The Vanishing Point Read online

  He talked about his work. He said he loved to look at people. He loved their faces, their eyes, the color of their skin. At first, he would observe them. How they sat in a chair. How they crossed their legs or arms. He would look at their hands resting or clenched in their lap. He could read them, he told her. Some were very famous. It didn’t matter; they were still shy, still insecure.

  We’re all children, no matter our age. We wear our childhoods in our faces.

  There’s so much in a face, she said. My mother stopped looking at me when I got pregnant. She couldn’t accept it. She thought I was lazy. She wanted me to be an accountant. She never told me I was smart. Maybe she thought I would stop working so hard if she told me.

  My parents thought I was a bum for not going to law school, he said. My father threatened to cut me off. He told me he’d made an appointment with his lawyer—then he died. Cerebral hemorrhage. My mother was devastated. I took her into the darkroom with me. I asked her to watch me process. I had taken some shots of my father with his birds a few days before his death. She watched one come up, and she saw—

  He stopped talking a minute, shaking his head. It was a moment we had, you know? Where I knew I’d never have to apologize to her again. She accepted it, my work.

  You were lucky, Magda said. She allowed you to be yourself.

  Yes.

  I’ve never had that. Ever.

  No?

  Maybe because I’m a woman. We don’t get that choice. Not really, we don’t.

  He smiled at her knowingly. I thought we were a liberated society.

  Right. Not quite. At least not in my neighborhood.

  What about your work? What happened?

  I got quiet, that’s what happened. Once, my mother saw a few of my pictures—she said they weren’t nice. They made her friends look bad. The wrinkles, the bad teeth, the big stomachs. I photographed some of the women I knew from Port Richmond, most were immigrants. I took a picture of two adjacent yards, split by a chain-link fence. There were two parallel clotheslines and one woman on either side, one black, one white, same hands, same clothespins, same clothes—their husband’s respective uniforms—hanging there in the cold like ghosts.

  That’s a good shot, he said.

  Some of the men were making their own wine, like they’d done in the old country. They grew their grapes on tiny plots of land. They would dance. They would stumble out of their chairs and clap. They would laugh, showing their crooked teeth. The women around the kitchen table, drinking this homemade wine, their cheeks flushed. They were so beautiful. And nothing mattered. Because they were here.

  Yes, he said, and told her how many times he’d wanted to kiss the ground when he returned from some other country where he’d felt unsafe.

  I photographed some of the young girls on our street, she said. Girls like me. First-generation Americans. From all over. Just kids. Bad skin. Bad teeth. Poor. But you could see the light in their eyes. The light of their dreams, you know? That hope?

  He took her hand, then the other one. He kissed them both. You are kind, he said. You have kind eyes.

  No, I am too frightened to be kind.

  She told him about Theo. By nature he was impulsive, giving, noble, and terribly bright. He had heroic qualities. He’d grown taller than she’d expected, and had the face of a young prince in an old German fairy tale, the high forehead and cheekbones, the square chin, the light brown hair he’d taken to pulling back with an elastic. He was built like a medieval soldier, someone Michelangelo would have sculpted. And he was a good person. He never spoke ill of anyone, even the ones who hurt him. He seemed to understand from a very early age that the world was imperfect, and so were the people who inhabited it. He was open to people, he let them in.

  Too much, she told him. He trusted too easily.

  Rye took her into his arms. Then he will trust me, he said, and said it again, as if to reassure her. He will trust me.

  The train pulls into Philipse Manor. For a moment she considers not getting off, riding north, leaving all this behind. Escaping for good. But then she’s up, walking toward the door, buttoning her coat, wrapping the scarf around her neck, and stepping outside into the shattering cold. In the parking lot she finds her car and sits there awhile, letting it warm. She looks at herself in the sun-visor mirror, takes out her brush, her lipstick. There’s something in her eyes—a wildness. She feels like she’s capable of anything.

