The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [95]
So he did know.
“I give a damn,” David said. “But things are complicated, Paul. I’m not going to talk about this with you, now or ever. There’s a lot you don’t understand.”
Paul didn’t speak. David stopped at a traffic signal. There were no other cars around and they sat in silence, waiting for the light to change.
“Let’s stay focused here,” David said at last. “You don’t need to worry about your mother and me. That’s not your job. Your job is to find your way in the world. To use all your many gifts. And it can’t all be for yourself. You have to give something back. That’s why I do that clinic work.”
“I love music,” Paul said softly. “When I play, I feel like I’m doing that—giving something back.”
“And you are. You are. But Paul, what if you have it in you to discover, say, another element in the universe? What if you could discover the cure for some rare and awful disease?”
“Your dreams,” Paul said. “Yours, not mine.”
David was silent, realizing that once, indeed, those had been exactly his dreams. He’d set out to fix the world, to change it and shape it, and instead he was driving in the flooding moonlight with his nearly grown son, and every aspect of his life seemed beyond his grasp.
“Yes,” he said. “Those were my dreams.”
“What if I could be the next Segovia?” Paul asked. “Think of it, Dad. What if I have it in me to do that, and I don’t try?”
David didn’t answer. He’d reached their street again, and this time he turned toward home. They pulled into the driveway, bouncing a little over the uneven edge where it met the street, and stopped in front of the detached garage. David turned off the car, and for a few seconds they sat in silence.
“It’s not true that I don’t care,” David said. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
He led Paul out into the moonlight and up the exterior stairs to the darkroom above the garage. Paul stood by the closed door, his arms folded, radiating impatience, while David set up the developing process, pouring out the chemicals and sliding the negative into the enlarger. Then he called Paul over.
“Look at this,” he said. “What do you think it is?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Paul crossed the room and looked. “A tree?” he said. “It looks like a silhouette of a tree.”
“Good,” David said. “Now look again. I took this during surgery, Paul. I stood up on the balcony of the operating theater with a telephoto lens. Can you see what else it is?”
“I don’t know…is it a heart?”
“A heart, yes. Isn’t that amazing? I’m doing a whole perception series, images of the body that look like something else. Sometimes I think the entire world is contained within each living person. That mystery, and the mystery of perception—I care about that. So I understand what you mean about music.”
David sent concentrated light through the enlarger, then slid the paper into the developer. He was deeply aware of Paul standing next to him in the darkness and the silence.
“Photography is all about secrets,” David said, after a few minutes, lifting the photo with a pair of tongs and slipping it into the fixer. “The secrets we all have and will never tell.”
“That’s not what music is like,” Paul said, and David heard the rejection in his son’s voice. He looked up, but it was impossible to read Paul’s expression in the soft red light. “Music is like you touch the pulse of the world. Music is always happening, and sometimes you get to touch it for a while, and when you do you know that everything’s connected to everything else.”
Then he turned and walked out of the darkroom.
“Paul!” David called, but his son was already clattering angrily down the exterior steps. David went out to the window, watching him run through the moonlight and up the back stairs and disappear inside. Moments later a light went on in his room, and the precise notes of Segovia drifted clearly and delicately through the air.
David, running over their conversation in his mind, considered going after him. He’d wanted to connect with Paul, to have a moment when they understood each other,