dawns that you are not there for us. All this had only been a way to pass the time. He has waited all day for you. The world has tilted in your absence. After dinner everyone goes to bed, as if an early night will somehow speed up the process of your return. The table is left uncleared, kitchen detritus left to soak. It is the earliest in years that the house has fallen to darkness. With Ben and Vishni sleeping downstairs, one in the guestroom, the other in her room behind the kitchen, adjacent to the studio, the house feels lopsided. In bed especially, I feel poised to tip; how little it would take to tumble me: a gust from the open window, the telephone’s ring. Before I draw the curtain, I stare up at the stars and wonder whether the city’s neon would hide the bear and the scorpion from your sight; whether you would use the constellations to guide you from Penn Station to Hell’s Kitchen. Remember when you first moved here, you taught me how I could navigate my way home after dark by following the scorpion’s tail from rear end to tip? Imagine being born and raised in the country and never having learnt these skills; what a wonder you were! Every day, there seemed to be a wondrous new discovery to be made about you: setting traps behind the refrigerator that caught the kitchen rat, mending windows, your ability to recite any number of poems from Leaves of Grass that a well-meaning teacher had forced you to learn by rote as punishment for a litany of youthful misdemeanors. All this on top of the paintings. But navigating the stars was a party trick I never tired of. It was like leaving the world behind for the celestial. You made the walk so often from our country station, nothing grander than a platform and a sign thick with dust; you may as well have been blindfolded.
In the city too, where the steps that lead home are ingrained in your memory, you walk from Penn Station without sight: along Sixth, heading downtown. You pass the fancy shops, virtual museums of aspiration for tourists and office workers, always closed to the likes of you; affordable yet still overpriced; and finally past those less desirable, stores that only stand because it is cheaper to open than shut up completely. Below Avenue A you hit your stride: deep down into the city’s unfathomable bowels. Then, nothing. A hinterland of boarded-up warehouses and tenements, long since abandoned, that now shelter only hobos and the spoils of local crime, theft and drugs. Though you are several blocks away from the Hudson, its dank fills your nostrils. You gorge on a nourishing stink that gives your aching muscles life. It is the closest you will get to milk now you are decades past weaning; now that your parents are no longer here to fight over and nurture you. What you are looking for no longer exists, and yet, there you are, standing outside an apartment that is now a laundry, on a street where life as you know it has vanished. I know this is where you will end because it is the one place you have never showed me. I had to find it for myself during visits to the city. A piecemeal search: riding subway lines and roaming every back street until I could be sure. If you feel the weight of the tenements across your shoulders, find some space among the stars. Drop all that you have carried and let the lightness of the night take you. If you are no longer angry, look up and let the sky speak for us. Take your photographs so that clarity comes from your anger. At the very least, one good picture should emerge from the black mist that marks your mourning for everything you left behind. All that you missed, the funerals of your parents, your brother’s homecoming, the rapid decline of the tenements, how your neighborhood vanished into a ghost town, will be captured somewhere in the roll of film you carry in your pocket. That is one thing I can be sure of.
– Whatever happens, no matter how long I have to sit in the studio or sand down and creosote the fence? Whether I have to help James birth his dairy cows, or shell a bucket of peas for Vishni, I must take one good photograph a day. Just one. I’m not greedy, Anna. I only want one to lead to another and then the next. It’s like crossing the mountain river when we go fishing. You take the pass one stone at a time.
Where did those photographs go? Developed at the drug-store and then placed in a box at the bottom of your wardrobe. Sifting and poring. The bad photographs bundled together and burned with the trash. The examples deemed good sometimes shown to me and Vishni, most often not. You were not secretive but your photos were a private undertaking; something you started over the last few years to make sense of the practice I had committed you to, when you were probably too young to understand what it truly meant. Your interest in photography began shortly after we last saw Ben, a Halloween party high up East, when Provincetown’s tourists had long since returned to the city and the cobwebs you had sprayed in all corners, combined with the creaky walnut floors, gave his house a feeling of the Marie Celeste. We were a party of eleven almost groping in the dark for other signs of life, the spirits of those who had lived and partied here during that long summer. You and Ben talked alone for much of the night, or that is, Ben spoke to you. Your faces were mostly serious, none of the fooling around that Vishni and I were so used to. His mouth so close to your ear, your neck craning into his, you were a hair’s breadth from a kiss. When he remembered his manners as the host, you flicked through the monographs in the upstairs room he used as an office. I found you crouched over his albums, oversized books the size of table tops, filled with giclée prints from artists he was interested in. You were looking at photographs of crumbling diners and abandoned gas stations deep in the country; of families of hobos dressed in found hippy clothes riding the freight trains. The gloss from the prints reflected in your eyes and back onto each plastic sheath that held them.
– They’re amazing. Why has he never shown us this stuff before?
– Probably because we never asked.
– All this time it’s been sitting in his house. All this time.
In your wonderment you soaked everything up, as you used to do when you first saw my paintings. You still had interest in those, but not the sense of wonder as now overtook you with Ben’s photographs. I knew, because something similar had happened to me many years before. I saw a Modigliani portrait hanging in an alcove of a Chicago museum during a college trip and I felt my mind unlock. It has felt as if the last three years has been a slow period of unlocking, of opening yourself up to new possibilities and closing your mind to me. I do not say this from a sense of jealousy. I have often lain awake wondering how this life would ever nourish you, how sitting like a statue day in and out could ever be enough. I took you at your word when you said it was; took heart in how fast your legs ran around the meadow; how rosy your cheeks had become from eating good home-cooked food; the pride you had in being known and respected among the community, whatever they may have thought of me; but most of all because of the trust you had in my hands as they posed you and the nodded appreciation at the end of each day when you saw the progress made on the canvas; how even my stolid snail’s pace still felt like some form of magic. You have spoiled me over the years with your patience and blind faith; whether this was something I encouraged in you or that simply lay inert in your personality, waiting to be drawn out. Either way, it has made me fat and somewhat complacent. I was like a suburban wife who believed she was enough for her husband; that he would never stray elsewhere. Now I am suspicious, mistrustful, as she might be after being wronged; bitterness staining her tongue. You have given yourself up so readily and for so long, I don’t know how else to be. Your face is puffy with all the secrets you hold, the lining around the eyes tight as you hold them all in. When I am cleaning up I sometimes catch you out of the corner of my eye, staring at the paintings as if you want to burn them. Who planted the seed for that, Ben or I? I move as you do, by stealth, forcing lightness into my heavy legs as I tiptoe across the floorboards so as not to wake those below. The room is dark but never completely black. Black is for those who refuse to see color, even the red of their eyelids as they close. The hook on the back of your door where the camera used to hang is unadorned. I feel it as I push it open, hearing nothing knock against the wood on the other side. For most of the day I had been caught up thinking about your clothes, forgetting that if you left carrying your camera you would have all you need. So much about today has been about remembering and forgetting. The rigor of the studio shields me from the worst of it. Only at night do I lapse. Even as I open your wardrobe and pat my hands along its varnished floor, I know that my fingertips will find no resistance; that your slim box of photographs will be gone. The only picture left in the room should be where it always was, in a frame on your dresser. There were never any paintings here, only this. Still feeling my way, I pat up and around until I find it, hoping that this will have
