But now his matters, too. Maybe he won’t be the great photographer himself, but he’ll be the next best thing: the one who recognized genius and ferried it deftly into the world. A few might share the letter writer’s view—like Charlie, maybe—but most will see him as a generous mentor and promising young curator.
He exhales a great cloud of smoke at this vision and the vision slowly disintegrates; the city returns. A hobo walks by, dragging behind him a cart stuffed with paper bags and old electronics. Paul thinks of Judith: how she could have captured this man’s image, made him into something magnificent. He lets the fleeting joy of this thought swell inside of him, generous and unenvious. Judith had her talent; he has his own—and yes, she’s gone, but he’s still alive.
Instead of heading home, he ducks into a bar in Chelsea and stays until midnight. He thinks he might go home with one particular pretty girl, but she says she has plans and slides him her number for a “rain check.” Once he finally leaves the dim, cozy glow of the bar and finds himself back on the street, alone and wobbling drunkenly, the unwanted phrase pops into his head and repeats, repeats:
FUCKING PARASITE
FUCKING PARASITE
The words trail him down the subway stairs. Standing and swaying in the train car, he sees nothing but strange characters, some of whom catch and hold his eye: a man with a deeply scarred cheek; a woman with a swollen-shut eye, compulsively knitting; two shockingly thin young women, possibly twins, leaning together as if conjoined at the temple. Paul thinks he may have entered some kind of hell, after having lived in paradise briefly. But it isn’t hell, of course, it’s just thecity, flaunting its mundane horrors. They’re nothing new, they just seem especially horrible after his time at Doven Gallery.
He’s relieved when he’s climbing the steps to the door of his building. He thinks about going straight up but instead heads to the row of metal mailboxes with a quickening pulse. He pulls out a small stack of letters and bills and shuffles through them, spotting another envelope with the address written in block letters. Are they thesameblock letters, though? He can’t tell. He tears it open and unfolds a sheet of yellow legal pad paper bearing a message from someone who signs off, “An ex-con.”
Did that bitch really take those pictures or did you take them? Is there really even a Judith Stanley or did you make her up to make money? That’s what I think. I watch a lot of television and I never saw a news story about a Jersey housewife getting killed so I think you made it up. I don’t really care except I hate bitches like her. Glad she’s dead.
The last line sends a chill through him. Despite the half-witted, delusional content, Paul can’t ignore how this letter echoes the other one at the end.Glad she’s dead.Could this “ex-con” be the same writer putting on an act, trying a new way of goading Paul? His instincts tell him no, they’re different people, but even so, he compares the two envelopes when he gets upstairs. His eyes flit back and forth between them but he can’t be certain they’re the same—or different. They look similar, but one slants slightly to the left; the other is nearly perfectly vertical.
But who cares? He sets both letters aside. He’s just had one of the best days of his life; it doesn’t matter what an ex-con and an angry woman (or just one angry woman) wrote in their unhinged letters. No one will see these letters but him—and he isn’t required to open them! But he does require sleep. Tomorrow—or later today, really—he has to drive to New Jersey and teach class. It’s been two weeks, and he’ll have to dip himself back into his old life for a while—though he can hardly imagineit.
24.
Amidst the small crowd of students stopping to congratulate him on theHarper’sfeature, Paul spots Charlie leaving and calls her down. When he first saw her tonight, surveying him with those dark eyes, he felt skittish and guilty. He thought of all the time he’d spent with her in his mind, lonely on his couch, and the sad shabbiness of it made the glamorous day he’d spent at Doven wither and recede; he wanted badly to grasp it back. He thought maybe if he could graspher—or jostle her, unsettle the girl whomightbe his letter writer andwasthe girl who liked challenging him in front of the class—he could regain his confidence and recapture the loftiness of his newly minted existence.
But as she nears him, coming into soft focus like a classic movie queen, he catches himself staring at her breasts beneath the thin fabric of her sweater, the dramatic curve of her hips in her bell-bottomed jeans. He struggles to meet her keen and questioning—and laughing?—dark brown eyes.
“Hey, Charlie,” he says, feigning nonchalance. “What did you make of theHarper’sportfolio? I assume you saw it.”
“It was out of this world. Fantastic,” she says, her face lighting up. It stirs something in Paul; she’s become warm again, readable.Fuckable.She’s impressed with what he’s done and she can’t help showing it. Glowing with it, even.
“I just love her work so much,” she goes on, cheeks flushing. “I can’t believe I was in class with her. Her pictures are so—powerful. Like magic, almost. They speak to me—and to so many people I know. She was a genius,” she says reverently. Paul could be anyone—one of her peers, or a table, for all his presence matters to her. His lust shrivels to nothing.
“I agree. I, uh, enjoyed writing the introduction,” he says, giving her an unsubtle nudge.
