Double Image

1

APPROACHING THE BEVERLY HILLS HOTEL, Coltrane steered left off Sunset Boulevard and headed up Benedict Canyon Drive. It was a little after eight Wednesday morning, the day after Packard’s funeral. Determined to start the project, he and Jennifer had set out early. They drove through the shade of towering palm trees, past expensive homes concealed behind meticulously trimmed hedges and tall house-hugging shrubs. The sky was clear and bright for a change, the clouds having moved on.

“Don’t keep me in suspense. Which house is first on the list?” Jennifer asked.

“Falcon Lair.” Coltrane wore his typical work clothes: leather hiking boots, jeans, and a navy sweatshirt.

In contrast, Jennifer had an orange sweatshirt with a Southern California Magazine logo. Her short blond hair was tucked beneath a baseball cap, making her face look attractively boyish, reminding Coltrane of the movie actor she now mentioned. “Rudolph Valentino?”

“The sheik himself.”

“I never understood why he called the place Falcon Lair.”

“In the mid-twenties, Valentino’s second wife was trying to get the studio to let her supervise the production of one of his movies. The picture was called The Hooded Falcon. But she ran up costs so much that the studio canceled it. To make her feel better, Valentino named the mansion they were building in honor of the aborted project. They got divorced shortly afterward.”

“And what happened to Valentino?”

“When his wife left him, he threatened to blow his brains out. Instead, he bought tons of antique furniture – suits of armor and Moorish screens, crap like that. It was more than Falcon Lair would hold, but he managed to cram it all in there. In the end, he almost spent himself into bankruptcy. He worried about his career until he died at the age of thirty-one from a bleeding ulcer.”

2

PACKARD’S MUCH- PRAISED PHOTOGRAPH OF FALCON LAIR had been taken from a neighboring hilltop. It showed the thirteen-room mansion tiny in the distance, surrounded by a high white wall, perched on a flattened ridge, looking so isolated that it bore an intriguing resemblance to a Spanish monastery. None of the many hills beyond it had any houses on it, but tentacle-like roads predicted the invasion about to take place. On the bottom left of the photograph, amid exposed earth on one of the slopes, a developer’s sign announced BEVERLY TERRACE. The implication was clear. Soon the area would be filled with comparable estates. The remoteness that made the location attractive would be destroyed. As if commenting on the impending invasion, Packard had managed to capture a bird of prey hovering in the foreground.

3

NEAR THE TOP OF BENEDICT CANYON DRIVE, Coltrane chose a secluded street to the left and headed higher into the wooded hills. The neighborhood became increasingly deserted the more the houses looked expensive.

“How do you know this is the way?” Jennifer asked.

“I don’t. Monday, I bought a contour map and tried to orient it with Packard’s photo and a Beverly Hills street guide. Falcon Lair is on one of those bluffs to the right, so we have to go in the opposite direction to find the spot where Packard took the photograph.”

Jennifer shook her head. “These streets weren’t here back then. There’s no way to tell which route Packard used.”

“And all these trees cut off the view, so we don’t know where we are in relation to Falcon Lair.”

Six hours later, dogged determination was all that kept them going. “This assignment needs an explorer, not a photographer,” Coltrane said as he steered onto yet another side street.

Jennifer squirmed. “My rear end hurts. I feel as if I’ve driven to Vegas and back.” Empty coffee cups, along with scrunched-up junk-food wrappers, littered the floor of the passenger seat – from several bathroom trips to West Hollywood. “I bet I put on ten pounds.”

“Maybe getting me to do this project was Packard’s idea of a practical joke.” Coltrane reached the crest of what seemed the hundredth side street and pointed toward a walled estate on the left. “Do you think this is where he took the photograph?”

Jennifer glanced from the estate toward the barely glimpsed view to the right. “Let’s give it a try. Anything to get out and see if my legs still work.”

A breeze smelled sweet. Despite the recent rain, Coltrane heard a lawn sprinkler.

“Could be.” He studied the estate. It was higher than the street. In fact, it was on the highest spot around. “From inside, we might be able to see over the trees toward the opposite side of the canyon.”

