Picture Palace

by Paul Theroux

  Here he is in the garden in his white suit and boater, showing under the straw lid the jut and nibble of his profile; there, grinning from the window of the summer kitchen with jam on his mouth; making a mouse of his bicep; standing on his head, his flannel cuffs at his knees; streaming with surf in his bathing suit—a set of striped long johns in which his penis showed like a hitchhiker’s fist; clamming, with his trousers rolled up; fooling at the windmill, with his legs crossed and his hands under his head, whistling; doing cartwheels in the twilight; lowering his head and peering innocently into my box.

  Frank brought me some of these pictures—not all. Where were the others? It was a question Orlando stopped asking. Not lost—I remembered them clearly enough, I could peruse them in the dark, shuffle them like a pack of cards and play them to recreate the past as solitaire. But most did not exist. Again, I had denied myself, for though I took hundreds of them, and fussed over each shot—“a little to the left,” “come forward,” “smile,” “hold it”—often when I trained the camera on Orlando I didn’t have any film in it. I wanted more than his picture. The camera was only a stratagem to charm him, a trick that was to turn me into an observer of chance, one of life’s onlookers. My instinct told me that a photograph—of which I already had many—only diminished the subject and made it into a trifle. It was something snatched (how apt the term “picture-taking” was!) that afterward seemed much smaller, almost worthless, a feeble duplicate of what I wanted. Photography was in its infancy and so was he.

  No film: my confidence trick. He looked at me more sweetly through the lens. Why spoil it with a photograph? I didn’t want his brown blur in an album. I loved him and I wanted to sleep with him.

  I could see no point in anything else in the world, certainly none in taking pictures. I used the camera to get close to him, but I knew that as soon as we were lovers I would take that empty apparatus and drown it in the deepest part of Nantucket Sound.

  Going downstairs to Frank after raking over the past I felt awkward, as if I had done some shameful thing alone. Photography had been a companionable if fruitless deception, but this reminiscence seemed so embarrassing when I stopped, as if I had been laboring to uncover some muddy secret, groping for the past on all fours, blundering around in the dark. Already I knew that my retrospective was not his retrospective. He had pictures; I was flying by the seat of my pants. After a morning of it, verifying the pictures he brought me by remembering how inaccurately they portrayed me, I wanted to re-enter the present, just to prove that I existed. I half expected Frank to accuse me with, “What have you been up to?”

  He did not say a word. I felt like a jackass. Did he see me?

  “Hi toots!” I was falsely hearty and wondered if he noticed.

  Frank looked up, surprised with handfuls of my photos. His jacket was off, sleeves rolled up, all business. He was shuffling around, thinking with his feet, and there on the parlor carpet like a leaf-storm his latest batch from the windmill. He did not have the slightest idea who I was and what, apart from those damned pictures, I had done.

  “Anything more you wanted to see?”

  “Not at the moment. I just came down for a whizz.”

  He recoiled at my vulgarity, then smacked his lips at an old photo and said, “We’ll lick it into shape.”

  Not the slightest idea.

  “Sure will.”

  “Say, Maude, what’s this all about?”

  And my heart almost stopped. Orlando? Had Frank guessed what I had just disclosed to myself, the sentence I had discovered in the picture palace of my memory: I loved him and I wanted to sleep with him? No. It was a rear view, an old shot, the back of a head. It might have been a weasel.

  9

  A Retreat

  MY FATHER was a broker. I was afraid of the word; it suggested damage, like something he did with a pick and shovel, or a sledgehammer—certainly a destructive job. Whatever it was, he sometimes did it in New York, saying “Abyssinia!” and setting off for his “orifice” and now and then including a visit to the “uproar.” In New York he knew some folks (“good scouts”—Papa’s highest praise) called the Seltzers who, being publishers, knew everyone. They gave parties where, so Papa said, you might meet people like Scott Fitzgerald and Bunny Wilson and ones even more famous than they at the time, whose names might ring some bells now but don’t open any doors, such as Franklin P. Adams. When I told my father I was going to New York he said, “Then you must stay with the Seltzers,” and I was too naive to guess that what he really wanted was for them to keep an eye on me. I was seventeen, still a passionate virgin, had never been to the city and did not know what to drink. Beer made me throw up, and I hated the smell of my parents’ whisky lips when they kissed me, as they did at my bedtime. My usual tipple was a glass of expensive burgundy mixed with ginger ale, but even that gave me cramps and dizziness and made me want to lie down. Orlando used to say, “You’re a cheap date, Maude.”

