Over Exposure Part 12

"My name is Johnny."

"Johnny Fellows, yes, I know."

She had him on her caller ID just as he had her on his.

"Yes, Johnny Fellows."

"And why is it that you called me?"

Something awkward in that phrasing. An accent? Was she Spanish? Her voice had an aristocratic flair. Not quite haughty, but bold. The same pride he'd seen in her jut of jaw.

"Were you a model?" Johnny said. "A photographer's model?"

"Long ago, yes, I was."

"I searched you out," Johnny said.

"I suspected this was true." Her voice was dreamy and knowing.

"It's crazy, I understand that. But I fell in love with your photograph. 1955, Modern Photography, Ernest L. James."

She was quiet but he could hear her puttering. The whisking of sheets? Were they silk? Or perhaps she was she slipping into her robe? No, it wouldn't be a robe, but a kimono. The kimono would be black as her hair was black with the same deep l.u.s.ter. Dragons were embroidered on its back. Their red eyes, their long curved claws.

"Arnold, your father, is he well?"

"Arnold?"

Johnny felt a skewer slide deep into his bowels.

"Your father, Johnny. How is he? Does he know you're calling me?"

"You know my father?"

The walls of his study were bleeding light. His dizzy eyes, his spiraling gut. The woman on the phone, Lila Calderon, she'd spoken his father's name with a familiarity that was unmistakable. And Johnny saw again the bent corner of the magazine page. That dog-ear.

"He died," Johnny said. "Two years ago. Cancer."

"I see," she said with a faraway tranquility as if she might have suspected this. "I'm sorry for your loss, Johnny. I'm deeply sorry."

Johnny lost it. He began to jabber into the phone, demanding to be told how she knew his dad, but getting no response, then pleading with her to reveal what the nature of the relationship had been, bullying, beseeching, his words rushed out messily for minutes, then he halted.

"Are you there?"

She was not.

She had gone away, left the line to hum with miles of emptiness.

He could picture her in Santa Monica. She had set the phone back in its cradle, walked to her bathroom, stood before the deep tub, let her kimono fall to the tile, ran the water warm, dusted it with herbal soap, let the faucet flow until the water reached the brim, then slipped beneath the foam to linger away the California morning, to sip green tea, to recall the ancient smoky nights, the long lather of love with a man who no longer existed.

Candace was flummoxed.

"You're going to California?"

"Just for a day or two."

"What's going on, Johnny? You're in some kind of trouble, aren't you?"

"No, no, it's not any kind of trouble."

"What then?"

"The woman," he said. "Myra."

Candace said nothing, but she wasn't pleased by this turn.

Johnny felt the air dying in his lungs. A vice closing against his sternum.

"I need to go," he said.

"Why, for G.o.dsakes?"

"To see her, to speak with her. For my book."

"For your book?"

The television was running. It was always running. The cable news, the blather of the world. Their dinner plates were on their laps. Chicken with rice and mushrooms. He'd taken a bite and felt it turn to lead in his gut. And then he'd set off on this exercise in insanity.

"The woman I had a crush on. I spoke with her. I tracked her down and called her on the phone. And somehow it came out that my dad and her, my dad and her had some kind of affair, or relationship, or something, I don't know. She hung up."

"Where have you gone, Johnny?"

"What?"

"Where have you gone off to? What's happened to you?"

"Nothing's happened. I was writing the story and this came up and I started thinking about Myra and trying to imagine her, where she was today, and I don't know, I just reached for the phone."

"You called a woman in California. A stranger from fifty years ago."

"I'm nuts."

"I'd say so. I'd call that a little nuts."

"I want to interview her."

"You're not a reporter, Johnny. You're a retired guidance counselor who's been spending long hours alone in your room. You've cut yourself off from the world and it's made you spooky and off-balance."

"Spooky?"

She peered at him with a touch of dread as if his body might be disintegrating before her.

"Yes," Candace said. "I'll stand by that. Spooky."

He left Candace a note. He told her that he loved her. But he had to do this. He felt compelled. She'd hate him. She'd never forgive him. She might not be here when he got back. But Johnny Fellows had jumped from the ledge where he'd stood for decades alongside Myra and he was falling weightless through the immeasurable aira"nowhere to go but down.

Lila's house was hot pink. Vivid and glowing beside her neighbors' whites and beiges. Gaudy bougainvillea cascaded over her front porch, and the blooms of an ancient jacaranda sent a flurry of blue snow across her patio. The bungalow was old Spanish with a view down an alley to the Pacific, a block away.

Johnny parked his rental car at the curb, switched off the engine and sat for a while trying to remember who he was.

He was, he had come to understand, his father's son, the drab and spiritless man Johnny had never even tried to get to know. He was in involuntary lockstep with him, following the breadcrumbs to a holy grail programmed into his blood. He was on a quest to confront the woman who'd stoked his inner fires and stoked his father's as well. The woman who had undermined his marriage in ways both subtle and profound.

Is that why he was here, to save his life with Candace? To dispel Myra's spell? To break the hold her nakedness had on him? To set himself free?

Or had he come with some dim yearning to seduce her? To charm her to her bed and draw aside her clothes and view the body, that thick nest of hair that had obsessed him so, to curl his fingers through its snarls, to take a fistful of it, to bury his face in its coils, its musk, to draw into his lungs the atoms of her hidden realm? Was he still an undeveloped eight years old? Was he still trapped in the bas.e.m.e.nt, in the darkroom, still dizzy and insane from inhaling the glue, and the pans of harsh chemicals?

