The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (29 page)

The next morning he called up the offices of
Vogue
magazine and Paramount Pictures. After running the gamut of questioning secretaries, he was finally put through to the proper people who, in both cases, were surprisingly kind and helpful. He asked the woman at the fashion magazine who she thought was the greatest portrait photographer in the city. Without hesitation she said Jeremy Flynn and gave him the name of the photographer’s agent. At Paramount, the vice-president in charge of something said the greatest make-up person in the world was so-and-so. Beizer carefully noted the names and addresses. He had expected more trouble finding these things out, but perhaps since he had figured out his problem, the solution clicked into place like the gears of a car engaging.

He called the photographer and the make-up person and made appointments to see both of them. They charged an obscene amount of money, but the best were always worth it, particularly in this case.

When he met them, he explained his situation in almost exactly the same words: he was fast going blind. Before that happened, he wanted to see what he would look like for the rest of his life. He was hiring them to help him get as close to that as possible. The visagist should make him up to look as convincingly fifty, sixty, seventy as possible. Knowing his family history of bad hearts dying somewhere in their seventies, Beizer assumed his would too. So his face at seventy would be close enough to his final days to satisfy.

The photographer was fascinated by the idea. He recommended pictures done with no tricks—no special lighting or backgrounds. Just Beizer in a dark suit and a white shirt. That way, his face would take up the entire world. One’s eye would be forced to look at the face and nothing else. Yes! That was exactly what he wanted.

At the end of their meeting, Flynn asked what good would the pictures be when Beizer could no longer see them.

“Because I
will
have seen them. I’ll be able to put them in front of someone and say, ‘Is that what I’m like now? Tell me the difference between what’s on paper and what you see.’ ”

“Points of reference.”

“Exactly! Points of reference.”

“Will you remember what’s there? Even after years of not having seen?”

“I don’t know. I have to try.”

The big day came and he had the astonishing experience of seeing himself age forty years in one afternoon. Like time-lapse photography, he saw brand new wrinkles groove his face, making it into something foreign yet funnily familiar at the same time. He saw his hair disappear, his eyes turn down, skin like breaddough hang from his chin and neck. If an experience can be funny and terrifying at the same time, this was it. Each time he was eager to see what the next decades would do to him, but when the makeup man said, “OK, have a look”, Beizer was hesitant. He kept saying, “You think that’s what I’ll really look like?” But down deep he knew it was.

So, this was it. Him for the next forty years. When he was a boy, he was a terrible sneak when it came to Christmas presents. Every year he was compelled to find where all of his gifts were hidden, so that weeks before the big day, he knew exactly what he was getting. This was the same thing. Now he knew what he would be “getting” as the years passed.

And one would think that seeing himself across the rest of his life like that would have had some kind of large effect on Beizer, but the only real emotion he felt at the end of the session was amusement. When they were finished, he told the other two this and both said the same thing—wait till you see the pictures. In real life a person wearing make-up looks ... like a person wearing make-up. Especially if it is thick and involved. But wait till Flynn’s photographs were ready. Then he’d see a hell of a difference. Any great photographer knows how to cheat light and time. Flynn loved the idea of showing this man the rest of his life in pictures. He planned to use them as the nucleus of his next exhibition, and thus would spend even more time than usual making them as perfect as he could.

The call came very late at night. Beizer had been watching television and eating a plum. He didn’t know what he enjoyed more—looking at the TV or the fat purple plum with the guts of a sunrise.

“Norman? This is Jeremy Flynn. Am I disturbing you?”

“Not at all. Have you finished the pictures?”

Flynn’s voice was slow in coming and, when it came, it sounded like he was testing every word before he let it walk across his tongue. “Well yes, yes, I just tonight started to work on them. But there’s a ... Well, I don’t know how to put it. This is a crazy question because I know it’s really late, but do you think you could come over here now?”

“At eleven at night? I really want to see them, Jeremy, but can’t we do it tomorrow?”

