Over Exposure Part 11

Johnny a.s.sumed the style grew out of one of the modern age's last taboos. The forbidden allure of pre-p.u.b.escence. Fully s.e.xualized women simulating innocent girls.

As the raunchy pictures filled his computer screen, Johnny felt no urge to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e. Instead, what he experienced was a persistent and cavernous yearning. While his eyes roamed the bodies of anonymous women, he suffered a vast ache in his soul. An absence that yawned within him as large and unknowable as that bottomless canyon that opened below Myra's bare feet.

In early October he realized one morning that he'd been obsessing over surrogates for Myra, and that's when he decided to hunt for her.

It seemed to John Fellows that the Internet had absorbed most of the tangible world and nearly everything that once existed in three dimensions was floating in cybers.p.a.ce if only one had the skill and resolve to search it out.

Within a single day he located a site that trafficked in old issues of Modern Photography, the magazine she'd appeared in. Many of the pages within the magazine were reproduced and viewable online, but to his irritation, he could not locate Myra's picture among them. Unsure of the exact date of the magazine he had spent so many hours absorbed in, Johnny ordered every issue from 1954 and 1955. Furthermore, he paid an outrageous sum to have all twenty-four of them delivered the next day.

That night in a fever of expectancy he sat on the couch and pretended to be alive. Candace was watching their favorite sitcom and giggling along with the laugh track. Johnny held himself still, feeling the fracture lines branching through him as though he might crack apart right there and spill out a grim confession to his sweet blond wife, reveal that he had sinned against her, that he had betrayed her, that indeed, their whole romantic life together had been one long sham. For half a century he had been furtively in love with a woman named Myra. A ghostly being who haunted his reveries, whose perfumed breath whispered into his dreaming mind, and even now in his deep middle age, this seductive mistress had more than once materialized in his sleep to harden his c.o.c.k, make him grind against the mattress until he released a flood of nocturnal emissions into the secret flesh behind Myra's nest of hair.

"Is something wrong?"

He made himself breathe. He made himself look at her.

"No," Johnny said. "Why do you ask?"

"You're so quiet."

"I am?"

"Yes," she said. "Very quiet."

"It must be the writing," he said.

"Not going well?"

"It's harder than I imagined. I'm just preoccupied."

"When are you going to show me something?"

The commercials ceased and the sitcom resumed. Johnny steered his eyes to the set and chuckled at the first comedic moment.

"Soon," he said. "When I'm comfortable with it."

"You can show me anything," she said. "No matter how raw it is. I'll go easy on you."

Johnny swallowed. He produced a smile for Candace, his devoted wife, his friend, his lover. He presented it to her and she seemed to buy it.

As the sitcom moved through its unvarying formula, Johnny's blood turned slowly to sludge, until he could bear it no longer.

"I'm a fraud," he announced.

By then Candace was into the show, and missed the pathos in his voice.

"Oh, stop. You're just learning to play a new instrument in the band. Writing can't be easy. Give yourself some time."

She laughed at something one of the actors said.

Johnny sat silently, feeling the fractures branch out from an immense cavity in his chest, sending shoots of anguish and dread squirming into every extremity.

At noon when the FedEx man arrived, Johnny didn't answer the bell. So disgusted with his disloyalty to Candace, he wanted this transaction to be devoid of human contact. He waited at the edge of the curtains to make sure the man would leave the parcel as Johnny had stipulated on the note he taped to the mailbox.

After the truck was gone, Johnny went to the door, ducked outside into the dazzling noonday sun, and scooped up the package. His hands were clumsy and damp. His heart was losing traction.

He shut the door and stood sightlessly in the living room. That flare of sunshine had stunned him. Johnny held the box with one hand and with the other he knuckled the blinding ache from his eyes just as he'd done so many times as a child after another of his father's flashbulb portraits.

When his vision finally cleared, he carried the package to his study and set it on his desk. He stared at it numbly. He opened a drawer, removed a knife, thumbed open a blade. He drew a straight line down the seam of the strapping tape with the clarity of purpose a cardiac surgeon might employ on his first stroke.

