William Bayer - Blind Side

The understatement appealed to me. This was the tail end of the nation. It was pathetic, and there was no reason to make anything more out of it. I stationed myself there, then started taking pictures of people taking pictures of one another as they posed before the buoy.

It seemed to me that the premise behind their picturetaking was their conviction that by freezing selected moments from their lives they could somehow cheat aging and death. That seemed poignant to me, well worth trying to express. But it was an elusive idea, and, though it

As the afternoon waned, I strolled down to Mallory Pier to attend the sunset. I ate by myself at a Cuban restaurant, and then went back to my room to rest. The moment I lay down I felt empty and forlorn. I'd found Kim, heard her story, and believed in her again. I had, moreover, held her in my arms, and I no longer felt the anger that had brought me to this strange tropical little town. I didn't even think it was important anymore to know her real name; she was who she was, authentic to her vision of herself.

But I was bothered greatly by her idea that we should Continue with the blackmail. That she thought I'd even consider a thing like that disturbed me very much.

She came to me that night after she finished work. She used my bathroom to wash away the sweat and the smell f food, then crawled into bed beside me and molded her body against mine.

"Did you call him?" she asked.

"Scotto. No."

"Why not? I was sure you would."

"Maybe tomorrow."

"Tomorrow's a new day," she said.

"Are you working?"

"Yeah, but I'm free until five." She hugged me.

"Would you like to go snorkeling out on the reef? It's really a lot of fun. One of my roommates has a boyfriend who has a boat. We can borrow masks and tubes."

It was fun. The roommate, Pam, a frizzy-haired blonde, was from South Carolina and spoke with a spunky Southern drawl. Her boyfriend, Doug, who owned the boat, was a genial beachcomber type.

With their lean bodies and gorgeous tans, Kim, Pam and Doug looked the embodiment of sun-worshiping American youth. But they were nice to me, didn't make me feel apart even though I was pale and middle-aged. As soon as we were out on the water the girls took off their tops. Then Doug showed me how to snorkel. The reef was fascinating, the corals beautiful and delicate. I learned the names of different varieties: elkhom, staghorn, pillar, flower, brain.

I liked the schools of tiny fish that darted between the corals, and the occasional moray eel that wriggled its way among the underwater trees. Doug pointed out sponges on the ocean floor and an encrusted cannonball from an ancient wreck.

The girls had brought along a hamper of sandwiches.

We ate, I took portraits of them, and then we headed back. The whole trip, spent with attractive friendly kids, made me feel good burned by the sun, washed by the sea.

After Kimberly went off to work, I returned to my room, stared at the phone and thought about calling Scotto. But I decided to put it off – I knew that once I called him, my life would be changed. I wasn't ready to break m Kev West idyll yet.

The next day Doug picked us up in his ratty jeep and drove us up to Sugarloaf for flats fishing. Again the girls took off their tops. Kim's anointings of my skin with suntan oil finally began to take effect.

When Kim caught a bonefish, I immortalized her victory with a photograph showing her holding up her catch and grinning like Ernest Hemingway,

When we got back to Key West and she went off to work, I thought again of calling Scotto, and again I put it off. I studied Rakoubian's pictures for a while, to see if they contained something new. The shots of Darling in his mask were frightening, but the hurried pictures of him going into buildings seemed almost innocuous.

Several times on my various walks I'd passed the Key West Public Library. At two the next afternoon I entered the low pink-hued building, found a chair in the small reference section, and spent the afternoon researching the mysterious architect.

He appeared, from the pictures I found of his various homes, to be as rich as Rakoubian had said. In a spread on his Manhattan town house in Architectural Digest, I saw two paintings by Gauguin on the dining room walls and a portion of his priceless collection of Japanese scrolls and screens.

But it was his remarkable vacation house in Jamaica that intrigued me most, a building he had designed himself. In this elegant structure, made of bleached wood and great expanses of glass, he had tried, he said, "to combine the majesty of a Palladian villa and the austerity of a traditional Japanese house."

Each piece of furniture was a handmade original, every object exquisitely chosen, every flower perfectly arranged. Floating above the fireplace was a gilded medieval sculpture of an angel. It seemed improbable that a man who had created such a paradise could be so awesomely corrupt.

But as I read other articles I found subtle indications.

"A tough boss, incredibly demanding, he doesn't suffer fools gladly," an associate said.

"He's quite capable, when displeased, of treating you as if you don't exist."

Another architect, a rival, said, "We are what we build, and Arnold Darling's buildings reflect his soul. Sharp, hard-edged slashes against the sky, there is no comedy in them, no wink of complicity. His is a brutalism that conceals its brutality. Darling diagrams the cruelty of our corporate age."

I believe in the efficacy of photographs, that a welltaken picture can often tell you more about a subject than even a firsthand look. So I pored over photographs of Arnold Darling's work, searching for keys to the man, and by the end of the afternoon I began to understand a lot.

He was secretive. The articles told me that, but his buildings expressed it too. No question that he was an artist who channeled his feelings into structure and form; the buildings were strong, sometimes even magnificent, but there was also stealth and cunning in them, a clandestine rage and a taciturnity that matched his tight-lipped face.

Walking from the library down to Mallory Pier, I thought about Darling in his mask. Why, I asked myself, does he wear a fencing mask, instead of one made of rubber, or one of those fetishistic black-leather jobs you see in sex boutiques?

There was a reason he liked the fencing mask, and the more I pondered it, the more clearly I saw how that was connected to his designs. Such a mask does not cling to the contours of the face; rather, it acts as a second skin. Darting's buildings were like that, seamless, self-protective. Their vauttlike doors gave an impression of impenetrability and their deep-tinted windows hid their occupants from sight.

But there was more. A fencing mask, designed to protect the face from the consequences of combat, is, by its nature, aggressive. It's the mask of the warrior, the man who attacks, and who, while so doing, conceals his eyes.

At the bottom of Duval, I paused before a person I'd noticed several times before, an old man, sitting against a wall, quietly playing a harmonica. When our eyes met, he gestured toward a tin cup by his feet. I put five dollars in it and asked if I could take his picture. He nodded, then began to play again.

As I focused on his face I was struck by its vulnerability, the very opposite of what I'd seen in I)arling's. There was pathos there, and pain, and the ravages of life. Nothing in his countenance was masked.

I think it was at that moment, the moment I took that picture, that all the anger I'd previously felt toward Kim was suddenly transferred to D-arling. I hadn't cared about him before, but now, on my way to the sunset ritual, I began to care very much. This was the man who had murdered Sonya and Shadow, and had ordered lye thrown at my eyes. He was rich and secretive and evil, and now I too began to hate him.