The Drowning House (4 page)

Chapter 4

OUTSIDE, THE SKY WAS GULF BLUE
, a color you see nowhere else, intense and full of light, a color that throws ordinary things into sharp relief and turns them into sudden visions. The clouds were few and scattered. Not the conditions a photographer looks for. Too much contrast, too many shadows. But it was on a day like this that I had taken the photo of Bailey in the swing, the photo that changed everything.

Over the years, I had produced my share of ordinary scrapbook pictures—evidence of Bailey’s progress, of our life as a family. And like any parent I had thrown away my share of botched shots, especially as Bailey grew and became more active.

The spring she turned five, it was clear a transformation was under way. It was not just that she had lost the plump, rounded arms and legs, the dimpled hands and elbows of her first years. As a young child, Bailey had been exceptionally fond of sitting. She would take up a location, usually a busy one, the floor in front of the dishwasher or the middle of the front steps, and dispose herself and her things—the Playskool barn, the plastic glamour dolls she forced to inhabit it—as though she planned never to move again.

Or she would sit in my lap, taking inventory of my features. She would explore my ears with her fingers, my teeth, so much larger than hers, so plain and serviceable, lacking any frilly scallop. She would touch my eyelashes with one carefully extended finger, laughing when I blinked.

After she turned five, all that changed. When Bailey came to me, it
was to fling herself facedown across my legs, exhausted, speechless. Her back, which had been soft, undifferentiated flesh, had become a complicated system—a multitude of ribs, the small, distinct shoulder blades that stood out like wings. Although I knew she weighed more, she seemed lighter. She no longer possessed the specific gravity that belongs uniquely to babies and young children, that makes them—at the same time—so easy to hold and so fatiguing to carry. She seemed to be assuming a new form. Preparing herself for some astonishing and yet inevitable role.

I did a series of running, then jumping shots—Bailey with her arms pumping, Bailey with her arms and legs outstretched, hair flying. About that time, I must have taken the first shots of the swing.

It hung from an old oak in the backyard, a rope swing with a weathered wooden slat for a seat and two knots underneath where the frayed rope tied. Below the swing the grass had worn away, leaving a patch of packed earth and hardy weeds. The tree was mossy, bent, and the whole arrangement had a pleasantly rustic look that fit the haphazard, overgrown character of our backyard. Far better, I thought, than the metal swing sets I remembered from my childhood. The chains that pinched, the seats that burned on hot days. The rust. If the rope swing had to be shared, well, that was a plus for an only child.

I took some panning shots, sighting over the lens and deliberately blurring the background. Then I realized it wasn’t motion I wanted to capture but stillness.

Stop-action photography had always fascinated me. Not the science, not the discoveries—I didn’t care that a horse at full gallop lifts all four feet off the ground. It was the expectant silence that enclosed the runner halted in midstride, the ballplayer, one hand stretched above his head, reaching for an invisible ball.

Who wouldn’t choose to remain in that moment of perfect anticipation? What outcome could measure up to the infinity of possibilities it promised? Who wouldn’t choose to preserve them all forever, to remain safe and hopeful in the endless present of those images?

But the foot slaps the track, the ball hits the glove. Every instant of every day, life is streaming past, all experience—every action,
word, or thought, every particle of intention—rushing toward some moment you can’t foresee that is anything but safe. Toward, perhaps, one ordinary afternoon.

I set my shutter speed at 1/1000 and began again. We were in the backyard. Bailey had been to a birthday party where she had eaten a popsicle, and there was a cherry ring around her mouth. The overalls that had been clean four hours before were streaked with food and grass stains.

The northern sky was pale blue, the light diffuse. The clouds were mere fluff. When one of them covered the sun, I raised my Leica and caught Bailey just as she left the swing, in that instant when she knew herself to be weightless, flying. She climbed back into the swing, and I took another. “Again!” she said. Then the process took over, and I knew I was working well because of the way everything else thinned out around me until the yard and the street and the voices of the children seemed faint and far off. I couldn’t tell yet whether the result would be good, but the feeling was there, and I gave myself up to it. I finished a roll, reloaded, and started another.

I had the best shot expensively matted and framed (that was in itself a bad sign, suggesting that I felt it needed dressing up) and gave it to Michael for his birthday. He unwrapped it cautiously, holding it in his lap. “Very expressive,” he said. He kept his head down, his eyes fixed on the image, so I couldn’t see what was in them.

“Michael. That sounds like something you overheard at an opening. I want to know what you think.”

“Do you?”

“What do you mean?”

He looked at me then, and I saw that he was struggling with a mixture of emotions. “Do you care what I think?” I went behind his chair and put my hands on his shoulders.

“Of course I do.” Gently, I massaged the place where his muscles knotted. I moved up to the back of his neck. “I want to hear your ideas. But I don’t want advice.” I felt him stiffen, and I dropped my hands. “I can’t work that way.”

“No? How do you work?” He stood and moved away to the window. The afternoon light picked out the lines that were starting in his forehead, the shadows under his eyes. Was that what made him look suddenly so sad? And so fixed in that sadness, as if the thoughts he was having were the same ones he had had many times before, the only thoughts he could have?

“Well,” he said, “okay. Since you want to know. I wish her hair wasn’t in her face. I wish her overalls were clean. But that’s not it really. This isn’t my Bailey. I don’t know her. It’s a beautiful picture of …” He shook his head. Then he turned toward me so that he was backlit, a dark figure without a countenance. “I know I’m a lousy judge. It’s probably really great. So let’s forget that. Let me say instead that sometimes it’s as if we’re just, I don’t know … props. Interesting, but only in the context of your artistic vision. Whatever that happens to be at the moment. The Laughing Girl. The Man by the Window.”

