Always you look for patterns, and then things that don’t fit. In her bedroom there was one expensive piece of furniture, a drop-leaf table from Connecticut. I saw parts of it a couple of times. Then in one photograph it had been pushed against the wall and loaded down with bottles and vases that would wreck its surface, I thought. It looked like a piece from the 1820s. Didn’t she know how much it was worth?

  I sat on my new couch, listening to the cd. I had arranged the pictures on my coffee table, and now I pulled out the ones that showed my actual subject, her face, her body. I put the rest aside. But the portraits I also separated into groups, according to whether they were candid or posed, or according to what mood they captured, or according to whether I could fit them into an imagined narrative. Then I gathered them at random, squared them face down like a tarot deck, turned them over one by one.

  There was one I thought had been included by mistake, a nude. It had been stuck to the back of something more innocuous. I pulled it free, set it aside, didn’t look at it.

  And now I tried to arrange the photographs into chronological order. Four years of a relationship. In fact I could see different hair-styles, different events—birthdays, perhaps. And Thanksgiving. Sarah Kettle liked candle-light. She liked to pose next to the spread table, a turkey baster in her hand. I counted three of those. Time had gone by. I tried to see it in her face.

  I put my glass down on the stone coaster. I ran my finger along the table’s soft mahogany. Finally, I wiped my hands on my bathrobe and picked up the last photograph, the nude. Again, I don’t think it had been forwarded intentionally. Part of the surface of the Polaroid was marred, where it had stuck to the back of another print.

  By this time I was used to the several expressions of Sarah Kettle—aggressive, embarrassed, goofy, pensive, anxious, even angry, when she had not, I gathered, wished or consented to be photographed. Because of that, and because I was listening to a prissy, self-conscious little rendering of “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” I expected to see some sign of irritation in her face. But there was nothing close. Almost for the first time she stared straight at the camera. High cheekbones, thick lips, delicate, long jaw. One hand was on her hip, one knee was bent. Dark skin, dark eyes. Her head was cocked to one side, so that her hair fell away from her small ear.

  She had a long scar along the outside of one leg, the remains of a sports injury, I thought. And she was a beautiful young woman, as it turned out. Beautifully formed. She had a small, delicate tuft of pubic hair. And because her expression was so indistinct (Boredom? Cold? Happiness? Desire?), it served to emphasize by contrast the peculiar clarity of the rest of the photographs, how each one seemed to show a single unmixed mood. How strange it was, I thought, always to know what someone else was thinking.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have looked at that last photograph. Perhaps I should have thrown it away, because it wasn’t useful to the story I was trying to write. I had pretended to myself it couldn’t hurt and probably might help, the way a painter might want to look at a model’s naked body, even if the finished portrait shows no skin at all—I have no idea how painters think. What I know is, once I saw that final photograph there was no going back, not so much because of the but because of the face—those sleepy, almond eyes.

  I gathered the pictures and laid them all aside, except for that one. I turned on my laptop. I had some ideas, and I scratched at them for a few hours. I thought I’d try to invent some stories, a series of interlocking sketches with her in the middle—a mystery, a fantasy, a joke. Like for example, I thought about her walking back and forth, back and forth, scratching her bare arms. She was wearing something blue—very sweet, with little embroidered flowers. “I’m really, really sorry,” she said, looking really, really sorry. Tears in her eyes: “I never wanted to hurt you. We saw each other every day. He works on the floor above me, for God’s sake. We didn’t plan on this.”

  Or else outside in the cold, dressed in a wool jacket and a scarf. We were walking along Kelly Drive by the art museum. She was laughing. “What are you looking at?” she said to me. “Old man—wipe that grin off your face.” Then she came up and put her mittened hand against my chest.

  Or else something less literal, something more symbolic. Maybe if there was something that was threatening her. Some beast at the door, and there was some way to protect her. I thought of a gray journey through the cold, a lighted window at the end.

