Picturing Will (27 page)

Though I have decided to give you a key and to tempt you to read my words, finally, I think that the flashlight I bring into the driveway will be your primary help, in terms of illumination
.

Enough. There have already been enough conclusions. You have always been so smart about implied questions, ever since you first looked up at me and seemed, in that first glance, to take in everything
I wanted. Then
you
became the questioner, not me. When I came into your mother’s life, I recall distinctly, you didn’t make a scene. You stayed calm, as any intelligent adult would in the face of an intruder. Maybe you thought I’d sneak off under cover of darkness, taking only the jewels—or the cameras, in this case. Maybe because you knew only what happened day to day and didn’t have a clear idea of what your life would be, you considered me not so much an intruder but a phenomenon, like a flash shower or a sudden gift of new Keds
.

If your wide-eyed wonder was resentment, I never knew it. You came to love me—that much is clear. Though I have done other things through the years, I still think of myself as the person who knelt so many times to tie your shoelaces. Who needed to see them double-knotted, and to know that you were safe, again, from tripping. I could have identified your feet—and still could, I see them so clearly—in a lineup of a hundred children
.

Off we marched—maybe even hand in hand—to whatever was ahead of us, which I sometimes had no more idea of than you. But you thought I did. You may also have thought that it came naturally to me to bite my tongue when I felt like cursing, or that it was easy to stop when the caution light flashed yellow, instead of gunning the car
.

Do you see all this as altruistic? Of course it wasn’t that, however much I might like to imply, now, that it was. I didn’t see you as a hurdle: You were the simple stepping-stone to her heart. Then, to my surprise, I started to love you
.

I remember taking you out in a brook to fish, and finding that the rocks were slippery, and that the water moved faster than it seemed to from the shore. I went back and got our shoes, yours and mine—I had to take care of you, after all
—
and endured your protests that only sissies wore shoes out on the rocks. Later, I got in trouble with your mother for getting your new shoes soaking wet
.

Who was the real child? Who was naïve? Let the current rush around us, I thought, heady, as I often was, with my certainty that we’d stand firm. That we’d make it. Always. Every time we tempted fate
.

PART III
CHILD

TWENTY-ONE

I
t sits on the piano in the living room—the
Vogue
photograph taken twenty years before. When the picture was shot, Will was urged to look not at the camera but at the photographer’s raised hand, fingers wiggling like tiny fish splashing in the air. It is a photograph in which he looks somber and his mother beautiful. Her eyes could have bored through the lens. As he nestles in her arms, naked from the waist up, Will’s skin looks like porcelain. Turned only an inch farther to the left, Jody’s lips could have grazed his fashionably long hair. Previously, the picture sat on Jody and Mel’s night table, but in recent years it has moved first to the Biedermeier chest, then to the piano. Except for the times Will visits Connecticut, he forgets the photograph, but once he enters the house he finds that he gravitates toward it. It is a conventional portrait, in its way—the people are attractive, the photograph well lit, but still: not as evocative as the photographer had hoped.

He is so in love with his wife. Through the living-room window he can see Amanda, standing on the lawn talking to Mel, swaying slightly to keep their baby relaxed as he slumbers in her arms. But actually, it must be out of habit that she cups her hand behind his head and shifts gently from foot to foot; the baby has been sleeping deeply almost from the moment they left New York. The motion of the car puts the baby to sleep.

Today is his mother’s birthday, and he and Amanda and their son are putting in a command performance. On his birthday, Will usually receives only a card. Amanda’s birthday often goes unacknowledged. Jody has been consistent through the years: Her time and energy are still reserved for her career. She is more expansive with the hangers-on than she is with Will, Amanda, or Mel. The house is often filled with adoring acolytes or journalists who stay an extra hour or an extra day, during which time everything goes off the record and they hear Jody’s version of how she became so successful. For years, to all but family, she has been known simply as Jo.

Revisionism set in long ago. As she tells it, although Haveabud conceived of himself as divinely inspired and always pirouetting on the cutting edge, he was really a rather fatuous neurotic whom she successfully manipulated, knowing better than he what the marketplace wanted.

Haveabud. It is amazing to Will that even at Columbia University, where Will is an art historian, Haveabud’s name sometimes comes up, or appears as a footnote in some book or article about contemporary American art. He is in Paris now, reunited with some former painters he once represented whom he turned into performance artists. Apparently, he became something of an overnight sensation abroad. Several years ago, Amanda found a photograph in a magazine of Haveabud, at a fund-raiser in a private home on Avenue Foch. Like all people the media elevate to stardom, Haveabud learned how to smile.

Will still exchanges Christmas cards with Corky, who is a nurse’s aide in Coral Gables.

Wayne has not been heard from since at least fifteen years ago, when he sent Will a postcard from Mexico City.

Wagoner died at sixteen, drowned with another boy when their boat capsized.

Though Will and Amanda were almost two hours late, Jody was not prepared for their arrival. Her distaste for schedules and for doing the expected has become even greater with the passage of time. Looking around the living room, Will reflects that there is not even a particular chair that might be said to be her favorite. Mel has had to fight to keep his old blue chair, though she still threatens to give it away. She alternates between teasing Mel and being so conciliatory that Will can only think her attitude is condescending. (“Darling,” she said to Mel the last time Will and Amanda visited, when he told Amanda, in great detail, about his desperate courtship of Jody, “it’s perfectly all right to be conventional. You know I’ve always found it charming.”)