  She opens the glove compartment, finds her cigarettes, lights one, cracks the window. She can hear the wind as it gusts against the glass and, somewhere in the sky, the cries of birds. The light is sharp, fragile, and, as the train pulls out, it breaks and breaks.

  They lived near the river, on Farrington Avenue, in a white clapboard Colonial with glossy black shutters and a trellis that clamored with wild roses in summer. The house was a fortress built in the twenties. They’d been renovating since they moved in. High ceilings, elegant moldings, plaster walls, wood floors. Julian had cool, impersonal taste. The Italian-leather sofas, vintage rugs. She often thought it resembled the theater set of a Pinter play, down to the bar cart from his mother’s house, stocked with expensive whiskey.

  They were the Ladds. They lived a privileged life. Julian worked for it. From the very beginning, it was all about proving to her that he was better than Rye—smarter, more successful, a better husband, better at everything, better for her. She’d catch him looking at her across the table. He was possessive, devoted, demanding. He expected certain things from her: a clean house, dinner on the table when he came home, her tolerance in bed. When they made love, he was distant, impersonal, like he was paying for it. He rarely looked into her eyes. It troubled her, but it was a subject she could never bring up. Still, she tried to love him. She loved the sad, hidden boy inside of him. The boy his father had ignored. She saw who he was in his old photo album, the longing that bled through the snapshots like too much light. The one on the field after a track meet. Just him on the dark, late spring grass, tall and slender and elusive, the empty stands behind him, his hair sweaty over his brow, the lithe, deerlike stance.

  Over the years, she’d stopped trusting him. He had a secretive manner that excluded her. She couldn’t break through it. She sensed he was capable of unspeakable things. On some level, she didn’t care. It was like an ailment, a compulsion. She didn’t think it had anything to do with her. Maybe she’d convinced herself that it was part of the bargain. That she deserved to be betrayed. Once in a while, some man came on to her, one of the fathers at Theo’s school, one of the men she knew from town. She’d flirt back, sometimes even exchange numbers, typing into her contacts digits she knew she’d never call. She was a mother first. Her own pleasure was secondary. At night she would cling to his back, waiting for him to open his eyes, to see her, but he never did. He was a sound sleeper. He told her he never dreamed.

  Mornings, he’d leave the house before six to catch the express train. He was finicky about his clothes, the Tom Ford suits, crisp blue shirts, the sleek Ferragamo loafers. Even the sandalwood cologne, which he’d found in some boutique in the village, was part of his costume. He’d come a long way from the malcontent camera nerd in polyester shirts and Wallabees that she’d met in the Brodsky Workshop. He was moody, particular, intolerant. Women noticed him. His arrogance appealed to them. Once the money started flowing, there was little she could do to stop him. She’d concluded that a man’s failure to communicate could be his best asset in the boardroom, so often misinterpreted as a poker-face strategy. In Julian’s business, being cagey and enigmatic was tolerated and even admired. It was a small price to pay for results.

  Like the accidental genius of his old photographs, he left out the essential clues and counted on others to draw their own conclusions, which were almost always more complex and intriguing than any he’d intended.

  She’d never told anyone about Brodsky. He’d let her into the workshop with next to no experience. It was her eye he accepted, he explained. There
were only two other women; the men ignored them. They were polite during critiques, but Magda knew they didn’t think much of her work. Even Rye rarely commented. Once, he went up to her in the hallway on a break and told her how much he’d liked one of her shots. She can still remember how she’d felt, the stupid grin on her face, the warm feeling rushing through her. It was a kind of sex, this sanctioning of her potential. She hated herself for letting them decide.

  Over the years, she had learned not to care. She wasn’t a typical American girl, begging for approval. She could be fierce. She knew how to fight.

  Brodsky liked her; he encouraged her. Her pictures had a darkness that verged on noir, infusing an ordinary moment with a casual disturbance, intent on disrupting assumptions, like Winogrand’s work in the sixties. A nun in a long habit on roller skates, a homeless man lounging on the sidewalk reading Chaucer. She constructed her photographs like small plays, using street people as her players. The juxtaposition of people and things impelled her to see beyond the curtain of routine and express an ironic, almost playful, irreverence.

