“That’s how it seems.”
“Perry’s told me about the important work they’re doing. How our city is going to be the springboard. They talk like such crusaders. Such passion. Springboard. Don’t you just love it?”
Sylvia’s head fills with a picture of a naked Perry and a naked Candice bouncing into the air off a monstrously high diving board. Intertwining during their free fall.
“You have to love it,” she says.
“But this morning I saw the forms required a witness—”
“The forms?”
Mrs. Acker nods and leans forward, pulls up one of the manila folders and hands it across the table. Sylvia opens it and reads Last Will and Testament of Roberta J. Acker. She looks up and Mrs. Acker is holding a pen out.
“You’re leaving all your money to Reverend Boetell?”
Mrs. A smiles and nods, proud and determined. “And the house. And all the rental properties and Louie’s antique coins and the greyhound I keep down in Rhode Island, though to be honest, Sylvia, I think his best days are over.”
It takes Sylvia a second to realize Mrs. A means the greyhound.
“Don’t get me wrong. It doesn’t all go to the Reverend personally. It goes to Millennial Ministries Corporation of Macon, Georgia. And there is a small clause for the cats.”
“The cats?”
“Perry’s assured me they’ll be taken care of.”
“I’m sure.”
Sylvia starts to read through the first paragraph of the will and stops and says, “I can’t witness this, Mrs. Acker.”
Mrs. A looks confused.
“What’s the problem, dear?”
“It’s just,” Sylvia stammers, “I can’t—”
But Mrs. A suddenly ignores her and lunges for the remote control to the TV and the cat leaps over the coffee table and disappears in the direction of the kitchen.
“I just love this part,” Mrs. A says, focusing in on the screen, and Sylvia turns to see the Reverend in a brown suit that looks a little like cowskin. The man is furious, worked into a lather that puts his art museum spiel to shame.
The volume on the set comes up and the Reverend’s eyes roll back in his head and he slaps a hand on his forehead and falls to his knees, brings his microphone up until it touches his mouth and gets assaulted with spittle. It’s as if he’s launching into a seizure that will require long-term medical care. His whole body starts to buck like a rodeo rider on a ghost-bull.
“I saw a vision,” he screams, in a roar so intense it appears likely he’ll rupture blood vessels. “I saw a vision of the coming rapture. I saw the future of the coming war when blood will engulf this wretched planet. And I heard the voice of the Holy One calling down to me, calling down with the mission I could not refuse, calling down, dauuoown upon my pitiful human ears. And he said the battle is now upon us, my miserable servant. The battle is here and the time is now. And he says unto me the tha-rone of Satan rises in the east. The time of the tribulation screams down to our feet and none can escape the ravagement of these horrors. And I saw the son of may-ann with seven stars in his right hand and the key of David in his left hand and a raayzor-sharp two-edge sword issuing from his mouth. And his face was like the sun shining in full inferno. And I looked upon that face of the Master, seated there in the golden throne, and he showed me the scroll and the seven seals and said, it must be you, Garland, it must be you and you alone who will break open these seals and prepare my people for the coming Armageddon …”
Sylvia closes the manila folder and puts it back on the coffee table, but Mrs. Acker doesn’t seem to notice. She’s fingering the remote control box like prayer beads and Sylvia gets up and leaves the apartment without another word.
Down in the darkroom, she mounts the step stool and makes herself look at the seven pictures.
And all the surety of last night is gone.
There’s nothing in these images to suggest that this woman was Sylvia’s mother. That Sylvia is the infant in her arms. That a man named Terrence Propp took the shots. Or that the man named Terrence Propp is Sylvia’s father.
Playing the idea back now, like this, it sounds ludicrous to her. The kind of thing you can only conceive of at the height of your most outrageous drunk. The kind of thing that in a day’s time and sober, you can’t imagine having considered.
She imposed that meaning on these photographs. She took the essence of these seven images and imbued them with a need completely specific to her, and yet one that, until now, she’s not sure she knew existed.
And if she can do that with random pictures, chance images that happened to come into her possession, she has to wonder what else, what other artifacts, what other identical and meaning-free objects she commonly acts on. What other haphazard items does she mindlessly change into something she wants or needs them to be?
The first answer is Perry.
And then everything else lines up behind
The Berkshires nightgown.
The Snapshot Shack
Old movies.
The last answer is Memories of my mother.
Last, not because she’s exhausted the subject, but because she sees there might be no end at all.
What she needed was for Rita Hayworth to look out from the screen just once, just one time during the tenure on mother’s couch, during the Lost Months, the zombie-time. She needed Rita H to turn away from her on-screen co-star and peer into Ma’s dim living room and take the cigarette from her lips and say, “The world does not revolve around you, Sylvia.”
She takes the snapshots of Perry and Candice from the pocket of the robe. She gets off the stool and walks to the dry-line and pins one color snapshot over each of the Madonna and Child shots. She moves back to the stool and sits down and looks. There’s no reaction, chemical or otherwise. No interaction between the two series. Nothing that will give up an answer, a way to act or react.
So, what to do? Confront Perry? Wait for him to come home, be sitting maybe in the living room, silent and coiled the way he was the day of the Skin Palace riot. She could glue the pictures to the TV screen until the whole tube was covered, stay frozen as he walked in loosening his tie, wait until he noticed the new station she’s found on the cable band. The infidelity collage network.
Or maybe she could get dressed right now and go down to Walpole & Lewis, march past the receptionist’s warning that Mr. Leroux is in an important meeting, throw open the doors on the conference room where Reverend Boetell and the FUD-heads are huddled down with Perry and Candice trying to decide how to rid the world of Hugo Schick and all things lewd and lascivious. She could throw the pictures on their fat walnut table, watch Boetell’s face go white and red, see Candice run for the partners’ washroom, feel the vibrations of Perry’s future crashing and burning around him.
But if she really doesn’t love Perry, these photos shouldn’t mean much beyond hurt pride and embarrassment. And if that’s true then the only motivation for attacking him with the pictures is vengefulness.
Stilclass="underline" three feet in front of her is a photograph, the last photograph in the series, of her lover, the man she’s lived with these past two years, the man who supposedly wants to marry her and buy a house together and have kids together. And he’s naked, in their bed upstairs, having sex with someone other than Sylvia, with a woman he very likely finds more attractive.