Eight Girls Taking Pictures (52 page)

It was the chemistry of the plates and the promise of imperfection that swayed Mr. Lux. In his mind he saw Jenny, now fifteen and still enamored with the Rolleiflex, and understood that the mechanics and complexity of the Seneca would intrigue her. He wasn’t sure what she wanted from photography, but he knew that whatever it was there was a greater chance of finding it in this anachronistic camera store than in a place lined with new Nikons. Nothing about that girl was predictable; he supposed that he would never know if it was nature or nurture, and so decided to simply accept it as
what is.
“Okay,” he said.

As Ed Schonneker was writing up the ticket, he stopped. “Wait, I do have something else,” he said, and with that he disappeared into a back room.

Mr. Lux wandered about the crowded store, studying the array of cameras. One was a massive old plate camera on a stand making it nearly as tall as he, with a lens the size of his hand. The box was a reddish hued wood, marred and dulled in spots. And then there were the handsome vintage wooden cameras looking impossibly new, their brass fittings as polished as the natural stained wood.

There were Graflex cameras, black boxes with tall, black leather hoods that sprang up like jack-in-the-boxes. And newer Graflex Speed Graphics with round flashes, which he had seen in every vintage movie that showed a newspaper reporter. There were Rolleiflexes, so visually and mechanically flawless. Rolleicords, Kodak Retina Big and Small Cs that reminded him of family road trips through the Grand Canyon; Contessas, Contaxes, and Leicas of every vintage, in every imaginable condition. Panorama and pinhole cameras. There were strobes and leather camera bags, and lenses. Tripods and glass plates and film backs for sheet film. Sets of lens filters in green, red, yellow, and blue.

All these cameras, these tiny “rooms” of light and shadow; these beautiful machines that produced the stuff of dreams. They were so appealing in their construction and appearance that Mr. Lux realized he desired them in the same way he coveted a painting or a sculpture.

Many of the store’s wares were on shelves behind the counters, or in the vitrine, or lying about—an indication that the owner either trusted his clientele or didn’t care what disappeared from his vast collection.

“Look, let me just give you this.” Ed set a smallish, substantial black leather case with a hinged lid on top of the glass counter. It was taller than it was wide and opened from the top, as if it were meant to hold business files. “It’s a carry case for the camera. Obviously, whoever owned it didn’t use the case too often.” It was in remarkably good condition compared to the camera, which isn’t to say it looked unused—only that it appeared less used. The unlatched and opened lid revealed two compartments, neatly divided by a leather-covered divider. Mr. Lux slid the closed camera into the larger section; the other section held six glass plates.

“Let me pay you for it,” said Mr. Lux, who really wasn’t all that interested in the carrying case.

Ed Schonneker put up his hands. “What am I going to do with it?”

After he latched the case with the camera inside, Mr. Lux paid the bill, then stepped out into a San Francisco afternoon cooled by incoming fog.

The camera that Mr. Lux bought for Jenny that day in San Francisco sat on her dresser, while the carrying case was shoved in a closet.

“I got you this camera because it’s an elegant machine, and the way it takes pictures is with a great deal of stillness and contemplation. This characteristic will force you to think about what you see. It will slow you down,” he told her. (Jenny, at fifteen, was carrying on a love affair with speed: she ran with the dogs, she rode a ten-speed racing bike, she gunned around the gardens in a ratty Jeep. She was the one who kissed the boys who asked her out first—not that there were too many—rushing into everything. She ran up the stairs in her parents’ very modern, very spare house; she ran to the bus that she took to school.) “A blur is just a blur,” he said.

But Jenny was more interested in other things, like the cycle of life on Summerplace, which offered ideal examples of birth and decay, growth
and decline. She was impulsive, hurried in her curiosity about the wheel of life—always about life. The abstract world, the fantastic, the dreamy and intangible didn’t enthrall her—with the exception of Summerplace, sprung from Mr. Lux’s imagination—and for this reason she was as bored by religion as she was excited by science.

Her parents would say it was because, unlike the majority of the townspeople, they didn’t attend church. When asked why he eschewed the church, her father said, “I don’t need the business contacts and I don’t need a lecture.”

