Judith Krantz (27 page)

“Yeah, when you remember the stuff he sent back, Cambodia in ’75 and the boat people shots in ’77—”

“The Patty Hearst scoop—”

“Hell, Herb, what about his coverage of the surrender to the Commies of Saigon in ’75? The airlift of the last marines off the roof of the embassy?”

“How about the Black September massacre at the ’72 Olympics—remember that, Jim? Gabe almost got himself killed there—”

“And those pictures from Biafra? They accounted for one of the Pulitzers, and Kent State the other.”

“That’s all history now, Herb. Ten will get you twenty that one day soon Gabe’ll be covering some Baroness de Rothschild’s fancy-dress ball. He’s dug in here in Paris now, settled down with the girl of his dreams, and once that happens …”

“Well, what the hell, love can hit the best of them, or maybe it
is
burnout—Gabe’s been around awhile—every one of us is going to have to quit sooner or later,” Jim said.

“Not everybody quits. What about Capa? He landed on the beach in Normandy on D-Day, and he was still working when he stepped on that Thai mine, poor bastard.”

“Capa was generations—eons—before Gabe,” Jim said. “They don’t make them like that anymore.”

“Anyhow, there’s no question that Gabe’s left a body of work, you can’t deny that …”

Herb’s voice was abruptly cut off as the door opened and closed behind them. Envious cocksuckers, Gabe thought, envious, envious,
envious
, you couldn’t even have a personal life without incurring their poisonous envy. All they were really saying was that they hoped he’d lost it, the sanctimonious bastards, the cocksucking, motherfucking pricks. They were hoping, not predicting or commenting, but
hoping
with all their envy-ridden hearts that there was one
less photojournalist in the world who could show them up for the amateur snapshot album hacks they were, one less photojournalist who they knew would always be better than they were on the worst day he’d ever had.

As soon as he could, Gabe left the Press Club and walked blindly across Paris, not waiting for stoplights, plunging through traffic, paying no attention to the alarm of the automobile horns, not seeing the gray city that was decked out for Christmas, not noticing the rosy children or the lazy pigeons or the flocks of pretty girls, not buying flowers or stopping for coffee or lingering on a bridge, a man whose bridegroom’s nerves had been forgotten in the awful birth of a far greater fear.

On the morning of her wedding day, Jazz woke up late. The night before, her father had insisted on taking them to dinner at Taillevent, so that instead of their usual quick brasserie dinner they had stayed up unusually late eating and drinking. Oh, but it had been so good, Jazz thought as she stretched and yawned, reluctant to get out of the warm bed, yet anxious for the jubilant day to begin.

Finally she put on a heavy robe, socks and slippers, for Paris was as cold as Finland in December, and twice as damp. She rushed to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. Gabe had forgotten to leave her croissants, she saw with a twinge of disappointment, but he’d been so absentminded yesterday evening that he was capable of forgetting to have any breakfast himself. Warmed by the tea, she brushed her teeth, washed her face and sat down at her small dressing table in the bedroom to inspect her face in the dim light of the thick gray haze that lay outside, hanging over the Seine. Propped up in front of her mirror was a blank envelope. Puzzled, Jazz opened it and two folded sheets of paper fell out, covered in Gabe’s handwriting. There was no salutation on the first page, and no date.

Automatically, Jazz turned the sheets of paper over to see if there was anything more on the back of them. She peered inside the empty envelope and reread the letter. She got up and looked in the closet in the hallway. Gabe’s clothes were there, except for his heavy coat, his sturdiest boots and a pair of corduroy trousers. She looked in the dresser and found that his warmest sweater was gone. She didn’t bother to look for his cameras. She wandered around the bedroom, backtracking and stumbling as if the small room were a forest and she were a lost child. Finally she got back into the bed and pulled the quilt up over her face. Her mind wasn’t working. All she could think was that it
wasn’t possible. It just was not possible. It could not be possible. He’d left her, left her on their wedding day, because he loved her too much. Did it make sense? Was there any twisted way in which it made sense? He was getting out while they were still happy. He’d been incredibly happy since he met her. Therefore he’d left her. He loved her so much that he had run away from her. Did that make sense?

I should cry, Jazz thought. People cry. Her eyes were dry, but she felt as if they were bleeding. Her heart was thumping with sickening heaviness and her hands and feet were freezing.

The doorbell rang and she was out of bed in a second, racing to answer it. Gabe hadn’t left after all, she knew he couldn’t, it wasn’t possible, it never had been. She flung open the door. Mike Kilkullen stood there, his arms full of packages from Fauchon, blocks of foie gras for the wedding party.

“Daddy!”
Jazz screamed. She pulled him inside, ran to the bedroom and came back with the letter, holding it out to him. “Read it!”

Quickly, Mike scanned the two pages. He pulled Jazz close and held her as tightly as he could as she began to shake as if she were coming apart. She was not weeping, but terrible noises came out of her throat, sounds of an inhuman keening, a lost howling. There would be plenty of time later, Mike thought, to tell her that Gabe had been right about one thing in his life. Jazz deserved better than him.

I
n the years to come, her departure from Paris never became any clearer to Jazz than a blur of dank, dark fog, in which the only reality was the figure of her father, to whom she clung, physically unable to let him out of her sight. She felt like a small, crushed animal who’d been run over and thrown to the side of the road to bleed to death all night long.

Mike Kilkullen threw a change of clothes and all the files from her darkroom into a bag, slung her camera bag over his shoulder, and watched over her all night in his hotel, until they took off for California the next day. Years later he told her that he had remembered to telephone Chez Alexandre that afternoon to tell the proprietor to carry on with the party and to explain that the hosts had unexpectedly left on assignment in the Middle East.

