Robert’s house sat at the top of a hill in Sonoma, five miles up from a road that led into town. It was cold in Sonoma in the winter months, and when it rained it seemed to last forever. Rain was predicted for later that night, but now it was clear; the moonlight giving the landscape a bluish monochromatic glow.
Over the last few months Robert’s life had become relatively simple. Since his wife Katie’s unexpected death a year ago his days were spent less and less with the final paperwork involved with insurance, accounts, and bills. More time was spent preparing for and dreading an upcoming retrospective exhibition of his photographs at the Museum of Sonoma County in Santa Rosa. His evenings were spent increasingly with Joyce, his girlfriend for the past three months and the curator of the exhibit.
Neither Joyce nor Robert had any children. He and Katie had moved from Los Angeles to Sonoma fifteen years ago when he was in his sixties and his name in photography had started to fade. Joyce was working as assistant curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which she described as “a full-time position of being ignored.” She moved to Santa Rosa five years after Robert and Katie left Los Angeles and shortly after her husband died. Robert often wondered whether she moved to be close to them or because of the job opening at the museum. The museum gave her more responsibility, he knew; but he also thought of the museum as a place that featured artists who were either unknown or in the process of becoming undiscovered.
Robert now sat at the dining room table covered with folders of proof sheets and photographs, trying to decide which ones were worthy of showing. He reached for a vial of artificial tears and induced drops into his burning eyes. Although he wasn’t hungry, he went to the kitchen looking for something to eat, returning with pre-packaged squares of Tillamook cheddar and some Saltine crackers. An email from Joyce sent a few minutes earlier appeared on the screen of his laptop.
“I’ve been thinking more about the exhibition lately. (And you, of course.) I think you should include some of the photos you took of Katie. Or think about it at least. We need to talk more about the exhibition. I need blurbs for the photos; desperately.”
He started to reply but called her instead.
“I knew you would call,” she said. “I want to talk about the show and see what photos you’ve selected. I’d like to come over.”
“That’s fine. Come on over.”
“I’m coming over. And I plan to stay the night. If you don’t mind. Do you mind?”
“I don’t mind.”
“I didn’t think you’d mind,” she said and hung up.
Their pattern of banter hadn’t changed much over the years. Katie knew he was attracted to Joyce. In fact, Katie had told Robert that in the event of her death he should marry Joyce; she even mentioned it to Joyce. As much as he liked Joyce, Robert felt no one could ever replace Katie. Joyce wanted to be number one in his life, he knew. He knew this because she told him.
“I’ve been where you are now,” she had said as they lay in bed one night. “You’ll never forget her and you shouldn’t. I know someday I’ll be your number one. Maybe you know this, but probably not. I have more experience with this. It might be a while and that’s fine. I’m OK with waiting.”
It had started to rain when Joyce arrived. She hugged Robert, resting her head on his shoulder as she did so. “Am I holding you too tight?”
“It’s fine.”
“Just right then?”
“Just right.”
She let go of him and hung her coat in the closet. “About how many years worth of phone books do you have in that closet?”
“I haven’t counted.”
“I think it’s time you threw them out.”
She was a few years younger than Robert though she looked like she was in her late fifties. She talked about her day, focusing on a ‘horrible-awful’ poetry reading held at the museum. “It was some woman wearing too much makeup reading from a book of her poems that was just published; she was totally full of herself.”
“Glad I wasn’t there,” he said.
“You would have hated it. Anyway, I didn’t mean to talk about that. Do you know what photos you want to show? Or how you want to organize them?
They sat next to each other at the dining room table. On the wall facing them was a framed photograph of Katie. She was on a bicycle, left foot on the pedal, having come to a stop next to a tree. A church was visible in the background. She wore a long skirt and a wool sweater; her hair was long and straight, parted in the middle. The picture hung at his first group exhibition in Los Angeles twenty years ago. His last exhibition was part of a group show two years ago at a trendy new art gallery in San Francisco run by people who looked too young to run an art gallery.
“I’m not too happy about this exhibit,” he said.
“Why?”
“A retrospective exhibit is a not-so-subtle reminder that I’m in my retrospective stage of life.”
“We all are sweetheart. Get over it.”
“I guess. I just have my doubts about it.”
“OK, you can have all the doubts you want, but it’s still going to happen and I need your help. So what do you think? By year, or by subject matter, or just random? I’m thinking by years or decades, but it’s up to you.”
