Exiles in the Garden (14 page)

We are proud of our country, Lucia said.

And with good reason, Mag said, believing that at any moment Lucia would break down. She had not touched her tea. Her voice was unnaturally low. Mag said, I am sure if Alec knew you were upset he would apologize.

He did apologize, Lucia said. But he was not sincere.

Men, Mag said, in the absence of anything else to say.

Yes, Lucia said.

You must speak to Alec about it. This must not come between you.

I intend to, Lucia said.

I'm sure Alec meant no harm, Mag said, but Lucia did not look convinced.

Alec's work routine had been disturbed by the return of the chief photographer from the war. Ed Weekes was subdued as he gave a briefing on what the photographers could expect in Vietnam, the blood and the filth, killing heat and close combat in the rain forests and rice fields. No shortage of material, he said. There was material everywhere you looked, even up at the sky. You had only to decide where to aim your camera, which, by the way, had to be kept immaculate at all times owing to the frequent thunderstorms and the filth. The army was superb, would take you anywhere you wanted to go in comfort and relative safety. The army wanted the story of their heroic troopers in the papers and the division commanders saw their units as career-builders, publicity always welcome. You had to be careful, though, deciding where to aim the camera. The troopers didn't like you taking shots of their dead. Hated it, in fact, and it was easy getting into very bad trouble.

Someone asked Ed if there was an army escort with him in the field, monitoring what he did and how he did it. Did you have a babysitter, Ed? Oh, no, he said, they don't give a shit. It's the grunts who give a shit. They don't like you taking pictures of their dead friends. As a matter of privacy. Taste, we would say. They don't like interference of that kind. You couldn't explain to them that you were just trying to do your job. They didn't give a rat's ass about your job. I tried to make it clear that my shots were framed in such a way that no one could see the dead man's face. He would not be recognized by friends or family. I was making a simple shot of an infantryman on a pallet, his weapon across his chest. His face was out of the frame. He was covered by a poncho anyway. But that seemed to enrage them even more. I didn't know what to make of it so I put my camera down. To tell the truth it was a kind of no-win-type situation.

I didn't like it, Ed said.

Things were sort of out of control.

The company commander, a captain about the age of my son, came to take me by the arm and lead me away. For Christ's sake shut up, the captain said. You're making things worse. Their blood's high. We had a God-awful morning. You're a stranger here. You're not one of them. So back off.

So, Ed said, you have to watch where you point your camera. There are some things off limits. You have to find out for yourself. It's not like here, a ceremony in the Rose Garden or a congressional hearing. He fell silent then, having said all he felt he could say. After a moment one of the other photographers asked if Ed had found the war a worthwhile assignment. His work there was widely admired. Ed, did you have any fun? Ed waited a full minute before replying.

I'd call it a civic duty to go, he said.

Would you go back, Ed?

If they asked me to, he said, I would.

Alec had listened to all this with incredulity. Ed Weekes had lost his bearings. Who could believe in photography as a civic duty? Now and then a picture brought enlightenment or delight. Sometimes one brought grief, the sharp pain of recognition or remorse. That was all you could ask for. Most of the time a photograph was merely illustrative, a witness being sworn in at a congressional hearing, a woman's umbrella bending against the wind on a city street. Of course going to the war was a wise career move but that was something else entirely. That night, sitting in their garden waiting for the babysitter so they could go next door for cocktails, Alec related the conversation to Lucia. He described Ed Weekes, a tough, no-nonsense character, three decades on the job. He lived to photograph the news. Now, after Vietnam, he was—diminished. He'd lost his swagger. Probably he was too old for war duty. Everyone knew that combat was a young man's game, a young man's legs and restlessness and lust, a desire to get the shot at all costs. Lucia misunderstood. She said, You're not going over there, are you, Alec? I'd hate it if you were. No, Alec said. I have you and Mathilde. Why would I go to Vietnam? I don't know, she said. Maybe you'd think it was your civic duty. I don't think that, he said. That isn't the way I think.

She wanted to make certain, so she asked him, Why not?

Alec said, I'm just a photographer, Lucia. I don't make any great claims for what I do. I'm good at it. But it's not worth a life, mine or anyone else's. I don't like war and I don't intend to contribute to it.

