The Memory Keeper's Daughter (20 page)

"Perfect," she said. "We're having lobster." Yes, so ordinary, this talk. The stunning moment was behind them now, and she was the gracious hostess, moving as easily in her role as she moved within her whisper of a dress. Howard was her guest; she offered him a wicker chair and a drink. When she came back, carrying bottles of gin and tonic and a bucket of ice on a tray, the sun had reached the edge of the water. Clouds billowed high in airy shades of pink and peach.

They ate on the porch. Darkness fell swiftly, and David lit the candles set at intervals along the railing. Beyond, the tide came in, waves rushing invisibly against the sand. In the flickering light, Howard's voice rose and fell and rose again. He talked about a camera obscura he had built. The camera obscura was a mahogany box that sealed out all light, except for a single pinpoint. This pinprick cast a tiny image of the world onto a mirror. The instrument was the precursor to the camera; some painters-Vermeer was one- had used it as a tool to achieve an extraordinary level of detail in their work. Howard was exploring this, too.

Norah listened, awash in the night, struck by his imagery: the world projected on a darkened interior wall, tiny figures caught in light but moving. It was so different from her sessions with David, when the camera seemed to pin her in place and time, hold her still. That, she realized, sipping her wine in the darkness, was the problem at the heart of everything. Somewhere along the way, she and David had gotten stuck. They circled each other now, fixed in their separate orbits. The conversation shifted, and Howard told stories about the time he'd spent in Vietnam, working as a photographer for the army, documenting battles. "A lot of it was boring, actually," he said, when Paul expressed his admiration. "A lot of it was just riding up and down the Mekong on a boat. It's an extraordinary river, though, an extraordinary place."

After dinner Paul went to his room. A few minutes later, notes from his guitar cascaded amid the sounds of the waves. He had not wanted to come on this vacation; he had given up a week at music camp, and he had an important concert to play just a few days after they got home. David had insisted that he come; he did not take Paul's musical ambitions seriously. As an avocation it was fine, but not as a career. But Paul was passionate about the guitar, determined to go to Juilliard. David, who had worked so hard to give them every comfort, got tense every time the subject came up. Now Paul's notes fell through the air, winged and graceful but each one a little cut, too, the point of a knife piercing flesh.

The conversation moved from optics to the rarefied light of the Hudson River Valley, where Howard lived, and southern France, where he liked to visit. He described the narrow road, a thin dust rising, and the fields of pulsing sunflowers. He was all voice, hardly more than a shadow next to her, but his words moved through her like Paul's music did, somehow both inside and outside her at once. David poured more wine and changed the subject, and then they were standing, stepping into the brightly lit living room. David pulled his series of black-and-white photos from his portfolio, and he and Howard launched into an intent discussion about the qualities of light.

Norah lingered. The photographs they were discussing were all of her: her hips, her skin, her hands, her hair. And yet she was excluded from the conversation: object, not subject. Now and then when she went into an office in Lexington, Norah would find a photo, anonymous yet eerily familiar too-some curve of her body or a place she had visited with David, stripped of its original meaning and transformed: an image of her own flesh that had become abstract, an idea. She had tried, by posing for David, to ease some of the distance that had grown between them. His fault, hers-it didn't really matter. But watching David now, absorbed in his explanation, she understood that he did not really see her and hadn't for years.

Anger rose up in a rush that left her trembling. She turned and walked from the room. Since the day with the wasps she had drunk very little, but now she went into the kitchen and poured herself a red plastic glass brimming with wine. All around her were dirty pots and congealing butter, the fiery red husks of lobsters like the shells of dead cicadas. Such a lot of work for such brief pleasure! Usually David did the dishes, but tonight Norah tied an apron around her waist and filled the sink and put the remaining oyster stew away in the refrigerator. In the living room the voices went on and on, rising and falling like the sea. What had she been thinking, putting on this dress, falling into Howard's voice? She was Norah Henry, the wife of David, the mother of Paul, a son nearly grown. There were strands of gray in her hair, which she did not believe anyone could see except herself, squinting in the harsh light of the bathroom. Still, it was true. Howard had come to discuss photography with David, and that was that.

