Mandy Bécot ***stories from the heart***

email the author at: mbecot at lookatusgo.com

Russell locked his door behind the last of staff and set aside his camera.

He knew it was good. The images were there. He’d really captured them.

But there was something . . .

The groove was so clean when he slid into it. The studio slid into the background. Klieg lights, reflector umbrellas, blue and green backdrops, all faded.

Image, camera, man became one, a single flow of light beginning before time was counted and ending in the printed image. A ray of primordial light traveling forever to glisten off the BMW sports car parked in one corner of the room. Another ray lost in the dark blackness of the finest leather bucket seats. One more picking out the supermodel’s perfect hand dangling a single, shining, golden key.

He couldn’t quite put his finger on it . . .

Another great ad by Russell Davis. Russell Davis, Inc.

But . . .

The groove had definitely been there, but he’d hadn’t been in it. That was the problem. It had slid along, sweeping his staff into their own orchestrated perfection, but he’d remained untouched. Not part of that ideal, seamless flow.

“Be honest, boyo, that session sucked,” he told the empty studio. Everything had come together so perfectly for yet another ad for yet another high-end glossy. Man, the Magazine would launch spectacularly in another few weeks, a high-profile mid-December launch, a never before seen twelve page spread by Russell Davis, Inc. and the rag would probably never pay off the lavish party of hope, ice sculptures, and chilled magnums of champagne before disappearing like a thousand before it.

“Morose tonight, aren’t we?” he asked his reflection in the darkened window of his Manhattan studio. His reflection was wise enough to not answer back. There wasn’t ever a “down” after a shoot, there had always been an “up.”

Not tonight.

He’d kept everyone late, even though it was Thanksgiving eve, hoping for that smooth slid of image, camera, man. It was only when he saw the power of the images he captured that he knew he wasn’t a part of the chain anymore.

The single perfect leg wrapped in thigh-high boots visible in the passenger seat. But he’d been no more than the observer, the man behind the camera. Now that he faced it, months, maybe even a year had passed since he’d been yanked into the light-image-camera-man slipstream. Now he merely trailed in the churned wake as the ship passed in the night.

“You’re just a creative cog in the advertising photography machine.” Ouch! That one stung, but it didn’t turn aside the relentless steamroller of his thoughts speeding down some empty, godforsaken autobahn.

His career was roaring ahead, his business fast and smooth, but, now that he considered it, he really didn’t give a damn.

His life looked perfect, but—“Don’t think it!” but his autobahn mind finished, ‘it wasn’t.’

Russell left his silent reflection to its own thoughts and went through the back door that led to his apartment, closing it tightly on the perfect BMW, the perfect rose on the seat, and somewhere, lost among a hundred other props, the long pair of black leather Chanel boots that had been wrapped around the most expensive legs in Manhattan. He didn’t care if he never walked back through that door. He’d been doing his art by rote, how God-awful sad was that?

And it was commercial art. He’d never had the patience to do art for art’s sake. No draw for him. No fire. He left the apartment dark, only a soft glow from the bathroom’s nightlight revealing the vaguest outlines of the framed art on the wall. It was almost too much.

He didn’t want to see the lifesize prints by the art artists: autographed Goldsworthy, Liebowitz, and Wolf, a hundred rare, even one of a kind prints, all the way back to his prize, an original Daguerre. The collection that the Museum  of Modern Art kept begging to borrow for a show. He bypassed the circle of chairs and sofas that could be a playpen for two or a party for twenty. He cracked the fridge searching for something other than his usual beer.

Maybe he was just being grouchy after a long day’s work.

Milk.

No. He’d run his enthusiasm into the ground but good.

Juice even.

Would he miss the camera if he never picked it up again?

No reaction.

Nothing.

Not even a twinge.

That was an emptiness he did not want to face. Alone, in his apartment, in the middle of the world’s most vibrant city.

