Double Image (9 page)

“You want something?”

“I’d like to take your picture.”

“Why?” The woman tensed.

“Somebody once took a picture of me and my mother exactly where you’re standing. I’d like to feel what the photographer felt. I’d like to try to take the same picture.”

The woman looked baffled.

“Go back to what you were doing. I won’t bother you. I’ll just take one picture and leave.”

The woman’s gaze faltered as she struggled with her suspicion. At last, after another shrug, she returned her attention to the boy and started pushing him again.

Coltrane selected a fast shutter speed to avoid blur, then peered through his viewfinder. Knowing that Packard’s camera was too awkward for this situation, he was using his Nikon. Through the viewfinder, in miniature but somehow intensified, the woman pushed. The boy went up in the air, then swung back down. The woman gave another push, her body leaning into the motion. The boy looked up, as if his goal were the sky. As he veered back down, Coltrane adjusted the focus. He readied his finger on the shutter button. There wasn’t any question about the position he wanted them to be in. He had studied that position thousands of times in the photograph that had made him want to be a photographer.

In
Sightings
, a book that Packard had written about photography, the master had devoted a chapter to his theory of anticipation.

Once you see the elements of the image you want, it’s too late to release the camera’s shutter. By the time you do, those elements will have changed. In that instant, clouds will have shifted, smiles will have weakened, branches will have been nudged by a breeze. It is the nature of life for things to be in motion, even if they do not appear to be, and the only way to capture the precise positioning of your subject as you desire it is to study your subject until you understand its dynamic — and then to anticipate what your subject will do. The photographer’s task is to project into the future in order to make the present timeless.

Do it now, Coltrane thought. He pressed the shutter button, and in the ensuing millisecond, as the camera clicked, the woman and the boy achieved perfect balance. Through the viewfinder, time seemed suspended. Coltrane sighed and lowered the camera. The boy reached the limit of his upward glide, hovered, and began to descend. Time began again.

“Thanks,” Coltrane said. “What’s your name and address? I’ll send you a couple of prints.”

“Do I look that stupid? You think I’m gonna tell you my name and address?”

Coltrane’s spirit sank.

He turned from the playground and studied the trailer behind him. The three concrete steps to its entrance were cracked. The screen had been torn from the bent aluminum door. One of the windows had cardboard in it.

He crossed the gravel lane. The bent door creaked when he opened it. The metal door behind it shuddered when he knocked. He waited, not hearing any sound. He knocked a second time but still didn’t get a response. When he knocked a third time, he started to worry, only to see the door open and a stooped, wrinkled black woman with short silver hair frown out at him.

“You.” The woman clutched a tattered housecoat to her chest. “Where you been? Ain’t seen you in a couple of months.”

“I was away on several business trips — out of the country.”

“Got to thinkin’ somethin’ had happened to you.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, it did. Is this a convenient time?”

“The same as before?”

“Yes.”

“Get it over with.”

Entering, Coltrane smelled ancient cooking odors. He faced an oblong living room filled with tattered furniture. To the left, a fold-down card table had a jigsaw puzzle on it. Farther to the left, a counter separated the living room from the murky kitchen.

It seemed barely yesterday that he and his mother had stood where he now stood, the door open behind him, sunlight gleaming in, when his father had turned from playing solitaire at the kitchen counter and raised the gun toward his mother’s face.

Coltrane heard the shot slam his ears. He gaped at his mother falling, at the blood around her on the floor. He stared down for the longest time.

Finally, he raised his head and turned to the elderly woman. “Thank you.”

“What do you get out of this?”

“I’m not sure.” Coltrane gave the woman three hundred dollars.

“Real generous this time.”

“Well, I’m going through some changes. I might not be back.”

SCHOLARS ANALYZING PACKARD’S CONTRIBUTION TO photography had documented the location of each house in his series, but Coltrane never knew what he was going to find when he reached each address. Some of the houses no longer existed, variously replaced by an apartment building, a four-lane street, and a supermarket. Others had been renovated, their facades altered to the point where they weren’t recognizable. A few had been maintained. Most had decayed. But if finding them wasn’t difficult, locating the spot from which Packard had photographed them turned out to be almost as arduous as figuring out the vantage point from which he had photographed Falcon Lair.

