Past Sandia we turned north, past dry fenced fields crisscrossed by guileys and sparsely covered with desert grass. Then we drove through the old gold-rush town of Golden, where piles of stones, ruins of buildings, were spread about on either side of the road.
We stopped in Madrid for a beer in the local saloon. Ten years before, when Frank had first brought me there, Madrid had been a ghost town. Now it was a thriving village. But still there were haunting visions: rotted-out old houses strangely illuminated by the dying sun, and the hulks of forsaken automobiles with cryptic slogans emphatically scribbled on their sides.
It was late in the afternoon when we reached Galisteo. Mai must have seen us coming. She emerged from the house when we drove up, wearing a faded work shirt, jeans and hand-tooled boots. She smiled at me, the same marvelous smile that had driven me to distraction in Saigon.
"Howdy, stranger," she said.
I rushed to her, grasped her up, whirled her around in my arms.
"Geof-Frey, Geof-Frey!"
Then a bunch of handsome Eurasian kids crowded around.
Frank introduced them, three girls, Ali, Jessie and Meg, and the smallest, a boy, Jude, who gazed at me shyly while clinging to his mother's waist. Ali, the oldest, h@d-Mai's willowy Vietnamese figure and the swelling breasts of an American teenage girl. She stood against Frank, who placed his hands protectively on her shoulders, while I distributed the funky Key West T-shirts I'd brought them all as gifts.
When the kids had gone to their rooms to start their homework, Frank showed me the improvements he'd made in the house. It was an old adobe set in a two-acre field, a ruin when held found it and bought it cheap.
He'd rebuilt slowly, adding rooms as the family grew. In the years since I'd seen it, he'd added one for Jude and enlarged the back building, Mai's studio and foundry. His own studio and darkroom were in Santa Fe, twenty miles to the north. dinner: a rich beef Mai had prepared a Vietnamese broth called phu, crisp spring-rolls, cha-gio, and thin slices of barbecued pork served with mint, lettuce leaves and delicate rice-flour cakes. The accompanying nuocmam sauce perfumed the dining room and brought back memories of warm mellow evenings in Saigon.
"Mom usually cooks Mexican. Makes a mean chili," Ali said.
"But tonight, in your honor, (ieof-" Frank gestured at the array of food. ed to their After the girls had cleared the table and retir rooms, the three of us sat out on deck chairs in front of the house sipping beers and watching the sun sink behind the old Spanish cemetery on the hill.
"The girls are great. Beauties too," I said.
"Yes, they're great kids, Geof-Frey."
Mai had always divided my name into syllables. She'd been in the States for fifteen years, but she still spoke with the singsong accent she'd used when she was an art student in Saigon, She'd met Frank at the VietnameseAmerican Association when she'd enrolled in his Englishlanguage class. We'd both fallen in love with her, but Frank had won her heart. I'd always envied him his marriage. That night, looking at her, I could feel a little of that envy still.
Several of her metal sculptures were set out on the field in front, angular black forms made of old iron Frank had stripped off a ruined steam locomotive he'd found in Gallop, then hauled piece by piece to Galisteo. In the fading light her sticklike constructions began to resemble the skeletons of dinosaurs.
"You guys have it made out here. Hope you know that," I said.
"I think so," Mai said.
"But sometimes Frank doesn't." She turned to him, shook her head.
"Sometimes I wonder if we aren't playing in the bush leagues," he said.
I reminded him of the dreary hassles of the city, the meretricious charms of the big-league Art Scene in New York, and how fortunate he and Mai were that they didn't have to compete with superficially talented hustlers like Harold Duquayne.
"Sure," he said.
"But there've been some times lately when I've wondered when the struggle's going to end."
"It will, Frank." Mai rose, kissed me on the cheek, then stood behind Frank's chair, leaned down, thrust her fingers into his beard and kissed the top of his head.
"It's a good struggle. I think so, Geof-Frey." She looked at me, kissed Frank's head again, then slipped inside the house.
Frank and I remained out long after the sky turned black, catching up on everything, his kids, Mai's sculptures, his and my ambitions in photography.
"Fame, success-I know better than to care about that," he said.
"But I'd like just once to experience it, to know firsthand how it feels. I think then I'd have an easier time living out here renouncing it."
"The only trouble with that," I said, "you might find out that you like it."
"Yeah, Geof." He laughed.
"Well, isn't that the risk you take?"
The terrible splendor of the sunrise: In northern New Mexico it comes out of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, comes fiercely, firing up the cold dry shrublands, reddening the salthush and the scrub. The yuccas, chollas and grasses begin to glow. The gullies, called arroyos, create the shadows, black slashes across the plain. Then, as the sun rises, you feel the first intimations of the heat.
By 6:30 the kitchen was busy, Mai presiding over the stove, supervising the frying of sausages, the turning of flapjacks by Jessie and Meg. When we all were fed, Frank piled me and the girls into the Land Rover and took off down a dirt road that followed the dry gulch called Galisteo Creek. He dropped the girls at the school bus stop near lose Cerrillos, then turned north toward Santa Fe.
His studio was situated on an upper floor of a restored warehouse on Guadalupe Street. Not the choicest area in that city of galleries, but, still, within walking distance of the Plaza. A sign on the door said:
FRANK CORDERO, PHOTOGRAPHS. There was a big room, lit by track lights, where he exhibited his prints, a darkroom where he did black-and-white printing for two famous Santa Fe photographers, Leo DeSalle and Nelly Steele, and a small workshop where he kept the old cameras he found, rebuilt, then sold to collectors.
He was getting tired, he told me, of making more money from the cameras than from selling his own photographs.
"Sometimes I'm here the whole day, and no one comes in', not a single person. No need for anyone to buy anything@enough for me if they just come in and look."
He put a CLOSED FOR THE DAY sign on the door, then we got back into his car.
"Where're we going?"
"Old road to Taos," he said. "'We'll talk as we drive."
I told him the story, all of it, every detail from my first meeting with Kim on Desbrosses Street, to her seeing me off for Miami the morning before. He nodded as I spoke, occasionally asked a question to clarify the sequence of events. Other than that, his only interruptions were the stops he made to show me the sites of famous photographs.
I welcomed these respites. It was stressful to tell my tale, and listening to myself recount it, I began to wonder about my role. Did I come off as hero or antihero, lover or fool? Frank didn't let on what he thought. But I could tell by his smile that he liked the way I'd handled Rakoubian. And I knew, despite his silence, that he was taking in everything I said.
Meantime I was thrilled to see the places where the legends of our profession had planted their tripods and created immortal images. We stopped before the old wooden cross that Eliot Porter had photographed on the outskirts of Truchas, and then the small grave marker Beaumont Newhall had found in the cemetery at Las Trampas. We visited the church in San Lorenzo Pueblo photographed so brilliantly by Laura Gilpin, and the Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos (perhaps the most photographed site in the American West) where Paul Strand had so gravely shot the buttresses.