Past Due (29 page)

I found a place to park with time on the meter. How lucky was that? Half an hour, I wouldn’t need much more, a couple quarters doubled it, and then I was on my way. I knew where she was, she had said a smart cracker like me could find it, and I was and I did. Skink had given me the address, an old rehabbed factory building, Skink had given me the security code to the front door, a pair of binoculars was all it took, he said, to snag that. No need to use the intercom, 53351 and I was in. Up the threadbare stairs, one flight, two flights, there was only one door on the third floor, large, metal, rusted around the edges and at the seams, the entrance to an old sweatshop of some sort. I gave it a bang.

“What was his new hobby,” I had asked. I thought it would be photography, I had the damn photographs, it had to be photography, but that wasn’t what Sylvia was referring to.

“What was his new hobby?”

“He started keeping a journal,” she said. “A diary. Wouldn’t let me peek, it was all very serious, very secret, but I could see him working all through the night, scribbling away, scribbling, scribbling.

‘What are you doing all that for?’ I asked him once. And what he said I thought was so terribly pretentious, so unlike him, that I knew it had come from someone else.”

“What did he say?”

“Only this. He said, ‘I’m turning my life into art.’ ”

I knocked again.

Footsteps. The door creaked open wide and there it was, smiling at me, the face I had been wondering about from the first time I had spied her naked body on those photographs.

“Come in, please. I’ve been expecting you for some time now.”

Oh, I bet she had.

A
BOVE HER WRITING
desk, framed and written out in fine calligraphy, was a peculiar quotation that I remember for its apt strangeness. There was much to see in the huge studio loft of Alura Straczynski, fine paintings on the walls, photographs, colorful scarves tacked to the plaster as if billowing in the wind. There was a couch and a chair and a huge four-poster bed that sat in the center as if an altar to some great pagan entity. The ceiling was open and rough, with a web of pipes and wires over the beams and large gas heaters yawning down. The floor was apparently the same wide and scarred old wood that had been there when the building had been raised a century before. A scent of musk and flowers and exotic incense permeated the space, a scent that was both warm and intensely feminine. And there were the books, journals in all shapes and sizes, arranged neatly in a great mahogany bookcase standing up by the desk. They sat on their shelves like the collected ledgers of a venerable corporation, so many of them that it almost seemed the purpose of that space was to create and to house and to protect them. But it was the quotation that struck me most forcibly, a quotation from a man with whom I often could identify, another urban Jew suffering an intense bout of dislocation, Franz Kafka:

And now, here I was.

Alura Straczynski, lover of Tommy Greeley and subject of his most ardent photographs, stood pensively by the door as I examined her loft. She wore a lose peasant shirt unbuttoned at the top, a long gauzy skirt, her hands were clasped one in the other, her arms held before her like a V. There was something of a dancer’s grace in the way she held herself back, tensed with anticipation. I couldn’t help but examine her closely, more closely than I ever had before, trying to see in her something of the woman in the photographs. Her thin arms, the long legs I could glimpse beneath her diaphanous skirt.

She caught me staring and smiled and there was something about the smile I didn’t like.

I turned away and examined again the large open space. There was a small kitchenette in one corner, a door leading to a bathroom in another, and by the window stood the tall writing desk with the framed quotation above it. No chair or stool squatted before it, just the desk, its upper surface about chest high and tilted slightly back, a heavy journal open atop it, a fountain pen and a pair of glasses resting atop the journal.

I noticed a framed photograph on the wall near the desk that looked familiar. I stepped toward it. A young Alura Straczynski, taken from the neck up, her shoulders bare, her head held at a dramatic angle. Where had I seen this photograph before? Yes, in the Mayan slate frame in Jackson Straczynski’s office. But there was something else that tolled familiar in the shot. The texture of her skin, the blank backdrop, the angle of the capture, the way the camera seemed to caress her features. I hadn’t noticed it when I had spotted it before but now it seemed obvious.

“Tommy Greeley took this,” I said.

“Why do you think so?”

“I’ve seen other examples of his work.”

“Have you indeed?” That damn smile again, as if she knew exactly what I had pinned to my bedroom wall.

“What is this?” I said, looking around.

“This is my studio.”

“And what do you do here?”

“Whatever I choose,” she said. “This is my sacred place. Sometimes I dance naked. Sometimes I paint.”

“Naked?” I said, staring once again at her. Her smile seemed strangely knowing.

“If I choose,” she said. “But most importantly, I write. My journals. Recording my life with complete honesty is what I consider my most important work.”

“Life into art.”

“Yes, like we talked about. But it is more than just the glistening surface, Victor, though I want the surface to glisten. No, I have to admit to a grander ambition. I want to travel deeper, into the murky realms that have always seemed to defy exploration, into the very heart of what it means to be a woman. Some spend years in analysis to peer there. I have spent a lifetime with my journals, recording and rerecording, sifting, analyzing, distilling. Searching for that one unmentionable truth at the very bottom.”

