The Vanishing Point

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth Brundage

  Cover design by Lauren Harms

  Cover photograph by Igor Ustynskyy / Getty Images

  Author photograph by Edward Acker

  Cover © Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  littlebrown.com

  First Edition: May 2021

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  ISBN 978-0-316-43036-4

  LCCN 2020945987

  E3-20210402-DA-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: Portraits of Adults Julian

  Part Two: The Decisive Moment Rye

  Simone

  Rye

  Magda

  Part Three: Act Natural Theo

  Julian

  Theo

  Magda

  Julian

  Magda

  Part Four: Illumination Theo

  Rye

  Theo

  Rye

  Simone

  Rye

  Theo

  Rye

  Theo

  Part Five: The Aperture Rye

  Magda

  Julian

  Magda

  Theo

  Rye

  Simone

  Rye

  Simone

  Julian

  Rye

  Part Six: Raw Simone

  Rye

  Magda

  Rye

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Also by Elizabeth Brundage

  For my children

  Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

  Tap here to learn more.

  All photographs are time exposures of shorter or longer duration, and each describes a discrete parcel of time…Uniquely in the history of pictures, a photograph describes only that period of time in which it was made. Photography alludes to the past and the future only in so far as they exist in the present, the past through its surviving relics, the future through prophecy visible in the present.

  —John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye

  Part One

  Portraits of Adults

  A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

  —Richard Avedon, In the American West

  Julian

  It was on the subway that night, heading home from work, when he discovered the news about Rye Adler. Peering over the shoulder of a fellow commuter, he saw his long-lost friend looking back at him. Under his gloomy, unsmiling portrait read the headline: Rye Adler, Photographer of the Rich and Infamous, Is Presumed Dead at 52. Shaken, he stepped off the train at 86th Street and climbed up from the din of the underground into the late March dusk, taking the damp air into his lungs. For a moment he stood on the sidewalk, bearing the wake of irritable strangers, then started west as a cold rain began to fall. He remembered a bar he’d gone to a few times over on Amsterdam, and he walked the few blocks without an umbrella, ducking under ledges and awnings. The place wasn’t crowded, and once he’d crossed its dark threshold, entering a sanctuary of bloodred booths and muffled chatter, he doubted his ability to ever leave. He sat at the bar in his coat and ordered cheap bourbon because that was what he’d drunk with Adler back in the day, when they were grad students in Philadelphia and in love with the same woman.

  Unlike his old friend, Julian hadn’t made it. Not like he’d hoped. His mother always consoled him that it took longer than anyone predicted, but now that he was almost fifty, the prospect of any true recognition seemed doubtful. His friends all had the impression that he was doing well, better than they were, even, but this perception was entirely superficial, based on his skillfully curated social media pages and the sound bites he used at cocktail parties and gallery openings. Early on, he had, like Rye, achieved a certain distinction for attending the famed Brodsky Workshop, known among photography insiders as a breeding ground for the best talent, but for reasons that remained mysterious to him, things hadn’t turned out like he’d planned. Out of pride, he’d convinced himself that he wasn’t a failure; he was simply more suited to commercial work, and by anyone else’s standards he’d had a fine career. He’d made plenty of money. But advertising was a whole different animal, or maybe mindset was the better word. You had to narrow your focus and put the needs of others before your own. Others: that vast, proverbial melting pot of humanity. Whenever he lost track of what that was, he took a field trip to Walmart and roamed the aisles. He and Rye were on opposite ends of the anthropological spectrum: where Rye exploited his subjects in the name of high art, Julian promoted the products that kept them alive.

  He finished his second drink and thought of calling his wife, a habit he had yet to break. He had to assume she’d seen Adler’s obituary. He pictured her wandering around in a morbid daze, crashing into things. He would never forget their last night together out in Westchester, how she’d sat on the back steps in her mother’s old coat, smoking like a teenager. And later, after he’d held her for the last time, how she’d cried in his arms. He knew it was mostly his fault. As his therapist liked to say, he had trouble committing to things. While he’d succeeded in staying married to the same woman for exactly twenty-one years, he’d never actually felt committed—just the word made him feel wrapped in a straitjacket—and he could admit to being a shitty father even though he still couldn’t talk about it, couldn’t even say his son’s name out loud without breaking a sweat, that was the truth of it. How he would ultimately resolve this in his mind, he didn’t have a clue; maybe he never would. He felt really bad about that, but, to be fair, it wasn’t Julian who’d asked for the divorce. Ever since the thing with his assistant, she’d stopped talking to him. Shortly thereafter, he’d been served with divorce papers at his office, and Vera, his assistant, had gone into the bathroom to cry. It was kind of a scene. Embarrassing him like that in front of the people he worked with hadn’t been nice. But his wife could be ruthless when she set her mind to it. Under the circumstances, he was glad he’d insisted on keeping the apartment. This was where he belonged. Here in the city, alone.

