Picture Palace

by Paul Theroux

  “Miss Pratt?”

  “No more questions,” I said. But I wasn’t getting anywhere. I smacked into a wall, dislodging a picture.

  “Please,” said Mr. Umlah.

  “Can’t you see I want to get out of here!”

  They made way, they cleared a path for me. The floor was at once echoic. But this was worse: the room tilted oddly. I inched forward foolishly in blackness, using my hands like a swimmer. I should never have come, I thought. Why had I? There I was, in the middle of this crowd, a jackass, exposed. There was a hush in the room.

  No, someone said.

  “I’ll be all right in a minute,” I said. “I just need some elbow room.”

  Oh, God.

  “Let me give you a hand,” said Mr. Umlah.

  Do something.

  “Go away,” I said. But I was off balance and started to teeter. The deck bucked and nearly toppled me. I heard surf, a heavy sea—this was a gale. I struggled on.

  Very distinctly, one of the fretting voices—but this was both a whisper and a shout—said, She’s blind!

  It is a terrible word. It stopped me in my tracks. They were bellowing at me. Most people think that if you’re blind you’re deaf as well (and kind and forgiving and charitable and not interested in money). They screeched and rushed forward to help me, and of course, being gallery buffs, they all had cameras. I heard film being wound, dust caps removed, the ratchetings of lenses being focused.

  “No pictures!” I said. “Put those things down!”

  And they obeyed, they gave me room. But I’d had enough. The sob started in my chest; I fought it, and then let go, and in front of all those people I turned on the waterworks.

  24

  Buffaloed

  PHOEBE said, “It’s another cable.”

  “Don’t!” I blocked my ears. I’d had just about enough of apologies and people weeping over me. The pity was much worse than the praise. It was hard being famous; it was unbearable being a freak. My photographs, which I had found in a mood of adventure and exuberance—the greatest joy I had ever known—were prophetic in a grotesquely wounding way: I was now like one of the wilder-looking members of Millsaps Circus, being celebrated for my deformity.

  It was no use explaining that I had been fine when I’d taken the pictures in Florida. I was assumed to be a champion of the afflicted. No one knew the true source of my special sort of blindness, and I wouldn’t quote anyone my favorite line from Orlando’s poetry book: “I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.” (“He was a Harvard man,” said Orlando when, to educate me, he read these poems.) For the camera crowd I had become my own pictures. Americans adore a handicap in a celebrity. I had been revealed as The Blind Photographer of the Cape. The attention exhausted me. It was the tyranny of admiration. So I had fled and I wanted nothing more than to curl up and make myself as small as a comma or the tadpole it resembled and just wriggle away.

  “Listen,” said Phoebe, and even with my fingers stuck in my ears I heard her. “It’s from Papa. They’re on their way home, they’re—” She stopped and took a deep breath.

  “What’s wrong?” I looked closely at her. She was squinting hard at the cable, her face twitching in hesitation, her eyes darting as she reread the message.

  “Nothing.”

  “Read it.”

  Her voice went flat as she read, “Leaving today.”

  “There’s more.”

  “No.”

  Tumblers gulped in her little locked heart as they fell into place.

  “Read the rest of it, Phoebe.”

  “How do you know so darned much!” she said, and went on reading in a dull defeated voice, “Leaving today, thanks to you. Papa.”

  “‘Thanks to you,’” I repeated. “Does that mean me?”

  “Us, apparently. There’s no name.”

  “Sounds like sarcasm, don’t it?”

  She was shaking her head and her mouth was set in a rueful little pucker. “It beats me.”

  I said, “He’s burned up.”

  “I can’t see why. Can you?”

  “Sounds as if something’s seriously wrong.”

  She turned on me with surprising heat. “You’re crazy! Why, there’s nothing wrong. He’s just being funny—that’s his idea of a joke.”

  She was embattled, and she had her reasons. She knew she had nothing to fear from me, but we had neighbors and they had eyes. Suppose one of these local infidels had an inkling of what was going on here between her and Orlando—seen them somehow from a dinghy? Or, ignoring the NO TRESPASSING signs and cutting through the yard—as they often did to go clamming—had a glimpse? If they had seen, and alerted Papa (it was possible: they were a contrary bunch) there would be hell to pay.

