Where the River Ends (7 page)

“She should be here. With us.”

“With all due respect, sir. You’ve had four years. You couldn’t have asked for a much more captive audience. If you wanted to be with her, you could have.”

“Just what is that supposed to mean?” His anger was palpable. He was not used to, nor did he tolerate, discussion that was not geared toward total agreement. I had never fallen in line with this so our conversations had been short and usually started and ended by him. It has its roots in the moment I asked him if I could marry his daughter. Also another short conversation.

“Sir, I don’t expect you to understand.”

He was screaming now. “You’re delusional…a dreamer who never would have amounted to anything had it not been for Abbie.”

“I agree with you, sir, but—”

“But, what!”

I stared at Abbie. “Please understand…” He started to say something else, but I flipped the phone closed and tossed it in the river, where the water swallowed it. Tiny bubbles rose up around its edges as the light on the faceplate dimmed to dark.

I climbed back to my seat, my hands remembering the feel of the paddle, and fought to find that one description that just nailed my wife. You’d think after fourteen years, I’d come up with something, anything but “Honey.” I admit, it’s rather weak.

I tapped the article in the map case. “You would have to pick the most difficult one.”

“I’m not here to check off just
one.
”

“I figured. Guess we better get busy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You rest. I’ll paddle.”

She cracked a smile. “Just the way it ought to be.”

I sunk the paddle in the water, pulled hard, reminding my muscles, and slipped beneath the moss-draped arms over the river. The ocean lay 130-plus miles beyond—an hour in a car or a week on the river.

On the outside, everything had been taken. Abbie’s professional life, her beauty, the welcoming softness of her bosom, the rounded curves, the confident smile. But that was just the external stuff. We could live without that. What about the stuff you couldn’t see? Her unbridled passion for life, her intimate desire for me, her childlike hope in pretty much anything, her incomparable dreams. Abbie was a shell of her former self. A feeble skeleton dressed in a ghost’s clothing. The only thing left was time.

I’m no sage. I don’t pretend to have this all figured out, but I know this: some live well, some die well, but few love well. Why? I don’t know if I can answer that. We all live, we all die—there is no get-out-of-jail-free card, but it’s the part in between that matters. To love well…that’s something else. It’s a choosing—something done again and again and again. No matter what. And in my experience, if you so choose, you better be willing to suffer hell.

I didn’t look back and wouldn’t look ahead. So I stared at Abbie, sunk the paddle in the water and pulled.

7

I
woke up hungry, face tender and one eye swollen completely shut. My lip was busted and looked out of proportion to the rest of my face. Somewhere along my right rib cage, a knifing pain told me that I’d either broken a rib or bruised it rather severely.

I put on some water to make some Raman noodles, when I heard a tap at the door. I pulled some jeans over my boxer shorts and opened the door.

It was her.

I stood there like a deer in the headlights.

She looked up and down the street, then without invitation, stepped past me and into my studio. She was wearing a baseball cap, sweatshirt and jeans and looked sort of like one of those Hollywood A-listers who’s shopping in the mall and trying not to be noticed. I stuck my head out the door, looked up and down the street and then back at her. She motioned to the door, which I shut, and then moved toward the back, near the boiling water, and out of the streetlight.

Hands in pockets, she looked around, taking in what little there was to take in. When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes. “I didn’t get to thank you. I just ran and…” She wiped her face on her shirtsleeve.

“Would you like some tea?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

I might not have had much, but tea I had. I reached into a drawer stuffed with tea bags and she started laughing. “You like tea?”

I shrugged. “I umm…I steal it from work. A bag or two a night. Sometimes three. It’s easier than stealing coffee.”

She laughed again. I poured two mugs of tea and pointed to a chair in the corner. Since I didn’t have a table, I often ate in that chair with my dinner on my lap. She sat and I leaned against the wall, the tea bag string draped across one finger. She sipped and eyed the hundreds of pieces of my work either leaning or hanging around my studio. She stared up at the loft. “You stay busy.”

