“Six tomorrow night?” Coltrane asked. “Come over to my place. I’ll make my famous marinara sauce.”
“Which place is that?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your town house or…”
“Oh.” Coltrane realized what she was getting at. “Packard’s. The furniture’s going to be delivered tomorrow. I thought you’d like to see it.”
“Yes and no. Packard’s house has unpleasant associations for me.”
“That’s another reason we have to use New Year’s Eve to put the past behind us.”
21
COLTRANE WAITED UNTIL JENNIFER GOT INTO HER CAR AND drove away, her red taillights disappearing around a corner. He thought for a moment, then picked up his car phone and pressed numbers.
“Vincent, I’m sorry to call you this late, but I remembered that you told me you didn’t go to bed until two or three in the morning. I was wondering if you’d do me a favor. I’d be glad to pay for any expenses it involves. I don’t care what it costs. Before you return Jamaica Wind to your collector friend, would you ask him if we could take it to a duplicating studio and have it transferred onto videotape? It would be a way of protecting the movie. Also, would you mind doing the same with your copy of The Trailblazer? I’d very much like to have copies of them.”
EIGHT
1
STIEGLITZ.
When Coltrane returned to Packard’s house, he went straight to the vault and for the first time ignored the life-size face of Rebecca Chance gazing at him from the darkness of her sanctuary. He was too compelled. Pivoting toward the shelves on the right, he picked up stack after stack of boxes and carried them out to the shelves in the vault.
Stieglitz, he thought again.
Driving home, he had been unable to stop marveling about how unique it was for a photographer of Packard’s genius to have devoted so much of his output to a single person. Indeed, he could think of only one other photographer who had done so: the most influential in the medium, Alfred Stieglitz, who during 1918 and 1919 had obsessively taken pictures of his lover and eventual wife, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. These photographs and others taken in later years amounted to more than three hundred, although there were rumors that after Stieglitz’s death, O’Keeffe had prevented the release of many others, perhaps even destroying them.
Randolph Packard had been infamous for his arrogance, but he had been humble in his appreciation of genius and, like every other great photographer during Stieglitz’s lifetime, he had made a pilgrimage to New York to learn from the master. Packard’s first meeting with Stieglitz had been at Stieglitz’s celebrated gallery, An American Place, in 1931, two years before he took the photograph of Rebecca Chance’s house and twelve years after Stieglitz had taken the bulk of his passionate photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. Had Stieglitz shown Packard the O’Keeffe portraits? Had the idea of a pictorial monument to Rebecca Chance occurred to Packard because of Stieglitz’s influence? If so, some of the photographs would have been…
Pausing only long enough to verify that the humped rock formation in the photographs of Rebecca on the cliff was in fact the same as the formation on the cliff she had leapt from in Jamaica Wind, Coltrane hurriedly set aside the boxes he had previously looked at. Each night when he had responded helplessly to the urge to come down here, he had been eager to sort through the entire collection but had never gotten past three of the boxes. To have rushed through such an abundance of beauty would have been gluttony.
But now rushing was exactly what Coltrane did, opening box after box, sorting through their contents as quickly as he could without risking damage to the images. The late hour and the glare of the overhead lights made his head pound. His hands trembled with apprehension that he was wrong, with anticipation that he was right. His emotions twisted and tugged. Five boxes. Eight. Twelve. Their contents occupied shelf after shelf. Photographs of Rebecca Chance on horseback, on a sailboat, on a diving board, a forest path, a garden terrace, a stone staircase, a sun-bathed balcony. Fifteen. Eighteen. Of Rebecca Chance in evening clothes, in slacks and a blouse, in jodhpurs, a swimming suit, a gardening dress, a flower-patterned skirt, a white top, and an even whiter shawl.
The full impact of the amount of photographs that Packard had taken of Rebecca Chance was stunning. These many pictures – no wonder Packard hadn’t produced many new photographs. He wouldn’t have had the opportunity. Developing so many photographs (and Packard always developed his own work) would have taken a lifetime.
Although Coltrane was fervently convinced that his logic was correct, his hands trembled with despondency as he reached the final box and fumbled to lift its lid, expecting disappointment. As a consequence, he wasn’t prepared. The first nude photograph rendered him powerless. His legs became rigid. His body turned to stone. His breathing stopped.
The most arousing photograph he had ever seen showed Rebecca Chance naked and yet covered, draped with the chromium beads that hung on the walls of the dining room upstairs. She leaned with her customary natural grace against the blackness of the wall beyond the beads. She was angled slightly to the left, her head and body almost in profile but not quite, both of her eyes visible, directed unashamedly toward the camera. Light came from the left, contributing a sheen to her lush black hair, making her dusky skin seem to glow and her dark eyes seem to have something burning within them. At the same time, the light reflected off the strings of chromium beads, causing them to gleam with the simultaneous evocation of ice and fire. The image had so tactile an illusion that Coltrane could feel those cold/hot beads on his own skin. They seemed to caress him, all the while promising to move and expose more of Rebecca Chance’s magnificent body, the gleaming beads contrasting with the large dark nipples that projected from among them, as well as with the even darker silken pubic hair past which they dangled.
Coltrane’s penis hardened. The unwilled motion broke his paralysis, causing strength to return to his legs. His hands, frozen in the act of setting the box’s lid to the side, resumed their activity, trembling as he placed the lid on the shelf. His breath returned, air coursing into him, filling his lungs, reducing the light-headedness that had increasingly overtaken him while he stared at the picture. But his dizziness was only partially abated, for he felt he was falling into the photograph.
His erection became harder. Conscious of his body as much as he was of hers, he thought, I was right. Stieglitz had shown the way. Of the hundreds of photographs that Stieglitz had taken of Georgia O’Keeffe, an astonishing number of them were the most meticulous, loving nude shots that any man had ever taken of any woman. Sometimes it seemed that Stieglitz had commemorated every inch of O’Keeffe’s body, her expressive hands, yes, and her breasts and her eyes, but also her elbows and knees, the cleft in her hips and the soles of her feet, the curve of her shoulder blades, parts of her that, to Coltrane’s knowledge, had never been the subject of a close-up portrait but that Stieglitz’s amazingly intimate photographs evoked. One critic had been almost frightened by the power of Stieglitz’s portraits of O’Keeffe, describing them as primal, implying that Stieglitz thought of O’Keeffe as the great Earth Mother.
But in Packard’s naked depiction of Rebecca Chance, she wasn’t the mother but the lover of us all, Coltrane thought. Overwhelmed, he turned to the other photographs in the box, finding more nude portraits, each more candid and beautiful than the one before. None was as artistically staged as the one he had first seen, but each was a work of art because Rebecca Chance was a work of art. Her unclothed body, its smooth curves, indentations, and ridges, was mysterious, at the same time daunting, so powerful in its frank presentation of sexual womanhood that it caused Coltrane to react not only with desire but also with awe. Rebecca Chance didn’t pose so much as present herself before the camera, allowing herself to be photographed. Gazing unabashedly into the lens, she was so at home with her female nature that Coltrane had to fight feeling embarrassed about his sexual reaction to her.