  He sat in the bar till closing, then walked home in the cold, pulling up his collar. The lobby of his building, with its deco floors and granite walls, seemed morbidly serene, and the lonesome elevator, as it rose
to the fourteenth floor, was like a rattling cage. He shuffled down the corridor to his door and retrieved the paper from his mat. As he stepped inside, he encountered the screaming emptiness of his apartment. There was no longer any evidence of their life together. Even their wedding photograph, which had long reigned on the surface of the credenza, was absent. After that last night, when he knew it was over with her, he could no longer bear to look at it and threw it into the incinerator.

  He poured himself a drink and stood for a moment in the silent living room, staring out at the night, the city’s cold geometry. The vacant streets seemed to ache with a prescient gloom. He spread out the paper on the coffee table and reread the article about Adler, which listed his numerous awards and accolades, his long-standing Magnum membership, and his gift for capturing the inner lives of celebrities, quoting some of the editors he’d worked with, none of them able to comprehend how he’d met with such a fateful end. It was a tragic little story, really. As previous articles had alleged, he’d possibly taken his own life, hurling himself off a bridge somewhere upstate, but his body had not been found, and nobody was really sure if it was suicide. To anyone who knew Adler as well as Julian did, suicide was certainly not an option. They were having a memorial service on Sunday up in Hudson. He knew he had to go.

  He wasn’t especially tired. He lay on the couch, its fabric like cold asphalt and its architecture equally unyielding, remembering that September of ’98 when they first met, back when they were still equals and nearly feral with ambition. The Brodsky Workshop was competitive; it took only twelve students a year. Unlike the others’, Julian’s CV was pretty unremarkable. He’d gone to Rutgers, then worked a couple years at the Star-Ledger, Newark’s stalwart chronicle of the times, covering mostly sports and local elections, the occasional crime. He was still living at home, working out of a darkroom he’d built in his mother’s basement, when he’d decided to apply. He could vaguely recall the work he’d submitted to get in: stark black-and-white shots of his neighborhood out in Jersey, the unbearable stillness of the houses on the cul-de-sac, the overgrown lot behind the Pathmark, where, at thirteen, he’d gotten caught shoplifting, the window of the pizza parlor in the village, piled to the ceiling with slim white boxes.

  As proud as he’d been of those images, it soon became obvious that Rye’s were better. When they tacked up their assignments on the wall, Adler’s stood out. They were street scenes, mostly. People you might see every day but captured with a certain unapologetic tenderness. The woman in the pink kerchief, for example, standing on the corner, smoking a cigarette, accusing you of not noticing her just like all the other people in her life, the husband she couldn’t trust, the mother who drank, indifferent teachers blind to her potential, all evident in the premature lines on her forehead, the shabby, slightly dirty white handbag clutched under her arm, the fraying collar of her coat. Adler didn’t just look at someone; he looked into them, without judgment, with the sort of empathy they couldn’t find anywhere else.

  By the end of the first week, everybody knew Rye Adler had something special. Everybody wanted to be around him. To know what he knew. To see how he saw. Even then, when he was still in his twenties, people who mattered were calling him a visionary.

  Almost by chance, they shared an apartment that year. Julian had been living out of his suitcase in a cramped, seedy motel room when he saw a ROOMMATE WANTED notice in the workshop lounge. You might say that everything that followed was set into motion the second he pulled off that tab with Rye’s number on it. It was one of those older walk-up buildings around the corner from the university. The apartment was on the second floor over a hardware store that featured, in its large storefront window, a cat named Nicholas who dozed all day in the sunlight and patrolled the aisles by night; occasionally they’d wake to a murderous disruption. Of the two small bedrooms, Rye’s was slightly larger and had built-in shelves stacked with books of all kinds. Thumbtacked to the wall were assorted black-and-white pictures he’d taken of his parents in their Marrakech home, his mother’s glance of expectation as she fondled her beads, his father peering up over a French newspaper, and a poster from his favorite film, Blow-Up, which Julian hadn’t seen. Julian’s room was narrow and spare, with a twin bed and a dresser and a window that looked out on an alley. It suited him just fine. In the living room were a couple of mismatched chairs Rye had pulled off the street and a plant with leaves like elephant ears that clung to the dirty bay window. From the moment he moved in, Julian concluded that as roommates they were incompatible. Where Julian preferred a quiet, nearly monastic existence, Adler had a sort of impromptu celebrity that attracted a nightly brigade; it wasn’t unusual to find strangers sleeping on the floor the next morning. Even though it sometimes annoyed Julian, he never complained; he knew that living with someone like Rye was, for him, an accident of destiny. As a result, he didn’t mind being the one to clean up the mess, the countless beer bottles, ashtrays, dirty plates, and when Rye would emerge hours later still in his boxers, his hair mussed, surprised to find the apartment clean, he’d tease him for being such a neat freak. Julian didn’t let it bother him. Rye often treated him with measured tolerance, like he was a slightly annoying little brother. And in turn he put up with Rye’s idiosyncrasies, the ever-present containers of takeout in the refrigerator or Rye’s dirty laundry getting mixed with his own. Once, at the Laundromat, he’d discovered one of Rye’s Hawaiian shirts at the bottom of his pile and, as a symbol of his devotion, washed and even ironed it and, with great satisfaction, presented it to Rye like a gift, but his roommate only shrugged and said thanks, as if he’d just handed him the newspaper or something, and it occurred to Julian that Rye was used to people doing things for him. Unlike Julian’s Levi’s and JCPenney sweaters, Rye bought his clothes at flea markets and secondhand shops, preferring, he said, the life-worn threads of dead men. He rolled his own cigarettes with cheap pipe tobacco and smoked like a drifter, pinching the butt between his two stained fingers, but as much as he personified a man on the skids, he had an arrogance only bought with money. One night, a little drunk, he admitted that his father had made a fortune as a civil engineer, an architect of bridges. They’d moved around a lot. No matter where they lived, he told Julian, his mother always insisted on fresh flowers. In contrast, Julian’s father was a mid-level executive for a women’s clothing company. He’d worked in the city on Seventh Avenue until he dropped dead of a heart attack when Julian was fifteen. Julian grew up an only child in a split-level house in Millburn. They had a Ping-Pong table in the basement and a white poodle named Lulu. His widowed mother had taken a job at Lord & Taylor, at the perfume counter, to make ends meet. She’d come home reeking of hyacinths.

