They were driving and it was the dead of night now. In the middle of the night they were speeding across the vast and unknowable country. Then the sky went white and he saw a hole in it like a cigarette burn. He would miss this bed, he thought, it would be hard to leave. He would miss this woman, this night. He would be leaving soon, he knew that now, he could not stay any longer. He was grateful to have had the chance to give her something, but he could not fight for himself. This is what I have been running toward and away from, he thought. This hole in the sky. He could picture himself wriggling through it, ending up on the other side, like some character from a silent comedy or a cartoon strip, always getting into scrapes and miraculously out of them, endlessly emerging from the brink of disaster. But he could not stay here, in this hospital, in this world, any longer. It was impossible. He had used up all of his earthly means of escape.
He looked at the wall with its wide expanse of soft white skin and its subtle shadows changing in the light. He pictured vividly that it would still be here tomorrow, when he was gone. And the pillowcase, he could see the corner of it out of his eye, against the wall, like the collar of a man’s shirt against a woman’s neck. He could use the pillowcase. He would shred it. Not too thin. It would hold him, as it had held him for so long, only now it would be for the last time. He lay in bed and planned his escape. He said to the wall on which he could project her face into the shadows: Forgive me. I gave you all I could.
What does it mean for a soldier to take his own life after he has survived the war? It depends on the meaning of survival. It depends on the meaning of war. He had nearly given his life for a story about his country, but he didn’t believe in that story anymore. Then he had come home and he had kept on fighting and had fought for another story: Honor’s. Now he felt that his job was done. To live a life with no story, this was not survival. To begin again, that felt like another war. He had fought. He had lost. He had won. He had loved. He was done. It was over.
•
Parvin did not die. When she finally reached the other side, Hyacinth was waiting for her on the shore. He was holding a bag filled with the coins that Kaya had gathered from the base of the potted plant. He had more of the string that Avedis had invented. “In case of emergency,” Hyacinth said. And he had with him a blanket to wrap her up in, he knew she would be shivering and blue, and he carried her to a waiting carriage. Where it was going, Parvin didn’t know, and she didn’t care.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Vivian
T
he photographs were never recovered. Vivian worked with the police and the case remained open for many years, but there were so few clues, so little evidence. And what could possibly have been the motive? The negatives were valuable, but not worth that much, and would have quickly been discovered had they been in circulation. Perhaps there was a mad collector out there who would purchase them, but it seemed unlikely. It appeared that the theft was personal. When the police questioned Vivian about her various relationships and asked her if there was anyone who might wish her harm, she was reminded of all of the mysteries she had ever read and how she had always thought that was a ridiculous question. Of course there must be someone out there who wished her ill, there were any number of random people one slighted in the course of a lifetime, and any number of intimates one would inevitably hurt as well. But she had kept to herself for so long now that unless it was some insanely rivalrous colleague, of which there were too many to count, she could think of no one who would do something like this, and even her fellow photographers were not really capable of stealing. Stealing her ideas, yes, that happened all the time, but her actual pictures? What good would it do? She could always take more.
That’s what the director of the museum said to her and that’s what she did, over several years. She took hundreds of new pictures, all color now, still of children, still of their moody, mysterious selves and their faces and bodies that continually protected and betrayed them. She finally did have her show, it was not her last, and it was received with great critical acclaim, even helped, perhaps, by the scandal of the stolen photographs. The art world turned out for the opening. It was the early Seventies now. Women’s long legs outlined by flowing pants strode across the stone floor of the sculpture garden. Men wore their hair to their shoulders and smiled more than they would a decade later. Older patrons of the museum still dressed in pearls, suits, pumps, handbags, and they mingled with the artists and fashionable younger set like antique ceramic animals mixed in with essential oils and incense on the top of a dresser.
Vivian was surrounded by groups who gathered around her and dispersed. In other words, she was alone. Her hair was slightly shorter these days, still brown, and for the occasion she was wearing a floor-length off-white Indian-style heavy cotton dress with a V-neck bordered with lace. She still looked pretty in a lined but delicate way and much younger than her years, which were approaching sixty. She beamed. She was proud of her work, and gladly accepted compliments. She nodded thoughtfully at people’s comments, tilting her head lower the more important the speaker, but listening equally intently, if not more so, when the speaker was a student or a friend. Mostly, though, she was aware of an absence, of her missing pictures, and she winced imperceptibly when she caught sight of a particular image that reminded her of an earlier one that had disappeared. The drinks flowed. People ate Brie on stoned wheat thins. As the night wore on she drank more and felt different feelings, a growing pride as she sensed that the show would mark a major advancement in her career, and a nagging desire, which she thought she had put aside some time ago, to know the truth about the theft. She found herself by the end of the evening desiring to know more than ever who, at the height of her career, had wanted to bring her down.
