Picturing Will Read Free

had ever been night travelers. If she did not confide in him about that time, she would forget it sooner, she was convinced. Why remember your vulnerabilities? It was a great advantage that her accomplice in those days had been a baby, who would forget the wind blowing through his hair and the rush of hot and cold as she put her lips to the brim of his stocking cap and tried to breathe evenly, getting over her anxiety about how they would live and what would become of them. That would all be as lost to him as the moment of birth. It would matter no more than a lost marble mattered a month after its disappearance. Your secrets were always safe with babies. With adults—and sometimes even with yourself—they were not at all safe.

TWO
    T he day after Jody photographed a wedding on an estate east of town she called the housekeeper to see if she could return to rephotograph the grounds. Something about the house—nothing architectural; some nebulous something that seemed to be in the air—had gotten her attention. She was not sure herself what she wanted. She only knew she wanted another opportunity to poke around.
    Though she photographed weddings for a living, her real interest was in the photographs she took for herself. She had gotten good enough, she knew, to start thinking seriously about showing her secret work. Photography had been a fascination at first—nothing she thought she would ever be involved in. Will had been an infant then, and her marriage had just about collapsed. She would buckle Will into a car seat and drive into Washington every week to see photography shows, or to browse through museum bookstores and look at books she couldn’t afford. How vulnerable she must have seemed to anyone who noticed her: a pretty young woman with an infant in a Snugli slumbering on her chest, attention riveted to the book she was examining, as if it could provide her with clues about the rest of her life. Where had the photographers positioned themselves, and why? The photographers’ preoccupations became clear, their level of aggression measurable. In the best photographs, the photographer’s presence was palpable. Though she had revised her thoughts now and was inclined to think just the opposite, she was interested, then, in trying to understand what the photographers revealed about themselves. The risks they took were the ultimate fascination. She had tried to figure out when the photographers thought they were hiding, and to what extent this was true. Sometimes the photographer disappeared as unconvincingly as a child playing hide-and-seek who couldn’t help peeking around the corner to see how the game was going. Other times you couldn’t help thinking that the photographer had orchestrated the moment in order to make a personal statement, which did not express the subject’s feeling at all. Looking at photographs was a little like sleuthing, but in so many cases the mystery transcended anything that could be explained.
    She bought photographs from the Library of Congress.
    Wayne asked her why she wanted pictures on the walls of people she didn’t know.
    She cashed the Christmas check she got from her father and bought a Canon TX.
    Wayne reacted like someone whose cat has proudly brought home a dead mouse.
    She bought a developing tank and practiced prying open a roll of film with her eyes closed, trying to wind it on the reel by her sense of touch.
    As she tipped the tank back and forth, Wayne looked at her as if she were a deaf person shaking maracas that had no seeds inside.
    Memories of those years could overwhelm her when she least expected it. Perhaps the road she was driving on reminded her of the road she and Wayne had lived on. Certainly it was not the sight of the wedding house itself, one of many big houses that had been kept up but not extensively renovated, painted over too many times without having been scraped, the shutters hanging a bit awkwardly. Still, there were nice things about the big