Eyes

by William H. Gass

  Oh…yes…Mr. Gab also had a very moving photograph—perhaps a tad mellow—of some trailer-camp kids in Richmond, California, that Ansel Adams had taken with Dorothea Lange’s twin-lens Rolleiflex during the War, cropped and dodged according to his own account, and just how had that dramatic image made its way into a cello envelope and thence to a cardboard box in this silly little shop on Arsenal Avenue except if it were hiding out?

  Mr. Gab was as silent about his system of supply as he was about everything else. He sold so seldom he may have been holding most of his stock for years, and in the same boxes too, long before his assistant became old enough to observe any rate of change. Nevertheless, from time to time a very big Russian-looking man in a very heavy Russian-looking coat, though not with a dead animal on his head, which would have made everyone take note, came with wild hatless hair to see, and apparently to consult with, Mr. Gab, going into his quiet private quarters for a little chat, carrying a case large flat and black. The Russian’s big bass would soften as soon as his wide back disappeared behind the rug, which Mr. Gab held open for him as though they were entering a box at the theater. How are you this very day, my boy, the big man would thunder when the stupid assistant greeted him with a wince of recognition and a pleasant surprised smile. Annduh Missterr Gahb, my boy, is he ahbought? His accent, thick as his coat, was too eclectic to be genuine, and had been faked to cover a Russian one, the assistant thought. It was then, at the card table in the company of the ceramic cat, that the case would click open to disclose, the assistant imagined, a wondrous rarity, an August Sander maybe, filched from a German collector, a labor leader in an ill-fitting unpressed dark suit, throttled tie, intense vest, like those Mr. Gab wore, hair receding so it was now a headband, and those arms at his side ending in pugnacious little fists.

  But when the assistant went later to look under Sander in the German box he found only the one which had been there through uncounted years: the hotelkeeper and his wife, Gastwirtsehepaar, around 1930, Tweedledum with Tweedledee, posed outside their vine-sided hostelry, she in her polka dot dress and frontally folded arms, he in bow tie and white shirt and hanky, a startle of patches against the compulsory black suit, including vest—black too—tucked under the coat like a head hid in a camera’s hood—uh oh—there’s one button missing, one out of four, too bad, the bottoms of the innkeeper’s trousers hiked in an ungainly fashion above a pair of sturdy polished shoes, black as well, the innkeeper’s arms clasped behind him so that the swell of his stomach would suggest to a hesitant guest hearty fare; well, they were both girthy full-fleshed folk as far as that goes, her eyes in a bit of a squint, his like raisins drowning in the plump of his cheeks.

  What made August Sander’s portraits so great—“great” was the appropriate word in the assistant’s opinion—was the way his sitters made visibly manifest, like the backgrounds behind them, the lives that had shaped their pictured faces and forms, as though their daily occupations had drawn them there to be displayed for the camera with all the seriousness suitable to such a show of essential self.

  If you were to look at the penetrating portrait Berenice Abbott made of Eugène Atget when he was a wispy-haired old man with sunken cheeks, a mouth relieved of most of its teeth, assertive nose, and intense eyes, you might get a whiff of Mr. Gab too, for he was ancient early, grew up to reach old in a hurry, and then didn’t change much for decades, except to solidify his opinions, much the way Atget had, both men easily angered, both men hugging their habits, each short of speech, and patient as the stones Atget alone gelatinized. Mr. Gab disavowed color with the fervor of a Puritan, and nothing in the shop had a hue you’d want to name beside the dull brown cardboard and the pillow in his chair, because the walls were once a clean cream dirtied now to nondescription, and the lino floor was like a playing board of black/white squares, a design mostly seen unmopped in public toilets, while the rug he’d hung across the door to his digs was a tweed a fade away from tan.

  Mr. Gab was a stickler. His ideal was the perfect picture taken on the wing with one shot, and allowed to emerge from its development like a chick its egg, so that one saw not just the subject supremely rendered but a testimony to the unerring fineness of the photographer’s eye; an eye unlike the painter’s, he claimed, because the painter constructed; the painter made up his image as if the canvas were a face; while the photographer sought his composition like a hunter his prey, and took it away clean, when it was found, to present in its purity, as the result of an act of vision, the sort of seeing no one else employed, what Mr. Gab called “slingshot sight.” Painting took too long, sculpture of course was worse, and encouraged thinking, permitted alterations, endured changes of mind; whereas the photographer came, saw, and shot in a Rolleiflex action, in one unified gesture like waving off a fly.