  She grew up fatherless; he’d died in an accident when she was six. After that, it was just her and her mother. They came from Lodz. Her mother’s brother lived in Port Richmond. He was a Latin teacher in the high school, a surrogate father to her. They believed in only tangible things. Dreams, her mother said, were for fools, and rich people. They worked. They never complained. Her mother was ambitious. She did the books for a company that printed textbooks. And she owned the two-family house they lived in, the first floor rented to a butcher and his young wife. They’d bring them cuts of beef wrapped in brown paper.

  Her mother could cook. She made her own yogurt, her own wine. Even on the tiny plot of land in their backyard she made a garden. You have never seen such a garden, vines with the fattest purple grapes, flowers as big as your fists. They came to the U.S. when Magda was a toddler. Her mother was aloof, a person of secrets. In one of Magda’s earliest memories, she’d spied her parents alone in their room, her mother sitting on the edge of the bed, half clothed, dabbing her neck with cologne, her father buttoning his shirt. The casual separation that could happen after lovemaking, a kind of reckoning. It was her first photograph, she thought now. Taken inside her brain. Even as a child, Magda recognized it as intimacy. As soon as she could hold a pencil, she began to draw, but her mother refused to encourage her, claiming that artistic pursuits were impractical. When she started high school at St. Anthony’s, her uncle, an amateur photographer, gave her an old Pentax with a broken light meter. Figure out how to use it, he told her. You’ll find in life that you can’t rely on anything but your own instincts to tell you when there’s enough light.

  She started taking pictures at recess, of the sisters in their gray habits, smoking on the playground, and Father Mullahy combing his hair, the back of his sandy head, the tortoiseshell comb, his freckled hands. After school, she photographed the children on the street, the stray cats. The row houses of Port Richmond, with their solemn brown stoops puddled with sunlight. When she went to pick up her first roll of film at the photo store, the man behind the counter, who had developed and printed them, handed her the envelope and looked at her carefully, like a scholar or a judge, and said, These are good.

  It was the first time anyone had ever told her she was good at something. But her mother insisted she get an accounting degree. She went to a community college and earned her associate degree, then started working for an accountant, helping out during tax season. Brodsky was a client. He came in one day around lunchtime with a folder of receipts and notes scribbled on mustard-stained napkins. Everyone knew Brodsky. He had a thick accent. He came from Prague. He found an envelope of some of her recent photos on her desk and sifted through them, shaking his head with amazement. You took these? She nodded. You must come to the workshop, he said. It is where you belong. Come, I will tell your mother.

  Her mother made him tea with mint leaves and kiffles with apricot filling. He licked his fingertips and flattered her, and she waved him off like she did most men, staring bashfully at her hands, already resigned to giving him whatever he wanted. Brodsky explained that her daughter had a talent that could not be ignored. So her mother relented and agreed.

  Brodsky would give her advice. You can’t be sentimental in this life, Magdalena, he told her—he was the only one who called her that. Not if you want to get anywhere. If you want something, you have to take it. You have to feel it here, in your belly. Like fire.

  They understood each other. He would invite her to his apartment. He lived in city housing. The elevators took forever. He said it was like Dante’s Hell, all nine floors. He would give her vodka in a pickle jar with half a lemon floating in it, and they’d talk with the windows open, and she could hear the men playing chess in the courtyard and the wheels of strollers, and sometimes the babies cried or their mothers would argue or laugh. He was an old man with a bad leg by then. White hair curling out of his ears. He would lie on his dead wife’s crocheted quilt and smoke and talk about the old days, when he was a student of Alexey Brodovitch. He told her he would come back in his next life and marry her.

  Once, halfway through the year, he asked her to take off her shirt. He just wanted to look. She told him no. He said, Just this once.

