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

baseboards had been covered. The carpets I had trod upon had been replaced.
    Now it was Gloria’s place. Not mine. She had cleared me away. I guessed she had done with her mind and her heart what she had done with her house.
    That insight should have relieved me. It was what we both wanted to happen when we split. But now, seeing the evidence, I felt sad.
    I poured myself another drink and settled down with an article that described how to photograph constellations. This was not something I expected ever to try.
    Gloria had been in there for a little over half an hour when she opened the door to the darkroom. “Why don’t you come in?” she said.
    There were a dozen or so eight-by-tens laid out on a table. “Don’t touch them,” she said. “They’re still damp.”
    I looked them over. “They’re not that good, are they?”
    She nodded. “Without a tripod you just can’t get quality stuff with a long lens.”
    “The man who took these wasn’t especially interested in quality.”
    Gloria shrugged. “His exposures are all okay. Probably used a programmed camera. But there’s a definite tremor, and the focus is shaky. I’d guess he was using a fast film. It’s pretty grainy. What are these for, anyway?”
    I pointed to one of the pictures. “This man, I think. I wanted to know what he looked like.”
    The photograph showed a man and a woman seated close together. The woman was in quarter profile. The man was nearly full face. “Do you see this man in any of the other shots?”
    We looked them over together, bending over the table, our shoulders touching. Gloria pointed to one of the pictures with the eraser end of a pencil. “Here. This is the same man.”
    This shot was taken from a distance. The camera seemed to be aimed upward, as if the photographer had been lying on the ground. It showed a number of people entering and leaving a building. One of those who was facing the camera did indeed appear to be our man. He wore dark-rimmed glasses. He had a long, thin face. He was bareheaded, revealing a broad forehead and light, receding hair.
    “Let’s find another shot of the woman,” I said.
    Again we pored over the pictures. The woman appeared in most of them, but there was no full-face shot. In profile she appeared to have a slightly upturned nose, dark hair cropped close at the nape of her neck and brushed back on the sides so that her ears showed. I picked out the best of them. “Can you blow up her face on this one? And this one of the guy?”
    Gloria nodded. “Sure. They’ll look pretty fuzzy, but I can do it. Anything else?”
    She was standing close beside me. I touched her cheek with the back of my hand, and she tilted her face up to me. “That’s all,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
    She smiled quickly and turned away. “Sure. Go away.”
    I went back upstairs, put on my coat, and went out to the front steps to smoke a cigarette. All of that history, and yet Gloria seemed a stranger to me. An attractive stranger, I admitted. I tried to push away the quick flash of her smile, the hurt that dwelled in her eyes, the touch of her skin. She would make my pictures for me and I would thank her and leave. All the rest was reflex.
    The afternoon sun had already sunk behind the row of expensive suburban homes across the street. The cloudless sky was the color of ice. A short winter day, quickly passed, like so many of the days in my life. Gone and forgotten in that great headlong rush toward the end of it.
    I snapped my spent Winston toward the snow and went back inside. A chill had penetrated to my spine, and I wasn’t sure that it was only the dry January air.
    When Gloria emerged from her darkroom, she found me sitting at her desk looking for photos of nudes in her magazines.
    She stood in the doorway, leaning her hip against the jamb. “Want to take a look?” she said.
    I stood and moved toward her. She watched me, her eyebrows arched perhaps a millimeter, her lips parted as if she were about