  But I was no one’s date, least of all Orlando’s, and he was the reason I went to New York. We had spent the summer of 1923 together on the Cape, which had thrown me into confusion. All that winter and spring I had been there with my mother and Phoebe, studying with Miss Dromgoole, the Anglo-Irish tutor Papa had hired to prepare Phoebe and me for the girls’ school in Switzerland. Orlando was at boarding school—Andover—and I had not seen him for months. When he wasn’t around, which was more than half the year, I could believe that I was imagining it, that feeling of having a sleek animal in me gnawing my guts so hard I couldn’t breathe. In June I felt the creature tear around inside me. The three of us swam, Ollie beat us at croquet, we bicycled over to Hyannisport to help Papa with his boat; and I wanted to tell him about this hungering thing within me. But instead of telling him, I pretended I was angry—to provoke his sympathy, so that he would put his arm around me and ask me what was eating me. Yet I knew I could not tell him the real reason, because that would have been to obligate him with our secret. The next move had to be his.

  It was a tormenting summer. The Cape heat had needles of chill in it, the whine of the grasshoppers fiddling in the sun was like the sharp teeth of the wakened thing in me chewing at my resolve; and at night the bullfrogs and crickets insisted I stay awake. Twice I went to Orlando’s room, but I hesitated at his door and listened to his sleepy snorts. And I saw it all ending, slipping from focus, the family traipsing off in different directions, the order broken up, our faith dispersed. I had been with them too long to think that it would ever be better for me elsewhere. I knew that I was happy and I wanted it to last. Papa and Mama spoke of going on a cruise or to their friend Carney’s in Florida; Orlando was already talking about Harvard, Phoebe of Switzerland. I hated hearing people making plans that did not include me. I felt sure that if I wouldn’t be happy neither would they, and we could save ourselves by sticking together. One of the consolations of selfishness is that you actually believe you’re doing other people a favor.

  “How’s my photographer?” Orlando said.

  I didn’t dare say.

  “Let’s see some pictures,” said Papa.

  I wouldn’t show him.

  Phoebe said, “Do me in my new dress, Maude.”

  I thought: Not on your life, sister.

  Mama, seeing me unhappy, bought me a folding camera.

  But my picture-taking was too much of a reminder of my remoteness for me to pursue it with them, and I didn’t want them to think that I could content myself so easily that way. I would not photograph them. It was then, out of pure spite, that I did my first pictures of the blind: the child holding the bat, blind old Mrs. Conklin the chain smoker, who, clawing at her scalp, had once set her own hair on fire; Slaughter, the piano tuner, and one of Frenise’s squiffy-eyed nieces named Verna, from Martha’s Vineyard. It was outrageous, I was ashamed of the pictures, I had the prints. I knew I had done it only for the distraction, and I remember Mrs. Conklin demanding suddenly from her darkness, “What are you doing, child?”

&nb
sp; One hot day in August I went out to the orchard behind the windmill and sat under a tree to fret. It was damp there, a dark green moisture on the thickness of uncut grass. In rage and frustration I jumped up and pulled on a branch and shook down thirty apples. They hammered from the limb, dropping plumply with skin-splitting plops and I could taste their bitter bruises in the air after they fell. Then I saw Orlando’s face rising from the tall grass near the windmill. It was, all at once, blank, curious, defensive, drained of color, and when he stood up I could see the grass stains on his trousers.

  “What’s wrong, cookie?” he asked gently and squatted and tumbled to his knees.

