by Whitney Otto
She wondered why it was that a woman’s life—whether it’s a single life or a general experience—could so effortlessly be told using collage. As if women could never be anything but the sum of their parts. The products of their many desires.
“Are you going to New York?” Ignacio asked, holding what Charlotte knew was a letter from Ines, the one where she told Charlotte that she had found the perfect studio. Maybe they could even live there, like in Berlin, like in London (the first and second times). Rainier Ermler would envy the natural light. Seeing Ignacio with the letter was a relief. It also scared her. “God, don’t make me ask you a second time,” he said.
Charlotte said nothing as she thought about the previous six months and the unexpected collision of her decision to be with Ines in New York and her national fame in Argentina. She knew that she loved Ines, but she also loved making her photomontages of female fears and fantasies. She liked being known, liked being taken seriously as an artist, and to leave Buenos Aires would be to leave the demand for her work and start all over. She had known what it felt like to have zero interest in her work, she knew the silence of the telephone—and now she knew the thrill of the flip side of that silence. Could she go back to that place where no one called and no one cared?
“Have you thought about Barrie?” asked Ignacio, still clutching the letter. “Have you thought about me?”
She thought about them more than she thought about her photography, but only slightly. It was her secret shame that, once she was a wife and mother, those roles didn’t eclipse her passion for her work. Who can say why we love the things, or the people, that we love? At a point very early in her life—before Ignacio, Barrie, Ines—she fell in love with the camera, and everything since then had been a way of integrating her love of Ignacio, Barrie, Ines with that original love. And guilt? Always guilt.
“Ignacio,” said Charlotte.
He opened his hand, the letter fluttering to the floor. “You’ll think me slow, but I didn’t know always about you and Ines.”
She went to him. Placed her hand on his arm.
“You’d think I’d stop loving you, knowing that you didn’t love me.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Even without Barrie, I still want you. Even with the other women, I’ve still wanted you.”
Theirs was never a grand love affair, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t love. And she appreciated his discretion when it came to his other women—not many, not serious, not yet—often hoping that he would find what he didn’t have with her and also dreading that he would find it.
“I thought you knew,” she said.
“I don’t even know my own heart, so how am I supposed to know yours?” he asked her. “I know you hate being a wife.”
But she didn’t hate being a wife. If she hated it, she would’ve hated it with Ines too. She didn’t hate being a wife any more than she hated being a mother. What she hated was the way that wife, mother, and photographer created an unsolvable equation. What she hated was trying to solve the mathematics of her various roles. Factoring in her love and artistic connection to Ines was nearly impossible. Factor in fame and success, and she was no longer certain about anything.
She saw Ines on the deck of the ship as she left London. She saw Ines standing on the dock as Charlotte gazed down at her from the ship taking her to Buenos Aires. She imagined leaving Barrie, or Barrie leaving Ignacio. She imagined herself leaving Ignacio, realizing how much she would miss him. She imagined leaving the photography career she’d always wanted only to realize that she knew what it was like to be without Ines, just as she knew what it was like to be away from Ignacio, but she never knew what it was like to walk away from the thing she had most wanted. Years later she would say, “Photography allowed me to make the world and be in the world.”
“You still haven’t answered my question: Are you going to New York?”
Ines Ines Ines, she thought, will understand better than anyone that a woman always has to choose.
A WORLD THROUGH MY WINDOW OR EARLY SKYLINE
The Morning Was Marked by the Reappearance
The eighth morning of Miri Marx’s stay in Rome was marked by the reappearance of a young woman with whom she had shared the hotel bar that doubled as a breakfast room for the first four mornings, before the girl’s absence on the fifth. Miri’s breakfast companion had caught her attention for a couple of reasons, not the least of which was the young woman’s complete lack of interest in anyone, or anything in the room as she sat, for four mornings in a row, reading the paper and drinking her coffee. From time to time, Miri glanced over at the girl as she drank her own espresso, tearing off little bites of her breakfast roll and working the crossword puzzle from an English-language newspaper, her Leica another object on the morning table, with the girl never glancing back. A tourist, Miri reasoned, would not be so completely disengaged from her surroundings.
