Cortlandt Alley was just that – a narrow, garbage strewn strip of pavement that stretched south from Canal to Franklin Street.  Except for the fancy condo on the corner of White, there weren’t any addresses along the alleyway, just a few building numbers sprayed here and there on heavy metal service doors.  Leaning against one door, a small tree tried to die.  There weren’t any real streetlights either, just a few floods that kept the passageway from becoming a total black hole after dark.

Hughie was the alley’s guardian.  He lived in the projects near Cherry Street but hung out all day, and most of the night, at the Canal Street entrance blocking anyone who tried to enter the alley.  He had a black rag tied over the front of his face.  All he did all day was hold a blue paper cup with a picture of the Acropolis printed on it and the noise of coins rattling inside.  But no one crossed him.  He was too scary looking.  Then again, no one gave him any money either.  He was a big red headed brute whose nose had, years ago in a subway fight at Tremont Avenue, been razored clean off.  He'd refused the doctors’ offers to reattach it and had instead vanished into the Bronx night.  Maybe he thought having the face of a character in a Bela Lugosi horror film made him look tough.  

 On the day I’d bought my new leather jacket, I’d taken Hughie back to my place and given him the heavy wool overcoat I’d worn the past three winters.  Hey, it wasn't that threadbare and it still wasn't torn anywhere. 

“I won’t be using it again,” I’d told Hughie.

Hughie had never forgotten me after that.  "Nobody's life is ever what they expect it to be," he'd always say when I passed him on my way home.  I figured Hughie was referring to himself.  But he could have been talking about me just as well.  Tonight, as I passed by, Hughie looked at me somewhat hopelessly.  “I have seen Cindy in a long time,” he said.  “Isn’t she coming back anymore?”

That stopped me.  I’d forgotten how much Hughie had been attached to Xin.  “No, Hughie.  I don’t think she’ll be back again.”

“That’s too bad.”  Hughie looked like he was going to cry.  I knew how he felt.

Home, reached through a padlocked fire door up a flight of broken wooden stairs, is actually a huge floor-through space in an old brick tenement whose windows were boarded shut years before.  The cracked plaster walls haven’t been painted in decades until they’ve crumbled into a uniform greenish gray color that’s like a creeping fungus in a 50’s scifi film.  The only natural light in the room comes through a metal grated skylight in the center of the ceiling.  I wonder sometimes if some nineteenth century photographer might not have once used that same light to take portraits of people now long dead.

One small radiator coughs up heat in the winter.  The only other fixtures are an industrial sink and a free-standing claw-footed bathtub.  There’s no stove, just a refrigerator filled with film.  I don’t cook anyway, and the room temperature is low enough in winter to keep the Guinness chilled.  That’s as much as I care about.

There’s photography equipment strewn all over the floor.  4800 ws Speedotron packs sit beside white-painted reflector panels; black Chimera soft boxes on heavy duty light stands stand in the center of the space.  An ancient Wells Fargo safe that looks like a prop from a Randolph Scott western and that contains all my cameras and lenses is planted solidly in one corner where it reaches almost to the ceiling.  Against a back wall, in totally random order are piles and piles of art and photography books.  There aren’t any chairs or sofas, only an old army cot to sack out on.  That doesn’t matter much to me, though, because, in the years I’ve lived there, I’ve never once invited any guests.

Hours later, I’m squatting on the floor as I delicately painted a platinum emulsion to art paper before exposing it to UV light.  A bare overhead lightbulb casts a sickly glow off the top of my shaven head.  I can see its reflection in the ornate six foot mirror prone horizontally beside me on the floor.  The effect in the looking glass is a C41 to E6 cross process that creates menacing deep yellowish green shadows behind my reflection.

That was when the doorbell rang.  I hadn’t heard it in so long that it took me a while to realize what the sound was.

There was a Japanese woman, pretty and still in her 20’s, standing at the door when I finally went downstairs to open it.   She was dressed neatly in a wool overcoat and waterproof boots.  Her black hair was tied back with a red rubberband in a pony tail.  “Are you the photographer Jim McKane?” she asked.  Her voice had only the slightest trace of an accent.  It sounded more Ivy League than it did Asian.