“The last thing,” I said.

“If that’s how you want to put it. And my studio is the tool I use to get there, so to speak. The ax for the frozen sea within. I sit here and the world comes to me, just as you have, dear Victor, and whatever happens in this loft is my raw material.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Come over here and I’ll show you,” she said.

She moved toward the tall writing desk, almost glided there, and I followed, as if impelled by some unknown spell. She put on her glasses, took up the pen, a fine fountain pen with a golden nib.

“Stand closer,” she said, and I did, until I could feel the heat off her shoulders, smell the fresh scent of her dark hair. Standing beside her as I was, I could lean forward and peer over her shoulder onto the pages of the journal. She dashed the pen in the air twice, put the date and time into the journal, and began to write in a careful and lovely script.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s wrong with my tie.”

“Shhhh,” she said. “Just read.”

“What are you doing?” I said.

“I am writing as truthfully as I can,” she said. “I seem always to be more honest on the page than I ever can be with the spoken word. The barriers are lowered when I write. You want the honest truth, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then read,” she said.

“This is too weird,” I said.

“Stop it,” I said. “I’m not,” I said, even though I was, even though I couldn’t stop looking at both her neck and her words, and I very much didn’t want her to stop writing. There was something drawing me out, her very presence so close, the heat from her body, the words that seemed to cut so close to her bone, my obsession with the photographs from her youth that had captured me from the first.

I pulled my attention from the drifting line of prose and there she was, staring at me, her eyes soft, her lips red with life, leaning toward me, into me, her hip on my hip, her shoulder on my chest, her chin raised, her face so close to my own that I could feel her halting breath as she waited for me to take her in my arms, to press my body into hers, to feel that urgent moment of discovery as I kiss her. As I kiss her. Kiss her. Her. Kiss her.

For the moment I wanted to, it was all I wanted to do. I saw not her but the photographs pinned to my wall, the lines, the hollows, the soft arcs of flesh, and all I wanted to do was kiss her and hold her and feel that body, whose every curve and blemish I knew, against my own.

But I didn’t.

Because that moment flashed through me in the quick of a blink and suddenly the spell was broken. Who I saw before me was not the woman of the photographs, a woman who lived truly only in the fevered artistry of Tommy Greeley’s eye, but Alura Straczynski. And Alura Straczynski was not that woman now, and had most likely not been that woman then, no matter that it was her arms, breasts, hips, hands in those photographs. The only truth in art is in the artist’s soul. The subject, in the presence of the art, is always a lie.

So I didn’t kiss her. So what I did instead was back away.

She stared at me for a moment, puzzlement at first creasing the moist expectation in her face and then she smiled with a peculiar amazement, like a scientist finding a strange and wondrous result in the most banal of places, Alexander Fleming examining his spoiled petri dish.

“Is that how you seduced Tommy Greeley?” I said. “With your journals.”

“I didn’t seduce Tommy,” she said. “He seduced me.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“As if the bed wasn’t sign enough of your willingness?”

“There was no bed then. It was open space, with a mirror on the wall and a barre. I was then primarily a dancer. He was my husband’s friend. We double-dated. Occasionally, on the walks to one restaurant or another, we would have a private talk. And then one night he quietly asked if he could come to my studio and watch me dance. I looked away, shyly, I was very shy in those days, but I whispered yes. And as I danced for him, I realized how much I liked being at the center of his attention. He read me poems, Byron—
‘And the midnight moon is weaving her bright chain o’er the deep’
—and I danced to the rhythms of the verse, and it was strange and magical and I liked it in a way that shocked me. Then said he wanted to photograph me. He said he admired my lines.”

“That’s a pretty good one right there.”

“Yes, it is, isn’t it? He photographed me dancing at first. In my leotards. My movements, my positions. And as the session wore on, I could feel his emotions veer out of his control, as if my very movements conjured up his desire. But then he had a different idea.
At first I said no. Absolutely not. I was happily married, devoted to my husband, why would I allow that? But when I woke up in the middle of the night and tossed in my husband’s arms, I imagined the emotions of it, the vulnerability of it, the thrilling sense of violation. I wrote and wrote, pages, whole sections, working it out in my journals, what it might mean, stepping over the boundaries, opening my life up to what? And then, after enough thought, I found I couldn’t stop myself.”

“Is that always your excuse?”

She laughed. “Of course you are right. Remember when I said I have a harder time being honest with the spoken word. The rationalizations slip in without my even realizing it. I didn’t want to stop myself. He threw a carpet down on the floor and then a sheet over the carpet and he laid me down in various poses. The bright lights, the soft linen beneath me, the sound of his camera clicking and spinning, the movement of my naked body, his presence hovering above me with that hard black object and its single thrilling eye. The sex seemed an inconsequential step after opening myself to him that way.”