The Beauty of Death Vol.1

The Bitches of Madison County-1

THE BITCHES OF MADISON COUNTY

by John F.D. TaffDonald Harmon stepped off the private jet and onto the dull gray tarmac of the metropolitan airport.

One word, grim and dead in his brain, lay just as lifeless on his tongue.

Home.

Harmon was not a large man; a fact that had lent itself well to his chosen profession and had saved his life on innumerable occasions.

Still, he carried with him an undeniable air of power, of self-assuredness; not aggression or belligerence, but rather self-containment, as if no opinion or judgment could pierce the shell of his carefully constructed personality.

Harmon carried with him everything he owned—two trunks of camera equipment, a few mementos from his travels, a ridiculously few articles of clothing stuffed into two duffel bags. And in one of those bags was an envelope; cream-colored and slightly textured, a gold embossed rectangle near the return address, his name carefully typed on its front.

Within that envelope was the reason Harmon was here; in the city he’d left, for good he thought back then, more than thirty years ago.

Dear Mr. Harmon,

Although the investigation into the unfortunate incident in Kisumu has proven, thus far, inconclusive, we regret the necessity to cancel your current project and its funding. We have enclosed a check that should cover your expenses to date. Our contacts in the Kenyan government have told us that they wish you out of their country immediately—before they change their minds.

Please accept this with the best possible wishes. We will contact you when another suitable project arises.

Yours truly, etc., etc., etc.

An over-large check and a plane ticket on a chartered jet rounded out the envelope’s contents.

He found out quickly how empty the words in that letter were.

Clutching those bags, staring into the hot orb of the sun as it tried to melt the asphalt and metal, he wanted to tear that letter and the check into tiny pieces.

But this was a passing desire; this sun, a weak counterpart to its African companion.

To Donald Harmon, life was seen through a lens.

Which meant, of course, that life was a narrow circle of reality, surrounded on all sides by darkness. Only the things at the center of this circle concerned him. Anything outside this focused sphere of realism, anything within the darkness—or beyond—did not concern him.

His camera had taken it all in during its thirty-year partnership with him.

His paychecks bore the best of credentials: National Geographic, The Smithsonian, The Discovery Channel, the BBC, PBS, The Learning Channel, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Yes, he’d shot for them all; everything—color, black and white, slides, motion picture film, video, even infrared and night vision.

The things his camera showed him, he showed the world.

And it brought him money and security and a kind of life that seemed adventurous and romantic, but in the end was as little connected with reality as he was.

Whispering Pines Condominiums was as upscale as such developments come. It was complete with lighted tennis courts, three pools (one indoor and heated), a clubhouse, laundry facilities, and a large population of single women.

In other words, his surroundings were teeming with the kind of life Harmon wanted to study.

His first subject was Cindy Barbett, a 35-year-old divorced accountant who left for work early each morning and came home usually late in the evening. She lived in the apartment downstairs from him, and so made an easy subject.

For the first few days, he did not photograph her at all, as was his habit. Instead, he made copious notes in a three-ring notebook. He spent Wednesday affixing reflective film to all of his windows and the sliding glass door that led to his own deck so that no one would be able to see into his apartment.

Across the flooring of his deck, he spread a length of black theatrical scrim cloth so that Cindy would not be able to look up and see the pencil-size camera he had aimed down at her lounge chair from a space between the deck’s boards.

He began principal photography on Thursday; as she left for work, driving away, coming home. Harmon worked feverishly, eating little, living on coffee and cigarettes. He stayed up long hours, lest she should come or go without him knowing.

And he began to see the patterns of her life, as if looking at some grand design from a higher ground. She stayed late at work on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. She had six nice outfits that she wore in varying combinations so as not to repeat them too often.

She did laundry on the weekends, lay out on her deck to sun herself, drank Diet Pepsi seemingly by the gallon. She read People and Us and Cosmopolitan and Vogue. She backed from her parking place without looking, usually hit the curb when she pulled in.

Cindy never had any visitors, male or female, so her s*x life was null as far as he knew.

As notebooks and slide sleeves filled, though, Harmon slowly lost interest in her. He realized that, much like the weaverbirds, Cindy’s life was a series of uninteresting activities strung together in a predictable routine that, though possessing the illusion of complexity, was truly boring.

So, he began to look for a new subject.

This was the pattern that he repeated over the next two months, finding another woman in the complex to study, untangling the seemingly complex strands of her activities, finding himself uninterested when the knot finally dissolved and the line of her life sprang taut and predictable.

Just as his attention wavered, however, a new subject presented itself to his lens.

Jayne Fletcher was a rather severe woman whom Harmon had seen several times when he was picking up his mail or taking the garbage out. Maybe 40 years old, maybe older, but her body was trim and fit.

She lived across the parking lot from Harmon’s apartment. In fact, their apartments were exactly on the same level, so that their bedroom windows opened on one another.

It was one morning when Harmon was walking past his bedroom window on his way to shoot another day in the dreary life of one of his more boring subjects that he really noticed Jayne.

