The Vanishing Point Page 4

  My wife lives in the country. Not the real country, Westchester.

  I didn’t know you were married.

  We’re getting divorced. She doesn’t love me anymore. I’m coming to terms with it.

  I’m sorry, she said.

  When you’re in it, you can’t see. Then suddenly it’s over and you see everything.

  Thunder rumbled. He could feel the ground shaking under his feet. Then the sky filled with light so bright it might’ve been noon. He vaguely entertained the notion that this was The End. What if it was? he thought almost hopefully. He imagined the reports on TV, people running through the streets. This weather’s crazy, he said.

  Get used to it. It’s only going to get worse.

  Another blast shuddered through the clouds, and the house suddenly went dark.

  Great, Constance said. Just what I need.

  Inside, they were lighting candles, and you could see the tiny flickering flames reflected in the old panes. It was almost like being back in the seventeenth century, when the Dutch were still here, and the world wasn’t ruined yet.

  It began to rain, a celestial tumult.

  I have to go in, she said. She took a final drag of her cigarette and tossed it to the ground. I have a feeling it’s going to be a very long night.

  Wait, he said. Look at that—

  They stood there together behind a curtain of shimmering glass. He’d never seen such a hard rain. He wondered how he’d ever make it home.

  It was after midnight when the lights finally came back on. They’d been sitting around the fireplace, resigned to the darkness, maybe even grateful for it. There were only a few of them left, and they were all grabbing their coats, getting ready to go. He knew he had stayed too long.

  I’m sorry, Simone, he said uneasily. I should have left hours ago. I’m afraid I’ve missed my train.

  No, I’m glad you’re here, she insisted, really I am—this she added as if to convince herself. She looked at him, and he could see the day on her, the weariness in her eyes. You can stay in the studio. There’s a futon up there.

  I don’t want to impose.

  She shook her head. Please, she said. I want you to.

  Constance took him out to the carriage house, carrying a folded blanket and shuffling along in a pair of untied Bean boots. They stepped inside the three-bay garage, where Rye’s old black Porsche was parked. They both stared at it. There was something eerie about the dull shine on the steering wheel, the tongue-red of the leather seats.

  Up here, Constance said.

  Julian followed her up the narrow stairway. Constance was his Virgil, leading him through the dark woods. He didn’t know what they would find.

  On the landing, she took a key on a string from around her neck and unlocked the door. They went in, and she kicked off her boots and dropped her coat to the floor. He took off his loafers and set them neatly by the door. It was cold and drafty and there were many windows covered with old yellow shades. She turned on a small lamp. Here, she said. There’s a—

  Let me, Julian said.

  He pushed some old newspapers into the woodstove, then a couple pieces of wood, and struck a match. Almost immediately the flames sprang to life. He closed the stove’s door and looked up at her in the golden light.

  Not bad for a city boy, she said.

  I have many unexpected talents.

  She dug around in a cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Jameson’s. She handed him a glass and took one for herself, and they sat on the old couch, its oxblood leather scratched to shreds by the dogs.

  He asked how long she’d been working there, and she told him two years. She’d gotten the job through a professor at Vassar.

  That’s the only way you can get these jobs, she said. Rye had me printing, keeping track of his files, corresponding with editors. We’d sit together in front of the computer. It was a tedious process. He was never satisfied. I don’t think he ever fully adapted to digital. He was pretty old-school. But mostly I work for her.

  Doing what?

  Taking care of the dogs. Going to the market, cleaners. She’s fussy.

  Really?

  Prone to tantrums.

  He nodded like he understood.

  People with money, she said bitterly. They’re just different.

  He asked her where she stayed.

  Just down the lane, she said in a mock-British accent. There’s a farm down the road with a little guesthouse.

  Will you stay on? Now that he’s gone.

  I don’t know.

  They sat for a moment, drinking their whiskey.

  So, this is where he worked?