Jennifer checked her watch. “Ten after two. The light will soon be perfect.”

“Yeah, maybe the day won’t be a total waste. Maybe I can still get some shots.”

The rhododendron-lined driveway had a closed metal gate. A smaller closed gate had a sidewalk leading onto the property. An intercom was mounted on an ivy-covered wall.

Coltrane pushed the button.

“Hello?” A female voice, sounding tinny, came from the intercom.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m a photographer for-”

“You’re early.”

Coltrane exchanged a puzzled look with Jennifer.

“Excuse me, ma’am?” he said to the intercom.

“You’re not supposed to be here until Saturday.”

“Saturday?”

“For our daughter’s wedding.”

“I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding.”

“My God, don’t tell me you can’t be here for the wedding!” the woman said.

“I don’t know anything about that. I work for Southern California Magazine and-”

“Magazine? But I don’t want any magazines.”

Jennifer started to giggle.

“Ma’am, I’m not selling magazines. What I want to do is take some photographs of a house across-”

“Photographs of our house? My husband will go insane. He hates anybody knowing anything about our private life. The last movie he produced was about Arab terrorists. He says, if they find out where we live, they’ll blow us up in our sleep.”

Jennifer bent over, trying to stifle her laughter.

“Ma’am, I have no intention of photographing your house. I want to photograph Rudolph Valentino’s house.”

“Rudolph Valentino? You’re not making sense! For all I know, you’re a terrorist. Young man, I can see you from the house. If you don’t leave right now, I’m calling the police!”

“Please, let me explain!”

The intercom had been making a slight buzzing sound. Now it went dead.

When Coltrane turned to Jennifer for moral support, he found her slumped on the curb, holding herself, laughing. “Only nineteen more houses to go,” she managed to say between guffaws. “At this rate, you’ll be done by next summer.”

“Maybe not,” a voice said.

4

JENNIFER STOPPED LAUGHING. They spun toward the gate, where an attractive, delicate-looking woman in her late twenties studied them. She was tall and slim, wearing tan slacks and a brown cardigan. Her arms were crossed. A kerchief covered her hair.

“Are you really from Southern California Magazine?”

Jennifer stood and showed her best winning smile, gesturing toward the logo on her sweatshirt. “Cross my heart.”

“Just a second.” The woman reached through the bars on the gate and pressed the intercom.

The tinny voice responded immediately. “Young man, I told you-”

“Mother, don’t call the police. These people seem all right. I’m going to let them in.”

“But-”

The woman took her finger off the intercom’s button, then pressed numbers on a keypad on the other side of the gate, freeing an electronic lock. “You’re serious about photographing a house across the canyon, Mr…”

“Mitch Coltrane. This is my editor, Jennifer Lane.”

“Diane Laramy.”

They shook hands and stepped through the gate.

“What’s this about Rudolph Valentino?”

Coltrane explained the assignment as they climbed a smooth slanted lawn, stopping with their backs to a lemon tree at the hill’s highest point.

“And there it is.” Jennifer sounded amazed. She showed Packard’s photograph to Diane, then pointed down toward a curving street of houses on an opposite but lower hill. One sprawling red-roofed structure stood slightly apart, perched on an eroded slope, solitary on a dead-end road. Its walls were still white. It still looked like a Spanish monastery. But there the similarity ended. The invasion that Packard’s photograph had predicted made Falcon Lair look besieged.

“I was beginning to think this project couldn’t be done,” Coltrane said.

“Eerie,” Diane said. “Looking at that photograph and then at the house, I feel as if I’m in the past and the present simultaneously.”

“That’s the idea,” Coltrane said.

He and Jennifer crisscrossed the hill, leaning this way and that, all the while comparing their view of Falcon Lair to the perspective in Packard’s photograph, trying to find the exact spot where Packard had set up his camera.

Scraping his back against the lemon tree, Coltrane smiled. “Well, I’ll be… Yes. Right here.”

“Let me see.” Jennifer hurried to Coltrane’s left.

