Picture Palace

by Paul Theroux

  In the succeeding days the pictures he brought me reminded me of the many magazines that had paid my way and finally crashed—dear old Collier’s, the winning Saturday Evening Post, the all-purpose Look, and vividly illiterate Life. I had always liked the big-format family magazine in which a two-page picture could be bled at the margins, and the photograph itself wrapped around your face, your nose in the staple where it belonged. When television sent those magazines into liquidation, photographs were reduced in size. They either had news value or they didn’t count, and ambitious pictures like my group portraits John Hancock and Red Sox Fans became unthinkable.

  It was about then, with the folding of Life, that I abandoned my idea for the panning shot with which I had hoped to fill an entire issue: a sequence of pictures taken from South Yarmouth, Massachusetts, to San Diego, California. Cross Country I had planned to call it, every inch of it in tiny pictures. And if that worked I’d do the ultimate panning shot, around the world in a zillion frames.

  I stopped working for magazines. I could not bring myself to do the ghoulish photojournalism that was so much in demand—two children failing ten storys from a burning balcony, the seconds-before-death pictures of executions and ambushes and train wrecks: snuff shots, as they were called. Several publishers offered me contracts to collaborate on picture books, with texts by famous writers, as Agee and Evans had done on the peckerwoods. I probably would have done it if it had meant only pictures, but I could not see how forty pages of tortured prose like Jim Agee’s would have helped my pictures. He wanted to make the reader see the pictures, so he described them, every blessed detail, but before I knew it I was in the dark, stumbling among the subordinate clauses and tripping over semicolons, each word calling to mind a thousand pictures, as I was fond of saying.

  The beauty of photographs, I told those publishers, was that they required no imagination. They took your breath away, dragged you under and kept you there. The written word was a distraction, and anyone who wrote about pictures was just showing off. No one got fat reading about food—he just got hungry. On the other hand, my Cheeseburger was as good as a meal. Many people burped after they looked at it.

  “Nearly done,” said Frank some days after the Pound business. He showed me an interior shot of my own house.

  “Whose Room?” I said.

  “That’s what I was going to say.”

  “It’s a sequence,” I said. “Objects have memories. Rooms are psychic.”

  “I’d love to hear all about it,” he said. “But I have to go down to New York to check the audio for the show.”

  “Audio? I thought this was a picture show?”

  “The tapes I was telling you about. Sea gulls and waves. Traffic. It’s a new concept I’m working on—atmosphere.”

  “If you’re catching the bus to New York, Fusco,” I said, and looked at his beads and those high-heeled shoes, “you’d better go fluff up.”

  He left me with the picture. A parlor; but come a bit closer. Look at the cigar butt in the ashtray, the knitting on the stool, the dents and worn places in the chairs, Papa’s reading glasses, Mama’s handbag—she never went anywhere without it. And more: two flower stalks in a vase, with their petals missing, and out the window a fisherman, obviously a trespasser, making his way to the beach: low tide. It is a poem. Two people have just left that picture.

  He died first, of a coronary that killed him by pinching one pipe, then another, until finally all his systems failed. It was not the departure he had wished, “leaving the building” on a moment’s notice. He was kept waiting, and he hated that. When we were together, Mama and I were strangers to each other; and she knew it was her turn. She broke her hip, caught pneumonia and finally let go. Her last words: “Pull up the shades.”

  The deaths of Orlando and Phoebe, the loss of my parents, only hurt me on cold rainy days, like a football injury, a bad knee.

  Though I still took pictures, and was visited by youngsters—every two years or so there was a photography epidemic and I was rediscovered—I did nothing of any importance. The great picture magazines were gone, the galleries were full of conceptual junk (Six Bricks, Doris’s Tit, Untitled #82) and minimals and people doing it with mirrors. I began to doubt that photography was an art. It was a way of life, the best vocation for a single gal to get out and meet people, find a husband, make a few bucks. “I want to be a photographer” was a plea for love.

