The First Time Page 5

  More likely a nervous breakdown, Mattie decided. How else to explain this outrageous behavior? How else to explain her complete and utter lack of control?

  The key suddenly slid into the car door. Mattie had taken a deep breath, then another, shaking her fingers, wriggling her toes inside her black suede pumps. Everything seemed to be working okay. And she’d stopped laughing, she noted gratefully, sliding behind the wheel and checking her reflection in the rearview mirror, using her car phone to call Roy Crawford, to ask if they could change the time of their meeting, possibly view the exhibition early, then discuss possible purchases afterward at lunch, her treat.

  Some treat, Mattie thought now, wiping away the last of her tears, struggling for at least a semblance of control. Why hadn’t Jake followed her? Surely he had to have realized that something was wrong. Surely he had to know that her outburst hadn’t been designed to sabotage him. Although how could he know that when she wasn’t sure of it herself?

  “Think you’re okay now?” Roy Crawford was asking, his eyes pleading for a simple yes.

  “I’m fine,” Mattie told him, obligingly. “Thank you.”

  “We could do this another time.”

  “No, really, I’m fine.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” This time Roy Crawford’s eyes begged for a simple no.

  “I don’t think so.” Mattie took a deep breath, watched Roy Crawford do the same. He has a very big head, she thought absently. “Shall we go inside?”

  Minutes later, they were standing in front of a naked woman, artfully angled around an antiquated wash-stand so that only her buttocks and the curve of her left breast were exposed to the camera’s prying eye.

  “Willy Ronis is a member of the famous triumvirate of French photographers,” Mattie was explaining in her best professional voice, trying to keep her mind in the present tense, her trained eye on the stunning display of black-and-white photographs that lined the walls of one of the institute’s more intimate downstairs rooms.

  When we mix black and white together, she heard Jake interrupt, we get gray. And different shades of gray at that.

  Go away, Jake, Mattie instructed silently. I’ll see you in court, she thought, and almost laughed, biting down hard on her bottom lip to ensure her silence. “The other two members of the group, of course, are Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau,” Mattie continued when she thought it was safe. “This particular picture, entitled Nu provencal, is probably Ronis’s most popular and widely exhibited photograph.”

  So let’s take a few minutes and examine the varying shades of gray.

  Let’s not, Mattie thought. “An interest in the nude female form is a distinguishing feature of Ronis’s work,” she said.

  “Is there some reason you’re shouting?” Roy Crawford interrupted.

  “Was I shouting?”

  “Just a little. Nothing to get upset about,” he added quickly.

  Mattie shook her head in an effort to rid herself of her husband’s voice once and for all. “Sorry.”

  “Please don’t apologize,” Roy said, obviously frightened she was going to start crying again. Then he smiled, a big loopy grin that went perfectly with his big head, and Mattie understood in that instant why women of all ages found him so attractive. Part rogue, part little boy—a deadly combination.

  “I’ve always wanted to go to France,” Mattie said, lowering her voice and concentrating on the photographs, trying to assure herself she was capable of normal, adult conversation, despite the fact she was undoubtedly in the middle of a total nervous collapse.

  “You’ve never been?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I would have thought someone of your background and interests would have been to France long ago.”

  “One day,” Mattie said, thinking of the many times she’d tried to sell Jake on the idea of a Paris vacation, and of his persistent refusals. Not enough time, he’d said, when what he really meant was too much time. Too much time to spend alone together. Not enough love. Mattie made a mental note to call her travel agent when she got home. She hadn’t gone to Paris for her honeymoon. Maybe she’d go there for her divorce. “Anyway,” she continued, the word stabbing at the air, startling them both, “this photograph is of Ronis’s wife in their summer cottage.”

  “It’s very erotic,” Roy commented. “Don’t you think?”

  “I think what makes it so sensual,” Mattie agreed, “is the almost tangible depiction of the atmosphere—you can actually feel the warmth of the sun coming in the open window, smell the air, feel the texture of the old stone floor. The nudity is part of the eroticism, but only part of it.”