I'd never forgive you if you went.

Drop it, he said, suddenly angry.

I don't like it when you speak to me like that.

Then drop it, he said, more gently now.

Thirty minutes later Alec was standing near the d'Ans' fountain, drinking champagne. Lucia had retreated to the back of the garden, she and two of the second-tier intellectuals deep in conversation, leaving Alec with Ronald diAntonio and General Symjon. They were talking about the assassination, the latest report, more questions. The killing was almost four years back but its shadow was still present, a stain on democracy's honor. Ronald thought Washington was disoriented, no longer the hospitable place it had been. The city had lost confidence. Its sense of itself was rattled and it seemed suddenly old and enfeebled, yet at the same time truculent as a schoolyard bully. The war went on and on, Johnson's war, which he could neither win nor end. General Symjon remarked that Washington reminded him of his own capital after the Anschluss. No one could believe it, yet there it was, a beautiful grande dame transformed overnight into a witch. Do you think the CIA was behind Dallas, Alec? What does your father say? Alec mumbled something noncommittal. His father refused to discuss the assassination and even now, facing a difficult election, was vague and unconvincing in his campaign speeches and the audience Q and A that followed. Oswald ... acting alone ... the country must move on ... put this behind us. The general said that the important thing was to draw the correct lessons. This will happen again, he said. Once begun, there is no end of it. Assassination is a hereditary disease. Ronald and the general began to speak of cities, the character of the metropolis, how one capital differed from another. Paris, the seat of government, was only nominally a political city; Washington was nothing but. Alec was only half listening, preoccupied as he was with Vietnam as a civic duty. Then the general said something so odd that Alec touched his arm and asked him to repeat what he had said.

I was telling Ronald about Damascus, the general said. I see it as a dark, sullen city without any particular charm. Routine architecture, much of it of recent construction. As it happens, there is great beauty in Damascus but the beauty lies in the interior spaces. You must get inside the walls, into the courtyards. Once inside the courtyards you must open the doors that lead to the great rooms. Then it is fabulous. Beyond description. You find yourself in another world, centuries past. Mosaics of the most extraordinary complexity, mesmerizing in their intricacy. I daresay—the general smiled in recollection—you find yourself in the skin of another.

Every so often Alec arrived home late to find the party next door still in full throat. He could hear the general's parade-ground voice and Lucia's laughter. Alec would dismiss the babysitter, old Mrs. Bazaroff, who lived around the corner and loved Mathilde, and take his daughter into the garden where they would sit quietly together and look at the roses. Alec was teaching her their proper names: 'Betty Prior', Rosa 'Eureka', Rosa 'François Rabelais', and the grim-faced one he called Rosa 'Photographera'. That was the one without character and the one Mathilde took to. She was such a sweet child, grave of manner but with an impish smile when she chose to use it. After the rose reverie Alec would read to her and put her to bed and return to the garden, this time with a drink in hand to wait for Lucia, who always arrived slightly breathless with startling stories from the émigrés because there were always new arrivals with fresh anecdotes from their troubled homelands, eyewitness accounts of indignities and dissension. She would ask him about his day, and as he told her of his assignments he knew how banal he sounded, recounting the shoot on Capitol Hill or the White House, a portrait of some new cabinet member or senior Pentagon general. She had no more interest in this work than he did.

But there was something new today, he said.

The entertainment editor had assigned him—a temporary thing, she had said, but see what you can make of it—to a shoot at a small theater off Connecticut Avenue, a rehearsal of a contemporary drama. Alec liked the way the actors used their bodies, how they stood, and how they gestured. A tilt of the head or a sudden shift of weight had meaning no less assured than the lines they spoke. He was accustomed to shooting men at microphones, often reading from a script. Prepared text, they liked to say. These actors, especially the women, were lithe and composed assembling disparate parts into a harmonious whole. Alec found himself shooting from unfamiliar angles to get in the skin of the actors. Later, he joined the company for a beer backstage, curious to see how their off-job manner differed from their on-job manner. They were exceedingly affable, interested in his work for the newspaper and attentive when he described shoots in the Oval Office or on Capitol Hill, the staginess of them and the symbols—the microphone at the hearing, the gesture with the furled document, an American flag always somewhere nearby. While the actors talked among themselves Alec squeezed off a dozen shots—not for the newspaper but for them. Alec decided that their on-job manner and their off-job manner differed pretty much as his own did. You had a working face and a nonworking face. Same face, different focus. An audience made the difference.

