The weight of water - Anita Shreve [9]
I look over at Thomas. He is breathing slowly. His face, which normally has high color, has gone pale. He seems stunned by the simple fall of hair from a knot-as though the image itself, or the memories it evokes, were unwanted news.
I do not have many personal photographs of Thomas. There are dozens of other pictures of him, photos of a public nature: book-jacket portraits, for example, and formal snapshots in magazines and newspapers. But in my own collection, Thomas has almost always managed to avert his eyes or to turn his head altogether, as if he did not want to be captured on any day at any place in time. I have, for instance, a picture of Thomas at a party at our apartment after Billie was born: Thomas is stooped slightly, speaking with a woman, another poet, who is also a friend. He has seen me coming with the camera, has dipped his head and has brought a glass up to his cheek, almost entirely obscuring his profile. In another photograph, Thomas is holding Billie on a bench in a park. Billie, perched on Thomas’s knee, seems already aware of the camera and is smiling broadly and clasping her tiny fists together with delight at this new activity, at this strange face that her mother has put on — one with a moving and briefly flickering eye. Thomas, however, has bent his head into Billie’s neck. Only his posture tells the viewer he is the father of the child.
For years I thought that Thomas avoided the camera because he has a scar that runs from the corner of his left eye to his chin — the result of a car accident when he was seventeen. It is not disfiguring, in the way some scars can be, ruining a face so that you no longer want to look at it; instead, Thomas’s scar seems to follow the planes of his face — as though a brush had made a quick stroke, a perfect curve. It is almost impossible not to want to touch that scar, to run a fingertip along its bumpy ridge. But it is not the scar that makes Thomas turn his face away from the camera; it is, I think, that he cannot bear to be examined too closely by a lens. Just as he is not able to meet his eyes for any length of time in a mirror.
I have one photograph of Thomas in which he is not turned away. I took it on the morning after we met. He is standing in front of his apartment building in Cambridge, and he has his hands in the pockets of his trousers. He has on a wrinkled white shirt with a button-down collar. Even in this picture, the viewer can see that Thomas wants to pull away, and that it is with the greatest of effort that he has kept his eyes focused on the camera. He looks ageless in the photograph, and it is only because I happen to know that he is thirty-two that I would not think he was forty-seven or twenty-five. In the picture, one can see that Thomas’s hair, which is naturally thin and of no distinct color, has recently been cut short. I took the picture about nine o’clock in the morning. He looks that morning like someone I have known a long time — possibly since childhood.
We met for the first time, appropriately, in a bar in Cambridge. I was twenty-four, and worked for a Boston paper, assigned recently to Local Sports. I was on my way home from a shoot in Somerville of a high school girls’ basketball team, but I needed a bathroom and a pay phone.
I heard his voice before I saw his face. It was low and measured, authoritative and without noticeable accent.
When he finished the reading, he turned slightly to acknowledge a nod, and I could see Thomas’s face then in the light. I was struck by his mouth — he had a loose and generous mouth, the only extravagance in a spare face. Later, when I was sitting with him, I saw that his eyes were set closely together, so that I did not think he was classically handsome. His irises, however, were navy and flecked with gold, and he had large pupils,