11. Sunday #3
He didn’t look at her as he began to speak.
“Things weren’t good for me and Paola when I moved to Las Vegas.
I don’t remember how much I told you back then, but things were bad pretty much right away.
It was the combination of not being able to work much because of visa issues, staying home with Jandro, and living in the same house as Paola’s parents.
She had a job working for her father, and he offered me a job too, taking photos of real estate, but I said no.
I felt like that would make things worse, if Paola and I were working for her father and living with him.
He would have had control over every aspect of our lives.
But when I turned him down, he decided I was lazy. ”
Some of this was what Sarah had feared would happen back in Toronto. “So did Paola end up getting her American law degree?”
“She took the bar exam, but she didn’t practice. Her father offered her a raise if she agreed to keep working exclusively for him.”
“That’s…”
“Controlling? Yeah. And meanwhile, I was home with Jandro all day and really isolated. I got a little depressed. Sometimes Paola would get home at night and I would just take off in my car and drive out into the desert an hour or two until everything was quiet. There were some of the most amazing stars I’d ever seen out there.
So I started taking my camera. And it was like I got a piece of my soul back.
” He shot her a look. “It was a learning curve, but I went on a lot of message boards about night photography and met other people who did it. And eventually I got a few of my shots into a gallery in Vegas.”
“And all was forgiven with your father-in-law and he started taking you seriously?” Sarah asked lightly.
Ren gave a weary smile. “It’s like you’ve heard this story.
He did not take me seriously. And I wanted to move back to Canada, but I had done everything wrong in terms of being able to move away and share custody.
We did eventually move out of her parents’ house, but her father gifted Paola the house we moved into, so he still had control over us that way. ”
“Right.” She could see it all: the outlines of the whole divorce.
“So when we split, I doubled down on night photography because I could schedule it around spending time with my son, since it was the exact opposite of Paola’s work schedule.
I started running workshops on weekends.
And once I had a few clients who liked shooting with me, they started suggesting places.
‘What if we did one at Yellowstone? What about the Grand Canyon?’”
Sarah nodded. That was how her photography career had taken off: recommendations from a few loyal clients.
“By that point, Jandro was in school, so I worked out a schedule where I could be home for three weeks and then go away for a week on a workshop. Sometimes I was assisting friends with running workshops, sometimes I was running my own. But it gave me a life back. It’s why I was worried about you when Paul said you stopped shooting after your divorce. ”
She shrugged. “My Single Life series was fun, and my babies series was fun. The problem was that I stopped feeling fun, so I couldn’t seem to shoot anything people wanted to buy. People don’t want images about loss and grieving. There’s no money in grieving.”
“Was there one thing that happened that caused the divorce?” Ren asked.
Sarah shuddered, looking out the window. “I don’t want to get into it.”
Ren nodded and flipped on the radio, searching for stations.
The pickings were slim. Newfoundland didn’t do radio especially well.
It did two things well: it had a lot of trees and it kept going.
There was one road across the northern end of the province, a long stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway, and once you were on it, there was not much to see except rolling hills, clusters of small houses, and lots and lots of balsam firs and white spruces, on and on to the horizon, broken by the occasional lake that mirrored the bright blue sky.
“Should I play some music?” she asked as Ren searched the static. “I have an app on my phone. Or I could connect your phone.”
“You can play anything as long as it’s Pearl Jam.”
She picked up her phone and put on a playlist for him. “I’ve actually been on an eighties kick,” she explained. “I’ll do the first hour of music and you pick the next.”
They listened to Sarah’s current favorite mix, filled with songs from The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, and The Clash. Somehow, the despair that seemed to bubble just beneath the surface of those songs had suited her this past year.
“I bet your high school boyfriend loved this stuff,” Ren said after a while.
“He was more into Marilyn Manson,” Sarah said with a grin. “We don’t need to talk about it.”
“And did you do goth make-up too?”
“Like I said, we don’t need to talk about it.”
“I wish that photo had been on your living room wall.”
“They’re all burned, and that’s all you’re going to hear about it.”
Ren laughed and Sarah let herself be happy for a moment. He was her friend, in spite of everything. And they were on a road trip.
