Chapter 18
Professor Vic Connelly came off like Hollywood’s version of a slightly past-his-prime photog. That’s what they called them in the business. Photogs.
He had the rough-hewn good looks of a middle-aged Robert Redford. He never seemed to comb his thick, sandy hair, but it always appeared perfect, just the same. In his khakis and denim shirts, still draped with that photographer’s utility vest he’d worn in every stinking shithole and hot spot around the globe, he still looked like he could hack it in the field.
But as Amanda watched him during his captivating Journ 101 lectures, with the auditorium filled to capacity and coeds gazing dreamily up at him, she knew better. He had grown soft. Comfortable. This was kryptonite for a photog, who thirsted for the action. Those mosquito-infested, shithole hotel rooms. The bumpy rides on the back of jeeps and trucks, whose blown-out shocks and rigid suspension systems sent jolts up one’s back with every pothole. The smell of decay in the killing fields. The dark, awful sight of blood in the dirt. The surprised yet lifeless eyes of the dead. And the god-awful, animal-like howls of the wounded.
No. Vic – Professor Connelly – had left all that behind. Now, he had an old, arty house in a small college town. No doubt, the place was bedecked with framed, oversized prints of all his most famous images. And he clearly had his pick of coeds cowed by his credentials, his wise, knowing words, his heady, intellectual conversations and those irrepressible wisdom wrinkles at the corners of emerald-green Irish eyes. Eyes that had seen so much. Eyes that could see what no one else could as the tableaus of war, crime and inhumanity played out before them.
Eyes that could only pretend to smile because of all they had witnessed around the world.
But Amanda could see. She saw the hint of hollowness behind them. And no number of couplings with sexually adventurous twenty-year-olds, no amount of ego-boosting lectures in front of adoring students and no portion of ponderous faculty dinners and university functions would ever fill the void.
Amanda saw all of this and more, as she watched her professor in the grand lecture hall, his whiskey-varnished voice echoing in the sound system. And she knew how she would win him over, too.
Because she wanted him and all that he knew. She wanted to be all the places he had been. And she wanted to see through his vacant, yet powerful eyes that had perceived and captured so much history over the years.
So her pursuit of this wisdom, this quest for personal knowledge through conquest, began after class on fine, fall day.
As usual, a column of coeds surrounded the professor. He was taking their questions, inspiring their minds and basking in their fawning praise that so inflated his ego. It was a nice touch that Professor Connelly had put one of his own photo books on the class’s required-reading syllabus. It was a good way to juice his royalties. And because he and his introductory course were so popular, he sold a lot of books. And to cut down the number that ended up on the re-sell market, he personally autographed the books for his students – and many students who wanted his signature on the title page. All, so the books became keepsakes, rather than dispensable, returnable college texts.
Amanda had to admire him for this. Vic Connelly was playing all the angles. He was comfortable, all right. Too damn comfortable. And she knew that deep down, the photog he once had been loathed this later self. And he longed for action. For challenge. For adventure.
Amanda took a seat in the front row of the auditorium, waiting until the mutual admiration society that surrounded the professor died off. It was a long wait. There was some un-witty banter, some thinly veiled sexual advances – all from the young women, no less. And there were autographs. The professor couldn’t resist. He couldn’t help himself. He was a middle-aged man in a candy store of coeds. What man wouldn’t take advantage? No doubt, phone numbers were exchanged. Perhaps the willing young woman would text a sexual selfie, showing all she had to offer the professor in the form of after-class extra credit.
Watching this, getting a glimpse at the substantial and motivated competition, some young women might become discouraged. Some might even retreat and surrender, believing that another woman would claim this man, this older professor on the make.
But Amanda harbored no such insecurities. Like a good journalist, she had studied her subject. And she had practiced her pitch. And as the last smitten student shuffled away from the podium, their autographed books still wet with black Sharpie ink, Amanda went for it.
