She stepped outside, carrying the garbage to the Dumpster. The sand was faintly cold against her bare feet, the air as warm as her own skin. Norah walked to the edge of the ocean and stood gazing at the vivid white sweep of stars. Behind her the screen door opened and swung shut. David and Howard came out, walking through the sand and darkness.
“Thanks for cleaning up,” David said. He touched his hand briefly to her back and she tensed, making an effort not to move away. “Sorry not to help. I guess we got talking. Howard has some good ideas.”
“Actually, I was mesmerized by your arms,” Howard noted, referring to the hundreds of shots David had taken. He picked up a piece of driftwood and flung it, hard. They heard it splash and the waves licking, pulling it out to sea.
Behind them the house was like a lantern, casting a bright circle, but the three of them stood in a darkness so complete that Norah could barely see David’s face, or Howard’s, or her own hands. Only shadowy shapes and disembodied voices in the night. The conversation meandered, circling back to technique and process. Norah thought she might scream. She put one bare foot behind the other, meaning to turn and leave, when suddenly a hand brushed her thigh. She paused, startled. Waiting. In a moment Howard’s fingers ran lightly up the seam of her dress, and then his hand was slipping inside her pocket, a sudden secret warmth against her flesh.
Norah held her breath. David talked on about his pictures. She was still wearing the apron, and it was very dark. After a moment she made a slight turn, and Howard’s hand flowered open against the thin cloth, the flatness of her stomach.
“Well, that’s true,” Howard said, his voice low and easy. “You’d sacrifice something in clarity if you were to use that filter. But the effect would certainly be worth it.”
Norah let her breath out, slowly, slowly, wondering if Howard could feel the wild rapid pulsing of her blood. Warmth radiated from his fingers; she was filled with such yearning that she ached. The waves rose and eased away and rose again. Norah stood very still, listening to the rush of her own breath.
“Now, with the camera obscura you’re one step closer to the process,” Howard said. “It’s really quite remarkable, the way it frames the world. I wish you’d come by and see it. Will you?” he asked.
“I’m taking Paul deep-sea fishing tomorrow,” David said. “Maybe the next day.”
“I think I’ll go inside,” Norah said faintly.
“Norah gets bored,” David said.
“Who can blame her?” Howard said, and his hand pressed low on her belly, hard and swift, like the beat of a wing. Then he slid it from her pocket. “Come tomorrow morning if you want,” he said. “I’m making some drawings with the camera obscura.”
Norah nodded without speaking, imagining the single shaft of light piercing through darkness, casting marvelous images on the wall.
He left a few minutes later, disappearing almost at once into the darkness.
“I like that guy,” David said later, when they were inside. The kitchen was immaculate now, all evidence of her dreamy afternoon hidden away.
Norah was standing at the window looking out at the dark beach, listening to the waves, both hands sunk deeply in the pockets of her dress.
“Yes,” she agreed. “So do I.”
• • •
The next morning, David and Paul rose before sunrise to drive up the coast and catch the fishing boat. Norah lay there in the dark while they got ready, the clean cotton sheet soft against her skin, listening to them bump around awkwardly in the living room, trying not to make any noise. Footsteps, then, and the roar of the car starting, then fading into silence, the sound of waves. She lay there, languid, as a line of light formed where sky and ocean met. Then she showered and got dressed and made herself a cup of coffee. She ate half a grapefruit, washed her dishes and put them neatly away, and walked out the door. She was wearing shorts and a turquoise blouse patterned with flamingos. Her white sneakers were tied together and swinging from her hand. She had washed her hair and the ocean wind was blowing it dry, tangling it around her face.
Howard’s cottage, a mile down the beach, was nearly identical to her own. He was sitting on the porch, bent over a darkly finished wooden box. He was wearing white shorts and an orange plaid madras shirt, unbuttoned. His feet, like hers, were bare. He stood up as she drew near.
