Metropolis, p.3
Metropolis, page 3
Not centered. Moving out of or into the frame. Sometimes he holds the camera sideways. Sharply lit. Not pretty pictures. Not meant to be. The truest picture is the one where the person has no idea he’s in a photograph, when he’s not pretending to be someone else. This makes him known in a way that he will never see or even know himself. A photographer’s job is to be a ghost, not appearing in the photos but still there.
Serge has thousands of prints and contact sheets, many more thousands of negatives and rolls of undeveloped film. He’s never shown a single photograph to anyone. They are his alone. He ducks into a west-facing alley and casts his shadow at a sharp angle against the brick. He presses the shutter, then does it three more times. He’s never taken a picture of his own face but he has lots of photographs of his shadow. This is his truth: he’s both here and not here at all.
It was an especially late night. Brick & Trowel, being the very cool bar/restaurant it is, never closes before the witching hour, two a.m. in Cambridge. Usually Serge gets to leave by two forty-five, no later than three. But last night there was a private party, and when there are private parties the owner doesn’t close down the way he’s supposed to. The longer people drink, the more money he makes. This doesn’t work out so good for Serge. Like this morning, when he didn’t get home until after four.
He sleeps late and wakes up groggy, the rumble of the huge dishwasher still stuffing up his ears. He puts a toothbrush and toothpaste into his back pocket and heads for the bathroom. There’s one on the fourth floor and one on the second and he switches back and forth between the two every other day so he’s not always in the same bathroom or hallway or stairwell. He uses the shower in the janitor’s room late at night. He hardly ever runs into another person.
Today there’s more going on than usual. On the fifth floor, his floor, a door is wide open. Inside are dozens of doghouses. Most are lined up on shelves, but some are at least four feet tall and stand on the floor. Each one is decorated in a different way. One is covered with dog bones, one with flowers, one with fire hydrants. They have windows and doors, and the insides are painted to match the outsides. Some even have wallpaper. Pictures of dogs on the walls. Dog beds inside. Serge steps away before the man kneeling in front of the largest doghouse notices him.
When he reaches the fourth floor, there’s a door pushed halfway open. He takes a step closer and hides behind a pole, cranes his neck to see better. There’s nobody inside but it looks like a rich teenager’s bedroom. Two teenagers. Two desks are covered with books and notebooks, two bureaus, and two corkboards full of papers and photos. Movie and music posters. Home to a boy and a girl. He notices there aren’t any beds. Just a chair and a footstool with a small table next to it. There’s something about this that makes him sure it was created by a woman. And then he gets what it is. A shrine. To her children.
Darkness presses down on him, and he shivers from the cold that fills his bones. The children are dead, and the mother is trying to keep them alive in her mind. She sits in her chair and looks at all of their things. She visits them and cries for them. He walks quickly to the bathroom, closes the door behind him, and leans against it, overwhelmed by sadness.
Maybe he’s been wrong about taking pictures of people when they’re not aware of themselves. Maybe the way to find the truest photo is by taking pictures of what a person can’t leave behind. Like the pictures he’s been taking of his shadow. Here and not here.
Serge works on coming up with the courage to ask Rose to help him. He doesn’t like talking to people, and he really doesn’t like talking to people if he has to ask them a favor. But he can’t get the idea of photographing the insides of the storage units out of his head. He wants it more than he wants to eat. Rose has a master key and she’s nosy enough to know when someone is or isn’t in the building.
What he’s asking for is probably against the law. But it’s against the law for him to be living here, and Rose is okay with that as long as he gives her money every month. So he’ll offer her money. Offering is different from asking a favor. He doesn’t have much money, but he doesn’t spend much and he’ll pay what he has to.
Soon. He’ll do it soon. Maybe even today. He picks up his Rolleiflex and begins shooting his own unit.
5
Jason
A large Black woman stands outside Jason’s door. She’s wearing a dark dress, a wildly colorful scarf, and a skeptical expression. He’s grown used to this expression, has seen it many times over the last nine months. “This a lawyer’s office?” she asks.
He pushes his glasses up his nose and comes from behind his walnut desk, bought almost a decade ago for a different time and space. He holds out his hand. “I’m Jason Franklin, and you must be Ms. Bell. And yeah, you’re in the right place. May look strange, but I make it work.”
She takes him in, along with the bookshelves lined with legal tomes, and four ladder-back chairs circling a small table. “Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” she finally says.
“The trade-offs you make to do the work you want.” Only partially true.
“You’re telling me you’d rather be here than in some big office tower downtown?”
“Crazy, huh?” He leads her inside and pulls out a chair at the table. “Take a load off, Ms. Bell. Want some coffee? Tea? Something cold?”
It’s clear she’s still not convinced, but she sits and asks for water, watches him closely as he retrieves two bottles from the dorm-room refrigerator, hands her one, and keeps the other for himself. “How do I know you’re a real lawyer?” she asks.
Jason points to the framed documents on the wall: undergraduate diploma from the University of Pennsylvania, law school diploma from Harvard, Massachusetts Bar admission certificate.
“You went to Harvard?” she asks.
