Afterlife

From Lives of the Artists

He had heard vaguely of Vivian Maier and that was his first thought really, the climb up the creaking stairs, the strange jury-rigged wire for the light, the boxes stacked neatly, pressed demurely and geometrically into the furthest recess of the attic wall, some of them still taped over like when you do a move and just never get around to unpacking, others in a different state, open and bulging, toys and mementoes of the kids dumped and forgotten, and he had a fantasy of himself, however improbable, like one of these guys on the Antiques Road Show, with an eagle-eye for the stellar piece of junk in the family of rubbish, he’d caught himself pressing his toe squarely into the floorboards on the ground floor of the house, everybody does it, the search for hidden treasure, the reversion to a certain mazy, sun-stroked phase of childhood, when anything is possible, however unlikely surprise of any kind would be in the square family home, the shore of Lake Michigan. And when he cut through the packing tape, dug past recipes, postcards, found the photos neatly arranged by year, at least in the beginning, he was in the right mindset for it, all these women in the supermarkets, that was the tip-off, nobody he would know, nobody who looked like family, the way they draped their arms on produce shelves, stood with keys in hand next to their cars, the fierce expression as they looked through the lens, all the cat-eye glasses, and flipped through, one after another, the same composition, like a signature, like some kind of medieval altar-piece – he was stretching his associations – always one subject, always in the center of the frame, always the same expression pretty much, like she had asked to take their picture, they had sourly agreed, she had fussed with the light meter, the composition, they had tried to smile, tried to make it something casual, she had talked them out of it, they were getting annoyed, they were thinking about time, Jay could almost hear her apologizing, giggling to herself, shuffling backwards and forwards, and then, this being her cunning, the expression shifting, taking on something hard and iron-like, like one of these dicky-bird nineteenth century portraits, like something you’d see in the Greek wing of the museum, all of them thinking probably about the errand they had set out on, all of them annoyed, not sure why they’d allowed themselves to be waylaid by the eccentric in the supermarket, but that everyday irritability transmuted into something that looked as if it could be dipped in bronze. And, just like her, everything neatly ordered, row after row of it, the same way her spices were alphabetized, her gift-wrapping station an assembly line, dates penned on the back of the photos, all very much in its chronology. And, just the way he would have at the Art Institute, Jay took in the splendor of it, went downstairs to recuperate, have a coffee.

Clyde was there, with measuring tape, something connected to the tax assessor. They waited together for the coffee to brew, the usual difficulty with him in finding the right topic, the solace of rituals. He was going on about property taxes and assessments, the difficulties of making appointments, the general lack of competence in bureaucracies. It was very strange to see him cast in his new role, trying it on, the tape measure wound around his neck, the way he kept shifting his glasses to settle on the bridge of his nose, this was a real work-in-progress was Jay’s thought. “Listen,” he said at last. They had gone through the rituals of cups and creams and sugars. “Your mom – was she very serious as a photographer?”

Clyde gave him that squinting, sideways look that Jay always found so unnerving, like he was pretending to be hard of hearing, like what the other person said was giving him a headache.

“I knew she had a good eye, but all I ever saw was family photos, Christmas photos, the way she arranged the house. I didn’t know she was interested in it beyond that.”

Clyde was standing there, one hand on his hip, blowing unnecessarily before each sip of his coffee. He looked like he was listening to a joke, waiting for the punch line. And there was no way back now, even though he was suddenly regretting his whole approach to the conversation, could feel, somewhere in his nervous system, the clotted, acrid sensation of a blunder, could already start to form the words of Jamie’s remonstration. And he told him about the neatly-organized rolls of portraits, the hieratic composition, the evident strength of it, and there were still many boxes to open.

Clyde was getting a faraway look, just what Jay should have known to be afraid of, lips pursed, jaw tight, like he was multiplying large sums in his head. “Nah,” he drawled, “she was into it for a while, she gave it up to have kids. I wouldn’t call her a photographer.”

“So you don’t remember her running around taking pictures of everything? At the checkout line, things like that?”

The same sidelong look, the mouth pinched in distaste. Jay couldn’t help himself, imagined a cop sauntering up to the driver’s side, the window begrudgingly rolled down, imagined the knock on the front door, marshals with their shoulders rolled back, the furtive eyes, the telling of tales.