  I could not be too cynical. Photography had taught me to see. It was harmless enough, but it was only a beginning; blindness had taught me much more about vision. My life had been interesting, I had been lucky, and until Frank arrived that summer I believed that I had been mostly happy and had never hurt anyone.

  Something short and personal, he had said, after I had returned from London in the summer, when I faced the fact that pictures lied like damnation, and my heart seizure—so like Papa’s—needled home the fear that I might not have much time left to tell the truth.

  And even then, after so long, I did not know what the truth was.

  29

  Bodies of Thought

  THERE MUST BE more, but where? Frank was not around to answer the question. And I was glum, the Cape was deserted, the tourists had gone: WINTER RATES said one sign, SEE YOU NEXT YEAR another, and CLOSED FOR SEASON on Kopper Krafts, Pilgrim Laundromat, and the Leaning Tower of Pizza; empty beaches, clear water, hordes of tiny fiddler crabs, and every motel reflecting my depression in its pitiful motto, VACANCY. There is no wasteland like an abandoned resort, no more melancholy sight than drizzle and wind tearing at cheap plastic.

  I remembered phrases; I hadn’t seen the pictures that fit them. The captions had stayed, the pictures were gone, so the captions were meaningless. The baboon I had done—under protest—for the National Geographic remained in my mind as “Airbrush flies, remove genitals.” The Marilyn Monroe pictures I had refused to retrieve from the windmill even after the editor had moaned, “Mailer needs them for his book.” The annual winter swim of the L-Street Brownies. The ones I had done of gawkers at the Family of Man exhibition, of Walker in Connecticut, of the shopping mall on Route 28, of the pretty policewoman with the pistol and nightstick in Hyannis (called Move Along); the medium close-up of the elderly bag-carriers at Angelo’s Supermarket in South Yarmouth—“They thought I was going to seed,” one retired soap-powder salesman had said, heaving my groceries into the back of my Chevy and wiping his hands on his apron: I remembered that, but where was the picture? Frank had not shown me that one, or the others.

  Was I only imagining that I had done Mailman’s Shoes, Butcher’s Apron, and Harry Truman? I had always believed that I had been fascinated by double images. I had seen a few—but the rest? The Gay Head Indians on the Vineyard? Kennedy on his sunfish? Or the busing pictures I took only a year before in South Boston (negative prints with a difference: the shanty Irish showed up as black monkeys gibbering at white mothers)? Gone.

  And where were those so-called erotic pictures I had done for the skin magazine? I was ashamed of them, but I knew that if I had a chance to look closely at them I would remember the weather, the light, the circumstances, an incident, a syllable to grasp, so I could tug memory from its dark hole.

  The pictures I had taken were not the ones I studied, not the foreground figures—everything but. Oh, this was curious. My eye tracked around them to slightly-out-of-focus fences and buildings, or to little people far-off watching me work. I found a new alignment in these shots, a back-to-front reality as I traveled deeper into the picture, sometimes surprising myself by seeing new lisps and stammers. Someone watching from a window, laundry blowing from a line I had taken to be empty, or the man in the Ghost Ship sequence—had he been there at the time, or sneaked in at a later date? Boats appeared on seas that had been featureless when I’d photographed them; faces where there had been only shadows; buds had burst into flower and leaf and, over the years, some of the trees I’d shot had died. Most of my subjects’ expressions had changed, grins to fr
owns, dimples subsided, eyes had grown shiftier, and people who had looked wise had become wicked or smug.

  Perhaps there were no more pictures, none with secrets, only fixed images with nothing in front, nothing behind, the flat surface absolute as a mirror of ice reflecting my face in a certain light and forestalling my drowning. Perhaps it didn’t matter. I had remembered the important things—my girlhood, my love, my blindness, and the few adventures which, until I examined them, had seemed uncomplicated pleasures.

  And yet, since the war, when I had felt like a failure, as if I had seen nothing and what I had done had been strictly private—no one paying any attention—and sensing in my loneliness the selfish widowing of wasted time and trying not to care where my life had gone—at these times, someone, usually a gal, always carrying a camera, would show up and remind me that I had been original or witty, that she had seen something I had done, and I would rejoice and want to stick fifty dollars into her hand.