  I said, “Maybe not seriously wrong—maybe just a little peculiar.”

  “Peculiar?”

  “Unusual,” I said, but I regretted that word.

  “What do you know?” she said. “You act so high and mighty, but you can’t see your hand in front of your face. You go creeping around the house pretending you’re normal and barging in where you don’t belong—don’t think I haven’t noticed—but that doesn’t mean you can see. This is the thanks I get for reading to you and making sure your seams are straight—accusations and blame!”

  “No one’s blaming you, Phoebe,” I said calmly.

  “You’re a fine one to talk!” she said, “You’re the unusual one around here. You’re downright peculiar. Yes, Maude, I think there’s something strange with you upstairs—I’m sorry, but I really do.”

  Something strange with me upstairs—look who’s talking! But I held my tongue.

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” I said. “The fact is, the folks are on their way home. And something’s—well, something’s up. We’d better get the place shipshape.”

  “The place is shipshape,” she said, still smarting. “If you weren’t blind you could see that.”

  “It’s dusty,” I said. “It hasn’t been cleaned since Orlando went back to Harvard. Dishes in the sink, crumbs on the carpet. If Papa walked in now he’d have kittens.”

  Phoebe, in a voice I did not recognize as hers, said, “I can’t face him.”

  “Sure you can. We’ll get it spick-and-span in no time.”

  But Phoebe had gotten up from her chair. She walked halfway across the parlor and stopped and looked through the window to the Sound. And I knew what she was thinking: If he knows, it’s the end, I’m done for. More than anything, she dreaded being found out. And I suppose she was afraid of what Orlando’s reaction would be—defiance. Her fear was also compounded by the memory of what she’d done, for in retrospect, and in Papa’s eyes, her sleeping with Orlando was a kind of insanity. What’s got into you? Papa would say; and she’d cry. Love was the explanation, but that was no explanation at all, since to the observer love looked selfish, a kind of stupor and lose of control. People saw in lovers what they saw in gluttons—a shameless and faintly absurd expression of appetite, a habit, an addiction that had no rational explanation. No matter how Phoebe tried to defend herself Papa would stoop and say, You what?

  Off and on, for the next two days, Papa’s question seemed to occur to her. She brought it up like wind, a burp she suppressed with a wince.

  I hoped she would fight for Orlando. But she fell silent; she was spiritless; she was drowning. And her descent—like people’s experience of my photographs, that surrender to memory—was a solitary plunge from the shoals of the present to the deeps where her love lay like a sunken ship, broken on the bottom, all its treasure fuzzed with tufts of sea moss, and rapid fish flashing through the wavering grasses and splayed barrel staves. But there was a difference between her and my fans: it was as if she wanted to stay there and not surface, to die a watery death in that dark and be among the split-open casks of her love until her white body was bones and turned to coral.

  She didn’t reply when I said, “Phoebe?”

  She was reflective; and
fear, making her thoughtful, gave her a look of weary intelligence. The strain of fright had dimmed her sparkle and made her seem wiser than she was. I had regarded her as rather frivolous—a flibbertigibbet, in fact. But this look of piety and panic in her scared me. She had been quick to shift the blame onto me (“You’re the unusual one around here”), but that was momentary; now she ignored me. She mooned around, taking walks on the lonely beach to Gammon Point, as if trying to decide whether to take the plunge. And if she did do herself in we’d all be at fault, for suicide is usually just another way of having the last word, inevitably, Take that!

  She could not see that what she had done with Orlando was pure genius, love’s perfect fit. But I could, and I vowed to defend her. Several times, shadowing her on the beach, I came within an ace of rushing up to her and crying, I know all about it! Don’t give him up! I’m on your side!

