by Paul Theroux
“Gosh.”
“What do you want?” said Stieglitz.
“I want to take your picture.”
This brought a frank honk of derision from the lady, and the other two were silently guffawing in that struggling way, as if they were straining to lift something off the ground. But Stieglitz wasn’t laughing and when they saw he wasn’t they stopped their nonsense.
“You forgot your camera,” he said gruffly, perhaps wondering whether his leg was being pulled.
“Left it home on purpose,” I said. “But I’ve got plenty of these.” I showed him the loaded film holders.
“You need something to stick them in.”
I gave him my sweetest smile. “I thought I might use your camera, Mister Steiglitz.”
From the expression on the others’ faces you would have thought I had asked their bishop for his jockstrap. The very idea! they were thinking. How could she!
But for the first time since entering the room I saw the traces of a smile on Stieglitz’s mustache, the flattened ends rising and curling with interest, his mouth a wrinkling phrase between reluctant but definitely mirthful parentheses.
“That’s a pretty big camera.”
“I’m a pretty big gal.”
He nodded and passed his hand down his mouth, restoring his mustache to its former sneering shape.
I noticed that he had ignored the other people. It occurred to me that he disliked them and was willing to demonstrate this. He got up and, one shoulder higher than the other in a resentful slouch, went over to the beat-up camera, and walked around it, eyeing it sideways, as if he were preparing to stick his hand in and pull out a bunny.
“So you’re interested in photography, eh? Know anything about it?”
“Enough,” I said. “I get a real kick out of it.”
“Gets a kick out of it,” he said to the puzzled watchers. “Hear that? It’s important.” He waggled the bulb at me. “Think you can handle that?”
I took it and gave it a hard squeeze and heard the shutter plop.
A sly look returned the parentheses to his mouth and he said, “All right, make it snappy.”
Humoring him, I had let him think he could humor me. If I had introuced myself as Maude Pratt of the Negative Boogie-Man Prints I would have been out on my ear. But who was I? Just a plain-looking gal in a wool hat, with a handbag full of film holders, saying gosh and gee. If he had known who I was—his meticulous assassin—he would have given me the bum’s rush; but as a beginner, fumbling with her sleeves, I posed no threat. And the fact that I was a woman probably had something to do with it, too: he had nothing to lose. It was the secret of our success. As woman photographers we were either ignored to the point where it did us absolute good, or else courted in that sexually testing way that turned every approach into a flirtation. The business with the rubber bulb: this simulated hand-job was supposed to make me flinch. American photography, with very few exceptions, is the story of a gal with gumption aiming her camera at a man with a reputation.
Stieglitz had caved in, but any inkling that I was a photographer, his equal, ambitious, with nothing but contempt for his magician’s bluff—the slightest hint that I was more than I seemed, and he would have kicked me into the middle of next week.
He had moved over to the wall and rocked himself back and fixed his face into that grim little look, as if he had just noticed the roof leaked, posed like Steichen’s Gordon Craig. The dirty window filtered a lemon light across one side of his head and gave the rest of him inkstains of shadow, black arms, black coat, one black ear. He was more than ever the vain magician refusing to reveal the unsurprising object on his person. I knew as I opened the back of the camera and saw his face flickering there that this was how he wanted to look, disliking everyone and everything. It was the expression I tried to catch, his weak challenge of malice.
“It’s shaky,” I said, aiming the camera. “And what’s this?”
“The lens,” he said. “It’s a Goerz Dagor. Best there is.”
“It’s so darn oxidized I can’t read it. Gosh, this diaphragm’s really illegible. I don’t know how you do it—”
As I criticized his camera he forgot his face and started to think. If people aren’t thinking it is impossible to get a good likeness. Now I could see, upside down on the frosted glass, uncertain thought starting to snarl his mouth, and his eyes pricked with suspicion sighting along the bridge of his nose.
I slipped the film holder in and standing next to the camera grasped the bulb and said, “Here goes,” and squeezed it. I heard that curious per-plunk as of something caught in a small trap.
Bang, I thought, You’re dead.
“Keep going.” He did not change his posture, though with each shot he inched back until on the last one—impatient to be done and perhaps aware that he’d been jacklighted like a porcupine on a lantern—his eyes had grown much smaller, giving his head a ducking tilt varnished with the hard gleam of scorn and envy. He had been holding his breath.
“There,” I said. “Now that didn’t hurt a bit, did it?” I put the exposed film holders in my bag.
He sighed and sat down changed. I knew—not from anything I had seen when I had shot him, but from the way he looked now—that I had succeeded. He was crookeder and stamped with exhaustion, and instead of sneering, naked. It was as if in photographing him I had peeled a layer from his face he now realized was gone.
“If you’re quite finished, young lady, you can go.” His voice struck dull tricked notes.
“Thanks a million,” I said, and at the door, “Would you like to see the prints?”
“I very much doubt they’ll be worth looking at.”
Wrong, I thought. I smiled at the people who had watched it all. I had witnesses.