“There were always cameras around,” he said, “that was the thing, every second recorded – at least for the first few years or so, when everybody’s cute.” And the big grin, the space between his teeth, the laying-it-on-thick, which Jay tended to think was just his version of good manners, which Jamie insisted always meant that you were about to get hit for a loan, that the sky was going to come crashing down in some totally unexpected way.

They went through the rituals of dish collection and tidying, Jay stretching upwards, making a grunting sound like he were readying himself for heavy work, he always took on a persona around Clyde, couldn’t help it, he seemed to be passing himself off as some kind of forklift driver. Went trudging upstairs, letting himself step more heavily than he normally would have, the same clump of distress somewhere in the ancient parts of his brain, the feeling of missteps, wrong angles, dropped passes. There were plenty more boxes, and he went through them archeologically, lifting them reverently towards the middle of the room, careful to grab none of the photos in the corners. There were the shoppers, there were landscapes – Lake Michigan, he guessed – for several tedious rolls some detailed study of sky and water, there was her, her pinned hair, dressed not exactly provocatively but a bit skimpily, negligée, some kind of nightgown, positioned the same way the shoppers were, dead-center in the frame, very still somehow, lips parted, eyes down, palm resting on cheek, different days, different gestures, the same composition, always pretty much the same expression, the stillness to it, the resignation, the feeling of settling in for a very long wait. 

And then photographs of a different kind, just what Clyde was describing, babies crawling around, little kids in facepaint with balloons, the usual smudging, the usual problems with exposure and movement, Nancy herself in some of them, which explained the mechanical issues, the absence of framing. What might have been an attempt at a series, a man in a wool coat, horn-rimmed glasses, the same sidelong look as Clyde, the impatience, the distaste, that Jay remembered in the handful of times he’d met him.

That’s what Jay was working through when there was the heavy stepping on the staircase, Clyde still with the tape measure over his neck like it was a new outfit, just wandering up to the attic for a bit of family memorabilia, a pleasant rummaging around of memories, as if he’d been up here anytime in the past fifteen, twenty years. And Jay, in good conscience, showed him what was in front of him, passed back and forth photos of Clyde dressed as an Indian, Jamie as some kind of a good witch with a wand, the usual affirmations, the usual identifications of place-and-time, and then, because he was conscientious, because he felt duty-bound, Jay pulled out the other boxes, the shoppers, the self-portraits. He watched Clyde flipping through them, Clyde grabbing them at the corners.

“You don’t remember this kind of thing?” Jay asked him.

Clyde shook his head, examined the backs, another new role for him, the muscles of his face collecting in a new way, investigator, art historian. “It looks like these stop about 1960,” Clyde said. Well, imagine that, Jay thought, imagine any connection there – firecrackers lofted into neighbors’ picnics, small acts of arson whenever anybody’s back was turned.

He went dutifully through a different box, letters from that time, typed or neatly handwritten, the careful way she would write in a letter if she missed it on the first pass, also carefully preserved, although, alas, not manifestos, not descriptions of technique or purpose, writing home when she was in college, news of campus events, friends’ engagements. Clyde was immersed in his new role, a kind of lock-and-load style of working his way through each

Clyde was immersed in his new role, a kind of fire-and-reload style of working his way through each envelope, even a lifting of the negatives to the light, a squinting examination like he were a gumshoe in an old movie. A very peaceable scene, a very uncharacteristic scene, Jay at the end of what he was doing, just kind of shuffling items around, like a prospector unwilling to leave the site of his discovery. Clyde, clearing his throat at last, looking for the new tone. “Yeah, these are cool,” he said at last. “I know somebody who would know. I’ll take a few photos, send ‘em around. He’ll get back to me pretty quick.”

***

He listened to radio on the drive back – his radio, his rock, his sports, his politics. There was a ritual to it, a comforting, and he was aware of that, the flock of recriminations, the assertion of normalcy.

Jamie was in worship when he arrived, standing, facing the speaker on the living room mantle, swaying from side to side, eyes closed, candle in one hand. He made a point of slipping past, not disturbing, but with her eyes shut, she said, “Jesus, took you all day.”

“Just made a dent in it,” he told her. “There will have to be a bunch more trips.”

They were in the kitchen preparing their dinner when he told her what he’d come across. A plate was spinning in the microwave. He was pouring glasses of water, dealing with the table setting. What was it about these familiar rituals that loosened his tongue? – why was it easier to talk about art, and money, when the appliances were humming around him, when he didn’t have to look directly at anyone, kept his eyes on the timer, on the spinning plate?

