About three miles from Ma’s apartment was a small shopping plaza, an old fifties kind of thing, a strip of a dozen linked stores all housed in a large one-story rectangle of a structure with a flat roof and dingy metal canopy that hung out over the sidewalk. There was a five-and-ten and a drug store, a liquor store, a soft-serve ice cream shop, and a shoe repair place. More than half the shops were empty and the plate glass windows were whited out with what looked like soap. Sylvia stood and stared at the soaped windows and wondered why they did that. Didn’t that just call attention to the demise of the business and contribute to the seedy feeling of the place in general? It drove her kind of crazy that she couldn’t come up with a single decent reason for whitewashing the window of an empty storefront.
She crossed the street to the plaza and noticed, at one end of the parking lot, what looked like an enormous old camera. It took a second to realize it was a drive-through photo shop. The Snapshot Shack, one of those boxy huts where you pull up to a little window and drop your film for developing and the clerk always tries to push new film on you. In this particular store, the drive-up window looked like an enormous round lens, which was okay, even kind of cute. The problem was that they’d painted the place this awful shade of brown, like an old camera, but at this scale — five feet high and wide — the brown was drab and sort of depressing.
To this day, Sylvia has no idea why she walked over to the shack. But as she approached the window, she saw the hand-lettered cardboard sign taped to the glass that read
HELP WANTED
No Experience Necessary
and when the obese woman inside slid open the window and asked if she’d come about the job, Sylvia shook her head yes and took the clipboard and questionnaire.
Then the fat woman slid the window closed again and Sylvia stood out in the cold with this horribly dull pencil filling in her name and age and work experience and her breath kept forming a cloud in front of her eyes. She had to knock on the window when she was done and the woman acted annoyed as she took the clipboard back inside. The clerk was reading a supermarket tabloid and Sylvia had always remembered one headline: Screen Siren Denies Porno Past.
The fat lady started to read the application and stopped halfway through. She looked out at Sylvia like she’d been insulted and said, “This says you went to college,” all accusatory, like she was some suspicious prosecutor and had uncovered hidden evidence. Her tone was confusing and Sylvia just shrugged at her.
The lady moved up closer to the window until her head was framed between inside and outside. “It says you got a degree in fine arts.”
Sylvia nodded.
The lady turned her head from side to side like she was looking at these invisible assistants crammed somewhere inside the shack.
“What the hell do you want this job for?” she snapped.
Sylvia said the first thing that came to mind, which happened to be the truth: “I’m very interested in photography.”
About a month later, at the beginning of February, Sylvia was getting ready to shut the Shack down because of an approaching blizzard. Perry pulled up in the Buick just as she was hanging the Closed sign. He dropped off a roll of 24-exposure Kodak 200 Gold and they got talking. He was just finishing at the public defender’s office at the time, just making the move to Walpole & Lewis. He sat with the car idling for fifteen or twenty minutes as the snowfall started to pick up. Before he drove off, Sylvia agreed to meet him the next night for spaghetti at Fiorello’s down on San Remo Ave.
That’s when everything changed. That’s when Sylvia reentered the world and real life regained its status as slightly more relevant than Rita Hayworth dancing her heart out through the musical number “You Excite Me.”
As she gets undressed, Sylvia stares at Perry, all hunched up in the bed. And she tries to imagine what her life would be like right now if he hadn’t driven up to the Snapshot Shack that day.
4
Sylvia wants to be clear about her feelings for the Canal Zone. She’s not an insider. She’s never lived there. She knows that half those people would just as soon spit on her as give her the time of day. She’s fairly sure that most of the poetry readings are really just clashes in the latest fashion war, that the bulk of talent that hangs out on Rimbaud is in the areas of posturing and attitude. And she can’t say Perry is totally wrong when he points out that the lines between the Zone and Bangkok Park are blurring more each year.
She’s never pretended to be some cutting-edge bohemian. It’s not like she wants to carve some place for herself down in the clubs, to integrate herself with the Black Hole group or Mona Jackson’s clique. It’s just not like that. She’s older than most of these people. She never got kicked out of any of the great schools. She’s never dyed her hair to some attention-grabbing shade. She’s not great with obscenity. She doesn’t even own a whole lot of leather.
It’s just that, compared with the rest of the city, in the Zone it’s all right to want to spend your days scouting images, looking for that one sweet shot. In the Zone, her job at the Snapshot Shack is like a hip career and, given the choice, she’d rather someone view her eight hours inside an enormous camera as some kind of oblique statement rather than a sign of laziness or retarded ambition.
And maybe she is too concerned with what other people think of her, but if they’re going to start dwelling on her faults, this would be pretty low on her list. The thing is, the Canal Zone can also be a lot of fun. It’s never stagnant. People are outside all the time, middle of the night, middle of the winter, they’re standing in small packs, imported cigarette smoke engulfing their heads, their eyes jumpy from lack of sleep. She can usually find a way to ignore the trendiness and the retro-snobbery. She tried to tell Perry that she gets what she wants out of the Zone. Dozens of weird little one-room ethnic restaurants open and close every month. Every corner has some old bibliophile holdout ranting against the big chain stores and offering you some coverless Verlaine paperback for a dime, a buck for volume J of the eleventh-edition Britannica. There’s some kind of bizarre parade every other day and it’s always a challenge to decipher the theme. The handbills posted on the telephone poles and stop signs are invariably mondo tracts, little Cliff’s Notes to the Kabbala, even when they’re just advertising a new band or a common boycott or a special at the Afghani deli. It’s like a funny, ongoing flea market, she tells Perry. It’s like a little front against boredom. What’s so bad about that?
Jack Derry’s Camera Exchange is supposed to be down on Waldstein. That’s near the border of Bangkok Park and if Perry knew she was that close to the war zone, he’d have a fit. The city has pretty much given up on the Park. Everyone accepts now that you’ll never really know what goes on in Bangkok. The Spy has begun to act like the place just didn’t exist, as if they’d already filled some quota for murder and drug and gang stories, as if the nightly body count in the Park no longer qualified as news.
Sylvia had one experience, a long time ago, in Bangkok Park. It’s the kind of story that will always lose something in the telling because it had more to do with her interior reaction than with the landscape. For that reason, she’s never told Perry about that day. It’s like trying to put words to someone’s first look at one of Kettelhut’s Cambodian photographs. No matter how perfect the phraseology, it’s destined to fall short of what really took place in the viewer’s heart and brain. She doesn’t mean to be melodramatic, but she was only nine years old at the time and things can hit you as a child, things can take hold of you.