Miri noticed her because she was new to Rome, and curious about the guests in this rather small hotel, with its twelve floors, rooftop terrace of tables and chairs, and, of course, the cozy breakfast room–bar, with its marble fireplace, formal chairs, and crystal chandelier that could use a good polish. She had initially been attracted to the hotel’s intimate size, wedged in between other old buildings and cafés, as well as its excellent proximity to everything in Rome.
The Hotel Locarno was located on a narrow street several hundred feet from the Piazza del Popolo, not too far from the Tiber River, the Borghese Gardens, and the Via Condotti, which led to the Spanish Steps, and which became a kind of touchstone for Miri’s explorations around the city. She liked the constant crowd that gathered around the base of the wide stairways. She liked her evening walks, because she liked the nighttime lights of Rome—shop windows full of beautiful shoes, sweaters, suits, and jewelry; illuminated fountains and statues; the lit apartment windows, cafés, the streetlamps that spilled light onto the Spanish Steps.
Miri Marx was traveling Europe without an itinerary. Her only plan was to keep going as long as she could, wherever she could, but since arriving in Rome she’d had no immediate desire to be anywhere else. There was something about the city that was high-voltage and leisurely all at once. Rome was bustle and long meals; excited voices and measured arias; lazy afternoons in the sun and restless nighttime forays to clubs and restaurants. She had been living a rather restless life herself, and the paradoxes of energy and stillness, an inclination toward art and music, and the complex elevation of women combined with their second-class status made a kind of sense to Miri, whose vagabonding in foreign countries, and taking pictures, was not the usual life for a bright, educated twenty-nine-year-old woman in 1951.
On the fifth morning, when Miri had come to expect the young woman, she never showed. Miri briefly wondered why it was that they never ran into each other beyond breakfast in the bar, especially in a hotel this small, where the chances of seeing other guests dropping off room keys, or sharing the compact cage elevator that slid up and down the center of the twisting staircase, were pretty good. It baffled Miri that the girl was nowhere to be found; she assumed that she had checked out, almost immediately regretting that she hadn’t tried to speak to her, if for no other reason than that the young woman was beautiful, tall with wavy, dark hair whose smooth surface caught the light. Her face was a perfect arrangement of lines and angles—the high forehead, the straight, strong nose, with the equally strong chin, a mouth with full lips—perfect for the camera.
Now, seeing the young woman back in her customary morning spot in the bar after her absence of three days felt so comforting that Miri had to remind herself they were strangers.
But it wasn’t only seeing her for four mornings, then missing her for three, then Miri’s feelings of familiarity upon her return; it was that there was something about beautiful girls denied their privacy, as if, by being blessed with such physical good fortune, they had entered some informal, weird visual public domain where their beauty belonged to everyone
. A funny little contract between the admirers and the admired. Miri wondered where the girl had gone for the past three days, then wondered why she should care. Then conceded that maybe she just wanted to talk to someone who seemed a little like her: young and traveling and here.
Miri Marx Grew Up
Miri Marx grew up in Los Angeles, in the Valley, to be precise, the sort of sweet, precocious only child who seemed more like a roommate living with her happily married parents. Though Mr. and Mrs. Marx could not have adored her more, it wasn’t in them to monitor her every move. They valued her independence. If pressed they would sum up their parenting by saying, “We simply didn’t need her to be the embodiment of our dreams.”
And they were dreamers: her father, with his exquisite mechanical toys (ships, airplanes, trains, cars) and enamel birds, and her mother, a movie wardrobe mistress who quickly advanced to becoming Esme Esme of Hollywood and a head costume designer just when movies stopped asking the actresses themselves what they had at home in their closets, and, by the way, could they sew?
