That’s what it was like, living where I did. I was too often the only one who noticed something, or wanted something, or thought something was special or beautiful or funny.
There was this house in our town that was burgled. The thieves left a Picasso. It was hanging on the wall, right there, and they carried out the television and the computer, walking past it, back and forth. It was an original, signed Picasso litho worth $40,000. But in suburban California, only sappy, ostentatious Kinkades get treated like art. Picasso can’t even get himself stolen. That’s what it’s like back home. If you recognize a Picasso, if you notice Gauguin isn’t wearing pants, you’re the foreigner. It doesn’t matter that I was born there. I’m a foreigner.
Now thinking of that Gauguin photo just puts Nick in my mind: Nick half-undressed. Nick only half-rumpled, Nick holding back. He’s ruined that for me. It’s not funny anymore.
It’s important for me to make it clear that Nick’s not all that. He’s not. He’s just some guy with an accent and floppy hair; God knows there are enough of them in this town. God knows, half the men in this town wear knee-length wool coats and winter scarves striped with their school colors. Everyone talks like he does. But I was vulnerable to that. Americans are. We feel superior to the traditions that sort people into classes, but we envy them too. They’re romantic. I let myself get all romantic about the whole English thing, and he was a piece of it. I wasn’t in love with him. I was desperate for him. Those are two entirely different things.
Because Polly was so prissy about me reading Gretchen’s emails, I didn’t tell her the interesting part. The other biographer had offered money for the photos.
I immediately thought about selling some to her, of course I did. It was the same as someone looking down at the ground from a height. You think about what a jump would feel like, and the fall, and the splat. It doesn’t mean you’re considering it, it’s just a mental journey. You see it and think what it would be like.
After I got the letter from Dad, I thought about it a different way.
It would have been so easy to scan a few. I could even just take pictures of them. The biographer wouldn’t be picky about the source. She wanted them, right? So she wasn’t going to get all righteous and say no.
Except for Gretchen having gone all nuts. Just like that, everything done. Not just for now, but done in a final way. Even the portrait photograph of the two sisters together, which used to hang in Gretchen’s bedroom, was gone. She’d told Nick to actually get rid of everything. That’s crazy!
Maybe he’d thought so too…
I stood up straighter. Maybe he’d recognized that it was ridiculous. Maybe he’d tried to save Gretchen from herself. Maybe he’d saved those photos somewhere before he disappeared…
Maybe he’d saved me.
It was easy to get to Nick’s house: Just go all the way up Madingley Road. For all the web of curvy, crossed lanes downtown, the roads out of town are long, straight spokes. Madingley Road heads for, well, Madingley village. People take this road to get to Churchill College, and the Observatory, and the four thousand white crosses of the World War II cemetery of American soldiers. I took it to Nick’s house, which is right across from the vet school horses.
The house is modest in that it’s not some huge edifice. It’s an aesthetic stack of all-white boxes with windows in a swath all the way across. It was really built in the thirties, not an homage to the thirties, and you can tell the difference. It’s kind of cramped, a little shabby with age, but full of strong shapes and interesting light. The whole thing is topped by a tangle of branches reaching over from the wood behind it.
I rang the bell. A girl answered. This had to be Nick’s sister, Alexandra.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m a friend of Nick’s. He’d borrowed something of mine. I’m really, really sorry to bother you. I didn’t want to do this, but I really need to have it back.”
She squinted at me. “What was it?” She didn’t open the door any farther, only kept it open enough to stick her face through.
“Some photographs. They were in a big box.” I gestured with my hands to indicate the size. “And some papers and stuff, but mostly photos. Do you know if he left them here?”
“Nick doesn’t really keep anything here.”
“I know. I know, but it isn’t at the Chanders’ house or in his office and so I thought…” The contents of those two places had been discussed in the press.
“Were they some really old photos?”
Yes! “Yes,” I said. “Really old. They were mine, and I’d like them back.”
She lifted her shoulders, then dropped them in tandem with an enormous sigh. “Somebody dumped some old photos in the pond. I thought it was our neighbor. Why would Nick do that?”
I told her something about Nick trying to protect me from some old memories that he thought weighed too heavily on my mind. She squinted at me. Good girl for being suspicious; that had sounded stilted even to me. So I tried it a little different and beseeching: “Oh, please, can you tell me where the pond is?”
She squeezed her arm out without opening the door any farther and pointed.
I thanked her and ran around the house. I didn’t see any photos; just nature. The ground near the water was unmaintained, a wild mess of roots, leaves, and weeds.
It was nearing dark already. Winter afternoons don’t last long here. I swept at leaves with a stick, to see what was under them. Nothing but bugs and dirt until, halfway around, a white corner stuck out. I picked it up and turned it over. It was of Gretchen and her friends, at some high school event. It was useless to me itself, but it was like a big fat X in the dirt: The Linda Paul pictures were here. And they’d been discarded; I could collect and sell them legitimately. I could sell them all, not just a discreet few. How could Gretchen complain, when she’d thrown them away?
I got down on my knees to push the leaves around with my hands. Then a stick plunged down in the dirt, right next to me. It nearly impaled my wrist. I fell back and shielded myself. The person with the stick shined a flashlight on me.
“You’re trespassing,” she said. “I demand you leave immediately.”
“I’m a friend of the Frey family…” I said, but my excuse counted for nothing.
“Then you would do well to return to them before I phone for the police.”
I backed up like a crab, and she followed me, poking the flashlight at my face so I never felt comfortable rocking forward to stand up.
“Look,” I said, “I just made a mistake, okay? I didn’t mean to cross into your yard…”
Then she saw the picture in my hand. She snatched it up and scampered backward, out of my reach in case I planned to wrestle her for it.
She turned her back to me and trained the light onto the picture. Now, with the light facing away from me, my eyes readjusted.
Every one of those big trees had photos nailed to it. At first they were all just rectangles to me, but as my eyes coped with the fading light I made out the shapes of familiar scenes. There didn’t seem to be any order to it-black-and-whites and color ones were grouped haphazardly; baby Gretchen and teen Gretchen and young Linda Paul. The neighbor lady put her flashlight on the ground and I couldn’t see much anymore. But I heard her-thud, thud, thud. She must have been nailing up the picture she’d taken out of my hand.
I stood up and rubbed my arms. There! Hanging primly from its wire, the way you’d hang it in a drawing room, was the framed photo of Linda and Ginny. I remembered it. It was formal and beautiful and surely the biographer would pay something for that. Wilting flowers had been intertwined through the elaborate frame. The glass front was cracked. She was distracted. I stepped toward it.