Fiona spotted Corinne and Fernand in the center of the room, holding court. Their picture was being taken.
Claire was still at the mouth; Fiona would give her space. She was increasingly reassured that Claire wouldn’t flee the gallery.
This work was much more postmodern, much more multimedia—Fiona wished she had the vocabulary for it—than anything she’d seen from Richard before. A large photo showed a Polaroid sitting on a stack of papers. The Polaroid, in turn, was of a man in a chair, his face in his hands. It looked like the ’80s or early ’90s—something about his white T-shirt, his Docksiders—but Fiona didn’t recognize him. Next to it hung a photo of an apartment building’s facade, three of the windows painted over with red X’s. According to the sign, Richard had taken the photo in 1982 but added the X’s just this year. She supposed that the show’s title, Strata, was about this layering of old and new.
She found the updated Julian series—the 2015 Julian smiling mischievously. But no face in a Richard Campo photo ever showed just a single emotion. He also looked embarrassed, and also triumphant.
She almost collided with Jake Austen. He said, “There’s my girl!”
She patted his chest. “I am not your girl, Jake. But it’s good to see you.”
It was, really. She’d had the feeling for the past ten minutes that she didn’t know what the hell year it was—the year of Nora’s show, the year Julian vanished, the year she first took Claire to the Brigg, the year Claire was born—and here was a living, breathing reminder that it was 2015.
He said, “Check it out! From the movie.” He pointed across the gallery to where that actor stood, the one someone on the street had called Dermott McDermott.
But no one was looking at him; everyone was looking at Richard, who had just entered the room. Slim gray slacks, a coral shirt open at the neck, his cheeks glowing with attention. Her famous friend. How bizarre life was.
* * *
—
By the time Fiona made her way around the sectional wall, Jake was off toasting with some loud young Brits, and Julian had circled back.
He said, “Is everything okay with your daughter?”
“Lord only knows.”
“It’ll be okay. I can tell it will. I know these things. And my God, she’s just like you.”
Fiona laughed. “She’s nothing like me. That’s the problem.”
“Are you kidding? Don’t you remember yourself? You were the most bullheaded little—you were practically feral! Remember when you told your parents you’d climb in the coffin if we couldn’t all come to Nico’s vigil?”
“There was no coffin. I said I’d stand up and tell everyone.”
“Okay. But you see my point.”
“That was the only way I could survive.”
Julian smiled. “It’s not a bad way to be. Hey, are you really moving here?”
“I actually think so, yes. For a while. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but I am.”
“Well I’m proud of you. Hey, have you seen it yet?”
“Seen what?”
“Well, two things, really. Three things! Did you see me? Do I look okay?”
“You looked smashing, Julian.”
“Okay, two other things. This one.” He took her shoulders and angled her toward a glowing light box mounted on the wall and covered, every inch of it, with black and white contact sheets. As big as a picture window. Some strips of photos hung vertically, some horizontally. Occasionally they crossed each other. The piece was titled 1983. Magnifying glasses, strong ones, hung at each side—great, because Fiona didn’t want to dig her readers out of her purse.
She started arbitrarily on the top left. A strip of some kind of party, too many men in each frame to make anyone out. A strip of a face she thought was Katsu Tatami’s. Four in a row of what looked like that year’s Pride parade, men waving flags. There was the really tall guy who used to sell loose cigarettes on Halsted. There was Teddy Naples. They kissed and danced and lounged on couches and wore ridiculous clothes and flipped pancakes and sunbathed on the rocks.
She was hoping to see Nico there, but she didn’t.
Julian said, “Look.”
There she was herself, an arm around Terrence. In a restaurant, it looked like. She never remembered being that pretty, that happy. Claire was just an egg in an ovary, one more thing Fiona hadn’t ruined yet. At the left of the shot was Yale, mouth open, talking to someone out of frame. A mirror behind them all, in which you could see a room of tables, diners, and Richard himself, camera flash for a head.
She wanted to climb into the photo, to say, “Stop where you are.”
Wasn’t that what the camera had done, at least? It had frozen them forever.
Stay there, she thought. Stay there.
Julian gave her a minute and then he said, “I was thinking about Hamlet. You know I was in it three different times, and I never got to be Hamlet? Actually it’s Horatio I was thinking about. I never got to be him either.”
Fiona was filled with ridiculous, irrational love for Julian just then, for whatever he was about to say, because she could feel Nico beside her, and Yale and Terrence and all of them, rolling their eyes at Julian’s making this about himself, about his acting, which was such a Julian thing to do, and they all loved him anyway, and she still did too.
He said, “The whole play is about Hamlet trying to avenge his father’s death, trying to tell the truth, right? And then when he dies, he hands it all to Horatio. In this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story. See, I’d have made a great Hamlet! But what a burden. To be Horatio. To be the one with the memory. And what’s Horatio supposed to do with it? What the hell does Horatio do in act six?”
Fiona leaned her forehead against Julian’s. They stood like that for a moment, head to head, nose to nose. The warmth of his skin soaked into her body, all the way down to her feet.
She still had the magnifying glass in her hand, clenched tight. She wanted to call Claire over, show her these photos, tell her what Julian had just said, try to explain, or to try to start to explain, what her life had been. How this show might begin to convey it all, the palimpsest that was her heart, the way things could be written over but never erased. She was simply never going to be a blank slate.
But she could do that in a minute. Claire was still here and she wasn’t going anywhere, and Julian was drawing her further into the gallery. The magnifying glass fell from her hand, swung on its little chain.
He said, “This is the third thing.” The video installations. Two screens at the very back, far apart. He stood her in front of the one on the left. “The other is drag shows. This is the one to watch.” It showed a crowd on a sidewalk, standing very still. He said, “The Bistro. Do you remember the Bistro, or were you too young?”