Eight Girls Taking Pictures (53 page)

Not Rome. Rome felt indolent and indulgent, its famous timelessness a consequence of knowing that one day you’re an empire and the next you’re nothing; it’s simply the way of life. A living thing, by definition, is unfixed, rising or falling. It was this very characteristic that reminded Jenny of Summerplace: the births of the dogs and cats, a family of ducks, the gardens in bloom, the quickening of spring, the fading of fall.

They walked and walked in Rome until they had to purchase new shoes, then they walked some more. Jenny bought handfuls of postcards that she pasted into a travel journal.

When Abner asked her why she didn’t take photographs instead, she said that all she wanted was an illustrated record of their trip, and that she didn’t bring a camera because she didn’t want to spend their trip looking through a viewfinder. The postcards would remind her of where they had been. Besides, it was wonderful here, but it wasn’t home. What she meant was, there was nothing she wanted to say about the places they saw that hadn’t already been said a million times in postcards.

About a month into their extended honeymoon, Jenny and Abner spent the day at a centuries-old garden called Bomarzo outside of Rome. It was a strange, overgrown, contradictory place that a duke had once used for trysts
and
to honor his adored wife. There were peculiar statues of sea monsters rising from the ground, and of bizarre, double-finned mermen; a two-story house that was built to lean for no discernible reason; there were inscribed messages that were as cryptic as some of the statues. They agreed it was almost a kind of spectacular roadside attraction; nothing about it explained itself. What did this structure mean? How to decipher an arrangement of statues in an expanse of lawn? What would Mr. Lux make of it? What about all the mysterious messages carved into the stone figures? Jenny was taken with the atmosphere of mortality and time, Abner with the landscaping, both with its sheer mystery.

They heard a classical trio play in a church in Venice.

They stayed in a cheap hotel that smelled like someone’s basement in a tourist town on the Adriatic, the two of them, alone, holding hands, wading out into the sea for what seemed like miles, the water never rising above their ankles.

They spent two days at the Uffizi in Florence. They visited the imitation David in the Piazza della Signoria. And then they saw the real thing at the Galleria dell’Accademia; the contrast between the fake David in an enormous, open-air space and the genuine David in a room was startling in that the locations so radically changed the scale of a human to him.

They climbed to the top of the Spanish Steps, along with all the other visitors to Rome.

When they split up for the day, each wanting (and needing) a little time alone, there were five postcards waiting for Jenny at their room:

1. A mythical stone girl lay on her back creating a makeshift bench, the Latin words etched on her side worn away by age. The message read:
Having a Coke with you is even more fun than being freaked out by Bomarzo.

2. The Bridge of Sighs:
I can’t believe I ever thought this was romantic. And yet, it was romantic being there with you.

3. A picture of the sea with a distant shore:
I think if we kept walking we could’ve made it there.

4. A picture of Botticelli’s
Venus
:

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint

you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except for possibly
The Polish Rider
occasionally

5. A picture of the Trevi Fountain:

I once started out

to walk around the world

but ended up with you.

Thank God.

For twenty years the Seneca sat on a shelf in Jenny’s studio, a reminder of her father, now deceased, her mother, relocated. Jenny and Abner had moved to Summerplace upon their return from nearly two years of travel.
Their residency was meant to be temporary, but Mr. Lux liked having Abner around to help with the gardens, now quite grown and established, the men carrying on a continuous conversation about the plantings and pools. Abner was also a part-time professor at a local college that specialized in enology. He taught landscape architecture, his ambition to strike out on his own supplanted by caring for the living art of Summerplace.

Jenny was restless, aimless. She didn’t know what she wanted, except that she wanted, in many respects, exactly what she had: Abner, their three girls, her father’s botanical dream. Once they came home from their travels, she was sated; whatever is the opposite of wanderlust, that was what she had. Her disquiet was not about domesticity—it was about photography.

She occasionally picked up a photography assignment (a property for a real estate agent or homeowner; a high school tennis team; a wedding) using her father’s old Rolleiflex, telling herself it was good to “work the creative muscle.” However, working the muscle implied that this sort of photography was an exercise that affected what she really wanted to shoot when, in truth, the pictures were throwaways. They had as much to do with making pictures (for her) as mucking out a horse stall. It was not arrogance that brought her to that conclusion as much as uncomplicated fact: There was almost nothing that she felt “too good for,” but she was aiming and shooting without saying anything. It was like “mute photography,” and that was why each job was ultimately useless to her.

And she loved being home because there every day was new. It was her inspiration and her world. In Rome she had discovered that she could love being there and not be moved to take a single photo. She intuited that she had something to say about the pleasures of domesticity, she just didn’t know what it would be, or if anyone would care.

