Judith Krantz (21 page)

And photograph people Jazz did, all the rest of the summer, dragooning Susie, the vaqueros, the farmers who rented land on the ranch, their children, the mailman, the milkman, and every salesman who appeared. No one escaped. The friendly, well-known inhabitants of San Juan and their children, her schoolmates,
were persuaded to pose, whenever she rode her pony into town, her camera hanging around her neck.

By trial and error she taught herself as she began to work with a little more speed and accuracy and a little more understanding of light. Composition and a sense of exactly the right moment to press the button came naturally to her. Her very first picture of her mother reading was such a success that it was deemed good enough to be enlarged and placed in a position of honor on her father’s bedside table.

Sylvie searched stationery stores in San Juan Capistrano and Laguna Beach and San Clemente until she found a portfolio that looked almost like those of Mike’s grandfather, and Jazz began to keep her pictures and negatives there, filed in big envelopes that she labeled and dated carefully. Her father had another key made to the archive room and gave it to her solemnly. Jazz hung it around her neck on a piece of string until Sylvie persuaded her to put it in a special box in her chest of drawers.

“I wonder if this is just a phase,” Mike wondered aloud to Sylvie.

“I started acting before I was eight,” Sylvie answered. “You can’t tell anything from just one person’s experience, but I knew what I wanted to do with my life that very first time. I didn’t have a moment’s doubt.”

“When I was seven I won the roping contest at the Fiesta,” Mike added thoughtfully. “Beat all the vaqueros and my own father.”

“Come on, cowboy,” she giggled, “you couldn’t have.”

“Honestly. It’s not a question of how big or strong you are, but how well you throw. It’s the angle at which the reata wraps itself around the hooves that stops the calf.”

“What a family of prodigies. I’m glad she hasn’t been roping calves all summer,” Sylvie laughed, and kissed his lips.

“Oh, darling, must you …” Mike caught himself,
ashamed that the words had escaped. He had promised himself so long ago that he would never ask her not to leave the ranch, not to make another movie, but Sylvie had been home for so long now that for just a second he’d forgotten the stern prohibition which made their life together possible. Sylvie caught his tone and understood the words he hadn’t said.

“I told you yesterday that I was ready,” she said gently, tenderly, but implacably. “I phoned my agent this morning.”

“Did he have anything interesting?”

“Lots of things. He’s sending the scripts by messenger tomorrow.”

“Isn’t the mail fast enough for him?”

“For me, yes. Evidently not for him.”

Another necessary lie, Sylvie thought. She had requested the messenger. Her need to be back doing her work had been growing and building for weeks, a pressure as solid, as internal and as restless as a child wanting to be born. Only the evident happiness of her husband and daughter had prevented her from making the phone call she’d made today.

It was if a spell had been cast over her, putting her will to sleep. The longer she didn’t work, the more difficult it became to disturb the status quo. In another week, two weeks at the most, she’d start to grow bored and boring, irritating and irritable. Their pleasure in her being home would be destroyed. But why on earth was she actually
justifying
herself to herself like this? It was proof, if she needed proof, that staying away from work for too long was wrong for her.

Jazz was happily awaiting the beginning of third grade at the grammar school at the Mission in San Juan. Mike was always busy, no matter what the season. Her own time to bask in the sun, growing mentally fat and lazy like a declawed kitchen cat fed too many scraps, was over. And no matter what script she picked, no matter where it took her, she knew that she could safely promise Mike and Jazz to be back by Christmas. Not that she would ever promise, not out loud, for to promise would be to limit her freedom, to
be false to her beliefs. It was compromise enough to have told another lie.

Sylvie Norberg shut herself in the bedroom and attacked the pile of scripts. Usually so difficult to please, she was tempted by each of them at first reading. The sane simplicity of life at the ranch had become a prison the moment the scripts had been delivered. The soothing rhythms of a quiet, predictable, healthy life for which she had yearned last winter were intolerable at the approach of this new autumn. She ached to bend to the discipline of her craft. Her art. Her only art.

At second reading, only two of the scripts still appealed to her, and the third time she read them she was sure which role she wanted. And what she wanted, she would have.

