Double Image (30 page)

“That’s something else we haven’t done in a long time,” Jennifer said.

When he kissed her a second time, her mouth opened. Her tongue found his. With her body against him, he felt a tingle flood through him.

“Anything special you’d like to do tomorrow night?” he asked.

“More of what we’re doing now.”

“That can be arranged.”

“Maybe I’ll even distract you from Rebecca Chance.”

“Jealous of her?”

“You talked an awful lot about her tonight,” Jennifer said.

“The photographs of her don’t make you curious?”

“The only person I’m curious about is you.”

They kissed again, hungrily.

Jennifer broke away, breathless. “What time tomorrow?”

“I’m suddenly thinking about right now.”

“Can’t.” Jennifer inhaled. “The end of the year or not, I have an eight o’clock breakfast with my most important advertiser. I have to look alert.”

“Six tomorrow night?” Coltrane asked. “Come over to my place. I’ll make my famous marinara sauce.”

“Which place is that?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your town house or . . .”

“Oh.” Coltrane realized what she was getting at. “Packard’s. The furniture’s going to be delivered tomorrow. I thought you’d like to see it.”

“Yes and no. Packard’s house has unpleasant associations for me.”

“That’s another reason we have to use New Year’s Eve to put the past behind us.”

COLTRANE WAITED UNTIL JENNIFER GOT INTO HER CAR AND drove away, her red taillights disappearing around a corner. He thought for a moment, then picked up his car phone and pressed numbers.

“Vincent, I’m sorry to call you this late, but I remembered that you told me you didn’t go to bed until two or three in the morning. I was wondering if you’d do me a favor. I’d be glad to pay for any expenses it involves. I don’t care what it costs. Before you return
Jamaica Wind
to your collector friend, would you ask him if we could take it to a duplicating studio and have it transferred onto videotape? It would be a way of protecting the movie. Also, would
you
mind doing the same with your copy of
The Trailblazer
? I’d very much like to have copies of them.”

STIEGLITZ.

When Coltrane returned to Packard’s house, he went straight to the vault and for the first time ignored the life-size face of Rebecca Chance gazing at him from the darkness of her sanctuary. He was too compelled. Pivoting toward the shelves on the right, he picked up stack after stack of boxes and carried them out to the shelves in the vault.

Stieglitz, he thought again.

Driving home, he had been unable to stop marveling about how unique it was for a photographer of Packard’s genius to have devoted so much of his output to a single person. Indeed, he could think of only one other photographer who had done so: the most influential in the medium, Alfred Stieglitz, who during 1918 and 1919 had obsessively taken pictures of his lover and eventual wife, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. These photographs and others taken in later years amounted to more than three hundred, although there were rumors that after Stieglitz’s death, O’Keeffe had prevented the release of many others, perhaps even destroying them.

Randolph Packard had been infamous for his arrogance, but he had been humble in his appreciation of genius and, like every other great photographer during Stieglitz’s lifetime, he had made a pilgrimage to New York to learn from the master. Packard’s first meeting with Stieglitz had been at Stieglitz’s celebrated gallery, An American Place, in 1931, two years before he took the photograph of Rebecca Chance’s house and twelve years after Stieglitz had taken the bulk of his passionate photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. Had Stieglitz shown Packard the O’Keeffe portraits? Had the idea of a pictorial monument to Rebecca Chance occurred to Packard because of Stieglitz’s influence? If so, some of the photographs would have been . . .

Pausing only long enough to verify that the humped rock formation in the photographs of Rebecca on the cliff was in fact the same as the formation on the cliff she had leapt from in
Jamaica Wind
, Coltrane hurriedly set aside the boxes he had previously looked at. Each night when he had responded helplessly to the urge to come down here, he had been eager to sort through the entire collection but had never gotten past three of the boxes. To have rushed through such an abundance of beauty would have been gluttony.

