Florida Heatwave by Michael Lister Read Free Book Online Page B

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 manuscript.
    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 lenses.
    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 goddess Johnny had worshipped for half a century.
    The upward tilt of her jaw came across as crass 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 overexposed.
    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 passion 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 basement darkroom. 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 slut.
    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. 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,