  But all that was too murky, too sequential, with too much of an implied plot. And she herself was out of sight: In each of these scenes, I wanted to present her in one single mood. And the idea was, I would lay these stories out around an empty center, which in my mind I would fill with the image from the final photograph. So: unstated, undescribed, and yet, now that I thought about it, the key to the whole thing—I couldn’t get it out of my head. This was partly because I needed more exposition and saw no way to get it. I wanted a better sense of the woman’s attitude toward the person taking the photograph. I wanted clarification, perhaps other exposures from the same session, dozens of them, each one presenting a different version of that mixed, nuanced expression. And the body, of course—our hero would fixate on my interest in the body. He’d never send me anything else. He wouldn’t pay me. I might as well ask for something that smelled like her, a yellow t-shirt from the University of Pennsylvania, where I used to have a real job, not like now. Or as long as I was dreaming, maybe something more intimate, a pair of underpants or a brassiere. Yes, something like that might definitely help me out.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent too long in this room,” she sang. Etc., etc., and that was the end of the cd. I picked up one of her letters, typed, no scent:

  . . . I want to show myself to you, but I can’t. I want to talk to you in just a normal way like before. At least I remember it being normal, but maybe that’s what memory does. I can’t believe it was always like this. Would we have gotten to know each other like we have?

  What was she talking about? My correspondent, the person who had commissioned the story in the first place, I wondered if he had a chance in hell. But he deserved nothing, because of his stupidity. I turned off my machines and went to bed.

  I had other projects going, so I didn’t think about Sarah Kettle for a few days. I put all the pictures and letters in a drawer. Maybe I’d let some sort of plot develop without paying attention. Or I could try to get some outside help. I was teaching a class at the New School, and I thought I’d try a new form of triple-dipping. This was in the context of a general discussion about how writing something or describing something could enrich an experience, and also about whether memory could function more like photographs or like the movies. As an example, I showed my students one of the Thanksgiving scenes and asked them to invent stories about Sarah Kettle. It was interesting what they perceived, what they distorted. Then I revealed part of how I intended to use this image and the others. I also revealed part of the problem I’d been having. As a solution, a couple of students recommended a technique that we’d discussed, a “sling-shot” ending, which would break the story off before the conflict was resolved. Someone else suggested that in the final struggle I shouldn’t necessarily reveal who was the hero, who was the monster. This intrigued me, though I didn’t see at first how I could use both ideas at once. I have several engaging students in that class. One in particular, although she doesn’t say much.

  It so happened that I had some independent business that brought me to Philadelphia later that week. I took the train. And when after ninety minutes I got out at 30th Street Station, I decided to walk to my appointment on Washington Square, even though my memories of the city were complicated, and as recently as November I had promised never to return if I could help it. Those feelings had faded, but as I walked through the gray streets (it was an overcast March day), I found them coming back. I plodded over the bridge, down JFK past City Hall, and headed on down Market Street. I had some time to kill, but even so, what was I doing here? I could have taken the subway. Then I remembered Sarah Kettle’s address from her cv, and realized where she lived was on the way—why not? Added value, if I described the house. Maybe just the sight of it would jar something loose—I’d thought about her briefly on the train. It wasn’t yet four o’clock, but I knew she kept irregular hours. I played with the idea of knocking on the door, but I was afraid of scaring her, or else inspiring one of those angry looks I’d seen in the photographs. I felt I knew everything about her and at the same time nothing at all, the kind of simultaneous impression usually reserved for lovers or family members, and a little creepy in this case. I wouldn’t want her to think I was stalking her. That wouldn’t help her idiotic boyfriend’s (or former boyfriend’s) idiotic proposal. I cut over to Spruce Street, and up a street of row houses with alleyways between them. I was glancing at the numbers, and I crossed the street to the wrong side, so I could get a look at the entire house. She lived on the first floor, and the light was on.

  After a few minutes, I slipped down the alleyway around to the back. As I suspected, there was a sequence of three long fire-escapes that doubled as back porches, one on top of the other. I saw the light on in Sarah Kettle’s bedroom. I glanced at my watch, wondering if I had time to stay here long enough to see Ben Burgis slouch home from his job at the hospital, crash through the front door, try to grab her in his horrible embrace.

