Searching for Sylvie Lee (12 page)

Lukas leaned against the wall. He still had not switched on the lights, and he carefully asked, “How goes it with Jim?”

“Fine, he is just diving in bed with someone else.” My mouth dropped open. How had that popped out?

In the half-light from the curtained window, Lukas’s eyes widened but he showed no other reaction. Yes, he had always been like this. He was the calm itself. “Is he enjoying himself?”

“Seemed like it to me.” Then we both chuckled, even though my throat burned.

He came over and touched me gently on the arm. “Serious, goes it all right?”

Couscous started to wriggle and I set her down. I shrugged. My heart was throbbing as if it had been punched. “You are the first person I have told.”

“Sometimes it is easier to confide in a stranger.”

Now my voice broke. “You are no stranger.” And, despite myself, a few tears escaped my eyes.

Lukas took me in his arms then and I rested my head against his chest. He smelled of basil and ginseng and I felt the words his body said to mine:
You are safe here. Everything will be all right.
He whispered, “Why did you not come back to visit?”

I sniffed and pulled away. I cocked my head toward the main house. “I was not welcome.”

He didn’t meet my eyes, stared at the floor. “I—I wish I had someplace else you could have come back to.”

For a moment, I was confused. Then I understood. “No. You did not choose an easy path and it made sense for you to stay with your parents. Jim’s parents gave us our apartment too, so it is not so different.”

“I used to daydream about going to see you. I think that is what first made me want to travel,” he said in a low voice. “But by the time I was old enough, you were with Jim. I felt like I would be intruding on your life.”

“That is ridiculous.” I shook my head, shedding the intimate, serious mood. “Come on, turn on the lights and show me around.”

When he flicked on the track lighting, I was delighted to find the room arranged like a theater or movie set. There were no boring couches or oppressive sideboards. Long rolled-up backdrops leaned against the walls behind stacks of photography equipment. Lines of lights hung above us, angled in all directions like birds perched on a wire, covered with filters in yellow, blue, green. I picked up a small umbrella, opened it, and twirled like a girl in a black-and-white movie. “I love this.”

I stepped over to a rack by the wall that was stuffed with silk scarves, Balinese sarongs, Indian saris, flapper dresses, and tuxedo jackets. I arched an eyebrow at him. “Cross-dress much?”

He laughed. “All for photo shoots. I have to work, you know. He who sits on his butt must also sit on his blisters.” He led me to the back, where a wall had been erected next to the staircase, separating the last part of the garage space.

“I built this myself.” As he stood by the doorway, I noticed that the two doors attached to either side of the wall had two separate sets of hinges. I swung one outward and the other inward. We entered and Lukas drew back a thick black curtain that ran across the length of the room, separating us from the inside.

I made an appreciative noise in my throat. “A darkroom. I assume the second set of doors and curtains are so no one can walk inside and accidentally expose your film to the light. But who would come in here anyway?”

“My parents, the cleaning lady. You.” He tossed a key chain at me. I caught it on reflex—the keys to the main house and to his place. “My spare set.”

“I would not want to disturb your privacy.”

He rolled his eyes. “Right. Who was it who never knocked when she came to my room? Who would not even let me go to the toilet without chatting away about something?” He mimicked in a high falsetto, “‘Pee later! This is important!’”

I punched him in the arm. “I never did that. I am a very respectful person.”

Lukas flicked on the red lightbulb attached to the ceiling. It turned him into a long ruby sculpture. The glow reminded me of the red light district in Amsterdam, where the lingerie-clad prostitutes stood lit up in windows. Suddenly, I was aware that the boy I had known had turned into a man and we were alone. I coughed, mortified by my thoughts. For goodness’ sake, he was my cousin. I could barely get out the words. “Could—could you please turn on the regular light?”

He turned on the main lighting and then fanned his face. “Sorry, it stinks an hour in the wind here, heh?” Even though the windowless room was spotless, it still smelled of the strange and exotic chemicals stored inside the canisters and jugs that lined the shelves.

I recovered quickly and moved away from him. “No, I sense invention and possibility.” How to change the subject? I gestured toward his long workbench and the three deep sinks. “I did not think anyone did darkroom work anymore. Is it not all digital these days?”

Now a glow lit up his eyes. He ran his hand through his rumpled hair. “I am in love with imperfection. Some of my mistakes wind up being the most interesting work I have ever done. Come upstairs, I will show you.”

W
e entered his living room and kitchen, which only consisted of a combination oven/microwave, a mini fridge, and a stovetop. A low coffee table that had lost one leg was propped up by thick art and photography books—Basquiat, Dorothea Lange, Mondrian, Jerry Uelsmann, Vermeer. There was a door at the other end of the room. I assumed it led to his bedroom and bathroom. Everything was as neat as Lukas’s room used to be. I was the one who had always rebelled against Helena by living as messily as possible.

I snickered. “It is so bare here, a blind horse could do no damage.”

Lukas barked out a laugh. “I do not have time to collect thingies.”

I scanned his apartment again. “It feels more like a train station than a home. Like a stopping point before you arrive at your destination.”

He sat cross-legged on the floor, pulled out a thick black portfolio, and started flipping through the photos. They were mostly in black and white. I plopped down beside him, looked over his shoulder, and stopped him at a page: the hands of a workingman, crusted with dirt, callused, cradling a tulip bulb. “I love this one.”

He grimaced, rueful. “The client rejected it.” He tapped on the sheet beside it, which held a color photo of the farmer, cleaned and shaven, complete with a fake smile. “This is what they bought in the end. I keep this here to remind myself not to get too carried away when I am being paid by the client. I am a photojournalist. I should document, not dominate.”

