In the garden of Linda and Jay Peterson-Cornell’s house were two sculptures by Alexander Calder, both on one side of the large and bright blue swimming pool; inside the house on the walls of the living room were two Picassos and an Edward Hopper. There was also an early Philip Guston at the end of the sloping hallway that led to the guest area.
“Come,” Linda directed, and both the other women followed her down the hallway, which swerved around a corner then led through the long, glass-paneled walkway that finally opened into the guest suite. Linda nodded to the maid to indicate that she could leave, then Linda waited for Yvonne to say something. Yvonne just kept glancing around, gripping the handle of her wheelie suitcase, and said nothing about the house, which, even if you did not recognize the art on the walls—astonishing for a photographer not to recognize art—was still worth commenting on. The house had been renovated a few years earlier, and what the architect had done was inspired. The guestroom was all glass.
“Where’s the door?” Yvonne finally said.
“There is no door,” Linda said. She could have told Yvonne that there was no need to worry about privacy, as she and her husband stayed upstairs in the front of the house and the back garden had no houses overlooking it, but Linda did not say this. Instead she showed Yvonne the bathroom across the hall, which also had no door and was in the shape of a V and had no shower curtain or stall, the shower nozzle simply protruded from the wall. The floor was tilted to take the running water away.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Yvonne said, and Linda told her that everyone said that. Karen-Lucie Toth had continued to stand silently near Yvonne this whole time: She was the most famous of the photographers at the Summer Festival and the one who came back every year. Linda knew that Karen-Lucie had asked if Yvonne Tuttle could teach a class this summer, and the directors had agreed, although Yvonne’s portfolio was not as strong as the Festival usually required. But no one at the Festival wanted to lose Karen-Lucie: The students loved her, and her work was well-known, and also Karen-Lucie’s husband had thrown himself off the top of the Sheraton in Fort Lauderdale three years before. Karen-Lucie Toth got a pass on everything, including politeness, Linda thought, because when she said now to Karen-Lucie, “I don’t believe you’ve been inside this house before,” Karen-Lucie, also tall, also with brown hair—they could have been sisters, Linda observed—only said, in her extraordinarily thick Alabama accent, “I have not.”
After that, Yvonne and Karen-Lucie went away, and Linda, watching through the kitchen window as they walked down the road, saw them talking intently to each other and felt sure they were talking about her. Linda was jealous of Karen-Lucie Toth—she knew this, it was not a suppressed feeling—because Karen-Lucie was famous and childless and still pretty, and because she had no husband. Linda would have liked her own husband, whose intelligence had once impressed her so, to simply disappear.
The town hosting the photography festival was a small town about an hour outside of Chicago, with a library and a school and a church and a bright red hardware store that had a row of mason jars in its front window. There were also two cafés and three restaurants and one bar that at night often played live music. The houses near the center of town were large and old and well-kept, their porches cluttered this time of year with big pots of geraniums and petunias. The trees in town were tall oaks and black walnuts, and the boughs of honey locusts and chokecherries were pendulous, so that when there were no children playing in the park or in the schoolyard the trees could be heard with their own sound of whispers, and sometimes there was the tinkling sound of ash leaves too. A private high school that had gone bankrupt years earlier and eventually been forced to close was still available—parts of it—for the classrooms of the photography festival. In order to get to these buildings you needed to walk through pathways so thick with bushes and tree boughs that houses were only glimpsed as one passed by. It had almost a fairy-tale quality to it, the town. Yvonne Tuttle said this to Karen-Lucie Toth, and Karen-Lucie said she thought that too. They had just arrived at the building where a welcoming reception was being held.
Joy Gunterson, the director of the festival, had black ringlets and she was short and strikingly skinny. She thanked Yvonne for coming, saying that she was happy to include any friend of Karen-Lucie Toth’s. It seemed to Yvonne that Joy Gunterson’s eyes kept looking up toward the ceiling during this conversation, and after Joy walked away Yvonne told this to Karen-Lucie, who said “Oh, remind me” just as a woman walked up to them, dressed like someone from the sixties, with a pillbox hat, and a short coat, and a little pocketbook that matched her high heels; this woman threw her arms around Karen-Lucie, and Yvonne saw that the woman was a man. “I’m crazy about Karen-Lucie,” he told Yvonne, and Karen-Lucie puckered her lips and said, “Dollface, yew are just the sweetest little boyfriend I know.”
“You two look like sisters,” the man said. His shaved beard showed through his makeup, and his features were fine, almost perfect in their proportions.
“We are sisters,” Yvonne answered. “Ripped apart at birth.”
“Savagely,” Karen-Lucie added. “But we’re together now. Look at that sweet pocketbook on your darlin’ wrist.”
“What’s your name?” Yvonne asked.
“Tomasina. Here. At home, Tom.” He gave a graceful shrug, a subdued girlish bounce.
“Got it,” Yvonne said.
Linda did not comment as she got into bed next to her husband, and Jay did not comment either, although it was unusual these days for Linda to watch with him. On the laptop that Jay held against his knees they both gazed at Yvonne, who had arrived back at the house so late that neither of them had stayed in the living room waiting for her. Now she tossed her keys onto the bed, and her sigh could be heard through the audio. Yvonne put her hands to her hips and looked all around her. Then she went into the bathroom, where the cameras caught her staring so intently at the shower nozzle, which naturally gave the effect of Yvonne staring straight at them, that a shot of fear went through Linda, but Yvonne—surprising to Linda—chose not to shower and only used the toilet instead, washed her face, brushed her teeth, and came back into the guestroom, where she stood again, looking through the huge panes of glass that now showed the blackness of night. Finally she opened her small suitcase and undressed. Her body was more youthful-looking than Linda would have thought, but height could do that for you. Her breasts were still firm-appearing, and her thighs were—in the somewhat grainy light of the camera—smooth. She kept her underpants on and donned a pair of white pajamas that gave her the look, with her hair now in a low ponytail, of someone almost as young as their daughter. But of course she was not; she was a middle-aged woman a long way from her home in Arizona, and she reached for her cellphone and the ringing sounded quietly through the laptop on Jay’s knees.
“Talk low,” they heard Yvonne say. “I’ve got you on speakerphone while I unpack. I mean, this guest house, or room, or whatever it is, is miles away, but you never know. Jeeze.”
“Hey, honey child.” Unmistakably the voice of Karen-Lucie Toth. “You okay?”
“No,” said Yvonne. Her voice was muffled; she was facing away, pulling things from her suitcase. “It’s creepy here, Karen-Lucie. How’m I ever going to sleep?”
“Take a pill, honey. You know, I think I heard they got all their money from his father, who was in plastics. What’s that mean, I wonder, to be in plastics? The weirdos you’re staying with. They’re in plastics. Can you take a pill, baby doll?”