Like Clyde, she had a quick understanding of what he was talking about. “She had a great eye,” she said. “I’m sure she would have been an amazing photographer.” She reached in to the microwave to swap plates.

There was no point in delaying it, so Jay told her – the visit to the attic, Clyde as art appraiser, the writing to his friend.

“On a cold day in hell,” said Jamie, and sprinkled salt-and-pepper on the plates and led them to the table. This was her preferred mode of dealing with her religion, she felt it gave her a license to blaspheme as much as she wanted, it was a nice compromise, it effectively bridged the disparate halves of her personality.

“Did you bring any back with you?” she asked him. Jay said he hadn’t – it hadn’t occurred to him. “Well, did you take any photos of them?” Jay had to admit that he hadn’t done that either. As an archivist, he wasn’t shaping up to be much so far. Jamie had shifted to the tone she used when she talked to him like a child.

Clyde was going to send them around, he told her.

“To which art appraiser?” Jamie asked him. “One of the guys at the end of the bar? One of the guys he plays pool with? The guy who really likes the picture of the dogs playing poker?”

Jay conceded that he didn’t know who Clyde had in mind.

She chewed thoughtfully, she pointed her fork towards him like a baton. “You need to go back to the house,” she told him. Jay tried to interrupt that he was already planning on doing that. “You need to go back to the house and get ahold of what’s there and we’ll assess it for real.”

***

Jay’s next visit had a secret agent feel to it. It was agreed that it wouldn’t do to haul whole boxes downstairs and into the trunk of the car. If Clyde wasn’t in the house, he’d be close by – he’d never left town – and it was no good crossing him when he had dollar signs in his eyes. Jay reached deep into the wardrobe, a coat he hadn’t worn much since the ‘80s, a kind of patchwork of pockets, something that, if Clyde were nosing around, he could pass off as a Chicago eccentricity, some kind of retro chic.

The downstairs of the house had been cleared out, Clyde had been waiting for this particular windfall for a long time. On the kitchen counter was a brochure from a realtor. The bathroom, the kitchen were scented differently, the brokers’ trick of making everything smell like cinnamon, there was a process to it, a science, thought Jay, how you got rid of the previous occupant, especially if she’d been there for fifty, sixty years, how you fumigated away the traces of her, it reminded him of what he’d seen in worship, Jamie swaying with her eyes closed, lifting Nancy’s spirit up, up with her hands, like it was some kind of aerobics move, like she was raising the roof in a dance club, and everybody around her, her sisters, breathing, pulsing with her. “There’s a moment when the spirit leaves the room,” she told him, and she had been there for it, knew what she was talking about. “It’s very interesting, it drains upwards out of the body, taking the color with it, and then you feel it in the room, a shared entity, like a benediction, and then off it goes.” She had found it burdensome, weighing very heavily on her, she was going to worship five or six times a week, doing it in the living room when there was nothing at church, sweating it out, keeping it moving, sort of the way she had when she’d been really fixated on losing ten pounds.

He went through the boxes clinically, deliberately. He wanted one or two from each series, the supermarket, the landscapes, the self-portraits, the portraits of friends. He had loaded up his pockets with plastic sleeves and CD cases – it was nice to put their collection to some use again, to justify why they hadn’t tossed it sometime in the 2000s. Of course if Clyde was prowling around, or one of his minions, heard the clattering in Jay’s pocket, well – that would be a funny scene, he imagined himself being held upside down, like a geek in a crime movie, shaken loose as if searching for spare change. Only not so amusing because something like it might actually happen. He placed the photos carefully where the CD liner notes had been. He took several negatives a bit at random, that really made him feel as if he were making off with military secrets. The negatives, and some of the larger photos, were loose in his pocket, he went downstairs as carefully as a tightrope walker so as not to fray the edges.

He really knew nothing about art assessment, he had graduated university, brought his kids through school, enjoyed working with them on their essays, what does this writer mean here, what does that artist mean there, it felt like a puzzle, the artist would be expressing something about God, society, sex, usually it was sex, and he’d look it up in the textbook or online and be surprised at the elegance of the solution, read it out loud to his kids, but as for how one set of old photographs found in an attic got into a museum, as opposed to another, he couldn’t begin to guess. Jamie treated it the way you would if you were getting an estimate on a car or an antique. She went on yelp, worked her way down a list of museums, galleries, search terms with ‘art’ and ‘photography’ in them, appraisers, evaluators. Jay had the bright idea of finding critics at the newspaper – some of them had e-mails next to their byline – and writing to them as well. His primary duty was at the scanner, it was nice, it was the kind of operation they could perform together as a couple, he in the basement running through the scans, she monitoring from the desktop, shouting if it wasn’t lined up right or if the coloring seemed off.

