CHAPTER TWENTY
I could have picked up my Canon G9 and continued taking a picture each day, but something about seeing the Nikon go into the sea made me think that I might never take another picture. I canceled every remaining shoot on my calendar. I spent my days walking along the beach, looking out to sea, staring at the shells and stones and bits of garbage on the sand—balloons and carnations, condoms and plastic bags. I sometimes wondered if my camera might wash to shore one day, the home of barnacles and algae, an oddity that would make some beachcomber think about lost treasure, sunken ships, pirates from a photographic sea.
I told Marisol that we didn’t need any dinners prepared just now and spent entire afternoons cooking and baking. I have a book called The Best Recipe that examines top recipes for certain classic dishes and then presents a master recipe that takes the best part of all of them. So you turn to “Roast Chicken” and you get a discussion about how to roast the perfect chicken—what temperature, what length of time, whether or not the bird should be turned, whether or not it should be basted, more salt than pepper, more pepper than salt. There is lengthy commentary about the science of chicken roasting, the technology of ovens, the wisdom of letting cooked meat sit before you lean into it with a carving knife. This book, more than any other I know, makes the world seem totally comprehensible.
I spent the next week roasting chickens according to the various directions. I tied up their legs, I slipped garlic cloves under their skin, basted them with butter. We had so much chicken in the house that I resorted to taking platters of meat across the alley to Mrs. Jenkins. The third time I appeared with a browned bird, Mrs. Jenkins laughed at me.
“You’re becoming a chicken expert,” she said.
“I want to master the art.”
“I suppose you have.”
“I was thinking I would try some baking next. Strawberry rhubarb with a woven lattice top.”
“Make pfeffernüsse,” she said, but it was more like a command than a suggestion. “I love pfeffernüsse, but I’ve never met an American who can make it correctly. My mother didn’t use anise, but everyone thought she did. People tried to copy her recipe, the other women in town, but no one could do it just the way she could. Her secret was dark molasses.”
“Cookie baking was competitive in Leipzig, was it?”
“My mother made it so,” she said, and then she laughed. “My father, too. He bragged about my mother’s pfeffernüsse all day long!”
“My mother made amazing pie,” I said, “but my father only bragged about himself.”
Mrs. Jenkins nodded. “He was brilliant,” she said. “It comes with the territory.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why is that?”
“To believe you have something to say that the world wants to hear? Whether you’re standing on a stage, writing on a page, or putting something on a gallery wall, that takes a lot of ego, and a lot of discipline, too.”
I threw myself into the task of making pfeffernüsse that would please Mrs. Jenkins. I scouted out the thickest, darkest molasses at a natural-foods store in Santa Monica. I roasted and chopped my own almonds, minced my own orange and lemon peel from organic fruit purchased at the farmers’ market, bought a bottle of fine brandy for fifty dollars so that the teaspoonful I used would pack the most punch, and ground the black pepper from fancy Madagascar peppercorns.
I was in the midst of this pfeffernüsse frenzy when Bridget called.
“What’s with the radio silence?” she asked. “Are you mad at me?”
“I’ve been busy,” I said.
“Work?”
I set down the sifter I’d be using to turn plain flour into clouds of white fluff. “Yeah,” I said, “it’s been crazy.”
“Claire,” she said gently, “Harrison called me. He’s very worried.”
“I let him down,” I said. “I was a bad client.”
“Because you’re not really working, are you?”
“I’m making pfeffernüsse. That’s work.”
“Ah.”
“What, there’s something wrong with that? You never met a woman who spent a week making cookies?”
“Not a woman as ambitious as you.”
“What makes you say I’m ambitious? And don’t say that it’s in my blood.”
“But that’s the truth.”
“I’ve resolved to relinquish all ambition. I’ve decided I’m not cut out for it.”
“It’s not a bad thing to be ambitious, Claire.”
“No, but it’s exhausting,” I said. “I’m tired of it. Besides,” I said, “I’m the mother of an ambitious kid, so that should count for something.”
“Doesn’t count for squat,” she said.
“What kind of a comment is that?”