But now rushing was exactly what Coltrane did, opening box after box, sorting through their contents as quickly as he could without risking damage to the images. The late hour and the glare of the overhead lights made his head pound. His hands trembled with apprehension that he was wrong, with anticipation that he was right. His emotions twisted and tugged. Five boxes. Eight. Twelve. Their contents occupied shelf after shelf. Photographs of Rebecca Chance on horseback, on a sailboat, on a diving board, a forest path, a garden terrace, a stone staircase, a sun-bathed balcony. Fifteen. Eighteen. Of Rebecca Chance in evening clothes, in slacks and a blouse, in jodhpurs, a swimming suit, a gardening dress, a flower-patterned skirt, a white top, and an even whiter shawl.

The full impact of the amount of photographs that Packard had taken of Rebecca Chance was stunning. These many pictures — no wonder Packard hadn’t produced many new photographs. He wouldn’t have had the opportunity. Developing so many photographs (and Packard
always
developed his own work) would have taken a lifetime.

Although Coltrane was fervently convinced that his logic was correct, his hands trembled with despondency as he reached the final box and fumbled to lift its lid, expecting disappointment. As a consequence, he wasn’t prepared. The first nude photograph rendered him powerless. His legs became rigid. His body turned to stone. His breathing stopped.

The most arousing photograph he had ever seen showed Rebecca Chance naked and yet covered, draped with the chromium beads that hung on the walls of the dining room upstairs. She leaned with her customary natural grace against the blackness of the wall beyond the beads. She was angled slightly to the left, her head and body almost in profile but not quite, both of her eyes visible, directed unashamedly toward the camera. Light came from the left, contributing a sheen to her lush black hair, making her dusky skin seem to glow and her dark eyes seem to have something burning within them. At the same time, the light reflected off the strings of chromium beads, causing them to gleam with the simultaneous evocation of ice and fire. The image had so tactile an illusion that Coltrane could feel those cold/hot beads on his own skin. They seemed to caress him, all the while promising to move and expose more of Rebecca Chance’s magnificent body, the gleaming beads contrasting with the large dark nipples that projected from among them, as well as with the even darker silken pubic hair past which they dangled.

Coltrane’s penis hardened. The unwilled motion broke his paralysis, causing strength to return to his legs. His hands, frozen in the act of setting the box’s lid to the side, resumed their activity, trembling as he placed the lid on the shelf. His breath returned, air coursing into him, filling his lungs, reducing the light-headedness that had increasingly overtaken him while he stared at the picture. But his dizziness was only partially abated, for he felt he was falling into the photograph.

His erection became harder. Conscious of his body as much as he was of hers, he thought, I was right. Stieglitz had shown the way. Of the hundreds of photographs that Stieglitz had taken of Georgia O’Keeffe, an astonishing number of them were the most meticulous, loving nude shots that any man had ever taken of any woman. Sometimes it seemed that Stieglitz had commemorated every inch of O’Keeffe’s body, her expressive hands, yes, and her breasts and her eyes, but also her elbows and knees, the cleft in her hips and the soles of her feet, the curve of her shoulder blades, parts of her that, to Coltrane’s knowledge, had never been the subject of a close-up portrait but that Stieglitz’s amazingly intimate photographs evoked. One critic had been almost frightened by the power of Stieglitz’s portraits of O’Keeffe, describing them as primal, implying that Stieglitz thought of O’Keeffe as the great Earth Mother.

But in Packard’s naked depiction of Rebecca Chance, she wasn’t the mother but the
lover
of us all, Coltrane thought. Overwhelmed, he turned to the other photographs in the box, finding more nude portraits, each more candid and beautiful than the one before. None was as artistically staged as the one he had first seen, but each was a work of art because Rebecca Chance was a work of art. Her unclothed body, its smooth curves, indentations, and ridges, was mysterious, at the same time daunting, so powerful in its frank presentation of sexual womanhood that it caused Coltrane to react not only with desire but also with awe. Rebecca Chance didn’t pose so much as present herself before the camera, allowing herself to be photographed. Gazing unabashedly into the lens, she was so at home with her female nature that Coltrane had to fight feeling embarrassed about his sexual reaction to her.