He’d seen on several occasions that she left her bedroom window shades up, but he’d been too busy with Karen, his current subject, to see why.

This morning, Jayne sat perched on the edge of her bed like some exotic and magnificent bird. Her hair was down, and it was long and radiant and luxurious. She wore a pair of stockings that clipped to a garter belt around her narrow waist.

And nothing else.

Harmon stood transfixed as he watched her reach to someone else in the room.

When her hands came back, they were attached to the paperboy. For the next hour, Harmon forgot about Karen, refocused on Jayne. It was a study in physics and energy the likes of which Harmon had never seen before. Twice the paperboy prepared to leave, but each time the woman dragged him back and put him to work again.

When he finally did leave, at 9:17 a.m., he wobbled away on his bicycle as if having just completed the Tour de France.

Unlike Cindy or Karen or the dozen or so others he’d watched previously, Jayne presented Harmon with an interesting array of activities—and not a few challenges.

She was always punctual and neat, and Harmon slipped into her routine with little problem, photographing her in action with nothing to get in his way.

Her s****l proclivities proved ridiculously easy to document. The quiet Ms. Fletcher was conspicuously, voraciously active, with a marked taste for young men. In addition to her encounters with the paperboy, Harmon captured her seductions of the pool boy, several neighbors, countless pizza delivery boys, and even a Jehovah’s Witness.

One morning when he was sure of her schedule, he waited for her to leave for work, walked to her apartment. He carried a large metal toolbox with him. Setting this down on the stairs, he looked at her door from various angles and sightlines before deciding where to position the tiny video camera. With this, he’d be able to study how she answered the door.

Not to disappoint him, Jayne ordered a pizza that very same night, and it came attached to a rather sturdy young dark-haired boy who wore about him the air of a man on an important, desirable mission.

She didn’t even smile as she took his hand, drew him in.

Harmon saw the pizza box spill to the ground just as the door closed.

He soon realized that she was as much exhibitionist as nymphomaniac; he was only able to photograph her during these activities because she wanted to be seen, though she didn’t really know that she was watched.

But Harmon felt the need to see beyond what she presented to him. His experience in the jungle, on the savanna demanded it.

To capture the moment with a lion, he had told other photographers, you must think like it.

You must act like it.

You must live with it.

On Monday morning, when the knocking of Jayne’s car faded as it turned from the apartment complex’s entrance onto the main road, Harmon slowly dressed in blue coveralls, carried a few boards and a toolbox over to the door of her apartment.

He’d watched her enough to know that she hid an extra key on top of the light fixture outside her door. Reaching up absently, he found the key amidst the dust and dried bodies of insects, brought it down to unlock the door.

Replacing it, he creaked the door open, pushed his head inside.

It was dark and well ordered, a little warm and stuffy.

Seeing that no one had noticed him, he picked up the boards and the tool case, stepped inside, locked the door behind him.

This was the apartment of a spinster, despite what his cameras had already shown him. Couches and chair were stiff and prim, covered in fabrics that would stain and rip if allowed to. Cabinets and shelves were crammed with tastefully arranged bric-a-brac—vases, porcelain figures, silk flowers.

A china cabinet squatting impressively in the dining room held silver and crystal and heavy pieces of china with a florid rose print adorning the serving side. Harmon bet they’d never once been used.

Tables in the well-appointed little living room bore brass coasters, dried flowers, neatly stacked magazines—Reader’s Digest, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, National Geographic.

Smiling, he bent to flip quickly through the last one’s cool, slick pages.

An article about Albania caught his eye.

Photos by James Hendrickson.

Snorting, he turned the pages. The photos were dark and cold, the people alternately apple-cheeked and smiling or grim, dirty-faced testaments to poverty and third-world hardships. Yet at the core of each was something that bothered Harmon, had always bothered Harmon about his colleague’s photos.

They were posed, false. The photographer hadn’t captured a true moment in the lives of these people, this country. Instead, each face in each photo screamed, I know you can see me!

And that, to Harmon, was the antithesis of photography, of the moment.

The moment was a stolen kiss, the silent capture of the secret essence of the thing photographed.

Like the primitives, Harmon believed—believed with all the fervor of a religious zealot—that a photograph should strive to trap the soul of what it captured on its unblinking strip of film.

It should steal the moment, trap it in its shuttered heart, blast it forever onto the thin strip of celluloid.

And the person photographed should never know, should never be aware.

Hendrickson, by becoming a participant in his own photos, ruined what he shot.

He subverted the moment, the very thing photography should strive for.

As far as Harmon was concerned, Hendrickson proved himself little more than a wedding photographer or a bumbling uncle at a family picnic.

Shaking his head, Harmon closed the magazine, straightened the stack on the coffee table.

Jayne’s bedroom was simple to the point of austerity, and yet not in a way that testified to any particular design philosophy. It was not filled with the curved, blonde lines of Danish furniture, not the chrome and black of modernism, not the clean ascetic of Japanese design.