He spread the flaps and released into the air the tart mildewed scent of the antique pages. He lifted the magazines one by one from the box and lay them on the carpet at his feet, making a cartwheel around himself. Johnny had imagined it would take hours to sort through all those issues before he located the photograph. When he'd viewed the covers on the computer screen, none struck him as familiar. But apparently the image had lingered in some subliminal stratum of memory, for seeing them lying before him, Johnny knew instantly which was the magical issue.

On the cover was a black and white photo of a muted desert landscape at sunset, with a single tumbleweed kicking across the dunes.

He collected the others from the rug, and stacked them back in the box. He set the box on a top shelf in the study closet and shut the door. He carried the magazine to his desk and sat down before his computer. The cursor was blinking at the top left corner of a blank page. Its patient beat mocking his own churning heart.

As if by some charmed decree, the magazine fell open at his touch to her photograph. In a swoon of shame and delight, he felt it all flood back. He saw the long-ago bas.e.m.e.nt. He saw his father's darkroom, the workbench, the pans of woozy fluids. Johnny watched himself draw the magazine from the pile, leaving the stack askew so he could reinsert it in the same place when he was done. He flashed through the hours he'd spent with Myra. Every delicious fantasy he'd entertained. He heard the echo of his mother's step as she did her housework, the scent of model car glue in the air, the helpless longing that consumed him as he pried behind her pubic hair to see what wonders the world had in store for him.

She was more beautiful than he remembered. With a subtle thrust of her chin and upward tilt to her face, she seemed both defiant and full of wanton pride. Yet there was an undertone of disquiet in her eyes, as if her nerve was being tested by the cliff's staggering height.

Her eyes were large and dark and her eyebrows heavy. There was a trail of hair leading up from her bush to her navel. A fine dusting of hair on her thighs. And the hair on her forearms coiled as dense and dark as Johnny's own. Myra was unshaven. Primitive. A natural woman.

The photographer was identified as Ernest L. James.

Johnny swiveled to his keyboard and did a search on Ernest James. For the first half hour he learned little, then he hit a website that featured the photographer's work, among other landscape artists. Johnny clicked through dozens of his photos. No nudes. But a great many rocks and granite walls and stark cliffs and boulders.

So that was it. The woman on that mountainside was not the object at all. She was there, Johnny saw, simply to highlight Ernest L. James's true fascination. Geology. The earth. Formations created from great forces clashing one against the other, thrusting upward, dramatic outcroppings, peaks and pikes and crests and summits. The scar tissue of creation.

Myra was simply counterpoint. An umbrella in the drink.

For most of the afternoon he stared at her photograph on the shiny page and feasted on a thousand guilty memories. The cursor blinked. The house was silent. What had once inflamed his eight year old mind still set his heart ablaze. The man he was today and the boy he'd been were absolutely equivalent. In every important way, he knew not a single thing more than he had in that bas.e.m.e.nt. It was all still mystery. What was hidden behind Myra's profusion of p.u.b.es remained hidden and enthralling. Johnny was eight, Johnny was fifty-eight. The woman on the rock had not moved a muscle, nor had he.

It was nearly four o'clock when Johnny woke from his trance and thought to page to the end of the magazine and search the directory.

In fine print, he found the model's name.

Lila Calderon.

As his heart lurched and swayed, he heard Candace unlock the front door and step inside their home.

"You need to let me read some of it," Candace said to him at dinner. They were watching Wheel of Fortune while they ate the pork fried rice and spring rolls she'd picked up on her way home.

"I will. I will."

"You're getting gloomy, John."

"Gloomy?"

"Depressed. Sad, inward."

"I am?"

"Yes," Candace said. "I know you. You're disheartened."

"I'm okay. I'm good. I'm adjusting to being alone all day. That's all it is. Knocking around the empty house. I miss you."

"You're not writing at all, are you?"

One of the contestants had selected a vowel. The letter A. They always chose the letter A. A for alchemy. A for adultery. A for addiction. A for a.s.shole.

"There was this girl when I was young."

"A girl?"

"Yeah, when I was a kid. Eight years old."

Candace tried without success to smile.

"You never told me about a girl when you were eight."

"She was older. Like mid-twenties."

"Johnny! What are you talking about?"

"I had a crush on this older woman."

"Like a neighbor?"

"Yeah, sort of. Anyway, I'm trying to write about her. Her name was Myra."