  Mr. Gab knew Atget bided his time, did and redid; he knew that Edward Weston pulled images like putty into weird unnatural shapes; he knew that Walker Evans cropped like a farmer, August Sander as well, who also staged every shot with theatrical calculation; that Man Ray was like Duchamp, an incorrigible scamp; that Ansel Adams dodged and burned and renovated; that even André Kertész, who possessed, like Josef Sudek, a saintly sensibility, had more than once employed a Polaroid…well, Mr. Gab didn’t say very much about such lapses; he just threw up his hands, palms up/arms out, the way he did in the winter, salting his sidewalk, and said that it was beyond understanding that the same man who had taken, from an overlooking window, those pictures of Washington Square in a snow of fences—when? Nineteen seventy? well—in—anyway—a nearby year—it was dumbfounding that an artist of such supreme severity should have succumbed to Kodachromania and taken, it was said, as if he had embezzled them, two thousand Polaroids, sinking for a time as far as Cibachrome, but genius was a dark cave full of flickers; who knew what the darkness might disclose? who knew, his hands said, washing themselves in the air.

  Mr. Gab forgave, and forgave again, but certain photographers had too many counts against them, like David Bailey, to mention an outstanding instance, because he bandaged the body exposing only the legendary wound with its unlikely whiskers, or did the worst sort of celebratory portrait—Yoko Ono, for god’s sake—or shot up the worst sort of scene—Las Vegas, can you imagine?—consorted with cover models, and had nudes blow chewing gum bubbles to match their bubbies or wear necklaces of barbed wire; then there was a hot lens like Irving Penn, who spent too much time in the studio, who worked for fashion magazines (advertising and news were also OUT), who photographed Marisa Berenson’s perfect bosom and Rudolf Nureyev’s perfect limbs because they were Berenson’s boobs or Nureyev’s calves, and did portraits of famous folk like Truman Capote on account of that fame, often in silly contrived poses such as Woody Allen gotten up as Groucho Marx (Mr. Gab vented exasperation), or did cutesy-pie pictures like that faucet Penn pretended was dripping diamonds, but almost worst, his malignant habit of pushing his subjects into corners where they’d be certain to feel uncomfortable and consequently conspire with the tormentor to adopt a look never before or after worn.

  Nevertheless (for Mr. Gab was composed of contradictions too), Mr. Gab could show you (while complaining of its name) Cigarette No. 69, from a series Penn had done in ’72, or a devilish distortion from the box marked NUES which Kertész had accomplished in 1933 as another revenge against women…well, it was admittedly beautiful, simply so, so simply blessed…he might mention the gracefully elongated hands pressed between the thighs, or draw attention to the dark button indenting the belly as if it were waiting to ring up a roomer on the fourth floor, the soft—oh yes—mound, also expanded into a delicious swath of…Mr. Gab’s stupid assistant would have to say the word “pubic”…hair, a romantic image, really, in whose honor Mr. Gab’s hands shook when he held the photo, because he’d feel himself caught for a moment in the crease of an old heartbreak (that’s what an observer might presume), memories extended elastically through time until, with a snap, they flew out of thought like a pursued bird.
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  The customers…well, they were mostly not even browsers, but wanderers, or refugees from a bad patch of weather, or misinformed, even so far as to be crestfallen when they understood the Nowhere they had come to, but occasionally there’d be some otherwise oblivious fellow who would fly to a box, shove off the bag of beans, and begin to finger through the photos as you might hunt through a file, with a haste hope might have further hastened, an air of expectancy that suggested some prior prompting, only to stop and withdraw a sheet suddenly and accompany it to the light of the good lamp in the rear, where he’d begin to examine it first with a studied casualness that seemed more conspiratorial than anything, looking about like a fly about to light before indifferently glancing at the print, until at last, now as intent as a tack, he’d submit to scrutiny each inch with tight white lips, finally following Mr. Gab, who had anticipated the move, through the rug to the card table and the cat in the kitchen, where they’d have what Mr. Gab called, with a pale smile that was nearly not there, a confab.

