Void in Hearts (7 page)

We joined the country club.

We subscribed to the local theater company.

Gloria was elected president of the elementary-school PTA.

I canvassed the neighborhood on behalf of the American Cancer Society.

The boys played Little League baseball and Pop Warner football.

I coached their teams.

And Gloria and I got divorced.

The American Dream.

In the first few years after the divorce, I went back to Wellesley often. I mended broken things. I picked up the boys for weekends with their father. I allowed Gloria to persuade me to stay for a drink when I brought them back on Sunday evenings.

Gradually, without planning it or discussing it or agreeing to it, I stopped visiting the house. It became Gloria’s, not mine. And that was part of the separation process for us that, as I sat there smoking a cigarette in my car parked in my old driveway and recalled our aborted luncheon date at the Iruña two weeks earlier, I realized had still not been completed.

Perhaps those things never were completed.

I patted the envelope in the inside pocket of my jacket. Les Katz’s negatives. Gloria, once she got free of our marriage—which took several years after the divorce—had become a professional photographer. She did free-lance work for several national magazines. I had seen her stuff, and it was good.

She had told me that she had converted the basement into a studio. The old bathroom was enlarged to make a darkroom. She could make prints for me while I waited. I suspected I might need blowups of faces, once I got a look at what was on those negatives. She could do that for me, too.

I had called her that morning. “Gloria,” I said, mustering as much cheerful formality as I could, “I need your professional expertise.”

“He needs me,” she said.
“Mirabile dictu.
What is it, Brady?”

“Could you make some prints for me from a set of black-and-white negatives?”

“Mail them over. It’s no problem.”

“I need them today, actually.”

“Oh.” She hesitated. “You want to bring them out, is that it?”

“I guess it’s the only way.”

She paused again. “You haven’t been here in years. Are you sure…?”

“Look, if it makes you uncomfortable”

“That’s not it. I just assumed…”

I knew better than to tell Gloria her assumptions were wrong. She always interpreted that to mean I thought she was stupid. “I really need a hand here,” I said. “Mind if I bring the negatives over and wait while you do them?”

She sighed. She sounded relieved, somehow. “No, that’s fine.”

I got out of the car and went to the front door. She opened it. She was wearing tight blue jeans and a baggy shirt with the tails flopping. She was barefoot. She seemed to have lost a little weight in appropriate places since the last time I had seen her. I knew better than to mention it to her.

“Come in, Brady.”

I went in and took off my topcoat. I started to hang it in the closet in the foyer. Then I hesitated and handed it to her.

She seemed uncertain what to do with it. She looked sideways at me and grinned. “I was going to hang it in the closet. Where your stuff goes.”

“That’s what I started to do.”

We went into the living room. She laid my coat on the sofa. I looked around. None of the furniture looked familiar.

“Well,” she said.

“Your hair,” I said. “It’s different.”

She touched her head. “It’ll look better when the perm grows out a little. I’m starting to get some grays.”

“It looks good. You look good.”

She rolled her eyes. “You never used to compliment me. I think I like it.” She touched my cheek with her forefinger. “You look good, too, old man. You’re getting little wrinkles around your eyes. Looks distinguished.”

“I’m getting big wrinkles all over,” I said.

“You want a drink or something?”

I shook my head. “Thanks, no. I’d really like to see what’s on these negatives.”

I pulled the envelope from my jacket pocket and handed it to her. She slipped the negatives from their glassine protector and held them up to the light. “These were taken through a long lens,” she said, squinting. “At least a three-hundred-millimeter, I’d say. Maybe five hundred. Very shallow depth of focus. Doesn’t look too sharp on most of them. Well, let’s go see.”

I followed her down into the basement. When I had lived there, it was what we called a rumpus room. It had been paneled with cheap imitation oak and carpeted with rubberized indoor-outdoor green stuff. The boys kept their toys down there. There had been a small television, which Gloria and I dutifully restricted to Channel 2. Both of our boys, to our confusion, had been hooked on Mr. Rogers.

