To distract herself, she kept her gaze on Paul, who was running along the shore, a speck on the horizon. He was thirteen, and he’d shot up like a sapling in this last year. Tall and awkward, he ran every morning as if he might escape from his own life.
Waves crashed slowly against the beach. The tide was turning, coming in, and the harsh noon light would soon change, making the picture David wanted impossible until tomorrow. A strand of hair was stuck against Norah’s lip, tickling, but she willed herself to stillness.
“Good,” David said, bent over his camera and clicking off a rapid series of shots. “Oh, yes, great, that’s really very good.”
“I’m hot,” she said.
“Just a few more minutes. We’re almost done.” He was on his knees now, his thighs winter pale against the sand. He worked so hard, and spent long hours in his darkroom too, clipping images to dry on the clotheslines he’d strung from wall to wall. “Think about the sea. Waves in the water, waves in the sand. You’re part of that, Norah. You’ll see in the photo. I’ll show you.”
She lay still beneath the sun, watching him work, remembering days early in their marriage when they’d gone out for long walks in the spring evenings, holding hands, the air infused with scents of honeysuckle and hyacinths. What had she imagined, that younger version of herself, walking in the soft still light of dusk, dreaming her dreams? Not this life, certainly. Norah had learned the travel business inside out over the past five years. She’d organized the office, and gradually she’d started overseeing trips. She’d built a stable client list and learned to sell, pushing glossy brochures across her desk, describing in breathless detail places she herself had only dreamed of going. She’d become an expert at solving last-minute crises: lost luggage, misplaced passports, sudden bouts of giardiasis. Last year, when Pete Warren decided to retire, she’d taken a deep breath and bought the business. Now it was all hers, from the low brick building to the boxes of blank airline tickets in the closet. Her days were hectic, busy, satisfying—and every night she came home to a house full of silence.
“I still don’t see it,” she said, when David finally finished, when she was standing up and brushing sand from her legs and her arms, shaking sand from her hair. “Why take the photo of me at all, if you’re hoping I’ll just disappear into the landscape?”
“It’s about perspective,” David said, looking up from his equipment. His hair was wild, his cheeks and forearms flushed with noon sun. In the far distance Paul had turned and was on his way back, drawing nearer. “It’s about expectations. People will look at this picture and see a beach, rolling dunes. And then they’ll glimpse something a little odd, something familiar in your particular set of curves, or they’ll read the title and look again, searching for the woman they didn’t see the first time, and they’ll find you.”
There was intensity in his voice; the wind coming off the ocean moved through his dark hair. It made her sad, because he spoke of photography as he had spoken once of medicine, of their marriage, a language and tone that evoked the lost past and filled her with longing. Do you and David talk about big things or small things? Bree asked her once, and Norah was shocked to realize how many of their conversations were about things as perfunctory and necessary as household chores and Paul’s schedule.
The sun was bright on her hair and the gritty sand had caught in the tender skin between her legs. David was absorbed in putting away his camera. Norah had hoped this dream vacation would be a path back to the closeness they’d once shared. This was what had compelled her to spend so many hours lying in the hot sun, holding herself still while David took roll after roll of photos, but they had been here three days now, and nothing but the setting was significantly different from home. Each day they drank their morning coffee in silence. David found ways to work; he was either taking pictures or fishing. He did read in the evenings, swinging in the hammock. Norah took walks and naps, puttered, and went shopping at the bright, overpriced tourist shops in town. Paul played his guitar, and he ran.
Norah shaded her eyes and looked down the golden curve of the beach. Closer now, the runner’s shape had emerged, and she saw it was not Paul after all. The man running was tall, lean, maybe thirty-five or forty. He wore blue nylon shorts edged with white piping and no shirt. His shoulders, already tanned dark, were edged with a burn that looked painful. As he drew close to them, he slowed and then stopped, hands on his hips, breathing heavily.
“Nice camera,” he said. Then, looking straight at Norah, he added, “Interesting shot.” He was beginning to go bald; his eyes were dark brown, intense. She turned away, feeling their heat, as David began to talk: waves and dunes, sand and flesh, two conflicting images at once.
