The dark of night, I’ve learned, is the perfect time to develop film. In the first place—well, it’s dark, which is a necessary condition for the process. In the second place, making photographs is good for the soul. There’s a routine to it, a series of precise maneuvers on which you must concentrate all your attention. Once, back at the Scribe bar in Paris, Bob Capa told me that he took a hundred and six photographs on the landing beach on D-Day, the best photos he ever took, priceless, historic, irreplaceable, and some goober in the photographic lab back in London mishandled the film and destroyed all but eleven of them. So you see, you can’t let your attention wander. You can’t let any other ideas distract you. For a blessed hour, you can think of nothing else.

So I find a light socket for my red bulb. I lay out the trays, pour in the chemicals. Unroll the film from its casing, clip the ends, load the reel. Another thing I love about developing film at night, nobody bothers me. As much as I enjoy company—a certain kind of company in particular—I prefer to be alone. Answer to nobody, pretend nothing, expend not the slightest effort to entertain, to cajole, to argue your cause. To manipulate the inanimate is so much easier.

Not all the negatives are worth the effort of turning into photographs, mind you. I inspect each one thoroughly, and in the end I find only six I want to print. As I pull each one from its bath and hang it to dry, the way a housewife might hang her laundry, I feel a sense of perfect accomplishment, as if I’ve done all I could. I wash out the trays, put everything away. I unplug my red light from the wall and wind the cord around it. Then I switch on my penlight and gaze at each print in turn.

There is Lindquist with her short silver curls, her graceful, unscarred neck, the firm line of her jaw, although I would have liked her to gaze a little more toward the camera lens, because her eyes are astounding when fixed upon you.

There are the cherubs at play in the surf, goddamn them. Lani in the kitchen. The cherry-red Buick, which looks in motion even when it’s at rest. And last, there is Leo. I pull the photograph from its clothespin to examine it more closely. I realize I’ve forgotten what a perfect specimen he is, how like a drawing from an anatomy textbook. He lies on his stomach in the squalor of a sinful bed. One sheet twines around his ankle; another streaks across the small of his back; he clutches a pillow under one arm. The camera finds the left side of his face, exhausted and happy.