“Aw, don’t go away mad,” I yelled, but he ignored me.
“I’m going to bed,” Gryffin said when we got inside. He hung up his jacket and started for the kitchen. “You and my mother can sit up doing Jell-O shots if you want.”
“Wait,” I said.
I leaned forward, grabbed his chin and kissed him. He didn’t pull away. His cheek was unshaven, his mouth tasted of Calvados. I let my hand trail down his neck, my fingers resting for a moment in the hollow beneath his windpipe. I felt his pulse, then drew my mouth down to his throat and kissed it.
“Gryffin,” I whispered. “What kind of a name is Gryffin?”
He pulled away and left the room. When he was gone I started laughing uncontrollably.
The Adderall had kicked into high gear. I love speed, that black light you see alone at three am, when bottles shimmer like cut glass and everything reminds you of a song you once loved. This is when everything comes into focus for me, when what’s inside my head and what’s outside of it become the same thing.
What can I say? Bleak is beautiful. I stared at my reflection in a darkened window, pressed my palm against the cold glass. I thought of my camera in the spare room.
The house was dead still, the woodstove barely warm. Two deerhounds lay on the couch but didn’t stir when I walked past. Aphrodite was still conspicuous by her absence, though she’d left the radio on, a DJ whose voice droned into John Coltrane. I turned it off, found an empty film canister and dropped my stolen pills into it, and went upstairs.
The door to Gryffin’s room was closed. Mine was open. I went in and sat on my bed for a few minutes, my legs twitching. To blunt the speed, I drank some more Jack Daniel’s. The bottle was almost empty, so I killed it. I picked up my camera and checked the flash.
It was dead, and I hadn’t brought a spare battery—I couldn’t think of the last time I’d needed one. I thought of a recent argument I’d had with Phil.
“Get a digital camera, Cass. Anyone can take a great picture with one of those. Even you.”
“Screw that,” I’d said. “It’s too easy. It’s degraded art—no authenticity.”
“Oh, right.” He looked disgusted. “The last word on Degraded Art, from Ms. Authenticity 1976. You know what your problem is? You’re a goddam dinosaur, Cass. You’re fighting a culture war that ended thirty years ago. And you know what? Your side fucking lost.”
I started, hearing a voice in the spare room. I’d been talking to myself. It happens. I made the mistake once of mentioning it to Phil. He suggested I try Ecstasy.
I cradled the old Konica against my chest. It wasn’t even that late—a little past midnight. The drugstore speed would keep me going for a few more hours.
I felt pretty good, in between spasms of speedy paranoia. Kenzie Libby’s face, an outboard engine droning into voices that whispered my name. I wondered what Kenzie had said about me when she’d been online with Robert. I remembered what Toby had said about the islanders.
Every couple of years you get a witch hunt.
I pushed the thoughts aside. Time to move.
“Hey ho,” I croaked.
I went to the bathroom and drank from the tap then stared at my reflection in the mirror.
I looked like I’d crawled here from the city. I popped the lens cap from my camera and took a picture of myself. A great photographer could make something of all this, night and speed and that raw face in the mirror, shaky hands holding a cheap camera and a black T-shirt riding up to reveal a faded tattoo. A great photographer would see past that, all the way back to shadows in an alley and a car wreck in the woods.
I thought of Aphrodite.
Our gaze changes all that it falls upon.
I needed to talk to her again. I needed to make her see me; I needed to tell her how her photos had changed me all those years ago. I needed her to understand that I’d come here now hoping they would change me back.
The door to her room was open and a light was on. I listened for the television, the sound of voices, or dogs.
But the TV was off. If any dog was in there, it was asleep.
And Aphrodite? I peeked inside.
No dogs. No drunk. The rumpled bed was empty, still strewn with photography books. A lamp cast a piss yellow glow across the floor. I stood in the doorway and listened in case she was just out of sight, in a closet maybe.
But everything was silent. I went inside, stepping around a pile of black tights and underwear, a shapeless cardigan felted with dog fur, an empty bottle of Courvoisier. The cast-iron woodstove was cold, but the space heater worked overtime, cooking the room’s scents to a stew of dogs and brandy and unwashed laundry.
I stepped around heaps of clothes until I reached a wall of photos. Aphrodite when she was young and beautiful, a hybrid of Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Liz Taylor. A faded photo of a tall bearded guy, very handsome, glancing at the camera through lowered eyelashes. He held a toddler on his knee, the little boy’s head turned from the camera. Gryffin and his father.
Steve Haselton looked different from the photo I’d seen on that New Directions paperback: edgier, less blandly patrician. I guessed it was the long hair and beard and manic smile. He looked kind of like Hunter Thompson, right before or right after the drugs kicked in. There was a picture of Gryffin too, standing on the rocks by the ocean; maybe ten years old, gawky and wildhaired, holding up a starfish. Unsmiling. A somber kid.
And there were photos of the Oakwind commune at what I guessed must be a clambake. It looked more like the down east version of an acid trip. Long-haired people in gypsy clothes gamboled on the beach. It was raining. Smoke rose from a pile of stones covered with black gunk—seaweed? Mushrooms? In one photo, a naked little boy poked grimly at smoking rubble with a stick. Gryffin again.
It was less Summer of Love than it was Lord of the Flies. The photos were underexposed and out of focus, like the negs I’d processed downstairs. The kind of artsy stuff an ambitious high school photographer might shoot.
But each bore Aphrodite’s signature in the lower right corner. I turned away.
It was true. Something had been stolen from her. She’d had it, and she fucking lost it.
My foot nudged an empty bottle. It rolled beneath the bed, and I noticed something beside it, a stack of three oversized portfolios, expensive black leather Bokara cases.
They didn’t seem to have been moved for a while. The leather had a dull green bloom of mildew. I gingerly picked up the first portfolio, sat on the bed and opened it.
Inside were clear vinyl sleeves. Not the kind any serious artist would use today—chlorine gas leaches from the vinyl and turns your photos yellow.
But these pictures were old. More middle-class hippies playing at a freakshow; a sad photo of Aphrodite with her arms around her younger husband, his head turned from her, long hair covering his face. I replaced the portfolio and pulled out the next one.
This was more interesting. The vinyl sleeves held color landscapes, not the hand-worked images of Deceptio Visus or Mors but stark views of distant islands. With these photos she was almost onto something, but the pictures were all too literaclass="underline" a stormy sea, some jagged rocks, forbidding clouds. There wasn’t the imminence that irradiated her earlier work, the sense that she’d witnessed something unearthly and terrible yet lovely, something that had only revealed itself for that hundredth of a second and would never be glimpsed again, except here, now, in this image. There were so many photos crammed into this second portfolio—not just photos but contact sheets, negs, even faded Polaroids—that I could almost imagine her desperation, shooting hundreds of frames in hopes of nailing just that one.