Read Online Void in Hearts by William G. Tapply - Free Book Online

“Thanks, no. I’d really like to see what’s on these negatives.”
    I pulled the envelope from my jacket pocket and handed it to her. She slipped the negatives from their glassine protector and held them up to the light. “These were taken through a long lens,” she said, squinting. “At least a three-hundred-millimeter, I’d say. Maybe five hundred. Very shallow depth of focus. Doesn’t look too sharp on most of them. Well, let’s go see.”
    I followed her down into the basement. When I had lived there, it was what we called a rumpus room. It had been paneled with cheap imitation oak and carpeted with rubberized indoor-outdoor green stuff. The boys kept their toys down there. There had been a small television, which Gloria and I dutifully restricted to Channel 2. Both of our boys, to our confusion, had been hooked on Mr. Rogers.
    Now the paneling was genuine pine. Bookcases lined one wall. Track lighting along the ceiling played selectively on several framed photographs. There was an antique rolltop desk in one corner and a big square butcher-block table. Behind a locked glass-door cabinet were shelves containing Gloria’s cameras and the other tools of her trade. She had accumulated a lot of gear since I had lived there.
    “This place looks great,” I said.
    “Different, huh? I had a designer plan it for me. She drew the specs, picked out the carpet and the furniture and everything. It’s my office, all deductible. Here, peek into the darkroom.”
    She opened the door to where the little bathroom had been. Now it was a large rectangular room, with a double stainless steel sink, a counter of trays, shelves of chemicals, enlargers, and lots of other machinery I didn’t recognize.
    “Nice,” I said.
    “Why don’t you relax out there and I’ll get to work. There’s a bar in the cabinet beside the desk. Help yourself.”
    She closed the door, leaving me alone in the rumpus room. No, Gloria’s office. I looked around for an ashtray. There was none. I went to the bar. I found it well stocked, although there was no Jack Daniel’s. Just like Gloria, I thought, not to have my favorite sour mash Tennessee sippin’ whiskey on hand. All the booze struck me odd, at first. Gloria had never been much of a drinker. A little wine with a meal, perhaps, and an occasional gin and tonic on a summer’s evening. But then I remembered that this was her place of business. She met clients here. It was hard for me to visualize Gloria meeting with clients—conferring, bargaining, selling. That wasn’t the Gloria I had been divorced from eight years earlier.
    I poured two fingers of Wild Turkey—not a bad bourbon, but not Jack Daniel’s—into one of the expensive glasses I found stacked there. There was a built-in icemaker. I fished out a small handful of oddly shaped cubes and dropped them into my drink. Then I wandered around the room. It was, in part, a gallery.
    After our divorce, Gloria began to do some portrait work. Children, mostly, the occasional wedding and bar mitzvah. She had a knack, I knew, for persuading people to look natural.
    Eventually she moved into the magazine work. She specialized in photographing architecture. She did a big job on Newport a few years earlier, a lot of color work on the changes that were being wrought on the grand old buildings along the waterfront: Several of the pictures were framed and hung on the walls of my old rumpus room.
    I studied Gloria’s work. It looked very good to me—technically sound, but more than that, she had a gift for capturing the spirit of a building by clever use of angle and light.
    I sat in one of the Scandinavian Design chairs and riffled through a photography magazine. It took me a while to identify the source of the uneasiness I was feeling.
    There was no trace of me left in this house. None of my coats hung in the closets upstairs. The furniture I used to lounge on in the living room was gone. The paint I had painfully spread over the moldings and