The photographer’s circussy style was not lost on John’s young son Mikey, who used it for one of his famous wordless monodramas at his parents’ annual Pioneers Day barbecue the summer of the civic center controversy, an awkward occasion for Trevor whose wife Marge was leading the opposition to the building of the annoying thing, having even managed that very week to get a temporary restraining order (soon to be overturned, of course, no stopping John) to prevent the plowing up of the city park, and who, even at the barbecue, had trouble keeping her mouth shut. Well, nothing new there. Trevor was John’s personal accountant and a corporation officer, Marge the town’s most intransigent gadfly, there’d been embarrassing parties like this before. Fortunately John was a tolerant man with a good sense of humor, maybe he even got a kick out of Marge’s quixotic activism, they’d been at it since grade school after all, and — until now anyway — she’d not put Trevor’s business relationship with John at any serious risk. Trevor sipped his spring water and knocked on what he hoped was wood: John was about ninety percent of all the business relationships he had. Little Mikey had roped a pillow around his tummy, buttoned on one of his father’s trenchcoats, its tails dragging the ground, and rigged a fanciful camera out of a video cassette, toilet paper tubes, plastic dishware from a child’s tea set, and a penlight which his sister Clarissa complained he’d stolen from her bedroom. Now he bobbed and waddled through the lawn party, taking everyone’s photo by switching the penlight on and off, organizing “family portraits” with broad ludicrous gestures, and, whenever she hove into sight, chasing his mother about with his peculiar apparatus, click-click-clicking away as though demonically possessed. Not everyone got the point of Mikey’s act, especially this last part, even if they knew who was being mocked, but Trevor knew, he’d seen the photographer up to his tricks before. The first time, he’d been sitting in the Sixth Street Cafe on a crisp autumn day with a client, a farmer for whom he was setting up an improved health insurance policy with term life attached, when the photographer had come galumphing past the plateglass window, apparently on his way into the cafe. Suddenly, he’d pulled up short, his lashless eyes bulging, and then had hurried in his walrussy way across the street to the newspaper office and printshop and had ducked inside, reappearing behind the window over there a few seconds later, now hidden behind a camera with a long gleaming lens. He’d seemed to be aiming straight at Trevor, which had made him pull back a bit into the shadows, mildly alarmed. But then the true target of Gordon’s photographic attentions had come by, walking her dog. The dog had caught the food odors from the cafe and brought her to an abrupt stop, blocking Trevor’s view of the window across the street. When she had passed, the window was empty. Since then, more than once, he’d seen the fat photographer in timid clandestine pursuit, and in turn, inexplicably amused, had begun quietly to pursue the pursuer.
Here is one of Gordon’s photos on the same theme, though not the one John’s personal accountant saw being taken: A slender woman in a white tennis costume, having emerged from the driver’s seat of a Lincoln Town Car, is leaning back in to retrieve something from the front seat, her purse perhaps. The car is parked among many others in a vast blacktop lot in the middle of a modern shopping mall, and indeed the photo seems to have been taken from inside another car parked not far away. Has she surprised two young vandals? Dressed in studded leather jackets, printed tee shirts, and torn jeans, they seem to be fleeing from the far side of the Town Car as though to escape capture. Or, more likely, confinement: one of the two girls has her arm extended behind her as though she might have just pushed the backseat door shut, even as she rushes away. In the background, near the mock-arcade entrance to the mall with its automatic glass doors and rows of nested wire shopping carts, young out-of-focus dressalikes can be seen in studied poses — slouching, smoking, waving — vaguely reminiscent of smalltown photographs from generations past. Slanted sunlight falls on the driver’s white tennis shorts, creating a kind of blurry nimbus or halo around her hips (the impression is that of having been stared at too hard and long), a seeming photographic flaw that was perhaps, through darkroom manipulation, intentional.
