Authors: Nicholson Gunn
The taxi snaked its way down through the tourist
district. On the sidewalks on either side of them, crowds of drunken boys
clustered around the entrances of dance clubs, their gym-crafted pecs bulging
under tight shirts, silver chains glinting at their necks. The girls stood
apart wearing platform heels and little dresses, clutching their cigarettes and
shiny handbags, allowing themselves to be looked at. He heard the sound of a
bottle smashing somewhere in the darkness. A siren wailed nearby, but faded
quickly into the general clamor of the night.
They paused at a stop sign beside a restaurant. Its
kitchen was visible through an open window, circular, like a porthole on a
ship. Inside, a chef was bent over a counter, his arms moving rhythmically as
he chopped some invisible ingredient. The man was completely bald, his head as
smooth and unblemished as a flesh-hued bowling ball. Stephan had a sudden
vision of himself throwing a raw egg so that it arced in through the window and
smacked the unsuspecting chef on the side of his head. He imagined the yellow
yolk oozing down the side of the man’s face.
He felt a sudden urge to laugh out loud, but it quickly
passed, leaving him hollow. The taxi now moved south out of downtown, crossing
beneath the railway tracks and then passing under the Gardiner Expressway. The
Gardiner loomed over them, pock-marked and crumbling. It looked like a
triumphal archway built by a long-forgotten emperor to commemorate some obscene
conquest, in which countless thousands had been sacrificed for no good reason.
It was dark under the expressway, and he could make out
the shadows of homeless people among the support pillars, bedding down for the
night in fraying sleeping bags. Then they were through, and out into the
brightness of the harbor district, with its glass condominium towers and
tourist boats festooned with strings of Christmas lights.
He thought then of Natacha. Her hotel room in Chicago had
a beautiful view of Lake Michigan, she’d said. He’d had a text from her earlier
in the evening, when he was out with Pete, and all was well on her end. She’d
be back in her room by now, hunkered down after a celebratory dinner with her
team. None of it was real to him. It was as if she resided in a parallel
universe now, with concrete and glass and a lake just like here but with no Stephan.
The taxi pulled up in front of Jenny Wynne’s building.
“Home again, home again, jiggidy jig,” she said. There
was a cartoonish half moon in the sky, and under its reflected light the
building’s mirrored windows glinted blandly, giving away no secrets. He was
startled by how frail her building looked under the moonlight, how provisional
– as if at the first puff of wind off the lake it would collapse into a heap of
jagged shards. It had always struck him as vaguely odd that she lived in this
area. Of course, it was close to the offices of the
Telegraph
, where she
worked, but he’d have thought she might have chosen College Street, or Yorkville,
or the Annex, somewhere with at least a veneer of community.
She paid the taxi driver with a single crisp twenty.
“Please, keep the change.”
The driver gave thanks with a silent nod. Jenny opened
her door and got out, then bent down to look in at Stephan, smiling. Her smile
was so, so beautiful. It seemed to promise him anything he wanted – all he had
to do was to smile back.
He did smile back, bitterly.
This was it. He could reach across the seats and in a
single smooth motion pull the door shut in her face. Then he would order the
driver to take him uptown, back to quiet side streets and solid brick houses,
the artificial fire looping smokelessly in the hearth.
Instead, he popped open his own door and stepped out into
the cool, clear night.
She kept him around for nearly two months that time. The
first few weeks after he’d moved into her condo were bliss, one of the happiest
interludes he’d had with her, and he began to think it might actually work out.
Maybe the thrill of winning him away from another woman, someone he’d built a
serious relationship with, had somehow helped to sustain her interest. It even
occurred to him once or twice that she might actually have come to love him.
But soon her behavior began to change. She became frequently
irritable, accused him of cluttering up her condo with his junk, even though
most of his possessions were gathering dust in a locker in the basement. All
mention of Uruguay had long since been dropped. When she asked him to leave,
the reason she gave was guilt over what had happened. She had realized that by
taking him away from Natacha, she was acting in complicity with patriarchal
structures of authority, something she could not abide given her feminist core
values.