I picked a dirty T-shirt off the floor, turned it right side out and pushed my head and arms through it. As soon as I did, I realized my mistake. Somewhere in the last week, I’d run out of deodorant and since then, I’d apparently worn that T-shirt. I held out a stop-sign hand and said, “I’ll be right back.” I hobbled up the stairs, put on a clean T-shirt, washed my underarms with a rag, sprayed them with cheap aftershave, then came back down and resumed my tea-steeping dip with the tea bag. She pointed and said, “You forgot…one thing.”

I looked down and found my zipper wide open. While I fumbled with it, she set down her tea and began studying my art. Slowly, she eyed each piece. Really taking them in. I sat quietly. After the third or fourth piece, she stopped and looked around. “Where’s the piece of the Gullah woman?”

“What?”

She pointed to an interior wall. “It used to lean over there. She was working at the slave market, weaving a wiregrass basket.”

Somewhere in my first week at school, I was walking through the market, getting my bearings, when I came upon this woman. She looked mid-seventies. She was leaning against the brick of the slave market, a hundred baskets at her feet, a single piece of grass sticking out of her mouth, no teeth, no dentures, knotty hands, dirty dress, tattered hat, bronze skin and yet there was something about her eyes. With the woman’s permission, I spent a week—every afternoon for an hour when the light fell soft behind the trees—and captured her.

Abbie said, “Everybody paints the Gullah”—she shrugged—“they’re easy targets. But you’ve done something not normally seen. Not even in New York. You captured the eyes. And Miss Rachel”—she tapped the center of the woman’s frame on the canvas—“has some of the kindest and most beautiful eyes God ever made.”

“You know her?”

She looked over her shoulder. “I grew up here.”

I was confused. I scratched my head. I had never put her on display in the window. “Where have you seen it?”

She crossed her arms and pointed at the window. “We’ve never actually met, but from time to time, I window-gaze. See what’s new. What you’re working on.” She lifted her sunglasses back over her eyes and I saw her again for the first time.

“That was you fogging up my glass?”

She nodded.

“Why didn’t you come in? I don’t bite.”

She shrugged. “Sometimes it’s nice not to be known.”

She spent twenty minutes looking at my walls. The more she looked, the more I felt like a nude subject beneath the spotlight.

Finally she turned to me. “When do you graduate?”

“Technically, this summer.”

She waved her hand across the room. “Problem?”

“Well…no, not really.”

She read my hesitation and stepped closer. “We have a Christmas party. An annual thing. I’d like it if…if you’d come.”

“Yeah? I mean…” I tried to sound like I attend these things all the time. “Yeah. Sure.”

“Saturday week? Around seven. I’ll send a driver.”

Driver?
“Yeah, sure.” I pointed toward the street. “Mine’s parked right down the street. I don’t like him blocking my view.”

She scanned my studio one last time, her eyes landing on the only photograph I owned.

On June 13, 1948, Nat Fein was sent to Yankee Stadium. The usual photographer had called in sick. Nat, a thirty-three-year-old from Manhattan’s east side, usually shot human interest images for the
New York Herald Tribune;
i.e., he once took a picture of a cemetery with a one-way sign in the foreground. But June 13 was different. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the famous park in the Bronx and in that ceremony they would retire number 3. Babe Ruth. It was his house and everyone was there to see him. At fifty-three years old, he was the greatest player in baseball history, but for the last two years had been in and out of hospitals. A sportswriters agreement meant no one had ever used the word
cancer,
but when Nat first saw him in the locker room Babe was too weak to tie his own cleats. A male nurse did it for him. Nat watched him, saddened. The Babe, skinny, his uniform hanging off tilted shoulders, slipped on an overcoat and shuffled to the visitors’ dugout. When his name was called, the place erupted. Babe slipped off his coat, grabbed a bat and walked to home plate—leaning on the bat. When he reached home plate, he took off his hat with his left hand and stood there, facing the house that he built. Every photographer had staged himself along the first and third base lines—in front of Babe. To get a shot of one of the most photographed faces in history. But not Nat.

