The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller Read Free Book Online

limped away in the opposite direction.
    The next morning Grace woke up thinking about the Minolta her parents had given her for graduation. She took the camera out of its case and loaded it with film. That was the morning she began to photograph in earnest. She spent the next two months documenting every waking hour of her block. The people already knew her, so they tolerated her lens poking at them, even invited her into their apartments occasionally. She photographed everything, everyone she could – the Assembly of God Sunday service, the affable bodega owner, the El Greco grandson, the old men sitting outside the bodega, the Laundromat lady. She built her portfolio up image by image, photographing day and night as if pursued. The resulting stack of pictures showed obsessive commitment and a sharp eye. She got an appointment with the editor of the Hartford Courant , a paper she had heard was open to hiring young photographers. They took her on. She spent the fall and winter chasing fire trucks and photographing orange tape stretched around suburban houses where murders had occurred; by the following summer, she was on a plane bound for Louisiana to cover Hurricane Katrina for the Courant with a senior colleague. She slept just a few hours a night for the entire two weeks; there wasn’t a moment of that tragedy she wanted to miss. The trip was oddly blessed for her; images of horror and hopelessness spiked with humor seemed to cohere inside her lens again and again. She couldn’t seem to help being at the right place at the right time. The pictures she brought back were surreal: three children wearing rubber Halloween masks of George Washington, Elvis Presley, and Chucky discover the corpse of an aged man in an alley; a shivering dog stands perched on an island of garbage, surrounded by floating dolls; a big woman dances around in the remains of her decimated living room, wallpaper hanging from the walls like shreds of skin. Grace returned to the Courant a star. Within two years she was on the staff of Getty Images, touching down in Kabul.
    Grace was perplexed by what seemed to others to be talent yetfelt to her like something else. Her luck was uncanny to her. It was as though she herself was creating the images, dreaming them onto the emulsion. It was, perhaps, the way she was able to forget herself, to disappear, to become transparent when she photographed, that made it so hard for her to take credit for her own work. Sometimes, she was swallowed up by the experience so completely that she could not remember having taken the pictures at all. Yet she had, of course, and anything paranormal about her new chosen profession was, she knew, adolescent hokum she would never have shared with a soul, except her twin, whom she treated with the brutal frankness, the mocking acuity she reserved for her own internal life.
    Ben was, for Grace, an extension of her self. Some of what she was doing by working so hard, she knew, or rather saw dimly in some back room of her mind like a mouse one perceives scurrying along a wall out of the corner of one’s eye, was getting away from Ben by surpassing him. Their relationship was absolutely perfect. It was so perfect, in fact, that Grace needed no one else. She had not, as the psychotherapist she saw for a few months in college, Dr Sarah Kreutzfeldt, put it, ‘individuated completely.’ Grace’s chief complaint, when she first availed herself of the University Health Services, was that she couldn’t fall in love. She thought there must be something wrong with her. There had been one obvious opportunity: an intelligent, interesting, funny boy with sparkling eyes and a caved-in, question mark-shaped torso. She kept teetering on the brink of love with him, and even spent blissful hours in the zone of extreme fondness. But all it took was one flabby joke, a botched allusion, a moment of strained sincerity, and she felt a leaden seal forming in her gut, cutting her