The Fountain of Age (31 page)

None of it made any sense. All of it scared me.

It finally occurred to me to google Anna, who had a surprisingly large online presence without actually posting anything herself. She turned up in other people’s blogs, in small-town newspaper articles over two decades, in the proceedings of ALA conferences, in the Alumni Notes of her college. She ran childrens’ programs at the community center. She organized disaster-relief drives. A show of her paintings had hung on the walls of a local bank. She was the person that friends turned to in times of trouble. Why had such a woman—gregarious, kind, pretty, bright—never married, never had kids? One blogger wrote:
Dinner last night with Anna O’Connor. If
she
can’t find the right guy, what hope is there for the rest of us
? To which someone had added the comment:
Some people are just too picky. Deluded overage romantics, still hoping for a soulmate
.

Bitch. But correct? I could see in Anna the outlines of a life both brave and sad: filled with useful activities but still feeling itself somehow displaced. Not a skilled enough painter for a commercial art gallery. More intelligent than most people—she’d graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern—but not ambitious enough for big-time academe or for a corporate career. Lots of friends but with no one really close, and thus lonely underneath. I knew many people like that, including me.

Until she met this Montana guy online, who turned her into the hopeful, sexy woman who’d come to be photographed at Glamorous You.

I gazed again at the baffling, terrifying photos that couldn’t exist, and then I drove back out to Framingham.

“Ben! What are you doing here—did you come to bring me the replacement pictures? You didn’t have to do that.”

She came down the stone steps of the library, the last person to leave. Eight o’clock on a warm September night and sunset was long over. In the bright floodlights from the library, Anna looked both tired and tense, like a person who’d spent the day carrying loads of bricks up flimsy ladders. She wore another librarian outfit, brown pantsuit and sensible shoes, and her pink lipstick had been mostly chewed off.

“No, I didn’t bring the proofs. I have to talk to you about them. Will you come have a drink with me?”

“I don’t think that would . . . Oh, why not. Is something wrong? Do you need to talk?”

“No. Yes. Is there a bar close by?”

She didn’t know. Not a party girl. I found a fake Irish pub on Route 9, called her on my cell, and she joined me in a booth in the back. I’d already downed a double Scotch on the rocks. Another sat waiting for Anna. She took a sip and made the face of someone used to white wine. In the gloom of the pub, she looked old and strained.

“Okay, Ben, what’s this about?”

How do you blurt out that existing photographs—tangible, physical objects—can’t possibly exist? I was going to sound like a psychotic. Or a fraud. Can’t take flattering pictures of a client? Pretend she’s not there.

I said, “The pictures of you are coming out . . . odd.”

She flushed. “I know I’m not very photogenic—”

“No, it’s not that.” She had absolutely no inkling. I would have bet my eyes on it.

“Then what is it?”

“The photos are . . . blurry.”

“Blurry?”

“Yes.” I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t. “Very blurry. It’s my fault. I’m here to refund your deposit.”

“But . . . you have a terrific reputation as a photographer. I checked.”

I shrugged. Her mouth tightened. “Oh, I see. I look ridiculous, don’t I? A woman in her fifties posing for a glamour shot. And you don’t want to embarrass me by saying so.”

“No, it’s not that at all. I just—”

“Anything else here?” the waitress said. She wore a silly white apron with green shamrocks on it. I ordered more doubles. When mine came, I seized the glass as if it were a tree in a tsunami.

We sat in a heavy, unpleasant silence that stretched on and on. And on. Anna finished her first drink and made strong inroads on the second. Nothing I could think of to say seemed right, or even possible. Finally Anna made a sudden movement. I thought she was getting up to leave, but instead she said, “How much do you think a person should change herself for love?”

My answer was instantaneous and violent. “Not at all! Nothing!”

She peered at me, eyes a little unfocused, and I realized that Anna O’Connor could not hold her liquor. But if her inhibitions were in decline, her perceptiveness wasn’t.

“Who was she, Ben? Your wife?”

“Ex-wife.”

If it had been anyone else in the world, I wouldn’t mention Laurie. I hated to talk about her, even with Carol, although Carol knows the whole story because she and Laurie were friends. But I was desperate to keep Anna talking until I heard something—anything!—that would make sense out of those photos. And I don’t hold my liquor all that well, either.

“Tell me,” Anna said.

Pain always turned me angry. “Not much to tell. My wife and I had some problems. Nothing big, or so I thought. Then she met a guy in a chat room. She had an affair, she left me, and he left her. She wanted to come back to our marriage, and I said no way. It was good and she broke it. The pity-me note she mailed me said she was tired of trying to be somebody she couldn’t. Well, I can’t be somebody I’m not, either. I couldn’t ever trust her again. End of story.”

“I’m so sorry.” From Anna it didn’t sound perfunctory or condescending or phony. “You said ‘It was good’ but your marriage must have been troubled before she even met the other man.”

