All You Could Ask For A Novel - By Mike Greenberg Page 0,35

painting, impressionism, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, all the “out there” artists. That stuff mostly just makes me nervous. A nose is meant to be on a face, not disconnected and hovering overhead, adjoined to a bird’s wings. I prefer photos because they tell a story.

That’s why I love to look at the pictures I have on the wall that separates my children’s bedrooms. They are all black-and-white, and when viewed in sequence they tell the story of my life. Of our lives, really, Scott’s and the kids’ and mine. They begin with Scott and me in college, him with his hair so long and wavy. He loved wearing his hair that way, and he tells me all the time that the day he leaves Wall Street will be the last time he visits a barber for the rest of his life. He’s kept his hair so neatly parted and short for so long almost no one we know remembers that flowing mane he used to have, but I do. And I can still see it, on my walls, any time I want. When I do, I can go back to those days when he was wooing me, and he was so sweet and uncertain, wearing thick glasses and denim jackets and black boots. That’s the way I remember him.

If you follow the wall, left to right, top to bottom, you follow our journey. Scott and me in Hawaii, when he was afraid to go scuba diving for fear of being eaten by a shark. He kept saying, over and over, before we went down, “All I can hear in my head is the theme from Jaws.” Then we went down and it wasn’t at all scary, at least I didn’t think so, even after a tiny fish the size of my thumb took a nibble out of my leg, but Scott saw the blood and was convinced every Great White in the Pacific Ocean was going to smell it and he panicked and almost went too fast back to the surface. The photo I have on the wall is of the two of us after that dive, our hair dripping, wearing wetsuits, Scott drinking his third beer, trying to relax. You can still see the fear in his face. I love that picture.

Then there is the picture of me and a very old man atop the Arc de Triomphe, with the Eiffel Tower in the background. That was our first trip together, Paris in the spring, the year we got married. And Scott asked this old fellow to take our picture but his elementary-school French was so rusty that the old man thought Scott wanted a picture of him with me, and it was so funny, the man was really serious about it as he posed with his arm around my waist and his hand directly on my butt. I’ve never seen a picture where I am laughing as hard as I am in that one.

Then there are the standard photos: the wedding, the baby shower, me holding the twins when they were an hour old, and Scott holding them both over his head, one in each hand, when they were two. There is Scott the day his team rang the opening bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, the four of us fishing on our boat, the two kids simultaneously falling off water skis, and every Halloween costume the kids have ever worn, including the one great year when I talked Scott into dressing up and we went as Batman and Cat Woman and Robin and Bat Girl. We all look awesome in that one.

And so, tonight, I have new photos to show my husband. But they are certainly not going to be displayed where anyone, least of all our children, will ever see them.

The pictures are spectacular. When Pamela brought the contact sheets to my house the day after we took them, I was more nervous than on the day of my wedding. She had the most mischievous look on her face when she came around the side of the house, as though she’d been hiding in the bushes, waiting for the school bus to pull away so she could sneak inside.

“You are going to loooooove these,” she said, and pulled a manila envelope out of her ridiculously large handbag. “Are you ready?”

I nodded, and she dropped them on the table. At first I was confused. Pamela has taken pictures for me on at