Picture Palace

by Paul Theroux

  As I surrendered to this silly descent I slowed down. It was easy for me to see the jets of turbulent zeros bubbling past my face. This clouded cream-soda gave way to foam, to parcels of color, green and yellow-blue, like silks tossing a little way off, striping me as they moved. I made a fishy motion and the formless pressure of the fountain wrung me apart, scale by scale, and I glittered, sifting down in pieces like sequins from a torn gown.

  If I had not known better I should have said I was flying. But I had been here before, drowning in the wayward magic of the eye, stricken by glory—long ago, when I had still believed in the power of the photograph to drag the victim into its depths. Now I was ashamed of my helplessness at having pitched forward into one of my own photographs. I plunged toward a whimper of light.

  It was a drunken experience of dying—separation and the sucked-down sensation of finality—like someone stretching me out of my tights. Shapes were clarifying below me, but I was conscious that the vision that was animating me would destroy me—I was being tickled to death. I knew that it was too late to do anything but endure it. I would not have a second chance.

  The photograph (once through the floodgate I scarcely remembered what it was) had worked. It had defied and drowned me, and for those first instants upside down I thought damn, because I was learning the hard way what I had always known. And the deeper I went the more convinced I was that beyond this fatal blinding light there was only darkness and no one to tell.

  My ears roared with the racketing laughter of the torrential water. This decreased in volume, but I was still aware of sound—of sound fading—as if I were being deafened by it. Then the silence was perfect. There was a room down here, and bodies, and voices—marine whispers.

  —I was supposed to guard it with my life.

  —She’s in London. She’ll never know.

  I tried to reply, but nothing happened. I wasn’t there—my body wasn’t. I had shrunk to a vivid speck suspended in circular time.

  —Look at all the pretty pictures. Lengthened voices, ribbons of them repeating ictures, ictures. The conical echo of that room.

  —I’ve seen them all before.

  —Cookie saved everything. That’s a sign of loneliness.

  —Put them away.

  —No. There you are. Your white dress. Your hat.

  —And you showing off.

  —There’s Papa.

  —That’s all.

  —Wait. Her boogie-men. And this must be Florida.

  They were children in danger. I wanted them to stop, to go away, for their own good. But they were stubbornly playing, toying with risk. I thought: The past is not illusion—it is ignorance, it is all needless danger; inaction saves us. But they would not go away. They continued to sift through the trunk of pictures, compelled by their curiosity and the love that made them foolishly bold.

  —Oh, God. Look.

  In that moment they were lost. The water surrounding me rubbed their moans in my ears.

  —How could she?

  —It can’t be us.

  —It is. I won’t look at it.

  —We’ll have to do something.

  —Put it away. Pretend we didn’t see it.

  —It’s too late. She knows. She always knew.

  —Put it back!

  —She wanted us to see it.

  The speck I inhabited trembled tamely touching bottom.

  —We’re sunk.

  —I won’t give you up.

  —It’s impossible.

  —I don’t care if they find out.

  —They’ve found out.

  —They’ll have to forgive us.

  —No. There’s only one way they’ll understand.

  —Tell me.

  —Don’t make me say it.

  A chance current disturbed the ribbed sea-floor and took their voices away. I was still listening, but their voices were gone. Ploop, ploop— a fish tank’s murmur. There was a shadow, time turning blue; day, night; light, dark; the light changed, nothing else did.

  —You’re wrong. It’s not a choice. It’s the only thing left.

  —But so soon. You!

  —Don’t cry.

  But they were both crying and I knew that this sea I was lost in and had no hope of leaving was made immense by their tears. In this moonstruck tide I was pushed by their sorrow.

  —I can’t live without you. So I’m not afraid to die.

  —What they know won’t die.

  —I want them to know everything.

  —Then we’ll leave the picture and go.

  —I’ll go anywhere with you.

  —There’s only one place for us. There.