  “Makes you want to take off your clothes and jump right in the picture with her.”

  “An interesting idea,” Mattie said, trying not to picture Roy Crawford naked, as she led her client toward another group of photographs—two men sleeping on a park bench, workers on strike relaxing on a Paris street, carpenters at work in the French countryside. “There’s an innocence to these early pictures,” Mattie said, the disquieting thought suddenly occurring to her that Roy Crawford might be flirting with her, “that’s missing from most of his later photographs. While his sympathy with the working class remains a hallmark of his work, there’s more tension in the pictures Ronis took after World War II. Like this one,” she said, directing Roy Crawford to a later photo entitled Christmas, wherein a man, a haunted expression on his solemn face, stood alone amid a crowd of people outside a Paris department store. “There isn’t the same connection between people,” Mattie explained, “and that distance often becomes the subject of the photograph. Did that make any sense?”

  “There’s a distance between people,” Roy reiterated. “Makes sense to me.”

  Mattie nodded. Me too, she thought, as they studied these later photographs for several minutes in silence. She felt Roy’s arm brush against the side of her own, waited for it to withdraw, was strangely pleased when it didn’t. Maybe not so much distance after all, she thought.

  “I prefer these.”

  Mattie felt Roy Crawford pulling away from her side, like a Band-Aid being slowly ripped from a still-fresh wound. He returned to the earlier nudes, gazing intently at the body of a young woman slouched provocatively on a chair, her head and neck just outside the camera’s range, one breast exposed, her pronounced triangle of pubic hair the focal point of the picture, her long bare legs stretching toward the camera. A man’s clothed leg appeared slyly in the left corner of the frame.

  “The composition of this photograph is especially interesting,” Mattie began. “And, of course, the juxtaposition of the different textures—the wood, the stone—”

  “The bare flesh.”

  “The bare flesh,” Mattie repeated. Was he flirting with her?

  “The simple things in life,” Roy Crawford said.

  Things are rarely as simple as they sound, Mattie heard her husband say. And we all know that.

  “Let’s have a look in here.” Mattie led Roy Crawford into a second set of rooms.

  “What do we have here?”

  “Danny Lyon,” Mattie told him, resuming her most professional voice. “Probably one of the most influential photographers in America today. As you can see, he’s a very different kind of photographer from Willy Ronis, although he does share Ronis’s interest in everyday people and current events. These are photographs he took of the burgeoning civil rights movement between 1962 and 1964, after he left our very own University of Chicago to hitchhike south and become the first staff photographer for SNCC, which you may remember stands for—”

  “Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Yes, I remember it well. I was fourteen years old at the time. And you weren’t even a twinkle in your father’s eye.”

  A twinkle he extinguished when he left, Mattie thought. “Actually, I was born in 1962,” she said. He had to be flirting with her.

  “Which makes you—”

  “About twice as old as your current
girlfriend.” Mattie quickly motioned toward the first grouping of photographs, Roy Crawford’s easy laughter trailing after her. “So, what do you think? Anything catch your eye?”

  “Many things,” Roy Crawford said, ignoring the photographs, looking directly at Mattie.

  “Are you flirting with me?” Mattie asked with a directness that surprised both of them.

  “I believe I am.” Roy Crawford smiled that big loopy grin.

  “I’m a married woman.” Mattie tapped at the thin gold band on the appropriate finger of her left hand.

  “Your point being?”

  Mattie smiled, realized she was enjoying herself rather more than she should. “Roy,” she began, a pesky smile threatening to destroy the intended seriousness of her tone, “you’ve been my client now for how many years—five, six?”

  “Longer than my last two marriages combined,” he agreed.

  “And during those years, I’ve furnished your various homes and offices with art.”

  “You’ve brought culture and good taste to my boorish existence,” Roy Crawford conceded gallantly.