  I was too startled at first to tell him why I was in such a state. But I calmed down. I decided to tell him the truth, to say, You’re the only person I’ll ever love— it was the perfect place, secluded and smelling of smashed apples and dusty flowers. The lush place itself was my excuse; and there was that rumpus in my vitals.

  “Ollie, you’re the only—”

  I heard a noise and looked up to see if the windmill was turning. The sails were anchored, but sometimes they broke loose and spun all night. Today there was no feel of wind, only the silken rustle of its sound.

  “Did you hear something?” I said, worried that we’d be caught alone, discovered like plotters and perhaps accused.

  This took seconds. I saw Phoebe in her white dress spring up out of the grass and toss her hair and take a dance step toward us.

  “It’s only me,” she said.

  Orlando said, “It was Maude—fooling with the tree.”

  Snap: Orlando kneeling innocently on his grass stains with a slash of sunlight on his face and a kind of eagerness in his eyes; and behind him—Pre-Raphaelite, like the paintings Millais did from Rupert Potter photographs—Phoebe in the dress that gave her a moth’s fragile wing-sleeves, a brittle sprite fluttering over him as if she was learning to fly and about to droop on his wrist in exhaustion. Two pretty creatures wondering who I was, and in the foreground a mass of fallen apples like the windfalls on the morning after a storm, with white reflections printed on their upturned sides, and the birds’ mad tweeching and the sawing of insects’ teeth and the wind in the boughs and leaves that made a sound like surf.

  Phoebe said, “We couldn’t find you anywhere, Maude.”

  I smelled a rich odor of apples and summer, bees and blossoms and tomato vines and the fish and salt of the sea, maddening and hurtful.

  At dinner that night Orlando said, “If I were you, know what I’d do? I’d take my camera to New York City.” He touched my hand and set a growl going in me. “Yes, I would.”

  The next day I went and stayed with those people, the Seltzers.

  New York then was stink and noise, the dung of dray horses steaming in the sunlight and dogcarts jumping on the cobbles, Irish families, all woolens and shoes, toting patched bundles and pausing in the reek of beer to turn their white faces toward the fumes of the harshly honking cars. Half the city seemed to live in the street, jostling among the fruit and cats for room. Orlando had ordered me here: I wondered if this descent was a retreat. I had never been so close to such loud strangers—screwballs, swill-pails, fancy signs—and it amazed me to think that I had the same right they did to stare.

  I took pictures—bad blundering work that I recall with great tenderness, because I was overwhelmed by the crowds and wanted to photograph those trembling smells, that rapid movement, the laughter of picnickers in Battery Park, the early-morning stables. I tried and turned it into blurs, the kind of crudity that saddened me at the time but later, as memorable imprecision, fed me keenly each vivid line: the ice man in the rubber cape kneeling over a tombstone of frost and dividing it into bricks with the needle-point of his stiletto—the chips flying into his face; the men in aprons mounding sawdust with pushbrooms and the woman screaming “Waldo!” at a weeping child. The sun struck the signs Saloon and WOLFPITS FURRIERS and filled the street with smoldering paint; the trolley cars rattled and sounded their gongs at corners; and I fought to photograph the oddness of it—the mucky gutters, the woman smoking a cigarette, an urchin whacking a ball with a stave, the Chinese grocery, the horses munching out of the trim canvas buckets that fitted their faces like masks. I did not feel I was alone; I believed that the whole world squinted with me through my camera’s lens and that I could call up a stallion from a clumsy hoofprint.

  And yet I was alone. I got unexpected strength from this—being able to cover huge distances because there was no one with me. If I went far enough I would get the picture I wanted. Even then I didn’t take the view that one opened one’s eyes and there was one’s masterpiece: that goddamned tree. That was the consolation of laziness (Just look out your own window, the photography handbooks said). It had to be more than that, a quest which after great exertion and occasional luck brought me without sight of my shot; the next few steps composed the picture. My photographs were miles away. I stalked them and saw at the moment of discovery how temporary they were, and how the instant I snapped them they changed and vanished like smoke, or ceased to sing, like a lark in a snare. The life of a picture was that stinging second: there was nothing more.