  It was early in the afternoon. She felt like she owed him. She unbuttoned her blouse, pulled up her bra. He held her breasts in his hands. So beautiful, he said. His fingertips were yellow. He brought his mouth to her nipples. He sucked on them noisily. When he looked at her, his face was flushed with shame. Go now, he said.

  She never told anyone. It was something that happened. An accident. But she didn’t regret it. She knew he meant no harm. She forgave him.

  Brodsky taught them: if you want to be a true artist, you cannot be afraid. You have to push forward, without fear. You have to be open to failure. You should not fear it, he advised. Failure is your butter and your bread.

  When she first saw Rye, something pitched in her heart. She couldn’t move. She was afraid of him—because he looked right at her. He saw her.

  He was different. He was himself. Some people accused him of being an elitist because he didn’t always join the conversation, and often during a critique, he’d sit in the back and say nothing.

  He had a kind of darkness about him. A darkness because he knew people.

  He was very tall and slouched a little. His arms were long and sculpted and his hands had a particular grace, like the wings of a hawk or some such majestic bird, his fingers tapered and square at the tips. She’d hold his hand in both of her own, and it was big and warm and alive.

  He shared an apartment with Julian, but they weren’t actually friends. It was obvious to her that Julian despised Rye for reasons he’d never reveal, private reasons. Rye seemed almost cavalier in his indifference to others. He didn’t run after people. People came to him.

  He asked to photograph her. She told him yes, but in her mother’s house. Just standing next to him made her nervous. He came when her mother was at work. They drank some beer and sat at the little kitchen table by the window. She met his serious blue eyes. He was a few years older. He said he had a girlfriend from college with a beautiful name, Simone. They were engaged. She was a poet at Columbia. She was very smart, he said, the smartest woman he’d ever met. It made her jealous, and she told him she had a boyfriend, but it was a lie. She’d never actually been with anyone. Then he asked if they could start.

  He had a Leica M6, an expensive camera. She envied it. It made her hate him a little. She watched him load it with Tri-X, his fingers agile as a surgeon’s. Could you maybe let your hair down?

  She removed her barrette and let her hair fall down over her shoulders. And then she took off her shirt. Why did she do it? She wanted him to see how beautiful she was. More beautiful than his studious girlfriend! Maybe she thought he’d leave the girlfriend to be with her, something stupid like that. She could feel the light on her face. Her eyes were wet;
she was already in love with him. It was a love that couldn’t be. And she glanced out beyond the sheer curtain to the street, the dark line where the buildings met the sky, the faraway clouds, and heard the sound of the shutter as he took the shot, forever trapping her in his gaze.

  And then they were kissing. It was like an opera in her head. She brought him to her room. He stood in the doorway. There was her narrow bed with the iron headboard. Her tall dresser, the music box with its turning ballerina. The quilt neatly folded at the foot of the bed. There were the familiar sounds of her neighborhood, voices on the street, cars.

  Afterward, he said, I don’t think I will ever forget you, Magda Pasternak.

  They lay there, side-by-side, in her childhood bed, smoking like the couples do in movies. It was a little awkward.

  One weekend in the spring, he took her to his summerhouse on the sea. He’d invited a small group of them. It was a musty old house, what they called a saltbox. They walked on the beach, picking up shells. He found one, pink and perfectly formed. Here, for you. She held it in her hand. It seemed to signify something. She carried that little shell around in her pocket for a long time for good luck, but after a while, after they’d gone their separate ways, she lost track of it.

  His real name was Denis, but everybody called him Rye. He said it was a family name. For a few brief months they were good friends; they were lovers. It was a secret. It was like a hole she had dug in the ground, a grave for their love, full of whiskey and cigarettes and sex that she loved and made her sore and tears she cried alone later and his smell and his old, dirty clothes and his hands and how he looked at her, like she was beautiful, like she was everything, deeper and deeper and still deeper, knowing all along she should fill it in with dirt and walk away. But she didn’t. Couldn’t.