“Want some coffee?” he called. “I’ve been watching you walk down the beach.”
“No, thanks,” she said.
“You sure? It’s Irish coffee. With a little jolt, if you know what I mean.”
“Maybe in a minute.” She climbed the steps and ran her hand over the polished mahogany box. “Is this the camera obscura?”
“It is,” he said. “Come. Take a look.”
She sat down on the chair, still warm from his flesh, and looked through the aperture. The world was there, the long stretch of beach and the cluster of rocks, and a sail moving slowly in the horizon. Wind lifted in the piney casuarina trees, everything tiny and rendered in such sharp detail, framed and contained, yet alive, not static. Norah looked up then, blinking, and found that the world had been transformed as well: the flowers, so sharply drawn against the sand, the chair with its bright stripes, and the couple walking at the edge of the water. Vivid, startling, so much more than she’d realized.
“Oh,” she said, looking back into the box. “It’s astonishing. The world is so precise, so rich. I can even see the wind moving in the trees.”
Howard laughed. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it? I knew you’d like it.”
She thought of Paul as an infant, his mouth rounded in a perfect O as he lay in his crib staring up at some ordinary amazement. She bent her head again to view the world contained, then looked up to see it transformed. Released from its surrounding frame of darkness, even the light was shimmering, alive. “It’s so beautiful,” she whispered. “I almost can’t stand how beautiful it is.”
“I know,” Howard said. “Go. Be in it. Let me draw you.”
She rose and walked out into the hot sand, the glare. She turned and stood before Howard, his head bent over the aperture, watching his hand move across the sketch pad. Her hair kindled—already the sun was a hot flat hand—and she remembered posing the day before, and the day before that. How many times had she stood just this way, the subject and an object too, posed to evoke or to preserve what really did not exist, her true thoughts locked away?
So she stood now, a woman reduced to a perfect miniature of herself, every fact of her cast by light onto a mirror. The ocean wind, warm and damp, moved in his hair, and Howard’s hands, with their long fingers and trim nails, moved quickly as he sketched her, fixing her image on the page. She remembered the sand shifting beneath her hips as she posed for David’s camera, and how they had talked about her later, David and Howard, not as a flesh-and-blood woman in the room but rather as an image, a form. Remembering this, her body seemed fragile suddenly, as if she were not the accomplished self-sufficient woman who’d taken a group to China and back but rather someone who might be swept away by the next gust of wind. Then she remembered Howard’s hand, warming her pocket and her flesh. That hand, the one moving now, the one that drew her.
She reached down to her waist and caught the hem of her blouse. Slowly, but without hesitation, she pulled it over her head and let it fall on the sand. On the porch, Howard stopped drawing, though he did not lift his head. The small muscles in his arms and shoulders had ceased moving. Norah unzipped her shorts. They slid down over her hips and she stepped out of them. So far it was nothing unfamiliar, just the same swimsuit she had modeled in so many times before. But now she reached behind and unhooked the straps of the top. She pushed the bottoms over her hips and down her legs, kicking them away. She stood feeling the sun and wind move across her skin.
Howard slowly raised his head from the camera obscura and sat staring.
For an instant it had a nightmare quality, that sense of panic and shame when she realized, in the middle of
a dream, shopping or walking in a crowded park, that she had forgotten to get dressed. She started to reach for her suit.
“No, don’t,” Howard whispered, and she paused, straightening. “You’re so beautiful.” He rose then, carefully, slowly, as if she were a bird he might startle into flight. But Norah stood very still, intently present in her body, feeling as if she were made out of sand, sand meeting fire and about to be transformed, smoothed, made glittering. Howard crossed the few feet of beach. It seemed to take him forever, his feet sinking into the warm sand. When he finally reached her he stopped, without touching her, and stared. The wind moved in her hair and he pushed a strand from her lip, tucking it, very gently, behind her ear.
“I could never capture this,” he said, “what you are in this moment. I could never capture it.”
