I handed her my jacket but kept my camera bag. As she retraced her steps, I looked around at a big old-fashioned kitchen. A woodburning cookstove stood in the center, deerhounds flopped beside it like mangy fur rugs. There were fragments of Turkish carpets on the floor, and a trestle table covered with papers and the remains of breakfast. I set down my bag, wandered to the window and stared out at the cove. A small dark shape loped along the water’s edge then disappeared beneath the pines. It was too small for a deerhound. I wondered if it was a fox, or a lost cat.
“I see Toby got you here in one piece.”
I turned. A man was beside the stove, pouring coffee into a mug. I stared at him, incredulous, as Aphrodite came back into the room.
“This is my son, Gryffin Haselton.” She picked up a kettle from the stove and walked to the sink to refill it. “Do you want coffee or tea?”
“Coffee would be my guess,” said Gryffin. He crossed the room to hand me the mug he’d just filled. “I took your berth on Everett’s boat earlier. Toby said he’d make sure you got here okay. The way you were putting it away last night, I figured you’d sleep in.”
“You figured wrong.” I took the coffee.
“Well, you got some local color, anyway.”
Gryffin turned to get another mug. The deerhounds moaned softly as he stepped between them, and I reached down to stroke one warily. Its head felt like a skull wrapped in worn flannel. Aphrodite leaned against the kitchen counter and regarded me with those glittering black eyes.
“Tell me what this imaginary interview is supposed to consist of.”
I told her, glossing over the fact that Mojo was not a photography magazine and I was not, in fact, anywhere on its masthead. When I mentioned Phil Cohen’s name again, she frowned.
“Phil Cohen.” She stared at her moccasined feet then shook her head. “I never heard of him.”
“He said he used to come up here sometimes.” I fought to keep desperation from my voice. “He said there was, I dunno, a commune or something.”
Gryffin glanced at his mother.
“Denny,” he said, as though that explained everything. He stared at me in disgust.
Aphrodite gave him a quick look then turned back to me. “I have to check the woodstove.”
She left. Gryffin settled at one end of the trestle table. He pushed up his sleeves, displaying that scrawled scar on his wrist, crossed his long legs at the ankle and surveyed me with bitter amusement.
I drank my coffee and looked more closely at his face for any resemblance to Aphrodite.
Yeah, I should have seen it, I thought. Once, I would have.
That odd sense of recognition I’d felt when I’d first seen him outside the motel? It was his eyes. They were Aphrodite’s eyes, oblique, the green spark in his left iris a sort of optic smirk. His smile, too was hers; though what was cold in Aphrodite’s face became wry, even rueful, in her son’s. I thought of the joy in his photograph and wondered if he’d inherited that from his mother as well. I doubted it.
But I felt no recurrence of what I’d sensed earlier; no damage.
“He wouldn’t have waited for you, you know.” Gryffin glanced out the window at the cove. “Everett. I would’ve gotten a ride with Toby like I’d planned, and you’d still be sitting there in Burnt Harbor.”
I took a seat at the other end of the table. “No. By now I’d be on my way back to the city.”
“Really? You don’t seem like you’d give up without a fight. I would have guessed you’d have started swimming over.” He looked at my beat-up cowboy boots and black jeans. “My other guess is you’ve never been north of the Bowery.”
I didn’t take the bait. “So. Did she abuse you as a child?”
“Nope. She drinks too much, but I bet you can relate to that. Cassandra Neary. I googled you. You get a few hits. Your book does, anyway. Did you bring a copy?”
“No.”
“Too bad. That might have given you some street cred with her.”
“Phil Cohen said she knew I was coming.”
“She didn’t. And I have no idea who this Phil Cohen is. But if he’s a friend of Denny’s…”
His voice trailed off.
“Who’s Denny?” I asked.
“You really don’t know?” I shook my head, and an expression that might have been relief flickered across his face. “Good. Keep it that way.”
He leaned forward and added, “I don’t need to tell you she doesn’t do this often, right? See people.”
“My impression was she didn’t do it at all.”
“She doesn’t.” He sipped his coffee. “You’re not going to find out anything new, you know. I mean, you’re not going to find where any bodies are buried, because there aren’t any. You probably wish there were.”
“She said she didn’t have a darkroom here. Is that true?”
“She told you that? Christ.” Gryffin looked annoyed. “Of course she has a darkroom. Downstairs, in the basement. It’s been locked for, I dunno, ten years at least. Maybe longer.”
He gave a sharp laugh. One of the dogs looked up in alarm. “Aphrodite hasn’t taken a picture for years and years. She used to talk about getting another book together, showing in a gallery. But she never did. Maybe you can light a fire under her.”
He shot me a look, then shrugged. “My guess is, that ain’t gonna happen.”
I held my mug so tight it shook. Hot coffee spilled onto my hand. “You can go fuck yourself,” I said.
“Yeah? I’ll call you if I need any help with that.”
He stood as his mother entered the room.
“I’ll leave you two,” said Gryffin. “I’ve got some work to do upstairs.”
In the doorway he stopped and looked back at me. “Stick around for dinner,” he said. “We’re having crow.”
Aphrodite watched him leave. Her face was flushed, the glitter in her eyes banked to a glow. I caught the burnt-orange scent of Grand Marnier on her breath.
“Let’s go into the other room.” She started back down the hall. “The fire’s going in there.”
“What does your son do?”
“He’s a rare book dealer. On the internet—he had a shop, but he closed it a few years ago.”
I was glad I hadn’t mentioned the Strand.
I followed her into the next room, an airy space that looked out across the reach. This was more like I’d imagined Aphrodite Kamestos’s home. Twentieth Century Danish Modern furniture, Arne Jacobsen armchairs, a cane and bamboo Jacobsen Slug chair, a beautifully spare Klint dining table that served as a desk. A small black woodstove sat upon a tiled heath.
Surprisingly, there were no photos. But I saw a bookshelf on the far wall, filled with oversized volumes. Some I recognized from my own collection; others were books I had held covetously at the Strand but didn’t try to steal—too big, too valuable. There were pristine copies of Mors and Deceptio Visus; the limited Ricci edition of Lewis Carroll’s photos; Cartier-Bresson’s Images a la Sauvette. Pictures of Old Chinatown, Untitled Film Stills; books by Avedon, Steichen, Arbus; Herb Ritts, Larry Fink, Joel-Peter Witkin, Katy Grannan.
It was a small fortune in photography books—the Cartier-Bresson alone was worth a thousand bucks. And the presence of those last few artists signaled that Aphrodite had kept up with the field. It made the room feel like a museum, or the kind of place where you instinctively remove your shoes. I looked furtively at my scuffed boots.
“Sit.” Aphrodite settled into one of the armchairs. “Did you forget your tape recorder?”
“Hmm?” I took a seat and looked at her, puzzled.
“Your tape recorder. Did you leave it in the other room?”