And the hotel room I had fled for feeling so useless and guilty in seemed on my re-entry like an intimate corner of my soul. I screwed in my red bulbs and drew the shades and stuffed towels against the cracks of light. I padded back and forth in the rosy darkness uncorking solutions and filling the bathroom sink. Then I began that simple and pleasurable chemistry that is like laundering in reverse—producing human stains on clean sheets. I washed the negatives and dunked them in developer and agitated them until they ripened. I fixed them. The mottled result was a perfect image of Stieglitz, the layer of him I had filched, but much better than I had expected. Right between the eyes.
Sunday I spent making three sets of prints, and my only regret was that Orlando was not in the dark room to marvel at these trophies and hug me in congratulation.
Nor was he at Adams House.
“Who shall I say called?” said the voice.
“His sister,” I said. “And I am still waiting.”
I sent one set of prints to Stieglitz, without a note, without a name, and yet in the assured belief that my originality glittered in the work. He was vain: he would hang them.
The other set I sent to the Camera Club as my calling card. I would have more before long, and a show, and the kind of fame that would have Orlando shouting, “You’ve done it, cookie!”
My sense of victory was all the keener for my being truly unknown. I relished my anonymity in this triumph since I knew it could not possibly last. The celebrity’s assassin, no matter how obscure, inevitably gains his victim’s fame: it’s part of the act. There was no magic, but dammit, I deserved that man’s head.
17
Swamp Dwellers
THE PORTER, wearing a crimson pillbox, complained in dusky mutters about the number of trunks he had to carry—the peepshow that was virtually the contents of my darkroom. I couldn’t blame him—he didn’t know me. And I wasn’t pretty enough to forgive on sight. People looked at me with unfocused eyes in a grave lopsided way, as if at a double image.
After I boarded the train no heads turned. The man leaning at the door to the next compartment, seeing me smiling at the door to mine, concentrated his disappointment on my hat and knees. The steward slopped my drink and didn�
�t say sorry. (Now I was tippling regularly, gin for preference; I thought of it as hypo bath because it fixed me.) I could have been miserable, but—far from it—I was so convinced of my success as a photographer I felt I was traveling incognito—like the original who leaves her triumph behind and rather enjoys her fugitive’s disguise, since she knows that as soon as her true identity is discovered she will be eminent. My deed was inescapable. My own secret for now, soon it would be the world’s.
But I was a photographer for love. Orlando was the reason for my camera, and he would make it superfluous. I had no ambition beyond tempting him to its darkened side, and while my fame was crucial to this it struck me as foolish to pursue the lonely distraction of art beyond the room where we made a sandwich of our passion.
I was at the corner window, looking at my two faces in the double pane. The more distant one was prettier, like a mask behind a face.
“I love trains.” It was the man from the next compartment, propped on his forearms, simpering.
I said, “I wish they went a bit faster.”
“That’s the beauty of them,” he said. “I’m in no hurry.”
“If you’re not in a hurry, what’s the point in going?”
I spent most of the trip in my compartment, drinking, using my hypo to dream. It was the same dream: my surprise. Orlando was waiting in the windmill on a night after my return. Obeying his instinct he had kept this vigil alone. The promise we had made in childhood had matured to a vow.
The meniscus of moon hung between the windmill’s blades and bathed the earth in that exposing dust glow and made the salt marsh and the shore and the whole gray world, floor and ceiling, a flat-sided chamber for this vision. We were two images stealing together, as if we existed as fixed lovers in a field beyond the moon. Our ecstatic light-beams twisted toward earth, brother and sister, to be joined. The crickets, the sea-splash, the tremble of wind. And I knew he was there from the candlepower of his body that made the windmill shimmer like a lantern.
Back from the far side of the moon I crept across the grass and up the steps to where he lay. Somehow I shed my clothes. He laughed softly and folded me in his arms. He prepared me, then covered me and pumped me with life. My chafed skin was alight. Dreams are unspecific tumbling and heat, but I knew what I wanted—for him to burst through my squinting iris and demolish the virgin darkness in the camera of my flesh. Then goodbye photography! Goodbye film! Goodbye—
“Orlando, Orlando, anyone for Orlando.”
I woke and worked the shade up, and I Inew from the look of it where we were.
Florida, rinsed with green, with small sulking bushes, and here and there palms, was a wild garden of aching ferns in a clear yellow sunrise. After the low woods came seepages, fingers of water, then an ocean of hyacinths with birds diving into it and through the tangles of vines. They were not the spindly sandpipers and clumsy gray sea birds I was used to, but ones that had flapped from the dawn of the world, with flashing tails, long beaks, and legs that swayed and folded under them taking off. The white plumes of their feathers fanned out as they spilled again. The morning was so hot there was no dew on the leaves, which made the place look, for all its greenery, very old. Rags of moss dangled from overhanging branches and what flowers I could see were lotus-like, so delicate a photo would sink them.