In the ever-shifting world of photojournalism, a world in which the divorce rate for photographers for the
National Geographic
had almost reached one hundred percent, if attention was paid when the couple
formed by Jazz and Gabe never resurfaced in Paris, it didn’t reach beyond a small circle of incurious men with no long-term memory, men who forgot their best friends and lovers with each new job, men to whom a lasting relationship was as unthinkable as having only one single photo assignment for the rest of their lives.

Jazz remained at the ranch for weeks. She rode every day, packing a lunch so that she didn’t have to return before sunset. As she guided her horse through grassy pastures, moving among the large, calm herds of grazing cows and nursing calves, or picked her way along the edge of the harbor, looking for seashells, or cantered along the beach, the sun and the rain and the rising and falling of tides slowly began the process of mending that could not have taken place in any city on earth.

By the end of January she knew that she couldn’t stay on at the ranch forever. She had taken from it what she needed, but now she had to continue her life, to begin to be independent for the first time. Nowhere on a working ranch was there a place for her to do anything useful, and it was important to her to get back to work. She wanted to earn money, something she had never done except when she was doing the portraits of children in Paris.

Jazz put together a book of her work, using the best work she could find from her first year at Graphics Central, and from all the Paris files, the best of the film she had shot when she was with Gabe and the finest of her portraits of children. She borrowed her father’s car and went to consult the placement office at Graphics Central.

Cathy Prim, at the placement office, had been an acquaintance of Jazz’s when she was at Graphics Central. “You’re kidding, right?” Cathy asked her after she’d looked through the book.

“No? Why?”

“Look, Jazz, your work is astonishing, but this book is simply a mess. You’ve got the tabletop stuff you shot here, you’ve got photojournalism from hell
and gone, incredible shots that should have been published but never were, and you’ve got
uncanny
children’s protraits. What you don’t have is one clearly defined area in which you can display exactly what kind of photographer you are. This is an age of specialization—all I deal in are entry-level jobs, and nobody’s looking for an overqualified, Renaissarice-girl assistant—the Pope in Africa, for heaven’s sake!—who shoots everything in sight. This stuff, fabulous as it is, cancels itself out.”

“What do you think I should do, Cathy?”

“If you seriously want the kind of job I can steer you to, and I’m not sure you do, you’ve got to prune this book back to tabletop … that’s where ninety percent of the work is, and even your first-year stuff was excellent. Too bad you quit school.”

“What about the portraits?”

“You’d have to have a rep, and anyway there’s no real demand for children’s portraits—their parents take them with cameras any idiot can use. Have you ever tried to get a rep to even look at your work? You could get old and gray while you waited, and then there’s no guarantee that the rep would be effective.”

“Tabletop,” Jazz said slowly. “Cathy, to be honest, I’m … I’m not wild about tabletop.”

“But you’re great at it. What can I tell you? Unless you want to try to sign on at a photo agency and look for work in photojournalism. Now there’s a field that’s always wide open, and you’re meant for it.”

“Photojournalism is absolutely out for me.
Over
. I included it only to show that I can shoot fast.”

“You’re sure about that? It’s a major waste of talent, Jazz.”

“Positive.”

“How did you get to all those places, anyway?” Cathy asked curiously. “I’ve never seen anything like those shots in anybody’s book before.”

“Dumb luck,” Jazz said hastily. “Look, I’ll take your advice about tabletop. Have you got any openings?”

“Only one single opening at the moment, and it
just came in. A food photographer needs a Girl Friday. I could fill it with twenty different candidates, except they’re all Guy Fridays. It’s a real break, Jazz. If I were you, I’d try to grab it while it’s still available.”

“Does it involve doing dishes?”

“Could be. Also silver polishing, and probably sweeping up. When the word ‘Friday’ is in the job description, it means everything but life-threatening situations.”

“Does it involve cooking?” Jazz asked cautiously. She could handle sweeping up.

“You’re insane! All the cooking is done by the professional food stylists, who are home economists, gourmet chefs and highly trained in the art of food presentation. They won’t let you
near
the food.”

“That’s the good news. What’s the salary?”

“The minimum. Girl Fridays always get the minimum.”

“Where do I go to apply?”

“Mel Botvinick’s studio. He’s on Olympic and La Brea.”

“What do you know about him, Cathy?”

“He’s great. He graduated from here about nine years ago—one of our stars. Tops in the field. Two of his Girl Fridays have gone on to open their own studios.”

“Doing food?”

“What else? Food photography is serious big business. Listen, Jazz, don’t futz around. It’s a job, and you can’t imagine the competition for any kind of job in photography. You can use my phone to call, and then I’ll call them and put in a good word for you.”

“Cathy, you’re an angel.”

“What I’d really like to know is how you got those incredible pictures from all over the world.”

“I happened to be in the neighborhood.”

As Jazz walked through Mel Botvinick’s studio to the studio manager’s office where she was going to be interviewed, she had the impression of a tranquil convent
combined with a laboratory in which competent, silent people were engrossed in contemplative creation of some mystery known only to themselves. It was a large, high-ceilinged, windowless space lit mainly by a few strong worklights over a big wooden table where three women were seated on kitchen stools, intent on some detailed work she couldn’t observe. There was no smell of cooking, she couldn’t spot the large, elaborate kitchen she had expected, nor could she see any photographic equipment except one huge camera mounted on a tripod. The atmosphere of the studio gave Jazz an instant sense of security and serenity. In the middle of busy Los Angeles, it seemed an island of peace and calm. Suddenly, getting this improbable job became very important to her.

Jilly Hexter, the young studio manager, had an office in a loft above the studio proper. She leafed slowly through Jazz’s hastily reassembled book of her first year’s lighting assignments, which, to Jazz’s critical eye, looked boringly technical.