  Now a small flare of heat in that ocean of tears, the winking deception of this depth in which nothing solid moved—only the light invading from above and losing itself at this motionless limit. I had died. I knew what they didn’t. But I couldn’t save them. His courage was partly pretense—he had gone too far to deny it. And she who had been quick to love was impatient to die, recklessly believing her passion to be reason enough.

  —People kill themselves for less.

  —Maybe they only kill themselves for less.

  Not even worms lived here. The dust-motes and droplets of color simulated life among the shell splinters, stirred like me in the shallow troughs of the sea bed. Did they know that beneath the erupting waves the sinking light was pulverized to dust and darkness?

  —We’ll show them.

  And they showed me I deserved this death for my blind treachery. They were whispering, excited, full of plans, setting sail. Soon they were tacking toward the open sea. In all that buffeting they were silent and the voyage out was over before they knew it—too soon. Already he was dragging the sail down, paying out the sea anchor, comforting her as they bobbed madly in the little boat, prolonging the moment.

  —Let’s wait till it gets dark.

  —Then I won’t be able to see you. I want to hold you. Will it hurt?

  —Not if you keep swallowing.

  —I’m afraid. I want it to happen, but I’m afraid. Help me.

  —I love you.

  —Yes, yes.

  —What’s wrong?

  —I just thought of Maude.

  —Poor cookie.

  —Poor everyone.

  A boom ran through the sea, causing a swell, lifting the boat, tipping it and rattling the lines. The shoreline, lightly penciled on the horizon, was indifferent. Neither earth nor sky mattered. So they kissed, their feet already in the water.

  —It’s cold!

  —Easy does it.

  They slipped through the window of this great silent palace and were happy again paddling upright and awkwardly until they grew tired and leaned back. Gulping, they ducked under and did not begin to struggle until it was too late. They ceased to move their arms or legs.

  They fell slowly, wrapped together and dropping like a harmless spider on a strand of tiny bubbles. Though I passed within inches of them—and now I was rising: their dying had released me from the scrub of purification—they did not see me with their white eyes. Not a look, not one more word. They were below me, simplified to a blur, a pool of lowering light. The moment they were lost I broke clean through the surface.

  31

  Preview

  NEW YORK, a wet November evening. I was walking by the museum when I saw the posters, printed on six square feet of the beatific breast-feeding shot, The South Yarmouth Madonna.

  MAUDE COFFIN PRATT RETROSPECTIVE FIFTY YEARS

  I was out of habit of seeing my name written so large. It stopped me. Passersby were slowing up near the posters to look. I got a kick out of my anonymity, reading over their shoulders and hearing their grunts of approval: know-it-alls boasted to their dates that they knew my work. I lingered long enough to watch some invited people go in to the preview dressed in fancy clothes, animal pelts on their shoulders, diamonds around their necks, gold on their wrists,—wearing their wealth like the rankest trophy-hunting savages
. But they were hopeful, squealing in anticipation, with that just-washed look of partygoers. And they were so intent on making a graceful entrance they were unaware that on the sidewalk, in the lights of the museum marquee, I stood with my face hanging out.

  I slipped in by the side entrance so that no one would see me; no one did.

  The party was in progress on a second-floor landing. To call it a landing was not to do it justice. It had an immense stone rail on one side which overlooked the staircase, and on the other side an entire wall of glass gave a grand view of the garden courtyard with its floodlit mobiles and imprisoned statuary. On the stairs to the landing people were propped, as if they owned the place, and braying.

  ‘‘I am perfectly capable of finding it myself,” I had said to Frank over the phone, a week before this preview. I looked for him—we had agreed to meet at the show’s entrance—but if he was there I didn’t see him. I assumed he was lost in the same crowd that had swallowed me.

  The poster—the one I had seen out front—was plastered on the landing, rising from floor to ceiling, repeating my name and the picture, so big and numerous, was no longer mine. This was someone else’s red-letter day.

