INSTANTS
In winter the flat plain before the mountains is a white cover of blowing snow. On the plowed road, the snow swirls like dust. The stark white of the snowdrifts passes quickly out my side window. Today is cold sun.
A black Volvo passes me going about eighty on the straight road. Three pairs of skis stripe the roof, undersides blue and orange. Denver license. The man in the back seat takes a long look at Ellen beside me. She smiles, not at him, but at me.
I look ahead at the snow which is blown up by the Volvo. It curls, then rests. I imagine photographing the patterns as I once had with sand dunes. My equipment is in the back of the car. Before I slow down, new gusts of wind have swept away the patterns.
At Hartsel, the middle of the plain, we slow down. Another sixty miles to skiing. I drive slowly past the six or seven buildings of the town. The Volvo has stopped for gas. Two young men, dressed in colorful wool sweaters, stand beside the gas pump, while the woman goes inside.
“Do you think they are going to Vail?” Ellen asks.
“Don’t know,” I say. The unnecessary question breaks the silence we have been riding in. “How should I know?”
Ellen looks at me with dark eyes. I do not mean to be short with her. I mean something else that I can’t tell her.
Outside the town, we turn onto Route 9, a smaller road that curves along the edge of the mountains. The ranches along the road look bound up in snow for the winter. I wonder how the people survive.
The Volvo appears again in the rearview mirror. Its silver chrome bumper rushes at us. Again it passes, turning up the snow. The man in the back looks Ellen over once again. I try to see her expression, but she looks the other way, not following the Volvo as it races around the curve.
“He likes you,” I say.
She smiles, taking it as a compliment. The smile broadens her face. She looks fine with her hair pulled back. Her eyes seem pleased.
“Should I pull up to them?” I ask.
No,” she says, but her smile continues.
I press my foot on the accelerator. The VW picks up speed, slowly. I leave my foot down.
“Please,” Ellen says.
But I leave it down. We are suspended in the moving car, like drops of water at the tips of icicles, not knowing whether we’ll freeze or fall.
I slow for an unbanked right curve, trying to hug the hill, but the VW’s too light, and it slides out to the left. I let up on the accelerator and pump the brakes. A burst of sun hits from behind the hill.
The recognition of something on the road strikes me before it does Ellen. I press hard on the brakes; Ellen jerks forward, but grabs the dash in time. I hold hard on the wheel. The space seems to evaporate between us and the unmoving shattered cars on the road.
To the left of the wreck is a space to squeeze through. The black Volvo lies crushed against a Pontiac. Steam rises from the two engines into the cold air. The Volvo’s horn is stuck, and its tone changes as we inch by. Steel mashed and slanted skyward, hood crushed. Skis ripped apart, glass shattered.
Someone stirs in the Pontiac, but no one in the Volvo moves. The driver’s head is wedged between the door and the body of the car; the woman lies over the hood. Ellen’s friend in the back seat sits with head bent forward.
An instant.
I lift my sunglasses up onto my knitted cap. From the top of the mountain at Vail, the earth spreads out like a white apron covering a lap. Pockets of houses far below are folded into the creases of the apron. Over the valley, the skyline is only and all mountains. I imagine I’m not mortal. The morning’s accident’s in the past. I’m a bird that can fly the length and the breadth. In the anticipation of my flight, I know no bounds. Convictions, not thoughts, are in my mind. Born, the certainty that lives are hollow when two people are no longer of use to one another. I’m thinking of Ellen.
I pull the glasses into place again. The sky turns yellow-blue. The straps of the ski poles fit tightly around the backs of my wrists. With leg and pole together, I push away from my perch, and, impetus delivered, I glide. To my right, the mountain drops off precipitously to a basin below. I dig the edge of the ski inward and lean outward over the hill. The snow hisses beneath me. Whatever I need I have learned long ago and do not think about. Weight farther back in the powder, tuck and lift up. It is not like other things.
I stop. Down in the folds of the valley, Ellen skis easier terrain. She is foolishly afraid to ski here with me, and I am foolishly afraid to ski there with her. Where I stand, the mountain cuts off the wind. In the quiet, I pick out a cloud and watch it move across. Clouds are scarce today. It reminds me how lazy I am. I cannot muster my strength to hold onto people. It would seem that such a lazy person would content himself to hold onto one.
Without thinking, my weight moves. I feel I’m barely making contact with the smooth snow. Pole and spring up. I angle cross-country toward the manicured trail, hurrying, as if I’ve seen something to be afraid of. I’m making a run for it.
Full speed, I hit a drop-off. It had looked to me like the one smooth white apron. In the air, my body sinks quickly, though my mind waits. I lurch and lose balance. My poles flip out underneath me, and the skis drag. A tip catches, and I lurch forward, arms outstretched.
