AGAIN, THAT NIGHT SLEEP wouldn’t come, and I lay there, eyes opened to the rough white sky of the ceiling, and tried to work my magic. But I couldn’t evoke Jay this time, couldn’t bring the comfort of his presence to that room. I got out of bed and began to pace. If this kept up I would have to take something, ask Dr. Block for some pills to do the trick. You can’t depend on the imagination forever. You can’t depend on anything. I paced as if I was angry. I was angry, stomping across the floor at two in the morning wanting to bellow about injustice and loss. My heart banged in alarm and I was cold.
I went into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator, an old habit, but nothing offered solace, not milk or jello or fruit. I went to the children’s bedroom but once there I closed myself to the innocence of their sleep, to their beauty. So what, I thought. So what. I wanted Jay. I wanted him now and for all time. The news had a way of becoming fresh like that. My ears rang, my muscles jerked, as if I had just heard. Jay!
Then, sitting in the stillness of the bedroom again, I thought of his photographs. They always seemed a part of Jay, the way one’s voice and language are. I looked through the family album, feeling spent with sorrow. Jay had taken hundreds of pictures of me before Harry was born and at night he had whispered encouragement to the fetus through the stretched skin of my belly. Then he took pictures of the baby himself, born into the world, recording a miracle instead of an ordinary and tragic human event. That was his main quality, the real essence of Jay, his hopefulness, that unswayable pleasure in living. That was why he was willing, even eager to have children, to work at a job he didn’t love, to live an ordinary and unpromising life. It was related to the way he touched everyone: me, the kids, his hands making contact with the proof of his convictions. See, it’s worth it. It’s worth everything.
I closed the album and then I took a large box of prints from a closet, ones that he hadn’t had a chance to sort and select from for the book. I carried the box back to bed with me and there was a certain comfort even in its weight on my belly as I settled back against the pillows and opened it.
I felt an immediate sense of relief. It was like finding a responsive face in a roomful of hostile strangers. Jay’s sensibility was there in his selection of subjects, and in the mood and composition of the photographs. They seemed both modern and ancient at once. People in tenements or cliff dwellers in lost cities. It didn’t really matter. What Jay tried to show was that all change is superficial if the human condition remains the same. He wasn’t sentimental either. Elderly people, terrible old ruins, managed to look tough and ironic. There was vanity in the whores and even a certain majesty to their pimps.
But New York City is a bad place to take photographs of people and then just walk away. Everyone is suspicious. Who’s that guy anyway, and what does he want? Jay might have been with a finance company or the Narcotics Squad, or even the FBI. It’s not paranoid in those streets to believe a stranger is a private detective, a pornographer, a madman. Life is that precarious there, and you can see it in the photographs. Mothers sheltered their children with the wide protection of their arms. “Hey!” they protested to Jay and they cursed him and grabbed for the cameras.
He suffered guilt because of it. He knew that he was an intruder, and yet he felt that it was important, that all the photographs would become evidence in his book, and he would present their case to the world at large. If he asked for permission, it was sometimes given, but then something was lost and the photos became portraits. People posed for him. They clowned, mugged, leered, smiled, crowded into range. “He wants to put me in a book. Hey, I’m, gonna be famous! Wait, let me comb my hair, don’t show my tooth where it came out. Do I have to smile? Take my sister, she’s real cute. Make her famous.”
He wanted some of the pictures to be like that, he called them the “personality shots,” but he wanted something else too: the unrehearsed face of the community, the sense of a continuing life.
Once he came home with a terrible bruise under his eye.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. Don’t get excited. It was just a little scrap.”
“A scrap! Do you mean a fight, Jay? Do you mean someone hit you?” I hovered, nervous and breathless with outrage. “Bastards,” I said, soaking a cloth in cold water.
“Come on,” he said. “Take it easy. It was my own fault anyway.”
“Your fault? How could it be your fault?”
“Well, I invade their privacy, don’t I? It’s kind of a paternalistic thing I’m doing, isn’t it?”
Why did he always take on guilt so easily? Why was he so damned fair and good? “Shit!” I said. “You’re an artist.”
“Thanks for that, anyway,” he said, as I laid the wet cloth against his eye.
It occurred to me now, in this lonely bed, that the key to everything that had happened was in his goodness. Goodness = vulnerability = weakness. I’m crazy, I thought, but some part of me still believed it. Had he been a little tougher, less good, then nothing, not even death would have challenged him. But he was an open place, just like his own father. They were felled saints who seemed to lie down gladly. Then how would I teach my own sons? To avoid the bogeyman, boys, you have to be the bogeyman. Hit back, hit first, for God’s sake, and go for the eyes. But maybe the saintliness was in them already, an insidious genetic strain, and it was too late. I’m crazy, I thought, I should be locked up. But I felt, in that tough surviving membrane of my heart, that it was true.
“Jay,” I had said then, “I don’t want you to get killed in action. It’s not worth that.”
“Ahh, it was only a little misunderstanding. A fellow’s mother. She was deaf. You know, she kept smiling and nodding. A real beauty, a monument. La Chaise couldn’t invent those forms. The son said I took advantage of her.”
“But you didn’t. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know. But they’re the Indians and I’m the cowboy. Their disadvantage is historical.”
“You go into rich neighborhoods too,” I said.
“It’s not the same, sweetie. There’s hardly anybody in the streets there. Doormen, pekingese, fur coats going into taxis.”
“But you’ll be fair,” I insisted. “You’ll show both sides of everything.”
Jay laughed. “Your loyalty is a thing of beauty, Madam.”
“Well,” I said, relaxing a little.
“Listen, I was scared too. I thought he was going to go for the cameras.”
“Cameras!” I scoffed.
“Never mind. Love me, love my cameras, baby.”
“Jay, don’t go back there by yourself anymore.”
“Sandy …”
“I mean it. It could have been worse.” I touched his face lightly near the bruise. “I’m scared.”
“I’ll protect you,” Jay said.
“And who’s going to protect you, kiddo?” I meant from himself, from his vulnerability.
“You,” he said. “And Batman and Robin in there.” He gestured toward the other bedroom where the children were sleeping.
“Oh ha ha.”
“No, I mean it,” Jay said. “We’ll go out together, like a street gang. We’ll get matching jackets with our name on the backs. We’ll be the Avengers, okay?” He put his hand on my neck, cleared a space of hair, and bent forward to kiss it.
“Very funny,” I said.
But the next week, the children and I did go with him. It made sense. Who would be suspicious of a family, that unit from which most of us are sprung? We walked along the streets with Jay. I pushed Paul in a folding stroller and Harry ran ahead and then loitered, was alternately the lead and the tail of our procession. We might have been tourists dumb enough to have wandered into tough neighborhoods. But they let us alone. Nobody mugged or even taunted us. Hands came out for money and shadows in doorways took surprising forms. I saw all the sadness and all the beauty with Jay’s eyes, and with the eye of the camera.
Before we went home again, Jay took a picture of the children and me in front of a graffiti-streaked wall. There’s a timelessness to that picture. I seem happy and very young, standing with my hands in my pockets. The children are in a blur of motion near the skirt of my coat and Harry is smiling for once, unaware of the camera. I look like a sane and decent woman. It’s the way Jay saw us, the way he knew me. What would I become when his loving perception of me was gone from this life? I took the picture out now and looked at it for reassurance.