“It doesn’t count for what we’re talking about. So make pfeffernüsse for a while,” she said, “and then pick up your camera again and keep doing the thing you love.”
“What makes you think I love to take pictures?”
“I’ve known you a long time,” she said. “It’s not a big mystery.”
Peter called once that week, as well. “How’re you doing?” he asked.
“Great,” I said.
“You miss it?” he asked.
“Not a bit.”
“So you’re coming back soon, then?”
“Peter,” I said, “leave me alone.”
I could hear Harrison and Bailey whispering around the edges of my baking—they would meet in the hallway and lower their voices; they would stay up at night in the room off the kitchen, talking softly. Neither of them asked me what was wrong, but at the end of the second week when we had no groceries in the house except for the ingredients needed to make a spicy German cookie, Bailey announced that she wanted to go to Driggs, and Harrison said he was ready, too.
“Why the sudden interest in Driggs?” I asked him that night, after Bailey had gone to her room.
“I think it’s a good time to scatter the ashes,” he said. “I think closure might help you.”
I felt the way you feel when you know the people around you think that you are fragile, unsteady, not quite in your right mind. “I don’t need closure,” I said.
“You seem to be searching pretty hard for something,” he said.
“Do you want to know what it is? Do you really want to know?”
He took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said.
“I want to make something that feels like an emergency,” I said.
He wrinkled his brow, tried to follow my train of thought.
“It’s about making art,” I explained, “really good art. I’ve wanted to do that since I was a little girl.”
“So why all the baking?”
“It happens to feel like an emergency right now.”
“It’s hard to watch,” he said. “You seem pretty lost. All those chickens. All those cookies. You had a really good thing going.”
“You took my career to a whole new level and I’m grateful for it. I know it doesn’t look like that right now, but I really am.”
He turned to go, and then turned back around to face me. “Why didn’t you ever tell me this, about wanting to make art? We worked for months on what you wanted and you never once mentioned anything about art. It was all about the big clients, the big money.”
I looked straight into his eyes. “I only just figured it out,” I said.
We flew to Driggs that weekend, and disposed of my dad’s remains according to his wishes. We walked from the cabin down to the Owens Bridge and scattered his ashes into the Teton River. The larger pieces of bone floated down and sank to the bottom, where they instantly became part of the rocks and the sand and the reeds. The lighter dust spread out on top of the water, and its oils leached onto the surface and the ashes moved exactly like a cloud, roiling and dispersing as they floated away from us. It made me think of the words on the marker at Ernest Hemingway’s gravesite in Sun Valley, Idaho, a few mountain chains to the west. Best of all he loved the fall, the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods, leaves floating on the trout streams, and above the hills the high blue windless skies.
Bailey cried, and said she wanted to stay on the bridge awhile to sketch. Harrison and I walked slowly back to the house along the river. The water was so clear that it magnified every pebble and grain of sand. You could see water bugs on the surface, small brown frogs on the rocks at the edges, flies flitting around in a frenzy.
Harrison leaned down, scooped up a handful of water, and examined the bugs that stuck to his skin. “Hey, Claire,” he said, “would you like to learn how to fish? Conditions are perfect.”
I looked upstream at the sunlight on the water and the mountains in the sky. “Sure,” I said.
We went back to the house and made sandwiches and collected all the gear from the garage—the long rods and the sleek aluminum reels; the mesh vests with a dozen pockets and the tall rubber boots. Harrison carried the box of flies out to the chairs on the lawn by the river. He rigged one of the rods, tied a fly on the end of the line, put on the boots, and waded out into the water. I sat on the chair watching him, thinking that he was already gone—gone to commune with the fish, gone to a place where I didn’t know how to follow. But after a few graceful casts, he pulled up a cutthroat about ten inches long, reeled it in, came back on the lawn, and knelt down in front of me. The fish was beautiful—sleek and silver, with a bright red slash near the jaw. Harrison held it firmly in his hand, flicked open a knife and slit the fish’s white belly. I made myself look. What I saw was this: a universe of dead flies packed into that trout belly.