Bemused, Diane joined Coltrane on his right. He raised the photo so that it obscured the view, then lowered it, the Falcon Lair from the 1920s replaced by the Falcon Lair of the present.

“It’s like a weird kind of double exposure,” Diane said. “This lemon tree wouldn’t have been here then.”

“Or the lawn,” Jennifer added. “And obviously not your house.”

“And none of these other houses.” Coltrane continued to raise and lower the photograph, the effect hypnotic.

“So many years ago. Someone stood exactly where I’m standing now and took that picture.”

“He died on Sunday,” Coltrane said.

Diane suddenly shivered.

“Is something wrong?” Coltrane asked.

“No. There’s just a chill in the air.”

But Coltrane couldn’t help wondering if Diane had shivered for another reason. Her delicate features began to trouble him. Her skin was so translucent that he could see the hint of blue veins in her cheeks. Her eyes seemed sunken, possibly because she had lost a lot of weight. Her slacks and cardigan hung on her. Her kerchief covered her head so completely that he didn’t see any of her hair.

“Well…” Coltrane felt awkward. “We’re taking up your time.”

“No problem,” Diane said. “I’m enjoying this.”

“Even so…” Coltrane studied the sky. “The light’s about as good as I can hope for. I’d better get started.”

5

WHEN HE AND JENNIFER WENT BACK TO THE CAR TO GET THE camera, the tripod, and the bags of equipment, Diane insisted on helping, out of breath even though she carried only a small camera bag to the crest of the hill. Coltrane didn’t have time to think about the implications. He had only about two hours of effective light remaining and needed to hurry.

It took almost fifteen minutes to get the heavy camera secured on the tripod. After that, he used a light meter, calculated the necessary shutter speed and aperture setting, chose a lens, poked his head beneath the black cloth at the rear of the camera, used the bellows to adjust the focus, and compared what he saw to Packard’s photograph. Getting everything lined up was more difficult than he had anticipated. After forty-five minutes of concentrating on an upside-down reversed image, he felt light-headed, as if he were upside down.

He made twelve exposures, but he wasn’t satisfied. Framing the image to make its perspective identical to that in Packard’s photograph wasn’t going to produce a brilliant photograph, he realized. The result would merely be a visual trick. He had to build on what Packard had done, to find a metaphor equivalent to the bird of prey hovering over Falcon Lair.

“Mitch?”

Coltrane rubbed the back of his neck.

“Mitch?”

“Huh?” He turned toward Jennifer.

“You haven’t moved in the last ten minutes. Are you all right?”

“Just thinking.”

“You’ve got only forty-five minutes of light,” Jennifer said.

“Forty-five?” Startled, Coltrane checked his watch. He had lost more time then he realized.

Yet again, he poked his head beneath the black cloth at the rear of the camera. Earlier, when he and Jennifer had driven toward the estate, Coltrane had wondered, not seriously, if Packard had been playing a practical joke on him by suggesting this project. Now that idea struck him as being very serious. With one foot in the grave, had Packard been determined to show Coltrane – typical of all would-be Packards – that Coltrane didn’t have a hope of competing with him? Was this project the old man’s way of proving one last time how superior he was?

“Mitch?”

Coltrane noticed slight movement on the focusing screen. He heard a far-off echoing whump-whump-whump and peered up from the camera to search the sky, seeing that the movement was a distant whirling speck: a helicopter. He inserted an eight-by-ten-inch negative and grabbed the shutter release. “Come on,” he whispered tensely. He held his breath as the chopper’s glinting blades crossed the horizon.

“Now.” He squeezed the shutter release.

The camera clicked.

He breathed out. Packard’s bird of prey had symbolized Valentino’s bad ending and the impending invasion of the land. Now a helicopter and all it symbolized about the mechanization of the twentieth century had taken the falcon’s place.

“If that picture turns out the way I hope…” Coltrane watched the helicopter recede into the distance. “That was a one-time only chance. Even if another helicopter flies past, the odds are it’ll never be in the same spot as Packard’s falcon.”

Jennifer studied the sky. “You’re losing the light faster than we expected.”

“There might be enough for a couple more.”