  “And in all that time, you’ve never hit on me.”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  “So, why now?”

  Roy Crawford looked confused. His eyebrows, black as opposed to gray, bunched together at the top of his nose, creating one long bushy line.

  “What’s different?” Mattie pressed.

  “You’re different.”

  “I’m different?”

  “There’s something different about you,” Roy repeated.

  “You think that just because I fell apart earlier, I might be easy prey?”

  “I was hoping.”

  Mattie found herself laughing out loud. It scared her, forced her to strangle the sound in her throat before she could hear it again. So now I’m afraid of my own laughter, Mattie thought, swallowing hard. “Maybe we’ve seen enough photographs for one day.”

  “Time for lunch?”

  Mattie twisted her wedding ring until the skin around it grew sore. It would be so easy, she thought, picturing Roy Crawford’s big head between her slim thighs. What was she worrying about? Her husband was cheating on her, wasn’t he? And her marriage was over, wasn’t it?

  Wasn’t it?

  “Would you mind terribly if we postponed our lunch till another day?” she heard herself ask, dropping her hands to her sides.

  In response, Roy Crawford immediately lifted his hands into the air, as if one act were predicated on the other. “Your call,” he said easily.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” Mattie told him minutes later, waving good-bye on the front steps.

  “I’m counting on it,” he called after her.

  That was really smart, Mattie thought, locating her car in the parking lot around the corner from the gallery, climbing inside. And professional. Very professional. Probably she’d never hear from Roy Crawford again, although even as the thought was crossing her mind, it was being replaced by something else, the sight of her naked body slouching provocatively on a chair, Roy Crawford’s shoe protruding slyly into the corner of her imagination. “God, you’re a sick person,” Mattie said, banishing the troubling image with a determined shake of her head.

  Mattie gave her ticket to the parking lot attendant, who waved her away without any refund on her deposit. She pulled out of the lot, turned right at the first corner, left at the one after that, paying no real attention to where she was headed, wondering what to do with the rest of her day. A woman without a plan, she thought, trying to figure out what she’d say to Jake when he came home—if he came home. Maybe she should see a psychiatrist, she decided, someone who could help her deal with her frustrations, with all her pent-up hostility, before it was too late, although it was already too late, she realized. Her marriage was over. “My marriage is over,” she said simply.

  Nothing is ever as simple as it sounds.

  Mattie saw the traffic light several blocks ahead, registered the color red, and transferred her foot from the gas pedal to the brake. But it was as if the brake had suddenly disappeared. Frantically, Mattie began pounding her heel against the floor of the car, but she felt nothing. Her foot was asleep, she was kicking at air, and the car was going much too fast. There was no way she was going to be able to slow down, let alone stop, and there were people in the crosswalk, a man and two little children, for God’s sake, and she was going to hit them, she was going to drive her car into two innocent little children, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She was crazy or she was having some sort of seizure, but either way, a man and two little kids would be dead if she didn’t do something about it soon. She had to do something.

  In the next instant, Mattie twisted the wheel of the car sharply to the left, catapulting her into the lane of oncoming traffic and directly into the path of an approaching vehicle. The driver of the car, a black Mercedes, swerved to avoid a head-on collision. Mattie heard the squeal of tires, the crash of metal, the shattering of glass. There was a loud pop, like an explosion, as Mattie’s airbag burst open, smacking her in the chest like a giant fist, pinning her to her seat, pushing up against her face like an unwelcome suitor, robbing her of breathing space. Black and white colliding, she thought, clinging to consciousness, trying to remember what Jake had said in his summation about few things being black or white, only varying shades of gray. She tasted blood, saw the driver emerge from the other car, screaming and gesticulating wildly. She thought of Kim, beautiful sweet wonderful Kim, and wondered how her daughter would manage without her.

  And then, mercifully, everything disappeared into varying shades of gray, and she saw nothing at all.

  FIVE

  Kim’s earliest memory was of her parents fighting.

