Photographic (11 page)

She laughed. “No. I get that part.” 

“You’re as enigmatic as the Oracle, my lady.”

She took another swig from the jug and handed it back to Eammous. He returned his eyes quickly to the fire. 

“He’s perverse. He’s a genius. That’s the deal.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

They listened to the thump and crackle of the fire, the susurration of the ocean. 

“I’m not so lost as all that."

“Zeus is going to fuck with you, or steal your woman. That’s pretty much in the job description.”

“Good thing my woman is six thousand miles away.”

“Then you know which one you get.” She surveyed their camp. “It’s about time I built a hut.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

T
WO
MONTHS
HAD
passed since Marta had fallen into their lives. Jane still hadn’t mentioned her to Ian. At first it was because she knew how he felt about her kind; knew he would be disturbed and worried, and she didn’t want him to have another thing to think about. She knew it was an excuse. But he didn’t have to worry. She had taken care of the part involving Tam. How shocked he would be by her cleverness, bargaining with Marta and winning back those photos. Not telling him was something else though, too. More than anything, it was to have something to herself, a secret, even. He had his life halfway around the world, she had hers, here. Marta was different: dry, irreverent, fearless. Sometimes she liked to get mad and rant on about things, like men or the entertainment business. While she shook things up, she also brought some air in. 

On an ordinary Tuesday a manila envelope arrived in the mail, addressed to Jane, without a return address. She made a habit of opening all her mail in the house with a letter opener, part of the day’s ritual, so she was back in the study sitting at her desk before her curiosity was satisfied. When she sliced it open and turned it on end a stack of eight by ten black and white pictures fell out. No note. She studied the first one, trying to understand it. It took her a moment to decode the geography of the shapes, see them for what they were in the half-light of the study. She laid the first one down. One after another she looked at the photographs.

 Jane leaned forward and shut off the music she’d been listening to all morning, a female folk singer whose voice reminded her a little of her mother’s. In the stillness, she heard the sounds of the house: an occasional creak, the whoosh of the washing machine, wind blowing outside through the trees. There were so many tasks that needed doing. There always were. 

The pictures lay on the desk. She’d have to find a place for them before Tam got home. 

The first photo was of Ian by himself, outside a pale building divided by an open staircase. An establishing shot, so to speak. The next was of Delaney Corts outside the same hotel. The third showed both of them on the stairs, he farther up, turned around looking down at her, she with one foot on the bottom step about to walk up. The next shot showed both of them sitting at a small table on a balcony, eating breakfast or some small meal. Then a shot of a window with its shutters open, the shutters circled with black pen for particular attention. The next shot showed the shutters closed. The punch in the stomach came next. The following two images were shadows and light, blurred. Close-ups of a man and woman in bed. They looked like they were asleep, lying next to each other, his arm flung around her. They didn’t appear to have any clothes on. 

Jane flicked on the desk lamp. She turned the pictures around and around, trying to see better. No matter how she angled them or where she took them under the light, it didn’t help. It was Ian.

Pictures could be doctored. Had someone done this?

She remembered the night by the fire, when she’d felt him inside her, when she was full with memory, real as the present. A lie? 

This could either be easily explained away, or it couldn’t. 

What if it were true? The illusion of control had never been there, nor had she wanted it. It was trust, not control. Yet, now, she wished there were a line reaching out connecting them, so she knew something of him. He was so far away. She could not touch him with a phone line or a satellite. She thought, I live in the center of a small circle, the farm the epicenter. Distance and time might have finally triumphed together, even over promises. Even over trust.

She found her thoughts wandering, her mind canvassing far and wide, searching. Her eyes found Tam’s picture on her desk. In Tam’s face she could trace the combination of their love. Jane’s lower lip, the bridge of Ian’s nose, Ian’s brow, Jane’s forehead, rounded cheeks that were all Tam’s own. Tam’s six-year-old beauty held the best of their love. Tam’s long brown hair, soft like the under feathers of a bird’s wing.

