Ellsworth had not, except for a general mention of the “weekend festivities,” reported on that stag party in his newspaper, The Town Crier, though he knew about it, or some of it anyway. It was not for reasons of taste that he omitted it from his coverage of the wedding, otherwise extensive if not in fact exhaustive — no, what did he care about such matters, he who had snubbed his nose at propriety all his life? Nor was it a factor that the father of the bride was his patron; the record must be kept, as Barnaby himself would say, no fudging, my boy, on that. The point was, Ellsworth was interested only in recording significant history, and a-historicity was the very raison d’être, he knew, of stag parties, and indeed of all such carnivalesque activities. It was his duty as the town chronicler to bear witness, not to mere surface excitements, but to history’s deeper design. Or so he told himself back in those early days, his file cabinets still as orderly then as a genre plot, more folders in them than documents and reassuringly comprehensive, like a local map of time. So, though Gordon for reasons of his own was rather keen on following through on the night’s more irregular activities, Ellsworth was satisfied (comedians excluded) with the formal wide-angle lens photographs of the rehearsal dinner, paid and posed for by the parents of the betrothed, and after these had been taken he led a reluctant Gordon back to his studio to discuss the photo coverage of the wedding itself on the morrow and to carry on with the conversation they had begun as boys some twenty years before. Gordon’s growing fascination with the irrational, the erotic, the sensational, the morbid bordered, Ellsworth felt, on pornography, and caused him to doubt his friend’s continued commitment to those higher artistic principles they had once so passionately held in common, and which Gordon still claimed, all evidence to the contrary, allegiance to. There was, for example, the bizarre series of pictures Gordon was taking at this time of his dying mother, no longer compos mentis or even continent, confined now to her old iron bed in one of the dismal little back rooms above the shop. Perhaps, like all men, Gordon was blind to his own transformations. Ellsworth suspected that photography itself, not in his judgment an art form at all, might be the efficient cause of this relapse, the effortless voyeuristic eye replacing the critical eye of the creative artist, who must construct, out of the void of a blank canvas, over and over again, ever afresh, his own space, forms, patterns of light and color, unaided by the easy accident of an opened lens.
Pauline, who knew everything there was to know about ahistoricity, being a longtime native of those unlighted regions, also had cause to wonder about her husband’s artistic principles, not to mention the soundness of his mind, though this was sometime later, his mother whom she never knew passed on by then, her daddy jailed, John’s wedding ancient history, her own more recent but even more forgotten. Pauline, it should be said, was not a curious person. Teachers had often noted this with some dismay on her report cards. It was something Daddy Duwayne, ever her most influential mentor, had broken her of early on. Narcissistic men sometimes found this characteristic lessened their erotic enjoyment when with her, but most found it comforting. Being incurious, Pauline supposed all others, except maybe teachers, were as well, and it was not until little Corny and his friends started using her like an animated pop-up picture book that it occurred to her she might have something to offer to those wanting to see but not use, and willing to pay for it besides, and if she could not thereby wholly escape her ahistorical condition, she might, if fortune smiled, escape at least the trailer park. Had she not been by nature or by education so incurious, that first photo session, after Gordon had shooed Corny and his father and that poor little French girl out of the studio and locked the door, might right then have made her think twice about returning for another, but Pauline had long since grown accustomed to the eccentricities of the aroused male, and so not only came back for further sittings, so-called (sitting being what he rarely let her do), but in time moved in above the studio and, after the ruckus with Daddy Duwayne, married the photographer. By then, of course, she had given up on the glittering kingdom of the centerfold, just a childish fantasy anyway, she supposed, and had come to accept as her lot in life these safe dusty rooms overlooking Main Street, wherein she was, if not transported, at least more or less content. Gordon’s photos of her were much too unusual for the men’s magazines, needless to say — he kept trying to turn her into something other than what she was — nor would he have sent them there even had they been suitable. His photos of her, as with many others, were not for general viewing, but were kept in large thick albums in locked cabinets at the back of the shop. Others might have been curious about these albums, but Pauline of course was not. Though, like all artists, he was a bit peculiar, her husband, though he sometimes hurt her, rarely had much to say, and had a crazy way of staring, he had nevertheless taken good care of her and was, she believed, essentially a good man or anyway benign — at least that was how she felt up to the time that poor lady was killed at the humpback bridge and Gordon, obsessed with the accident and exhausted from overwork, uncharacteristically left some of his secret albums out and open where she could not help but see. One lot in particular gave her goosebumps. She decided to tell Otis about them the next time she saw him.
This was not to be for some time, as it turned out, due to a religious experience suffered by the town’s police chief. After Duwayne’s arrest some four years before, Otis, not yet the chief, had picked Pauline up at the photo studio in his squad car and driven her out to the trailer park to ask her some questions about what he had found there in the course of his investigations. Though Pauline told it without emotion, it was a pretty sordid story of rape, child-battering, incest, torture, and all manner of filthy and unnatural sexual acts, all mixed up with her father’s mad evangelical harangues — sordid but also quite exciting: the next thing Otis knew he was getting sucked off again, and this time he didn’t cry. After that, he and Pauline visited the trailer more or less regularly. He picked up more of the story, ashamed that it was such a turn-on, and over time a kind of friendship grew up between them. Otis would ask her to show him exactly what it was her father did to her, she would get him to play the part of the father, though of course he would never really hurt her, and they would end up on the floor a little later in a sweaty cuddle, he telling her by then about his own boyhood, his troubles at home after his old lady walked out on them, the black moods his old man went through until finally he blew his stupid brains out, and then about his own marriage, too early probably, right out of the army, didn’t even know what it was all about before the kids started coming, but mostly about his job and about life down at the station, where he hoped to be promoted soon. She was a good listener, never asked questions, but remembered all the things he told her, making them seem important. She got married, he gave her and the photographer a nice present, his wife had more children that her husband photographed, the promotion came through, they went on meeting out at the trailer. It was like a second life they could visit from time to time, and so the months and years went by. But then one day he stepped out of the trailer, still buttoning up, and there was John’s wife. He was momentarily blinded as though suffering some kind of holy vision, his ears started to pop and ring, and he found himself, crazily, reaching for his revolver. Somehow, instinctively, he managed to slam the door shut behind him, hoping Pauline took the hint, and as his vision cleared he saw that John’s wife was not alone, but with some sort of committee of housewives. He still couldn’t hear what they were saying, but enough leaked through to suggest it had something to do with the town beautification program. The trailer park was an eyesore and they wanted to do something about it. He stood there with his circuits blown, nodding stupidly, a speechless imbecile trying to look serious, hoping only that his fly was done up but afraid to look. One of the women, squinting suspiciously, took a sharp look for him, then cast her skeptical gaze up at his face, seeming to peer straight through him and on into the trailer behind. This was the wife of the Ford-Mercury dealer. One night later she was dead. Grotesquely. Upside-down, blood leaking from her ears. But still staring. And the day after that, Otis arranged for a long weekend and went on religious retreat, promising the Virgin never to see Pauline again.