ALBERTINE sat at her vanity, looking through a photograph album. I looked over her shoulder. A depression was coming over us. I could feel it, not only in myself, but in her, too. She was trying to find some good shots of the island in the summer that she could send to a realtor who wanted to send them to a potential buyer, in Maine. It was a long shot, the realtor had admitted. She suspected that he was just an armchair shopper, intrigued by the fantasy of running a small hotel on an island in a place where there was summer. The photographs were depressing us because so many of them had been taken in the lounge, with Albertine at the piano and happy guests, flushed with booze, mangling the lyrics to their favorite songs, and because we looked so good in them. There we were, over a succession of summers that had had their ups and downs, but in every one of them we had been younger than we were at the moment, and, if the photographs were accurate, we had been happier and slimmer and healthier, and we had had nice tans, too.
“We look so happy,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Everybody does. I guess it’s partly because this kind of photograph is supposed to commemorate a happy occasion, and one feels good and looks good on those occasions. Or fakes it. But I wonder — I wonder — ”
“Whether we could ever approximate those two people again.”
“Yes,” I said. “Why is it that we were able to be happy then and can’t seem to be happy now?”
“We weren’t flat broke then.”
I leaned closer to one of the pictures. In it, Albertine was smiling, glowing. She was playing, and a group around the piano was singing. I couldn’t recall the occasion for all this juice and joy. It was almost certainly someone else’s occasion, a guest’s, a birthday dinner at Small’s followed by drinks in the lounge, but in our early days out here Albertine often used to claim that a stranger’s occasion like that was, remarkably, coincidental with an occasion of our own, so the verve she was putting into her playing in the picture I was looking at might have been in celebration of the anniversary of the third night we spent in bed together, which I remembered perfectly well without the benefit of photography.
“I guess that was it,” I said.
ON THE EDGE OF SLEEP, I remembered something about Mr. Himmelfarb that I had forgotten to use in “Photographic Proof.” I turned toward Albertine and raised myself on one elbow so that I could see her face. She seemed to be asleep. I wouldn’t be able to tell her until the morning, when I would have forgotten it again. If I tried to write it down I was sure to wake her. Even uncapping my pen usually woke her up. I lowered myself again and sighed.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I thought you were asleep,” I said.
“On the edge.”
“I remembered something about Mr. Himmelfarb — ”
“Mmm.”
“He used to mix up the pictures sometimes, on purpose. Every now and then he would slip a picture of a mysterious stranger into a package of snapshots — a beautiful woman or a handsome man — the sort of thing that could cause a sensation in a suburban household.”
“My heart races at the thought,” she said.
[to be continued]
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