  Yes. She looked around as if the past two years had been nothing more than a dream. Do you want a tour?

  It was like the scene of a crime, the futon in the corner, its filthy sheets strewn on the floor. A few old glasses out on the tables, dust. The smell of the dogs. As he looked around at the disarray, he felt an oddly appealing sense of déjà vu, for the space was not all that dissimilar to the apartment they had once shared.

  She showed him the office, the towering flat file, a large mid-century Bauhaus-style desk, a pair of Barcelona chairs. She dropped into a desk chair on wheels that squealed like a barn animal whenever she moved.

  He wasn’t here all that much. He was always going somewhere. Her voice trailed off. I think that was the trouble between them. He’d go away, then come back. They’d fight. He’d come up here. He’d be in here all night, working. And then he’d leave again.

  She opened the door to the darkroom and switched on the light. Newly printed photographs hung from a line.

  That was Tokyo, she said. Right before. He was there for Vanity Fair.

  He glanced at the pictures coolly. Nothing special, he thought.

  I should go, she muttered. It’s very late.

  He found her coat and held it up for her, and she turned around and pushed her arms into the sleeves, and for just a moment, he laid his hands upon her shoulders, admiring the downy little hairs on the back of her neck. Slowly she turned and looked up at him. I’m sorry I stayed so long, she said.

  You have nothing to be sorry about.

  They were speaking in code. He felt sure there was something between them, some obscure and essential connection. They were like operatives bound by information that was at once incriminating and revelatory.

  At the door she stepped into her untied boots and gazed up at him with wet eyes. He wasn’t satisfied. In his work, I mean. He said he’d lost his edge.

  Haven’t we all, Julian thought.

  He was searching for something…

  What do you mean? Like what?

  She shook her head, trying to find the right word. Transformation, she said finally. He said he was tired of all the bullshit. He couldn’t trust anyone. He was tired of not believing in anything.

  What, like God?

  She nodded. It was only then that he noticed the cross at her throat. For some reason he thought of his wife’s pale neck, her own disassembled devotion.

  What if there isn’t one? What then?

  She considered the question and countered, darkly, What if there is?

  He offered, but she wouldn’t let him walk her home. He watched her crossing the yard, her hair blowing around her face, hugging herself in the cold, until the darkness absorbed her and she completely disappeared.

  Part Two

  The Decisive Moment

  Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

  —Henri Cartier-Bresson,

  The Decisive Moment

  Rye

  The sun is setting in Tokyo. He sits at a table near the window, where the golden light finds his hands. The bar is crowded with wealthy tourists, a parade of affluence—the clothes, the handbags, the shoes, the casual apathy of the very privileged.

  He is feeling estranged from his own life.

&nb
sp; Such random exclusivity, he thinks.

  He suddenly cannot bear it.

  Why is he here?

  Maybe he doesn’t care anymore. Maybe he’s lost his empathy.

  He remembers the refugees, hordes of them, crossing the broken earth from Sudan, how they’d faded and faded as the sky grew brighter, hotter, erasing their features as they blackened in silhouette.

  Simone, before the trip. She’d let him photograph her.

  When he was searching for her in the forest of birch trees.

  And she became a stranger to him.

  Maybe his soul is involved. Maybe his soul is yearning for something—someone—else. Is it her age? No, in fact she is more beautiful to him now, more beautiful in her vulnerability. Her culpability. But this is something ethereal—her scent, perhaps—he can no longer smell her. He can no longer find her in the dark. Her scent is indeterminate. And now he is walking in circles. Or maybe he doesn’t actually desire her. If he is really honest. Loves her, yes, but desire is something else. He knows desire because he is a manufacturer of it. And desire is about loss. It’s about disruption, chaos.

  He finishes his beer, watching the woman across the room at a small table drinking a Kir, waiting, he imagines, for her husband, who is unforgivably late.

