Books |
The Vanishing Point: A Novel
Elizabeth Brundage
By
Published: Aug 09, 2021
Category:
Fiction
There is only one kind of novel I like to read and only one kind I like to recommend to you — novels I can’t put down, novels that, if I must go out, I read on the street. Those books are well written, but they’re not about the writing. They’re about the stories. Mostly, they’re about the people. The characters don’t have to be, to use the awful Hollywood term, “relatable,” but they do have to be recognizably human — I have to know where they’re from, where they want to go, how they plan to get there, and what they might do when life and other people get in the way.
“The Vanishing Point” is that kind of novel. I started reading it in the afternoon, couldn’t cancel the evening, and wasn’t able to start reading again until 6 AM. I didn’t stop until I finished, at which point I shot off a note to Elizabeth Brundage, who I know slightly: “This is the best novel I’ve read this year, by a factor of ten.” [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Start with the characters, who are so precisely externally and emotionally described — see the excerpt below — that you feel you’re reading non-fiction.
Rye Adler is a gifted and much praised photographer, “the eye of a generation.” He’s a child of privilege; his parents were “educated, adventurous, charitable.” And he cherishes his own privilege — he loves his work and his freedom more than he loves his wife. (This is almost exactly what Matisse told his wife before they married.) For that reason, “they’re better apart than together.” Rye lives in an early Dutch Colonial built in 1670 with….
… Simone, his wife. She met Rye when he was at Philadelphia’s Brodsky Workshop, “known among photography insiders as a breeding ground for the best talent.” She’s a translator, which is to say that she, like Rye, looks hard at things. She’s smarter than Rye and has his number: “a man who hid behind his success.” (Know any? I know a dozen.) For all that she has achieved, for all that she is, she feels like “a glorified temp” at the college where she teaches part-time.
Julian Ladd was Rye’s roommate at Brodsky. Unlike Rye, who took powerful portraits, Julian preferred ruined buildings, deserted streets — environments as cool and distant as his personality. That esthetic is not the way to prominence. Brodsky’s tough on him, and even Rye says his photographs have “no soul.” Julian abandons photography and makes a great success in advertising. He looks good: “Tom Ford suits, crisp blue shirts, sleek Ferragamo loafers, sandalwood cologne he’d found in some boutique in the village.” Under that front is a burning envy of Rye.
That envy wasn’t just about talent. At Brodsky a woman came between them: Magda Pasternak, Brodsky’s most compelling female student. She’s talented, beautiful, and, thanks to a nude portrait Rye made of her, iconic. She becomes Rye’s lover. Then he gets an assignment that takes him a continent away. On his return he marries Simone, and…
And now it’s two decades later, and I can’t tell you the plot without spoiling the revelations, which detonate without warning — on about ten pages, I’ve scrawled “did not see that coming” in the margin. Let me say that nobody’s marriage runs smooth here. That Magda has a son, and that he doesn’t have feelings usually associated with kids: “Theo was his own person and not really interested in doing the things everybody else was doing but wasn’t smart enough or articulate enough to put that into words.” Will Theo find drugs? Count on it. Count also on turning the pages rapidly. Count on emotions that escalate and escalate to the point of…
Now consider the title. A “vanishing point” is “a point at which receding parallel lines viewed in perspective appear to converge.” The result, in art and photography, is “the illusion of depth.” The bombshell word is “illusion.” In romance, the illusion is that we can truly know our lovers, that time and caring will create a merger of souls, that two can become one. We know better — we live parallel lives, and parallels never converge — but each time we tumble into a grand passion, we forget what experience has taught us. This time, we say, it will be different. But it can never be different enough, and sometimes someone gets pissed off, pissed off to a point we haven’t thought possible. That’s this novel.
“It faut payer,” Colette said. You pay for everything. But if you pay and keep going, your story might brighten, life may reward your courage, and, against all odds, you may earn something like happiness. For me that’s the story of this emotional thriller, but then I’m a romantic. It’s just possible Elizabeth Brundage is too.
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EXCERPT
Almost by chance, they shared an apartment that year. Julian was living out of his suitcase in a cramped motel room when he saw a ROOMATE 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, 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 take-out 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 J.C. Penney sweaters, Rye bought his clothes at flea markets and second-hand 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 woman’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 round 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 accidently 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.
