by Paul Gregory Duch

In those days I wasn't as careful as I am now, so I went along with anybody's suggestions. I plunged into one adventure after another--adventures that mostly turned out not to be adventures at all but sad, pointless experiments without a breath of mystery.

One summer, when I was twenty, I was invited to join some college friends on a journey of discovery. We drove through New England, seven of us in a rundown minibus, to a rocky, isolated beach in northeastern Maine. According to the rules we set for ourselves, we were to bring with us as little money and as few "non-essential" possessions as possible. By a logic we all understood at the time, we defined non-essential to include things like food and clothing. The essentials were books or musical instruments or oil paints--items that would help us to better explore our artistic souls and to understand life's deeper meanings. We would live in tents and sleep under the stars. Material discomforts didn't matter. What mattered were the important creative and intellectual insights each of us was on the verge of discovering.

My vocation was photography. My camera was my most valuable possession, my tool for shrinking the too-big world down to size. With my classic Hasselblad I took the official group photograph upon our arrival. I captured the eager, steadfast look we had collectively adopted, the look of an expeditionary force about to stake a claim to unmapped territories.   I sensed I was nearing what the philosophers called self-actualization. With the raw beauty of the beach as inspiration, soon I would undoubtedly be composing the first photographs of what would one day be termed my Early Period.

As it turned out, however, I took no great pictures that summer. I was too preoccupied with Lauren.

I think back on all this as I watch her trying on coats and hats and gloves in an elegant department store. I watch from a careful distance. Today's encounter is purely a chance one: after years of separate destinies, we find ourselves in the same vast, bustling mall.

When I first met Lauren, she was still just an idealistic student with a round face, blue eyes, and a sweet, naïve voice always asking questions like, "Shouldn't we get deeper into literature, Robert?   What if we miss a pivotal idea?" And she was constantly accumulating books: battered, dusty tomes she found rummaging through piles at second-hand stores and libraries. She urged these volumes on me, but I never did get very deeply into literature. She brought her collection along on the Maine retreat, carrying the volumes around in sacks that always seemed about to surrender to the weight. I often watched her read, and I worried that from the words of those dead authors she might somehow cull a living truth that I couldn't share. Gradually, I became convinced books contained secrets only very few could interpret, a form of code. Whenever I took one up, I gazed upon not great truth but bare fiction, as if by my ignorant touch the very words themselves changed on the page.

"You'll do your best work, your most creative work, on the open road," she told me after reading a dog-eared edition of On the Road . It was the final week of August.

"Where should I go?" I asked.

"Anywhere. Everywhere."

"Do you love me?"

"Yes!"

"Will you come with me?"

"I have some things to take care of at home first. Then, yes. Of course!"

When the summer ended I struck out for the open road. I intended to travel for months, and at the end of the journey carry my teeming camera triumphantly home, a capsule containing the philosophy of a generation and all the mystical secrets of the universe. I planned to take pictures of men with evasive masks of despair and mystery on their rugged faces, and mountains with blends of color that held a secret meaning, and trees that really weren't trees at all but huge, leering symbols of ice. In my carefully-constructed scheme, everything stood for something else. The world was a cryptic facade of messages to be decoded, and I would capture it all through my lens.

Lauren promised to join up with me somewhere in Pennsylvania, but she never did. I waited for days in a motel in coal country until I realized it was time to abandon my insane photographic journey and find her. I hitchhiked back to Connecticut, where she lived. I discovered she was no longer at her former address. Her friends claimed to know nothing of her whereabouts, though I suspected they were instructed to keep the truth from me. Many months later I heard she had gotten married. The man, I learned, wasn't anyone likely to ever get very deeply into literature. Lauren had married for money. A man twice her age. ("Old enough to be her father," was the way it was usually phrased.)

I watch her shop for nearly an hour. I keep out of her line of sight and wonder if I should dare to walk over and present myself to her, like a man seeking employment as her gardener or chauffeur. I'm afraid she won't remember me, although perhaps my fear should be that she will. When she leaves the department store, I follow her out into the courtyard of the mall. She takes a seat on a wooden bench near a pool of lighted water. I find myself drifting toward her, finally getting so close that I can smell her perfume--or imagine I can--and see that she is wearing a sweater embroidered with the initials marriage has given her.

I speak her name.

She looks up. As I advance, she stands defensively. She hasn't recognized me. Truly I must look like a hobo to her. I'm glad she didn't see me yesterday, and the day before, wearing the same shoes and frayed jacket.

"Sorry," I say. "I mistook you for someone else."

"But you called my correct name."

