“Your dreams,” Paul said. “Yours, not mine.”
David was silent, realizing that once, indeed, those had been exactly his dreams. He’d set out to fix the world, to change it and shape it, and instead he was driving in the flooding moonlight with his nearly grown son, and every aspect of his life seemed beyond his grasp.
“Yes,” he said. “Those were my dreams.”
“What if I could be the next Segovia?” Paul asked. “Think of it, Dad. What if I have it in me to do that, and I don’t try?”
David didn’t answer. He’d reached their street again, and this time he turned toward home. They pulled into the driveway, bouncing a little over the uneven edge where it met the street, and stopped in front of the detached garage. David turned off the car, and for a few seconds they sat in silence.
“It’s not true that I don’t care,” David said. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
He led Paul out into the moonlight and up the exterior stairs to the darkroom above the garage. Paul stood by the closed door, his arms folded, radiating impatience, while David set up the developing process, pouring out the chemicals and sliding the negative into the enlarger. Then he called Paul over.
“Look at this,” he said. “What do you think it is?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Paul crossed the room and looked. “A tree?” he said. “It looks like a silhouette of a tree.”
“Good,” David said. “Now look again. I took this during surgery, Paul. I stood up on the balcony of the operating theater with a telephoto lens. Can you see what else it is?”
“I don’t know … is it a heart?”
“A heart, yes. Isn’t that amazing? I’m doing a whole perception series, images of the body that look like something else. Sometimes I think the entire world is contained within each living person. That mystery, and the mystery of perception—I care about that. So I understand what you mean about music.”
David sent concentrated light through the enlarger, then slid the paper into the developer. He was deeply aware of Paul standing next to him in the darkness and the silence.
“Photography is all about secrets,” David said, after a few minutes, lifting the photo with a pair of tongs and slipping it into the fixer. “The secrets we all have and will never tell.”
“That’s not what music is like,” Paul said, and David heard the rejection in his son’s voice. He looked up, but it was impossible to read Paul’s expression in the soft red light. “Music is like you touch the pulse of the world. Music is always happening, and sometimes you get to touch it for a while, and when you do you know that everything’s connected to everything else.”
Then he turned and walked out of the darkroom.
“Paul!” David called, but his son was already clattering angrily down the exterior steps. David went out to the window, watching him run through the moonlight and up the back stairs and disappear inside. Moments later a light went on in his room, and the precise notes of Segovia drifted clearly and delicately through the air.
David, running over their conversation in his mind, considered going after him. He’d wanted to connect with Paul, to have a moment when they understood each other, but his good intentions had spiraled into argument and distance. After a moment, he turned and went back to the darkroom. The soft red light was very soothing. He considered what he’d said to Paul—that the world was made of hidden things, of secrets; built of bones that never saw the light. It was true that he’d once sought unity, as if the underlying correspondences between tulips and lungs, veins and trees, flesh and earth, might reveal a pattern he could understand. But they had not. In a few minutes he would go inside and get a drink of water. He would walk upstairs and find Norah already asleep, and he would stand watching her—this mystery, a person he would never really know, curled around her secrets.
David went to the mini refrigerator where he kept his chemicals and film. The envelope was tucked far in the back, behind several bottles. It was full of twenty dollar bills, new and crisp and cold. He counted out ten, then twenty, and put the envelope away, behind the bottles. The bills sat neatly on the counter.
Usually he mailed the money, wrapped in a sheet of blank paper, but tonight, Paul’s anger lingering in the room, his music floating on the air, David sat down and wrote a letter. He wrote swiftly, letting the words pour out, all his regrets about the past, all his hopes for Phoebe. Who was she, this child of his flesh, the girl he had given away? He had not expected that she would live this long, or that she would have the sort of life Caroline wrote him about. He thought of his son, sitting all alone on the stage, and of the loneliness Paul carried with him everywhere. Was it the same for Phoebe? What would it have meant to them to grow up together, like Norah and Bree, different in every way yet intimately connected too? What would it have meant to David if June had not died? I would like very much to meet Phoebe, he wrote. I would like her to know her brother, and for him to know her. Then he folded the letter around the money without rereading it, put it all in an envelope, and addressed it. Sealed it, stamped it. He would mail it tomorrow.