Nat had seen his face and it wasn’t the one he wanted to remember. Also, the only place “3” could be seen was from behind home plate. So that’s where he stood. And while most of the other photographers used flashbulbs, Nat used available light. He shot low, near the ground, up across Babe’s shoulders and out into the upper deck.

The result was one of the most famous pictures in sports history.

The next day, it appeared on the front of the
Herald Tribune
and then the AP picked it up and it ran on papers around the country. Two months later, Babe Ruth died. And in 1949, Nat Fein received the Pulitzer Prize for the photo.

She pointed at the picture. “Seems sort of out of place.”

I shook my head. “Not really.”

She seemed intrigued. “How so?”

“Take a long look at it.” She did. “Now close your eyes.” She looked at me. “Just close them.” She folded her arms and closed her eyes. “Now, tell me what you see.”

She opened her eyes. “His face.”

“Exactly. Except you can’t see it by looking at that photo.” I walked to the wall and slid a large canvas out from behind another. I had filled most of the canvas with the Babe’s face.

“Wow.” She studied it a minute. “Have you shown that to your professors?” I shook my head. “You should.”

I slid it back into its place. “I’m…well, I do faces. At least I’m trying.”

She stared at me. She didn’t want to leave. “Why?”

I folded my arms and shrugged. “Because of what they say without ever uttering a word.”

She nodded. “I’d better get back. He’s probably worried. Flew all this way and I’m not even home.”

“Who’s
he
?”

“Daddy.” She checked her watch. “About seven, then?”

I glanced at my watchless arm and said, “Sure. When the freckle gets past the hair.”

She laughed. “Thanks for the tea.”

“Yeah…there’s always more. And if not, I know where I can steal some.”

She pulled the baseball cap down over her eyes. Her tone when she spoke was quiet and soft. “And…for last night.”

I set down my tea. “Anybody would have done the same thing.”

“Yeah?” She shook her head and pointed over one shoulder. “One man with binoculars was watching us through a window. Another, a jogger, crossed the park and pretended not to see.”

“How’d you see them?”

“It was hard not to. I was on my back.”

I shoved my hands in my pockets, trying to look like James Dean. “Well, next time, pick somebody bigger. Make it a challenge.”

“Do you always make jokes when someone else is trying to be serious?”

Long pause. “I rented this place eight months ago with the hopes that the storefront would allow me to sell my work.” I waved my hand across the room. “I’ve yet to sell the first piece. Making jokes helps me…in truth, it’s the curtain I hide behind so folks like you won’t see that the emperor’s food taster has no clothes.”

She bit her lip. “From what folks are saying, you don’t wear them much anyway.”

“Yeah, it’s a new marketing campaign to get people to the window.”

“Too bad you can’t keep them there.”

“Ooh…that cuts deep.”

She walked across the room, grabbed Miss Rachel and placed her in the window. “Each piece should have a name. It’ll help people identify with them. Buyers, that is.” She thought a minute and pointed at Miss Rachel.
“Contentment.”
She looked at me. “Because she is.”

She untied the dusty $300 price tag off an existing piece and hung it over the corner of Miss Rachel’s canvas. Then she carefully placed a 1 in front of the 3 and stood back, chewing on a fingernail. She tilted her head, considered it a moment, then wrote over the 3, creating an 8 in its place. She stood back. “Folks around here like to feel they are buying something of value. If you don’t value your work, why should they? In New York, this would be a bargain, and”—she waved her hand across the shoppers milling along the streets—“that’s where most of these folks shop when they’re not”—she shaded her eyes with her hand—“fogging up your window.”

She tugged on the bill of her baseball cap and disappeared around the corner. She had yet to tell me her name.