A woman was tapping on his window.

She stood in the street. Her hair was short and graying, but he recognized her eyebrows, still thick and dark, her cheekbones, her bold chin, her wide-set eyes. The flaunting, aristocratic look.

He rolled the window down.

"Johnny?"

"Yes."

She wore jeans and a loose white shirt with green vines embroidered across her heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s. On the vines were small red buds, hundreds of them, tight, unopened buds.

She held out a padded mail envelope. No label, the flap sealed.

"This is for you."

Johnny took it from her and lay it in his lap.

"It's everything we did," she said. "Arnold and I. It's all there. That's the sum total of everything that happened."

"I want to talk to you."

She shook her head and her smile was grave and final.

"Just for a few minutes," Johnny said. "Talk with me, please."

"Go home to Candace. Work harder."

"Candace? How do you know Candace?"

She looked off toward the beach.

Candace had called her. Found her on the Caller ID, spoken to Lila.

"What did you tell my wife? What did you say?"

"It's all in there. Everything I could possibly tell you is in the envelope. That's all there is, all that happened between your father and me. Now go."

Johnny sat at the gate, waiting for the red-eye flight back home. The envelope lay in his lap unopened. He watched the people in the lounge area. He listened to the announcements. He watched the pa.s.sengers flow around him with the slow ungainly silkiness of underwater performers.

He made it home by nine A.M. Her car was gone. Candace might be at school. She might have gone home to stay with her parents.

Johnny walked inside. He checked her closet. He checked the kitchen and the luggage cabinet. She was at school. He closed his eyes and drew the first breath he'd managed since he'd left Santa Monica. He wiped his eyes dry.

He carried the padded mailer to his study and set it on the desk beside his computer, and jiggled the mouse to wake the machine from its slumber. He watched the cursor blink. Watched it blink on the empty page of his empty ma.n.u.script.

He tore open the mailer and reached into it and drew out another envelope. Printed on that envelope was the name of the photography store in Miami where fifty years before his father purchased fluids and film and an occasional camera or lens.

Inside the second envelope were dozens of photos of Lila Calderon.

In each she was naked. Some were taken in natural sunlight, outside in patios or screened-in backyards, some were taken indoors against a variety of prosaic backdrops.

She had displayed her body for Arnold Fellows, shown him everything she'd shown Ernest L. James. But as Johnny dealt the photos one by one from the pack in his hand, setting each on the desk beside him, it was clear the woman in these pictures was not the erotic G.o.ddess Johnny had worshipped for half a century.

The upward tilt of her jaw came across as cra.s.s and petty. Her eyes were guarded, ambiguous or vague. Whatever instructions Arnold had given her had not coaxed from her the defiant authority Johnny had witnessed in the magazine photo. Each of her poses seemed posed. Her arms awkward at her side. Her hands as gawky as broken chunks of brick. Even the lush hair between her legs that thrilled Johnny to his molten core, seemed blurry, indistinct, amateurishly out-of-focus or over-exposed.

There were three sets of photos. One group was taken while Lila was still in her twenties. In the other two she was at least a decade older. But in that interval Arnold Fellows had made little progress in mastering his craft. Whatever artistic techniques he had acquired over the years were insufficient. His pa.s.sion could not offset his incompetence.

He'd taken dozens of girlie shots and paid whatever fee was arranged, and flown home to bring Lila's image alive in that bas.e.m.e.nt dark room. Arnold had to have known his failure. He could not have been so cloddish as to deceive himself into believing he had done justice to his model. Because of his own artistic limitations or deficiencies within his character, he had turned Lila Calderon into a vulgar s.l.u.t.

Johnny stacked the photos and slid them back in the envelope and replaced it inside the mailer. He went to his desk and pulled out the issue of Modern Photography and turned to Myra's photo on the cliffside. He stared at her body, at the sleekness of her skin against the jagged planes of rock. He studied her glossy black hair which lifted infinitesimally on a breeze that seemed to swell up from some place within the earth's unfathomable depths, and her dark eyes looked out and penetrated the lens, looked into the photographer's eye and beyond him, beyond his shrouded head, off into some distant era that had not yet arrived, into the far-off room where Johnny Fellows sat, his heart finding a new measure, slowing for the first time in a long while to something like a natural pace.

"Well, look who came home."

Johnny stood in the foyer, waiting, as Candace opened the front door. Through the doorway a slash of golden light was projected across the floor, its dagger tip touching Johnny's feet.

"Yes, I'm home," he said. "If you'll have me."

She set her purse on the table by the door. She took her time with her school books and her papers. She shut the door and bolted it. She was slim and blond and her hips hardly swelled at all. Beautiful in her own way.

She turned to him and in her eyes was something more solid and more certain than he'd detected there before. For five decades Johnny had failed to see her clearly, failed to capture her carnality in the thousand snapshots he took of her every day. He'd blurred her beauty, cheapened her essence with his own insufficient craft.

"You need to tell me everything."

"Yes."

"Absolutely everything."

"I will."

"If you skip anything, I'll know it. I will, I'll know, Johnny. No matter how hard it is to tell me, you have to do it. If you're going to save this, you have to say it all, down to the smallest detail."

"I'm ready."