He examined more photographs and came to a remarkable sequence in which Packard had done what Stieglitz only hinted at with Georgia O’Keeffe, photographing literally every inch of Rebecca Chance’s body, her ears, the top of her head, the nape of her neck, the area beneath her arms, the inside of her thighs, the backs of her knees. There was no area so commonplace or private that Packard had not taken a picture of in close-up. What made the sequence so moving was the devotion with which Packard had recorded the separate parts of the object of his obsession, as if in the thoroughness of his subdivision of her he could multiply her beauty.

Coltrane reached the last of the nude photographs and felt emotionally exhausted. Bracing himself against a shelf, he closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and mustered the energy to begin putting all the photographs back into their boxes. His hands felt numb. His heart pounded. Despite his closed eyes, he continued to see Rebecca Chance, naked, gazing at him. Raising his eyelids, he took one more look at the final nude photograph before him, then managed to put all of them away.

Upstairs, on the sleeping bag next to the increasingly pathetic-looking artificial Christmas tree in the living room, Coltrane fell into a black doze almost immediately. On previous nights, Ilkovic had haunted his dreams, turning them into nightmares, but tonight, it was Rebecca Chance’s arms that reached for him, her naked body pressing against him.

“CAREFUL,” the paunchy foreman told the two young men who were working with him. They all wore blue shirts that had the same logo as was on the side of the blue semitruck: PACIFIC MOVERS. They opened the back of the truck, the right and left hatches slamming against each side. After securing the hatches, they pulled out a ramp from a slot beneath the truck, the ramp making a scraping sound that grated against Coltrane’s nerves. While the workers hooked the ramp into place, Coltrane walked toward the open rear and saw stacks of furniture hidden by generous amounts of protective blankets.

“Careful,” the paunchy foreman repeated, and now Coltrane realized that the man was talking to
him
, not his young coworkers. “You’d better stay out of the way. Sometimes stuff falls, or one of these guys might trip.”

“I hope not.”

“The last thing we want is a client to get hurt.”

“I’m not worried about
me
. Don’t let anything happen to the furniture.”

“No problem there. I’ve been doing this for twenty years.”

But the young men obviously hadn’t — they looked barely older than twenty. Uneasy, Coltrane backed away, watching them mount the ramp and begin undraping blankets from the first layer of furniture.

His chest felt warm when he saw a glimmer of metal. He was suddenly looking at a chair. But he had never seen any furniture like it — so simple and yet so aesthetically pleasing. The chair’s legs and sides were composed of steel tubes, the gray hue of which was polished to a sheen. The seat and back had clean, straight lines, black suede over a padded reinforcing material. It invited being touched, which Coltrane almost did as one of the young men carried the chair past him at the bottom of the ramp. The second young man followed with another chair.

“Where do you want them?” the foreman asked, looking up from a clipboard.

“In the dining room.”

Coltrane led the way into the house. In the living room, the miniature Christmas tree and the sleeping bags were no longer in evidence. “The dining room’s to the left.”

“Nice house.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.” The foreman turned to the young men. “Okay, put the chairs against the dining room wall so they won’t get in the way. Hold it. Those walls are . . .”

“Covered with strings of chromium beads,” Coltrane said.

“I definitely haven’t seen anything like
that
.”

And so it went, the young men unloading furniture while the foreman didn’t do anything but make check marks on his clipboard, then follow his helpers into the house to be certain that nothing was damaged.

Four more dining room chairs. Then the dining table itself: glass-topped, rectangular, with rounded corners, a steel frame supporting the glass top, and steel legs.

The foreman used a soft cloth to wipe smudges of dust from the glass top. “Not a scratch.” He looked at Coltrane for confirmation.

The living room furniture was framed by aluminum tubes that were coated a shiny black. The tubes were arranged horizontally, eight inches apart, forming low cages with high backs. The effect was vaguely industrial, a glorification of mechanization that had been prevalent back in the late twenties and early thirties, but the design was so harmonious that it felt liberating. Thick, wide cushions were set into the frames and against the backs. The material was red satin. Three chairs and an L-shaped sofa filled the living room. Glass-topped side tables, coffee tables, and wall tables filled more of the space, as did a chromium cabinet. So much glass and polished metal made the living room gleam.