In places the swamp water had scummy stretches, with black saplings and bitten-off tree trunks standing in them, some like gallows and others like coatracks and drowned knees. Each dead thing had collar stripes of dark tide marks, a decoration that took the curse off them. The green lace of stagnation hit by the morning light exploded like a dish of sulphur with an afterburn of midges sifting in bunches above it. I could not imagine furry things surviving here, but only families of waterproof reptiles pushing their snouts through the warm swamp and depositing eggs.
It had a lively smell of danger and it was huge and spreading in vine-whips and fleshy shoots, sliding from stump to stump like a sponge growing in a puddle. It had gone on fattening in the ooze, but for all its density it had a limpness: the smallest movement of a bird stirred it. I had never seen anything like it. It was the earliest moment of life in America, before the canoes, and so different from what I knew on the Cape, where there were footprints in the remotest dunes. I had not known places like this existed; I could not believe my luck.
Eden was like this. Not that manicured park of fruit trees and fig leaves and trimmed hedges, the Old Testament orchard signposted with punishments for picking the fruit and walking on the grass—not that, but this wilderness of succulence, trackless, risky, and half-sunk in bubbly mud, sprawling sideways in an infancy it could not outgrow—order without rules. Here, one could imagine brother and sister bumping like frogs in broad daylight, for in one plump tree with its feet in ferns an orchid clung amid a bandaging of vines, moss dripped, an upright fringe of green flames flickered along its boughs and its own leaves were sheltering hands. Other identical trees embraced, wrapped together like lovers and swelling where they touched.
One thing about photography: there are no second chances. I tried to do this vision of Florida from the train, but the rocking window jogged my camera. Though I was able to shoot it later, without the whoops-a-daisy of the train, none of the pictures looked genuine. My best pictures saw more than my eye and these lacked that great slap of sight.
We’ll have our honeymoon here, I thought: a honeymoon in paradise.
“I hope you find something to do here,” said Mama, almost her first words to me after I arrived in Verona. Her tone was dim and discouraging. She blinked at me as if to say, You shouldn’t have come.
Papa read the words written on Mama’s face: “I can’t for the life of me think why you came all this way. Furthermore, I doubt whether Carney has room for you.”
“You said there are twenty bedrooms in this house.”
“Palace,” said Papa. “Twenty-five. And they’re full.”
“Can you beat that.”
Carney’s palace (we were on settees in a mammoth lounge) was an Italian-style fruitcake with a bell tower and battlements, a courtyard filled with leering statuary and surrounded by a blundering wall. On the shore side a pier jutted into the Gulf of Mexico. But the yachts at the pier impressed me less than the pelicans I could see opening like umbrellas for their dives, and the chandelier in our lounge wasn’t half as splendid as its reflecting shape, the pyramid of oranges in the crystal bowl beneath it. The place itself, with its pictures and gold pillars and baroque scrollwork and high painted ceilings, although magnificent at a distance, was up close much shabbier. It was nailed together several degrees out of kilter and thickly regilded: movie theater or opera house decor, a spectacular silliness. Here bad taste was gluttonous, size mattered more than finish, and I was sure that none of it had the grandeur of the swamp they had drained to build it on.
It distressed me to think that Mama and Papa could be happy in this monkey-house of vulgarity, and had visited year after year. But I think what worried me most was the person responsible for this mess. It was a motiveless satire of grace and art, and each smirking cherub and blistered wall showed it. It did not reduplicate the Italian original, it did not come near—it was as if the savage who made it, having failed at creation, could only mock it in debauched stucco and brass. The tropical storms had done the rest, completed the parody by pocking it with salt. A person who would do this would stop at nothing.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Tell Carney I’ve got a room in a boarding house. Mrs. Fritts’s. She’s a nice old body.”
Mama said, “Circus people stay at those places.”
“She’s a big girl now,” said Papa. He stared hard at me. “But what about your sister? What’s she supposed to do while you’re gallivanting down here?”
Speak for yourself, I almost said. But I was warned by an anxious look on his face, a double image of worry in fact, since they were both tanned and wore blue and white outfits that matched. Far from home they
looked startled and ashamed, as if seeing them here in Florida I had discovered them misbehaving in a state of undress and was spoiling their fun.
Papa said, “She won’t sit on her hands if I know my Phoebe.”
“Phoebe can look after herself,” I said.
“Hasn’t got a brain in her head,” said Papa. “And Orlando’s probably out raising hell. I tell you, Maude, if anything happens you’re responsible.”
“I’m not staying here long,” I said. “I’ll just do some pictures and go.”
“Carney doesn’t allow photographers on his property.”
“Then he’s either a fool or a criminal,” I said.
“He’s a Renaissance Man—American Renaissance,” said Papa. “He doesn’t want to be made a fool of.”
“Your Mister Carney is mistaken. We interpret, Papa. We do not create.”
“He’s quite a patron of the arts—”
I turned to the portrait of Carney as Papa spoke. He was a red fleshy man with tiny eyes set deep in a swollen swinish head, a porker’s hot face and bristly neck, hands like slabs of meat, and wisps of white hair, like smoke coming out of his earholes. He was squatting in that ornate frame over the mantelpiece as if watching us through a window with his raw rummy’s face.
