Generation Loss (13 page)

"Business,"
he said tersely. "And just because she's a bitch doesn't mean I have to
be."

He
turned to stare out the window. Aphrodite's slight figure walked along the
water's edge. Behind her, the deerhounds ran and leaped across the mossy slope
like figures escaped from a medieval tapestry.

"Wait
till after lunch, maybe she'll be better then," said Gryffin at last.
"After a few more drinks."

"I
doubt it. She seemed a little—paranoid."

"She
is. And the alcohol makes it worse. Actually, I was surprised she opened the
door. If Toby hadn't been with you, she wouldn't have. But come on. I'll take
you upstairs."

He
stood.

"So
the drinking's a problem," I said.

"Sure
is. It's why she stopped working. Or maybe she stopped working and then she
started to drink. It changes according to who she's pissed off at. It was after
my father killed himself. None of this is breaking news, so don't bother taking
notes."

He
held open a door for me. "Watch your head—"

The
stairwell was dark. At the top Gryffin opened another door, and I stumbled
after him into a long, sunlit gallery. At the end of that hall, more steps led
up to another narrow corridor.

"Sorry
it's so cold," said Gryffin. "No central heat. I think there's a
space heater in your room." He stopped in front of a closed door.
"The pictures you want are in here."

Cold
stale air surrounded us when we stepped inside. On the far wall, two small windows
looked across the water to the islands. "I assume these are what you
meant.
Deceptio Visus'.'

I
nodded. For a minute I couldn't speak.

"Jesus,"
I finally said. I felt as though I'd been holding my breath for years, waiting
for this. I started to laugh. "Holy shit, this is amazing."

They
hung on the walls, each photo framed and numbered as in the book. Some had been
shot from a promontory looking out across the bay at distant islands; others
were views of Paswegas. I crossed the room, shivering again, but not from the
cold.

Amazing,
" I repeated in a whisper.

Close
up, the colors looked like prismatic syrup poured onto paper: indigo and blood
red sky, cadmium sunlight smeared across cobalt water, pine trees like emerald
stalactites. The paper was thick, and there were tiny necks of pigment on the
white borders, as though someone had flicked a Paintbrush. I brought my face so
close to the prints that my breath fogged the glass.

"This
is fucking incredible." I glanced over my shoulder. Gryffin leaned against
the far wall, watching me. "Do you know how she did these?"

"Hey,
if you're asking me—"

"I'm
not. I know. You don't?" He shook his head. "It's an unusual method.
"See, this is all really heavy watercolor stock ..."

I
tapped the glass covering one photo. "You coat the paper with gelatin and
let it dry. Then you paint over it with layers of pigment mixed with starch.
Remember when you were in kindergarten and you colored a page with a red
crayon, and then a blue crayon on top of that, then a yellow one or whatever,
then scraped it off with a nail or a chopstick so the colors came through? This
is the same principle. Once you've covered the paper with pigment, you add a
sensitizer then dry it in a closet, someplace dark. It's a really slow emulsion
when it's finished, and light sensitive. When it's dry you put your negative on
top and set the whole thing outside in the sun for, like , three hours. You
need really strong, hot light—I bet she did it on the beach. The sun just boils
that emulsion right off. Then you wash it, and . .."

I
peered at the photo. "Well, it looks like she worked over the finished
prints. Touched them up with colored pencils, or maybe pastels. It must've
taken her forever." I shot him another look. "Didn't you ever wonder
about that? How she did these?"

"Not
really. She never cared what I thought. And, well, she's my mother. Did you
spend a lot of time wondering about what your mother did?"

"No.
But I spent the last thirty years wondering how your mother did this."

"Satisfied?"

I
took a step back from the wall. The way the photos were hung made the two
windows, with their views of the real islands, look like part of the sequence.

I
liked the illusory islands better.

"Yeah,"
I said at last. "I guess I am. But..."

I
glanced around the room, frowning. "Her other pictures—the ones from the
other book.
Mors.
Where are they?"

"She
destroyed them."

"What?"

"She
burned them. Or, I dunno, maybe she tore them up and threw them into the ocean.
It was a few years after I was born. I don't remember it, but I remember
hearing about it years later. There was some kind of a big scene, with—"

He
stopped. I felt as though I'd been kicked in the stomach. "But— why?"

"I
don't know." He looked away. "Something bad happened. You know about
Oakwind? The commune?"

I
nodded, and he made a grim face. "Well, this was after Oakwind split up,
but I gather it had something to do with that. There was a lot of bad blood
there, between her and—well, her and just about everyone except for Toby. It
didn't start that way, but.. ."

"But
why would she destroy those pictures? They were taken, what? In the
1950s."

He
shook his head. "Cass, I have no clue. I wouldn't bring it up, though, in
the unlikely event she talks to you again. Not unless you still want to drive
back to New York tonight. You hungry?"

"Not
really."

"Well,
I'm heading down to the Island Store to get a sandwich. Want to come?"

I
wanted to stay, but I wasn't sure he'd leave me alone there. And even if I
wasn't hungry, I needed a drink.

"Yeah,
sure," I said. "One minute."

He
waited as I made a final circuit, looking at each photo. Then we went back down
to the mudroom.

"My
mother'll be off for a while with the dogs," he said and pulled on a heavy
coat. "They won't bother you. Mostly they just sneak around looking for a
soft place to sleep. But if you were expecting Aphrodite to make lunch or
something—uh, she doesn't do lunch. She barely does dinner. She does cocktails,
after-dinner cocktails, pick-me-ups. A lot of pick-me-ups."

He opened
the outer door, looked doubtfully at my leather jacket. You going to be warm
enough?"