  Because, of course, I was grateful to her. If I couldn’t have him, it was only right that she should. She was my double and so I throbbed for her, I shared their passion, hidden like a photographer. My sight had originated with their love. Then, I saw what my life had been and what my work must be. My photographs expressed nothing of this; they told no story. There had been no link between what I was and what I saw. In a picture I never took, called Portrait of the Artist, a grizzled prospector squats in a gully sluicing sand, a cadaverous geezer panning for gold. There is a shadow on his face, but in his rusty skittle there is a knucklesized nugget gleaming among the dull pebbles and grit. He might be on the point of snatching it up, or else he could be preparing to dump it back into the gully. But you see it: you are the artist. I described this picture to Phoebe to tell her how much I needed her.

  She would not be drawn. I hoped when the day came that she would say So what? and go on loving.

  She stared at the December sea, that plowed field of fugitive furrows under a mammoth sky.

  Papa arrived without warning one frosty afternoon just before Christmas. We heard Mr. Wampler’s beach wagon in the drive, then saw Papa—tanned the hue of varnish and in his long fur-collared coat—striding up the front walk. Behind him, Mama supervised the unloading of the suitcases. Mama looked uneasy, Papa resolute, in his brisk brass-tacks mood, spanking his hands for warmth.

  Phoebe said, “Damn that Ollie. He said he’d be here.”

  “He’ll come,” I said. “He’ll stick up for you.” Though this was incautious (I had nearly given myself away), she nodded. But she was trembling and looked terribly worried.

  “Well, well, speak of the devil,” he said in the front hall, shrugging out of his coat. “Didn’t think you’d have the guts to face me.”

  But he went right past us, through the house, shuffled his mail, and did not say another word until about six o’clock, when he had changed his clothes and set the logs alight in the fireplace. One thing about Papa: he had a sense of occasion. He stood there in his black tuxedo, his back to the fire, a stiff drink in one hand and a big cigar in the other, as if he’d just been elected mayor.

  We took our seats—Phoebe and I on the sofa, Mama in her wing-chair.

  Papa said, “Too bright in here for you, Maudie?”

  “It’s just fine,” I said.

  “I was referring to your goggles. Mind taking them off? They’re distracting me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’d rather keep them on.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Phoebe bought them for me. She says they suit me.”

  “Just because Phoebe has a crazy notion,” he said, “it don’t mean it’s right.”

  Phoebe groaned, dreading what was to come.

  Mama said, “They make you look awful funny.”

  “Let’s drop it,” said Papa. “I’ve got a question to ask and I want a straight answer. Have I done right by you—ever let you down or given you any reason to complain?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “Phoebe?”.

  She shook her head guiltily. “Course not.”

  “Look at me, both of you. What do you see?”

  “Papa!” said Phoebe, and she was on the verge of blubbering.

  I said, “There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

  “You bet your boots there is! If you’d take those goggles off you’d see it.”

  “I don’t want to hear this,” said Phoebe, but I propped her up and kept her on the sofa. I couldn’t face this alone.

  Papa said, “No, it’s not your father you’re seeing. Know what it is?” He bared his teeth. “It’s a jackass.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said.

  “How can a jackass help looking silly?” he said. “Know what I was asking myself all the way home from Florida? Why—I was asking—why does a daughter of mine, whom I’ve loved and respected ever since she was yay high, go out of her way to make a jackass of me?” And as if calling a witness he said, “Mother?”

  Mama was looking at Phoebe and me. She said, “You’ll never know.”

  This got us nowhere. It was theater. When your back is to the wall, the people you love most, believing themselves to have been deceived, take their time and enumerate their grumbles instead of rushing in for the kill. They make it a production. They toy with you, taunt, reminisce, and destroy you, not with one clean thrust through your heart but by slapping one petty grievance after another into your face. What makes it so painful and peculiarly nasty is that only they know your weaknesses. Other people can hurt you, but only those you love can make you suffer.

  “God,” Papa wheezed, striding up and down before the fire—there was an actor in this man, “I recall when it was all different. You girls were pipsqueaks. Your mother and I would take you out in the boat—”

  I suffered for Phoebe. She was there beside me, petrifying with shame, dying a slow death, sinking. And I was getting angrier. How dare he? I thought. But he wouldn’t wind it up.

