore a Buju Banton T-shirt and pants five times too big for him. He also wore an expression of boredom I hoped to change into one of intense interest. He usually spent his after-school time playing Dungeons and Dragons on the computer, but I'd lured him into the darkroom today.

Oliver nodded, although I wasn't sure he really remembered what I was talking about. I'd given him a crash course in photo processing before we set up the darkroom, but I'd been so busy filling the trays with solution, setting out the tongs, and putting the enlarger together that I hadn't reviewed the procedures.

I pulled the chain on the antique wrought-iron floor lamp with the oversized red bulb that served as my darkroom illumination. When I switched off the overhead lights, the room flooded with a low-level amber glow, not unlike the streetlamps of the gaslight era. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, and then I felt the peace that always enveloped me when I committed myself to a couple of hours in the darkroom. I was safe in the glow of the bulb, safe from needy clients and angry judges, from pending motions and briefs to be written and court appearances that couldn't be adjourned. All that mattered was the negative in the enlarger and the photographic paper going through its cycle of chemical baths. All that mattered was focus and exposure and timing and keeping the dust off the negative.

Nobody was going to jail if my picture turned out badly. Nobody was going to do time for something he didn't do if my photograph came out fuzzy or overexposed. In the darkroom, unlike the courtroom, I was free to fail.

“Let's try this at thirty seconds,” I said. I'd already shown Oliver how to place the negative in the metal holder inside the enlarger. I'd placed unexposed paper into the easel and positioned it beneath the enlarger lamp. I handed Oliver the oversized clock and let him adjust the timer. Then I turned on the enlarger and watched the picture appear on the paper.

“Hey, it's like backwards,” Oliver exclaimed. “All the shit that supposed to be dark is light.”

Oliver's mother would have told him not to say
shit
. I contented myself with remarking, “Good observation. That's because this is still the negative. When we put the picture into the developer bath, it will come up positive.” I suited action to words, taking the paper out of the easel and slipping it into the first tray along the counter.

Usually when I print, I watch the picture come up. I love the way a blank piece of paper becomes a photograph. Sometimes I love it so much I let the paper stay in too long and end up with a too-dark print. But today my eyes were on Oliver's face. Would he get the same thrill I did? Would he see the magic of an image forming where only a minute earlier there had been nothing?

“Here it come,” he said, a note of triumph in his voice. He gave me a white-toothed grin. “Here come the skull.”

Then he lowered his voice and did a perfect imitation of the old Here-come-the-judge routine, substituting the word
skull
for
judge
.

The kid was a born comic. He already spoke several languages, in that he could switch from a street argot so arcane I couldn't understand a word to perfectly grammatical English; he could imitate his parents' Jamaican accent so well you'd think he just got off the plane from Kingston; or he could do a Southern drawl that had you believing he'd been born in Alabama.