There is a puppy. After so many years of protesting, Jody is now so fond of the puppy that she takes it into the bathroom with her when she bathes. She is upstairs now, calling downstairs that she will be down momentarily. He can hear water draining from the bathtub. The puppy whining to be let out.

Will goes into the kitchen to get something cold to drink. Mel’s medicine is kept in the refrigerator. He looks away and takes a glass from the shelf. It is a wine goblet, but what does it matter? He shakes the orange juice and pours half a glass. Closing the refrigerator door, he thinks: Florida Sweet. That was the brand Corky bought. Florida Sweet orange juice. He had been so helpless. Helpless in the motel room with Haveabud and Spencer. Helpless when the police led his father away—the beginning of the end of Wayne’s marriage to Corky.

Jody was absent too many times and wanted to hear too few things. If not for Mel, he might have been sent to Florida more often. Years later he found out that when Mel got the call to come get him, Mel was furious, because he had wanted all along to stay in Florida in a motel and wait while Will had his visit. If only that could have happened. If only Mel could have been there in fifteen minutes, instead of the next morning. Corky had clutched him and cried—the two of them alone, in that sad house.

On the other hand, Mel was hardly a hero. He should have made Jody face up to the fact that she was his mother. Or was it to Mel’s advantage that she let him take over? Was that part of the bargain—Mel’s caring for Jody’s child as a condition of marriage?

Years ago Will had started to tell Jody about Haveabud, and she had shushed him. Nothing negative could be said about her manic mentor.

He had been so close to Mel. Why hadn’t he told Mel? Perhaps he had tried, and he had blocked out Mel’s response. Or perhaps—this was the way he remembered it—Mel had been so shaky when he arrived back in Florida that Will realized he should not bring up anything that might cause further trouble.

The dog comes bounding down the stairs, tail swishing, sniffing its way to Will, in the kitchen.

This is what will happen now: Jody will descend the stairs, and soon there will be exclamations about the baby’s beauty and compliments on the dog’s amusing energy. Mel will open a bottle of champagne, and the birthday cake on the kitchen counter will have its three candles lit (one for the last year, one for the next, and one to grow on), and then Jody will make a wish and blow them out.

The rest of the day, though, will not be so predictable. As they take an evening walk, Mel is going to give Will a key, and tell him that there are papers he wants him to know about, in the event anything happens to him. Nervously, Will will put the key in his pants pocket and try to change the subject. “They’re only things I’ve written—not official documents,” Mel will say.

Things he’s written?

Later that night, he will know what those things are. Having opened the locked metal box in the carriage house where he and Amanda always sleep, he will sit on the floor and untie the string around a heavy cardboard envelope. He will flip through a few pages, then read only the first paragraph before sitting in a chair to read more. He will read:

Of course you do not want the child to be a ventriloquist’s dummy, but if there could be a bit more sitting on the knee, a little less of the back of the head and more of the profile as you spoke, that might be all the better. The child that reminds you of your own mortality needs so much tending to—so many wisps of hair brushed off the forehead, so many dollar bills handed out, so many anklet cuffs turned down, so much humming to accompany the soprano-sung solo—that it is almost impossible to decide whether to be as quick-talking as an escaped convict, or as patient as a penitent
.

For hours, Will will not put it down. He always knew the care Mel took raising him, but now he will also sense a sort of narcissism difficult to separate, at times, from true involvement: an almost militant desire that things go well, or at least have a rationale, after the fact.

All those years Jody was photographing, Mel was writing.

But what does Mel want? To explain that everything was more difficult than it seemed? To impress with his sensitivity? To have his writing published? Because Jody’s notoriety would certainly mean that such a manuscript would be of great interest.

No. Mel never misled him. If Mel wanted the manuscript published, he would either have said so or have done it himself.

The next day, should he say that he read Mel’s writing? Should he awaken Amanda? Or crawl into bed and nestle against her? Or just sit there with his eyes closed, listening to the breeze blowing through the trees?

With his eyes closed, he remembers a moment earlier in the evening—sees it as if he could at once be part of the scene and also absent himself from it to take a photograph. He smiles at this strange desire. Is the desire to photograph genetically encoded—or at least entirely predictable when parents have young children? Will has his imaginary photograph but knows that others would see him differently.

They would see a young man standing on a wide green lawn. His eyes are quite brilliant when he first looks up. Only when he fixes a more even gaze on you do they gradually become less intense: what most people call kind eyes.

Mel has given the baby a bright red ball. The child holds it, unsure. He looks at his father.

Across the distance, Will smiles and speaks. He nods, holding out his hand.

The child’s knees bend as he does a skittish little dance. Then, holding his arms stiffly, fists behind his hips, he jumps high and lands slightly crouched, looking something the way penguins did before they became extinct.

“Throw the ball,” Will says, smiling in an attempt to persuade the child. “Come on. You have to let go of it sometime. Come on, baby, throw me the ball.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A
NN
B
EATTIE
lives in Charlottesville,
Virginia, with her husband, the painter
Lincoln Perry.