She doesn’t notice, or pretends not to. She stares at him and simply nods, holding his gaze. Says nothing about his introduction. He knows she read it; curiosity alone would have driven her to read it. Her silence resounds in the empty classroom like a booming judgment. Paul scrabbles at his jacket pockets for his cigarettes. He’d be all right, he’d handle this just fine, with a cigarette.
“Professor—Paul—did you want something else? I’m about to miss my ride,” Charlie says, and a swift, bright fury rears up in him. He drops his hands, forgetting the cigarettes—he wants something else. He wants to grab her arm, press her up against a wall, grind into her with a hot hand smothering her mouth. He wants to hear her trying to scream.
“No, no,” he croaks out. “I just wanted to get your take on theHarper’sthing. Glad you enjoyed it.” He spits the last words, but she misses—or ignores, again—the bitterness.
“I loved it. I’ve looked at the pictures like a million times.” No mention, again, of his introduction, of anything to do with him, even thoughhemade the portfolio happen—as she damn well knows. He can’t help thinking she’s withholding that praise intentionally. Because she hates him. Enjoys pricking his ego in person, and maybe also in neatly printed block letters.
Charlie turns and walks briskly up the stairs, giving him nothing but her beautiful behind.
When he’s certain she’s gone, he smashes his fist into the tablebeside him and stands there, breathing heavily, holding his throbbing hand, until the anger fades. Depleted, he gathers his belongings.
He finally lights a cigarette when he steps outside, and stands smoking it under the awning. His is the only car left in the lot. The nicotine doesn’t calm him like he thought it would; he starts staring around at still and moving shadows, at the swaying tops of trees. He feels nervous and observed. He’s been so focused on Charlie tonight, but what if there’s someone far more dangerous out there now, watching him? Judith’s killer must be aware of theHarper’sfeature; he may have even read or watched Paul’s interviews. If he has, he knows Paul was here that night and could have heard something, seen something. And Paul is easy to find. Especially easy to find in this dark parking lot. He takes one final inhale before crushing the cigarette beneath his heel and walking quickly to his car. As he fumbles for his keys, he senses a presence just behind him. He whirls around as he opens the car door, seeing nothing, no one there. Only the darkened school entrance and the bushes around it, slightly stirring like the trees.
He gets in the car, tosses his bags beside him, and forces himself to sit there with the doors unlocked and his window down while he lights another cigarette. Why in god’s name would Judith’s killer come after him? If he’d been useful to the police, they would have caught the guy already. Paul isn’t thinking clearly. He blames Charlie for rattling his confidence the way she did. If she’d just given himone wordof praise or thanks or congratulation, he wouldn’t have walked out feeling twitchy. But she couldn’t spare it, could she? She had to make it all about Judith. If Charlieisthe one writing to him, it’s because she’s eager to puncture the bubble of his success. She thinks he deserves to have it punctured. Well, he won’t let her. He’s been handing her the power to harass him, when he’s the powerful one. Thesomeone. He starts his engine, revs it, and goes peeling out of the parkinglot.
25.
He tosses the latest batch of letters onto his dining table, tells himself not to mess with them, then starts picking through them anyway. He needs a hit of something nice, something to lift him up after dealing with Charlie’s ugly silence and the paranoia that overtook him back in the parking lot.
He zeroes in on a promising-looking one. The handwriting on the envelope, all elegant loops and curves, tells him it’s from a woman, one as sane and orderly as his own mother, whose handwriting resembled this. The letter starts promisingly enough; Farrah from Minnesota calls Judith “a visionary who made [her] feel seen.” Fine, good. But then she goes on to lament Judith’s death in a long, winding paragraph, and closes without mentioning Paul at all. His absence is central, slighting—a replay of what happened in the classroom. He crumples the letter and envelope viciously in one hand and drops them in the trash.
So long, Farrah from Minnesota.
One more, he tells himself. Catherine of Chicago is just as impassioned as Farrah was—or more—and while she does thank Paul briefly for his work, she spends several paragraphs detailing her responses to each of the twenty photographs from the feature. She’s an amateur photographer herself, she notes, and discusses the originality of the angles, the perspectives, and the use of light—as if Paul needed a lesson in the merits of Judith’s work. At the very end, she asks Paul if hewould look at her photographs, which she will “happily send.” He laughs out loud. It’s not the first of these solicitations he’s received, though it’s phrased more eloquently than most. He’s flattered and pleased by this sign of his new prominence, but not enough to do more than send Catherine’s letter floating to the floor. He sighs and eyes the significant pile. One more? Then he can give it a rest. He shuffles through and finds a neatly typewritten envelope addressed to “Mr. Paul Sorenson.” He likes the touch of respect. Appreciates it. There’s no return address, which strikes him as a bit at odds with the rest of the envelope’s formality, but he tells himself it doesn’t matter. This one will be good, it will give him what he wants. What he deserves.