“I don’t shoot model portfolios if that’s why you’re here,” I said by way of answer.  I wasn’t trying to be unfriendly; I just didn’t have time to waste.

“That’s not why I’m here.”  The woman laughed as though I’d just told the funniest joke in the world.  “My name is Chizuko Watabe, and I’m a freelance journalist from Tokyo.”

She must have seen by how I shrugged my shoulders how unimpressed I was with that one.  “I wondered if you would mind if I asked you some questions.”

“Questions about what?”  I was honestly puzzled.  I couldn’t think of anything I knew that would be of interest to a journalist.

Chizuko took my question for assent and brushed past me.  Before I knew it, I was following her up the stairs to my studio.

“What is it you want to know?” I asked a second time when I was again standing beside her.

Chizuko looked around my place closely.  Although she said nothing, her fascination was evident.  I wasn’t overly surprised since the space probably looked more like a flea market than it did a photography studio.  Then Chizuko sat down abruptly on the army cot.  I thought how little chance there was that a Western woman would invite herself alone into a man’s home and then seat herself on his bed.  But Chizuko, without looking at me and with no apparent self-consciousness, took from her large leather bag a notebook computer and what I recognized as a voice recorder.

I was still standing; there really wasn’t anyplace else to sit anyway. “Please tell me why you’re here,” I demanded.  At this point, curiosity was the only thing holding me back from showing this pushy reporter the door.

“You are very famous in Japan,” said Chizuko in a matter of fact voice as she switched on the voice recorder. 

I felt relief as much as an urge to laugh.  So, after all this, it was simply a case of mistaken identity.  “Sorry,” I said, “but you’re got the wrong guy.  I’m not famous anywhere, least of all in Japan.”

Up to now, Chizuko’s face had been fairly expressionless, limiting itself to a polite smile.  Now she registered mild astonishment.  “Are you not the same Jim McKane who has the website The Dark Mirror?”

It was my turn to be surprised.  “Yes,” I admitted.  “That’s my site.  Have you seen it?”

“The photographs of Asian women on your site are known all over Japan.  They are of such different style, so antique, so ...”

“‘Pictorialist’ is the word you’re looking for,” I interjected.  “It’s a style of art photography that was popular in the early twentieth century before photographers like Stieglitz and Strand moved on to ‘straight’ photography.”

“Good,” said Chizuko.  “I did not know this word ‘pictorialist.’  I will have to study research it.”

“Be my guest,” I said.  “It’s a very well known movement in photography and I’m sure you can find loads of information about it on the web.”

“Thank you, but that is not all I’ve come to write about.  People in Japan want to know why all you photograph are Asian models.  They want to know about you.”

I was still trying to absorb the fact that there were people who actually were aware of my work.  I didn’t buy Chizuko’s claim that I was famous – she probably was exaggerating to get my cooperation – but just knowing my site had visitors was a revelation to me.  Then Chizuko’s last remark got through to me, and I instantly wanted to stop the conversation.  “Why I shoot what I shoot is my business.  No one has to know anything about me.  If some Japanese people like my work, that’s great and I’m extremely honored; but the photographs have to speak for themselves.  There is nothing I want to say.”

Chizuko’s smile disappeared.  “Is there some secret?” she asked.  “Perhaps you only photo Asian women because you are obsessed with them sexually.  Is that true?  Do you have what is called here, I believe, ‘Yellow Fever’?”

I looked at her evenly.  “If that’s what people want to believe, let them,” I said.  “I don’t care what they think.  An artist doesn’t have to explain his choice of subject.”

“Looking at you, I do not think myself that you have this sickness.  But I do think there is something you’re not telling me, something you do not want anyone to know.”

“Maybe so, but I’m as entitled to my privacy as anyone else.”

“Putting your work up for public display makes you known.  You have to accept that it makes you a public figure.”

“I don’t have to accept anything,” I replied.  I was conscious of the cold tone of my voice.  “This interview is over.  Please show yourself out and don’t bother me again.  Thank you.”