A Joy Division song came on that they both knew the words to, and they sang along. She had never heard him sing before.
An hour and a half into the journey, they stopped at a larger town to buy a few last items they would need: a sleeping bag for Sarah, some hiking sneakers and practical clothes for her, and a few odds and ends that would help them survive a week of night shoots.
Ren paid for everything with his credit card.
“I feel like a teenager with my mom at the mall,” she said as they walked out of a store. “I can pay for my own clothes.”
“But you’re only buying them because I needed your help and didn’t warn you ahead of time,” he said. “I imagine you prefer slightly more fashionable stuff than this.” Then he smiled. “Or at least, twenty-year-old vintage versions of this.”
“Do you still wear leather jackets? I haven’t seen one on this trip.”
“I had the one I wore at McGill until recently. My son just stole it from me.”
“I have to meet this kid.”
Ren grinned. “He’s very funny.”
As if on cue, just as they were crossing the small shopping mall parking lot, his phone rang.
“Jandro,” he said. “Qu’est-ce qu’il se passe?”
Sarah pointed to the driver’s seat, offering to drive, and Ren nodded and then handed her the keys and stepped away to talk to his son in French. She watched him rubbing the back of his head while pacing anxiously for a few minutes before he returned to the car with a sigh.
“Everything all right?” she asked, starting the engine.
“Jandro wants to come with me on my workshop to the Galapagos Islands later this summer, but his mother says it will interrupt his tutoring schedule. She’s trying to get him ready to do testing so he can apply to private schools for high school next year.
He thinks I can talk her into letting him go, but I try not to get between them in fights. ”
“Makes sense.”
“Paola thinks his whole future is on the line, which doesn’t help because he has test anxiety.
And I want him to do well, but I hate how intense she gets about it.
” Ren sighed and rubbed his face. “I just think it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he comes on that trip with me.
But I can’t admit that to him without starting a fight with her. ”
She nodded. “Agreeing on how to raise kids is hard even when you’re married,” she said. “Anya’s always getting into disagreements with Jeremy about Ilona, and they’re both pretty easygoing. Paola always seemed…” Sarah stopped herself.
“She wants what she wants,” he filled in.
“Like a freight train that you can climb aboard or get out of the way. Anyway, I was going to stop over in Toronto on my way home from this workshop, so I’m going to see if I can get her to bring him up and I can spend a weekend there with Jandro instead, so he still gets a fun trip this summer.
He could spend a day or two and visit some universities in Toronto with me.
Paola wants to inspire him to get excited about college. ”
“How often do you come to Toronto?” The thought hurt a little. Had he been passing through town often without telling her?
He gave her a quick look. “I usually make it up once a year or so.”
She nodded. “Right. Well, it’s your turn for music.” She tried for a casual smile. “I want to see if you’re listening to the same stuff you were listening to in Las Vegas.”
“What was I listening to? I don’t even remember. I remember we listened to that Lord Huron song.”
“It was a lot of male singer-songwriters who were deep in their feelings.”
Ren connected his phone to the rental car and put on a playlist. “Here’s my current favorites. You can tell me whether my taste has changed.” The songs now were by Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, and Nick Cave.
“Huh,” she said as she looked through the list. “Now it’s all men who are disappointed with humanity.”
Ren gave a little laugh. “Probably accurate. Right after my divorce, I was sad, but I wasn’t angry yet.”
“When did you get angry?”
He looked at her for a long moment. “So can I explain what happened? That night?”
Sarah hesitated, then shook her head. “No. Not yet. We’re getting along right now, and we have to work together this week. I don’t want to fight.”
He took another long breath and released it. “Okay. Not yet.”
Sarah felt like a coward. A long stretch of highway opened ahead of them and Leonard Cohen muttered in their ears about the darkness of modern society.
“So you promised to talk me through the basics of shooting the stars,” she said at last.
“Sure,” he said. He looked at the road. “You know a lot of this already, but the basic problem with night photography is setting your exposure and shutter speed, right? If you set your exposure correctly for the stars…”
“Then the foreground is too dark,” Sarah filled in.