She phoned her agent and told him her decision. As she had been certain, the part had not been cast. The director, an old friend, had been waiting for her, putting off the studio from month to month, so sure was he that only Sylvie Norberg could do justice to his film. Preproduction had been so thoroughly planned, even in the absence of the hoped-for word from the star, that he could begin filming in Greece by the end of September. That meant she had to leave at the end of this weekend to go to Los Angeles for meetings and costume fittings and makeup tests and rehearsals and—oh, all the thrilling, buzzing, entrancing multitude of things she had missed without knowing that she was missing them.

For once in her life, Sylvie Norberg’s confidence in her power to make the infallibly correct choice was mistaken. For twenty-nine years she had existed according to her own rules, living by her own freely made decisions, expecting and receiving the self-fulfillment that was her right. Chance, always random, chance that cares nothing for rules or freedom, had always been on her side. She never gave a thought to the laws of chance. It was benign, and she believed she lived under a lucky star. Yet the only
law that rules chance is its eternal presence in the affairs of humankind.

On the night of the wrap party, at the beginning of the third week of December of 1969, Sylvie and her costar drove back to the small hotel in which the cast was staying while they were on location on a Greek island. They had left the wrap party early, anxious to get back to the hotel unobserved for one last night together before they said good-bye and returned to their separate homes, he in Rome, she on the ranch. The night was dark, the road was bad, the curves were unmarked and the Italian actor drove dangerously fast. He overshot a steep turn and the car went off the road, landing far, far down the cliff. Neither of them survived the crash.

Sylvie Norberg Kilkullen was not home for the Christmas of 1969. For once in her life, what she wanted she would not have.

N
either Mike nor Jazz could have endured the years after Sylvie’s death without the comfort and nearness of each other. Beyond their most immediate and hideous grief came a profound and lasting loss that no one else could possibly share. They were utterly necessary to each other, two people who knew that the other still listened for the same rapid step to approach, for the same light silver laughter to sound in the next room; two people who saw the same slender figure bending intently over a heap of freshly cut flowers, hesitating for a thoughtful instant before she began to fill a vase; two people who knew which records they could never dare to listen to again, which books had to be packed away, which familiar groupings of furniture should be rearranged so that Sylvie’s empty chair would no longer be a constant reminder of an absence they must attempt to learn to accept.

For the next six years Jazz went to the public school in San Juan Capistrano, riding her pony back and forth every day from the ranch to the history-filled
town, so calm that it didn’t even have a policeman until she was ten. As she grew older, the wives of Mike Kilkullen’s neighbors began advising him that Jazz should be sent to boarding school when she was ready for high school, suggesting that he enter her at the excellent Santa Catalina school, far up the coast. Although he couldn’t imagine life at the ranch without his daughter, Mike knew that his well-meaning friends were right. When Jazz first heard of this impending separation, she refused violently, but by the time she was fourteen, after years of a running battle, she had finally been persuaded to go to the all-female Bishop School in La Jolla, which was near enough so that she could board during the week and still come home every weekend.

In the spring of 1978, as Jazz approached her graduation from the Bishop School, she made plans to enter Graphics Central in the autumn. This school of the applied arts, located in Los Angeles, near UCLA, had a reputation for teaching photography that was as impressive as that of Brooks in Santa Barbara or the Art Center in Pasadena.

Many years had passed since Sylvie’s death, and the “mourning process,” as people had decided to call it, Mike Kilkullen thought grimly, should have been over long ago.

God knows, about four years after the car crash he had started to look around, honestly started to try to find a woman he could care about. There had never been a shortage of possible candidates once it became known that he was again available. No single man could escape a rain of invitations from well-meaning hostesses, particularly not a man who lived so close to growing centers of hospitality like Newport Beach and Laguna Beach. Mike Kilkullen had ventured out to parties up and down the coast from San Diego to Los Angeles whether he felt in the mood or not, considering it his duty not to become a hermit.

