David Morrell: Double Image

For about twenty minutes, as he headed north along the slippery, glistening 405 back to Los Angeles, the storm matched his mood. Then it seemed to cleanse him. Although the rain-slowed traffic would normally have made him impatient, he felt oddly content just to gaze past his flapping windshield wipers. He put on one of his favorite tapes and listened to Bobby Darin sing heartbreakingly “The Gal That Got Away.” As he admired Darin’s perfect phrasing, it occurred to him that almost no one had ever spoken favorably about Bobby Darin as a human being. Because of a heart condition, Darin had known that the odds were he wouldn’t live past his thirties. Feeling the pressure of limited time, he had so devoted himself to his career that no one else had mattered. Self-centered didn’t begin to describe him. Nor did cruel . Talent, it seemed, wasn’t any guarantee of noble character. Mulling over these issues, Coltrane made the obvious application to Randolph Packard: Maybe it’s not a good idea to meet one of your idols.

THROUGH THE STORM, Coltrane’s headlights revealed Jennifer’s red BMW parked at the curb in front of his town house. It troubled him. He had left a message at Jennifer’s office, telling her he wouldn’t be home. Why had she come over, regardless? Worried that their problems might be starting again, he pressed his remote-control garage opener, steered into the single stall, and shut off the engine. After hours of listening to the cacophony of rain drumming on his roof, he sat motionless, wearily enjoying the comparative silence. Then he pressed the remote control again and got out of the car. Despite the rumble of the descending garage door, he heard another door, the one at the top of the stairs. Kitchen light spilled down.

“Mitch?”

As Jennifer appeared above him, he saw her through an imaginary camera, its lens intensifying her. Nimbuslike, her blond hair seemed to radiate the light behind her. She wore gray slacks and a crewneck navy sweater. Her lips had a touch of pale orange lipstick.

“Are you all right?” She took several steps down toward him.

“Didn’t your assistant give you my message?”

“Message?” Jennifer looked confused. “No. I was away from the office all afternoon. By the time I had a chance to call in, my assistant was gone.”

Coltrane’s shoulders relaxed. It had just been a simple misunderstanding. It wasn’t going to be like before. He gripped the railing and climbed to her.

“I got worried when you weren’t here,” Jennifer said. “Then I finally noticed the open magazine on your kitchen table. When I saw the article in the calendar section, the time and date for the Packard exhibit, I figured out where you’d gone.”

“If you ever decide to get out of the magazine business, you’d make an awfully good detective.” Coltrane shut the kitchen door. “You wanted to know if I’m all right. No.” He stroked her hair and kissed her; her lipstick tasted of apricots. “I was a fool. I should have stayed home. With you.”

The compliment made Jennifer’s blue eyes seem as clear as the Caribbean when the sun emerges from behind a cloud. Then something else he had said registered on her, making her frown. “Why did you call yourself a fool?”

“Let’s just say meeting Randolph Packard wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be.”

“You have awfully high standards.”

Her remark puzzled him. “I’ve admired his work since I was old enough to tell a good photograph from a bad one.”

“Then I don’t know what more you could want. From everything I hear, things couldn’t have gone better.”

“Everything you hear?” Coltrane creased his brow.

“Packard phoned fifteen minutes ago.”

“ What ? You’re kidding me.”

“He got your number from the magazine photographers directory. He thought you’d be back by now. When I told him you weren’t, he talked about you. You made quite an impression on him.”

Coltrane felt a dizzying sense of unreality.

“He said he hasn’t met anybody as honest as you in a long time. What on earth did you say to him?”

Coltrane sank onto a kitchen chair. “Actually, I insulted him.”

Jennifer’s mouth hung open.

“I told him I thought his photographs at the exhibition were ugly.”

“You certainly know how to win friends and influence people.”

“Believe me, I wasn’t exaggerating about his photographs. They’re as ugly as the ones I’ve been taking.”

“And the ones you removed from your wall?”

Coltrane turned toward his living room. During the day, he had taken down all his framed photographs. His Time cover of an American soldier spooning food into a skeletal child’s mouth in Somalia, his two Newsweek covers (one of which showed a widow keening, holding her dead daughter in one arm and her dead husband in the other after a rocket attack in northern Israel), and his much-reprinted Associated Press photo of the first wave of American helicopters to invade Panama. These and other sensational highlights of his career were now stacked on a closet shelf. “It takes one shitty photographer to recognize another.”

“Maybe that’s why he wants to do a project with you,” Jennifer said.

Coltrane wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. “Do a project with…”

“He says he knows your work and thinks it’s impressive.”

“You’re making this up.”

“Not at all. But he says you’ll be putting in most of the effort. He’ll supply the advice and the original photographs for a photo essay in Southern California .”

“What are we talking about?”

“His famous series of L.A. houses in the twenties and thirties.”

Coltrane straightened. That series of twenty photographs was a masterpiece. Packard’s depiction of various styles of houses in widely separated areas of the not-yet-overgrown city not only had been hauntingly beautiful but had seemed to mourn the impending loss of the innocence it celebrated.

“Packard thinks they ought to be done again,” Jennifer said. “Go back to the same neighborhoods. Find the same spots where he set up his camera. Choose the same angles. Shoot what’s there now. He says he’s been thinking about a continuation of the series for a long time, but now he isn’t well enough to do it.”

“All he’s asking me to be is his assistant?”

“More. Even if he could take the photographs, he says he wouldn’t . He agrees with your opinion of his recent work – he can’t see beauty anymore. He’s hoping, if you take the photographs, the same places all these years later, maybe you’ll find the beauty he can’t find.”

“I’ll be damned.”

SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT, Coltrane woke to find himself reaching for her. His lips touched hers, but as he continued to roll onto his injured side, he winced from pain. “Lie still,” she whispered. “Let me do the work.” He felt her warmth when she leaned over him, kissing his neck. She trembled from the brush of his hands against her breasts. Floating. Flowing. Pain stopped. So did time.

“WE SHOULD NEVER HAVE SPLIT UP,” he said.

The bedside lamp was on. They had just returned from the bathroom. Naked, Jennifer sat next to him on the bed, her legs curled under her.

“I didn’t give you a choice,” she said.

His emerald eyes studied her. “I didn’t pay enough attention to you.”

She shook her head. “We both know the truth. I crowded you until you had to back off.” She looked at her hands. “There’s something I never told you.”

Coltrane frowned, wondering what she was getting at.