Part Two
I WANT them back.
He wakes with this sentence. He had dreamed of his grandparents, all of whom are dead now. In the dream they were walking, the four of them together, on a rope-and-wooden bridge over a stream in a park heavy with foliage. White feathers rained from the trees and the grandparents were laughing, sharing a bottle of wine with napkins and plastic cups. Adams watched them from a distance, seated at a red cedar table, thinking how much the grandparents could’ve taught him about history, marriage, politics. But when they were alive, he was a small child, not yet ready for their lessons, and he knew in the dream that he couldn’t go to them. He began to regret that for much of his life his timing has been off with people who might’ve proved important. Relations, friends, possible lovers. People he relinquished when circumstances made friendship too difficult.
I’m not done with them. I want them back. Toby and Deidre too.
The unfinished business with his children sends him to the kitchen. There’s only a little apple juice left in the refrigerator, so he pours a cup and stands at the window to toast his family, here and gone.
Pamela’s hair color remains the same (rich auburn), she has gained no weight (one hundred and ten pounds, consistently, since college), but her attitudes are shading into gray, she’s reading more books, and her thoughts are changing her, physically, from the inside out. She looks younger than Adams and talks like someone he has never met. On Saturday she attended a pro-Palestinian rally; she plans to march in protest of American military presence in Honduras.
“Where are your politics these days?” he asks.
“On the left, where my heart is.”
Already he has spent hundreds of dollars on Pamela’s work, and now she’s asked him for a loan. At forty-one thousand a year, with a family of four, he is nearly underwater.
He sits in front of the TV with a bag of Doritos and a pocket calculator. Frank Gifford informs him that Tom Landry is the only coach the Dallas Cowboys have ever had.
In the last three years his social security tax has risen from $2,346 a year to $3,407. Even with the latest tax cut he figures to absorb a net loss this year of over six hundred dollars and will have to spend part of his savings.
The kids’ bills will be about the same — higher dental costs, perhaps — but Pamela is unpredictable. And he never knows when Kenny will have an emergency, like the time he was arrested in Buster Keaton’s old house with three actresses and a bag of coke. One of the women, subletting the house from its current owners, took the rap — “I don’t touch the stuff,” Kenny said — but the incident cost Adams five hundred dollars for bail.
Before she left, Pamela developed a series of holograms based on the work of Dieter Jung, a German photographer and painter. She had attended an exhibition of Jung’s “Spanned Rainbows,” depictions of light in oil. The word Wirklichkeit occurred to her as she viewed the paintings. “Wirklichkeit means everything we know,” she explained to Adams. “It’s inseparable from Werk, to work, and wirken, to effect.”
Pamela cherishes her German ancestry (her father’s mother came from Siegen) and, to Adams, her pride recalls their days at the University of Nebraska. Pamela had been a commercial photographer, active in local publishing though only a sophomore, and Adams had distinguished himself as an outstanding student in the geology department. As his graduate studies progressed, he became increasingly interested in contour charts and even secured a number of grants for surveys. At night, in the lobby of her dorm, Pamela discussed her plans with Adams. “Photography’s an art, but I can’t afford to be fancy. I’ve got to earn some money.”
After graduation Adams went to Alaska for two months on a postdoctoral grant from Conoco, leaving Pamela to finish school. That summer she did freelance work (the AP picked up her shot of lightning striking the state capitol in Lincoln) and took a night course in the history of photography. In August she had a gallery showing with two friends. She had made a series of double exposures — celery superimposed on a farm laborers’ rally — and tinted them, each a different color. Though the response was good, she didn’t take it seriously and concentrated on journalism. Then she got chummy with a few fashion designers for whom she did Sunday-supplement ads.
The day she returned from the Jung exhibit she leaped and sang. Her eyes narrowed, thin as almonds, and she played with the ends of her hair. “If you make the viewer aware of the materials of art — the pigment in the paint, the emulsion on the film,” she said, “you’ve performed a critical as well as an artistic act. It’s what I’ve been looking for in my work.”
Suddenly fashion ads were out. At dinner she lectured him on aesthetics. A grid can be centrifugal or centripetal. When Mondrian paints a vertical and horizontal grid and places it within a diamond-shaped canvas, cutting off the corners of the grid, our view is truncated but we know that the painter’s landscape continues beyond what we can see. On the other hand, grid lines can act as a divider between the world of the canvas and the space that the viewer occupies. The prevalence of the grid in modern art, and its profound ambiguity, reveal the depths to which our century is divided between the sacred and the secular, the inner and outer worlds. The grid is essentially materialistic, of course, despite what Male-vich says about Mind and Spirit or the Greek cross in Ad Reinhardt’s nine-square grids.
Adams didn’t know what she was talking about.
She traced the roots of Wirklichkeit. Originally, she discovered, Werk and wirken meant to wrap with wicker. To medieval Germans, the empirical world was woven from a variety of materials, including earth, air, water, and fire. Each man or woman was a knot or straw.
Next, Pamela tested the limits of her equipment. With nails she scratched patterns on her negatives. On long exposures she alternated light and dark, oscillated color, and formed swirls — like fingerprints or cloth swatches — with different intensities of light.
Within a month she had borrowed holographic equipment from her friend Cyndi. “A hologram looks three-dimensional, but it’s not. It’s formed by curved space and pulsating light,” she explained. “A map of our cognition.”
Her first images were conventionaclass="underline" butterflies, cats, sparkling rocks, each structured like a feather. One chilly night in February, sleet pelting the windows, Pamela called Adams into the garage. “Look,” she said, switching off the light.
In the air, twisting above the vise grip, the word Wirklichkeit. Aquamarine. Wrapped in wicker. Rippling like a wave, or Adams’ breath.
She was making progress. It made him uneasy.
Adams asks Carter’s secretary, whose name is Jill, to dinner. She accepts. He makes reservations for two at the Ivory Rose, which has the best Indian food in town. It turns out that Jill is, like Adams, a world traveler. Over curry and chutney she tells him she once had an Algerian lover. In Algeria there were no working toilets. She had to squat over an open hole, wipe herself with her left hand.
Since returning from Algeria she has attended a number of est seminars. “I was raised a Baptist, but their ideas about women are skewed. I mean, be submissive and all that. Don’t have sex. Shit. Who are they kidding? The Gospel writers — excuse me, this isn’t good dinner conversation, I know — but they didn’t have to walk around with tampons between their legs, know what I mean? The preachers don’t know what it’s like. So I figure, whatever the church says about women’s bodies and sexual behavior and all that, they don’t know the first thing. Those decisions I make for myself, est is hokey in a lot of ways, but they let you make up your own mind, and you can walk away anytime you like.” She sugars her tea. “A lot of people are turned off by est.”