Frames Per Second (6 page)

But the next morning, his father postponed the hunting trip until the camera store opened and they went in together to buy a used Nikon. His dad smiled in the background as Ben haggled over a telephoto lens.

As they drove away in his dad’s old Plymouth, Ben looked at the camera on his lap, the jewel-like finish of the body, the heavy lens. Holding it gave him the same feeling as being out on a winding trail early in the morning. Breath making a white fog in the cold air. Not knowing what was around the next bend, but eager for it.

His dad said, “Just learn how to do it right.”

“Thanks, Dad.” Ben’s voice was husky.

His father rested his hand on his shoulder. “I should’ve seen it sooner, what you were doing.” His father paused. “I miss her, Ben. What I’ve really wanted to do since your mom was killed was to shoot that trucker. Not the guy that’s in prison now. I hate him, but now it’s too late. What I’ve wanted to do is hunt him down and shoot him
before
he got behind the rig, before he killed your mother. If I could, that’s what I’d do.”

His dad sighed. “But that can’t happen. And stacking up racks and mounting heads won’t make it happen. Neither is shoving you along to do something you don’t want. It’s time I sell my guns. Put your old Remington up on the wall for display. Maybe use it to bag a few ducks for dinner now and then.” His father smiled crookedly. “I’d kill for my family, but it’s too late. So I’m gonna stick close to the family I’ve still got.”

His father’s love had warmed Ben all his life. His dad had embraced Andi and the children completely. It was devastating for all of them when he died of a heart attack.

And yet, a year ago, Ben had been glad that his father wasn’t around to see him separated, going through a divorce. Ben couldn’t help wonder what his dad would think of him now. What would he think of Ben arriving at the cabin without his family? Of leaving his wife and children to another man?

After flipping the circuit breaker to turn on the power, Ben loaded up the refrigerator. He felt the cans of beer. Still cold. He grabbed two, and then went out to drag the old aluminum rowboat down to the water. He shoved off into the lake. He rowed for a long time, until the light he’d left glowing in the cabin was just a faint pinprick. His hands and back ached.

He lay along the thwart with his legs bent, his head on a flotation cushion. Slowly, the last color from the sky disappeared, and the stars emerged.

He sipped at the beer, waiting for some epiphany, some better understanding. But even in doing that, he knew he was using the old steps for himself. Why should the stars reveal anything about Ben Harris? Without him being able to frame them through ground glass, without being able to compose them against a stand of trees, black and silver in the moonlight, he had no control over them.

And without that, he could find little meaning.

How could she do it to us?

That’s what he really wanted to think about. A year ago, when she asked him to move out, he stumbled around for months, thinking, How could you do it? Have you forgotten who we are?

Fifteen years of marriage, gone.

His lover and best friend, gone.

Now this.
Married.

The idea of Kurt dating Andi had been bad enough when Ben first heard through the kids that she was dating a senior editor at
Boston Magazine.
At the time, Ben knew Kurt only through his reputation, which was as an effective, if somewhat staid, editor. At that distance, the idea of Andi dating was barely palatable. The idea became hellish when Kurt won the hotly contested editor-in-chief position at the
Insider,
and became Ben’s boss.

Ben had been tortured by the image of them in bed; physically repelled at the thought of Kurt’s broad back moving over her. At times, it had taken all Ben had in him not to stand up in the office and knock Kurt out of his chair.

But the finality of this was worse. The idea of Kurt sitting at the breakfast table, pouring cereal for the kids, talking to them as if he were their father … and worse, the possibility, the
likelihood
that they would respond, that they would love this interloper.

Ben sat up, dipped his hand into the lake water and rubbed his face. Tried to wash some acceptance into himself. Told himself that times had changed; that Kurt was in and he was out. That he had to accept that he was joined at the hip with Kurt, a man he doubted he would’ve liked under any circumstances.

It was a nauseating pill, but Ben knew he had to swallow it somehow. For the sake of the kids. For some semblance of a friendship with Andi. As for the
Insider,
he’d give it a little more time. His work with Peter was the best of his career and he saw no reason to let Kurt take that away, too.

Ben shifted on the thwart, squirming to find some comfort on the hard wood, but he couldn’t. He felt out of sorts with the world. Not for the first time, he thought,
How did I let this happen?

Andi had been just twenty-one when they met. Good girl from an old Boston family who had long ago lost their money, but not their expectations.

“Help her out,” said Jack Griswald, their editor from the
Portland Press Herald.
Ben, a veteran photojournalist of all of twenty-five himself, had taken her out on her first hard news assignment to cover an accident at a paper mill.

A workman had been killed, a horrific accident where his jacket had caught in a roller press and he had been pulled in. The accident itself was too gruesome for the paper. Ben limited himself to reaction shots from co-workers, and the spokesman for the mill. Then they went to the workman’s home to talk to his widow. Absolute de rigueur in those days. Ben hated it himself, but when he looked over at the new reporter then, her face white, her fists clenched over her notebook, he thought he would have to conduct the interview himself.

But she did her job as well as anyone could have expected. She talked quietly with the widow and learned about the workman, Jeff Kirkland, and listened to the woman’s grief, without ever asking that brutally cruel question so many reporters favored: “What are you feeling?”

And in the car on the way back to the paper, Andi cried quietly, making no objection when Ben rested his hand on her shoulder. However, upstairs in the newsroom, she went back to her business, and wrote an article that was factual, but sensitively conveyed the loss of Kirkland to his wife and son.

All very professional, and Ben respected that about her.

On the side, she continued to help Dorothy Kirkland, first by helping her find a job, then with a follow-up article months later that brought in enough cash to establish a college trust fund for the Kirkland boy. For this, Andi gained the nickname “PollyAndi” from her peers. Griswald admonished her, saying that although the Kirkland articles had worked out, if she was to be a reporter, her role was not advocacy or charity.