Alec told Lucia that he had produced a unique portfolio; at any event, he had never done anything quite like it. The editor of the entertainment pages agreed but not for the same reason. We'll use one of them, she said, but forget the others. These are not what we expected. Why the odd angles? The way you photographed this troupe, they look like anybody you'd see on the street. We wanted the sort of shot you make on the Hill or in the Rose Garden. Something with some glamour to it.

They aren't glamorous people, Alec said.

Wrong, the editor replied. They're actors. My readers want to see actors. Actors mean glamour.

Driving home, Alec had the idea he was not meant to work for other people. He had lived in Washington his entire life but could no longer recognize himself in it. Perhaps he knew it too well. He knew suddenly that he was an artisan in search of material, the block of wood that became a refectory table, the iron slag that became a cemetery fence, or the lump of gold that became Lucia's choker. He was in search of a subject and wondered if he had found it on the stage of the theater off Connecticut Avenue. He felt an affinity with the actors in a way that seemed impossible with political figures—and that was the trouble, they were "figures." Nor was it a matter of age. One of the actors was older than his father. He was loose in his skin, that one, with a natural merriment. Photographing the rehearsal, Alec felt a part of it even while he was trying to make his camera disappear. He saw himself growing old before his own eyes with nothing much to show for it except a White House press pass and a portfolio of staged glossies.

Then something very strange happened, Alec said.

The night was chilly. He stopped at the traffic light just beyond Washington Circle. A man and a woman, lovers from the look of them, were talking earnestly on the sidewalk in front of a Greek restaurant. The man wore a red scarf and a black short-billed cap of the sort favored by V. I. Lenin in his revolutionary youth. He held his cigarette ash end up, between his thumb and forefingers, gesticulating as he spoke, unmistakably a European. Alec watched them with his photographer's eyes, and when the woman turned toward him his breath caught in his throat. Olivia Sorrensen stared at him as she listened to the man in Lenin's cap whose voice rose in a sour inventory of complaint, the internal contradictions of the State De-pot-ment, filled with idiots who failed to appreciate his genius—and then his words were lost, run together in frustration. The accent was pure Hibbing via Foggy Bottom. Olivia's face was pale in the wan glow of the streetlights. Her eyes grew wide and she made a little gesture with her hand that said to Alec, Don't interfere. Alec was in the process of rolling down his window. Robert Sorrensen looked at him sternly, evidently the look he liked to use at embassy gatherings.

Alec said, Excuse me. Which way to M Street?

You're on M Street, Robert said.

Yes, of course. I mean Wisconsin Avenue.

Well, make up your mind.

Alec couldn't help smiling at this sorry imitation of an out-of-patience ambassador. Olivia's hand went to her forehead as she looked away.

Wisconsin Avenue, Alec said.

Robert ground his cigarette beneath the heel of his shoe. He said, Straight ahead.

Thanks, Alec said pleasantly. Good night to you. Good night, miss.

Good night, Olivia said.

Have a pleasant evening, Alec said.

The light turned green and he put the car in gear, accelerating slowly. In the rear-view mirror he saw them watching him and then Robert turned to her, his shoulders rising, saying something more. Olivia shook her head but continued to watch Alec's car slowly drift up M Street. And then they turned and walked the other way. Two feet of distance separated them but it might as well have been a continent. Olivia did not seem much changed except the look in her eyes when she made the defeated gesture that said to him, Don't interfere. Don't come close. Drive away. Alec continued to watch them in the rear-view mirror. Robert was wiry of build, thin-faced, narrow-shouldered. He seemed to have a prisoner's pallor but that could have been the glare of the streetlight. Robert put a cigarette in his mouth. His lighter flared and in a sudden movement he tore the cap off his head and tried to stuff it in his pocket—Lenin no more, merely another disappointed apparatchik. The cap fell to the ground and they both reached for it, bowing, holding the pose. And in that moment, Alec said to Lucia, they both seemed like actors lit by stage lights.