One part of him was strangely amused, another livid, a
third forgiving – she was Jenny Wynne after all. The normal rules of human
conduct didn’t quite apply. Regarding Natacha his emotions were less
conflicted: he was entirely at fault, and deeply sorry for his betrayal of her.
Natacha herself could not have agreed more. When he told her what had happened
she had used many choice phrases, in a fairly loud voice, then thrown a silver
replica of the Chicago Sears Tower (or whatever it was now called) at his head.
Fortunately, she missed, although the adjacent drywall had suffered a nasty
gouge.
In late July, he started making preparations for his
departure from the city. He sold off his remaining possessions, summarily fired
his clients, visited with his parents out in the suburbs to fill them in, and
said goodbye to his remaining friends. (Pete was not among them. He was so
angry about what Stephan had done to Natacha that he refused to answer his
phone or respond to email.)
On his last full day in town, Stephan stopped by Bill’s
place to drop off his key. It was a sunny summer day, but the place was packed
with customers – digital people making high resolution prints, a class of
Photoshop cadets in the newly converted lounge, and even a few film purists
skulking in the remaining darkrooms.
“It’s really turning around,” Bill said, beaming. He
seemed, unthinkably, to have lost a few pounds. “I was sure I was a goner, but
we’re catching on with a new crowd. Still, we’ll miss you, Stephie – don’t
forget about us once you’re a bigshot down in the States.”
He flew out the next morning. As his plane arced up over
Lake Ontario, vaulting its huge expanses in a single, effortless stride, he
remembered again that the date was August 2, 2005: his thirtieth birthday. At
least he would always remember it.
So: New York.
There was a logic to it all under the circumstances.
Since he’d pretty much blown up his old life, he might as well take the
opportunity to start over from scratch. Or to put it another way: if he was
going to go down, he might as well go down swinging. Of course he’d been
considering such a move for years, but now that he was actually going through
with it he felt little joy. He had no immediate prospects in the city, and few
concrete ideas about how to break in there.
He’d been in New York for three aimless weeks, holed up
in a month-to-month room at the Hotel 17, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf
Coast. He’d been channel surfing on his room’s tiny television when the news
reports started coming in. Following the hurricane’s second landfall, New
Orleans’ levees were beginning to breach, its Lower Ninth Ward already half
underwater. Stephan had never been a hard news photographer, rarely taken more
than a casual interest in current events. But within five minutes he was at an
Internet café, emailing editors, scrambling for a way to get down there.
Somehow he knew that this was it. His moment had finally come.
It was a thrilling, nauseating trip. Katrina was a
disaster for hundreds of thousands of people, but for him, perversely, it was a
winning lottery ticket. Several of his shots of the destroyed city appeared in
major American magazines and newspapers. His recent life reversals had rendered
him philosophical in the face of danger, and his past photography of abandoned
factories and warehouses provided him the visual toolkit he needed to do the
work. He knew the bitter poetry of decaying timbers and shattered bricks. His
images were more vivid and real-seeming than the things themselves.
He’d shot on a digital body, one of the new Canon 5Ds, a
rental. The need to get his images quickly out of the shattered city meant that
film was out of the question. He made the transition to digital overnight,
literally, with barely a second thought. It was like tearing off a bandage, the
pain sharp but brief. There was, he quickly learned, much to like about
digital. As with most things in life, there were pros as well as cons.
Over the next seven years, he spun his New Orleans
success into assignments with Reuters, the Times, The New Yorker. He travelled
to Detroit to shoot the city’s slow-motion collapse and to Washington to
photograph the inauguration of President Obama. His images were nominated for
several awards, and the recognition led in turn to a teaching gig at Columbia,
a limited-run coffee table book with Phaeton, and a retrospective show at the
Aperture Foundation.