Moonlight poured in through the windows in the gallery space. Paul had stopped playing. David gazed at the moon, higher in the sky now, yet distinct and sharply rendered against the darkness. He’d made a choice, on the beach; he’d left Norah’s clothes lying on the sand, her laughter spilling into the light. He’d gone back to the cottage and worked with the photos, and when she’d come in, an hour or so later, he hadn’t said a thing about Howard. He’d kept this silence because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had created hers.
Now he went back into the darkroom and searched through his most recent roll of film. He’d taken some candid photos during the dinner party: Norah, carrying a tray of glasses, Paul standing by the grill with his cup lifted, various shots of them all relaxing on the porch. It was the final image he wanted; once he found it, he cast it with light onto the paper. In the developing bath, he watched the image emerge slowly, grain by tiny grain, something appearing where nothing had been. This was always, for David, an experience of intense mystery. He watched as the image took shape, Norah and Howard on the porch, lifting their glasses of wine in a toast, laughing. A moment both innocent and charged; a moment when a choice was being made. David took the photograph from the developer, but he didn’t slide it into the fixer. Instead, he went into the gallery room and stood in the moonlight with the wet photo in his hands, looking at his house, darkened now, Paul and Norah inside, dreaming their private dreams, moving in their own orbits, their lives constantly shaped by the gravity of the choice he’d made so many years ago.
In the darkroom again, he hung the photograph of that moment to dry. Unfinished, unfixed, the image wouldn’t last. Over the next hours, light would work on the exposed paper. The picture of Norah laughing with Howard would slowly darken until—within a day or two—it would be completely black.
II
THEY WERE WALKING ON THE TRACKS, DUKE MADISON WITH his hands shoved in the pockets of the leather jacket he’d found at Goodwill, Paul kicking at stones that zinged against the rails. A train whistle sounded, distant. In silent accord, the two boys stepped to the edge of the tracks, their feet still on the westward rail, balancing. The train was coming for a long time, the rail beneath them vibrating, the engine a speck, growing steadily larger and darker, the driver blasting on the horn. Paul looked at Duke, whose eyes were alive with the risk and danger, and felt that rising excitement in his own flesh, too much to bear almost, with the train closer and closer and the wild horn sounding through all the neighborhood streets and far beyond. There was the light and the engineer visible in the high window and the horn again, warning. Closer, the wind off the engine flattening weeds, he waited, looking at Duke, who stood balanced on the rail beside him, the train rushing, almost on them, and still they waited and waited and Paul thought he might never jump. And then he did, he was in the weeds and the train was
rushing a foot from his face. For an instant only the conductor’s expression, pale shock, and then the train—darkness and flash, darkness and flash—as the cars passed, and then it passed into the distance, and even the wind was gone.
Duke, a foot away, sat with his face raised to the overcast sky.
“Damn,” he said. “What a rush.”
The two boys brushed themselves off and started walking toward Duke’s place, a little shotgun house right by the tracks. Paul had been born over here, a few streets down, but even though his mother sometimes drove him over to see the little park with the gazebo and the house across from it where he’d first lived, she didn’t like him coming over here or to Duke’s. But what the hell, she was never around, and as long as his homework was done, which it was, and as long as he’d mowed the lawn and practiced the piano for an hour, which he had, he was free.
What she didn’t see wouldn’t hurt her. What she didn’t know.
“He was royally pissed off,” Duke said. “That train dude.”
“Yeah,” Paul said. “He sure as hell was.”