On the way home from the restaurant where she had celebrated with some museum people and critics and old friends, she caught sight of her reflection in the window of a closed store and stopped. She was wearing a brown coat over her long dress and a scarf tied around her neck. She was struck by something about the coat. It was wool, not too heavy. A spring coat, her mother would have called it, and the way it fell on her, or didn’t fall exactly but held its own shape, not accommodating to hers, seemed decidedly old-fashioned in contrast to the flowing dress. It made her look, she thought, like a child. For a second a specific child came to mind, then disappeared in a flash. The image of the child reminded her of earlier lives she had led and the coat reminded her of the shapes she had tried to fit into throughout her life. She felt the childishness of her own inability to either adapt to the shape or throw off the coat. She would never, she realized, have been happy adapting to the cut of the coat. She should have learned that by now, but still there were times when she felt haunted by an uneasy feeling that she was not living the correct life, that she should never have become an artist. But it was too late. And anyway now she understood: Every choice would have brought some kind of pain. This life was the correct life. This was who she was.
She walked to the corner and waited for the light to change. There was a metal garbage can on the sidewalk, debris moving around inside it as the late April wind blew a little stronger than gently and the blue-gray underwater light of the city streets in the early morning appeared to make objects float. The traffic light seemed to take forever. She stared up at the yellow fixture suspended above the street, and within it the illuminated red circle. A bright orb pulsing against the dull colors of the faded night sky, the looming neutral buildings. Another memory formed and then disintegrated in her mind. She felt a shift inside as if she had remembered a name that she had been trying to summon all day, or for decades. She couldn’t have said what the name was, but she knew that something she had worried about was no longer worth troubling over. She knew that her stolen pictures were safe. The light changed again while she thought this and instead of crossing the street right away she stood there and took off her coat.
The breeze felt good. She let the cool unclean air ripple through her long dress. She cradled the coat in her arms for a while. Then she folded the coat and settled it into the garbage can, nestled among the newspapers and wrappers and food. The light changed. She crossed the street. She left the coat. She headed home.
Iris
After Iris and Alex got divorced, Iris moved with Anna to the West Side. They lived in a rent-stabilized apartment in the Nineties on West End Avenue where the rooms branched off of a long narrow hallway like pages falling off the spine of an old book. Guests were always getting lost and ending up in the pantry by way of the maid’s bathroom. Of course there was no maid. Alex remarried and lived on Park Avenue and Anna spent her weekends with him and his new family. Sunday nights she would return home to Iris, watch some
Masterpiece Theatre
with her mother, and fall asleep to the sound of Iris’s typing, the quick footsteps of little intellectual mice. Iris had become a journalist. When friends asked Anna what her mother wrote about she would say: Pretty much anything. And that was true. She had written everything from restaurant reviews to celebrity interviews to investigative pieces about insurance fraud or water safety. Eventually, Iris remarried as well, but it didn’t last long, and when it was over she decided that marriage was not for her. Shortly after, Anna gave birth to Honor, to Iris’s horror and chagrin, and it was really only then that Iris discovered the meaning of familial pleasure. Honor she adored. The child returned her affection, not caring if Iris showed up two hours late for a visit or if she spent the whole time talking about her latest article. Iris oozed love for the little girl and would look at her with a gaze of such acceptance and devotion that the child could not help but fall into her grandmother’s arms. This was helpful, since her mother was still in school.
One day Honor was at her grandmother’s house while Anna studied in the library for her graduate school entrance exam. The little girl wandered freely around the apartment. Iris was at her typewriter. It was 1988. Outside, the world was gleefully throwing off the old habits of book learning and face-to-face communication in favor of newer, more technologically advanced and faster methods of progressing in life without having to actually experience it, but in Iris’s apartment the walls were lined with the soon-to-be-relics of print culture, although they did not know yet of their imminent irrelevance and so stood proudly at attention or jauntily slanted and at ease at their posts. Honor loved to pull out a bunch of them and use them to build castles as if they were blocks, but now she was getting old enough to enjoy flipping through them and studying the pictures or the tiny letters which she was just beginning to understand could interact with one another to make sense.
The narrow hall was a dim haze. The dust motes blanketing the bookshelves that lined the passage swirled frantically when Honor passed, like thousands of tiny fish disturbed by a great ship. The little girl, not yet five, knelt down to scan the lowest shelves and found a gigantic book,
The History of Italian Art
, lying on its side. It was a huge linen-covered tome missing its glossy wrapping and when Honor opened to the middle the smooth pages buckled and swelled in a wave and out rolled a faded piece of paper the size and shape of a ticket stub. It wafted to the ground and was blown, who knows by what wind, through the space under a door that Honor had never before noticed. It was a thin door, inconspicuously located at a break between the shelves, painted a graying white just like the shelves and walls, and it had a fancy cut-glass doorknob. Honor instinctively lifted herself up onto her tiptoes and turned the knob. Here was a closet, stuffed with shopping bags that in turn overflowed with more stuff. The door had obviously been squeezed shut against the tide of unwanted things that could not be parted with, and so with its opening a few bags were dislodged and one spilled its entire contents onto the floor.
