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7
THROUGH THE STORM, Coltrane’s headlights revealed Je
“Mitch?”
As Je
“Are you all right?” She took several steps down toward him.
“Didn’t your assistant give you my message?”
“Message?” Je
Coltrane’s shoulders relaxed. It had just been a simple misunderstanding. It wasn’t going to be like before. He gripped the railing and climbed to her.
“I got worried when you weren’t here,” Je
“If you ever decide to get out of the magazine business, you’d make an awfully good detective.” Coltrane shut the kitchen door. “You wanted to know if I’m all right. No.” He stroked her hair and kissed her; her lipstick tasted of apricots. “I was a fool. I should have stayed home. With you.”
The compliment made Je
“Let’s just say meeting Randolph Packard wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be.”
“You have awfully high standards.”
Her remark puzzled him. “I’ve admired his work since I was old enough to tell a good photograph from a bad one.”
“Then I don’t know what more you could want. From everything I hear, things couldn’t have gone better.”
“Everything you hear?” Coltrane creased his brow.
“Packard phoned fifteen minutes ago.”
“What? You’re kidding me.”
“He got your number from the magazine photographers directory. He thought you’d be back by now. When I told him you weren’t, he talked about you. You made quite an impression on him.”
Coltrane felt a dizzying sense of unreality.
“He said he hasn’t met anybody as honest as you in a long time. What on earth did you say to him?”
Coltrane sank onto a kitchen chair. “Actually, I insulted him.”
Je
“I told him I thought his photographs at the exhibition were ugly.”
“You certainly know how to win friends and influence people.”
“Believe me, I wasn’t exaggerating about his photographs. They’re as ugly as the ones I’ve been taking.”
“And the ones you removed from your wall?”
Coltrane turned toward his living room. During the day, he had taken down all his framed photographs. His Time cover of an American soldier spooning food into a skeletal child’s mouth in Somalia, his two Newsweek covers (one of which showed a widow keening, holding her dead daughter in one arm and her dead husband in the other after a rocket attack in northern Israel), and his much-reprinted Associated Press photo of the first wave of American helicopters to invade Panama. These and other sensational highlights of his career were now stacked on a closet shelf. “It takes one shitty photographer to recognize another.”
“Maybe that’s why he wants to do a project with you,” Je
Coltrane wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. “Do a project with…”
“He says he knows your work and thinks it’s impressive.”
“You’re making this up.”
“Not at all. But he says you’ll be putting in most of the effort. He’ll supply the advice and the original photographs for a photo essay in Southern California.”
“What are we talking about?”
“His famous series of L.A. houses in the twenties and thirties.”
Coltrane straightened. That series of twenty photographs was a masterpiece. Packard’s depiction of various styles of houses in widely separated areas of the not-yet-overgrown city not only had been hauntingly beautiful but had seemed to mourn the impending loss of the i
“Packard thinks they ought to be done again,” Je
“All he’s asking me to be is his assistant?”
“More. Even if he could take the photographs, he says he wouldn’t. He agrees with your opinion of his recent work – he can’t see beauty anymore. He’s hoping, if you take the photographs, the same places all these years later, maybe you’ll find the beauty he can’t find.”
“I’ll be damned.”
8
SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT, Coltrane woke to find himself reaching for her. His lips touched hers, but as he continued to roll onto his injured side, he winced from pain. “Lie still,” she whispered. “Let me do the work.” He felt her warmth when she leaned over him, kissing his neck. She trembled from the brush of his hands against her breasts. Floating. Flowing. Pain stopped. So did time.
9
“WE SHOULD NEVER HAVE SPLIT UP,” he said.
The bedside lamp was on. They had just returned from the bathroom. Naked, Je
“I didn’t give you a choice,” she said.
His emerald eyes studied her. “I didn’t pay enough attention to you.”
She shook her head. “We both know the truth. I crowded you until you had to back off.” She looked at her hands. “There’s something I never told you.”
Coltrane frowned, wondering what she was getting at.
“This is hard for me to… I was married once.”
He turned his head in surprise.
“Ten years ago. I found out later he’d screwed my best friend the night before the wedding. That was after I found out he’d been screwing every woman he could all the time he was married to me, which wasn’t long, just under a year.”
“Why on earth didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s not something I’m comfortable talking about. All the story proves is that I’m a fool.”
“But why did he marry you if he didn’t intend to be faithful?”
“He said he loved me.” Je
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
“Not as much as I was. The point is, I had a hard time trusting men after that. I kept suspecting that anybody who showed an interest in me was really trying to take advantage of me.” Je