“You forgot the Snotty Lawyer.” Now I was glad I couldn’t make out his face. It was easier to speak my mind to that dark outline. “Do you hear yourself? Do you hear what you’re saying? You, the hotshot litigator? What happens to people when you put them on the stand? I’ve heard you planning it. So don’t tell me it isn’t deliberate.”

“That’s different. I’m talking about us.”

“I don’t recognize the distinction.”

“I know you don’t.”

“Michael, I can’t keep my life in compartments. One for work and one for home. One for you and one for Bailey. I can’t measure out my feelings like that. So it’s true, I admit it, my work and my life overlap. What’s wrong with that? I’m a mother and a photographer, for God’s sake. Why can’t I photograph Bailey? Oh, yes, snapshots for the album, those are fine. But if I choose to photograph my child in any other way, you think I’m exploiting her?”

I felt the blood rising to my cheeks as I went on. “You’re right, the Bailey you know isn’t the one I do. Your Bailey sits perfectly still. In a chair. Her hands are in her lap. She looks at you. Isn’t that what
you’d like? Isn’t that your vision?” I couldn’t have explained why the thought of it was so unbearable. But I could feel a hot whorl of anger spiraling up inside me like smoke off a smothered fire.

“Just because something’s ordinary doesn’t mean it’s contemptible.”

I hardly heard him. “You know what I think? I think it drives you crazy that what I do is something you don’t understand. You don’t get it. You don’t see what I see. So you want me to photograph in a nice, obvious way that’s easy to understand and that makes you comfortable.”

He shook his head, but without conviction. In matters of taste, Michael was deeply, thoroughly conventional. I’d once taken a picture of Bailey gazing out a window with her eyes wide and one small finger up her nose. I loved its unself-consciousness. Michael hated it. Why was I still trying to win him over? When of course he would have preferred a traditional portrait—his daughter, dressed and posed, looking into the camera.
Looking at him
.

He didn’t answer. To his credit, he kept the photo of Bailey on the credenza in his office. He was still trying. In those days, we both were. And one afternoon a former classmate of Michael’s who worked in marketing stopped by. A client, he explained, was launching a campaign. The picture was exactly what they wanted. It captured a child’s energy, her exhilaration. It didn’t look posed. She wasn’t a model, was she? That made a difference. She didn’t look like a professional. “Your daughter?” he said. “Outstanding. Your wife took it. You must be proud.”

And in fact he was. Almost immediately, for the first time, Michael was truly proud, even if he didn’t entirely comprehend what it was the marketing people saw in the photo. All it needed was for Richie (and the others who came after) to endorse it.

I admit, the vindication, when it arrived, was sweet. And I made a real effort to enjoy it without gloating. At the same time, I was hurt—and angry—that the opinions of a group of relative strangers meant so much more to him than mine. If he couldn’t see for himself, make his
own judgment and defend it, if he was going to take it on faith from someone, why not from me?

The deal bought the two of us, as a couple, some time. There were meetings, there was a contract to be read, considered, signed—this was Michael at his best, lasering through the pages of stultifying prose, offering elegant, subtle changes. There were celebrations. There was backslapping and applause.

It was like a wave that comes in and covers everything strewn across the beach, all the small items that up until then have been the focus of much attention. The arguments we had been having, the facts we had stockpiled for the sake of having those arguments again, all the details that, a few days before, had preoccupied us, disappeared under the smooth swell of activity.

I have been tempted to blame what came afterward on Michael, to say he was the one who was ambitious for the kind of street-corner recognition that comes with commercial success. I would like to be able to claim that I had nothing to do with it. But I can’t.

I wanted to sell the photo as much as he did, maybe more. It wasn’t something I had anticipated. We didn’t need the money, Michael was doing well, and he had never held it against me that my income, when I had any, was sporadic. But when the pieces of the transaction came together into a whole in front of me, it was like the lights going up on a stage. I saw immediately that there was a place for me on it. So Michael and I together traded away a portion of our daughter’s childhood. Our reasons may have been different, but we acted together.

Don’t misunderstand, Bailey adored it. This is how I defend myself in the conversations I have over and over with no one. I say that Bailey shivered with delight to find herself in window displays and on the pages of magazines. And once as a cardboard cutout, almost life-size, in a shopping mall. The image seemed to be everywhere. Sometimes we’d stop to look at it and a passerby would discover the likeness.
Oh my, is that you? It’s you!
That was part of it. She was a minor celebrity.

But she was so young.

A child spends her first years in a kind of trance, an uninterrupted
flow of sensation, from which she wakes into consciousness only now and then. Her sense of self begins as flashes—
this is my hair, long enough now to reach my mouth, to grind between my teeth; this is my cheek, creased from the way I slept
—realizations that are, for a child, like electric shocks that sizzle along the nerve endings. Too much, too soon is like being struck by lightning.

Bailey was not, would never be, a professional model, despite both hints and more direct offers. That was not something either Michael or I would have contemplated. The photo, after all, was the point. It was enough. And I had thought it would end there.

What neither of us had foreseen was how the campaign would change her. Not in a way that would have been apparent to a casual observer. I saw it, though, and I knew Michael did too. Bailey held herself differently. Her movements were purposeful in a way they hadn’t been before. Her headlong grace was gone.

I told myself it would have happened anyway, Bailey was getting older. She was a little girl, and girls, especially those gifted with an extra measure of charm, like to practice their skills. They may go through a phase where they make up to people, especially to men. Why did I find it so disturbing? I only know that there were times when, watching Bailey pirouetting in front of Michael, trying out sideways glances and theatrical sighs, I felt sick at heart.