Double Image (8 page)

The tinny voice responded immediately. “Young man, I told you—”

“Mother, don’t call the police. These people seem all right. I’m going to let them in.”

“But—”

The woman took her finger off the intercom’s button, then pressed numbers on a keypad on the other side of the gate, freeing an electronic lock. “You’re serious about photographing a house across the canyon, Mr. . . .”

“Mitch Coltrane. This is my editor, Jennifer Lane.”

“Diane Laramy.”

They shook hands and stepped through the gate.

“What’s this about Rudolph Valentino?”

Coltrane explained the assignment as they climbed a smooth slanted lawn, stopping with their backs to a lemon tree at the hill’s highest point.

“And there it is.” Jennifer sounded amazed. She showed Packard’s photograph to Diane, then pointed down toward a curving street of houses on an opposite but lower hill. One sprawling red-roofed structure stood slightly apart, perched on an eroded slope, solitary on a dead-end road. Its walls were still white. It still looked like a Spanish monastery. But there the similarity ended. The invasion that Packard’s photograph had predicted made Falcon Lair look besieged.

“I was beginning to think this project couldn’t be done,” Coltrane said.

“Eerie,” Diane said. “Looking at that photograph and then at the house, I feel as if I’m in the past and the present simultaneously.”

“That’s the idea,” Coltrane said.

He and Jennifer crisscrossed the hill, leaning this way and that, all the while comparing their view of Falcon Lair to the perspective in Packard’s photograph, trying to find the exact spot where Packard had set up his camera.

Scraping his back against the lemon tree, Coltrane smiled. “Well, I’ll be . . . Yes. Right here.”

“Let me see.” Jennifer hurried to Coltrane’s left.

Bemused, Diane joined Coltrane on his right. He raised the photo so that it obscured the view, then lowered it, the Falcon Lair from the 1920s replaced by the Falcon Lair of the present.

“It’s like a weird kind of double exposure,” Diane said. “This lemon tree wouldn’t have been here then.”

“Or the lawn,” Jennifer added. “And obviously not your house.”

“And none of these other houses.” Coltrane continued to raise and lower the photograph, the effect hypnotic.

“So many years ago. Someone stood exactly where I’m standing now and took that picture.”

“He died on Sunday,” Coltrane said.

Diane suddenly shivered.

“Is something wrong?” Coltrane asked.

“No. There’s just a chill in the air.”

But Coltrane couldn’t help wondering if Diane had shivered for another reason. Her delicate features began to trouble him. Her skin was so translucent that he could see the hint of blue veins in her cheeks. Her eyes seemed sunken, possibly because she had lost a lot of weight. Her slacks and cardigan hung on her. Her kerchief covered her head so completely that he didn’t see any of her hair.

“Well . . .” Coltrane felt awkward. “We’re taking up your time.”

“No problem,” Diane said. “I’m enjoying this.”

“Even so . . .” Coltrane studied the sky. “The light’s about as good as I can hope for. I’d better get started.”

WHEN HE AND JENNIFER WENT BACK TO THE CAR TO GET THE camera, the tripod, and the bags of equipment, Diane insisted on helping, out of breath even though she carried only a small camera bag to the crest of the hill. Coltrane didn’t have time to think about the implications. He had only about two hours of effective light remaining and needed to hurry.

It took almost fifteen minutes to get the heavy camera secured on the tripod. After that, he used a light meter, calculated the necessary shutter speed and aperture setting, chose a lens, poked his head beneath the black cloth at the rear of the camera, used the bellows to adjust the focus, and compared what he saw to Packard’s photograph. Getting everything lined up was more difficult than he had anticipated. After forty-five minutes of concentrating on an upside-down reversed image, he felt light-headed, as if
he
were upside down.

He made twelve exposures, but he wasn’t satisfied. Framing the image to make its perspective identical to that in Packard’s photograph wasn’t going to produce a brilliant photograph, he realized. The result would merely be a visual trick. He had to build on what Packard had done, to find a metaphor equivalent to the bird of prey hovering over Falcon Lair.

“Mitch?”

Coltrane rubbed the back of his neck.

“Mitch?”

“Huh?” He turned toward Jennifer.