Russell turned away, and just as the door swung closed, the last sliver of light, relentless blue-white of the refrigerator bulb, shone across his bed. A quick grab left the narrow beam illuminating a long pale form on his black bedspread.

The Chanel boots weren’t in the studio. They were still wrapped around those three thousand dollar-an-hour legs. The only clothing on a perfect body. Her long, white-blond hair, a perfect Godiva over the exquisitely tanned breasts. One leg raised just ever so slightly to hide what was meant to be revealed later. Discovered.

Melanie.

By the steady ride and fall of her flat stomach, he knew she’d fallen asleep, waiting for him to close down out front.

How long? Two months? Three?

She’d made him feel alive. At least when he was with her. The super-model in his bed. On his arm at yet another posh gallery opening, another four-star restaurant, another gathering of upscale people.

Or was it about how he looked on her arm?

Did she know tomorrow was Thanksgiving? That his parents were expecting him? That he’d rather die than attend? There were always certain to be several eligible woman who’d finagled an invitation in hopes of snaring one of People Magazine’s “100 Most Eligible.” Heir to a couple billion, wealthy on his own, by his own sweat. Number twenty-four this year, up from forty-seven the year before.

No.

Melanie wasn’t that. It wasn’t the money that drew her. She wanted him. But that wasn’t all. She also wanted the life that came with him, wrapped in the man package.

His fingertips were growing cold where they held the refrigerator door cracked open.

If he woke her there’d be amazing sex. Or a great party to go to. Or . . .

Did he want “Or”? Did he want more from her?

Sex. Companionship. An energy, a thirst, a vivacity he was very afraid he lacked. Yes.

“More?” he whispered into the darkness to test the sound.

The door slid shut, escaped from numb fingers plunging the apartment back into darkness taking Melanie along with it.

His breath echoed in the vast darkness. Proof that he was alive, if nothing more.

Maybe Angelo would know what to do. He always did. Maybe this time Russell would listen. Seattle. Damn! He’d have to go to bloody Seattle to find him.

West Point Lighthouse
Discovery Park, Seattle
First lit: 1881
Automated: 1985
47.6617           -122.43499

 Chief Boatswain’s Mate Christian Fritz served as the lighthouse keeper for many years in the 1900s. His wife was blind. One of the advantages of this posting was that the terrain from the keeper’s cottage to the lighthouse was relatively level. This allowed her to freely stroll the station’s grounds accompanied by her guide dog, a Boxer named Cookie.

In 1985, it was the last lighthouse in Washington State to be automated.

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CHAPTER TWO
January 1st

“If you were still alive, you’d pay for this one, Daddy.” The sharp wind took Cassidy’s words and threw them back into the trees. She leaned into the wind and forged her way downhill until the muddy path broke free from the mossy smell of the trees. Her Stuart Weitzman boots were long since soaked through, her feet freezing. The two-inch heels had nearly flipped her into the mud a dozen different times.

Cassidy Knowles stared at the West Point lighthouse. It perched upon a point of rock, tall and white, with its red bonnet straight and snug. A narrow trail traced along the top of the gigantic breakwater leading to it. The parking lot, much to her chagrin, was empty. Six, beautiful, empty spaces.

“Sorry, ma’am,” park rangers were always polite when telling you what you couldn’t do. “The parking lot by the light is for physically-challenged visitors only. You’ll have to park here. It is just a short walk to the lighthouse.”

The fact that she was dressed for a nice afternoon lunching at Pike Place Market safe in Seattle’s downtown rather than a blustery mile-long walk on the first day of the year didn’t phase the ranger in the slightest.

She’d have gone home, if it hadn’t been for the letter stuffed deep in her pocket. Instead, she’d buttoned the top button of her suede Bernardo jacket and headed down the trail. At least there was no rain, so the jacket was only cold, not wet. The stylish cut had never been intended to fight off the bajillion mile-an-hour gusts that snapped it painfully against her legs. And her black leggings were about five layers short of tolerable and a far, far cry from warm.