In the following two weeks, each of Coltrane’s setups — in locations as various as Arcadia, Whitley Heights, Silver Lake, and Venice — turned out to have a story behind it, some as poignant as his meeting with Diane, others comic or repulsive or ennobling, and in two cases violent. In Culver City, he lugged the view camera, its tripod, and its bags of equipment to the top of a warehouse that had not existed when Packard took his photos. In Gardena, he paid for permission to shoot from an upstairs bedroom window of an eighty-year-old widow’s house. Other places, he photographed from an alley, a school yard, the side of a freeway, and the back of a pickup truck. He escaped a pack of vicious dogs. He saved the life of a drug addict who had overdosed in a drainage ditch. He talked his way out of a confrontation with a street gang. He met a blind novelist, a one-armed songwriter, and an aging actor who had once played a policeman on an ensemble TV show and was now an insurance salesman. He took pictures of everything.

Some nights, he got home too late to call Jennifer. Other nights, he had so much work to do in the darkroom that he kept the conversation short. “I’ll tell you all about it when I’m finished. I’m afraid I’ll jinx this if I talk about it or interrupt it. I haven’t felt this involved in an awfully long time. The project’ll be done soon. Then we’ll go away for a couple of days. Up to Carmel. Anyplace you like.”

Each night, when he checked his answering machine, there was always at least one hang-up call and that strange mournful music.

IN A CITY OF IMITATION, the house was unique. Designed by Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright, it had been constructed in 1931 for a movie producer whose films were unoriginal but who knew enough to let an original-minded architect do his job. In an area prone to earthquakes, it was made from reinforced concrete. Its staggered three stories created a castle effect. Glinting windows dominated the upper rooms, which were flanked by shrub and flower-filled terraces. Pounded copper sheets displaying pre-Columbian designs that resembled arrowheads led up each corner and along the parapets.

In Packard’s photograph of it. But Coltrane had no idea if the house still existed. Using his
Thomas Guide
and information from one of Packard’s biographies, he approached the area via a densely built, narrow, tree-lined street that curved up one of the numerous hills near the Hollywood Reservoir. Doubt made him uneasy, but as he crested the hill, peering over and down toward the middle of the congested area across from him, he felt his heart beat faster when he recognized what he was looking for.

His breath was taken away. This was one case where Packard’s photograph didn’t do justice to its subject. For one thing, the house had a presence, a solidity, an immediacy that the photograph, even using tricks of perspective and shadows, only hinted at. For another, Packard’s photograph had been in black and white, leaving Coltrane unprepared for the greenish blue of the hammered copper trim along the corners, or for the coral tint of its stucco and the red and yellow of the flowers on the terraces.

After so much effort trying to find the sites from which Packard had photographed the other houses, he had chanced upon the exact spot he needed for this house on his first try. He couldn’t get over it. Excitement swelling in him, he got out of his Blazer, opened the back hatch, and arranged his equipment. Waiting for a truck to pass, he set up the view camera in the street (he was amazed by how efficiently he was now able to handle it), made the necessary adjustments to match the image with the perspective in Packard’s photo, inserted an eight-by-ten-inch negative, and took the picture.

His chest relaxed with satisfaction. To make sure there hadn’t been a mechanical failure, he decided to take a dozen more exposures, but basically he had gotten the job done — and there wasn’t any need to find details that commented on the difference between the past and the present, because in this case there
wasn’t
any difference. Although the neighborhood had become overgrown, the house had been maintained exactly as it had once looked in Packard’s photograph. It was as beautiful as ever.

A horn sounded behind him. He waved for a station wagon to squeeze around him, then redirected his attention to the house below him. After retrieving the exposed negative, he decided to check that the camera hadn’t shifted slightly, and he stooped to peer beneath the black cloth, concentrating on the upside-down image on the focusing plate.

