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On my break, I went to the audio-video section of the library to see if they had the Yaz album there. I wanted to hear the song again, even though it was already earwormed deep into my brain. They did have it, and I spent the remaining fifteen minutes of my break listening to “Only You” on repeat.
“Oh, Peter,” Ellie said, stopping by the circulation desk later, holding out a big book toward me. “You put a hold request on this, right? It was returned this morning.”
My heart leapt, and I took the book from her hands, turning it over to see the front. The wordRobinwas emblazoned in raised white letters on the cover, and the underlying black-and-white picture showed a man’s naked torso and nothing more.
“Thanks,” I said.
Ellie nodded. “No problem.”
I put the book aside, eager to be allowed to look at it in peace. But, alas, there was no peace that shift. The semester was in full swing. For hours we were swarmed by an endless glut of patrons wanting to check out research books.
But when the line did die off, and after Ellie went into the back, I was left alone. LayingRobinon the circulation desk, I examined the front of the book before flipping it over to read the back blurb.
Robinis an extraordinary collection of a photographer’s most intimate works. Every photo comes alive as we peer at it, bringing us closer and closer, until we, too, are worshiping at the divine trough of beauty and passion that is his lover, Robin.
Intense. Okay.
I opened the book and within a few pages, I decided the blurb didn’t lie. The photos were stunning, far superior to the other portraits of Harold Seville’s I’d seen. I ran my finger over one of them: my uncle George, Harold’s Robin, by the stove, lighting his cigarette from the pilot light. It was breathtaking—the glowing elegant bend of his body, the strength in his shoulders, the way his mouth puckered and his cheeks sucked in…
I couldn’t explain it, but it was as if I were there andIhad taken this picture, likeIhad been the one in love with George. How was it possible Harold had captured that adoring feeling of romantic love so that I, a stranger to both these men, felt it in my heart just by looking?
And in such a common sort of photo. There was nothing overtly romantic. Nothing sexual.
Not that there weren’t pages like that, too.
I hadn’t wanted to see my uncle’s cock, but Harold Seville had had other plans. Because there were photos of it alone, photos of George submerged in a bubbleless bath, shots of him wetting his naked body down with a hose outside in the middle of summer…
My uncle’s body was nice. I could understand why Harold had taken so many pictures of it. Of course, it was a lot like my own, and I noted that this was how Daniel saw me. How Adam might have seen me, too. Through this lens of love and passion.
I thought of the English Literature paper I had coming up. More poetry. If you asked me, not a single poem we’d read in class this semester, or even in Dr. Landry’s class back in high school, came close to the intimate beauty and demonstrable love of the photo Harold had taken of my uncle sleeping in a rumpled bed, his hair a mess and his mouth open and drooling.
“Wow,” I whispered to myself, closing the book as I spotted a patron coming toward me with a stack of journals, followed by a small army.
I didn’t have time to think about the photos after that as I dealt with students desperate to finish papers and cram for midterms. It wasn’t until after midnight, when I got back home and found myself alone in the kitchen, sitting at the counter while I talked on the phone with Daniel, that I remembered the book again.
“Do you think he’d want to meet you?” Daniel asked after I’d told him all about it.
“Who? My uncle? He’s dead.”
“No, the lover. The photographer. Harold Seville. Maybe he’d like to meet you.”
I was quiet. The thought hadn’t occurred to me. “Why would he?”
“Well, you’re a photographer too, so that might be one reason. Also, you’re the nephew of the man he loved so much he documented his feelings in this way.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “How would I even find him?”
“There’s this cool thing called a phone book.”
I snorted. “He doesn’t live in Knoxville.”
“Right, but you work in the library where they have all of the phone books for the entire state, the entire country maybe.” Daniel laughed.
“What if…” I sighed.
“Yeah?”
“What if it hurts him to meet me?” I remembered my mother’s refusal to truly see me for all those years. I thought about the whys of that. “I look a lot like George.”