  She sat at the back of the classroom, blue ballpoint pen scribbling a series of connecting hearts across the cover of her English notebook, her head tilted toward the teacher at the green chalkboard at the front of the class, although Kim was barely aware of his presence, hadn’t heard a word he’d said all period. She shifted in her seat, looked toward the window that occupied one whole wall of the tenth-grade classroom. Not that there was anything outside to see. What was once a grassy courtyard had been paved over the previous year and filled with portables, three in all, ugly prefabricated gray structures with tiny little windows too high to look out or see in, in rooms that were either too hot or too cold. Kim closed her eyes, leaned back in her seat, wondering which it would be by the time her math class rolled around. What was she doing in this stupid school anyway? Hadn’t the whole point of moving to the suburbs been to get her out of overcrowded classrooms and into an environment more conducive to learning?

  Wasn’t that what all the yelling had been about?

  Not that her parents did that much actual yelling. No, their anger was quieter, trickier to get a handle on. It was the kind that lay coiled and sleepy, like snakes in a basket, until someone got careless and removed the protective lid, forgetting that the key word here was coiled, not sleepy, and that the anger was always there, ready and waiting, eager to strike. How many times had she woken up in the middle of the night, roused to consciousness by the sound of strained whispers hissing through tightly clenched teeth, and run into her parents’ bedroom to find her father pacing the floor and her mother in tears? “What’s the matter?” she would demand of her father. “Why is Mom crying? What did you do to make Mom cry?”

  Kim remembered how frightened she’d been the first time she’d witnessed such a scene. She’d been, how old? Three, maybe four? She was having her afternoon nap, sleeping in her small blue brass bed, nose to nose with a large stuffed Big Bird, a slightly ratty Oscar the Grouch tucked tightly underneath her arm. Maybe she’d been dreaming, maybe not. But suddenly she was awake, and she was frightened, although she wasn’t sure why. It was then that she became aware of muffled noises from the other bedroom, Mommy and Daddy whispering, but not the way people usually whispered. These were really loud
whispers, as cold and biting as a winter wind, whispers that made her cover Big Bird’s ears and hide him under the covers beside Oscar the Grouch when she went to investigate.

  Kim slouched down in her seat, her right hand absently patting the tight little bun at the top of her head, checking to make sure there were no stray hairs at the base of her neck, that everything was rightly secured and in its proper place, the way she liked it. Miss Grundy, her mother sometimes teased, a laugh in her voice.

  Kim liked it when her mother laughed. It made her feel secure. If her mother was laughing, it meant she was happy, and if she was happy, it meant everything was all right, her parents were going to stay together. She wasn’t about to become an unpleasant statistic and hopeless cliché, the child of a broken home, the product of a bitter divorce, like so many of her friends and classmates.

  If her mother was laughing, then all was right with the world, Kim reassured herself, trying to block out the eerie sound of her mother’s laughter earlier in the day, a grating sound that was anything but happy—frantic as opposed to abandoned, closer to hysteria than genuine mirth, and like the angry whispers of Kim’s first childhood memory, too loud. Much, much too loud.

  Was that it? Had her parents had another fight? Her father had gone out again last night after dinner, supposedly back to the office to prepare for today’s trial. But wasn’t one of the reasons they’d moved to the suburbs so that he’d have space for an office at home, one that came complete with computer, printer, and fax machine? Had it really been necessary for him to drive back into the city? Or was there another reason, a reason who was young and pretty and half his age, like the reason Andy Reese’s father found to walk out on his family? Or Pam Baker’s father, who was rumored to have more than one reason for abandoning his.

  Or the reason Kim had seen her father kissing on a street corner, full on the lips in the middle of a sunny afternoon around the time they’d moved to Evanston, a reason who was plump and dark-haired and looked nothing like her mother at all.

  Was that the reason she’d come down for breakfast this morning and found her mother standing alone in the middle of the backyard pool laughing like a lunatic?