"I'm sorry. I hope I haven't inconvenienced you."

"What is this? Who sent you here?" She studies me up and down. "Oh. . . Robert!" she says at last, and laughs. "Of course, I recognized you right away, don't you know?" Politely, with the graceful quickness of a reflex, she extends her hand.

I wither from our touch. The rings she wears intimidate me. I wish I can once again feel her skin, after so many years, but I feel only the smoothness and hardness of her jewelry. I hold her hand for the briefest possible instant then let it fall away. I imagine all of her body has become this way: smooth and hard, polished and extravagant.

"How many years has it been, Robert?"

"A long time."

"Do I look different?"

"No, not at all."

"I just returned from Europe. Phillip and I. You've never met my husband, have you?"

"I wouldn't think so."

"We must have you for dinner some night. He'd love to meet you, I'm sure. I'll introduce you as the world's greatest photographer, which I'm sure you must be by now. Phillip owns cameras, too, but he never has the time to learn how to use them properly. You could show him how to take art pictures." She laughs. "Arty pictures."

I can see that she has acquired a new habit: leaning her face slightly forward as she laughs, allowing a strand of hair to fall onto her forehead, then very carefully reaching up and with the back of her hand pushing it into place again. I wonder if she would've developed a habit such as this shortly after her marriage, perhaps to impress her new friends with her skill at contriving meaningless routines and her ability to do things the same way over and over again.

"Of course, you're probably too busy with your own photography to bother teaching anybody else," she says.

"I don't take pictures anymore," I tell her. "I sold my camera years ago."

"What do you mean?"

"Why should I waste my time?"

"But you were so talented once."

"We all thought we were geniuses, didn't we? We were all going to become famous, weren't we? A famous photographer, a famous poet, a famous musician. What were you going to become, Lauren? A writer?"

"You were the best of all of us."

"Pipe dreams. I put my heart into it and got nothing in return. I only took pictures with meaning. I had all the symbolism worked out, like a fool.   Rivers stood for one thing, mountains stood for something else. I was only kidding myself. Things are what they are in life. All the rest is a lot of crap."

"Did I tell you I just returned from Europe? Have you ever been to Europe?"

We talk back and forth for several minutes. We stand near the pool of water and tell lies. I listen carefully to Lauren's words, recalling the common girl I had known ten years ago and trying to imagine her living, as I heard she was now, behind high walls of stone and wrought-iron gates. Her voice is no longer sweet and naïve as it had been in the days when she said things like, "There are so many significant truths to discover in this world. If only we knew where to look!" Her voice is rapid and indifferent now and she says, "I feel I've come so far, but the past will always be important to me. It all seems so distant and yet so close."

"It seems very distant to me."

"Well, to change the subject..."

"Yes?"

"If I stay here much longer, chatting with you like this, I'm going to be late for an appointment."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to keep you."

"It was so fortunate we ran into each other today. Robert, what do you think of me?"

"Life takes twists and turns. I wish maybe things had turned out different."

"Would you like to see me again? Not with my husband at dinner, but just you and me. Understand, of course, that it could only be a now-and-then thing.   You're not married, are you?"

"No."

"Just an evening once in a while is what I mean. Or maybe an odd afternoon." She speaks quickly and precisely, as if she had recited these same conditions to a dozen men before and had become accustomed to affirmative replies. "Phillip is very independent. He goes places, like golfing and shooting, and away on business, and I go with him sometimes, but he's not like you can be. You and I can talk about the old things. We can talk about books and your pictures and deeper meanings and all of that. Nobody talks about that stuff anymore." She laughs. "That crap."

Lauren is still very beautiful. As I listen to her, I think of all the foolish things I have believed in at various stages of my life: socialism, existentialism, and the notion that I was somehow talented. If I do not catch myself, I could easily imagine that the two of us are young and idealistic again, standing ankle deep in the cold Maine surf, philosophizing about the future. I had kissed her so often then without ever stopping to think how it might be if a lifetime passed between kisses. We had held each other so many times without ever wondering how it might be if we weren't really holding each other at all but rather were standing infinitely apart in our own separate worlds, seeing each other through eyes that were distant and anonymous. In the years since the beach Lauren had found what all of us were searching for and what I would probably never find. She had learned how to live.

"Of course, I can occupy myself other ways," she puts in. "But this is such a good idea, I think.   Wouldn't you like to share something that is secret and illicit?"

"But your husband," I find myself saying. "How do we arrange it so he doesn't catch on?"

Her faces brightens, like a child's. "Well, Robert, you always had the creative mind. I'm confident you'll think of something."

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