  “You made it! Aren’t you thrilled?” screamed a woman with an animal pelt on her head. Thinking that she might be addressing me I smiled. Then she walked past me. Oughtists, she said in that New Yorker way to a beaming midget, ought and oughtists.

  “Where’s Maude?” said the midget, looking directly at me. The woman didn’t know. They went on talking about my works of ought.

  I had stiffened to prepare myself for their rushing over and saying, “Where have you been hiding?” But no one asked the question, and I would not introduce myself. I rather enjoyed my anonymity in here, as I had outside. I could mooch around, eavesdrop, examine faces and reactions, and not be required to say a single thing. Praise can only be answered with humility or thanks; I didn’t feel modest or grateful.

  I was a stranger. It was the funereal feeling I had had earlier in the summer, on my return from London. But this was a joyous occasion, people saying Maude this and Maude that. I had every reason to believe that I had lived through a death by drowning. The death had shown me what I was, what I had done: it was just as well that no one recognized me.

  Having entered the museum so obliquely from below I’d had to work my way up the stairs, through the throngs of people who were swigging and yelling. I had counted on seeing Frank on the landing and I winced when I gained it, expecting his shout, Here’s the star of the show! or something equally foolish. I fought forward to the exhibit’s entrance, for the party was outside the gallery proper. ENTER HERE, said a placard, but the mob I had assumed to be lining up for a look was simply gathered there blocking the way.

  My impatience tired me. After fifteen minutes I was winded and wanted to sit down, or for someone—where was the peckerhead?—to rescue me. Some people stared at me and I grinned back, assuming they had recognized me. They looked away. I could not explain it, but then, I didn’t recognize any of them either.

  A few years before, a place like this would have been full of people I knew—Imogen, Minor, Ed Weston, Walker, Weegee—and I searched the faces for moments before I realized that they were as dead as Mrs. Cameron. In this room was the new generation of photographers and art patrons. I could spot them: that long-legged blonde in the cape, that other ingratiating gal with the sunglasses perched on her hairdo, a pair of black simpering queens, and another black looking toothy and hostile, as if he were going to shriek at me in Swahili. Most of the photographer types were wearing leather jackets, combat boots, itchy shirts—advertising themselves as toughies, men of action. Even the gals looked the bushwhacking sort. The marauders and fuck-you-Jacks of a profession that was a magnet for neurotics, they were deluded by the fear of competition and all wearing their light meters as pendants around their necks. If it was an art, it was the only one in which the artist actually wore something that made him visibly a practitioner.

  And there were others, pairs of people, slightly mismatched, whom I took to be photographers hand-in-hand with their subjects. That anorexic gal and her friend, whose face I recognized from a drugstore paperback—surely she aimed to be a credit line on his book jacket? This dapper little man and the wheezing old dame: it could only have been a relationship that started with a studio session (“Look straight at me, dear, and forget your hands for a minute”); the boogie-man and the blonde with her tough twinkle—it wasn’t too far-fetched to imagine that they had launched their romance with a camera and for all I knew kept it airborne the same way (his brutally honest chronicling of ghetto life, her cooperation amounting to human sacrifice). The bearded lout and that girl-child; the virago and her soul-mate into, as they would say, the woman’s thing. I could identify the mediocrities by their catch phrases: the prancing Minimalists, the Deeply Committed crowd, the Really Strange bunch, the Terribly Exciting ones, the Intos, the Far-outs, the Flakys.

  These were cannibals’ success stories. But what the hell—they were having a swell time. Photography didn’t matter: they had each other. That was the whole purpose of taking pictures—it won you friends, it got you fame and fresh air. “I’m working on a new concept,” said the bearded lout, and I knew that if he hadn’t been a photographer in the pay of Jack Guggenheim he’d have gotten twenty years as a sex offender for some outrage upon that girl-child’s person. The work was an excuse; the idea was to involve yourself with people, which was giving photography a bad name.

