Ending by Hilma Wolitzer Read Free Book Online Page A

television.
    He would lay the prints out across the floor of the living room and try to arrange them in some sequence. It became a Sunday morning project and the children, in their pajamas, pretended to help. “Put this one here, Daddy.”
    “Okay. Okay, honey, just wait a minute now.” He was distracted, and he hardly noticed them, but his hand reached out anyway, separate from his consciousness, and he rubbed their heads and tickled their feet. He studied his photographs the way Old World Jews would study the Talmud. They knew it by heart, but there was always a possibility of discovering something new, some hidden and revelatory meaning.
    They’re large photographs and it was startling to walk by and be assaulted by those images. The city seen through Jay’s camera has an arrested look, as if motion has been artificially stopped, and then begun again the moment we look away. Of course he was mostly concerned with the people, with their faces, with the intricate composition in space of their figures on a city street. Half shutting my eyes, so that the lashes formed a veil to blur my vision, I looked through Jay’s folder, almost afraid now to encounter his perception of the world. But after a while I opened my eyes and looked at the photographs closely again, bringing into focus his credulousness, his concern, his tender insight. I turned the photos one after the other in a parade of evidence, and the people looked back from crumbling and elegant streets, surprised to find themselves there, in that very moment, for some mystical purpose, alive. And there was the dumb look of lean dogs crouching in city streets, tramps of the world, and the leavings of garbage and graffiti, and the idea of people suggested even in the empty geometry of city landscapes.
    Yet he was never really satisfied with what he had done. Once, when I made a fuss over a new batch of prints, he said, “Yeah, but I don’t think it’s what I really want. I want to get inside …”
    “My God, you’re a madman,” I said. “Jay, these are good !” I picked up a photograph of a black woman and her family eating their dinner at a small square table. She looked polished, as if she were made of some durable life-resistant wood. Yet the whole photograph had a dusty granular quality to it, as if it were very old and had nothing to do with these glittering, accelerated times. “Matthew Brady could have taken this,” I said.
    Jay looked pleased then. “Do you think so, Sandy? That’s what I want to do, get across the idea of ongoing history. You know, we’re all old, young, dying, dead, resurrected.”
    But it wasn’t really ever enough. For instance you can’t show poverty the easy way, with torn underwear hanging on frayed clotheslines. Conditions of the spirit are evasive, maybe even unphotographable.
    I brought the folder and the cameras he had asked for to the hospital. Jay and Martin photographed one another, nurses who pretended petulance, other patients, and the view from the window of their room. When I came to visit again, Martin took my picture as I entered the room, and I worried later what face I had been wearing for posterity.
    Martin looked through the folder over and over again. “God, this is beautiful stuff, Jay,” he said. “This is the way I always felt about the city, like as bad as it is, it’s the only place where you can live a real life. Do you know what I mean? Someday I’m going to do portraits, nothing else. Eyes kill me.”
    Jay winked at me over Martin’s bent head.
    When I was home again that night, I looked into the mirror at my own eyes. Did I expect to find in them some mystical continuation of our lives, or even a permanent reflection of what had already been? I stared, moving closer and closer, watching the starburst of yellow open around the pupils until my breath fogged the mirror.

14
    F ATIGUE WAS JAY’S MAIN COMPLAINT. He went to bed fatigued and he woke unrefreshed as if sleep had been an arduous