A soft voice asked, “Do you suppose…”

Puzzled, Coltrane looked at Diane.

“When you’re finished taking pictures of the house…” Diane hesitated.

“Yes?”

“Could you take one of me?”

“Of course. It would be my pleasure.”

“You’re sure I’m not imposing?”

“Not at all. You made us feel welcome. I’d enjoy repaying the favor. If you turn this way… yes… with the sunset on your face…” Coltrane smiled. “It’ll be lovely.”

6

“SHE’S DYING,” Coltrane said, driving from the mansion.

“Something’s definitely wrong,” Jennifer said.

In his rearview mirror, Coltrane saw Diane standing in her driveway, her arms crossed on her oversized sweater, forlornly watching them head back toward Benedict Canyon Drive. Then he rounded a corner, and she disappeared.

“Studying her through the camera made it even more obvious,” Coltrane said. “The hollows around her eyes. I don’t think she has any hair under that kerchief. I think she’s bald from chemotherapy. I think getting married on Saturday is her attempt to grab at life.”

Jennifer didn’t say anything for a moment. “Yes. To grab at life.”

It was after dark, around six, when they pulled into the garage beneath Coltrane’s town house in Westwood. Jennifer’s BMW was at the curb.

“Do you want to get something to eat?” she asked.

“What I’d really like to do is go into the darkroom and develop these negatives.”

The photographs of Falcon Lair turned out to be excellent. Most were a close match to the angle Packard had used, but close wouldn’t do it. For the exercise to work, the match had to be perfect. The one with the helicopter in place of the falcon did the trick. All Coltrane had to do was crop it a little and print a slight enlargement of the cropped area so that Falcon Lair was precisely the same size in both photos. Eerily, the helicopter was almost exactly where the falcon had been. By modifying the development period, Coltrane was able to get the same crisp black-and-white definition that Packard had. When he glanced from Packard’s photo to his own, he had the odd sensation that he was looking at time-lapse photography, that both pictures had been taken by the same person, who had made himself wait motionless in one spot for two-thirds of a century. Staring at that relic from the past, he couldn’t help recalling that after Valentino’s death, Buster Keaton had moved into the area and put up an Italian villa. John Gilbert had built a Mediterranean palace. Other movie stars – their names no longer familiar – had built their own mansions. All lost and gone. Only Falcon Lair remained. And would remain as long as Packard’s photo and his own survived.

“It’s a keeper.” Jennifer put an arm around him.

But the photograph of Falcon Lair wasn’t the treasure of the day. That honor went to the image of Diane.

He had done it in color. The glow of sunset chased the wanness from Diane’s cheeks. Her face was raised yearningly, her recessed eyes sad, her gaunt features determined, her frail shoulders braced as she smiled wistfully toward the sunset of her life.

“That I want my name on,” Coltrane said. “Her bravery’s an inspiration.”

“Packard would have been pleased to take that picture,” Jennifer said.

While they worked in the darkroom, they heard the phone ring on three different occasions. Each time, it stopped after four rings, the limit Coltrane had set for the answering machine to engage. “It’s probably more reporters wanting an interview about those war-atrocity photos. I hope my fifteen minutes of notoriety soon stop,” he said.

But after he finished making the prints and went to the living room to press the play button on his answering machine, he frowned when all he heard was mournful classical music.

Jennifer stopped next to him. “The same as on Saturday night?”

Coltrane nodded, troubled. “And this time, we know it wasn’t Packard.”

7

REPRESSING HIS MISGIVINGS ABOUT THE PHONE CALLS, Coltrane left his apartment the next morning shortly after seven. He brimmed with energy, never having been this enthusiastic about any project. First, a few blocks away, he stopped at a mailbox to drop in an envelope addressed to Diane. Along with three copies of her photograph, the package contained a copy of Packard’s Falcon Lair photograph and Coltrane’s parallel version of it. His note read, “Here are some mementos of our photographic adventure. Enjoy your honeymoon. I wish you every happiness.” He watched the lid close on the mailbox. To grab at life, he thought.

With that, he went to work.