  My anonymity made me cynical. Perhaps I was being unfair. It was possible that they had taken pictures and developed them and, like me, at some later date, had drowned in them and known the terror of what they had done.

  “He’s into some very exciting things.”

  “He hasn’t had a show for years.”

  “I consider this an event. He’s a very private person.”

  “He’s supposed to be here somewhere.”

  This “he” I kept hearing about was certainly not me. I had stopped basking. My fatigue turned complacent and then panicky. I had not introduced myself, so I was temporarily forgotten. They would be justified in thinking that I was spying on them. They might round on me and say, “At least you could have had the courtesy of telling us who you were!”

  But no one in that jammed room asked.

  “Isn’t that him?”

  More than that (“Excuse me, lady,” a man said, yanking a tray of drinks out of my reach), I noticed a distinct irritation when my glance met one of these wild-eyed talkers, as if I were a gate-crasher who had no right to listen. I could have put up with being ignored; I could not bear being strenuously shunned. I was in the way! And there was a lot of shoving when the real celebrities showed up, various people I had seen on television talk shows, mainly hideous novelists who had written frank autobiographical books about their unnatural acts.

  “Mind moving?” This from one of our photographer friends with a chunk of expensive apparatus in her mitts, a motor-driven Voigtländer aimed at my earhole.

  Someone famous had just entered. Who it was, I could not say. But there was movement, a prelude to stampede, people beating their elbows to get past me.

  “Pardon me.”

  A man’s hand squeezed my shoulder. About time. I turned and smiled.

  “Are you Lillian Hellman by any chance?” The man bowed to hear my reply.

  “Sorry, buster. I’m her mother.”

  But though I was furious for being mistaken for Lily (is there any old lady on earth who is flattered by the suggestion that she resembles another old lady?), I hoped the man would pause long enough for me to tell him who I really was. Rebuffed, he fled sideways into the mob.

  Already I was sick of the party. The people had stopped talking about me and on their third or fourth drink were just whooping it up, paying no attention to the posters with my name on them.

  “He’s done it as a multi-media event. I’m going in as soon as they shut this wine of
f.”

  I had no business here. This was a spectacle of the kind I had avoided for thirty years. There was no reason why anyone should have recognized my face: professionally I had no face. I was for most only a name and Twenty-two White Horses and celebrated for a period of blindness when I had done Firebug. For one person I was the Cuba pictures, for another the Pig Dinner sequence; blacks knew me as the creater of Boogie-Men, New Englanders for The South Yarmouth Madonna, Californians knew only my Hollywood work, the British were aware of my London phase but nothing more, literary people my Faces of Fiction, and for some camera buffs I was the young gal who had done Stieglitz with his own peepstones.

  To be famous is to be fixed—a picture, a date, an event, a specific and singular effort. To be fixed is to be dead, and so fame is a version of obscurity. One appeared at one’s own party only to haunt it. If Frank had been around he would have steered me into the crowd and made the usual introductions, as the custodian of my reputation. But I did not see him.

  Nor did I see the show. There was still a mob at ENTER HERE and it was the same bunch I had seen earlier, a bit rowdier and more drunken than before. They had found a cozy place to gather and were ignoring the exhibition—plenty of time for that when the drink ran out. The party was the thing. Yet it burned me up to think that they had come here to see each other and were not paying the blindest bit of attention to my pictures.

  I wondered if I should throw a fit—wave my arms and bellow at them, maybe embarrass them with a hysterical monologue about the meaning of art; or do something shocking, make a scene that they would talk about for years afterward.

  Bump.

  “I’m awfully sorry.” The jerk who had taken me for Lillian Hellman rushed away. The party was starting to repeat, to replay its earlier episodes in tipsy parody.

  Several people, assuming my black dress to be a uniform, demanded drinks from me. They howled when they saw their mistake, but it inspired me. I found a tray of drinks and began to make my way through the room, handing them out and sort of curtseying and taking orders, saying “Sir” and “Madam” and “I’m doing the best I can.”