“For me, he’s wrong,” Andi said, looking over Ben’s photos one night. They were friends at that point. He thought she was interested in him, but couldn’t tell for sure. He, on the other hand, was hopelessly in love. He was feeling like a coward for not pursuing things further.

She touched his prints, shots of children, of criminals, of accident victims. Shots of loneliness, of happiness, of loss, of serenity and euphoria.

“You manage it, though,” she said. “You show your indignation, your respect, your compassion. It’s all here.”

“I report first, though.”

“It’s still filtered through your head. Just like I choose what to write, you choose what to shoot. It’s inevitable that we editorialize.”

“That’s the challenge,” Ben agreed. “What I capture is not necessarily the whole reality, but the one I see. But I try to keep myself out of it.’’

“Mmmm. I want my words to do some good and I have to go about it the direct way.” Her eyes met his. “As a matter of fact, I appreciate directness in most things. I like to know what people are feeling.’’

“Uh-huh,” he said, feeling suddenly like he was about to jump out of a plane. “Seeing as you appreciate directness …”

“Which I do,” she said, smiling.

He told her how he felt about her. Stumbling a bit, but getting the words out.

She took his hand and pulled it to her, kissing the back of his wrist, for the first time. He pulled her into his arms.

They didn’t stop until the bedclothes were tangled and they were lying side by side, breathless.

Those first few years, they just drank each other in. They moved together, sometimes for his jobs, sometimes for hers. New York first, then San Francisco. Andi quickly moved away from daily news into more in-depth articles for magazines. Then she secured a column in the
San Francisco Chronicle
soon after she learned she was pregnant with Jake. “Andi’s Attitude,” based upon the concept of a one-year weekly observation of a woman stepping away from her career to have a baby. Woman in workforce issues were big in the media then and her timing couldn’t have been better.

“Andi’s Attitude” slowly began to build toward what it would eventually become—a nationally syndicated column that covered a wide variety of issues, from homelessness to race relations, all from her unabashedly opinionated viewpoint. But the way there was rocky. And, perhaps it was somewhere in there that her stated opinions made her rigid, made her unforgiving.

They had moved back to Boston to be close to her family when she was pregnant with Lainnie. It was a tough pregnancy, and right after Lainnie was born Andi was laid low with a bout of pneumonia and unable to write. She had to set aside the column for six months, and with it, her income.

Ben had been doing increasingly frequent shoots for
Newsweek
at that point; his career was essentially on the rise. But he ran into a dry spell just at the time they needed cash the most. As freelancers, neither he nor Andi had the best insurance coverage, and her medical bills had sapped their savings.

A photo editor from the
National Enquirer
called right about that time saying they had been admiring his surveillance photography and the
Enquirer
wanted to hire him for a shoot right in Boston. The editor positioned the piece as an exposé on the plight of street hustlers.

Ben didn’t believe the shoot would be that straightforward, but after a moment’s hesitation, he said yes. The rent was due.

The night of the shoot, the reporter on the job, Larry Hall, set him straight, “Get me shots of young, pretty hookers with older-looking business guys. We’ve got to titillate the shoppers in the grocery stores, get them to buy an issue to cluck over those skimpy outfits, and wonder if hubby is one of the guys screwing around on the side with teenage pros.”

“I don’t like this,” Ben said.

“You don’t need the work, just drive away,” Larry said, looking through his binoculars.

Ben took the pictures.

Just around midnight Father Ray Caldwell showed up in the Combat Zone. He was wearing street clothes and even though Ben had covered him once—at a fund-raiser where both Caldwell and Andi were speaking—Ben didn’t recognize him until he was loading his second roll of film.

Larry Hall recognized Caldwell at the same time and immediately pocketed the exposed roll. “Father
Ray?
The guy who’s always standing up for children’s rights? This is good shit. You keep shooting, follow him home while I get this in. If God’s on our side tonight, he’ll take her home and screw her brains out on film.”

“Wait a second,” Ben said. “You’ve got to talk to him. See what he says. Maybe there’s another explanation, maybe he’s trying to help her.”

Larry laughed as he slid open the door of the van. “Maybe. That’s not my job. I’ve got what I need right here.”

Ben put his hand out. “Give me that and go talk to the girl after he leaves.”

“If
he leaves.”

“Get the facts straight.”

“We’ve got a deadline.” Larry slammed the door and ran like hell. By the time Ben got out of the van, Larry was in his car and gone.

Ben got back into the van and refocused on Caldwell. He didn’t release the shutter until it became apparent the priest was indeed going upstairs with the young girl. He came out about a half hour later. Ben got the shot.

Father Ray was on the cover of the next issue. Big XXXs behind him on a marquee reading “Girls, Girls, Girls.” Holding the hand of a young prostitute who could have been asking his advice, or could have been soliciting him.

Either was possible.

The headline read:
“Got a Confession, Father?’’

Larry Hall’s article nailed it home. Famous priest caught skulking around the Combat Zone “in disguise.” The girl wasn’t identified, but she clearly appeared underage.

Speculation crossed over into the “legitimate” media within the day. Father Caldwell held a press conference two days later, denying any involvement beyond his counseling. He refused to identify the girl, saying he had gone upstairs to talk with her and give her money to return home. He said she came to him originally in confession. The camera flashes flickered across his face time and again, revealing the shine of sweat, the fear in his eyes.

He looked guilty.

With the number of priests who had been prosecuted in recent years for child molestation, Father Ray was openly doubted on the news night after night. “Man on the street interviews” judged him as guilty. “Smoke and fire,” said one woman. “You know the way it works.”