Matters of the Heart

Half an hour later, he was back in his living room, in the white shirt Hope had asked for, and sat down at his handsome partner’s desk. Hope moved the computer away because it looked so incongruous in that setting. He was a delightful subject, fooling around, telling jokes and stories about well-known artists, writers, his house in Ireland, and the outrageous stunts he had pulled on book tours in his youth. At one point he had tears in his eyes when he talked about his son and bringing him up on his own, without a mother after her death. There were so many magical moments while she talked to him that Hope knew she would have a multitude of great shots to choose from, each one better than the last.

And then finally, after a few shots of him leaning against an antique ladder in front of the bookcase, they were through. And just as she said it, he exploded in laughter with a look of joy and release, and she stole one more shot of him, which could just turn out to be the best one. Sometimes that happened. And he gave her a warm hug as she handed her Leica to Fiona, who took it reverently from her hands and set it on a table with the others. She unplugged the lights and began to break down the equipment and put it away, as Finn led Hope downstairs to the kitchen.

“You work too hard! I’m starving!” he complained as he opened the refrigerator and turned to her. “Can I make you some pasta or a salad? I’m about to keel over from starvation. No wonder you’re so small, you must never eat.”

“Usually not when I’m working,” she admitted. “I get too involved in what I’m doing to think about it, and it’s so much fun doing the shoot.” She smiled shyly and he laughed.

“Most of the time I feel that way about working on a book, although at times I hate it too. Particularly rewrites. I have a nasty editor, and we have a love-hate relationship, but he’s good for the books. It’s a necessary evil. You don’t have that with what you do,” he said enviously.

“I have to edit myself, but I have clients to deal with who commission the work, like your publisher, and museum curators, who can be pretty tough, though it’s different than doing rewrites must be for you. I’ve always wanted to write,” she confessed. “I can barely write a postcard—for me it’s all visual. I see the world through a lens, I see into people’s souls that way.”

“I know, that’s what I love about your work, and why I asked the publisher to get you to do the photo for the book jacket.” He laughed then as he expertly made an omelette for them both, moving like a tornado in the tiny kitchen. He had already made the salad while they talked. “I hope my soul doesn’t wind up looking too black in the shots you took,” he said, pretending to look worried, as she looked at him intently.

“Why would it? I didn’t see any signs of a black soul, or a dark spirit. Is there something I missed?”

“Maybe a little friendly hereditary craziness, but it’s harmless. From what I’ve read about my Irish relatives, some of them were fairly nuts. But not dangerously so, mostly eccentric.” He smiled at her as he said it.

“There’s no harm in that,” Hope said benignly, as he put their omelettes on separate plates. “Everyone has a little craziness in them somewhere. I spent some time in India after my husband and I split up, trying to figure things out. I guess you could say that was crazy too,” she said, as they sat down at the beautiful mahogany table in his cozy dark green dining room. There were paintings of hunting scenes on the walls, and one of birds by a famous German artist.

“How was it?” Finn asked with interest. “I’ve never been to India myself. I’ve always wanted to go.”

“It was fantastic,” Hope said as her eyes lit up. “It was the most exciting, fulfilling time I’ve ever spent. It changed my life forever, and how I look at everything, including myself. And there are some of the most beautiful spots on earth. I just opened an exhibit of some of the photographs I took there.”

“I think I saw a couple in a magazine,” Finn said as he finished his omelette and started on his salad. “They were photographs of beggars and children, and an incredible one of sunset at the Taj Mahal.”

“I went to some incredibly beautiful lakes too. They’re the most romantic places you could ever dream of, and some other places were the saddest. I stayed at Mother Teresa’s hospital for a month, and I lived at a monastery in Tibet, and an ashram in India, where I found myself again. I think I could have stayed there forever.” When he looked into her eyes, he saw something very deep and very peaceful, and beyond it, deeper than that, he saw two bottomless pools of pain. He could see that Hope was a woman who had suffered. He wondered if it was only about the divorce and her husband’s illness. Whatever it was, he could tell that she had been to hell and back, and yet she was incredibly balanced and peaceful, as she looked across the table at him with a gentle smile.