  Though I satirized him for being a barnacle, I felt that way about Frank. I could not mock him without mocking myself. Secretly, holding my breath, I valued him: I needed his esteem. He was the young brash confidence I’d once had, single-minded, bossy, without any misgivings, convinced that photography mattered. I had become his subject: he was doing me.

  Frank had my crotchets, my spinster’s secrecies. He was wary of intrusions and kept his privacy private. He didn’t know me; I didn’t know much about him, but what I knew of him resembled the part of myself that I was determined to hide. I needed his esteem, but more, I needed his silly questions. Without him, I would have assumed the myth that others had created around me, and when it came time to reassemble the past, that would have been the version I’d have put forth. But the truth was elsewhere, and in retrospect I saw that the life I had taken to be so happy was incomplete and contradictory. Frank had helped me to see that, because his ignorant curiosity caused him to fling himself on me. He was still a barnacle, but he was plugging a leak, keeping me afloat. Now he was away. I missed the little bastard.

  When I had challenged him about photography—the pictures I no longer trusted—I wanted him to fight back. He usually had, and I was grateful. I needed him around to verify that the person he imagined was really me. I wanted to ask him if he was disappointed in me, if there was something I had missed, and today I wanted to ask him what happened to those pictures. Were they fantasy? If so, how else had I deceived myself?

  I looked out the parlor window and saw the plumed arms of cedar bushes work their elbows in and let the sea breeze bustle past. A row of dry flowers nodded, a ripple ran through the uncut lawn. And a light came on in the Sound, a bright medallion that surfaced and just as quickly sank. It was like that other time, after Mama died, when I had stood in the same parlor and found the picture of the old folks’ chairs, and took it. And in removing that picture I had deleted one more vision from my world.

  I was alone. I didn’t like it. Frank’s absence had left my life ajar. I was overdue for a gal with a camera to make her way to the front door. “Excuse me, are you Maude Pratt?” They always asked: no one knew my face. But she would remind me of a picture I had forgotten and bring me a flattering remembrance of the fact that I had lived.

  At the window this fall day I experienced a great emptiness, the yawn of familiar sky and old repeating weather. Wind was wind, sky sky, drizzle drizzle: my pictures not mine. Look out your window, the photography manuals said. There is your picture. In the place you least expected it. Waiting to be taken. That was a lie only beginners believed.

  I saw the windmill and said sharply. “Fusco! What have you gone and done with my pictures?”

  The memory of my blindness had always kept me out of the windmill. But today, desperate for a clue, I braved the path and walked to the narrow window. On tiptoe I looked in; and I was astonished by its neatness. It had been swept bare—smooth benches on a floor of planks, a gaping trunk, the thick vertical screw and cogwheels of the vane’s machinery: like the stalled flywheel of the narrative in my mind. I peered, as if into my empty head. Frank had been thorough. He had done his work well. Seeing this conical room so stripped it was as if every picture I’d taken had been imaginary.

  The past—that darkroom—was illusion. It was possible for me to believe that because it had so completely vanished it had never existed. I was a particle of light streaking through space, leaving no light in my track. In removing my pictures, Frank had taken away my past and tidied the evidence away. I had no life—perhaps I had never had one. The feeling I got in strange hotel rooms, that I didn’t exist, came upon me here on the broad lawn.

  He had detached my pictures from me. With the pictures I was two people, the photographer, the person. Without them, I was no one.

  Panic sent me back to the house—that sense of exposure woken by the hoot You!, that seeks the reassuring noises of habitation, the clunk of floors and hubbub in pipes. I did not pause. I went straight to his room.

  Months before, I had been bored and curious and had poked in his room and felt justified. Wasn’t he doing the very same thing to me? Today I sought refuge there. I wanted to see—what?—another of his mother’s letters; read my name, satisfy myself that I was real. And my excuse, and part of my intention, was that there were pictures I had not seen, incidents bleached on the tide-wrack of memory, years I could not account for. The pictures must have been somewhere: Marilyn, Move Along, Mailman’s Shoes, and more—if I saw them I would be able to continue.