  He rides the elevator up alone, up, up, sharing the space with his reflection in the mirrored walls. What does he see? Nothing. A man he does not recognize—

  In the room, he packs his small suitcase, gathers his toiletries, and secures his cameras in the camera bag, lovingly as kittens. His flight isn’t until morning, but he’s had enough of the crowded Tokyo streets. He stares out at the dark night, the twinkling lights, befuddled by some vague premonition, the lavish comforts of the room somehow compromised by an encroaching danger. Like water, he thinks, seeping under the door, gradually spreading to the corners and rising ever so silently over the bed as he sleeps.

  He’s having breakfast in the hotel café when her name flashes across his iPhone screen.

  Magda P. likes your photo. Magda P. started following you.

  (And in this decisive moment, everything changes.)

  He hasn’t spoken to her in over twenty years. They’d known each other once, briefly, long enough to know she was the kind of woman who could bring the darkness out of you.

  He clicks on her name, and a single photograph appears on her Instagram page. The picture is blurry, shot from a moving car, but there are two discernible figures, a boy and girl in their early twenties, standing on a highway exit ramp, holding up cardboard signs. The boy is in better focus, while the girl stands a distance behind him, smoking, a small pink backpack at her feet. The boy’s sign simply says HUNGRY. The picture has no likes, and Magda P. has no followers.

  Instinct tells him to block her from his account, but the concierge’s voice startles him. Mr. Adler, your car is here.

  Ah, yes, thank you.

  It’s a black Mercedes. The doorman holds an umbrella as he gets into the back seat. The air is cold, and it begins to rain. Even in the watery light the colors find him, the red paper lanterns, the yellow windows of shaded glass. He’d spent the week photographing the artist Masato Nakamura in an industrial warehouse near the university, where he teaches and where his work is on display. It’s Rye’s third time in Tokyo, an invigorating, inspiring city, but now, after Magda’s abrupt interference, his melancholy deepens and he is eager to get home. The rain is a blue shimmer at his window, and the shadows of raindrops dapple his hands like a rash.

  A few miles from the airport, he pulls out his phone and again looks at Magda’s photograph. Obviously she started following him so that he would check out her page and see it, and now that he has, he wonders what she wants with him.

  Using his thumbs, he enlarges the picture and studies the scene on the exit ramp. It’s impossible to tell where it is; it could be anywhere. Both the boy and girl are wearing hoodies. Their thin bodies share the same hunched posture, as if they have been standing there for days and have grown weary, their hoods like shrouds. The boy is tall and gaunt, his eyes projecting a vague sense of indifference—or is it arrogance? Rye can recall holding up a cardboard sign of his own back when he was around that age, but it was one of protest—anti-apartheid, anti-nuke—and that seems to him a telling difference. And yet, perhaps this is a protest of another kind, subversive and complex.

  Again he studies the boy’s gaze, the cool detachment, something nagging at him like the memory of a dream he cannot fully recall. But it isn’t until much later, on his layover in Chicago, while washing his hands in the men’s room and glancing at his own ragged reflection, that he understands why the boy’s face is familiar.

  It looks exactly like his.

  Simone is waiting for him in Albany outside the baggage claim. He sees her through the glass doors, leaning against her dirty white Saab in her farm coat and muddy boots, the green wool hat she knitted herself pulled low across her forehead. A countrywoman, he thinks. A country wife.

  He heads outside and tosses his bag into the trunk. Konnichiwa.

  She hugs him hard, and he can smell the cold fresh air on her neck.

  They break apart, and he tries to avoid her infrared gaze. Suspicious by nature, she evaluates his appearance, intent to uncover some deception. He knows she has never fully trusted him. It is the nature of his work, he reasons. The continual distraction of strangers.