"Myra?"

Hearing Candace speak the name shocked him. He couldn't believe he'd blurted out his secret. He floated out of himself and looked down at this moment with incredulity. Would this neutralize his fixation? Opening the sore, letting the festering juices leak out, would this cure him? Was he even sick? He didn't feel sick. Desperate, perhaps. Intense, yes. But not sick.

"So you're trying to write about your first crush."

"I guess you could call it that."

"That's sweet. That's good, Johnny."

"You're not jealous?"

"Should I be?"

Johnny smiled his way past the question.

"I meant to write about my job. About school. But I sat down in front of that d.a.m.n computer, and this was what came out."

"Let me read it, Johnny. It sounds great."

"Not yet. Oh, I do want you to read it, of course. I want your reaction. But it's still awkward and full of mistakes. Give me a while. A few more days."

Somebody had won a red Mustang convertible for solving the Wheel of Fortune puzzle. Johnny and Candace watched the woman run down to sit behind the steering wheel. She had long black hair like a Spanish priestess. Thick rich black hair. At the sight of it, Johnny's heart began to thrash so recklessly he had to stand and slip from the room lest Candace hear its throb.

The next morning as soon as she'd pulled from the driveway, Johnny began to insert Lila's name into online people finder sites. An entire industry was thriving on reconnecting those who'd become lost to one another.

Each website had a teaser page. Type in the name, the database went to work while showing an animated spinning wheel. A few seconds later a list materialized.

Every Lila Calderon in America. Their age, their city. Possible relatives.

There were four Lila's in the US.

Only one was in the right age bracket. Lila Calderon, age 75, Santa Monica, California. For a mere twenty dollars, Johnny would be provided her exact address, her phone number. For twice that he could access any public records that included her name. Property, DMV, deadbeat parent lists, divorce, marriage, a.s.sets search, criminal history and more.

Johnny typed in his credit card info and two minutes later he was looking at a map of Santa Monica with Lila Calderon's house marked with a red arrow. Her phone number. Two possible relatives. Lillian Sanchez, age fifty. Marianella Anderson, age twenty-five.

Johnny worked the math. He'd been eight. If the Lila standing naked on the mountainside was twenty-five when the photo was taken, she would be seventy-five today. Lila of Santa Monica.

Johnny stared at the possible relatives. Lillian Sanchez of Manhattan, age fifty. A name like Lillian might be simply a coincidence. Then again, could Lillian be Lila Calderon's daughter? Which would mean, of course, in the hasty arithmetic he was doing in his head, that Johnny's Lila would have given birth to Lillian sometime in the twelve months following the photo.

He looked again at her stance on the promontory. He tried to read that proud face, tried to interpret its deeper resonance. Had she been pregnant? Had she known? Had she suspected? Was she delighted by the life growing within her? Was she full of foreboding? Was the photograph a celebration of her secret or was it her swan song?

He looked at the telephone beside him on the desk. It was nine in Johnny's Miami, only six in Santa Monica. Was she up? Did she sleep late?

A woman answered on the first ring. A simple 'h.e.l.lo.'

His writing study became a whirl of color and shapes. He felt seasick and disconnected from the moment, as if his consciousness had not yet caught up with the impulsive acts his body was committing.

"h.e.l.lo?" she said again.

Lila's tone was quiet and serene. The voice might have belonged to a woman twenty years younger. Not a smoker, not a woman who had screamed herself hoa.r.s.e at men or other calamities. At peace. A drowsy contentment as if she had no fears and no enemies and no regrets.

"Is someone there?"

"Is this Lila? Lila Calderon?"

"That is my name, yes."

Johnny hung up.

He sat back in his chair and tried to breathe. He watched the cursor blink. Five minutes might have pa.s.sed, or it might have been an hour. So lost in the smog of his imagining, so bewildered by his own mad pursuit.

The phone rang. The caller ID said Santa Monica, California.

His hand snaked out, trembling, and he watched himself lift the receiver and bring it to his ear. He could not manage to speak a word.

"You just called me," Lila said. "Do you need something?"

There was no ill will in her voice. A simple curiosity. But then again, to have made such a call to a stranger at six in the morning, there had to be strong currents steering her. Something more compelling than curiosity.