He doesn’t answer, just grabs the handle embedded inside the ten-foot-wide door and pulls the massive piece of steel across the floor, closing them in. The door is heavy, but in the nine months since he moved here he’s learned how to brace his legs to make shutting it look easy. This is about as far as he could be from his Seaport office with its thirty-seventh-floor harbor view. But here he stands, inside a windowless yet well-appointed storage unit.
“Got to be one hell of a story.” Ms. Bell places her immense purse on the chair next to her and opens her water bottle. She waits a minute to see if he’s going to tell it, and when he doesn’t, she begins. “You helped my friend Alborz with her visa, and she says you’re smart and there’s nothing highfalutin about you. Realtor said I need a lawyer, and I figure a Black man would understand better.”
He gets a file folder and a legal pad from his desk, then sits down across from her at the table. He opens the file. “You said you’ve got issues with a developer wanting to buy your property. He strong-arming you?”
“W. G. Haines Companies.” Ms. Bell’s voice is thick with disdain. “Trying to buy up the whole block. Bought most of it already.”
Jason knows all about Haines Companies. Muscular and moneyed and looking to get even more so. “You’re not interested?”
Ms. Bell pulls a handful of papers from her purse. One is a map. “I live here.” She points to a red circle in the middle of a block in low-rent Roxbury, five blocks west of Boston’s fashionable South End, which has been pushing its fashionableness toward its neighbor for the past few years. “Was my grandmama’s house,” she explains. “Then my mama’s, and now it’s mine. Because of their hard work and some my own, I don’t owe a cent on it. We’re a family of hardworking and hard-saving teachers. We’re tough and always take care of ourselves.”
“Both my parents are teachers.” Jason already likes this woman, as well as the idea of helping her, of being able to help her. Not to mention screwing Haines Companies. David vs. Goliath perhaps, but David did win that one. “Also hardworking, hard-saving, tough, and proud of it.”
“That’s not how Haines sees it. To them, I’m a pain in the ass. Think just because I’m Black and living in Roxbury, they can push me around.”
“Then they’ve clearly got another think coming.”
“Except every one of my neighbors saw dollar signs and signed contracts. So maybe Haines’s thinking is better than we want to say. Even more messed up is those idiots were so hyped to get their hands on the money, they took what was offered and made my property worth less.”
“So you’re looking to sell? But it’s got to be at the right price?”
“A fair price,” she corrects. “My husband died a few years back, and I have three kids. One at UMass Boston and two at the Burke coming up. Got to give them options.”
“And Haines is lowballing?”
“The real estate guy said that if my house were on a different block, one Haines hasn’t gotten its chops into, I could get at least fifty grand more.” She jabs at the map. “Getting over a thousand dollars a square foot in the South End, he says. Around seven hundred in the block next to Mass Ave. And Haines thinks I’m going to jump for joy at a measly three hundred because we’re three blocks further in.”
“That’s the offer?”
“They went up to three fifty but say that’s all they’re going.” She juts out her chin. “So I want to sue them. Or have you pretend to sue them. Scare them into doing what’s right.”
“Seems workable.”
“And there’s more going on, but I don’t know if you can help me with that part.”
Jason tilts his head and waits.
“It’s the neighbors. Some of them at least. Haines’s deal is no one gets their money till the entire block’s bought in.”
“You the last holdout?”
“First, wet toilet paper on the bushes. Then, they egged my car. Last week, a bag of dog poop on the front stoop.”
“Nasty,” he says. “You sure it’s the neighbors?”
Her eyes widen. “You saying it could be Haines?”
“Not saying it is or it isn’t. Just thinking out loud.” He doubts it is Haines. The moves are too unsophisticated. But you never know. That could be the point.
Jason looks at the map. Ms. Bell’s property is in the middle of a line of attached row houses, which Haines probably wants to turn into expensive condominiums. It seems that with a little persuasion, the company could be convinced to add another fifty grand to the pot, maybe more. They have an urban gold mine here, and no company looking to develop in Boston wants to be sued for intimidating minority homeowners. “I’m going to check this out and see what Haines is up to, Ms. Bell. But I’m thinking we can make them do a hell of a lot better than that.”
She stands, smiles, and holds out her hand. “Kimberlyn.”
He shakes it and returns the smile. “Jason.”
Jason has come to dread Friday evenings. It’s the night he’s expected for dinner at his parents’ house, along with his two sisters, their husbands, and the three nieces he’s nuts for. In his old life, he’d looked forward to Fridays all week, a break from the demands of his job into the warmth and laughter of the house in Jamaica Plain where he was raised. Those days, he often had difficulty getting out of work early enough to join them. Now that’s the lie he tells them to stay away.
In his old life, he was an immigration attorney at Spencer Uccello, a rising star in one of the top firms in the city, where no one doubted he was headed toward partnership. He provided strategic advice to large American companies looking to hire foreign nationals and to large foreign companies looking to launch in the US. He brought in a lot of money, and even better than that, he was filling their diversity quota, his photo looking good on their website.