As a modern woman, she had nothing stopping her from pursuing a career outside the home. It was encouraged if one was to be taken seriously. For a girl who wasn’t raised traditionally or expected to live traditionally, it wasn’t that surprising that the contentments of home seemed extraordinary and marvelous.

In 1986 the girls were seven, five, and three years old, respectively.
Babe, Bunny, and Agnes, respectively. As Jenny’s mother once said of Jenny as a mother, “When I’m with you and the children, I always get the sense that you’re not really raising them. It’s more like you’re
observing
them.”

There was truth to that statement; Jenny was not the sort of parent who liked arranging the lives and hobbies of her kids. Instead, she enjoyed being around them, watching them, or listening to them. They had the same freedoms on the farm that Jenny had had in her youth. Their hours were their own as they played with the dogs and other animals, often in states of undress (usually for, but not limited to, swimming), or partial dress, or (Jenny’s favorite observation) playing dress-up. The kids in costumes gave way to various forms of playacting. Because Jenny would rather watch than interfere, the children often forgot about her presence. “I’m like the Jane Goodall of my own offspring,” Jenny would say would say with a laugh to Abner.

One day, when Abner came into Jenny’s darkroom to see a series of photos of a recent wine event hanging up, he turned to his wife and said, “I can take time off from work.”

“For what?”

“You can’t keep doing this.”

“I know.”

“You could go somewhere. See something.”

She slid her arms around his waist, her cheek against his back. “I would miss you. And the children. And Summerplace. I don’t think the answer is leaving—I think it’s staying.”

Jenny could never say what inspired her to pull the old Seneca off the shelf in her office. If she so desired, she could probably trace a sequence of thoughts that looked something like this: wife-parent-children–the future–love-identity-love-art–her father–her father–her father–missing him–the five-by-seven glass-plate camera he bought for her at Schonneker’s Camera Emporium in San Francisco, where he exited the shop to be greeted by a late-afternoon fog rolling in.

Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe she was remembering taking those first pictures of Abner. Maybe it was the fantastic thinking of Summerplace as an isolated wildlife science station in Africa. Maybe it was the thought of shooting one more high school sports team, or staff at a local bank, or wine party that made her consider never picking up a camera again and then panicking at the very idea. Maybe it was the magical notion of thinking it could bring her father back to her when he said that the Seneca, with its glass plates, was a camera made to slow the world down. “A blur is just a blur,” he said. There were moments when she felt lonely in her eccentricity, even though she couldn’t have asked for a better companion than Abner, or a more fitting home. Later she would say, “My art was not elsewhere.”

 • • • 

On a whim, with the kids being watched by the housekeeper, Jenny tossed the Seneca in the car and headed for the city. Not stopping to wonder if the camera store was still there, off Union Square, or if it had become a victim of dislocating high rents over the course of the past twenty years. This wasn’t the sort of endeavor where one thought it through, or called ahead; to hesitate would be to be ensnared by the doubt of a forming idea (as well as missing her father), and that would be too much to risk.

Schonneker’s Camera Emporium. Like the Tadich Grill, the City of Paris, Schroeder’s, Magnin’s—it remained. The place was still a jumble of cameras, ranging from the nineteenth century through the seventies. “Yes?” said a man of such advanced age she was sure he was the same Ed Schonneker who’d sold her father the Seneca. The realization that he was, in all likelihood, the same Ed who’d spent part of an afternoon with her father unexpectedly moved her.

“A Seneca Number Nine,” he said, when she set the camera on the counter. “The man who bought this was trying to decide between it and a Seneca Black Beauty.”

Now the image of her father trying to think of which camera her fifteen-year-old self would prefer was threatening to undo her completely. But she managed to say, “There is a glass plate in the back, and I don’t quite know what to do with it.”

The man made no move to touch the camera. Instead, he slowly walked to a desk near the counter, pulling a bit of pencil from a drawer along with a notepad with a logo for a local cab company. In perfect school-taught penmanship, he wrote a name and address. “Sam’s young,” he said, “but he knows what he’s doing.”

“Young” Sam Tsukiyama turned out to be a thirty-five-year-old man, the same age as Jenny, though he was a youthful thirty-five, much like Jenny. Everyone must seem young when you’re nearing ninety years old, she reasoned of Ed’s description.

Jenny showed up at Sam Tsukiyama’s Victorian, on Twentieth, half a block from busy Mission Street, with its mix of taquerias, dime stores, and markets. Other shops selling elaborate quinceañero dresses, religious objects, kitschy Vegas-style furniture, and inexpensive clothing lined the street. A blast of exhaust from a barbecue restaurant hit her as she approached the house, weaving through the sidewalk shoppers.