  “—never thought any daughter of mine would go out of her way to humiliate me. It’s not natural!”

  Phoebe just sat there, and because she was stone she didn’t tremble, she didn’t move. The tears were rolling down her cheeks and the tearstains gleamed in the firelight.

  “—given you a good home and I’ve had no regrets. I’ve always had reason to be proud of you. I’ve given you a lot of freedom, but you’ve abused it.”

  Papa, for all his puffing and blowing, seemed curiously happy. Banality followed banality, and I thought: Yes, this is his satisfaction. His discovery of what Orlando and Phoebe had done had wounded him, but he was taking pleasure in roasting her slowly by the fireside, pacing in front of the flames and letting his vengeful shadow jump all over the walls.

  “—it’s pretty painful to think of yourself as a man for sixty-two years and then wake up one morning and discover that everyone’s laughing at you.”

  I said, “No one’s laughing, Papa.”

  He smiled. Mama was somber, Phoebe still weeping softly, and I suppose my own face looked fairly grim behind my dark glasses.

  “Listen,” he whispered and cocked his head to the side and let the cigar smoke trail around his face. “If you listen hard you can hear them. Laughing to beat the band. Hear it? ‘Pratt’s daughter’s gone and made a jackass of him!’ Oh, sure, they’ll forgive the daughter, but old men get no mercy.”

  I said, “I don’t hear a blessed thing.”

  “You ain’t listening hard enough,” he said. “Because if you were you’d hear each particular voice. ‘Kick the jackass,’ they’re saying. Hee-haw, hee-haw. There’s a lot of people who wanted to see me down. And I fought them. Mother?”

  “You fought them.”

  “I never fought dirty, I never broke the rules—didn’t have to. I fought fair. I had friends then. But I never thought I’d get my rump kicked, and so hard, by my very own daughter.” He tapped an inch of cigar ash into the fire and repeated, “By my very own daughter.”

  I knew then that Phoebe was lost. She had given in, she wouldn’t defend herself
or Orlando. She’d let this nagging old comedian bully and bluster her into a full confession. I said, “Hold on, Papa.”

  For it was my crisis, too. I never could take another picture without bluffing, as I had fluked Firebug. Though blindness was no handicap to perceiving the world around me, I was incapable of seeing pictures—my own or anyone else’s. I could not read or write. So my career was at an end, and good riddance. But I positively would not be denied the satisfaction of witnessing Phoebe completing what I could not in loving Orlando. If you have no life, I thought, the next best thing is to be near someone else’s. Obviously my blindness was a reaction. It wasn’t simple shock—it was resignation. If I couldn’t have Orlando, then I didn’t want any other lover. But they had taught me to see love and that was reason enough to live.

  “Aren’t you interested,” I said, “in Phoebe’s side of the story?”

  “I know what Phoebe will say—that’s why I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Give me a chance, then.”

  “Pipe down,” he said, and he began to chuckle, a kind of ominous mirth. He was performing, taking his time. I had never seen him so jolly or known such desperate gaiety in his speechifying. There was something final about this comic effort, the flourish of a farewell, his last bow.

  Mama said, “Phoebe’s crying,” but Papa ignored this remark.

  “Bet you think I’m going to a party,” he said, giving his cummerbund a jaunty tug. “Am I going to have a high old time in this monkey suit? No, I ain’t. Know why? Cause there ain’t going to be no more parties. This whisky,” he said, swishing his glass, twirling it to his lips, and sipping. “Best bottle there is in the house, pre-war—I didn’t even drink it during Prohibition. Know why I’m drinking it now? No? Cause there ain’t going to be no more whisky. No sir.” He straightened and raised his cigar to admire it. “What have we got here? Not a five-cent El Ropo from the candy store in Hyannis—this here is a Havana, like the King of England used to smoke. Aromatic, no veins on the wrapper, you want to keep the fumes up your nose until you bust. One puff and you’re in Congress, two puffs and you’re President. When I lit it up an hour ago it was a foot long. Want to know why I’m smoking this here big cigar?”