The folders of proof sized prints she was now looking through held photos of people young and old in various locations: concerts, streets in large and small cities, farms, construction sites, amusement parks, and then just as many devoid of any indication of location. “I can sometimes tell what decade the pictures were taken by hair styles, clothes, and any cars that happened to be there,” she said. “But there are quite a few photos that don’t give any clues. I’d like to focus on those. The timeless ones.”
“Then organizing by year would be meaningless,” he said.
“Right. They should just be random. Or by mood. Happy, sad, indifferent. And what do you want to say on the blurb for the pictures?”
She held a photo of a man who looked like he was in his late twenties, in work clothes, part of a construction crew on a busy street. His head rested on his two hands which were holding the handle of a shovel with its blade on the street. His mouth was pulled slightly downward. “I like this one,” she said. “What was going on?”
“I think I remember. Hold on.” He looked for his notes on the photo. “Yes. I remember this one. Taken in Manhattan in 2009 in late October. I remember seeing a construction crew on a break; the guy asked me what I was taking pictures of. I said something like I was taking pictures of people who looked interesting. I remember he asked if I thought he looked interesting. I said yes, and we started talking.”
“What about?”
“The World Series. The Yankees had lost the first game of the World Series to the Phillies, and he wasn’t too happy about that.”
“It looks like he had lost a loved one.”
“Well, the Yankees are beloved in New York.”
“I’m serious. It looks like the weight of the world is on his shoulders; that something happened.” She looked at the photo again. “It looks like he could be thinking about a lot of things.”
“Yes. That’s true. He could have been. It’s an illusion. Like when you imagine what a character in a movie or play is thinking, filling in what a character leaves unstated. You’re working off the context. You’re drawn into an illusion. It’s no different with photos.”
Joyce moved her neck from side to side to undo the stiffness that had come from being bent over, looking at photos. The sound of soft rain on the roof could be heard.
“So what can you say about it? For a blurb about the photo, I mean. Can we say when and where it was taken and what you and he were talking about?”
“No. I don’t want those details of what I might have talked. I just want to describe what the person was doing; maybe where it was taken, and no more. ‘A construction worker in Manhattan.’ That’s all people need, really. Their own experiences will fill in everything else.”
“OK, but for your remarks about the exhibit, I’d like you to say what you just said about illusion, and context and interpretation.”
“I’ll give it some thought.”
“And I really do want one of Katie in there,” she said.
“Why?”
“People like to know about the artist’s life outside the photos. Some hint or glimpse. Even some of Edward Hopper’s paintings had his wife in them.”
“Hopper’s wife was a model for the women in some of his paintings,” he said. “There was only one portrait where she was actually named.”
“Whatever. Find me one of Katie that we can include. I’m sure there are plenty.”
After a moment of looking like he was going to refuse, he pointed to the photo on the dining room wall. “That one,” he said. “It’s the first photo I took of her. It was when we first met. It was 1981 in Santa Cruz when I was living there. She was teaching linguistics as an adjunct professor at the university.”
“I want the blurb to identify her. And the time and place.” They both looked at the photo.
“I don’t want her identified,” he said. His reasons would remain unstated. “You can say it was a project for a magazine. Photos of people in front of churches.”
“She was beautiful,” she said.
When he took the picture, he thought he knew her from somewhere, like a memory of a place one visited and not remembering in what city or when it was. Her lips were open slightly showing a trace of a smile.
“Why did you take a picture of me?” she had asked.
He wanted to say it was because she looked kind and he found that beautiful, but he told her about the assignment instead.
“Sounds like an interesting project. I’d be interested in seeing the finished product.” The church bell rang and she looked up at the church.
“The service is about to start,” she said. “You’re welcome to join me.”
They sat together toward the back. He felt that she was watching him, though she looked straight ahead. During the singing of hymns he imagined her listening to him sing and heard his voice as if through her ears. He sung in a soft voice except when the music was in his vocal range; then his singing became louder and confident. At times he felt they were the only two people there.
They met for coffee the next day, and that evening went to a dinner party at a restaurant with her friends. Her friends were artists, painters mostly. One person in the group was a photographer named Noah who knew of Robert’s work though Noah was more well known. He was mostly friendly except for an occasional passive-aggressive barb that would come out of nowhere as happened that night when he asked Robert, “Are you still taking pictures of people staring into space?” This was followed by a just-kidding smile.
Katie told him later she was sorry Noah said that as he drove her back to her apartment. Katie painted watercolors on outings with the group, though she didn’t consider herself to be an artist. She painted watercolors, sometimes with her group of friends, but also alone. Her paintings were of places she had visited, people she had known, but mostly of nature. “I like seeing things that live in the silence surrounding them – apart from words that describe them,” she told him. “I love words, but nature and silence make me feel pure.”