“Yes, we can. Of course we can, but Norman, I think you’ll want to see them now. I think you’ll want to see them very much now.”

“Why?”

Flynn’s voice went up three notches to semi-hysterical. The other day in his studio he had been very calm and good-natured.

“Norman, can you
please
come? I’ll pay for your taxi. Just, please.”

Concerned, Beizer put his plum down and nodded at the phone. “OK, Jeremy, I’ll come.”

Flynn was standing in the doorway of his house when Beizer arrived. He looked bad. He looked at the other like he’d arrived in the nick of time.

“Thank God you’re here. Come in. Come in.”

The moment they stepped into the house and he’d slammed the door behind them, Flynn started talking. “I was going to work on them the whole night, you see? I was going to give the whole night over to seeing what we’d done the other day. So I set everything up and did the first roll. Do you know anything about developing film?” He had Beizer by the arm and was leading him quickly through the rooms.

“No, but I’d like to learn. I don’t think I told you, but this whole thing started when—”

“It doesn’t matter, listen to this. I did the developing. I always do my own. And then I—here we are, in here. Then I got down to the first prints. Do you want to sit down?”

Flynn was acting and speaking so strangely, so rushed and strangled, like he’d swallowed air and was trying to bring it back up again.

“No, Jeremy, I’m fine.”

“OK. So I put the first ones down, all ready to see you, you know, looking fifty or sixty? I had all these great ideas of how to work with the paper to get this special effect I’ve been thinking about—But when I saw what was on the film, the film I took of you, I panicked.”

Beizer thought he was joking, but also knew instinctively that he wasn’t because of the scared seriousness of Flynn’s voice. “What do you mean, you panicked? Did I look so ugly?”

“No, Norman, you didn’t look like anything at all. You weren’t in the pictures.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look for yourself.” Flynn opened a very large manila envelope and slowly slid out a glossy photograph. It was of a large wheel stuck in the sand of a desert landscape.

“That’s nice. What is it?”

“It’s you, Norman. Look at this one.” Flynn slid out another photograph. A half-eerie, half-romantic picture of moonlight slanting across an empty set of swings on a playground. Beizer tried to speak but the photographer wouldn’t let him. He took out another picture, then another and another. All of them different, some strange, some beautiful, some nothing special.

When he was finished, he put his hands on his hips and looked at his subject suspiciously. “That is the roll of film I took of you, Norman. There was no mistake because I purposely left the film in the camera after I shot the other day. Those pictures are what the camera took of you.”

“I hate to tell you, Jeremy, but I’m not a wheel, or a swing.”

“I know that. I didn’t ask you over here to play a joke on you. That’s what I have, Norman. This is no joke. Those are the pictures I took of you the other day.”

“How am I supposed to respond to that?”

“I don’t know.” Flynn sat down. Then he stood up. “No, I do know. I have to say something else. I have to tell you, whether it helps or not. Maybe it’ll even scare you. When I was young and learning to develop pictures, I took a whole roll one time of a girl I knew who I had a crush on. Kelly Collier. That same day I went into the darkroom to do them because I was so eager to have them. While I was in there, she and her mother were killed in a car accident. Naturally I didn’t know that, but none of the pictures came out with her image. They came out like these.”

“You mean swings and a wheel?”

“No, but objects like that. Objects. Things that had nothing to do with her. I’ve never told anyone the story, but Norman, this is exactly the same thing that happened with Kelly. Exactly. I took the pictures and she died. Then I took
these
pictures while you’re going blind. There’s got to be a connection.”

“You think it’s your fault?”