  As I thought about this, I found I had climbed up the first steps of the fire-escape, onto the back porch. I could see the kitchen door above me. There was the lighted window.

  But then I checked my watch again, and as I turned I saw Annie Mertz come up the alleyway, a bag of groceries balanced on one hip. She was Sarah Kettle’s neighbor on the third floor. I tried to avoid her, but she’d reached the bottom of the steps. She put her hand on the railing. “Paul,” she said, “Paul, is that you?”

  Then after a moment: “What are you doing here? You’d better not let Ben see you. Is this about your stupid table?”

  After another moment: “Paul, you’re crying. Please—are you okay? Does Sarah even know you’re here?”

  THIS PEACEABLE LAND; OR, THE UNBEARABLE VISION OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

  ROBERT CHARLES WILSON

  “It’s worth your life to go up there,” the tavernkeeper’s wife said. “What do you want to go up there for, anyway?”

  “The property is for sale,” I said.

  “Property!” The landlady of the roadside tavern nearly spat out the word. “There’s nothing up there but sand hills and saggy old sheds. That, and a family of crazy colored people. Someone claims they sold you that? You ought to check with the bank, Mister, see about getting your money back.”

  She smiled at her own joke, showing tobacco-stained teeth. In this part of the country there were spittoons in every taproom and Bull Durham advertisements on every wall. It was 1895. It was August. It was hot, and we were in the South.

  I was only posing as an investor. I had no money in all the baggage I was carrying—very little, anyhow. I had photographic equipment instead.

  “You go up those hills,” the tavernkeeper’s wife said more soberly, “you carry a gun, and you keep it handy. I mean that.”

  I had no gun.

  I wasn’t worried about what I might find up in the pine barrens.

  I was worried about what I would tell my daughter.

  I paid the lady for the meal she had served me and for a second meal she had put up in neat small box. I asked her whether a room was available for the night. There was. We discussed the arrangements and came to an agreement. Then I went out to where Percy was waiting in the carriage.

  “You’ll have to sleep outside,” I said. “But I got this for you.” I gave him the wrapped dinner. “And the landlady says she’ll bring you a box breakfast in the morning, as long as there’s noaround to see her.”

  Percy nodded. None of this came as a surprise to him. He knew where he was, and who he was, and what was expected of him. “And then,” he said, “we’ll drive up to the place, weather permitting.”

  To Percy it was always “the place”—each place we found.

  Storm-clouds had dallied along this river valley all the hot day but no rain had come. If it came tonight, and if it was torrential, the dirt roads would quickly become useless creeks of mud. We would be stuck here for days.

  And Percy would get wet, sleeping in the carriage as he did. But he preferred the carriage to the stable where our horses were put up. The carriage was covered with rubberized cloth, and there was a big sheet of mosquito netting he stretched over the open places during the night. But a truly stiff rain was bound to get in the cracks and make him miserable.

  Percy Camber was an educated black man. He wrote columns and articles for the Tocsin, a Negro paper published out of Windsor, Canada. Three years ago a Boston press had put out a book he’d written, though he admitted the sales had been slight.

  I wondered what the landlady would say if I told her Percy was a book-writer. Most likely she would have denied the possibility of an educated black man. Except perhaps as a circus act, like that Barnum horse that counts to ten with its hoof.

  “Make sure your gear is ready first thing,” Percy said, keeping his voice low although there was noelse about—this was a poor tavern on a poor road in an undeveloped county. “And don’t drink too much tonight, Tom, if you can help it.”

  “That’s sound advice,” I agreed, by way of not pledging an answer. “Oh, and the keeper’s wife tells me we ought to carry a gun. Wild men up there, she says.”

  “I don’t go armed.”

  “Nor do I.”

  “Then I guess we’ll be prey for the wild men,” said Percy, smiling.