He’d had a series of affairs, discreet, well conducted, non-compromising affairs, but none of them had grown into an emotional connection. Sooner
rather than later, each attempt to create anything more than good times, goodwill and physical satisfaction faltered, withered and was abandoned.

By the time Jazz graduated from the Bishop School, Mike Kilkullen realized that his heart died with Sylvie. His love was concentrated on Jazz, although he had never stopped wishing that his older daughters would spend more time at the ranch, so that he could somehow reestablish the relationship he’d had with them before the divorce. Foolish though he knew that hope was, given Liddy’s dominance over the girls, he had never abandoned it, as each autumn he lured them and their children out to the Fiesta.

The Kilkullen Ranch, and its preservation as open range, had become more essential, more fundamentally necessary to Mike with each passing year, as he witnessed the carving down and paving over of Orange County. It seemed, from the freeway, to have turned into one inhuman, gigantic, heartless assemblage of tract houses, malls and office towers, a man-made money machine that defiled the ocean and the mountains on its borders. The bastards had turned paradise into a parking lot, all right, he thought in fury, as he turned down one offer after another for his property.
Somewhere
, for Christ’s sake,
somewhere
they had to be stopped.

Jazz was thoroughly dashed by the disappointments of her first year at Graphics Central, yet she knew that in order to pursue a career as a professional photographer she needed more technical training. She must be able to solve any problem that could be presented during any photographic assignment.

She entered school with a hunch that she would easily master the purely technical aspects of photography, since she had already taught herself so much, progressing from simple cameras to more difficult ones, reading everything she could find, taking and developing many thousands of pictures. Everyone who had seen her work had thought that she was gifted, but none of them had been professionals.

Jazz realized she was still an amateur, a hobbyist who had had no one to guide her. She needed teachers and the kind of focus that she would find at Graphics Central: the Zen Workshop, in which you took pictures without ever looking through the viewfinder; the Choreography courses, which taught focus on a moving target so that it became a totally automatic skill; the controversial Confrontation Class, in which each member took portraits of each other member in a style of his own choosing, attempting to delineate character.

However, Graphics Central did not offer these esoteric courses to first-year students. Jazz’s first year was spent learning the basics as if she were a would-be automobile mechanic who’d never been under the chassis of a car. She learned to load and unload every kind of camera in the dark, with a stopwatch held by the instructor; she took a course in the most basic details of darkroom technique, although she’d had her own darkroom at home for years; but the main thrust of the first year was the rudiments of lighting.

Indoor lighting, Jazz thought broodingly, never natural lighting, but one hundred million varieties and combinations of every kind of artificial illumination ever invented, from a bare lightbulb to the most advanced strobe. And the severe simplicity of the subjects that had to be lit! A tube of toothpaste was the most exciting assignment they were given, for at least they were allowed to squeeze some of the toothpaste out and coax it into the shape of their choosing, but the toothpaste tube came only at the very end of the year, as the grand climax to the course.

This beginning lighting course would lead directly, in her second year, to tabletop photography, which would probably become the financial mainstay of many of the students, Jazz realized, even as she groaned at the prospect.

Tabletop included anything that could be photographed on a stationary surface, from a perfume bottle to a toaster, from a diamond necklace to a pot roast. But until then, Jazz and the other first-year lighting
students, ninety percent of them male, illuminated and photographed nuts and bolts, literally nuts and bolts, and dollar bills and thumbtacks and grains of salt. They were given nothing that could spoil or rot or grow mold, no flower or apple, for each object was intended to last for years, as generations of students lit them in dozens of different, textbook-designated positions, none of which left room for improvisation.

The lighting assignments were so exhaustive and difficult that the course was considered the photographic equivalent of being a first-year hospital intern. None of the students got more than a few hours’ sleep at night for weeks at a time as they struggled to find the solutions to lighting nails and buttons and pieces of thread. “Bread, not thread,” was the class’s wistful rallying cry, but with a few exceptions, like impatient Jazz, who knew she’d never want to do tabletop photography, the students were grateful for the strict training that would leave them equipped to light anything on the face of the earth, or indeed in space, if they could get up there with a flashbulb or a light box, or even a match.