She stepped outside, carrying the garbage to the dumpster. The sand was faintly cold against her bare feet, the air as warm as her own skin. Norah walked to the edge of the ocean and stood gazing at the vivid white sweep of stars. Behind her the screen door opened and swung shut. David and Howard came out, walking through the sand and darkness.

"Thanks for cleaning up," David said. He touched his hand briefly to her back and she tensed, making an effort not to move away. "Sorry not to help. I guess we got talking. Howard has some good ideas."

"Actually, I was mesmerized by your arms, " Howard noted, referring to the hundreds of shots David had taken. He picked up a piece of driftwood and flung it, hard. They heard it splash and the waves licking, pulling it out to sea.

Behind them the house was like a lantern, casting a bright circle, but the three of them stood in a darkness so complete that Norah could barely see David's face, or Howard's, or her own hands. Only shadowy shapes and disembodied voices in the night. The conversation meandered, circling back to technique and process. Norah thought she might scream. She put one bare foot behind the other, meaning to turn and leave, when suddenly a hand brushed her thigh. She paused, startled. Waiting. In a moment Howard's fingers ran lightly up the seam of her dress, and then his hand was slipping inside her pocket, a sudden secret warmth against her flesh.

Norah held her breath. David talked on about his pictures. She was still wearing the apron, and it was very dark. After a moment she made a slight turn, and Howard's hand flowered open against the thin cloth, the flatness of her stomach.

"Well, that's true," Howard said, his voice low and easy. "You'd sacrifice something in clarity if you were to use that filter. But the effect would certainly be worth it."

Norah let her breath out, slowly, slowly, wondering if Howard could feel the wild rapid pulsing of her blood. Warmth radiated from his fingers; she was filled with such yearning that she ached. The waves rose and eased away and rose again. Norah stood very still, listening to the rush of her own breath.

"Now, with the camera obscura you're one step closer to the process," Howard said. "It's really quite remarkable, the way it frames the world. I wish you'd come by and see it. Will you?" he asked.

"I'm taking Paul deep-sea fishing tomorrow," David said. "Maybe the next day."

"I think I'll go inside," Norah said faintly.

"Norah gets bored," David said.

"Who can blame her?" Howard said, and his hand pressed low on her belly, hard and swift, like the beat of a wing. Then he slid it from her pocket. "Come tomorrow morning if you want," he said. "I'm making some drawings with the camera obscura."

Norah nodded without speaking, imagining the single shaft of light piercing through darkness, casting marvelous images on the wall.

He left a few minutes later, disappearing almost at once into the darkness.

"I like that guy," David said later, when they were inside. The kitchen was immaculate now, all evidence of her dreamy afternoon hidden away.

Norah was standing at the window looking out at the dark beach, listening to the waves, both hands sunk deeply in the pockets of her dress.

"Yes," she agreed. "So do I."

The next morning, David and Paul rose before sunrise to drive up the coast and catch the fishing boat. Norah lay there in the dark while they got ready, the clean cotton sheet soft against her skin, listening to them bump around awkwardly in the living room, trying not to make any noise. Footsteps, then, and the roar of the car starting, then fading into silence, the sound of waves. She lay there, languid, as a line of light formed where sky and ocean met. Then she showered and got dressed and made herself a cup of coffee. She ate half a grapefruit, washed her dishes and put them neatly away, and walked out the door. She was wearing shorts and a turquoise blouse patterned with flamingos. Her white sneakers were tied together and swinging from her hand. She had washed her hair and the ocean wind was blowing it dry, tangling it around her face.

Howard's cottage, a mile down the beach, was nearly identical to her own. He was sitting on the porch, bent over a darkly finished wooden box. He was wearing white shorts and an orange plaid madras shirt, unbuttoned. His feet, like hers, were bare. He stood up as she drew near.

"Want some coffee?" he called. "I've been watching you walk down the beach."

"No, thanks," she said.

"You sure? It's Irish coffee. With a little jolt, if you know what I mean."

"Maybe in a minute." She climbed the steps and ran her hand over the polished mahogany box. "Is this the camera obscura?"

"It is," he said. "Come. Take a look."