Movement caught his attention — someone coming out of the house’s front door, a portly man carrying a large cardboard box to a Mercedes sedan, then returning to the house. The man wore a green sport coat and had a distinctive rolling gait.

No. Coltrane frowned. It can’t be.

HE WAS WAITING AT THE MERCEDES when Duncan Reynolds again came out of the front door, carrying another cardboard box. As heavy as the last time Coltrane had seen him, his face as ruddy, Duncan set down the box beside an azalea, closed the door behind him, picked up the box again, and only then noticed Coltrane at the curb.

Duncan hesitated, concealing his surprise, then walked down a sloping concrete path to the street. “I don’t suppose I need to ask what you’re doing in the neighborhood.”

“Want some help?”

“Why not? Since you’re here.” Duncan, his eyes a little bloodshot, surrendered the box and unlocked the Mercedes’s trunk.

When Coltrane set the box inside next to three others, he got a look past an open flap, seeing binders of sleeve-protected photographs and negatives.

Coltrane stepped back from the car. “So we know why
I’m
in the neighborhood. . . .”

“I’m just taking care of the final details,” Duncan said.

Coltrane shook his head, not understanding.

“The movers were here earlier, carting away the furniture. But I didn’t trust them to handle the photographic materials.”

Coltrane continued to look perplexed.

“Of course.” Duncan gestured with realization. “You didn’t know.”

“Know?”

“This house belonged to Randolph.”

“Belonged to . . . This was
his
?”

“After Randolph photographed it, he couldn’t get it out of his mind. He was so haunted by the unusual design that he bought it.”

Coltrane continued to feel amazed. “None of his biographers ever mentioned that.”

“Well, as you must have gathered by now, Randolph liked to keep many details about his life confidential. He bought the house through an intermediary and put the title in the name of one of the corporations he inherited from his parents. Sometimes, he came here to reminisce about his youth. Mostly, though, he used it as an office, an archive, and a darkroom. Would you like to see the inside?”

A BROAD CHECKERED SKYLIGHT BATHED THE ENTRYWAY IN brilliance. Stairs led down and up, the areas beyond as bright as the entryway. Coltrane had never been in a house that collected so much light. Following Duncan, he climbed the steps and faced a white room with a wall of windows that looked down on a garden. The room’s lack of furnishings made its clean lines even more elegant.

“Bedroom and bathroom to the right.” Duncan pointed through a corridor into another sunlit area. “Dining room to the left. Note that its walls are draped with chromium beads. Original Art Deco design. The kitchen’s beyond it.”

As the stairs continued upward, Coltrane’s movements made a hushed echo. The next level was equally sunlit.

“A bathroom, a bedroom, and a study. Another balcony.”

One final set of stairs, and Coltrane reached a single room with four walls of windows and a skylight. A glass door in the middle of each wall led onto a flower-filled terrace.

“The master bedroom.”

Coltrane pivoted, spellbound.

“But I haven’t shown you the most important section,” Duncan said.

Curious, Coltrane followed him back down to the entryway, from where they descended toward the lowest level. In back, past a darkroom, windows looked out onto a narrow pool, its water reflecting the house’s coral stucco. Beyond was a flower garden.

But Duncan paid no attention to the view and instead guided Coltrane to the left, toward a white door within a white wall. When Duncan pulled at a recessed latch, he revealed not another room but another door, and this one was metal. He unlocked it. “This area used to be another bedroom. Randolph converted it into . . .” Beyond the door was an area more murky than the darkroom. “. . . a vault.”

Cool air spilled out, making Coltrane step back.

When Duncan flicked a light switch, a harsh glare exposed a windowless area that was filled with librarylike metal shelves, all but one of which were empty. “This is where Randolph stored all his important negatives and master prints.”

For no reason Coltrane could understand, he didn’t want to enter.

“A separate air conditioner keeps the area cooled to a constant fifty-five degrees.” Duncan’s footsteps scraped as he walked along the concrete floor.