Across the swan-bearing lake a wedding has just reached its completion. The groom is managing to look utterly solemn and completely delirious with joy at the same time. Adam and I watch the kiss, and I snap the shutter just as the kiss ends and the wedding party bursts into applause.
“Sucker,” Adam says.
“Oh, right,” I say. “Like you wouldn’t trade your life for his right this minute.”
“I don’t know anything about his life,” Adam says.
“You know he remembered to do all the things you forgot.”
“I think I prefer it,” Adam says, “when you reserve that particular lecture for yourself.” He points back across the lake where the bride has just leaped into her maid of honor’s arms, and I snap the shutter again.
“Or for one of your commitment-phobic boyfriends,” Adam adds.
“I guess the truth is, I can’t blame them,” I say. “I mean if I saw me coming down the street with all my stuff hanging out I’m not so sure I’d pick myself up and go happily ever after.”
“Of course you would,” Adam says. “And it’s because you would, and because the chance of that happening is so slim, and because you hold out hope anyway that it might . . . that’s what makes you a great photographer.”
“Greatness is nice,” I tell him. “I want contact. I want someone’s warm breath on my face.” I say it as if it’s a dare, which we both know it isn’t. The flower girl across the lake is throwing handfuls of rose petals straight up in the air.
I came to this city near the Hudson over a half year ago because I recently spent a long time under the dark naked water of the Smith River and I took it as a sign that the river wanted me away. I had taken so many pictures by then of the chaos of heaved-up rock and climbing trips and endless sky that I’d lost my balance and fallen into them. I couldn’t keep separate any more what was the mountain and what was me.
I thought there might be an order to the city: straight lines, shiny surfaces and right angles that would give myself back to me, take my work somewhere different, maybe to a safer place. Solitude was a straight line too, and I believed it was what I wanted, so I packed whatever I could get into two bags, left behind everything I couldn’t carry including three pairs of skis, a whole darkroom full of photo equipment, my bikes, and the mountains I’d sworn again and again I couldn’t live without.
I pointed myself east up into the endless air —all the way across the mountains and flats to this shining city on the Hudson...
You might forget, for example, that you live in a city where people have so many choices they throw words away, or so few they will bleed in your car for a hundred dollars. You might forget eleven or maybe twelve of the sixteen-in-a-row totaled cars. You might forget that you never expected to be alone at twenty-seven or that a crazy man might be waiting for you with a gun when you get home tonight or that all the people you know without exception all have their hearts all wrapped around someone who won’t ever love them back.
“I’m scared,” I say to Adam and this time his eyes come to meet mine. The fog is sitting in the center of the river like it’s endless and we’re about to enter it.
“I can’t help you,’ Adam says, and squints his eyes against the mist in the air. "I have man problems too." he adds.
When I was two years old my father took me down to the beach in Hawaii, carried me into the surf until the waves were crashing onto his chest and then threw me, I suppose, whether I would sink or float.
By the time the lifeguards arrived at my father’s side I had passed the flotation test, had swam as hard and fast as my limbs would carry me, and my father had me up on his shoulders, smiling and smug and a little surprised.
I make Adam drive back by Ground Zero on the way home, though the bridge is faster. The fog has moved in there too, and the last of the brides are worrying their hair-dos while the grooms help them into big dark cars that will whisk them away to the Honeymoon Suite at the Four Seasons, or to the airport to board planes bound for Paris or Rio.
Adam stays in the car while I walk back. The sidewalk is littered with rose petals and that artificial rice that dissolves in the rain. Even the swans have paired off and are swimming that way, the feathers of their inside wings barely touching, their long necks bent slightly toward each other, the tips of their beaks almost closing the “M.”
I take the swans’ picture, and a picture of the rose petals bleeding onto the sidewalk. I step up under the tallest of the arches and bow to my imaginary husband. He takes my hand and we turn to the minister, who bows to us and we bow again.
“I’m scared,” I say again, but this time it comes out stronger, almost like singing, as though it might be the first step—in fifty-five or a thousand—toward something like a real life, the very first step toward something that will last.
"Maybe this is the beginning" I breathe, "the beginning of the beginning of understanding."