He liked swearing, and the memory of the hot wind on his face, and the way it quelled, for the moment anyway, this quiet rage. He’d gone running on the beach that morning in Aruba with a carefree heart, pleased at how the wet sand at the water’s edge gave just slightly beneath his feet, strengthening the muscles in his legs. Pleased, too, because the fishing trip with his father had fallen through. His father loved to fish, long hours sitting in silence in a boat or on a dock, casting and recasting and—every once in a while—the drama of a catch. Paul had loved it too, as a child, not the ritual of fishing as much as the chance to spend time with his father. But as he’d grown older, the fishing trips had come to seem more and more obligatory, like something his father planned because he couldn’t think what else to do. Or because they might bond; Paul imagined him reading it in some manual for parents. He’d gotten the facts of life on one vacation, sitting trapped in the boat on a lake in Minnesota as his father, turning red beneath his sunburn, talked about the realities of reproduction. These days, Paul’s future was his father’s favorite topic, his ideas about as interesting to Paul as a glassy flat expanse of water.
So he’d been happy to run on the beach, he’d been relieved, and he’d thought nothing of the pile of clothes at first, discarded in front of one of the little cottages so widely spaced beneath the casuarina trees. He had run right past them, deep in a rhythmic stride, his muscles making a kind of music that sustained him all the way to the rocky point. Then he stopped, walked circles for a while, and started running back, more slowly. The clothes had shifted: the sleeve of the blouse was flapping in the ocean wind, and the flamingos, bright pink, danced against the dark turquoise background. He slowed. It could have been anybody’s shirt. But his mother had one like it. They had laughed about it in the tourist shop in town; she had held it up, amused, and bought it as a joke.
So, okay, maybe there were a hundred, a thousand shirts like this around. Still, he leaned down and picked it up. His mother’s bathing suit, nubby, the color of flesh and unmistakable, fell out of the sleeve. Paul stood still, unable to move, as if he’d been caught stealing, as if a camera had flashed and pinned him. He dropped the shirt, but he still couldn’t move. Finally, he started walking, and then he was running back to their own cottage as if seeking sanctuary. He stood in the doorway, trying to pull himself together. His father had moved the bowl of oranges to the counter. He was arranging photos on the big wooden table. What’s wrong? he asked, looking up, but Paul couldn’t say. He went to his room and slammed the door and didn’t look up, not even when his father came and knocked on the door.
His mother was back two hours later, humming, the flamingo shirt tucked neatly into her tan shorts. “I thought I’d take a swim before lunch,” she said, as if everything might still be normal. “Want to come?” He shook his head and that was that, the secret, his secret, hers and now his, between them like a veil.
His father had secrets too, a life that happened at work or in the darkroom, and Paul had figured it was all normal, just the way families were, until he started hanging out with Duke, an awesome piano player he’d met in the band room one afternoon. The Madisons didn’t have much money, and the trains were so close the house shook and the windows rattled in their frames every time they passed, and Duke’s mom had never been on an airplane in her life. Paul knew he ought to feel sorry for her, his parents would; she had five kids and a husband who worked at the GE plant and wouldn’t ever make much money. But Duke’s dad liked to play ball with his boys, and he came home every night at six when the shift was over, and even though he didn’t talk any more than Paul’s own father did he was right there, and when he wasn’t they always knew where to find him.
“So whaddaya want to do?” Duke asked him.
“Dunno,” Paul said. “How about you?” The metal rails were still humming. Paul wondered where the train would finally stop. Wondered if anyone had seen him standing at the edge of the track, so close he could have reached out and touched a moving car, the wind slicing through his hair, stinging his eyes. And if they had seen him, what had they thought? Images moving past the train windows like a series of still photographs: one and another; a tree, yes; a rock, yes; a cloud, yes; and none the same. And then a boy, himself, with his head flung back, laughing. And then gone. A bush, electric lines, the flash of road.
“We could shoot some hoops.”
“Nah.”
They walked along the tracks. When they had crossed Rosemont Garden and were surrounded by tall grass, Duke stopped, fishing in the pockets of his leather jacket. His eyes were green, flecked with blue. Like the world, Paul thought. That’s how Duke’s eyes were. Like the view of the earth from the moon.