  They get in the car, and she pulls out, and they wind around toward the airport exit. The car smells like gasoline and old leather. As much as he’s tried to persuade her to get a new one, she refuses. It’s a standard, and he watches her thin, capable hand as it manipulates the stick shift. There is something that happens to his wife when she drives. Contained in her seat, she handles the wheel like a race-car driver. He doesn’t tell her, but her driving makes him nervous, and he finds himself clutching the strap. It’s a side of her personality that continues to intrigue him. Unlike the other areas of her life, where she is cautious and deliberate, in the car, on the open road, she defies the rules. She dares to be free.

  How was the flight?

  Long. Screaming babies.

  Oh, dear.

  How’s Yana?

  She got that new job. She’s very excited.

  Does it pay anything?

  Not enough. But—it’s something.

  Yeah, it’s something. Good for her.

  Are you hungry?

  The word on the boy’s sign comes back to him. HUNGRY.

  Do you want to stop somewhere? We could stop at Jackson’s.

  They drive into the country on narrow back roads. A gentle rain falls on the windshield, and the wipers maintain a monotonous rhythm, keeping time in the deepening night. They stop in Old Chatham at the pub and order lamb chops and a bottle of cabernet. He studies his wife across the table, her hair pulled back hastily in a leather clip. She has always denied her own beauty, and yet tonight, even in yoga pants and a moth-eaten cashmere sweater, she draws glances from strangers. He is glad to be here, back in his town, a place where the space is open and free and he is accepted for who he is and also ignored for it. His wife looks at him carefully, like one of those early paintings of the Madonna, eyelids half closed, compassionate, full of grace.

  You look a little ragged, she says. Like you’ve been cut out with scissors.

  This helps. He holds up his glass, drinks.

  He wants to tell her about Magda, this intrusion from his past, but knows he cannot, and he finds himself wishing they were closer, more open to each other, no matter the trouble. But this notion, of course, isn’t realistic. Because Magda is the last person on earth Simone wants to hear about.

  They drive home in silence on unnamed dirt roads.

  You’re awfully pale all of a sudden, she says. You okay?

  I just need to sleep.

  It’s like the onset of a virus, he thinks, the only relief from which is stoic endurance while the illness runs its course.

  In t
he morning there’s a new picture of the boy and girl, standing under the awning of a Chinese takeout, waiting out the rain in the piss-colored light, their eyes distant, absent, passive. The photo had been shot with a long lens, perhaps from across the street. Rye enlarges the image, noting the vague details of light and dark, the hoods shadowing their faces, their entwined hands, the girl’s fingers bright with rings.

  Morning, sleepyhead, Simone says, climbing into bed with him. You were snoring!

  Was I?

  Are you better?

  Yes, I’m better.

  I made you pancakes, she says, and rolls onto her back, stretching her arms over her head. The sunlight has found them in the bed, the white sheets, the old Shaker quilt. He pulls her close, breathes her in. They look at each other; they don’t look. And he fills his hands with her.

  They spend the morning together, a rare occurrence. They walk through the orchard, the ground littered with apples. He pockets a few good ones. They wander down to the creek, the air cold enough for snow. The creek is gray under the early mist. They watch a lone heron lift from the shore. The house is warm when they return, and she makes him a cup of espresso, adding a tablespoon of sugar and warm milk just the way he likes it. They sit at the table, husband and wife, old friends. Her long silver earrings catch the sunlight as she lifts the cup to her lips. When they are finished, they drive into town to the Co-op to buy ingredients. She wants to make her famous beef bourguignon, she tells him, because it makes the house smell cozy.

  At heart, she is a city girl, particular and demanding, but here in this kitchen, with its stone floors, the white clay sink, the old black range big as a piano, she is as resourceful as a farmer’s wife. Yellow apples, wormy, deformed as crones, some with brown leaves, spilled out onto the table. No matter, Simone will take her knife to them and put them in a pie. He watches her at the cutting board, her narrow shoulders, an apron tied around her waist, her long arms and rather large hands. With such long, elegant fingers she might have been a pianist. But now this meal she arranges is her music, her symphony. She is very smart, his wife. Fluent in four languages. A translator by profession. But her favorite language is silence.