Clarissa, one of the secondary subjects in Gordon’s parking lot photo of the radiant tennis shorts (part of a continuing series), was not at all happy with her stupid little brother’s impersonation of the town photographer that afternoon at her daddy’s annual summer barbecue, refusing to take part with the other kids in his pseudo family portraits and determined to find some way of sabotaging the little showboat. It was especially disgusting the way Mikey went scuttling after their mom with that dumb thingamajig every time she came outside — why did everyone think it was so funny? When Clarissa complained that he was going to use up her penlight batteries, they all just laughed. Even Uncle Bruce, who had flown in just for the day and on whom both she and Jennifer had a tremendous crush that summer, seemed amused by the little sicko, it was unbelievable. Uncle Bruce was not really her uncle, as she had to keep reminding Jennifer all the time, Jennifer wanting Bruce all for herself and accusing Clarissa of what she called incestual madness. He and her father had both been in the same fraternity at college, and her father had told Clarissa years and years ago that since he called him “brother Bruce,” she could call him uncle. Of course, Jen’s father had also been in their fraternity, but that was different. Clarissa had dibs. Uncle Bruce was very sexy for an older man and tons of fun and Clarissa had made him promise a long time ago that when she grew up he would marry her, and she still meant it whether he did or not: she’d had it engraved in secret code on her love-slave ankle bracelet just to prove it. So, when Uncle Bruce not only let Mikey drag him into one of his ridiculous imitation studio photos, and one making fun maybe of her own family at that, but even with a big laugh and a hug pulled Jennifer along with him to be his pretend wife (Jen was really eating it up: come on! this was her best friend?), it was too much. She went looking for Jennifer’s nerdy brother Fish, found him hiding in the garage, sucking on a snitched can of beer. “Hey, Creep, where are those firecrackers you told me you brought?”
These annual Pioneers Day barbecues were part of a year-round parade of social affairs lavishly hosted by John and his wife, including everything from bridge foursomes, cocktail parties, and stag poker nights to bowl game gatherings, formal dinners, and kids’ birthday parties, a festal sequence that gave incident and body to the evanescent flow, configuring the town’s present as Ellsworth’s weekly paper and Gordon’s family portraits recomposed and fixed the past. The Christmas season did not really begin until their annual open house, the presidents’ midwinter birthdays gave way to John’s between, and their backyard barbecues were famous throughout the state, such wealth and power gathering there on those long summer days as to tickle all the senses: one could smell it suddenly in the rich sweet smoke, see it in the rugged smile of the handsome host, striding through the fresh-mown grass in his tooled boots and brushed denims, taste it on the quickened palate, hear it in the squat tumblers of golden whiskey wherein ice tinkled like pockets full of fairy coins. Brother Bruce, rare guest and ever rarer, called them milestones to oblivion, but was always cheerful when he said so, often donning the chef’s apron and pitching in, entertaining Clarissa with elephant jokes and funny riddles, showing Mikey magic tricks. Out-of-towners like Bruce were frequent guests, business cronies and college friends, clients, investors, politicians, all those who peopled John’s wider world beyond, dropping into town to join the local cast of characters as though from out the clouds, sometimes literally so by way of John’s airport, manifestations incarnate of the community’s global connections and beaming witnesses to its calendric revels, as celebrated at the home of John and his wife, that consummate hostess. As Waldo, another of John’s fraternity brothers and at the time his Assistant Vice President in Charge of Sales, put it that afternoon while John’s funny kid was into his fat photogoofer number, clinking glasses in a toast to the pioneer spirit of exploration and new discoveries with a beautiful young woman whose name he couldn’t remember (didn’t matter, at this point in a party all young women were beautiful and had the same name): “Only thing wrong with John’s parties, baby, is that, like life itself, they’re fucking beautiful but they’re too fucking short.” He threw his arm around the woman and raised his glass to Mikey and hollered “Haw!” as the kid passed by, pointing his crazy gizmo at them, and the way her head bounced off his shoulder he definitely had the impression that she was at least as drunk as he was or else stoned, which meant she was quite possibly as much in love with him at that moment as he was with her, whoever the hell she was. “You gotta move fast, know what I mean? or before you can even get your ass into the swing of things, shit, baby, the show’s over.”