Didn't happen. He'd managed four years of premed at
Yale, but then he rebelled, cashed in his med-school scholarship, and went to Paris to study photography. The result was he'd done what he wanted, been reasonably successful at it, and his father had never forgiven him. I think he was still striving for the old man's approval, even after all the years, but I doubted he'd ever get it. Steve was a guy still coming to grips with things that couldn't be changed, but in the meantime he lived in worlds that were as different from his own past as he could find. He deliberately avoided middle-class comforts, and was never happier than when he was in some miserable speck on the map where you couldn't drink the water. Whatever else it was, it wasn't New Haven. . . .
Thinking about him at that moment, I had an almost irresistible desire to reach for my cell phone and call him. God, I missed him. Did he miss me the same way? I wanted so much to hear him say it.
I had a contact number for him in Belize City, an old, Brit-like hotel called the Bellevue, where they still served high tea, but I always seemed to call when he was out somewhere in the rain forest, shooting.
Do it. Don't be a wuss.
But then I got cold feet. Did I want him to think I was chasing after him? I didn't want to sound needy . . . though that was exactly what I felt like at the moment.
Finally I decided to just invent a phone conversation, recreating one from times past, one where we both felt secure enough to be flip. It was something I did more than I'd like to admit. Usually there'd be eight rings at his Park Slope loft and then a harried voice. Yes. Steve, talk to me. . . .
"Yo. This is not a recording. I am just in a transcendent plane. And if that's you, Murray, I'll have the contact sheets there by six. Patience is a virtue."
"Honey, it's me. Get out of the darkroom. Get a life."
"Oh, hi, baby." Finally tuning in. "I'm working. In a quest for unrelenting pictorial truth. But mainly I'm thinking of you."