She tried to imagine her life without him. In some ways it wouldn’t change at all. The times she was alone would remain the same. The long emptinesses. What about the reunions? The coming back together? That moment when she first saw him again and ran up for the first hug; to be swept up in a great rush of his smell and the feel of his shirt and the taste of his mouth again after so long apart. Losing that moment was losing a fortune. Losing everything.

Who he was to her was not how others saw him.

To be married to a beautiful man, the most admired of his generation, to them was like being the possessor of a fabulous gem. They never tired of looking. They coveted and admired, seeing whatever qualities in this prize they felt like projecting.They could not perceive any flaws deep within the heart of the stone. 

This comparison was faulty; a person is not a thing, cannot be possessed. In the intoxicating first flush of romantic love, she had let herself believe that she and Ian possessed each other, so tempting was that illusion. But dangerous to play with, like all illusions about love. When the reality of aloneness, of that untouchable inner core of isolation that even marriage, even love couldn’t pale into nonexistence, what then? 

Reality had set in hard when he started working more and more, and she stopped traveling with him, after Tam, after the incident. With his long absences, both of them had to cultivate a self-reliance that stretched even further into autonomy. By relying so much on herself, what had she sacrificed? What was the missing piece, the dislocation that chided her now as she confronted the pictures on the desk? Or was this evidence of mere sport, something he was driven to by a new insatiability, as he rode heedless on the wave of fame?

She thought of his fame as by turns heavy and light, a burden and a ticket to every freedom. There was a point at which it had no longer been a choice and was only a snowballing reality that picked them up and hurtled them towards something that was beyond their will, beyond their anticipation, and was more frightening than gratifying. She could never decide if fame was something outside himself or an inevitable result of who he was. The same qualities that drew her to him drew the rest of the world, too. In that way it seemed he could never be wholly hers. Some part of him belonged to them—because they knew the part of himself he shared on the screen. The camera captured so much. It was so close, as close as when she kissed him. It saw all the passing expressions, the lines, the movement of his eyebrow after he said something funny. What she could keep for herself grew smaller as he perfected his art. The more he shared, sometimes she felt the less was left at the end of the day for her.

Together, she and Tam were anonymous. But as a complete unit, their family in public was public property. So much attention, even though much was positive, wore on them until a simple outing for dinner outside of Kittrie could become a major production, more trouble than it was worth. The whispers, followed by laughter, the sharp turning of heads, the bunching of waiters in their part of the restaurant, all part of the same flood of recognition that followed in his wake. The knot of people, starting with one or two, who wanted an autograph, wanted a picture, growing and growing like a group of ants clustered around a spill of sugar, endless supplies of people who could never be satisfied because the communication network by phone and text let new floods arrive every minute. He couldn’t escape them because he took what they wanted, himself, everywhere he went. It was the unspoken reason they had sought refuge in this Midwestern state. No insiders cruising for getaways had preceded them. It was calm, rolling, and with a certain staunch frontier quality that suited them. It would do as an illusion of escape. 

It wasn’t the life Jane thought she’d have. Sometimes the dislocation between who she had been and who she was now seemed too exaggerated to be real. It was the externals which had changed so dramatically. Who she was inside was a constant, so she told herself—except for the parts she’d carefully wrapped and left behind—but sometimes around the edges of awareness came the suspicion that she had changed in some essential way. And at the root of it all, the catalyst for this change that she wanted to deny even existed, was money. 