As for his personal life, it barely existed. There were a
few girlfriends, sure, but they came and went like ghosts. His life was full
enough with work alone; there wasn’t room in it for much else. Occasionally, on
a Sunday afternoon, this made him wistful, but it wasn’t something that kept
him awake at night. Some people were meant to be fathers and providers: the
goofy beer-bellied dads, fumbling with their yard-care products. Pete was one
of those. His kids were beautiful, with Sally’s deep brown eyes, as Stephan
learned once his old friend had softened up enough to add him on Facebook.
Aside from family visits – he went back to Ontario once or twice a year, to see
his parents – such interactions provided his only regular contact with his old
life, which suited him fine.
He loved his work, and was grateful he still had some in
the wake of the global financial crisis. At times he felt as if he’d arrived in
the Promised Land just as the old dreams were crumbling to dust, but then again
he’d always had a thing for decay. He covered the fallout from the recession,
photographing abandoned housing developments in Florida and Nevada. He covered
the brief sad flourishing of the Occupy Movement on Wall Street, just across
the Brooklyn Bridge from the Carroll Gardens apartment in which he’d settled
down.
There was always something happening. You had to stay
focussed on the ongoing moment or it would slip right past you.
* * * * *
On a cold, overcast afternoon in the winter of 2012,
Stephan ran into Nathan McGregor on the Avenue of the Americas, or Sixth
Avenue, as the locals, among which he had begun tentatively to number himself,
still called it. He had been on his way home from the offices of the publisher
of his new book, his head down to shield his face from the freezing wind. He
only looked up when he heard a distant voice calling his name, in an accent
that sounded ever-so-slightly foreign to his ear.
He recognized his old colleague immediately, even though
it had been seven years since they’d last been in contact. Nathan was dressed
in his familiar WASPish manner, in a camel coat and tweed pants, a tartan scarf
like an ascot at his neck. He looked healthier than Stephan remembered, his
skin pink and scrubbed.
They shook hands, smiling sideways at each other in their
old, fond, way.
“What brings you to New York, Nathan?”
“Work, dear Stephan, always work. I’m taking an extra
couple of days, though – enough time for some shopping, a gallery or two, a
little sightseeing.”
“We could have a drink.” Stephan found that he was eager
to hear whatever it was that Nathan had to say.
“What about tomorrow? I’ve a dinner this evening.”
“I’m heading out of town tomorrow morning, unfortunately.
I have to give a talk at at an art college in D.C.”
“How glamorous the life of a renowned New York
photojournalist must be.”
“Not really.”
“Well, how about a quick coffee right now?” Nathan said,
and Stephan recalled his old colleague’s warmth. “I was going to stop in at the
Frick, sit for a little while in the Garden Court, but I suppose it can wait.”
“I won’t keep you long. Scout’s honour.”
The place they settled on after a quick search was
nothing special – just a generic café of the type you’d find in any Western
city – but it was clean and warm and there were open tables here and there.
Even as the recession’s aftermath lingered elsewhere, New York was still New
York, and finding a parking spot or a free table amounted to a small victory.
Stephan ordered a scotch, to warm his insides, but Nathan stuck with a cup of
green tea.
“I’ve cleaned up my act,” he said, sounding apologetic.
“As you may recall, I became a little dissipated there for a while.”
Stephan waved the notion away. “And work’s going well?”
Nathan shrugged. “Well enough, I’d say. I switched over
to book publishing a few years back. It’s probably the one field worse off than
magazines right now, but I love it. That’s why I’m down here. I’m seeing a few
people about U.S. rights to a couple of lovely little novels I helped edit.”
“Fantastic, Nathan!”
“I don’t need to ask you how you’ve been doing,” Nathan
said with a mock-jealous glare.