  Rye had a girlfriend from college, Simone, his soul mate, he’d bragged to Julian, who occasionally made the trip from Manhattan, where she was getting a PhD in English at Columbia, and would arrive beleaguered, with a bulging sack of books that would end up scattered around the apartment, defaced by coffee rings, Post-it Notes, and crumbs that would sprinkle from the bindings, and, for the duration of her visit, there was evidence of her presence on every possible surface, her knitting projects, rarely finished, bunched on the couch, her sloppy, malodorous vegetarian concoctions lining the refrigerator shelves, and strands of her hair in the sink and on the bathroom floor, not to mention the occasional pubic hair—Julian was always relieved when she left.

  Unbeknownst to Simone, Adler had come down with a fever for one of the girls in the workshop, Magda. He wasn’t the only one; everyone was a little in love with her, even Brodsky. She was like a girl you happened to glimpse in a moving car, detained by some awful consequence, the type you wanted to save. She was local, from Port Richmond, the Polish neighborhood. Her parents had come over in the seventies, when she was a toddler, and along with an accent, she’d retained a certain reticence, unwittingly engineered by her Eastern Bloc roots. In stature, she was not delicate, and had a face that might have been drawn with thick crayon, the rou
nd bones in her cheeks, the wide mouth, the hungry, dark eyes. She dressed like a gypsy in baggy men’s trousers and outsize sweaters that concealed her sizable breasts and wore clunky shoes with straps, trawled out of Salvation Army bins. Her only vanity, it seemed, was the waxy ruby lipstick she drew on her lips. She seldom spoke up in class; perhaps she was intimidated—the women, three in all, had it rough. During the weekly critiques she’d stand in the back, lurking thoughtfully, her arms crossed over her chest. When her own work was critiqued, her back went rigid with defiance, like a Resistance fighter in front of a firing squad. She was good, and some of the men were jealous. Things were said to stir a reaction; they didn’t. She was stoic, unhindered. She worked as a figure model at the art school to make extra cash. One time he accidentally pushed through the doors of the studio where she was modeling naked on a platform. He remembered the cold look on her face as their eyes met across the enormous room. He backed out gently, before anyone else saw him, but something was established in that moment, something dark and indelible, seared into his memory like a brand.

  When he finally mustered the courage to ask Magda out, he came home one afternoon to find her and his roommate coiled in the sheets.

  It was another reminder that Adler was always a step ahead of him.

  One weekend toward the end of the year, Rye invited Julian out to his mother’s summerhouse on Long Island, an old saltbox on the tip of Montauk. There were a few other Brodsky people there: Marty Fine and his boyfriend, Lars, Magda, of course, and Rye’s sister, Ava, who’d driven down from Boston. Ava was still in college, a junior at Harvard, studying metaphysics. She was a smaller version of Rye, but shy, pale as sour milk, the sort of girl who preferred the company of books to people and rarely left her dorm room. The house had been closed up for a while, some of the furniture covered with sheets, but it was an extraordinary old place, wood-paneled, musty, overlooking the ocean. Rye and Ava shared the pretense of being average—his scruffy, secondhand clothes, her worn-out green-suede loafers (they were Gucci)—but they had an undeniable exclusivity that set them apart. It was what money did to you, he guessed, allowed you to believe you didn’t need anyone, gave you permission to be aloof. They wandered around the house with its narrow hallways and large, drafty rooms, the smattering of priceless antiques, sun-faded couches, oil paintings of sailboats and the sea. He could only imagine what it must have been like growing up here in the summer. Julian’s own summers had been limited to the local Y camp, where, at fourteen, he’d started as a CIT, with a whistle around his neck and a jumble of lanyard in his pocket. Nobody in his neighborhood had a pool; they’d relied on sprinklers to cool off during the hottest months. But this place, you had the ocean calling to you from every single room.