She began snapping pictures, as the professor patted together his papers and shuffled them into his worn leather satchel. Instinctively, he heard the clicks of the camera’s shutter, even one as quiet as the little Lycia Amanda always carried.
“Who’s there?” the professor asked blindly, raising a hand against the spotlight that bore down on the podium and blacked out his audience beyond the small stage.
Amanda kept clicking off pictures. The professor, his eyes narrowed and his forehead furrowed, walked ahead to the apron of the stage. Out of the focus of the light, his eyes readjusted on Amanda. Camera to her eye, finger on the shutter button, she clicked off a few more images.
“Hey,” the professor protested, raising a hand as if to shield his face. “I hate pictures.”
“That’s an odd thing to say,” Amanda observed, her British accent echoing in the large, empty space.
“I hate pictures taken of me,” he corrected.
“But you’re out from behind the lens, Professor,” Amanda pointed out. “You are a subject, now. An author. An intellectual. A professor of extensive accomplishment.”
He dipped his head and shook it.
“I’m not interesting,” he mumbled, then began turning away.
“You’re right,” Amanda said in a loud, clear voice, halting the professor. She lowered the camera from her eye, as he turned around.
“So I bore you?” he asked. “My lectures?”
“Yes,” Amanda answered, rising from her seat. “It’s canned. Rehearsed. I can tell you said the same thing a hundred times.”
“Maybe you should drop the course,” he advised, even as his eyes locked on Amanda as she stepped up the staircase to the stage. Her shoes clicked on the wood and echoed in the room.
Once on the same stage as the professor, she said, “Maybe you should drop the act?”
She walked across the stage to one of her photojournalist heroes, as he tried to make sense of the curious subject before him.
“You want an autograph?” he asked. But his own voice sounded meek and pathetic to him.
Amanda grunted a sarcastic laugh.
“I didn’t even buy your book, Professor,” she stated.
“But,” he stammered. “It’s required.”
“I remember when your images used to be required,” she said, stopping right in front of him, staring straight into his still-confused eyes. “Essential to the public. Essential to the world. Essential to humanity.”
The silence was deafening as she examined him.
Under the power of her stare, he felt naked and inadequate. But why?
“Besides, I have all your images,” Amanda added. “All the essential ones. The ageless, timeless icons that you give to the world.”
“So what’s with the camera?” He jerked his head to the Lycia dangling from her shoulder strap. “Why the pictures of me?”
“A case study,” she answered, then stared at him for a long moment with those penetrating, nearly painful, eyes.
“Of what?” he asked.
“Of you,” she answered, as if this were obvious. “And of what happens to a legendary photog after he hangs up the lens.”
He looked down, and his face seemed to sag.
“Who the fuck would read that?” he scoffed, his voice ringing with derision and self-loathing.
“I would,” she said. “I want the inside story. Not the shit you shovel in your lectures. I want to smell and taste and hear the front lines. I want how it really was. How you saw it. How you shot it and brought it
back.”
He stared at the wood of the stage, then shook his head.
“I can’t go back there,” he said. “It’s another life. Hell, it seems like another person.”
“That’s the first truthful thing you’ve said all day,” Amanda replied. “Because this bullshitter standing in front of me sure as hell isn’t Vic Connelly. No way in hell.”
He lifted his head, and for the first time, there was fire in his eye.
“Who in hell do you think--”
“There,” she said, quickly raising her camera and snapping images.
“Hey,” he protested, raising a hand. “I told you about that.”
“That’s the Connelly I know,” Amanda said. “I’ll soup these and bring them over.”
“Over?”
“Yeah,” she answered. “Tonight. Your place.”
“You still use film?” he asked.
Amanda just stared back, then cocked her head in a what-do-you-think pose. Then, she turned and left.
And Vic Connelly watched her as if nailed to his spot on the stage.
By damned, he thought. I did feel it. There for a second, I actually felt something.
And then a voice in his head answered:
“Life,” it said. “That’s what it feels like being alive, Vic, my boy.”