She gazed down the beach. Yes. There, barely visible, was another running figure, her son. The sun was so bright. For a few seconds she felt dizzy, little silverfish of light flashing behind her eyelids just as it glanced across the edges of the waves. Howard: she wondered where he was from, where he’d gotten a name like that. He and David were talking intently now about apertures and filters.
“So you’re the inspiration for this study,” he said, turning to include Norah.
“I suppose,” she said, brushing sand off her wrist. “It’s a bit hard on the skin,” she added, aware suddenly that the new bathing suit left her nearly naked. The wind moved over her, moved through her hair.
“No, you have beautiful skin,” Howard said. David’s eyes widened—he looked at her as if he’d never seen her before—and Norah felt a surge of triumph. See? she wanted to say. I have beautiful skin. But the intentness of Howard’s gaze stopped her.
“You should see David’s other work,” Norah said. She gestured to the cottage, tucked low beneath the palms, bougainvillea cascading off the porch trellises. “He brought his portfolio.” A wall, her words; also an invitation.
“I would like that,” Howard said, turning back to David. “I’m interested in your study.”
“Why not?” David said. “Join us for lunch.”
But Howard had a meeting in town at one o’clock.
“Here comes Paul,” Norah said. He was running very fast along the edge of the water, pushing through the last hundred yards, his arms and legs flashing in the light, the wavering heat. My son, Norah thought, the world opening for an instant as it sometimes did around the very fact of his presence. “Our son,” she said to Howard. “He’s a runner too.”
“He has good form,” Howard observed. Paul drew close and began to slow down. Once he reached them he bent down with his hands on his knees, dragging deep breaths into his lungs.
“And good time,” David said, glancing at his watch. Don’t do it, Norah thought; David couldn’t seem to see how much Paul recoiled at David’s suggestions for his future. Don’t. But David pushed on. “I hate to see him miss his vocation. Look at that height. Think what he could do on a court. But he doesn’t give a damn about basketball.”
Paul looked up, grimacing, and Norah felt a flare of familiar irritation. Why couldn’t David understand that the more he pushed basketball, the more Paul would resist? If he wanted Paul to play, he ought to forbid it instead.
“I like running,” Paul said, standing up.
“Who can blame you,” Howard said, reaching to shake hands, “when you run like that?”
Paul shook his hand, flushing with pleasure. You have beautiful skin, he’d said to her, moments ago. Norah wondered if her own face had been so transparent.
“Come to dinner,” she suggested impulsively, inspired by Howard’s kindness to Paul. She was hungry, thirsty too, and the sun had made her light-headed. “Since you can’t come for lunch, come for dinner. Bring your wife, of course,” she added. “Bring your family. We’ll build a fire and cook out on the beach.”
Howard frowned, looking out over the shining water. He clasped his hands and put them behind his head, stretching. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I am here alone. A retreat of sorts. I am about to be divorced.”
“I’m sorry,” Norah said, though she was not.
“Come anyway,” David said. “Norah throws wonderful dinner parties. I’ll show you the rest of the series I’m working on—it’s all about perception. Transformation.”
“Ah, transformation,” Howard said. “I’m all for that. I’d love to come to dinner.”
David and Howard talked for a few minutes while Paul paced along the waves, cooling down, and then Howard left. A few minutes later, standing in the kitchen, slicing cucumbers for lunch, Norah watched him walk far down the beach, there and gone and there again as the curtain caught the breeze. She remembered the dark burn on his shoulders, his penetrating eyes and voice. Water rushed in the pipes as Paul showered, and there was the soft rustling of paper as David arranged his photos in the living room. He’d seemed obsessed over the years, always seeing the world—seeing her—as if from behind the lens of a camera. Their lost daughter still hovered between them; their lives had shaped themselves around her absence. Norah even wondered, at times, if that loss was the main thing holding them together. She slid the cucumber slices into a salad bowl and started peeling a carrot. Howard was a pinprick in the distance, then gone. His hands were large, she remembered, the palms and cuticles pale against his tan. Beautiful skin, he’d said, and his eyes hadn’t left hers.