The first puff of snow hits my glasses. A binding snaps open. It’s the second impact, the bounce, when the pain stings my knee.
I’ve been drinking sold Scotches for almost an hour and have limped back and forth to the bathroom. Ellen has gone to the room to rest, and I’m waiting for her.
A stranger notices my cast and points. “Today?” he asks. He has on a gray sweater, lighter than his hair, baggy pants, and slippers.
I nod. He smiles.
“Broken?” His questions in one word bother me for no reason. The pouches under his eyes make him look weary.
“Torn ligaments.”
“It could have been worse,” he says.
“Could have been dead,” I say.
The accident that morning comes back to me, and the lightness of my tone frightens me.
He begins to tell a life story, how he got where he got.
Ellen comes in, sleepy-eyed from a nap. The man spends a long time looking at her.
“Profession?” he asks me.
“Free-lance photographer. Travel, fashion, on-the-scene things. Whatever I can get.”
“I don’t like the press,” he says. He goes on, thinking aloud that the press has sponsored the wars and the riots and the divisions in the country. I sip my Scotch as he starts to rave.
Ellen takes my arm, as if she knows what’s coming into my head. The man’s voice goes on. The room begins to wave like heat over a radiator.
“Come on, let’s go,” Ellen whispers to me.
I stand up but continue to listen, and listen until I am not hearing words anymore but only the hammering in my head. It’s the puffy skin under his eyes that keeps coming to mind.
“Please,” Ellen says.
The man is calling the press people liars and opportunists of the worst sort.
“Hey!” I shout.
He looks at me and stops talking. For the first time, he sees me. I can tell by his eyes. My fist rushes forward from my chest and connects to the right of his nose and a little above the mouth. I miss the sacks under his eyes.
I reach down and take Ellen’s hand away.
“I’ve been drinking too much,” I say. My voice comes disembodied from the air. I open my eyes and expect to see the voice, but it’s only the darkness of the room.
Ellen puts her head on my chest and rests her hands there, too. Her warmth seems so genuine I can’t disbelieve it.
“What are you thinking?” she asks.
“Nothing.”
I wonder in the silence whether anyone can think nothing.
Ellen moves. “Sometimes you shut me out so tightly,” she says.
She sits up on the bed in the dark. Her nakedness, moving away, is our nakedness together.
She doesn’t cry.
We met three months ago on one of my assignments to photograph a new exhibit she had arranged for a fine arts center. I see her there in good light, as though in my photographs—brilliant dark hair, dark eyes, yellow dress. Though now the light has gone.
Lying one night on a picnic blanket, she at first said no. She was the one with too much to lose. Then it grew darker, and, in dusk, the world dissolved around us, and, timeless, she said yes, because it no longer mattered what she lost. She couldn’t help it. I remember her short hair then and her wide-lipped mouth, and later, her hand shaking as she bent her cigarette over a match flame in the car.
Now, the sheets rustle, and she turns to me again. “There must be some other way for us to go on,” she says. “When it’s like this, I don’t know where I stand.”
“I don’t know where I stand either.”
“With me, you know.”
I can’t answer. I’m running away. As I run, I grasp one thing and then another, holding onto them for a moment to give me support, but I can hold nothing. It is painful to have everything slip beyond my reach, but, after a while, pain is no different from the absence of pain.
Finally I say, “With me you know, too.”
We lie together a long time. We return to the familiar warmth, sleeping. I hear her breath, and at last edge away from touching her.
In the middle of the night, I wake and turn to her. She doesn’t resist but eases over in the bed. Connection of the most superficial sort, almost like a glance.
That realization sends me running again, mindless, with the white snow rushing past me. My legs churn in the darkness, though the silence is broken by Ellen’s breathless whines.
Then it happens suddenly. At last, the running slows. I breathe again, sad to come back.
Instants. My first memory of particles was one afternoon as a child when the sunshafts came into my room through the windows. The light illuminated millions of particles of dust floating in the air. I could sweep my hand through the shaft of light, stirring the particles, but always they returned to floating again, in and out of the light, according to the currents of the air. One moment I could see them, and the next they had passed the border of light into the shadow and disappeared.
Instants. The instant of a shutter. The sand dunes. The pattern of snow curls on the road. The film freezes the moving particles. Beyond the shutter, the particles in life continue to move. A bird in flight continues to soar.
I have often sat alone in my darkroom hanging these instants along a wire. I have divided life into moments of separated time. At what point does a heart begin to flutter in the womb? I have, at times, stood before a trayful of negatives for hours, wondering what I have done to myself.
It is sleep coming on me. A few minutes have passed since Ellen and I have made love. I drift in that moment before sleep, like the particles of dust through the sunshaft of light in my room, not knowing even whether I am in the sun or in the shadow.