Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,36
full report. Thanks for last night. So to speak.
I rush to the front table and grab the letter. It’s a fat one! I bring it out to the front porch, sit down in one of the chairs, and open it.
It’s not a long letter, only one page. But there are photographs: that’s what accounts for the thickness. I suspect the photographs will speak more to me, and I suspect, too, that that’s what he intended.
I unfold the page, aware of a rush of joy that here his handwriting is again, in the here and now.
Cecilia,
So good to hear from you. I remember receiving letters from you before I went to Tahiti and I took that raft down the Amazon, and here would come a motorboat, sent to overtake me, and some guy would hand me a letter, and it got to be so that the three others on the raft with me would want to hear your letters, too, so I’d read them aloud. Then we’d all get quiet. Your heart’s always on your sleeve, Cecilia, I always liked that about you.
First of all, I’m not married. First and last, I suppose, so don’t think there’s any need for censoring. Say whatever you like.
It’s certainly a different life here than in Tahiti. I came back because my mom died, but also for reasons apart from that. But it’ll take some getting used to, being back in this country: strange politics here, strange attitudes. I’m a little tired of talking about Tahiti, all those people who want to know what it was like, living there, what was it like? Everything I want to say is in my photos. Or in my actions, I suppose, the point is I’m not much of a word man. But then you know that, I’m sure.
I remember a lot, too, Cece.
As for coming to see me, I don’t know, why not, come ahead. I’ll shine my shoes, we’ll go out dancing.
Dennis
Given the circumstances, it’s a little frustrating not to be able to call him, but there is something about the pace of letter writing that’s a welcome antidote to the speed of modern life. By their very nature, letters allow for more consideration of the words and thoughts that someone is offering you, in part because they prevent interruption. Perhaps best of all is their keeping quality—there were nights after Dennis left when I slept with pages he’d sent me from South America, and I felt as though I were with him, at least to the extent that I could be.
So I’ll write back telling him I’ll leave in a week. That will give me time to get ready, and also give some time to anyone else who might want to come with me. Then I’m off.
I read his letter again. Laugh out loud. And then I turn to the photographs.
They must be of where he is living now; they are at any rate certainly not taken in Tahiti. I see a young girl doing a cartwheel on her front lawn, her ponytails hanging upside down, her friend standing beside her, arms akimbo. On the front porch steps is an older woman, the child’s grandmother, perhaps, her chin in her hands, and here is where my eye is drawn: I think I see in the grandmother’s face a joyful recollection of doing cartwheels herself.
I asked Dennis once why he made photographs. I assumed it was because of the stories pictures tell, and the idea of something ephemeral being preserved. And that certainly was part of it. But what attracted him most was that cameras could record light. He said he was and would forever be a student of light, that the two things one uses, that one must have, in order to make a photograph are light and time.
He also told me that when he was in fifth grade, his teacher gave a slide show of modern art. Dennis was a poor student, probably dyslexic, though not diagnosed as such; it was not so easily recognized then. But at that moment, sitting at his desk in a darkened classroom that smelled of chalk and paper and baloney from the sandwich stored in his lunch box, he, in his words, took a trip to the Other. He realized he could explain everything he felt in a single image. Everything he felt and was.
There are a good twenty photographs, all scenes I imagine are from in or around his neighborhood. There’s an old woman wearing a stained coat