After lunch, David dozed in the hammock and Norah lay down on the bed beneath the window. An ocean breeze flowed in; she felt abundantly alive, somehow connected to the sand and the sea by this wind. Howard was just an ordinary person, almost scrawny and beginning to go bald, yet he was mysteriously compelling too, conjured perhaps from her own deep loneliness and wishing. She imagined Bree, delighted with her, laughing.
Well, why not? she would say. Really, Norah, why not?
I’m a married woman, Norah replied, shifting to look out the window at the dazzling, shifting sand, eager for her sister to refute her.
Norah, for heaven’s sweet sake, you only live once. Why not have some fun?
Norah stood, walking softly on the old worn boards, and fixed herself a gin and tonic with lime. She sat on the porch swing, lazy in the breeze, watching David dozing, so unknown to her these days. Notes from Paul’s guitar floated through the soft air. She imagined him, sitting cross-legged on the narrow bed, head bent in concentration over the new Almansa guitar that he loved, a gift from David on his last birthday. It was a beautiful instrument, with an ebony fretboard and rosewood back and sides, brass turners. David tried, with Paul. He pushed too hard on sports, it was true, but he also made time to take Paul fishing or hiking in the woods, on their endless search for rocks. He’d spent hours researching this guitar, ordering it from a company in New York, his face full of quiet pleasure as Paul lifted it reverently from the box. She looked at David now, sleeping on the other side of the porch, a muscle working in his cheek. David, she whispered, but he did not hear her. David, she said a bit louder, but he did not stir.
At four o’clock she roused herself, dreamily. She chose a sundress splashed with flowers, gathered at the waist, thin straps over her shoulders. She put on an apron and began to cook, simple, but luxurious foods: oyster stew with crisp crackers on the side, corn yellowing on the cob, a fresh green salad, small lobsters she’d bought that morning at the market, still in buckets of seawater. As she moved in the tiny kitchen, improvising roasting pans from cake pans and substituting oregano for marjoram in the salad dressing, the crisp cotton skirt moved lightly against her thighs, her hips. The air, warm as breath, glanced across her arms. She plunged her hands into a sink of cold water, rinsing the lettuce leaf by delicate leaf. Outside, Paul and David worked to light a fire in the half-rusted grill, its holes patched with aluminum foil. There were paper plates on the weathered table, and wine poured into red plastic glasses. They would eat the lobster with their fingers, butter running down their palms.
She heard his voice before she saw him, another tone, slightly lower than David’s and slightly more nasal, with a neutral northern accent; crisp air, edged with snow, floated into the room with every syllable. Norah dried her hands on the kitchen towel and went to the doorway.
The three men—it shocked her that she thought of Paul this way, but he stood shoulder to shoulder with David now, nearly grown and independent, as if his body had never had anything to do with hers at all—were clustered on the sand just beyond the porch. The grill gave off its aromas of smoke and resin, and the coals sent a wavering heat into the sky. Paul, shirtless, stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of his cutoffs, answering with awkward brevity the questions that came his way. They did not see her, her husband and her son; their eyes were on the fire and on the ocean, smooth as opaque glass at this hour. It was Howard, facing them, who lifted his chin to her and smiled.
For an instant, before the others turned, before Howard raised the bottle of wine and slid it into her hands, their eyes met. It was a moment real to only the two of them, something that could not be proven later, an instant of communion subject to whatever the future would impose. But it was real: the darkness of his eyes, his face and hers opening in pleasure and promise, the world crashing around them like the surf.
David turned, smiling, and the moment slammed shut like a door.
“It’s white,” Howard said, handing her the bottle. Norah was struck by how ordinary Howard seemed then, by the silly way his sideburns grew halfway down his cheeks. The hidden meaning of the earlier moment—had she imagined it then?—was gone. “I hope that’s all right.”