  I was sad over Orlando and had the sad person’s dull stamina, a cranky concentration, as I went about harvesting these split-seconds. One picture showed a huddled family on Mott Street, horses and clutter, Chinese characters splashed down a wall and a window of skinny stretched chickens; but what I remembered best was a song and the smell of frying and the ache of my swollen feet and how Orlando had said, “Don’t forget to come back.” These failures, so irksome then, gave me back the past. I could enter these pictures and start drowning and relive my life.

  The back of that head Frank had showed me; it had a face.

  It was after I returned from one of these exhausting outings that Mrs. Seltzer opened the front door and said in a hostess’s obliquely warning way—as much for the people inside as for me—“We’ve got company, Maude.”

  I looked beyond her and saw six or seven people arguing furiously. They’re just prostitutes,” one man was saying at the top of his voice.

  Mrs. Seltzer said, “Watch your language.”

  She steered me inside and she introduced me to everyone so fast I just heard my own name six times and didn’t catch anyone else’s. I was glad to sit down in a corner—I didn’t want to stick out and be noticed. Besides the Seltzers there were four men and one plump woman who kept her feet flat on the floor and didn’t say a word or even smile. She reminded me of a throbbing potato. And the small dark whiskery man who had been practically screaming turned to me and said in an accent I could not quite place, “What do you do, lass?”

  They had been having tea. This activity stopped with a sudden swelling pause and the room became big and still. Everyone looked at me. I looked at my knotted fingers. I didn’t know what to say.

  Mr. Seltzer said, “Maude’s a photographer.”

  And saved me.

  “Are thee?” said the weasel-faced man, passing his hand across his beard.

  “Yes. I’m a photographer.”

  You become what others call you, and this was my baptism. Magic: everyone relaxed. From that moment I understood the access a photographer has, the kind of gate-crashing courage the instrument granted. It was like having a title—make way for the queen; and I didn’t even have to show them my pictures. Here I was, seventeen, ignorant, a virgin, not pretty, “a cheap date.” But the statement worked a miracle and changed me, because I am a photographer implied You are my subject. It was much more a novelty then than now. Although photography had been rattling along for a century, cameras were still considered mysterious contraptions and photographers a little suspect in their poaching on the Cubists. Indeed, there was a whole raft of photographers in New York at the time—Stieglitz was only one of them—who were madly signaling their belief that they had killed painting dead with their arsenal of cameras. Photography was new; it was like comedy, it hadn’t been tainted by crit
icism, it was naive chemistry—leather bellows, smelly bottles, wobbly tripods—done in the dark. It was trying to replace painting by imitating it, so photographs looked freckled and corpselike, soft-focus poses that might have been painters’ instant fossils. The New York notion (which I did not share) was that pictures were made, not found. I had Orlando to thank for my philosophy of the direct approach: I never created pictures—I took them. But, for my supposedly chemical creativity, the people in the room looked at me with curiosity and affection, a kind of friendly trust that made me feel I belonged. It was so simple! Mr. Seltzer had said it, but I believed it, and so in myself, and stopped doubting. Orlando had been right to send me here.

  But the dark man said in his high-pitched voice, “Then where’s your bloody camera?”

  There was laughter. I said, “It’s right out front in the hall, where I left it.”

  “Take my picture,” said the man and showed me his yellow teeth.

  “No,” said the plump woman, throbbing at him. “Leave the child alone.”

  “What am I doing here?” said the man. His voice was shrill and complaining. “I don’t like it! I don’t want to be here!”

  I knew he must be someone famous because no one contradicted him or told him to shut his trap. He was being rude, but the silence seemed to say, “It’s just his way—he’s always like that.” The rest of the people resumed chatting about books, while the little man looked at me hard. His ears were purple, his beard ragged and he looked so sick I felt sorry for him.