They talked about the old days, Stephan probing for news
about former colleagues and Nathan demonstrating his old zest for gossip in
response. Sandra Blankton, Jenny Wynne’s old nemesis, had been made
editor-in-chief of
This City
, which did not surprise Stephan very much.
This was how the world worked. Sandra’s first order of business at the magazine
upon ascending to her new role had been to purge the ranks, and the team –
Nathan included – had been scattered. Not a single member of the old guard
remained in place, Nathan lamented. Amanda Ellis had gone on to become some
sort of content specialist at Yahoo. Joan Carpenter had died of cancer – she’d
received the diagnosis shortly after she’d been packaged out. Various others
had moved on, moved away.
“It’s a different time now, Stephan,” Nathan said,
blinking. “You got out at a good moment.”
“I got out?” Stephan asked.
Nathan shrugged again. “Didn’t you?”
“And Jenny Wynne? Remember her?”
“Of course,” Nathan said, shrugged. “She was part of that
little scene for a while.”
“I heard she tied the knot.” That was about all Stephan
had heard, more or less deliberately. He could have Googled her, of course,
inspected her party photos on any number of social media sites, but he’d wanted
a clean break.
“Yes she did, to Jonny West, the former guitarist from
Pooch Troop. Not the brightest move, I’m afraid.”
Stephan narrowed his eyes. Something about Nathan’s tone
had put him on alert. “Why not?”
“Well, from what I’ve heard, Jonny kind of lost it after
the band went out of fashion. He still tours as a solo artist – dive bars in
the US, mostly, I’m told. I hear he drinks, sleeps around. He likes to party
with the young females.”
“And Jenny?”
Nathan stifled a yawn. “She’d rather stay home with the
kids, I suppose.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Well, she tweets about it pretty ardently. After she was
laid off by the
Telegraph
, I guess she needed an outlet for her, ah,
prose. I may have even dipped into her musings myself, once or twice, out of
morbid curiosity if nothing else – she calls it the Poopy Diaries or some
such.” He shook his head, a pained expression on his face, as if someone had
just placed a soiled diaper in front of him on a bone-China serving plate.
“Why doesn’t she just divorce him if he’s such an ass?”
“Oh, I’m sure it could still happen, Steph, or just as
likely he’ll divorce her and run off with some 22-year-old tartlet. But for now
when he goes on one of his binges she lets it slide, I’m told. Maybe it’s out
of love for the twins? Gorgeous little princesses, I hear, perfectly identical
– platinum blondes, it goes without saying. They’ve all moved out to the
suburbs, to get the backyard swimming pool and the full ensuite. Quite funny.
She was such an urbanista, as we used to say. Do you remember that photo Helmut
Stumpfl did of her as Becky Sharp?”
Stephan’s face flushed. “I thought older women were all
the rage now... milfs and cougars and... yummy mommies.”
“Well, sure. All I’m saying is that I ran into her a
couple of years ago at a party, and I remember thinking at the time she
resembled a sort of… human trout.” Nathan sucked in his cheeks and made a fish
face, puckering his lips obscenely.
“Nathan! Jesus Christ!” Stephan cried, a bark of
horrified laughter welling up from his guts.
Nathan shrugged, sipped his tea. “I’m a homo, remember?
I’m allowed to say such things – I’ve a free pass on the political
incorrectness front. It’s a fringe benefit.” He sighed. “One of the few.”
Stephan eyed him. It seemed possible that all of this was
payback for some ancient dig that Stephan had once aimed at Nathan and
long-since forgotten. Or not. There was an ease to his old colleague’s manner
that made him think Nathan had simply forgotten that Stephan’s thing with her
had been so serious, back in the day. What did he care, after all?
“Thy plaintive anthem fades / Past the near meadows, over
the still stream,” Nathan recited, shrugged. “You’re an artist, Stephan, if I
may put it bluntly – you know this to be true. But don’t mind me. I’m always
fluffing things up for effect. Another nasty habit that seems to be getting
worse as I age.”