“Perfect,” she said. “We’re having lobster.” Yes, so ordinary, this talk. The stunning moment was behind them now, and she was the gracious hostess, moving as easily in her role as she moved within her whisper of a dress. Howard was her guest; she offered him a wicker chair and a drink. When she came back, carrying bottles of gin and tonic and a bucket of ice on a tray, the sun had reached the edge of the water. Clouds billowed high in airy shades of pink and peach.
They ate on the porch. Darkness fell swiftly, and David lit the candles set at intervals along the railing. Beyond, the tide came in, waves rushing invisibly against the sand. In the flickering light, Howard’s voice rose and fell and rose again. He talked about a camera obscura he had built. The camera obscura was a mahogany box that sealed out all light, except for a single pinpoint. This pinprick cast a tiny image of the world onto a mirror. The instrument was the precursor to the camera; some painters—Vermeer was one—had used it as a tool to achieve an extraordinary level of detail in their work. Howard was exploring this, too.
Norah listened, awash in the night, struck by his imagery: the world projected on a darkened interior wall, tiny figures caught in light but moving. It was so different from her sessions with David, when the camera seemed to pin her in place and time, hold her still. That, she realized, sipping her wine in the darkness, was the problem at the heart of everything. Somewhere along the way, she and David had gotten stuck. They circled each other now, fixed in their separate orbits. The conversation shifted, and Howard told stories about the time he’d spent in Vietnam, working as a photographer for the army, documenting battles. “A lot of it was boring, actually,” he said, when Paul expressed his admiration. “A lot of it was just riding up and down the Mekong on a boat. It’s an extraordinary river, though, an extraordinary place.”
After dinner Paul went to his room. A few minutes later, notes from his guitar cascaded amid the sounds of the waves. He had not wanted to come on this vacation; he had given up a week at music camp, and he had an important concert to play just a few days after they got home. David had insisted that he come; he did not take Paul’s musical ambitions seriously. As an avocation it was fine, but not as a career. But Paul was passionate about the guitar, determined to go to Juilliard. David, who had worked so hard to give them every comfort, got tense every time the subject came up. Now Paul’s notes fell through the air, winged and graceful but each one a little cut, too, the point of a knife piercing flesh.
The conversation moved
from optics to the rarefied light of the Hudson River Valley, where Howard lived, and southern France, where he liked to visit. He described the narrow road, a thin dust rising, and the fields of pulsing sunflowers. He was all voice, hardly more than a shadow next to her, but his words moved through her like Paul’s music did, somehow both inside and outside her at once. David poured more wine and changed the subject, and then they were standing, stepping into the brightly lit living room. David pulled his series of black-and-white photos from his portfolio, and he and Howard launched into an intent discussion about the qualities of light.
Norah lingered. The photographs they were discussing were all of her: her hips, her skin, her hands, her hair. And yet she was excluded from the conversation: object, not subject. Now and then when she went into an office in Lexington, Norah would find a photo, anonymous yet eerily familiar too—some curve of her body or a place she had visited with David, stripped of its original meaning and transformed: an image of her own flesh that had become abstract, an idea. She had tried, by posing for David, to ease some of the distance that had grown between them. His fault, hers—it didn’t really matter. But watching David now, absorbed in his explanation, she understood that he did not really see her and hadn’t for years.
Anger rose up in a rush that left her trembling. She turned and walked from the room. Since the day with the wasps she had drunk very little, but now she went into the kitchen and poured herself a red plastic glass brimming with wine. All around her were dirty pots and congealing butter, the fiery red husks of lobsters like the shells of dead cicadas. Such a lot of work for such brief pleasure! Usually David did the dishes, but tonight Norah tied an apron around her waist and filled the sink and put the remaining oyster stew away in the refrigerator. In the living room the voices went on and on, rising and falling like the sea. What had she been thinking, putting on this dress, falling into Howard’s voice? She was Norah Henry, the wife of David, the mother of Paul, a son nearly grown. There were strands of gray in her hair, which she did not believe anyone could see except herself, squinting in the harsh light of the bathroom. Still, it was true. Howard had come to discuss photography with David, and that was that.