“You haven’t moved in the last ten minutes. Are you all right?”

“Just thinking.”

“You’ve got only forty-five minutes of light,” Jennifer said.

“
Forty-five
?” Startled, Coltrane checked his watch. He had lost more time then he realized.

Yet again, he poked his head beneath the black cloth at the rear of the camera. Earlier, when he and Jennifer had driven toward the estate, Coltrane had wondered, not seriously, if Packard had been playing a practical joke on him by suggesting this project. Now that idea struck him as being
very
serious. With one foot in the grave, had Packard been determined to show Coltrane — typical of all would-be Packards — that Coltrane didn’t have a hope of competing with him? Was this project the old man’s way of proving one last time how superior he was?

“Mitch?”

Coltrane noticed slight movement on the focusing screen. He heard a far-off echoing
whump-whump-whump
and peered up from the camera to search the sky, seeing that the movement was a distant whirling speck: a helicopter. He inserted an eight-by-ten-inch negative and grabbed the shutter release. “Come on,” he whispered tensely. He held his breath as the chopper’s glinting blades crossed the horizon.

“
Now
.” He squeezed the shutter release.

The camera clicked.

He breathed out. Packard’s bird of prey had symbolized Valentino’s bad ending and the impending invasion of the land. Now a helicopter and all
it
symbolized about the mechanization of the twentieth century had taken the falcon’s place.

“If that picture turns out the way I hope . . .” Coltrane watched the helicopter recede into the distance. “That was a one-time only chance. Even if another helicopter flies past, the odds are it’ll never be in the same spot as Packard’s falcon.”

Jennifer studied the sky. “You’re losing the light faster than we expected.”

“There might be enough for a couple more.”

A soft voice asked, “Do you suppose . . .”

Puzzled, Coltrane looked at Diane.

“When you’re finished taking pictures of the house . . .” Diane hesitated.

“Yes?”

“Could you take one of me?”

“Of course. It would be my pleasure.”

“You’re sure I’m not imposing?”

“Not at all. You made us feel welcome. I’d enjoy repaying the favor. If you turn this way . . . yes . . . with the sunset on your face . . .” Coltrane smiled. “It’ll be lovely.”

“SHE’S DYING,” Coltrane said, driving from the mansion.

“Something’s definitely wrong,” Jennifer said.

In his rearview mirror, Coltrane saw Diane standing in her driveway, her arms crossed on her oversized sweater, forlornly watching them head back toward Benedict Canyon Drive. Then he rounded a corner, and she disappeared.

“Studying her through the camera made it even more obvious,” Coltrane said. “The hollows around her eyes. I don’t think she has any hair under that kerchief. I think she’s bald from chemotherapy. I think getting married on Saturday is her attempt to grab at life.”

Jennifer didn’t say anything for a moment. “Yes. To grab at life.”

It was after dark, around six, when they pulled into the garage beneath Coltrane’s town house in Westwood. Jennifer’s BMW was at the curb.

“Do you want to get something to eat?” she asked.

“What I’d really like to do is go into the darkroom and develop these negatives.”

The photographs of Falcon Lair turned out to be excellent. Most were a close match to the angle Packard had used, but close wouldn’t do it. For the exercise to work, the match had to be perfect. The one with the helicopter in place of the falcon did the trick. All Coltrane had to do was crop it a little and print a slight enlargement of the cropped area so that Falcon Lair was precisely the same size in both photos. Eerily, the helicopter was almost exactly where the falcon had been. By modifying the development period, Coltrane was able to get the same crisp black-and-white definition that Packard had. When he glanced from Packard’s photo to his own, he had the odd sensation that he was looking at time-lapse photography, that both pictures had been taken by the same person, who had made himself wait motionless in one spot for two-thirds of a century. Staring at that relic from the past, he couldn’t help recalling that after Valentino’s death, Buster Keaton had moved into the area and put up an Italian villa. John Gilbert had built a Mediterranean palace. Other movie stars — their names no longer familiar — had built their own mansions. All lost and gone. Only Falcon Lair remained. And
would
remain as long as Packard’s photo and his own survived.

“It’s a keeper.” Jennifer put an arm around him.