Between the glamour gowns of her mother and the intricate transportation machines of her father—the adult dresses ideal for the dress-up games of the most imaginative child, the children’s toys collected by adults who paid handsomely for each perfect object—it was no surprise that Miri Marx found photography, inheriting her father’s love of machines (cameras) and her mother’s sense of glamour (the image that heightens life). She eventually came to believe that a portrait should read like a story.
When Miri was seven years old, her parents told her that by age eight they would like her to begin to pursue a creative discipline, so she might give it some thought between now and then. Exactly one week later Miri said that she had given it some thought and had concluded that she liked the cello, thought watercolors were pretty, didn’t think dance or acting was for her, and had ultimately decided on photography. That year Hanukkah brought her a used Vest Pocket Kodak Model B with a compact folding lens and “autograph” feature that allowed Miri to write on the paper of the film, three rolls of 127 film, a small camera bag, a fountain pen, and a little leather-bound book for notes. Mr. and Mrs. Marx were neither pleased nor displeased with their daughter’s choice because the only thing that mattered to them was that she liked what she chose.
By the time she was twenty-five years old, through multiple jobs, Miri had purchased the Leica. She would never know if her view of the world was shaped by her love of photography, or if photography encouraged her to see the world as potential pictures: People’s faces were angles and planes. Palaces, skyscrapers, mosques, ripples on a lake were contrasts of shadows and light. A portrait wasn’t a single picture but a series of shots, a collection of events, a story.
Which is why when Miri Marx walked the inner perimeter of the Pantheon later on her eighth day in Rome and spied the girl from the hotel bar standing just far enough from the oculus to avoid the last drops of afternoon rain (disappearing into nearly invisible holes in the marble floor), the broken sunlight reflecting on her smooth, dark hair pulled back in a bun, her beautiful face tilted upward, eyes closed, Miri thought, What’s her story? Miri’s interest increased by the unusual occurrence of seeing the young woman outside the hotel bar, and for a second time in a single day.
The girl lowered her face, opened her eyes, and looked around the shadowed interior of the Pantheon, with its seven niches for seven gods and goddesses. Miri could see that the girl was adjusting to the darkness of the enormous circular room, exactly as wide as it was tall, the perfect symmetry noted by anyone who entered. The girl didn’t notice Miri, who (again) realized that she half expected the girl to greet her since she felt she almost knew her.
The girl remained motionless in the middle of the Pantheon, smiling a half smile as a young man came striding toward her. He placed a crown of flowers in her hair, then took her face in both his hands to kiss her. A long kiss spotlit by the slow moving disk of sunlight provided by the oculus. A kiss interrupted by the girl’s purse, which slipped off her forearm, landing at her feet.
The Oculus
The oculus was a thirty-foot-wide circular opening located at the apex of the Pantheon’s domed, coffered ceiling, inviting light where the only other light source was the huge entry. Considering the age of the structure (nineteen centuries), its geometric elegance, and its historical significance, the idea of cutting a hole in the ceiling, exposing the interior to the elements, seemed utterly odd to Miri.
The ray of light provided by the oculus circled the interior of the temple, much in the manner of an inverted sundial, defining the time of day, the year, the solstice, the equinox, the seasons, the weather.
When Miri was a child, her parents took her to San Francisco, where they rode the Muni out to the edge of the Pacific Ocean to a camera obscura—a tiny, squat structure with a miniature tower set in the middle of its roof. The darkened room they entered barely fit six people and had a large, white circle on a table in the center. A lens on the outside tower rotated 360 degrees, “photographing” everything, then projecting it, like an endless, unedited film, onto the white circle. Now, years later, in the Pantheon, as she watched the progress of the disk of light, Miri was reminded of the camera obscura and the white disk that brought pictures of the outside world into the darkness.