Norah smiled and splayed her hand flat on his chest, feeling the thin madras cotton and the warm flesh, the layers of muscle, bone. The sternum, she remembered, from the days when she had studied bones in order to better understand David and his work. The manubrium and the gladiolus, shaped like a sword. The true ribs and the false, the lines of union.
He cupped his hands lightly around her face. She let her own hand fall. Together, without speaking, they walked to the little cottage. She left her clothes on the sand; she did not care about that either, that anyone might see them. The boards of the porch gave slightly beneath her feet. The cloth over the camera obscura was thrown back and she saw with satisfaction that Howard had sketched the beach and horizon, the scattered rocks and trees; all these were perfect reproductions. He had sketched her hair, a soft cloud, amorphous, but that was all. Where she had stood the page was blank. Her clothes had fallen like leaves, and he had looked up to see her standing there.
For once, it was she who had stopped time.
The room seemed dim after the light of the beach, and the world was framed in the window as it had been in the lens of the camera obscura, so bright and vivid that it brought tears to her eyes. She sat on the edge of the bed. Lie down, he said, pulling his shirt over his head. I just want to look at you for a moment. She did, and he stood over her, his eyes moving across her skin. Stay with me, he said, and he shocked her by kneeling and resting his head on her belly, his unshaven cheek bristling against the flatness of her stomach. She felt his weight with every breath she took, and his own breath traveled on her skin. She reached down, weaving her hands through his thinning hair, and pulled him up to kiss her.
Later, she would be astonished, not that she had done these things or any of those that followed, but that she had done them on Howard’s bed beneath the open unscreened window, framed like an image in a camera. David was gone, far out at sea with Paul, fishing. Still, anyone might have walked by and seen them.
Yet she did not stop, then or later. He was with her like a fever, a compulsion, an open door into her own possibilities, into what she believed was freedom. Strangely, she found that her secret made the distance between herself and David seem more bearable too. She went back to Howard again and again, even after David remarked about how many walks she was taking, how far she went. Even when, lingering in bed while Howard fixed them both a drink, she fished his shorts off the floor and found a photo of his smiling wife and three small children, inside a letter that said My mother is better, we all miss and love you and will see you next week.
This happened in the afternoon, sunlight glittering on the moving water, heat shimmering up from the sand. The ceiling fan clicked in the dim room and she held the photo, gazed outside into the landscape of the imagination, the brilliant light. In real life, this photo would have cut, swift and sure, but here she felt nothing. Norah slid the photo back and let his shorts slip back to the floor. Here, this did not matter. Only the dream mattered, and the fevered light. For the next ten days, she met him.
August 1977
I
DAVID RAN UP THE STAIRS AND STEPPED INTO THE QUIET foyer of the school, pausing for a moment to get his breath and his bearings. He was late for Paul’s concert, very late. He’d planned to leave the hospital early, but ambulances had pulled in with an older couple as he was walking out the door: the husband had fallen off a ladder and landed on his wife. His leg was broken, and her arm; the leg needed a plate and pins. David called Norah, hearing the barely contained anger in her voice, angry enough himself that he didn’t care, was glad, even, to annoy her. She had married him knowing what his work was, after all. The silence had pulsed between them for a long moment before he hung up.
The terrazzo floor had a faintly pinkish cast, and the lockers that lined the walls of the hallway were dark blue. David stood listening, hearing only his own breathing for a moment, and then a burst of applause drew him down the hall to the big double wooden doors of the auditorium. He pulled one door open and stepped inside, letting his eyes adjust. The place was packed; a sea of darkened heads flowed downward to the brightly lit stage. He scanned them, looking for Norah. A young woman handed him a program, and as a boy in low-slung jeans walked out onto the stage and sat down with his saxophone, she pointed to the fifth name down. David took a deep grateful breath and felt his tension ease. Paul was number seven; he had made it just in time.