There was a time, he knew, when pepper trees had grown on Hollywood Boulevard, when Beverly Hills had bridle paths, when streetcar tracks occupied the route that freeways now did, when Sherman Oaks, North Hollywood, Burbank, Tarzana, Encino, Van Nuys, and all the other communities in the San Fernando Valley (how Coltrane loved the litany of their names) were distinct villages separated by farmland. Each had a different architecture, English-style cottages in one contrasting with mission-style bungalows in another, Victorians in this area, colonials in that. The distinctness of each area was destroyed as the farmland shrank and the communities merged, although sometimes, driving from community to community, if Coltrane ignored where the borders met and concentrated only on the historical core of each area, he could still see the contrast between one community and another.

Randolph Packard had managed to capture those differences. He recorded a sense of welcoming space, of sun-bathed separateness. As always in his photographs, a detail here and there predicted the impending doom – the tiny figures of surveyors on a field in the background, for example, or a half-completed skeleton of a building on a distant hill. Coltrane brooded about those changes as he took the 405 into the smog-filled valley. He imagined what it must have been like in Packard’s youth to have a clear view of the now-haze-shrouded San Gabriel Mountains. As he followed Packard’s route, trying to see with Packard’s eyes, he had the sensation of going back in time.

8

THE TRAILER COURT WAS IN GLENDALE – drab rows of dilapidated mobile homes, overflowing Dumpster bins at the end of each row, gravel in front of each trailer, no grass anywhere, no trees, just a few flower boxes here and there, spindly marigolds and geraniums drooping over their rims. Coltrane drove down to the third row and turned left, passing an elderly man wearing suspenders over a T-shirt and carrying a basket of laundry toward a clothesline at the side of his trailer.

Halfway along, Coltrane reached a small playground, stopped the car, got out, and approached the playground’s rusted waist-high chain-link fence. The swings and the teeter-totter were tarnished and unpainted. The ground was like concrete. A thin black woman pushed a young boy in a swing. The woman’s dark hair hung in half a dozen braids. She wore sandals, wrinkled shorts, and a red pullover, which, although faded, was the only bright spot in the trailer court. As the boy stretched his legs to give more force to his upward momentum, the soles of his running shoes were visible – and their holes.

The woman narrowed her eyes toward Coltrane, then returned her attention to the boy.

“Hi,” Coltrane said.

She didn’t answer.

“I used to live here,” he said.

The woman stayed silent.

“Every once in a while, when I’m in the neighborhood, I come back.”

The woman shrugged.

“My mother used to push me in those swings,” Coltrane said.

“You want something?”

“I’d like to take your picture.”

“Why?” The woman tensed.

“Somebody once took a picture of me and my mother exactly where you’re standing. I’d like to feel what the photographer felt. I’d like to try to take the same picture.”

The woman looked baffled.

“Go back to what you were doing. I won’t bother you. I’ll just take one picture and leave.”

The woman’s gaze faltered as she struggled with her suspicion. At last, after another shrug, she returned her attention to the boy and started pushing him again.

Coltrane selected a fast shutter speed to avoid blur, then peered through his viewfinder. Knowing that Packard’s camera was too awkward for this situation, he was using his Nikon. Through the viewfinder, in miniature but somehow intensified, the woman pushed. The boy went up in the air, then swung back down. The woman gave another push, her body leaning into the motion. The boy looked up, as if his goal were the sky. As he veered back down, Coltrane adjusted the focus. He readied his finger on the shutter button. There wasn’t any question about the position he wanted them to be in. He had studied that position thousands of times in the photograph that had made him want to be a photographer.

In Sightings, a book that Packard had written about photography, the master had devoted a chapter to his theory of anticipation.

Once you see the elements of the image you want, it’s too late to release the camera’s shutter. By the time you do, those elements will have changed. In that instant, clouds will have shifted, smiles will have weakened, branches will have been nudged by a breeze. It is the nature of life for things to be in motion, even if they do not appear to be, and the only way to capture the precise positioning of your subject as you desire it is to study your subject until you understand its dynamic – and then to anticipate what your subject will do. The photographer’s task is to project into the future in order to make the present timeless.