It was a bag of photographs. Contact sheets, individual prints, little plastic boxes of slides, vellum packets of shiny negatives, they all tumbled out at Honor’s feet. She looked down at them as if jewels from a treasure chest had spilled in front of her. She sat down. She made herself comfortable among the heap of things obviously so unnecessary that they had been hidden away and not missed. She felt at liberty to play with them. There was no one and nothing to stop her. She noticed a pen idling on the floor of the closet, toward the back. She crawled over the photographs and stretched her arm into the closet and grabbed the pen. It was a blue ballpoint. The top had been chewed. She pulled it off, picked up a large contact sheet covered with black and white images of children, and began to write her name, or her approximation of it, over the images. Then she drew heart shapes and flowers and designs that looked like stars. She drew suns with rays of different lengths angling out in every direction. She made circles and spirals and what she thought looked like staircases. She made a garden. She drew a mother and child.
She went through her entire repertoire of favorite subjects and worked her way over the contact sheets, the individual prints, then onto the tiny slides, their stiff white edges bordering miniature worlds of transparent colors, and then, finally, to the negatives, on which the blue ballpoint pen hardly showed up at all, other than to obscure the darkened faces and whitened backgrounds which already seemed dementedly drawn by some wild child. She took exquisite pleasure in her project. She worked with concentration and deep thought and she was fortunate that her grandmother, who eventually realized that she had not heard from her normally talkative granddaughter in over an hour, found the sight of Honor scribbling across the contraband photographs which she had absconded with so many years ago shocking but not enraging, disturbing but not worthy of raising her voice. She had changed. She was not the person who had stolen the photographs, not anymore. She would always be angry and difficult and filled with a sense that she had been robbed of the right parent, but she didn’t pay quite so much attention to those feelings after so many years. And she could forgive anything Honor did. That was love. If this was what it took to enable her to experience some love, then it was worth it. Everything, in this moment, seemed worth it.
That evening after Anna had picked up Honor and taken her home, Iris cleaned up the mess in the hallway. She took a garbage bag from the kitchen, the old Bergdorf’s bag was torn and had ripped nearly in half when it fell, and began picking up the pictures and putting them in the plastic bag. For the first time, she tried to really look at them, but now they were covered with the shiny lines and scrawls and indentations of the ballpoint pen. Here and there she could make out a face or a hand, sometimes the sense of a whole composition, and she had the distance now to see the photographs for what they were: works of art. She still felt personally enough about them to find it amusing and strangely satisfying that they had been defaced by her granddaughter, but she also recognized the loss that this represented. She had followed Vivian’s career and knew that the images would be worth a fortune, although she had long ago given up the thought of having a fortune of her own and had never really contemplated trying to sell them. No, however unethically, she still considered them her birthright, and now, at the age of fifty-one, she had mellowed to the point of feeling like this was the perfect use and manifestation of her inheritance.
She picked up the last picture. Underneath it, lying on the floor, was a yellowed piece of paper, the size and shape of a ticket stub. It was a ticket stub. The writing on it was faded but she could just make out that it was for a performance of Count Basie’s Orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom on Christmas Eve 1936. She threw it in the bag. The last thing she picked up was the book on Italian art. It had been among her father’s possessions. She didn’t notice as she closed it that it was inscribed to Joe and Pearl, from V. “One day I hope you get to see these pictures,” it read.
Anna
After her daughter moved to New York City and made it clear that she wanted the space and freedom to make her own life, far from the confusing influence of a somewhat unbalanced mother, Anna had found work at a small college in the Midwest and had made some effort to stay in touch with Honor but had not pushed it. After all, she had hardly been in close touch with her own mother in later years, and now that Iris was gone she guiltily enjoyed the feeling of unfettered—some would say unmoored—freedom from having no attachments to any generation but her own. Her daughter, she often thought, was probably better off without her. Anna drifted from job to job, relationship to relationship. It didn’t feel like drifting to her. Each entanglement felt heavy with meaning and purpose, every new employer held forth the promise of complete security and comfort. Eventually, however, the constant inconstancy caught up with her, and she accepted an administrative position at a junior college on Long Island, where she could have a nice apartment in a small house a short distance from a beach. She supplemented her income by giving music lessons. Her one indulgence was an upright piano. She still loved music. Sometimes she took down the old saxophone from the back of a closet and played a little, although she had never been any good.