The more pictures Miri took inside the Pantheon, the more she wanted to take, as the circular window, opening the roof to the vagaries of the sky, changed the interior of the temple hourly. How different was the temple at night? Or in the winter? She patiently shot the light, the statues, the visitors, which was how she happened to see the young woman from the hotel, now wearing a crown of flowers that had Miri thinking, What’s her story?
Very Early the Next Morning
It was very early the next morning that Miri decided to take her coffee and aeroposts and pen up to the roof terrace. The day was already shaping up to be hot, but the morning was still manageable, fresh and clear. As she wrote her letters, she found herself thinking about the Pantheon, wondering if she could find someone who could get her inside for a series of night shots; this distracted thinking led her to lose interest in the letters she hadn’t had much interest in writing anyway.
She gathered her things and was pulling on the hotel roof door when it came at her with a great deal more force than she was exerting.
“Oh!” said Miri.
The person pushing on the other side seemed as surprised as Miri, as she awkwardly pitched forward.
“Mi scusi,” said the young woman whom Miri recognized from the breakfast room–bar, and the Pantheon. In a way, having the young woman speak directly to her was a little like being addressed by an actor on a stage while sitting quietly in a theater.
The two smiled at each other as Miri stepped back to allow the other woman onto the terrace before Miri went inside.
Miri was only a few steps down the staircase when the door again opened, the young woman half in, half out, holding a palm-size book in the same hand that held the door.
“Um, sigorina, ah, mi scusi, were you, um, lei e stato solo qui?”
“I’m sorry,” said Miri, looking back at the woman, “I don’t speak Italian.”
“Neither do I. Clearly. I was asking—attempting to ask—if you were alone.” The girl was American.
“You mean just now? Or in general?”
“When you were outside.”
“Yes.”
“No one was there when you went outside? Or, happened by, or anything?”
“No.”
The American girl hesitated. She then stepped forward, letting the door fall closed behind her.
Miri was unsure whether to continue down the spiraling stairs without saying something more. It seemed rude to simply turn and go, so she said, “Are you alone?”
“How do you mean?” The girl was walking toward Miri, and when she reached her they naturally fell in step, the stairs barely wide enough to accommodate them.
“Are you tr
aveling by yourself?” asked Miri.
“Oh, I see. Yes. I was supposed to meet someone . . .” she said. Then, “What are you doing today?”
“I’d like to see the Colosseum.”
“It’s filled with cats, you know.”
“I love cats.”
“Well, I wouldn’t love those cats if I were you.”
They said nothing more as they descended the last stairs into the lobby, Miri handing the receptionist her room key.
“I guess I can go with you,” said the girl.
Though Miri hadn’t thought to invite her along, she felt completely comfortable with the arrangement.
Out in the bright summer sun, the American girl took a pair of sunglasses from her leather bag with its unusual drawstring closure—the bag that Miri recognized from the day before in the Pantheon, when she had seen the girl kissing the young man.
“Aren’t you meeting someone?” asked Miri, hesitating at the hotel’s entrance.
The girl smiled, and Miri was struck anew by her looks.
They walked toward the Via Condotti, with the girl stopping every so often to admire something in one of the shop windows. Miri enjoyed stopping along with her; it had been a while since she’d spent time with anyone.
The American girl leaned against the wall of one of the stores as she fumbled in her bag, extracting a cigarette and lighter, holding the pack out to Miri, who shook her head. Miri waited while the girl lit the cigarette, inhaling and dropping the pack and lighter back into her bag in one fluid motion. The girl’s eyes closed briefly as she savored the smoke. When she exhaled, she opened her eyes and said, “I’m thinking we should go to the Colosseum. You’ll see that I’m right about the cats. And I’ll be awed all over again by the place, which really is remarkable. Then we can grab a bite at a nothing place I know nearby. Have you been to the Sistine Chapel yet? Oh, of course you have. It was on the first day, wasn’t it? What about . . . let’s see . . . not the Catacombe di San Callisto which is a four-story burial ground that is creepy in every language . . . unless?”