Do it now, Coltrane thought. He pressed the shutter button, and in the ensuing millisecond, as the camera clicked, the woman and the boy achieved perfect balance. Through the viewfinder, time seemed suspended. Coltrane sighed and lowered the camera. The boy reached the limit of his upward glide, hovered, and began to descend. Time began again.

“Thanks,” Coltrane said. “What’s your name and address? I’ll send you a couple of prints.”

“Do I look that stupid? You think I’m gonna tell you my name and address?”

Coltrane’s spirit sank.

He turned from the playground and studied the trailer behind him. The three concrete steps to its entrance were cracked. The screen had been torn from the bent aluminum door. One of the windows had cardboard in it.

He crossed the gravel lane. The bent door creaked when he opened it. The metal door behind it shuddered when he knocked. He waited, not hearing any sound. He knocked a second time but still didn’t get a response. When he knocked a third time, he started to worry, only to see the door open and a stooped, wrinkled black woman with short silver hair frown out at him.

“You.” The woman clutched a tattered housecoat to her chest. “Where you been? Ain’t seen you in a couple of months.”

“I was away on several business trips – out of the country.”

“Got to thinkin’ somethin’ had happened to you.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, it did. Is this a convenient time?”

“The same as before?”

“Yes.”

“Get it over with.”

Entering, Coltrane smelled ancient cooking odors. He faced an oblong living room filled with tattered furniture. To the left, a fold-down card table had a jigsaw puzzle on it. Farther to the left, a counter separated the living room from the murky kitchen.

It seemed barely yesterday that he and his mother had stood where he now stood, the door open behind him, sunlight gleaming in, when his father had turned from playing solitaire at the kitchen counter and raised the gun toward his mother’s face.

Coltrane heard the shot slam his ears. He gaped at his mother falling, at the blood around her on the floor. He stared down for the longest time.

Finally, he raised his head and turned to the elderly woman. “Thank you.”

“What do you get out of this?”

“I’m not sure.” Coltrane gave the woman three hundred dollars.

“Real generous this time.”

“Well, I’m going through some changes. I might not be back.”

9

SCHOLARS ANALYZING PACKARD’S CONTRIBUTION TO photography had documented the location of each house in his series, but Coltrane never knew what he was going to find when he reached each address. Some of the houses no longer existed, variously replaced by an apartment building, a four-lane street, and a supermarket. Others had been renovated, their facades altered to the point where they weren’t recognizable. A few had been maintained. Most had decayed. But if finding them wasn’t difficult, locating the spot from which Packard had photographed them turned out to be almost as arduous as figuring out the vantage point from which he had photographed Falcon Lair.

In the following two weeks, each of Coltrane’s setups – in locations as various as Arcadia, Whitley Heights, Silver Lake, and Venice – turned out to have a story behind it, some as poignant as his meeting with Diane, others comic or repulsive or ennobling, and in two cases violent. In Culver City, he lugged the view camera, its tripod, and its bags of equipment to the top of a warehouse that had not existed when Packard took his photos. In Gardena, he paid for permission to shoot from an upstairs bedroom window of an eighty-year-old widow’s house. Other places, he photographed from an alley, a school yard, the side of a freeway, and the back of a pickup truck. He escaped a pack of vicious dogs. He saved the life of a drug addict who had overdosed in a drainage ditch. He talked his way out of a confrontation with a street gang. He met a blind novelist, a one-armed songwriter, and an aging actor who had once played a policeman on an ensemble TV show and was now an insurance salesman. He took pictures of everything.

Some nights, he got home too late to call Jennifer. Other nights, he had so much work to do in the darkroom that he kept the conversation short. “I’ll tell you all about it when I’m finished. I’m afraid I’ll jinx this if I talk about it or interrupt it. I haven’t felt this involved in an awfully long time. The project’ll be done soon. Then we’ll go away for a couple of days. Up to Carmel. Anyplace you like.”

Each night, when he checked his answering machine, there was always at least one hang-up call and that strange mournful music.