Now the paneling was genuine pine. Bookcases lined one wall. Track lighting along the ceiling played selectively on several framed photographs. There was an antique rolltop desk in one corner and a big square butcher-block table. Behind a locked glass-door cabinet were shelves containing Gloria’s cameras and the other tools of her trade. She had accumulated a lot of gear since I had lived there.

“This place looks great,” I said.

“Different, huh? I had a designer plan it for me. She drew the specs, picked out the carpet and the furniture and everything. It’s my office, all deductible. Here, peek into the darkroom.”

She opened the door to where the little bathroom had been. Now it was a large rectangular room, with a double stainless steel sink, a counter of trays, shelves of chemicals, enlargers, and lots of other machinery I didn’t recognize.

“Nice,” I said.

“Why don’t you relax out there and I’ll get to work. There’s a bar in the cabinet beside the desk. Help yourself.”

She closed the door, leaving me alone in the rumpus room. No, Gloria’s office. I looked around for an ashtray. There was none. I went to the bar. I found it well stocked, although there was no Jack Daniel’s. Just like Gloria, I thought, not to have my favorite sour mash Tennessee sippin’ whiskey on hand. All the booze struck me odd, at first. Gloria had never been much of a drinker. A little wine with a meal, perhaps, and an occasional gin and tonic on a summer’s evening. But then I remembered that this was her place of business. She met clients here. It was hard for me to visualize Gloria meeting with clients—conferring, bargaining, selling. That wasn’t the Gloria I had been divorced from eight years earlier.

I poured two fingers of Wild Turkey—not a bad bourbon, but not Jack Daniel’s—into one of the expensive glasses I found stacked there. There was a built-in icemaker. I fished out a small handful of oddly shaped cubes and dropped them into my drink. Then I wandered around the room. It was, in part, a gallery.

After our divorce, Gloria began to do some portrait work. Children, mostly, the occasional wedding and bar mitzvah. She had a knack, I knew, for persuading people to look natural.

Eventually she moved into the magazine work. She specialized in photographing architecture. She did a big job on Newport a few years earlier, a lot of color work on the changes that were being wrought on the grand old buildings along the waterfront: Several of the pictures were framed and hung on the walls of my old rumpus room.

I studied Gloria’s work. It looked very good to me—technically sound, but more than that, she had a gift for capturing the spirit of a building by clever use of angle and light.

I sat in one of the Scandinavian Design chairs and riffled through a photography magazine. It took me a while to identify the source of the uneasiness I was feeling.

There was no trace of me left in this house. None of my coats hung in the closets upstairs. The furniture I used to lounge on in the living room was gone. The paint I had painfully spread over the moldings and baseboards had been covered. The carpets I had trod upon had been replaced.

Now it was Gloria’s place. Not mine. She had cleared me away. I guessed she had done with her mind and her heart what she had done with her house.

That insight should have relieved me. It was what we both wanted to happen when we split. But now, seeing the evidence, I felt sad.

I poured myself another drink and settled down with an article that described how to photograph constellations. This was not something I expected ever to try.

Gloria had been in there for a little over half an hour when she opened the door to the darkroom. “Why don’t you come in?” she said.

There were a dozen or so eight-by-tens laid out on a table. “Don’t touch them,” she said. “They’re still damp.”

I looked them over. “They’re not that good, are they?”

She nodded. “Without a tripod you just can’t get quality stuff with a long lens.”

“The man who took these wasn’t especially interested in quality.”

Gloria shrugged. “His exposures are all okay. Probably used a programmed camera. But there’s a definite tremor, and the focus is shaky. I’d guess he was using a fast film. It’s pretty grainy. What are these for, anyway?”

I pointed to one of the pictures. “This man, I think. I wanted to know what he looked like.”

The photograph showed a man and a woman seated close together. The woman was in quarter profile. The man was nearly full face. “Do you see this man in any of the other shots?”

We looked them over together, bending over the table, our shoulders touching. Gloria pointed to one of the pictures with the eraser end of a pencil. “Here. This is the same man.”

