took of you last week to the papers. Famous surgeon seen dressed as a bunch of grapes.” He roared with laughter at the memory. She and half a dozen friends had gone as the Fruit of the Loom insignia to a Halloween party, and at the last minute the guy who was supposed to be the grapes couldn't come, and she had pressed Teddy into service. He had been a good sport, but they had also won the prize, so Vanessa had had someone take pictures of them. “How would that look in the medical journal?”
“That's blackmail.”
“You'd better be nice to me. I just sold another picture to Esquire.” She had been free-lancing for five months now, and she was doing very nicely.
“You're moving up in the world.” He was still standing in the hallway, talking to the door. “Are you ever coming out of there?”
“No, never,” she shouted back.
“What about dinner?”
“Sounds good. Where are we going?”
“How does P.J. Clarke sound to you?”
“Terrific. I'm wearing jeans and I don't want to change.”
“So what's new?” He was teasing. She was always in jeans, with her incredible blond hair swinging, and assorted army surplus jackets and vests, which made up the rest of her wardrobe. She wanted to be comfortable enough to take pictures at all times. She was in no way preoccupied with her wardrobe.
“I'll get dressed.”
He disappeared into his own bedroom and loosened his tie. He had led two lives for years, that of a sedate, successful surgeon at Columbia Presbyterian, in dark pin-striped suits, white shirts, and dark ties, and then a whole other life with Vanessa. A life of ice skating and pony rides and the zoo and father's days at camp, and hockey games and ice cream parlors. A life of blue jeans and sweat shirts and pink cheeks and windblown hair. She had kept him even younger than his forty-five years and he hardly looked more than thirty. His own blond good looks had held up well, and he actually looked a great deal like her. They had the same lanky frames, the same shoulders, the same smile, it was perfectly conceivable that she could have been his daughter. Once in a while when she was little, she had introduced him as her “Daddy,” but she still called him Teddy, and most of the time she told friends that he was her uncle. She remembered in every glorious detail the day she had been finally awarded to him in court, but of the ugliness of the past, she still remembered nothing.
He had consulted several psychiatrists over the years and they had eventually convinced him not to worry. It was disturbing that none of that had ever surfaced, but it was possible now, they all felt, that she would never remember. She was happy, well adjusted, there was no reason for any of the past to come leaping out. And they also suggested that if he wanted to, once she was an adult, he might want to tell her. He had decided not to do that, she was happy as she was, and the burden of knowing her mother had been murdered by her husband might have been too great for Vanessa. The only possibility that could be of concern was if she suffered some major trauma. In that case, perhaps, some of the memories could be dislodged. When she had been little, she had had frequent nightmares, but she hadn't even had those in years, and eventually Teddy had stopped worrying about it completely. She was just like any other child, happy, easygoing, better natured than most, they had never had any teen-age problems. She was just a terrific kid and he loved her as though she were his own child. And now that she was almost twenty-three, he couldn't believe how quickly the years had flown past them.
He returned to the darkroom twenty minutes later, in blue jeans and a dark brown cashmere jacket with a beige turtleneck sweater. She shopped for him sometimes at Bloomingdale's, and came back with things he would never have bought for himself, but he had to admit that once he had them he liked them.
“Are you ever coming out of there, Mrs. Cartier-Bresson?”
The door opened just as he said it, and she stood before him in all of her towering beauty, her hair flowing around her shoulders like a wheat field, and a huge smile on her face. “I just developed some truly great pictures.”