Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,6

of me that died, when I didn’t go with him.

But now. Here he is, on a card in my hand. Dennis Halsinger!

I don’t even bother to change out of my suit. I go directly to the little desk in the bedroom and take out stationery. Images of Dennis from the time we were together are tumbling around in my brain, falling over themselves for prime placement: his long blond hair, his face so handsomely chiseled I used to tell him he should model for Prince Valiant in the comics. I see us walking in a field with chest-high grass that moved in the wind like water, and where the birdsong was so loud it made us laugh—we had to shout to be heard above it. I remember us driving down the freeway on a hot August night, looking for a place far from city lights where we could lie down and look at the stars, and the place we found presented constellations to us with a clarity that rendered us speechless.

Dennis used to give books to me, battered paperbacks he had read and reread into buttery softness: Siddhartha, The Magic Mountain, Fear and Trembling. He said I’d learn more from them than from my psychology textbooks, and he was right. He gave me the I Ching, the edition with the foreword by Carl Jung, and we did our fist toss using pennies on the sidewalk in front of his house.

In addition to photography, Dennis did painting and sculpture, and I remember him up on a ladder barefoot and shirtless, his jeans barely hanging on to his slim hips, welding something onto a high, free-form tower he had made—he did at least wear a welder’s mask. I remember his hand guiding mine as he showed me how to draw a peony as big as a dinner plate. Feeding me the seeds of a pomegranate, one by one. The time we jumped in the Mississippi to go swimming and, afterward, came back to my place to dry off. We sat at the tiny kitchen table wrapped in towels and then he stood and dropped his towel and said, “This is the way I was born.” I stood and my towel dropped, too, and I went to him and he carried me to my bed. That was my first time; he was the first, and I’ve always been glad of that.

I begin writing:

Dear Dennis,

A few months ago, I started a letter to you. But there was too much to say. It was a time when I had just lost my best friend, and I was casting about for what to do with myself, needing to remember that life is mostly rich and beautiful and ever there for the taking. And if there was anyone who could remind me of that, it was you. But I wrote a few lines, and stopped.

Then, today, I got your postcard. And your photograph, wonderful as always.

Dennis used to take photos of ordinary people, beautiful images that you wanted to stare and stare at, that your eye roved over and kept finding things in. He took pictures in a casual, off-the-cuff kind of way, and I never understood how he was able to find the precise moment to snap the shutter. By showing a half smile, a finger to the corner of the eye, an unbandaged cut on a hand, he could reveal so much about a person. Sometimes it wasn’t the people themselves; it was their houses, or their cars, or their four dogs. It was random things that belonged to them—a tin of buttons. Brass knuckles in a bedside drawer. A cookbook open to a page with so many stains it looked like a Rorschach test.

Looking at Dennis’s photos showed me that photography was not only visual record keeping but a legitimate form of art. Not only did I see that a person’s soul could be captured (the Native Americans were right to fear the lens), but I saw how shadow and light affect the image. And I saw what Dennis meant when he said that photography is a process of elimination.

He once showed me a collection of photographs he’d taken of waitresses when he drove his motorcycle from Minnesota to California. You could see all the different uniforms, the white shoes, the variety of earrings, one lovely locket on a long chain. I remember a shot where a waitress had six plates lined up on her arm, while another sat in a booth, on break,