Her mother hadn’t had much money, although they hadn’t been exactly poor, either. It was an in-between sort of existence, the scruffy side of middle-class. Although, strictly speaking, she couldn’t apply a class to her mother. Her mother, brother and she had lived mostly outside the realm of other families, in their own universe, along with those families who chose the peripatetic life of travelers. They were called Rennies, Gypsies, other names by other people. They traveled with the Renaissance Faires around the country, the Celtic festivals, sometimes the Societies for Creative Anachronism. Her mother had many talents. She was a belly dancer, a singer, a face-painter, a craftswoman. Sometimes she told fortunes. She sang at shows for tips, she made pottery, she danced. Her whole body could vibrate like a plucked harp string. She was luscious and wild-haired and overwhelming. It was easy to disappear in her shadow. Magdalena lived in another world, another time, and was content there. She was never happier than when gussied up as a wench, a silver-scaled bejeweled belly dancer, or a seventeenth-century lady of means. Jane’s schooling had been haphazard as a result. Sometimes she was home-schooled, sometimes she attended the school nearest their current fair; sometimes she went to school at their real home, in the Ozarks. But after a half-year or so had gone by, Magdalena always got restless and was ready for the next gig.

And yet, at night, her mother sang special songs she loved, current and antiquated. To her daughter Jane, her son Lucius who was too young for school yet, and whomever else might be staying. Her full, low voice filled the room and wrapped Jane up like a cloak of velvet. Magdalena sang with her own accented English, different than, for example, Anni-frid and Agnetha’s Swedish accents, but no less mysteriously comforting in song. She favored heartrending ballads. Jane could still see her mother sitting cross-legged on the floor of Jane’s small bedroom, her full dyed cotton skirt a half-circle around her, spangled by small bits of mirrors and beads, a thick green cut leather belt at her waist, her crinkly ivory blouse falling lazily off one shoulder, head leaning against the wall as she sang the wee house to sleep. She didn’t try to sing quietly, lulling the children. On the contrary, she sang loudly enough for Lucius to hear in his tiny bedroom, really a large closet, across the hall, and Paulo around the corner in the kitchen, if he were home, and doubtless the neighbors on either side. Magdalena relished her own voice, letting it have full play in the echoes of the room, the hallway, the spaces of the cabin. She filled the home, tipping it over with her song: the truth, depth, and yearning of it—and as her voice reached the resolution of a full and beautiful note, it trembled into a vibrato suspenseful, then sweetly fulfilling. 

When Jane felt like a cry she’d put a record on the old turntable of one of the songs her mother used to sing, and think about Tam. Now she knew about being a mother, she appreciated her mother’s artistry. She didn’t know why the two connected. Listening to the singers and songwriters emanating from the mellow black vinyl, for the first time lately she’d begun to suspect her mother had a gift she’d never seen, or more accurately, heard, because it had always been a part of her life. Her mother’s voice had given them a living in an uncertain world. As a teenager Jane had chalked half of it up to the men at the Faires leering at her comely garb. Yet the songs on the records often sounded flat, uninspired, compared to Magdalena’s, which ripped out your heart. She gave everything, every time. 

It took about six years of motherhood and a thousand miles distance for Jane to begin to suspect something of her mother’s worth. Magdalena was so overwhelming a presence that Jane felt she’d been cleansing herself ever since their separation, trying to discover who was left after the tidal wave of Magdalena had passed her over.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

S
INCE
THAT
DAY
when she walked up to Ian’s trailer and had seen him for the first time, she’d been scooped up and pushed to the threshold of the door of his alternate universe. She hadn’t known it then, of course, but meeting him was the moment when everything started to change. It was her first brush with so many things, wrapped in one person. Her first suspicion hadn’t been when they shook hands; it hadn’t been the first moment she crouched down in front of him and turned his head side to side to look at his bone structure and coloring; it was when she held his chin in her hand and caught him looking at her the way she’d been looking at him. But the chemical reaction she felt to his presence, the desire to touch him and be touched, had soon been complicated by her comprehension of his persona. She now remembered those first heady couple of hours as the only time she ever had to be with him without any images distorting the pure space between them. The weight of who he was, or at least of his impending notoriety in their particular world, rapidly became apparent. Then not just apparent, but oppressive.