  The door was open. After my first intrusion, his threats, my promises, he trusted me. Thank God for that. If he hadn’t trusted me I would not have been able to betray his trust. But what betrayal? My bed, my bureau, my table and lamp, his shoes in my closet, his comb on my dresser, his fusty bachelor smell in the drawers, his calendars—

  No, not calendars, but sheets of paper tacked to the wall, just as he had explained to me, his method of writing. Six of them worked over with a felt-tip, “bodies of thought.”

  “If people aren’t’thinking it’s impossible to get a good likeness.”

  Maude says every picture contains its complete history, past and future. “The majestic echo of image.”

  Tape, lettering guides, bird calls, hooks, wallets, stiff cardboard. Extruded mountings. Bus ticket, bank, P.O., Bufferin.

  First with golf-ball grain, high contrast, halation, negative prints, available light, etc. Abandoned them when others used them.

  “The Bible is in error—in the beginning was the picture or Image.” Photography: “Matter over mind.”

  In fifty years of photography, no self-portrait. Why?

  Seeing these notations and mottos made me feel better, though I was tempted to pick up the pen and scribble additions to these bodies of thought, meddle with posterity. I resisted. I went over and sat on our friend’s bed—my bed—and felt a queer sensation in my body, the bed’s memory of its occupant’s restless sleep. A residue of heat, his sad story seeping through the blankets. He was weak and lonely, stifled by his own grim company.

  The bedside table stood handily by. I recalled my first excursion here, the pictures of Kenny and Doris. Oh, well. Let’s bring ourselves up to date. Did pornography freaks outgrow their infatuation with one sequence of sticky pictures, get tired of leering at the same set of views and move on to fresh batches, as philanderers sought new conquests?

  The drawer was shallow. A few photography magazines as before, and seeing them reminded me how for years it was the photography magazines which had printed the nudie shots, all the solemn camera jargon (1/10th, f-8, slight haze) under a pair of tits or a dimpled bum. At the back of the drawer was a chunk of prints with nicked edges: Doris kneeling, twatty; Kenny plugged into Doris; Doris in boots; Doris looking for something on her person; Doris with a grip on Kenny’s joystick; Kenny nibbling; Doris tooting his clarinet; Kenny straining; Doris going woof-woof; Kenny riding Doris; Doris athwart Kenny; Kenny bug-eyed; Doris bespattered. Yuck.

  And Marilyn, and two Pig
Dinners, and my half-dozen erotic ones, done—I now remembered—not for a “man’s magazine” but for a photography annual which, because it was for professionals, could get away with murder: strawberry licker, cello torso, sprawler, squatter, nipple examiner, and the leggy nude climbing a pole—the buttocky boy.

  There was one more picture, of two people, neither Kenny nor Doris. Nor was it deliberately erotic. I tried to put it away. I brought it near my face, and it brimmed like a rising tide of light.

  He was on his knees, the veins standing out on his forehead, marble and blood, in a posture of furious pagan prayer, his mouth fixed in demand. There were clawmarks on his shoulders. He might have been swooning, dying in a fit, he looked so tormented. His reflection blazed on the floor, a white shadow struggling under him. his double heaving at him. It was a dream I had dreamed: the two bodies creased, light on light, in a spasm of completion, nearly one.

  The photograph matched my memory perfectly, but how had it occurred?

  The day was not so dark through the far window, though the room was small and that flywheel like the intimation of eclipse. God, they looked so young! Hurry was implied on their faces, but they were caught in a penetrating embrace, eternally coupled in thought and body, like a pair of lovers on the weedy sea-floor where they had fallen.

  No, I gulped. But I had started to go under.

  30

  Drowning

  AFTER the first shock of bright airless matter slapped my mouth and masked my eyes and flushed me in sudden liquid, I stopped fighting for breath and bobbed like a cork. Then I fell again. I plummeted through a pipe of watery laughter and as I sank became lighter and the curvature around me more luminous and expressive. I was clearly drowning.