When she’d come clear of the trees and nearly been bowled over by a freezing blast of wind, any part of her that had been merely numb slipped right over to quick frozen. Leaning into the wind to stay upright, tears streaming from her eyes, she could think of a thing or two to tell her father.

“What a stupid present!” her shout was torn word-by-word, syllable-by-syllable and sent flying back toward her nice warm car and the smug park ranger.

A calendar. He’d given her a stupid calendar of stupid lighthouses and a stupid letter to open at each one. He’d been very insistent, made her promise. A deathbed promise.

She leaned further forward to start walking only to have the wind abruptly cease. She staggered forward, nearly planting her face on the pavement, before another gust sent her crabbing sideways. With grim force, she planted one foot after another until she’d crossed that blissfully vacant parking lot and reached the lighthouse itself.

At one of the windows she peeked in. Only by shading it with her hand could she see the dim interior through the dusty glass. No lightkeeper sitting in his rocking chair before a merry fire. No smoking pipe. No lighthouse cat curled in his lap.

Some sort of a rusty engine not attached to anything. A bucket of old tools. A couple of paint cans.

A high wave whipped a chill spray into the wind as it crashed into the rocks with a thundering shudder that ran up through the heels of her boots. Salt water on suede. Dad now owed her a new coat as well.

Cassidy edged along the foundation until she found a calmer spot, a little windshadow behind the lighthouse where the wind chill was only miserable rather than horrific.

Squatting down behind one of the breakwater’s boulders helped somewhat. She peeled off her thin leather gloves and blew against her fingertips to warm them enough so that they’d work. Once she’d regained some modicum of feeling, she pulled out the letter.

She couldn’t feel his writing, though she ran her fingertips over it again and again. His Christmas present. A five-dollar calendar of Washington lighthouses and a dozen thin envelopes. Wrapped in a x-ray folder with no ribbon, no paper.

A part of her wanted to crumple the letter up and throw it into the sea. It was too soon. She didn’t want to face the pain again.

The rest of her did what it supposed to do, it opened the envelope and pinned the letter against her thigh so that she could read the slashing scrawl that was her father’s. Even as weak with  sickness as he must have been, it looked scribed in stone. His bold-stroke writing gave the words a force and strength just as his deep voice had once sounded strong enough to keep the world at bay for a little girl.

            Dearest Ice Sweet,

He’d always called her that. Ice wine. The grapes traditionally harvested on her birthday, December twenty-first. “The sweetest wine of all, my little ice sweet girl.” By the age of five she knew about the sugar content of ice wine, Riesling, Chardonnay, and a dozen others. By ten she could identify scores of vintages just by the scent of the cork and hundreds by their logos.

            I’d hoped to make these journeys with you, a dozen dates
            with your old dad, a calendar’s year of months, but now
            I doubt that I’ll make it to even one. I hope that I’m there
            with you. I really do.

            This last six months has been the greatest gift you’ve ever
            given me. I know what it took for you to leave New York,
            no matter how much you went on about the good career
            move. Thank you for coming home to me.

Home. A house that was no longer his even by the time she’d returned. The vineyard in Kingston, Washington of all ridiculous places, gone five years before that. It had been her father’s passion and was now someone else’s tax write-off, it had certainly never turned a profit even with the sporadic tourism it drew. All that was left was his collection of reference books now filling most of the back bedroom in her condo and a thin stack of a dozen letters.

            Your mother loved this spot. She’d have been so proud of you.
            She was always the one full of ideas. She was the one who
            brought everything to life. I wish you could have known her,
            been raised by her, rather than by the quiet, sad man who had
            lost his one true love. 

            She was always coming up with crazy places for us to have dates.
            “Keeping the marriage alive,” she called it. As if our relationship
            could ever grow cold. We were so in love that even after five years
            together we never went anywhere without holding hands. We did
            a year of Northwest lighthouses long ago, shortly after you were born,
            and I wanted to share them with you in turn.