The saxophonist began, playing with passion and intensity, hitting one screeching wrong note that sent chills down David’s spine. He scanned the audience again and found Norah in the center near the front, with an empty seat beside her. So she had thought of him, at least, saving him this place. He hadn’t been sure she would; he wasn’t sure, anymore, of anything. Well, he was sure of his anger, and of the guilt that kept him silent about what he’d seen in Aruba; those things certainly stood between them. But he did not have the smallest glimpse into Norah’s heart, her desires or motivations.
The sax player finished with a flourish and stood up to bow. During the applause, David made his way down the dimly lit aisle, climbing awkwardly past those already seated to take his place by Norah.
“David,” she said, moving her coat. “So. You made it after all.”
“It was emergency surgery, Norah,” he said.
“Oh, I know, I’m used to it. It’s only Paul who concerns me.”
“Paul concerns me too,” David said. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Yes. Indeed.” Her voice was sharp and clipped. “So you are.”
He could feel her anger, radiating in waves. Her short blond hair was perfectly styled, and she was all shades of cream and gold, wearing a natural silk suit she’d bought on her first trip to Singapore. As the business had grown, she’d traveled more and more, taking tour groups to places both mundane and exotic. David had gone with her a few times in the early days, when the trips were smaller and less ambitious: down to Mammoth Cave or on a boat ride on the Mississippi. Each time he’d marveled at Norah, at the person she’d become. The people on the tours came to her with their worries and concerns: the beef was undercooked, the cabin too small, the air-conditioning on the fritz, the beds too hard. She listened to them thoughtfully and stayed calm through every crisis, nodding, touching a shoulder, reaching for the phone. She was beautiful still, though her beauty had an edge to it now. She was good at her work, and more than one blue-haired woman had taken him aside to make sure he knew how lucky he was.
He had to wonder what they would have thought, those women, if they’d been the ones to find her clothes discarded in a pile on the beach.
“You have no right to be angry with me, Norah,” he whispered. She smelled very faintly of oranges, and her jaw was tense. Onstage, a young man in a blue suit sat down at the piano, flexing his fingers. After a moment he plunged in, the notes rippling. “No right at all,” David said.
“I’m not angry. I’m just nervous about Paul. You’re the one who’s angry.”
“No, it’s you,” he said. “You’ve been like this ever since Aruba.”
“Look in the mirror,” she whispered back. “You look like you swallowed one of those little lizards that used to hang on the ce
iling.”
A hand fell on his shoulder, then. He turned to see a heavy woman sitting next to her husband, a long chain of children extending out beside them.
“Excuse me,” she said. “You’re Paul Henry’s father, aren’t you? Well, that’s my son Duke playing the piano, and if you don’t mind, we’d really like to hear him.”
David met Norah’s eyes then, in a brief moment of connection; she was even more embarrassed than he was.
He settled back and listened. This young man, Duke, a friend of Paul’s, played the piano with an intent self-consciousness, but he was very good, technically proficient and passionate too. David watched his hands move over the keys, wondering what Duke and Paul talked about when they rode their bikes through the quiet neighborhood streets. What did they dream, those boys? What did Paul tell his friends that he would never tell his father?
Norah’s clothes, discarded in a bright pile against the white sand, the wind lifting the edge of her wildly colored blouse: that was one thing they would never discuss, though David suspected that Paul had seen them too. They’d risen very early that morning for their fishing trip and had driven up the coast in the predawn darkness, passing little villages along the way. They weren’t talkers, either he or Paul, but there was always a sense of communion in the early hours, in the rituals of casting and reeling, and David looked forward to this chance to be with his son, growing so fast, such a mystery to him now. But the trip had been canceled; the motor on the boat had given out and the owner was waiting for new parts. Disappointed, they’d lingered for a while on the dock, drinking bottled orange soda and watching the sun rise over the glassy ocean. Then they drove back to the cottage.