Laurie had always said it was troubled; I’d thought it was mostly fine. She said I was “never emotionally present,” but didn’t all women say that? All the ones I’d known said it.
I feel like I’m always pursuing you, Ben, and never the other way around, and I don’t like it
. I scowled at Anna and tried to push away all memories of Laurie. As usual, it didn’t work.

Anna said gently, “Why didn’t you let her come back? It looks to me like you still love her.”

I snorted. “I told you, I won’t change who I am. And I don’t take sloppy seconds.”

“That’s a
terrible
thing to say, Ben! She’s not a whore, just somebody who made a mistake. Maybe somebody who needs you.”

“I’m not the Salvation Army, Anna.” I knew how my comments sounded. I also knew how much I needed to sound that way, especially to myself. Tough. Beyond caring.

Anna said, “My guess is that maybe you need her, too.”

“You don’t know anything about either of us!”

“No, I don’t. I’m sorry to pry.”

“Then don’t!”

I thought she’d leave then. Instead she said, “What really happened to my photos?”

I stared across the table. The original set of proofs were in my messenger bag. Pissed at her now, I took them out.

The weird thing was that after the first shock, she didn’t seem surprised, or at least not surprised enough. Her forehead crinkled like a topographical map but her eyes didn’t register all that much disbelief. She studied the kids, the teenagers, the adults, the handsome older man. I saw that she knew them.

“That’s him, isn’t it?” I said. “Your boyfriend.”

“Yes.”

“How did he—”

“I don’t know. I was thinking about him, about all of them. . . . I don’t know.”

“Are you saying that I shot a
picture
of what was in your mind instead of—”

“I don’t know!”

She stood, so quickly that she knocked into her second empty glass, sending it skidding across the table. She didn’t pick it up. “It’s late I have to go to work tomorrow thanks for the drink don’t worry about the—”

“You can’t drive, Anna. You’re drunk.” Apparently that didn’t take much.

She made a despairing little noise and lurched toward the ladies’. When she returned, her face was wet and a cab waited outside.

That was the last time I ever spoke to her.

But I went on shooting her, whenever I could get away from Glamorous You. I photographed Anna outside her house, outside the library, with friends, on the playground at the community center. Maybe she saw me, maybe not. Certainly she never acknowledged me.

Anna hurrying across the street to her parked car—but the negative showed another woman, younger and in tears.

Anna blinking in sunlight on the library steps—but it became the graying older man and the library was a dark blur.

Anna on her porch, both porch and house a swirl of black, Anna replaced by three small children.

I studied the photographs in my darkroom, in the kitchenette of my unkempt condo, in the middle of the night.
Let it go
, Laurie used to say, about so many things. But I couldn’t let this go. I kept looking for clues, trying to put it all together, shooting yet more film. I spent time—a lot of time—online, delving into Anna’s public life, looking for photos. I found them.

Then Anna disappeared.

I don’t know when he told her the truth, no more than I know anything else that transpired between them. The first chat-room encounter, the first emails, the first phone calls. Probably he told her how isolated he felt in Montana. Probably he told her how isolated he felt in this world, and at first she had no idea that the hackneyed phrase could have a double meaning. Maybe he told her why he was in Montana, of all places. Or not.

And she told him about her own version of loneliness, because that’s what all lovers tell each other. Just as all lovers say that finding each other is a miracle, an unlooked-for gift from what maybe isn’t such an indifferent universe after all. They each say that they would give up so very much to be with the other. Cheat on a marriage, leave a spouse, then regret bitterly their own stupid actions and promise the moon and stars for another chance.

How much do you think a person should change for love
? The answer in all the self-help books is: Don’t. The lover is supposed to accept you just the way you are, unconditionally. But when Anna asked me that, she didn’t yet know the full truth. She suspected something, that was clear not only from the anxiety and tension on her face, but from the photographs themselves. In each set of shots, the people got sharper. I found most of those people in jpg files, in blurry newspaper photos, in blog postings, in yearbook shots. The teenage boys were her troubled nephews; Anna had gotten one an after-school job at the library. The women were her newly widowed younger sister plus two of Anna’s friends. One had been laid off from her job but was now rehired. The other had broken her leg. The children were all from the community center, disadvantaged kids for whom Anna volunteered her time. Only Montana Man had no online photos.

What was he? Why was he alone in Montana, without others of his kind? By choice, or as the result of some unimaginable catastrophe? I would never know. The only image I would ever have of him was from Anna’s mind, as he somehow changed her from the inside out, changed her fundamental relationship to the world as I understood it. While she let him do it.

The pictures tell the story—but
not
the pictures of the people. It’s actually the backgrounds that matter. In the first one, my studio is only slightly blurred. With each subsequent shoot, the backgrounds—how Anna saw this world—got hazier, became nothing but shadows. Then the shadows turned into black miasma, as Anna struggled with her decision. The last several roles of film are like that.