She sat down on the chair, still warm from his flesh, and looked through the aperture. The world was there, the long stretch of beach and the cluster of rocks, and a sail moving slowly in the horizon. Wind lifted in the piney casuarina trees, everything tiny and rendered in such sharp detail, framed and contained, yet alive, not static. Norah looked up then, blinking, and found that the world had been transformed as well: the flowers, so sharply drawn against the sand, the chair with its bright stripes, and the couple walking at the edge of the water. Vivid, startling, so much more than she'd realized.

"Oh," she said, looking back into the box. "It's astonishing. The world is so precise, so rich. I can even see the wind moving in the trees."

Howard laughed. "It's wonderful, isn't it? I knew you'd like it." She thought of Paul as an infant, his mouth rounded in a perfect O as he lay in his crib staring up at some ordinary amazement. She bent her head again to view the world contained, then looked up to see it transformed. Released from its surrounding frame of darkness, even the light was shimmering, alive. "It's so beautiful," she whispered. "I almost can't stand how beautiful it is."

"I know," Howard said. "Go. Be in it. Let me draw you." She rose and walked out into the hot sand, the glare. She turned and stood before Howard, his head bent over the aperture, watching his hand move across the sketch pad. Her hair kindled-already the sun was a hot flat hand-and she remembered posing the day before, and the day before that. How many times had she stood just this way, the subject and an object too, posed to evoke or to preserve what really did not exist, her true thoughts locked away?

So she stood now, a woman reduced to a perfect miniature of herself, every fact of her cast by light onto a mirror. The ocean wind, warm and damp, moved in his hair, and Howard's hands, with their long fingers and trim nails, moved quickly as he sketched her, fixing her image on the page. She remembered the sand shifting beneath her hips as she posed for David's camera, and how they had talked about her later, David and Howard, not as a flesh-and-blood woman in the room but rather as an image, a form. Remembering this, her body seemed fragile suddenly, as if she were not the accomplished self-sufficient woman who'd taken a group to China and back but rather someone who might be swept away by the next gust of wind. Then she remembered Howard's hand, warming her pocket and her flesh. That hand, the one moving now, the one that drew her.

She reached down to her waist and caught the hem of her blouse. Slowly, but without hesitation, she pulled it over her head and let it fall on the sand. On the porch, Howard stopped drawing, though he did not lift his head. The small muscles in his arms and shoulders had ceased moving. Norah unzipped her shorts. They slid down over her hips and she stepped out of them. So far it was nothing unfamiliar, just the same swimsuit she had modeled in so many times before. But now she reached behind and unhooked the straps of the top. She pushed the bottoms over her hips and down her legs, kicking them away. She stood feeling the sun and wind move across her skin.

Howard slowly raised his head from the camera obscura and sat staring.

For an instant it had a nightmare quality, that sense of panic and shame when she realized, in the middle of a dream, shopping or walking in a crowded park, that she had forgotten to get dressed. She started to reach for her suit.

"No, don't," Howard whispered, and she paused, straightening. "You're so beautiful." He rose then, carefully, slowly, as if she were a bird he might startle into flight. But Norah stood very still, intently present in her body, feeling as if she were made out of sand, sand meeting fire and about to be transformed, smoothed, made glittering. Howard crossed the few feet of beach. It seemed to take him forever, his feet sinking into the warm sand. When he finally reached her he stopped, without touching her, and stared. The wind moved in her hair and he pushed a strand from her lip, tucking it, very gently, behind her ear.

"I could never capture this," he said, "what you are in this moment. I could never capture it."

Norah smiled and splayed her hand flat on his chest, feeling the thin madras cotton and the warm flesh, the layers of muscle, bone. The sternum, she remembered, from the days when she had studied bones in order to better understand David and his work. The manubrium and the gladiolus, shaped like a sword. The true ribs and the false, the lines of union.

He cupped his hands lightly around her face. She let her own hand fall. Together, without speaking, they walked to the little cot-tage. She left her clothes on the sand; she did not care about that either, that anyone might see them. The boards of the porch gave slightly beneath her feet. The cloth over the camera obscura was thrown back and she saw with satisfaction that Howard had sketched the beach and horizon, the scattered rocks and trees; all these were perfect reproductions. He had sketched her hair, a soft cloud, amorphous, but that was all. Where she had stood the page was blank. Her clothes had fallen like leaves, and he had looked up to see her standing there.