"I'll
be warm when I get back to the city." I swore as the zipper caught in
Toby's sweater. "Your helpful fucking friend already gave me
this
—'

I
yanked the zipper free then opened my
bag, grabbed my camera, and slung it around my neck. "And you know what
else?"

We
crossed the moss-covered yard, heading back to the harbor. "I could use a
pick-me-up too."

11

Instead
of going through the woods, Gryffin cut down toward the water. There was no
sign of Aphrodite or her dogs.

"This
isn't the way Toby took," I said. I had to pick among wet rocks and clumps
of seaweed, my boots slipping when I tried to climb over a granite mound.

"I
like to see the water," said Gryffin. He stopped and held out his hand to
get me over the boulder. I ignored it, and he shrugged. "That's the whole
point of coming here, right? For the water."

"You
tell me. Did you go to school here?"

"School?
No." He seemed amused. "They only have a one-room schoolhouse here.
It goes up to eighth grade. After that, kids used to go live on the mainland
and go to school in Machias. I don't think there's any kids left here now.

"Is
that what you did?"

"I
went to the Putney School. In Vermont."

Nowadays,
tuition at Putney will set you back nearly thirty grand. Even back in the '70s,
it would have cost a nice bit of change.

"Isn't
that where Dylan's kid went?" I asked.

"Yeah,
I think so. But that was after my time."

The
tide was coming in, covering the gravel beach and lifting black strands of kelp
from the rocks. I saw another sea urchin shell, almost as big as my fist. The
bottom had cracked open and the shell had filled with sand.

I
sifted the sand through my fingers then pocketed it.

Gryffin
started for where a thin line of birches ran up the hillside. When he reached
the first tree he paused to stare out to the islands. His profile was sharp,
his dark hair tangled in the collar of his coat. The light showed up more gray
than I'd noticed earlier. It wasn't a conventionally handsome face—nose too
big, eyes too small, weakish chin—but it was an intense one, eyes narrowed and
mouth set tight, as though it were a constant effort not to lose his temper.
Deep furrows in his brow suggested this was a habitual expression.

I
wondered what he looked like when he really did lose it. My fingers brushed the
spiny little mound in my pocket. I thought of hurling it at him, just to see
what would happen, but the shell was so fragile it wouldn't do much good.
Instead I popped the lens cap from my camera and shot a few pictures. Gryffin
looked back.

"What
are—hey, stop that!"

"What,
is there a family ban on photography?"

He
didn't reply, just turned and began walking again. I lowered the camera and
followed in silence up the hill, to where the birches joined bigger trees, oaks
and maples. Some of the birches must have been really old. They were huge,
their trunks charcoal gray. Not much moss here, just drifts of leaves with a
film of ice and scattered patches of thin snow. The ground crackled underfoot,
like walking on crumpled newspaper.

"So,
you come up here a lot?" I asked.

"Not
a lot. A couple times a year. Usually in the summer, or earlier in the fall. I
had to go to a show in October, otherwise I would've been here a few weeks
ago."

He
didn't walk particularly fast, but his legs were so long I had to hurry to keep
up. He kept his head down and his glasses jammed close to his face. He looked
like an overgrown teenager, gangly and wary. "I mostly came to see a
friend of mine. Ray Provenzano, he lives on the far side of the island. He was
a friend of my father's. Another poet. Also a book collector—that's the
delivery I told you about."

"I
know his name. Vaguely," I said.

"Yeah,
the Strand's a place you might still find Ray's books. Here, we're at the road
again."

He
crashed through a clump of underbrush onto the rutted roadway. I picked my way
more carefully, watching that my camera didn't snag on anything, finally
stomped out onto the blacktop.

"See
where we are?" Gryffin pointed. "There's the Island Store."

"How
do you get to see your friend on the far side of the island?"

"There's
roads—tracks, anyway—all over the place. Not a lot of cars, that's true.
Everyone uses three-wheelers or four-wheelers. ATVs. In the winter they use
snowmobiles. Hear that?"

A
sudden roar like a chainsaw erupted from the woods behind us. "That's a
four-wheeler. A few of the old-timers, they still have their old beaters to get
around in. Ray, he has a four-wheeler here. Not that it goes anywhere unless
his flunky, Robert, drives it. Not that he goes anywhere."

"How
come?"

"Ray
made him himself persona non grata a while ago. He was hiring teenage boys from
Burnt Harbor to come over and paint his house. I don't know what went on
exactly."

He
sighed. "Anyway, the kids' families didn't like it much. Next time he came
over to Burnt Harbor, he was ambushed. Spent the rest of the summer in the
hospital. He didn't press charges, so ... everything's kinda blown over. But he
doesn't go off-island much anymore."

"How
does he get his groceries?"

"He
has a teenage gofer. Robert."

"You're
joking."

"No.
Hey, Ray knows if he tries anything again, he's dead. Here we go.”

We'd
reached the Island General Store. Gryffin held the door for me and we went
inside.

Reggae
music blasted from the kitchen. An enormous Newfoundland dog lay on the floor,
sound asleep.

"Hey,
Ben." Gryffin reached down to rough the dog's head. Its eyes remained
shut, but its tail moved slightly. "Where's Suze, huh? Where's Suzy?"

I
looked around. A woodstove with no chimney hookup was covered with coffee
thermoses and Styrofoam cups. I could smell pizza baking, and stale beer. There
were shelves
of
canned goods and boxes of pasta; in a smaller back room,
cold cases of beer and milk. An ice-cream freezer. Behind the wooden counter,
cartons of cigarettes; on a high shelf accessible by a stepladder, bottles of
rum, whiskey, brandy, sake. An open doorway led into the kitchen.

"Sake?"
I said.