Her mother was less absolute but, in the end, gave in to her husband, as she did in most matters. Their marriage, like so many, was one of negotiation, with their particular summits deciding that he would do what he wanted to do, while she would find her own hobbies; she would influence the boys, and Jenny would be his charge. Not that it mattered; Jenny and her father were so simpatico that her mother never would’ve had any sway regardless. Jenny was her father’s favorite. Not as surrogate son (he had five sons) but as the child who shared his interests.

The summer after Jenny’s junior year, Abner Huxley, a senior in the landscape architectural program at Berkeley, had contacted Mr. Lux to ask if he ever hired interns to work at Summerplace. Mr. Lux had laughed over dinner at the idea of having an “intern,” since his fabulous garden, despite people’s curiosity, was still a private home.

But over the next few days, whenever he had to do something like retrieve the mail, Mr. Lux would sigh, “If only I had an intern.” When Mrs. Lux asked him to move a chair, he replied, “Why not wait until the intern arrives?” Suddenly, all manner of household chores and errands became the responsibilities of the Mythical Intern, so that when Mr. Lux did end up meeting, and “interning,” Abner, it was as if the younger man had been around forever. His normality, his laugh and easygoing nature meshed nicely with the Luxes. And Abner fell in love with Mr. Lux’s exotic gardens, his affection for arts, and with Jenny most of all.

For Jenny, meeting Abner was feeling that she had known him all
her life. For once, she didn’t rush into anything, and when she saw him walking the path lined with pieces of blue sea glass winding through the blue foliage and flowers, she only knew that she didn’t want him to simply pass through her life, but she was too inexperienced to know how to express it. So she said, “Wait here,” while she ran back to the house to get her father’s Rolleiflex 2.8D, to take his picture.

It was during this same visit that Mr. Lux, observing Abner’s enthusiasm for the garden, asked him if, upon graduation in June, he would like to work for him. “My sons have their own homes,” he said. While this job offer was almost tailor-made for Abner, his attraction to Jenny made him hesitate; he was the least opportunistic of men, sometimes to his detriment, and he didn’t want to suddenly seem like an opportunist. Mr. Lux, unaware of the spark between Abner and Jenny, insisted, saying, “This is what you studied for the last four years, isn’t it?”

Jenny’s happiness was so pure that it felt like a distillation of happiness. Maybe it was being in love along with being in lust (instead of just lust), but her parents’ home had now become a romantic landscape, a dressed stage, a cinematic backdrop for the man she loved. Strange to think that the thing before her (the wonders of Summerplace) was the very thing she could not see until there was a shift in perspective. Later, Jenny would say that she seldom knew what she would take a picture of when she picked up the camera, that she only knew once she peered through the viewfinder, as if the photograph had finally found her.

She recited this to him:

And she would quote Cocteau

‘I feel there is an angel in me’ she’d say

‘whom I am constantly shocking’

“Ferlinghetti,” she said. “But it could be me.”

And he replied, answering in Ferlinghetti:

I once started out

to walk around the world

but ended up in Brooklyn

And then she went back to Stanford in the fall, while he stayed with her father and mother.

The Luxes were surprised though not completely displeased when Jenny announced that she and Abner were getting married. Nothing fancy, they said. The wedding, they said, was only a starting point and nothing more. Someone mentioned their youth (twenty-one and twenty-two, respectively, barely out of college, Jenny having graduated only a week earlier), and Jenny countered that they had known each other for a year and, besides, how lucky is it to meet the person you know you want to know your entire life at an early age? “Youth and love,” Jenny said, “are not gasoline and matches.”

Her mother was about to protest, “That’s exactly what they are!” when Jenny’s father lightly placed his hand on his wife’s wrist.

Jenny and Abner traveled to London, Berlin, Madrid, and Rome. They loved Rome. Berlin was a divided city, the Brandenburg Gate a sad, grand monument that was the location of an August protest that summer in 1971, commemorating the ten-year anniversary of a similar protest. Abner and Jenny could understand only that the East was shutting itself off from the West “until further notice.” Spain belonged to Franco, London was still getting over the war.