This shot was taken from a distance. The camera seemed to be aimed upward, as if the photographer had been lying on the ground. It showed a number of people entering and leaving a building. One of those who was facing the camera did indeed appear to be our man. He wore dark-rimmed glasses. He had a long, thin face. He was bareheaded, revealing a broad forehead and light, receding hair.

“Let’s find another shot of the woman,” I said.

Again we pored over the pictures. The woman appeared in most of them, but there was no full-face shot. In profile she appeared to have a slightly upturned nose, dark hair cropped close at the nape of her neck and brushed back on the sides so that her ears showed. I picked out the best of them. “Can you blow up her face on this one? And this one of the guy?”

Gloria nodded. “Sure. They’ll look pretty fuzzy, but I can do it. Anything else?”

She was standing close beside me. I touched her cheek with the back of my hand, and she tilted her face up to me. “That’s all,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

She smiled quickly and turned away. “Sure. Go away.”

I went back upstairs, put on my coat, and went out to the front steps to smoke a cigarette. All of that history, and yet Gloria seemed a stranger to me. An attractive stranger, I admitted. I tried to push away the quick flash of her smile, the hurt that dwelled in her eyes, the touch of her skin. She would make my pictures for me and I would thank her and leave. All the rest was reflex.

The afternoon sun had already sunk behind the row of expensive suburban homes across the street. The cloudless sky was the color of ice. A short winter day, quickly passed, like so many of the days in my life. Gone and forgotten in that great headlong rush toward the end of it.

I snapped my spent Winston toward the snow and went back inside. A chill had penetrated to my spine, and I wasn’t sure that it was only the dry January air.

When Gloria emerged from her darkroom, she found me sitting at her desk looking for photos of nudes in her magazines.

She stood in the doorway, leaning her hip against the jamb. “Want to take a look?” she said.

I stood and moved toward her. She watched me, her eyebrows arched perhaps a millimeter, her lips parted as if she were about to speak. I held out my hand to her, palm up. She reached out slowly and took it, her eyes never leaving mine. Then she moved against me. She tucked her chin and put her face against my chest. “Don’t,” she mumbled against me.

I touched her jaw with my finger. She lifted her face to look at me. “Please, Brady.”

“Shh,” I said. I touched a finger to her lips.

Her eyes frowned into mine. Tiny vertical lines etched themselves between her brows.

“What do you want?” she whispered.

I gripped her shoulders and pushed her gently away from me. “I’m sorry. I’m—”

I saw her hand rise, as if in slow motion. It touched my jaw, fingertips first, then palm. Then it slid around to the back of my neck as she moved against me again, and her mouth angled up and I bent to meet it. It was the mouth of a stranger, a woman I had never kissed before, awkward, exploratory, before it slid away. Her arms went around my chest and she burrowed against me. I felt her shudder. I laced my fingers in her hair and urged her head back so I could see her. There was a little smile there, now, tiny crinkles at the corners of her eyes. Fire danced in her pupils before her lids dropped and her mouth lifted again, full of sweet, sad memory and familiar pain.

“This isn’t good,” I said into her hair.

“Come to bed with me.” A whisper against my throat.

Becca Katz had said exactly the same thing to me two days earlier. I had complied, out of what motive I didn’t want to know. I had then regretted it.

“No,” I said.

“Brady—”

“Come on,” I said. I took her hand and led her across the room. We sat in chairs beside each other.

“Why?” she said.

I shook my head. “It’s not right.”

“That is no answer. Don’t you—”

“I feel it. Of course. That’s the problem.”

She shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

I smiled. “Me neither. Let’s have a drink.”

“I don’t want a drink.”

“I do.” I got up and poured some Wild Turkey into my glass. I fumbled for the ice cubes, grateful for an activity that occupied me. I went back and sat beside her. “Listen,” I said, “it’s too easy. There’s a big pit there that we could fall into. We’d hurt ourselves. Don’t you see it?”

She nodded, fixing me with her eyes. “Sure. I see it. Maybe I wouldn’t mind falling.”

“The falling part might be okay. Hitting the bottom, that would hurt. You know it would.”

“You’d catch me.”

I nodded. “If I did, that would be the trap. Maybe I wouldn’t, though. I could hurt myself, too.”