V

When they got back to Main Street, Peter Tegelstrom was out at the foot of his house, perched on a crate nailing a string of Halloween lights along the low-hanging eaves. His children, a five-year-old girl and a son a year her senior, ran around excitedly, clapping and yelling as the row of pumpkins and skulls was unraveled. Will headed over to chat to Tegelstrom; Adrianna followed. She’d made friends with the kids in the last week and a half and had suggested to Will that he photograph the family.

Tegelstrom’s wife was pure Inuit, her beauty evident in her children’s faces. A picture of this healthy and contented human family living within two hundred yards of the dump would make, Adrianna argued, a powerful counterpoint to Will’s pictures of the bears. The wife, however, was too shy even to talk to the visitors, unlike Tegelstrom himself, who seemed to Will to be starved for conversation.

“Are you finished with your pictures now?” he wanted to know.

“Near enough.”

“You should have gone down to Churchill. They’ve got a lot more bears there—”

“And a lot of tourists taking pictures of them.”

“You could take pictures of the tourists taking pictures of the bears,” Tegelstrom said.

“Only if one of them was being eaten.” Peter was much amused by this. His arranging of the lights finished, he climbed down the ladder and switched them on. The children clapped. “There isn’t much here to keep them occupied,” he said. “I feel bad for them sometimes. We’re going to move down to Prince Albert in the spring.” He nodded into the house. “My wife doesn’t want to, but the babies need a better life than this.”

The babies, as he called them, had been playing with Adrianna and at her bidding had gone inside to put on their Halloween masks. Now they reappeared, jabbering and whooping to inspire some fear. The masks were, Will guessed, the shy wife’s handiwork Not gleeful vampires or ghouls, but more troubled spirits, constructed from scraps of sealskin and bits of fur and cardboard, all roughly daubed with red and blue paint. Set on such diminutive bodies they were strangely unsettling.

“Come and stand here for me, will you?” Will said, calling them over to pose in front of the doorway.

“Do I get to be in this?” Tegelstrom asked.

“No,” Will said bluntly.

Affably enough, Tegelstrom stepped out of the picture, and Will went down on his haunches in front of the children, who had ceased their hollering and were standing at the doorstep, hand in hand. There was a sudden gravity in the moment. This wasn’t the happy family portrait Adrianna had been trying to arrange. It was a snapshot of two mournful spirits, posed in the twilight beneath a loop of plastic lights. Will was happier with the shot than any of the pictures he’d made at the dump.

Cornelius was not yet home, which was no great surprise.

“He’s probably smoking pot with the Brothers Grimm,” Will said, referring to the two Germans with whom Cornelius had struck up a dope-and-beer-driven friendship. They lived in what was indisputably the most luxurious home in the community, complete with a sizable television. Besides the dope, Cornelius had confided, they had a collection of all-girl wrestling films so extensive it was worthy of academic study.

“So we’re done here?” Adrianna said, as she set about making the vodka martinis they always drank around the time. It was a ritual that had begun as a joke in a mud hole in Botswana, passing a flask of vodka back and forth pretending they were sipping very dry martinis at the Savoy.

“We’re done,” Will said.

“You’re disappointed.”

“I’m always disappointed. It’s never what I want it to be.

“Maybe you want too much.”

“We’ve had this conversation.”

“I’m having it again.”

“Well I’m not,” Will said, with monotony in his tone Adrianna knew of old. She let the subject drop au moved on to another.

 “Is it okay if I take a couple of weeks off? I want to go down to Tallahassee to see my mother.”

“No problem. I’m going back to San Francisco to spend some time with the pictures, start to make the connections.” This was a favorite phase of his, describing a process Adrianna had never completely comprehended. She watched him doing it: laying out maybe two or three hundred images on the floor and wandering among them for several days, arranging and rearranging them, laying unlikely combinations together to see if sparks flew; growling at himself when they didn’t; getting a little high and sitting up through the night to meditate on the work. When the connections were made, and the pictures put in what he considered to be the right order, there was undeniably an energy in them that had not been there before. But the pain of the process had always seemed to Adrianna out of all proportion to the improvement it was a kind of masochism, she’d decided; his last, despairing attempt to make sense of the senseless before the images left his hands.

“Your cocktail, sir,” Adrianna said, setting the martini at Will’s elbow. He thanked her, picked it up, and they clinked glasses.

“It’s not like Cornelius to miss vodka,” Adrianna observed.

“You just want an excuse to check out the Brothers Grimm,” Will said.

Adrianna didn’t contest the point. “Gert looks like he’d be fun in bed.”

“Is he the one with the beer belly?”

“Yep.”

“He’s all yours. Anyway, I think they’re a package deal. You can’t have one without the other.”

Will picked up his cigarettes and wandered over to the front door, taking his martini with him. He turned on the porch light, opened the door, leaned against the doorjamb, and lit a cigarette.

The Tegelstrom kids had gone inside, and were probably tucked up in bed by now, but the lights Peter had put up to entertain them were still bright: a halo of orange pumpkins and white skulls around the house, rocking gently in the gusting wind.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” Will said. “I was going to wait for Cornelius but . . . I don’t think there’s going to be another book after this.”

“I knew you were fretting about something. I thought maybe it was me—”

“Oh God no,” Will said. “You’re the best, Adie. Without you and Cornelius I’d have given up on all this shit a long time ago.”

“So why now?”

“I’m out of love with the whole thing,” he said. “None of it makes any difference. We’ll show the pictures of the bears and all it’ll do is make more people come and watch them getting their noses stuck in mayonnaise jars. It’s a waste of bloody time.”

“What will you do instead?”

“I don’t know. It’s a good question. It feels like . . . I don’t know—”

“What does it feel like?”

“That everything’s winding down. I’m forty-one and it feels like I’ve seen too much and been too many places and it’s all blurred together. There’s no magic left. I’ve done my drugs. I’ve had my infatuations. I’ve outgrown Wagner. This is as good as it’s going to get. And it’s not that great.” Adrianna came to join him at the door, putting her chin on his shoulder. “Oh my poor Will,” she said, in her best cocktail clip. “So famous, so celebrated, and so very, very bored.”

“Are you mocking my ennui?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so.”

“You’re tired. You should take a year off. Go sit in the sun with a beautiful boy. That’s Dr. Adrianna’s advice.”

“Will you find me the boy?”

“Oh Lord. Are you that exhausted?”

“I couldn’t cruise a bar if my life depended upon it.”

“So don’t. Have another martini.”

“No, I’ve got a better idea,” Will said. “You make the drinks, I’ll go fetch Cornelius. Then we can all get maudlin together.”