Thwonk (20 page)

I had just fastened a wet contact sheet onto my clothesline to dry. I shone a flashlight over it, searching the boxes of small photo squares for the best shots to develop.

“
Wow
,” Dad said quietly.

My heart leapt with pride. I picked four standout shots—the crown, the blurred dancing, the melting ice heart, my silhouette against the stage. I’d connected tonight. The feeling was everywhere I turned, in every move I made. I exposed them with the enlarger while Dad sat on a folding chair, watching. I sloshed the photographic paper in developer solution as one by one the hazy images bled into sharpness. They were superb. I squeegied each one and hung the wet prints on the clothesline to dry. Dad’s expert eyes studied each shot checking for shadows, distortions…

“Amazing. These shots have power, A.J.”

Dad’s face got soft. “I owe you an apology.” He leaned against the gray supply cabinet we’d rescued four years ago at the dump. “I’ve made a big mistake and I need to make it right.”

I sat on a folding chair and half missed the seat.

“When I left filmmaking,” Dad began quietly, “I
felt like a failure. I was hurt and angry because too many people had said no to my work. I vowed that I would never work at anything again that didn’t have a regular paycheck attached to it. I’ve kept that promise to myself and it was the right decision for me. But I also vowed that no daughter of mine was ever going to suffer like I had.”

I looked down, studied my ankle, and said I’d suffered plenty.

Dad scrutinized my dance prints like they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. “I was going to make sure that you had a career with absolute security,” he continued. “In my mind photography didn’t qualify. I didn’t want you to watch a dream die like I had to.”

He let out an antique sigh. “When you showed such talent for photography I was excited and scared. And then when you got so good at it I was downright…”

Dad walked toward me. I was looking down like a little kid and only saw his Nikes. He planted them square before me. “I had no right to track your life, A.J., to decide who you could or couldn’t be.”

I looked up to his knees, his chest. He extended his hand. “Can you ever forgive me, honey?”

I looked at my father’s hand that was reaching out to me.

I looked at my father’s face. It was filled with remorse and sadness.

I didn’t want to cry, but my eyes were misting. Dad took my hand. “I’m very sorry, honey. I really believe, A.J., that you’ve got the talent to make it.”

The words didn’t register at first.

“
Really?
” I cried.

“Without question.”

I clung happily to his hand. My eyes filled with tears.

“I’m sorry, too, Dad. I knew you were hurting, but I couldn’t see beyond my hurt to yours. You were just trying to protect me—I know that now. You spent all those years teaching me photography…I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”

Dad walked toward my dance prints. Their glory beamed through the darkroom like a searchlight cutting through fog.

“I bet on you,” he said.

Well, you know how it is when you’ve been waiting for an important person to give you the nod. Your hope soars into space like a cupid zooming toward the moon. I stood there looking at Dad and we started laughing and connecting because my art was so tied to his that sometimes I couldn’t tell where one of us started and the other began. I can’t remember who started hugging who first, but it was unquestionably the best hug I’d ever had, because it was a hug of all-out acceptance.

“This does not,” Dad warned, “mean that you just
approach this whole thing like some wafty airhead. You have to think about how to support yourself, about how you’re going to make it happen.”

“I will, Dad.”

“I wasn’t as consistent with that as I should have been, A.J. Every artist needs something to get them through the lean times.”

“I have you, Dad.”

“Always,” he said. “Just get a day job, kid.”

It was so late, I was beyond caring. Dad and I were at the kitchen table scarfing down steak sandwiches with sautéed peppers.

Dad patted his mouth with a napkin. “I learned something about myself tonight,” he said. “I finally figured out why I didn’t make it with my art.”

I stole a Frito off his plate. I’d finished mine. “Why?”

He leaned back in his chair and smiled sadly. “I wanted to be a filmmaker, A.J., because I liked the thought of it. But I wasn’t good at many of the things you need to be good at. I hated pushing one long project for months and years at a time. I hated the personal and financial sacrifices. I was terrified in the free-lance world every day, wondering if I could earn enough money to live on. The films I really enjoyed doing were the short funny ones, not the long ones with meaning.”
He laughed. “You know, advertising is a good place for a guy like me. I get a paycheck. I use my filmmaking to create short, punchy spots. I make people laugh. I’ve got security.” He ate a Frito and frowned. “I’ve also got dancing cereal chunks up to my earlobes. This ChocoChunks account is making me crazy…”

“You could get another client, Dad.”

He nodded. “And I’m going to, honey. I need to start working with a product that’s good for people again.”

Dad cut two gargantuan slices of Mom’s Triple Fudge Blackout Cake and plopped one on my plate. “Which reminds me,” he said, “now that we’re getting really serious”—Dad took out a piece of paper—“I jotted this down while you were gone tonight. Just a few thoughts to remember from your old man.”

His eyes got soft as he began to read. “I hope, A.J., that as you mature as a photographer, you will always appreciate the constantly changing gift of light. I hope that you will know a community of artists that can sustain you, that your desire for your art will grow stronger, that criticism will make you stretch and go beyond yourself, and that you won’t ever be afraid to put your butt on the line. I wish for you a sensitive soul that cries when things hurt and an eye that sees beneath the surface to the humor hiding in difficult moments. I hope that you take risks and never care about using too much film—toss it off, roll after roll—it will only make you better. Film is impossible to waste. And I hope that
your work will always speak to someone about who you are—if you can accomplish that, it will last long after both us are gone.”