But the photograph of Falcon Lair wasn’t the treasure of the day. That honor went to the image of Diane.

He had done it in color. The glow of sunset chased the wanness from Diane’s cheeks. Her face was raised yearningly, her recessed eyes sad, her gaunt features determined, her frail shoulders braced as she smiled wistfully toward the sunset of her life.

“
That
I want my name on,” Coltrane said. “Her bravery’s an inspiration.”

“Packard would have been pleased to take that picture,” Jennifer said.

While they worked in the darkroom, they heard the phone ring on three different occasions. Each time, it stopped after four rings, the limit Coltrane had set for the answering machine to engage. “It’s probably more reporters wanting an interview about those war-atrocity photos. I hope my fifteen minutes of notoriety soon stop,” he said.

But after he finished making the prints and went to the living room to press the play button on his answering machine, he frowned when all he heard was mournful classical music.

Jennifer stopped next to him. “The same as on Saturday night?”

Coltrane nodded, troubled. “And this time, we know it wasn’t Packard.”

REPRESSING HIS MISGIVINGS ABOUT THE PHONE CALLS, Coltrane left his apartment the next morning shortly after seven. He brimmed with energy, never having been this enthusiastic about any project. First, a few blocks away, he stopped at a mailbox to drop in an envelope addressed to Diane. Along with three copies of her photograph, the package contained a copy of Packard’s Falcon Lair photograph and Coltrane’s parallel version of it. His note read, “Here are some mementos of our photographic adventure. Enjoy your honeymoon. I wish you every happiness.” He watched the lid close on the mailbox. To grab at life, he thought.

With that, he went to work.

There was a time, he knew, when pepper trees had grown on Hollywood Boulevard, when Beverly Hills had bridle paths, when streetcar tracks occupied the route that freeways now did, when Sherman Oaks, North Hollywood, Burbank, Tarzana, Encino, Van Nuys, and all the other communities in the San Fernando Valley (how Coltrane loved the litany of their names) were distinct villages separated by farmland. Each had a different architecture, English-style cottages in one contrasting with mission-style bungalows in another, Victorians in this area, colonials in that. The distinctness of each area was destroyed as the farmland shrank and the communities merged, although sometimes, driving from community to community, if Coltrane ignored where the borders met and concentrated only on the historical core of each area, he could still see the contrast between one community and another.

Randolph Packard had managed to capture those differences. He recorded a sense of welcoming space, of sun-bathed separateness. As always in his photographs, a detail here and there predicted the impending doom — the tiny figures of surveyors on a field in the background, for example, or a half-completed skeleton of a building on a distant hill. Coltrane brooded about those changes as he took the 405 into the smog-filled valley. He imagined what it must have been like in Packard’s youth to have a clear view of the now-haze-shrouded San Gabriel Mountains. As he followed Packard’s route, trying to see with Packard’s eyes, he had the sensation of going back in time.

THE TRAILER COURT WAS IN GLENDALE — drab rows of dilapidated mobile homes, overflowing Dumpster bins at the end of each row, gravel in front of each trailer, no grass anywhere, no trees, just a few flower boxes here and there, spindly marigolds and geraniums drooping over their rims. Coltrane drove down to the third row and turned left, passing an elderly man wearing suspenders over a T-shirt and carrying a basket of laundry toward a clothesline at the side of his trailer.

Halfway along, Coltrane reached a small playground, stopped the car, got out, and approached the playground’s rusted waist-high chain-link fence. The swings and the teeter-totter were tarnished and unpainted. The ground was like concrete. A thin black woman pushed a young boy in a swing. The woman’s dark hair hung in half a dozen braids. She wore sandals, wrinkled shorts, and a red pullover, which, although faded, was the only bright spot in the trailer court. As the boy stretched his legs to give more force to his upward momentum, the soles of his running shoes were visible — and their holes.

The woman narrowed her eyes toward Coltrane, then returned her attention to the boy.

“Hi,” Coltrane said.

She didn’t answer.

“I used to live here,” he said.

The woman stayed silent.

“Every once in a while, when I’m in the neighborhood, I come back.”

The woman shrugged.

“My mother used to push me in those swings,” Coltrane said.