We paged through the warm-toned photos. They were almost three-dimensional with the depth of the developing he had done on them. I felt I could reach in and touch the images: a bat the size of a small dog hanging upside down with gleaming red eyes, a flamingo poised at sunrise, a child in rags peddling rice wrapped in leaves—and then his more commercial work: pouting models, tropical flowers and landscapes, all lush, colorful, filled with brilliance.

“I do not know, Lukas,” I said. “You, the camera, the subject. They all become one in the photo. Maybe you need more of yourself in your work, not less.”

Now his voice roughened, became more intimate. “I am fascinated by the way the process influences the result, the ways I can manipulate the images. A grain of dirt, a flash of light—I am crazy about the physicality of film. We are tangible beings. I revel in that.”

On some, he had colored in the negatives or clipped out a little girl and transferred her so that her ghostly image floated above her father who had just tossed her in the air. From the girl’s angle, I could not tell if the man was poised to catch her in his arms again or if he had launched her into the great world. There were even a few shots of Lukas from his trip to South America last year. He stood knee-deep in water, wearing tall rubber boots, his teeth white in the midst of his unshaven face, holding a line with a fish with large teeth dangling from the end.

I leaned closer to the image. “Is that a piranha?”

“Our dinner that night. The river was filled with them.”

“Bet you were glad for your boots. Who took the pictures of you?” I said, turning to another photo of him. Lukas smiling into the camera, a black spider monkey with one arm wound around his neck while licking its own fingers.

“My guide wanted to try out my camera. I believe the monkey had found a flea in my hair and was very happy about eating it.”

There was an old woman sitting in a ramshackle hut, her leathery skin illuminated by the weak flames in the tin can before her. A sheet filled with holes hung next to her and kept out the night, both serenity and struggle plain on her face. Then a faded Polaroid of me fell out. I took one look at my homely eight-year-old self and flipped it over. Some things I did not wish to remember.

“What is this doing here?”

“It was the first good portrait I ever took.”

“You were always sneaking around with that Polaroid camera. Did you not get it for your birthday?” I had not been allowed to touch it. Even though Lukas did not mind, I had understood the difference between Lukas and me then, between blood and child companion. Film was expensive. I had never taken a single photo with it.

He nodded. “Do you remember how the teacher made us sing that song for my birthday?”

“It was horrible.” I still remembered the lyrics, sung to the tune of “Happy Birthday to You.”

Hanky panky Shanghai

Hanky panky Shanghai

Hanky panky

Hanky panky

Hanky panky Shanghai

How the Dutch people loved this song. They would stretch their eyes into long slits and move them back and forth as they sang. To make things worse: that teacher had been our favorite, a friendly woman with long red hair who fed us tea and caramel waffles when we behaved. In that moment, the gulf separating Lukas and me, the only nonwhite children in the group, from the rest of the class grew into an abyss. That space had always existed, I realized then, I had just not been aware of it. Lukas had scrunched his face into a scowl and looked at me. I had pressed my lips together, unsure what we could do to stop them.

“Do not be shy,” the teacher said with her customary cheer. “Come up, sing along!”

At our silence, she took us both by the arm and led us, humiliated, to the front of the room. “Okay, everyone together. Again.”

The children obeyed. Lukas and I looked out over the classroom, surrounded by an ocean of singing pale heads.

“You too,” she said, nodding at us. She clapped her hands in encouragement.

Lukas wrapped his arms around his skinny frame and glowered. I burst into tears.

“Oh, sweetie,” the teacher said. She felt my forehead. “Sit down, then. You must not be feeling well.” As Lukas and I slumped in our chairs, I heard her say to the student teacher with a shrug, “I thought they would enjoy it, something fun from their culture.”

Now, Lukas said, “They still sing that song at children’s birthday parties, you know, to this very day. But a few years after you left, I went to the director and told her how racist it was and they never sang it at school again.”

“You have changed, Lukas.” He had once been a quiet child, like me, and now he was this.

“Yes and no. But I learned that if you do not speak, no one will ever hear you.”

At that moment, my stomach rumbled so loudly we both jumped. Hiding a smile, Lukas said, “Okay, enough of this. Shall we go get you something to eat? You lied about the airplane food.” He stood and held out his hand to me.

I let him drag me to my feet. “How did you know?” I stretched and groaned. It had been a long day.

He was already headed for the doorway and said over his shoulder, “You paid for the ticket, right? You would never purchase first class for yourself. When we were little, I always ate all of my candy in five minutes, but you would still be munching away many days later. Despite your expensive clothing, you are frugal.”

I used my haughty voice. “Oh? You are a fashion expert now?”

He scratched his head. “Umm, no. But I saw your bag in a magazine I worked for. And your clothes seem very—” He was bounding down the stairs in front of me; his broad back barely fit in the narrow stairwell. He fluttered his arms in the air. “Fancy. But you buy them as a soldier collects weapons. In the end, you are practical. You would see flying first class as wasting money on yourself.”

I flushed as red as a beet, happy his back was to me and he could not see it. He had it right. Indeed, I used those designer labels as armor, to communicate my status to my clients and colleagues, nothing more. I never indulged in extravagances just for myself.

He continued, “Come on. We can go to the snack bar and stop by Estelle’s. She would love to see you. Maybe she has an old bicycle she can lend you.”

We went outside and he wheeled a black bike out from underneath the carport. A gentle breeze tousled his hair.

I whistled. “Now you are riding a lady’s bike?”