“Look here,” he was saying. “I got this last week from my cousin Danny.”
It was a small plastic bag full of dried green clippings.
“What is it,” Paul asked, “a bunch of dead grass?” As he spoke he understood, and he flushed, embarrassed, at what a geeky dork he was.
Duke laughed, his voice loud in the silence, the rustle of weeds.
“That’s right, man, grass. You ever get high?”
Paul shook his head, shocked despite himself.
“You don’t get hooked, if that’s what’s scaring you. I’ve done it twice. It’s totally amazing. I’m telling you.”
The sky was still gray, and the wind was moving in the leaves, and far away another train whistle sounded.
“I’m not scared,” Paul said.
“Sure. Nothing to be scared of,” Duke said. “You wanna try it?”
“Sure.” He looked around. “But not here.”
Duke laughed. “Who do you think is going to catch us out here?”
“Listen,” Paul said. They did, and then the train was visible, approaching from the opposite direction, a small dot growing ever larger, its whistle slicing the air. They got off the tracks and stood facing each other on either side of the metal rails.
“Let’s go to my place,” Paul shouted, as the train bore down. “No one’s home.” He imagined them smoking pot on his mother’s new chintz sofa, and he laughed out loud. Then the train was rushing between them; there was the roar and silence, roar and silence, of the passing cars. He glimpsed Duke in flashes, like photographs hanging in his father’s darkroom, all those moments from his father’s life like glimpses from a train. Trapped and caught. Rush and silence. Like this.
So they walked back to Duke’s house and got on their bicycles, crossing over Nicholasville Road and meandering through the neighborhoods to Paul’s.
The house was locked, the key hidden under the loose flagstone by the rhododendron. Inside the air was warm, faintly stale. While Duke called home to say he’d be late, Paul opened a window, and the breeze lifted the curtains his mother had made. Before she’d started working, she’d redecorated the whole house every year. He remembered her bent over the sewing machine, swearin
g when the lining snagged and bunched. These curtains had a creamy background with country scenes in dark blue that matched the dark-striped wallpaper. Paul remembered sitting at the table staring at them, as if the figures might suddenly start to move, might step out of their houses and hang up their clothes and wave goodbye.
Duke hung up and looked around. Then he whistled. “Man,” he said. “You’re rich.” He sat at the dining room table and spread out a thin rectangular paper. Paul watched, fascinated, as Duke arranged a line of ragged weed, then rolled a thin white tube.
“Not in here,” Paul said, uneasy at the last minute. They went outside and sat on the back steps, and the joint flared orange on the tip and moved back and forth between them. Paul felt nothing at first. It began to sprinkle, then stopped, and after a while—he wasn’t sure how long—he realized that he had been staring at a drop of water on the pavement, watching it spread slowly and merge with another drop and then spill off the edge into the grass. Duke was laughing hard.
“Man, you should see yourself,” he said. “Are you ever stoned!”
“Leave me alone, you asshole,” Paul said, and then he started laughing too.
They went inside at some point, though not before the rain had started again, leaving them soaked and suddenly chilled. His mother had left a casserole on the stove but Paul ignored it. Instead, he opened a jar of pickles and another of peanut butter, and then Duke ordered a pizza and Paul got out his guitar and they went into the living room, where the piano was, to jam. Paul sat on the edge of the raised hearth and strummed a few chords, and then his fingers started moving in the familiar patterns of the Segovia pieces he’d played the night before: “Estudio” and “Estudio Sin Luz.” The titles made him think of his father, tall and silent, bending over the enlarger in the darkroom. The songs felt like light and shadow, one set against the other, and now the notes had been woven into his own life, into the silence in the house and the vacation on the beach and the high-windowed classrooms of his school. Paul played, and he felt himself being lifted up, the waves riding in and he was on them, he was making the music and then he was the music and it was carrying him up and up, rising to a crest.