One year later he and Katie were married; the friends he had met that night attended the wedding; they all remained friends for years. He liked all of her friends, though was guarded when he was with Noah.
***
“I wonder what people will think about what she might have been thinking in that photo,” Joyce said. It was starting to rain harder, the roof a sounding board for the rain drops. Joyce’s elbows were on the table, and she rested her head in her hands.
“Impossible to say. Largely pleasant thoughts is my guess.”
“Yes. I would say that.” She looked at it again.
“Any other photos of her that you’d like to include?”
“None,” he said. He had taken a photo of Katie the night she died. There was no reason to mention it to Joyce or anyone else for that matter.
She died while they were traveling on vacation through Morocco with the same group of friends he had known since they had first met, including Noah, the photographer. On that night they were taken to a place where they learned how to cook in a tanzine. They then sat around a long table to eat the food they had made, and shortly after they finished and comments about the food died down, Katie was suddenly very tired and said that she needed to lie down. Robert and Noah took her to an adjoining room that was dimly lit. She lay on a couch and fell asleep almost immediately, a faint smile on her face.
He grabbed his camera from the other room and took several pictures, adjusting for light each time, trying to highlight the face surrounded by the darkness of the room.
Some time later someone said that Katie wasn’t breathing. Three people tried artificial respiration and CPR which was continued in the ambulance. At the hospital she was wheeled into a room. He waited with Noah for any news. Several minutes later, a nurse came out; Katie had been dead for an hour, she told them. That meant that the people in the ambulance had been trying to resuscitate a dead woman, Robert remembered thinking.
The nurse told Robert she thought it was cardiac arrest; they wouldn’t know for sure until the medical examiner arrived, she said. “She didn’t have a heart problem,” Robert said, half believing that this fact would render the nurse’s words incorrect. “Yes, that can happen some time. I’m sorry I don’t have more information to give you. I’m very sorry for your loss.” The nurse put her arms on Robert and Noah’s shoulders as they both wept.
The days that followed were a confusion of paperwork, interviews with officials, and sorrow. In a conversation with Noah just before he left for him, Robert said he didn’t know whether she had already died when he took the photo of her on the couch.
“I think she was alive,” Noah said.
Robert chose to believe him. The picture he took of Katie that night would remain in his memory as the last photo of her before she died.
***
It was now ten o’clock; the selection and sorting of photos was completed. Proof sized pictures were laid out on the large table; those that didn’t fit were placed on the floor. All were assorted according to which ones would be on each of four walls of the room where the exhibit would be.
“We should have a picture of you,” Robert said.
“I don’t think I want to be in the exhibit.”
“No one will know who you are.”
“The people who work at the museum will.”
“So what. We’ll put it at the very end.” He picked up his camera lying in a corner of the room.
“What should I do? How do you want me to sit?”
“Don’t do anything. Don’t think about anything. I’ll just take pictures.”
After viewing the photos on the camera’s screen she said, “I like the one that doesn’t look like me.”
“You’re right. It doesn’t look like you. What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking I didn’t like this. OK, now I want to take one of you to include in the exhibit.”
“Fair enough. But you only get to take one.”
“What do I do?”
“The camera is on auto-focus and I’ve adjusted for exposure. Just aim. The camera will do the rest.” She took the photo and after viewing it he frowned.
“Why are you frowning? It captured you perfectly.”
He ignored her. “Let’s look at what we have,” he said and they walked around the room viewing the exhibit.
“How much of the conversations with the people in the photos do you remember without looking at your notes?” she asked.
“The notes just nudge my memory.”
“So you remember them all?”
He didn’t answer. It was now raining harder and he could tell that the run-off was filling a creek in the back of the house. The rushing water would eventually form a waterfall in the middle of the creek, reaching its maximum later that night. Joyce sat down, and Robert walked around the table of photos again. He imagined Katie by his side, asking her what she saw and in doing so seeing them through her eyes. The photos were a retrospective of images spanning many years without a timeline. “They’re timeless; best viewed in silence,” she would say. No more needed to be said, he thought, and bowed his head in reverence to the stillness.
a|bout the Author
Barry Garelick writes about time, memory, and people facing transitions in their lives. His fiction is published in Empyrean Literary Magazine, Cafe Lit, Opiate, and Fiction on the Web. He lives in Morro Bay, California with his wife
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