  The room where I spent the night was not fancy, which made me feel better about leaving my employer to sleep out-of-doors. It was debatable which of us was better off. The carriage seat where Percy curled up was not infested with fleas, as was the mattress on which I lay. Percy customarily slept on a folded jacket, while my pillow was a sugar sack stuffed with corn huskings, which rattled beneath my ear as if the beetles inside were putting on a musical show.

  I slept a little, woke up, scratched myself, lit the lamp, took a drink.

  I will not drink, I told myself as I poured the liquor. I will not drink “to excess.” I will not become drunk. I will only calm the noise in my head.

  My companion in this campaign was a bottle of rye whisky. Mister Whisky-Bottle, unfortunately, was only half full, and not up to the task assigned him. I drank but kept on thinking unwelcome thoughts, while the night simmered and creaked with insect noises.

  “Why do you have to go away for so long?” Elsebeth asked me.

  In this incarnation she wore a white dress. It looked like a confirmation dress. She was thirteen years old.

  “Taking pictures,” I told her. “Same as always.”

  “Why can’t you take pictures at the portrait studio?”

  “These are different pictures, Elsie. The kind you have to travel for.”

  Her flawless young face took on an accusatory cast. “Mama says you’re stirring up old trouble. She says you’re poking into things nowants to hear about any more, much less see photographs of.”

  “She may be right. But I’m being paid money, and money buys pretty dresses, among other good things.”

  “Why make such trouble, though? Why do you want to make people feel bad?”

  Elsie was a phantom. I blinked her away. These were questions she had not yet actually posed, though our last conversation, before I left Detroit, had come uncomfortably close. But they were questions I would sooner or later have to answer.

  I slept very little, despite the drink. I woke up before dawn.

  I inventoried my photographic equipment by lamplight, just to make sure everything was ready.

  It had not rained during the night. I settled up with the landlady and removed my baggage from the room. Percy had already hitched the horses to the carriage. The sky was drab under high cloud, the sun a spot of light like a candle-flame burning through a linen handkerchief.

  The landlady’s husband was nowhere to be seen. He had gone down to Crib Lake for supplies, she said, as she packed up the two box lunches, cold cuts of beef with pickles and bread, which I had requested of her. She had two adult sons living with her, one of whom I had met in the stables, and she felt safe enough, she told me, even with her husband absent. “But we’re a long way from anywhere,” she added, “and the traffic along this road has been light ever since—well, ever since the Lodge closed down. I wasn’t kidding about those sand hills, Mister. Be careful up there.”

  “We mean to be back by nightfall,” I said.

  My daughter Elsebeth had met Percy Camber just once, when he came to the house in Detroit to discuss his plans with me. Elsie had been meticulously polite to him. Percy had offered her his hand, and she, wide-eyed, had taken it. “You’re very neatly dressed,” she had said.

  She was not used to well-dressed black men. The only blacks Elsebeth had seen were the day laborers who gathered on the wharves. Detroit housed a small community of Negroes who had come north with the decline of slavery, before Congress passed the Labor Protection Act. They did “the jobs white men won’t do,” for wages to which white men would not submit.

  “You’re very prettily dressed yourself,” Percy Camber had said, ignoring the unintended insult.

  Maggie, my wife, had simply refused to see him.

  “I’m not some radical old Congregationalist,” she told me, “eager to socialize with every tawny Moor who comes down the pike. That’s your side of the family, Tom, not mine.”

  True enough. Maggie’s people were Episcopalians who had prospered in Michigan since before it was a State—sturdy, reliable folks. They ran a string of warehouses that catered to the lake trade. Whereas my father was a disappointed Whig who had spent a single term in the Massachusetts legislature pursuing the chimera of Free Education before he died at an early age, and my mother’s bookshelves still groaned under the weight of faded tomes on the subjects of Enlightened Marriage and Women’s Suffrage. I came from a genteel family of radical tendencies and modest means. I was never sure Maggie’s people understood that poverty and gentility could truly co-exist.