“No, I think ... I think sometimes the camera is able to catch things as they’re about to happen. Or as they’re happening. Or ...” Flynn licked his lips. “I don’t know. It has something to do with change. Or something to do with—”

Beizer tried to speak when he heard the other’s confusion. Because he realized it
did
have to do with change. As he looked longer at the pictures in front of him and listened to the other speak, he began to understand. What had happened was Flynn’s camera had photographed their souls—the dead girl’s and Beizer’s—as they were going through ... as they lived different things. A soul was able to try on different existences as if they were clothes in a wardrobe. Of course, a soul knows what’s coming. Beizer believed the human soul knew everything; naturally with the girl, it knew her body was about to die. And in his own case it knew what it would be like blind. So, even while living in them, their souls were going out looking, travelling, window-shopping for what they would become next. That was what the camera had somehow managed to capture. This plain metal and plastic, chemicals and glass had all worked together to catch two souls experimenting or playing, or whatever the word was for living a while in their future. Or was it their past? Maybe they’d like to rest in the moonlight and be swung on by day. Or maybe they were only re-living what it was like to be wheels, useless and thus marvellous out in a desert.

How did he know this? How could a plain nice dull man like Norman Beizer realize something so secret and profound? Because, as Flynn spoke, Beizer began to recognize the photographs laid out in front of him. Whatever part of him had been there in them suddenly and distinctly remembered being cold metal out in the moonlight, or the heat of sand all around him. He recognized and remembered the feelings, temperatures, sounds ... that were in each of the pictures.

What was even better, he knew that
that
was what he would remember after he went blind. It would be enough, more than enough, for the rest of his life. He didn’t need a camera, or ten unforgettable pictures, or portraits of himself as an old man. With this new understanding, he would have the ongoing knowledge and memories of where his soul had been. Until he died, blind or not, he would share the feelings and adventures of the part of him that was universal and curious. The part that was travelling, experiencing, knowing the lives of things. Things like wheels, like swings. One more bustling soul out there looking for what to do next.

H
E NEVER LIED TO
beautiful women. And this one was certainly beautiful: she stood in his doorway with the hesitancy of one who knows they’re intruding in your life but feel they must—like religious zealots, subscription sellers, police. Encountering them is usually annoying but this woman was so stunning that it was delicious. With those looks, how often had she felt like an imposition, or been forced to speak in a soft, almost begging voice to be given something? Never. It just came. Faces like hers were given everything, always. What could he have to offer that she would want? His house.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, but I used to live here. I grew up in this house. I was driving through town with my brother just for old times’ sake, and I was ... We were wondering if it would be possible to take a look around inside? Just to remember things.”

He was tired and cranky. Things hadn’t been going well at the job recently, so he came home at night absolutely wrung out and sanded smooth by the days. For dinner he would eat crackers and cheese, or soup out of a red and white can—anything that took no effort. He didn’t want to be reminded of good food. His wife had been a great cook, but she was gone now and every time he ate a good meal he thought of her and it made him sad or grumpy. They had lived pretty happily together in this house for a few years, but it wasn’t a special place for either of them. It was one of those in-between ones people inhabit on their way up or down. An invisible place with a driveway on the side where any number of invisible cars had sat over the years, while inside, owners dreamed of owning a better one—a better car, a better home, a better life.

He’d stayed on after the divorce because he was comfortable here and the one good thing about the house was it didn’t remind him of her so much. Now and then he’d open a drawer in the kitchen and see a can opener she’d bought, or notice her absence in the living room at night, but all in all he was OK here until he could come up with something better to do with the rest of his life.

Looking at this goddess on his doorstep, he meanly wondered how anyone could have memories of this house? The town itself was nothing special either. A few stores, a cannon on the green in the town square, a train station where every morning crowds of people who you never saw any other time climbed aboard to go somewhere bigger and better. But here was this knockout asking if she and her brother could look for their past in a few dull rooms. The thought made him sigh but he understood.

In the moment between understanding and inviting her in, he realized something not so good—he wasn’t in the mood for beauty. He didn’t want to see the weight and curve of her gorgeous brown hair; didn’t want a flash in the pants for this luscious creature in front of him. Beauty, in any form, called for too much from inside. Longing, lust, admiration—all of it made you sit up and take notice; they used energy and imagination that was best left alone right now. He didn’t want to sit up, and certainly didn’t want to deplete what small store of energy he had been using to slouch through these days.