Already, from the vantage-point of the house, the scanner, the desktop, the supermarket and public photographs seemed less interesting than they had when he was pulling boxes out of their recesses in the attic wall. There were several historical society-type books in the basement and these seemed to fit in well there, all the quaint crowds, the men in hats, the women in their period costumes. It was the portraits of Nancy in her bedroom that set it apart, she was very pretty, she’d gotten Queen Elizabeth a lot when that meant something, even Elizabeth Taylor, although that was probably people being gallant, and there was the way the hair was pinned back, the feeling that everything had been fluffed and straightened, everything just right, her holding her breath long enough for the shutter to go off, he had some sense of the exhilaration when it did, the feeling that was also in the supermarket photos of people somehow at their peak, arms draped over the hoods of the cars, keys dangling proudly from the hands. And then something else, a ferocity in her expression, a little bit like she was trying not to blink, but he’d seen it also when Clyde was ripped, decided for some reason to really challenge something you said, when Jamie was in rapture, the march from the sanctuary to the parking lot, the super-charged way she drove, eyes flashing, like she were on a mission or a crusade even if they actually were just going to pick up the kids or get groceries. He had known Nancy well, really well, he thought, planned the wedding and family vacations hand-in-glove with her, sat and went through taxes, a special kind of intimacy, the receipts, the hoped-for deductions that she shoved despairingly towards him, had at one time, shortly after her diagnosis, visited her every day, read to her, and when that proved too wearying, dutifully watched television, but the entire time, all the Christmases and Easters, even the last-minute scramble for Thanksgiving dinner, like the curtain was going up and she were managing everything backstage, never quite that same intensity, her in negligée, peignoir, staring down the camera with some private thought, like she were envisioning something and trying to get the contours of it locked in her mind, sort of the look people have when they’re trying to memorize a phone number that they know they’ll probably forget.

***

The art world turned out to be less reliable than what they were used to from getting assessments for body damage to their vehicle or the times Jamie had tried to sell off an antique. The museums universally failed to respond, the galleries the same thing apart from a form letter or two. A newspaper critic said he would get back to them but didn’t. There was a note from an auction house, which was another clever idea of Jamie’s. Someone wrote in the descriptive section of a form, “Period collection. Suburban. ‘50s, early ‘60s. Sharp eye. Viv. Maier ballpark. Lack of variety. Interest predominantly historical. Purchase at this time: Decline.”  

Jay had been struggling to remember the name of the woman who had turned out, posthumously, to be this great artist, had woken up a couple of times in the middle of the night thinking that it would finally pop into his brain, but no avail. Now he had what he needed to google, and he discovered a similar story, the Northwestern suburbs of Chicago, but a maid – a nanny – not a housewife, the trips into the city, the candid photos of street people, the raw and angry South Side, as opposed to the smug shoppers, and the volume of it, the storage units bursting with negatives, the persistence of it over decades, the manic urge to record, hoard, all of it completely indistinguishable from a mental condition. Nancy had given it up when she was 22 – after that, as Clyde said, it was pretty much all birthday parties, first steps, a long gap and then vacations. All girls, thought Jay, have a photography phase at some point.

Meanwhile, the relationship with Clyde had badly deteriorated. The bulk of the house was his, that had never been in dispute, he needed it, Jamie had her career, her husband, her kids, for that matter her personal savior, to balance it all out Clyde had an inheritance. Also, he’d remained, in the teeth of all reason, the favorite. But everything else had gone sideways, the shortfall in the property taxes in the period when Nancy was sick, the choice of realtor, the speed with which it went on the market and closed, like a firesale, which was Jamie’s charge. There was a debate about furniture, this was probably a trivial amount in dollars and cents, but it was symbolic, the sticking point, Jamie insisting that a few pieces were not to be given away, were hers technically, at least should have been assessed, not for Clyde’s brand of retail salesmanship, definitely not for Clyde’s current girlfriend, and Clyde, as was one of his specialties, started calling at 11 or 12 at night, picking up right where he’d left off, making his point, Jamie slamming the landline back onto its hook, the satisfying sound which really was, probably, the reason they’d kept the line running all this time.