I’m sorry that you have to walk this road alone, Ice Sweet Girl, but you were always the strong one.

Love you,
            Daddy

 
 Cassidy stared at the waves digging angrily at the rocks. Spray slashed sideways by the wind dragging tears from her eyes even as she struggled to blink them dry. She hadn’t cried in a long time and she was damned if she was going to start now simply because she was cold and there was a hole in her heart.

Seven days. She’d looked away for a one moment seven days ago and he was gone. Christmas morning. He’d hung on long enough to tell her of his last present, hidden in plain sight in a used X-ray folder on the side table. A long list of crossed-out names had shuttled films back and forth across Northwest Hospital. Last used by someone named Barash.

In the end he’d foiled her final Christmas hunt. There was no present he could hide that she couldn’t find before Christmas morning. From the Cabbage Patch Kid when she was six. The one she’d had to hold with her arm in a cast from falling off the kitchen stool she’d dragged into her father’s closet. To the used VW Rabbit he’d hidden out in the wine shed thinking that she never went there anymore. And she didn’t, except for some reason the day before her eighteenth Christmas.

She hoped that Adrianne Knowles had shared a nicer day with her husband than this one. Perhaps they hadn’t cared. Even discounting her father’s stories by half she’d been a vivacious spirit. For a moment she tried to place her only memory of her mother, a wasted form with parchment skin and dark hair, as thick and flowing as Cassidy’s own, in this wild wind. She couldn’t bridge the gap.

She scanned the letter again, her father kept apologizing for all the wrong things. Seattle had ended up being a great career move, or was becoming one. In New York, she was one of a thousand food and wine reviewers. Okay one in fifty, she was damn good, but she was one of three women at that level. The other forty-seven were members of longstanding in the old boys’ club.

“We’re looking for someone with a more refined palate.” Read as someone who was “male.”

In Seattle she was rapidly rising to the very upper crust of the apple pie. Her reviews ran in every local paper. The AAA was taking her national with their travel magazines and her reviews, carefully marketed into the travel section rather than “Food and Wine,” had just been picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle. From there, it hadn’t been a big step to national syndication. Six more months in New York and she’d have still been grinding her way up from the thirtieth spot to the twenty-ninth.

She had lost The Village Voice when she left Manhattan. That had hurt as they’d run her first ever review, a short piece on Jim and Charlie’s Punk and Wine Bistro. Jim and Charlie’s was still there, partly thanks to that review that was still framed in the center of bar’s mirror. Except for that one loss, her fame had only grown.

Her father’s cancer had brought at least that much good.

Now if only it hadn’t taken him with it.

A particularly energetic slash of spray jerked her from her reverie. Cassidy staggered to her feet, her legs almost asleep from the sustained squat in heeled boots. A barnacle caught her leggings. And while she escaped injury, the leggings were now ripped wide around the knee.

“Daddy!” She shouted her angry warning at the wind. For the hundredth time in the week since he’d died, her gut twisted in a knot because he would never answer again.

She planted her feet firmly against the blast of the wind and began the long uphill struggle to return to her car.

Nearly to the former keeper’s cottage she remembered the camera. Her back to the wind, she managed to get the thing turned on.

When she turned, a giant sailboat was sliding by close to the shore. She snapped quickly and captured a perfect image of the white and red lighthouse, the crashing waves, and the elegant, tall-masted sailboat with red sails and a hull the deep color of a summer sky. It turned sharply on the crest of a wave, the sails crashing from one side of the boat to the other while two people on deck frantically threw ropes one way and another. A wave sluiced down the deck, but neither sailor appeared to notice.

It was impossible in such rough weather, but they looked as if they were having fun. She turned back for the long, uphill trek to her car.

At least someone was enjoying themselves.