“Fish eat flies,” Harrison said simply. “Flies are born in the water, then they come to the surface to dry their wings and copulate. They return to the water to lay their eggs. A fish follows this life cycle as if its life depended on it, because, of course, it does. What a fisherman does is he becomes part of this cycle of knowing, and of living and of dying.”
I felt as if I were hearing ancient secrets being revealed for the first time. “Okay,” I whispered.
Harrison pointed to a row in the box of flies. “Dry flies mimic the adult flies on the surface of the water. Wet flies mimic the larva and nymphs underneath. We’re going to put a PMD on your line today,” he said, “because it mimics the nymph of the mayfly, which is mostly what that fish ate for breakfast.”
I nodded as he reached for a fishing pole. “This rod was your dad’s favorite,” he said. “It’s an Orvis Wes Jordan, made of bamboo. It’s probably fifty years old by now, but he loved the feel of it in his hands.”
I took the rod in my hands, and felt my heart leap—with nerves, with fear, with gratitude? I don’t know. The rod was incredibly light and it seemed as though it was an extension of my arm and my hand, my fingers and my self. My eyes filled up with tears. Harrison stepped closer and wrapped his arms around me. He pulled me in close to his chest and rested his chin on the top of my head. I stayed there for several moments, then turned my face toward the flesh of his neck and kissed his warm skin. He tipped his head and kissed me—a long, slow, deep kiss. “Maybe we should save the fishing for later,” he said.
I pulled back. “Not a chance,” I said.
We waded into the river, where he taught me the four-count rhythm of the cast, how to flick the rod so that the fly looks as if it’s rising from the water, struggling for air. We ate our lunch, and wandered upstream, looking for pools, looking for fish, trying to become part of the river. When I finally hooked a fish, Harrison talked me through what to do—how to reel it in, reach out, and take it in my hands. It was a magnificent rainbow trout, about fourteen inches long, and it had come to me, soft and silent through the water, like a gift. I admired its metallic-blue-green body and the bold line of crimson that ran from its gills to its tail, and then Harrison got out a pair of long-nosed pliers, removed the hook, and placed the fish in my hands. I lowered my hands into the water and watched the trout wriggle free, gather its strength, and dart into a deep pool, where it would no doubt feast on flies until the sun went down.
As soon as we got into bed, Harrison pulled me on top of him and kissed me again in the way that he had by the river. “You’re a very sexy fisherman,” he said. “I’ll commune with you and the fish anytime you’d like.”
“You’re a good husband,” I said, “and a good father and a good person.”
The next day, Harrison flew east to go over maple-syrup paperwork, and Bailey and I stayed to work with Alex, who was, of course, ecstatic to meet her. He whisked her into the study, gave a sermon about what was on the wall, explained where things were coming from—which other museums and galleries, which collectors—and made his plea for printing up certain images to fill in certain gaps.
“I don’t want to print anything new for the show,” she said. “I want it all to be his originals.”
“We can’t locate all the originals,” Alex said. “The owner of The Devil’s Stepping-Stones won’t lend us the print. She won’t even let anyone see it. It’s a gaping hole.”
Bailey looked at me. “So you’ve been to see Caroline Greer?” she asked. She was clearly surprised that we knew who had the print.
I nodded. “She’s adamant. She won’t let the original out of her house.”
“I’ll go talk to her tomorrow,” Bailey said.
In the middle of the afternoon, I snuck into the study and slipped the three slides of the juniper tree back into the notebook where Alex had filed them.
We ate a dinner of packaged noodles and jarred spaghetti sauce, and then Bailey and Alex returned to the study to go over Alex’s plan for the retrospective. I took a wool blanket from the linen closet—a red-and-black buffalo-plaid blanket that may never have seen the light of day—and stepped out onto the back deck. It was still quite cold at night, but I could hear the water gurgling in the river, making its case for summer. I sat down on an Adirondack chair and pulled my knees up under the blanket. I thought about what it would be like to die from hypothermia, to die from cancer, to die from drowning, a heart attack, a car accident, starvation, crashing into a tree. I thought of how much resolve it would actually have taken to buy a lift ticket, strap on skis, ride a chairlift, veer toward a tree. There had been a thousand opportunities to turn back.