He loved growing up in JP, a section of Boston known for its compatible mingling of race, ethnicity, and wealth, and he’d always imagined raising a family there. Though his family was middle class, he’d been around the one percent a lot, first at Boston Latin, then Penn, then Harvard, and most recently at his fancy-ass white firm. He’s a natural at code switching.
But he got carried away by the headiness of his new status, just like Sabrina, his ex-wife, had warned. The first in his family to command a high-six-figure salary. The first in his family to live in a doorman building. Money to burn after all those years of careful budgeting, his student loans disappeared in two years.
Then, The Case happened, and his ass got hauled out of capitalist heaven and dumped into a self-storage unit. It’s well past time to tell his family the truth, but he can’t face their disappointment. He, the bullied fat boy who made good, proving to his tormentors that his glasses and studiousness didn’t make him a loser. They made him a winner.
The family would be devastated, especially Tawney, his oldest niece, who idolizes him and is studying hard to become a big-time lawyer just like her uncle. His sister is thrilled, as not many fifteen-year-old girls in Tawney’s set are willing to give up their parties because they want to go to law school.
He checks his phone. Five thirty, and his mother likes them all there by six. He hasn’t been to JP in three weeks. It’s not as if he’s got all that much work to do, and he misses them. He thinks about the suit he’ll have to run to his apartment and put on, the cheery lies he’ll have to tell, the pride in his father’s eyes, the adoration in Tawney’s. He punches in the number. “So sorry, Mom,” he says. “It’s another working weekend.”
6
Liddy
Liddy presses a glass of vodka on the rocks between her palms. She’s standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that stretch across the northwest wall of her kitchen, dining room, and living room, and her eyes follow the sweep of Boston spread out fifty floors below her. The multiple bridges crossing the Charles River as it travels to the ocean. The Public Garden, along with the gleaming gold dome of the State House. The Common, where cows grazed in the seventeenth century. From her bedroom, she can see the harbor and its islands, the ocean beyond.
She lives in luxury at The Tower. Her husband owns one of the largest real estate development companies in New England. Her two children are healthy and happy. Her closets and jewelry boxes overflow, and Boston Globe photographers are always ready to snap her picture at charity functions for the Names column or Party Lines. She’s the epitome of the enviable bold-faced name, a woman of wealth and substance.
Yet some of Liddy’s happiest moments are when she’s curled up with a novel in her favorite reading chair, which is inside a self-storage unit in Cambridge filled with Robin and Scott’s childhood possessions. Possessions Garrett had insisted wouldn’t fit in the condo when they moved out of their house in Weston.
“Who needs all that junk?” he’d asked, nuzzling her neck. “The kids have flown the coop, and now it’s just you and me. Like it used to be. Like it should be.”
Instead of arguing, which she’d learned not to do, she brought the twins’ things to Metropolis without his knowledge, certain the kids would want their mementos. And now she can sit in her unit and be as close to them as a mother can be to children who are thousands of miles away.
The doorman rings to tell her that her limousine has arrived. A crazy gesture, the limo, especially as she’s going only a quarter mile, across the Common, to the Four Seasons Hotel. But Garrett is fond of such gestures, especially if he believes there will be a media presence, which tonight there certainly will be.
She throws back the rest of her drink, sucks on an ice cube for the last vestiges, and places the glass in the sink. Then she ducks into her bathroom to brush the alcohol from her breath and check herself in the mirror. The dress is a deep purple, her best color. It’s cut low, but not plunging, now that she’s crossed the great divide over to forty and has since added another four years. It’s fitted, amplifying her small waist, but not too tight, the silk floating an inch from her skin. The slit in the dress stops at knee level, but her heels are high and stylish, her hair newly highlighted, and she’s wearing Garrett’s early Christmas present, an emerald-and-diamond pendant. She takes the elevator down and glides through the marble lobby.
When Liddy arrives at the hotel, the cameras flash, and despite herself, her spirits rise. She’s always been a sucker for a good party. Tonight is the annual fundraiser for one of her favorite charities, Boston Partners in Education. She and Garrett are major donors to many local nonprofits. Have been for years. The name W. Garrett Haines III graces buildings on the campuses of Boston-area universities, museums, and hospitals.
Although her name never accompanies his, those in the know recognize she’s the impetus behind his generosity, and she’s aware they sometimes refer to her as the East Coast Melinda Gates. To be fair, Garrett’s desire to help others is sincere, which is one of the reasons she fell for him in the first place. But over the years, this caring has shifted from heartfelt giving into more of a PR event for W. G. Haines Companies.
As soon as she steps into the lobby, Liddy is scooped up by Janie Labott, the current president of the charity. Janie is good at her job, but she has no sense of humor, and really, what kind of name is Janie for a grown woman?
“You look fantastic, as always,” Janie fawns, and then draws Liddy close. “Please, here, to the right, the VIP salon.”
“Is there a bar?” Liddy deadpans.
Janie looks blank. “But of course,” she says primly. “Top-shelf.”
Liddy presses her lips together to keep from laughing.
“You don’t want top-shelf? I’m sure I can get you whatever kind of beverage you’d prefer.”
“Top-shelf is fine.”
Janie tips her head, still confused. “Only the best for our major donors.”