I was overcome. “You wrote that tonight?”

“Yep.” He folded the paper.

“It’s beautiful, Dad.”

“First draft too.”

I beamed. “But you hadn’t seen the dance shots yet…”

“Nope. But I’ve seen everything else you’ve ever taken.” He handed me the paper.

It was early morning, after five. I was sitting on my purple Persian floor pillow still holding the paper Dad had given me. I’d almost memorized it by now. But something else was happening, something appalling. Jonathan was packing up his quiver.

“You can’t,” I shouted, “be serious!”

He put the last arrow and two tiny apples inside and laced it shut. “I must leave you, my friend. My work is truly finished now.”

“Your work isn’t finished! I’m still a social wreck! The only male who nuzzles me is Stieglitz!”

Stieglitz heard his name and tried to climb into my lap.

“It is the only way, my friend. I cannot stay with you in this form forever.”

“What if I crash and burn?” This was likely.

“I have great faith that you will not.”

He turned to face me, his eyes warm and kind. “Your emotion is your strength,” he said. “To feel things deeply is a precious gift.”

“I won’t…see you again?”

He smiled. “You will see me often, Allison Jean McCreary, but differently.”

“I don’t want you any different!”

He fixed me with a mythological stare. There was no stopping him.

“I want to know what happened, Jonathan…with you and that other teenager…”

His little eyes grew old and sad. He sat next to me on the pillow. “I will tell you, my friend, since our time is drawing to a close.” He shut his eyes, seeking strength. “I could not make her trust me.”

“Why not?”

“She so wanted to be loved, she was so afraid of being alone, that she was willing to stay in a false relationship with a young man who brought her unending sorrow. She would not trust her feelings. She would not trust me.” He fingered his quiver. “I was brash and impatient with her. I left her too early in the process. I planned to come back and teach her a lesson, but I left before true trust had grown between us. When I returned, she had no foundation from which to believe in me or herself. My words rang hollow. She turned away.”

“That’s so sad…”

Jonathan sighed.

“But you left me, too, Jonathan. You were
really
impatient at times—no offense. I was ready to puree you in the blender…”

“I was,” he agreed. “I am learning each day and trying to better myself. Impatience is a profound failing.”

Tell me about it.

“Thankfully, beneath the anger, my friend, you believed.” He fluttered up and hopped into my hand. “She could never believe enough to let go, and so the time of her Visitation ended. I had to leave her with the fulfillment of her wish.”

I shuddered at the thought.

He patted his quiver gravely. “The choices we make can have lasting consequences.” Jonathan looked around my studio, studying every corner, like he was trying to memorize it. Then he turned to face me and held up his hands. “But I have righted the wrong with your Visitation,” he declared with power. “Thank you, my friend. I have found peace.”

I gulped. “You should be celebrating, Jonathan…”

He smiled and extended his dinky hand. I took it. It was like the smallest baby’s hand ever. “I will continue to carry that young woman as I will continue to carry you, Allison Jean McCreary—in my heart.” His little hand fluttered by his heart and rested there, laying claim to what was inside.

“I’ll carry you, too, Jonathan.” I was crying now.

Dawn broke across the sky flooding my studio with early morning light.

“It is time, my friend.”

I hung on.

“I wish I could have taken your picture, Jonathan…”

He shook his tiny head. “Some pictures are meant to live only in the heart, my friend.”

The warm, familiar ooze started trickling through me. I had to let him go.

“All right,” I said finally, “how does this work? Do you whoosh off on a rainbow, do we flag down a limo?”

He smiled like a little angel and flew to the black still-life pedestal. “Someday, Allison Jean McCreary, you will tell others what you have seen.”

I cried all the harder; Stieglitz jumped up to comfort me. I whispered “Thank you” as Jonathan folded his wings, raised his puny hands to the ceiling, and began twirling like a top. He closed his eyes, threw back his tiny head, and like a photograph stilling a whirling moment in time, he was instantly transformed back into a Coney Island cupid doll with a tacky little sash and stuffing spilling from his cheek. He flopped down, a tiny love soldier who’d been wounded in battle.

The growing light illuminated his essence.

Then the cupid doll leaned a little to the left as Stieglitz and I sat silently and pondered the miracle.

I had just arranged Trish Beckman on the small wire chair on my front porch in the definitive psychological statement. I uncrossed her legs, tilted her head to the left, and checked my light-meter readings for shadows. This portrait was my birthday present to Trish, who was low on cash and needed something emotional to give to her parents on their twenty-first wedding anniversary. Trish maintained that no one could take her picture decently except me. This was true.

I had given the photo session total thought, at first
envisioning Trish painted black and blue in an avant-garde expression of psychotherapy with shades of Andy Warhol, but that is not the stuff that adorns family rooms. I opted for the classic, purposeful head shot that chokes parents up. I said the session had to be outside even though it was the end of March because Trish’s cheek color peaked outdoors, giving her a ruddy air, an excellent statement for a budding therapist who will spend the next forty years inside on an upholstered chair listening to the world’s problems.