I closed my eyes and felt the cold in my toes, in my hands, in my earlobes. Sometime after the moon was high in the sky—a small silver crescent pasted against the black—Bailey came out on the deck and gently shook me awake.
“Is he gone?” I asked.
“Alex? Yeah. Why?”
“Caroline has negatives. A series of them that led up to The Devil’s Stepping-Stones. As long as we’re asking for the print,” I said, “I think we should ask for the negatives, too.”
It was dark. It was hard to see Bailey’s face. I couldn’t tell if she flinched.
Bailey and I went the next morning to see Caroline. We found her working in the flower beds along the side of the barn, her hair pulled back in a bandanna. When she saw Bailey, she blinked, stood, and took her in her arms like she was a long-lost child.
“I’m in charge of my grandfather’s retrospective,” Bailey explained. “He left me in charge. Did you know that?”
“No,” Caroline said, cutting her eyes at me. “Your mother didn’t mention it.”
“Did you know he destroyed most of his negatives?” Bailey asked.
“Yes,” Caroline said, “I heard that.”
“Do you know why?” she asked.
“I have a pretty good idea.”
“My mom said you have negatives you believe are my grandpa’s,” Bailey said. “Would you mind letting us look at them?”
Caroline took off her gardening gloves and led us into the barn. She plugged in the light box and handed Bailey the book of negatives. Bailey carefully looked at each page, peering at their dates. I imagined that she had spent many hours with my dad while he was stalking photos. She probably took her sketch pad with her, and patiently drew while he patiently waited for the right photo of that day. Looking at that series of negatives would be for her like coming home.
But after she scanned the series, she put the book down. “I don’t believe that this sequence is natural,” she said, “and I’m not even sure this is all his work.”
I closed my eyes and took in a breath through my nose.
“You don’t believe they are his?” I asked quietly. I wanted to demand to know why she was lying, but I already knew the answer. She had spent every summer of her childhood walking the fields and streams and mountains with my dad. She knew the nature of his genius better than anyone else in the world. She was lying to protect him, and Caroline must have known this as surely as she knew how birds choose their twigs for their nests. She just sat quietly at the table, watching us, a small smile on her lips.
“No, I don’t,” she said. “This picture of the moon isn’t in focus, the tops of these trees aren’t in the frame. These aren’t his.”
I turned to Caroline. “And you?” I asked. “What do you believe?”
She smoothed a strand of her hair back from her forehead. “I believe that Bailey is right,” she said.
I just closed my eyes and tried to keep breathing.
“Will you allow The Devil’s Stepping-Stones to hang in the show?” Bailey asked.
“No,” Caroline said, “I’m sorry.”
Bailey didn’t argue. She didn’t even begin to fight. The whole visit had been a performance and somewhere my dad was sitting by a fishing hole chuckling with delight at the ruse he had been able to pull off.
Later that afternoon, I drove into Jackson Hole. The same young man at the camera store handed me my slides and prints. “You should be able to take care of that kind of fuzziness with your Nikon, I should think,” he said, nodding at the prints in my hand. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to cry or explain the whole story to this stranger, but decided, in the end, just to smile and say thanks.
I looked at the photos when I got into the car—new prints of thirty-eight-year-old images, a fresh look at my fifteen-year-old self—and then I got out of the car, went back into the camera shop, and told the stunned shopkeeper that I needed another Nikon.
I drove over to the post office and bought a photo mailer. I slid the photos into the envelope with a note:
Dear Bridget,
The thing about being a GK is that it can take a long time to accept your fate. In my case, it took fifty-four years. I’ve bought a new camera (I threw my last one into the ocean—don’t even ask) and I’m learning how to fly-fish with my dad’s old bamboo rod. I thought you’d like to see these three photos that I took when I was fifteen years old and went out to visit him in Moab. My dad, it turns out, kept them all this time. I’m not in a legal position to hold on to them, but it would make me happy to know that they’re with someone who understands how much they mean to me.
xxoo
Claire