“You should go clear out the rest of it,” Jamie said to him once after she’d just gotten off the phone with Clyde. It was afternoon, the light was streaming through the kitchen, she was standing with her hands on her hips, cooling her heels.

“You?”

She shook her head. “I’ll rip his head off if I lay eyes on him,” she said. In her speech, she was always on the verge of un-Christlike behavior.

He made the familiar drive, the rock music, the high school basketball games. He liked the feeling of the stations fading in and out, all the Michigan auto dealerships and local law firms that he had come to know so well, could easily have sung a few of their jingles, would probably never hear any of them again. Clyde was downstairs with a minion, they had paperwork spread out on the counter. Something had gone wrong with the closing, he’d made a poor choice of broker, now there was a lawyer involved, money leaking out, a new urgency. Jay went through and hauled out pieces in the list order Jamie had given him, chairs that could be resold, knick-knacks with sentimental value. Clyde and the minion moved aside to let him pass through the kitchen, they nodded to him man-to-man, he was on the other side but he couldn’t really be held accountable for the feud with Jamie. They didn’t go so far, however, as to hold open doors or help him load up the car.

Jay had brought a box of trash bags with him, he went through the main floors, tossed everything loose – a very simple task, as Jamie always put it, but somehow Clyde hadn’t gotten around to it in the whole process of listing and sale and resale. Clyde stepped to one side when he dug through the kitchen cabinets for what was left of Nancy’s spices and jars. He took everything out to the bins behind the house, filled them up, piled the rest of the bags next to it – it wasn’t exactly suburban etiquette, but the trash guys would know what to do. He liked these kinds of methodical tasks, he was good at it, even at his age, a slowing-down of the nervous system down to some battery-saving mode, just one step after the next one.

“The photographs?” he said when he was back in the kitchen.

Clyde looked to his minion, who was in a very bent baseball cap, had the weatherbeaten, steady look of somebody who was a truly ace pool player. It was obvious he was part of the search committee for a buyer.

“No luck there,” Clyde said. “Not distinctive enough.” He said it like it was a technical term, like describing something that was ‘mint’ on eBay or ‘high-value’ on a car lot. His minion pushed up the brim of his hat, scratched at his forehead. The feeling was that this was an angle they had been working, a lot of conversations, a lot of disappointments about it, Jay was trying to picture the way Clyde might have announced his long-shot – his genius mother – the ironic toasts to her. “I think,” he said, and there was a very different note, something Jay hadn’t heard from him since was first introduced to the family, the ne’er-do-well, living at home, eager, for a brief moment, for Jay’s approval, “I think it’s worth sticking it out a little longer, I was talking over a couple of other possibilities.”

But Jay had his marching orders. He brought his bags upstairs, sat on the floor, and tossed handfuls of items into them. The attic looked rifled through, decimated, since he’d last been there. Everything that looked antique – everything that wasn’t nailed down – had been hauled away, tag-saled, pawned, the resale economy that Clyde was so versed in. It was just the personal effects that were left, the boxes with letters and photos. Just before leaving, Jay had made one last appeal to Jamie – they didn’t have to worry about auction houses or museums, could just keep them at their place, but Jamie was adamant. She had already made her albums, Jay had pilfered a nice sample of what was there, more clutter was the last thing they needed – they had been over this many times.

She had been a very private woman, Nancy, she liked the role she played in the family, the holidays, the child care, the loans, never really talked about herself, definitely didn’t try to exhibit anything she’d made. Everything in the attic was well-organized, clearly labeled – if a curator had come around, their work would have been done for them. But Jay wasn’t a curator. He had a thought of what Jamie had been like when she’d first discovered Jesus, out of nowhere, about ten years into their marriage, drove the permanent fissure between them – or, more precisely, what she’d been like before she fully discovered Jesus, before the worship and the swaying, when the concept of hell had somehow implanted itself in her, the tears coursing down her cheeks, the teeth actually chattering. “Can you imagine,” she would whisper to him, lying stricken on their bed, “death, eternal death, no light, no change, nothing after you, nothing at all?” And he had been annoyed with her, standoffish, hadn’t commented then, but, yes, he could imagine it. He zipped up the bags with the last of Nancy’s things.