Mr. Jones by Margaret Sweatman

Author:Margaret Sweatman
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Canadian Fiction, Canadian Author, Cold War, Spy, Espionage, Japan, Russia, Soviet Union, Communism, McCarthyism, Canadian History, Military History, Literary Fiction, Contemporary Female Authors, Paranoia, Historical Fiction, eBook, Kindle
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2014-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

At a quarter to seven, she went to meet Emmett and his new friend at the landing in her boat, an impeccable twenty-two-foot Shepherd runabout. Lennie in her sleepers looked baffled, doubtful, with her mother putting her in the boat in the dusk.

Suzanne had been navigating back and forth to the landing since she was a young girl. But Emmett’s friend appeared to find it exotic; he kept exclaiming over the white wake shining “like silver coins” illuminated by the boat’s stern light. It was dark now. “How do you know where you’re going?” he wanted to know. It was appealing, a lark, to experience the familiar through unfamiliar eyes. Dr. Kimura looked at her, and she knew he found her beautiful. She felt rakish. It was, she realized, perfect to have someone with them. She was glad she didn’t have to play the cheerleader, with Emmett in such a black mood.

All weekend, Dr. Kimura carried Lennie around with him. The moment he saw the baby in the boat, he picked her up as if she’d long been his, and Lennie seemed immediately to love him. Suzanne felt a bit jealous, Lennie didn’t like her to dandle her like that, but it was nice to have her hands free. On Saturday she took some photographs. Kimura asked many questions about her camera, her methods of developing film. He asked to see her prints.

“Most of them are in the city,” she told him.

Emmett was all keyed up. Without a word now, he went and dragged a shoebox out from under their bed. “Suzanne’s the photographer in this family.” He tossed the shoebox on the bed and opened it. “I can barely use a Polaroid.”

Some of the photographs in the box were old, pictures of Suzanne as a child, probably taken by her father, who’d once been in love with the camera too. Then there was a package tied in yarn. Suzanne bit her lip, seeing it in Emmett’s hands as he untied it. Dr. Kimura sensed her anxiety and said, “We don’t have to look at these now.” But Emmett had already loosened the bundle and spread the photographs on the bed.

“It was my avenues and doors period,” she said ruefully and began to collect them.

But Emmett moved her hands aside. He laid out the photographs like a game of solitaire. Among the avenues and doors, there was one strange sequence, exhibiting Suzanne’s skill with focus and light. The banality of the composition jarred with an attention to detail, knives and forks in a kitchen drawer becoming strange by virtue of her fastidious work in the darkroom; men’s shirts in a chest of drawers, leather belts coiled like snakes, a pillow on a tidy bed, the shape of someone’s head still visible in the creases on the pillowcase.

Emmett stood aside in bitter silence. Kimura mildly observed, “You have a fondness for still life, I see. But you have also taken some handsome portraits.”

“How do you know that?” Suzanne asked, looking nervously at Emmett.

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