Picturing Will Read Free Page B

me in infancy with pneumonia,” the housekeeper said.
    “I’m very sorry,” Jody said. She looked at the picture of Will. Impossible that he would be taken from her. As impossible as having aborted him to please Wayne. She looked at the ring—her hand, holding the picture. The enamel ring had cost more, she was sure, than the thin silver wedding band Wayne had given her. With the tip of her thumb, she pushed the ring closer to her palm.
    “It’s always easy to think there’s a reason for everything, unless something bad happens to you,” the housekeeper sighed. She offered Jody milk for her coffee. Jody poured some in before she realized what she was doing; she drank her coffee black. She would let the mug warm her hands a few seconds longer, then go outside and pour the coffee on the ground.
    Wayne had done that, years ago: poured all the coffee out of his cup over her tomato seedlings. He had also thrown things: bed pillows, dishes, unlit cigarettes.
    “I’m taking up too much of your time,” Jody said. “I’ll go outside for a few minutes and take a few quick pictures, if that’s all right.”
    The housekeeper shrugged. “The outdoors sure don’t belong to me,” she said, smiling as Jody walked out the door.
    There were times when the smell of the breeze let you know you were going to get a good photograph. A tingle in your fingertips preceded whatever was about to intervene: a breeze, a stream of migrating birds. The best of them were synergistic, or they didn’t work at all except as well-composed arty photographs.
    Earlier that day she had been looking through a book of Atget’s photographs of Paris—in particular, the photographs he took in the 1920s of hotel interiors. The picture of the Hotel de Roquelaure would have seemed a vision of heaven to any parent with a young child whose home was a battlefield of fallen animals, marching monsters, and discarded clothes. Only the black chair sitting to the side of the tall doors reminded you there was life in the hotel. You knew instantly that the chair was covered in velvet. It was not a leather chair, or a chair covered with any other material, but a chair with a fringed velvet seat. That hint of softness humanized the entire picture. The viewer believed there was a possibility of entering that room through the open door, of sitting in a magical chair.
    She set up the tripod and screwed on the camera. Why was she about to take a photograph of the side of a house? Because—unless you were Atget—you had to wait for a mystery if you did not discover one. It was all intuition and patience: A rabbit might appear from under the bush; a meteor might fall.
    She moved the tripod to another location so that when she photographed the house the little ash trees would be in the picture. She leaned over to look through the lens. Until you looked through the lens, you could never be sure. That was when things took on a prominence they didn’t have in life, or when details disappeared. You could find that the picture you thought to take with a wide-angle lens was really better seen in close-up. You could know the routine, use the right exposure, compose perfectly, but still—the photographs that really worked transcended what you expected, however certain the results may have seemed at the time.
    It was a nice shot, but Jody didn’t trust the dimming light, so she bracketed when she took the shot again. Then she let the tripod stand where it was and loaded the Leica. Its lightness was reassuring. With the little Leica in the palm of your hand you suddenly felt more delicate, but at the same time more connected to things, the way you felt when you slipped a ballet slipper on your foot.
    Through the lens of the Leica, the scene was nondescript. Turning a bit to examine the world, though, she found that it was just right for photographing the remains of a bird’s nest wedged between limbs above her head. No broken eggs lay below it. The ground was almost