  Concerning cost. This is what his stupid assistant assumed. The meeting would usually end with a sale, a sale that put Mr. Gab in possession of an envelope fat with cash, for he accepted nothing else, nor were his true customers surprised, since they came prepared with a coat in whose inside pocket the fat envelope would be stashed. Consequently, it was a good thing the shop was so modest, the neighborhood so banal and grubby, the street, in fact, macadam to a fault, resembling Atget’s avenues or stony lanes not a whit, not by a quick flip of light from a puddle or a flop of shade from an overhang, because the shop’s stock was indeed valuable, and somewhere there was concealed cash with which, his stupid assistant surmised, Mr. Gab purchased further contraband, plus, if funds had been apportioned, a spot where lurked the money that tided Mr. Gab, his business, and his stupid assistant over from one week to the next (though their wants were modest) until, among the three who stepped inside at different times on an April day, a shifty third would paw through the box marked PRAGUE as if a treasure had been buried there, and then, despite nervous eyes and a tasteless cream-colored spring coat where—yes—the cash had been carried, buy a Josef Sudek that depicted Hradčany Castle circa 1915 under a glowering sky.

  Mr. Gab really didn’t want to let go of anything. His pleasure in a photograph, his need for it to sustain his sinking spirit, rose as the print was withdrawn and examined, and neared infatuation, approached necessity, as he and the customer, photo in front of them, haggled over the price. So Mr. Gab drove a hard bargain without trying to be greedy, though that was the impression he gave. Still, he had to let some of his prizes go if he was going to continue to protect his stock and ensure his collection’s continued appreciation and applause.

  Yes…yes…yes…the audience was small, but its appreciation was deep and vast, and its applause loud and almost everlasting.

  Occasionally, as the assistant remembered, there were some close calls. A tall aristocratic-looking gentleman in expensive clothes and a light touch of gray hair chose a late afternoon to enter. Greeted by Mr. Gab in the usual way, he brusquely responded: I understand you have a photograph by Josef Sudek depicting two wet leaves. After a silence filled with surprise and apprehension, Mr. Gab replied with a question: who had informed the gentleman of that fact? He, by the way, he went on, was the owner of the shop; Mr. Gab was his name, while his visitor was…? It is common knowledge in certain places, Mr. Gab, if it is indeed you, the tall man answered, and consequently has no more distinct location than a breeze. For some moments, Mr. Gab was unsure which of his two questions had been addressed. I shall, the stranger went on, show you my card directly I have seen the Sudek. Two Wet Leaves, he repeated. What period would that be, Mr. Gab said, somewhat lame in his delay. Though it was his stupid assistant who limped. And who did so now—limped forward in an aisle while Mr. Gab was making preparations to reply. His stupid assistant: smiling, winking one bad eye. His naturally crooked mouth turned his smile into a smirk. Later, Mr. Gab would gratefully acknowledge his assistant’s attempt to Quasimodo the threatening fellow into an uneasy retreat.

  But the man pushed forward on his own hook, looking sterner than a sentencing judge. You’d know, he said. You’ve got a print. Two Wet Leaves. Archival quality, I’m told. Nineteen thirty-two. You’d know. Then casting an eye as severe as a spinster’s at the layout of the shop, he added: where shall I find it? (waving a commanding hand) where is it hid? The provenance of my photographs, Mr. Gab replied with nervous yet offended heat, is clear beyond question, their genuineness is past dispute; their quality unquestioned and unthreatened.

  As if Mr. Gab’s ire had melted the mister’s snowy glare, he made as if to communicate a smile. The assistant tried various slithery faces on and did appear to be quite stupid indeed. I should think every photograph in this place was in dire straits, sir, the man said sternly, ignoring the reassurance of his own signal. As I remember, Mr. Gab managed, Two Wet Leaves is quite impressive. You’d know, the man insisted, beginning a patrol of aisle one, his head bent to read the labels of the boxes. I had such a print once in my possession, obtained from Anna Fárová herself, Mr. Gab admitted. Soooo…the stranger straightened and turned to confront Mr. Gab. And was it taken by sly means from Anne d’Harnoncourt’s exhibit at the Philadelphia? Only from Anna’s hand, herself, sir, Mr. Gab replied, now firm and fierce, and no other Fárová than Fárová. As if there were many, the man said frowning, you would know.

  Why not an Irving Penn? This insult was not lost on their visitor whose upper lip appeared to have recently missed a mustache. The many boxes seemed to daunt him, and it was now obvious that Mr. Gab would not be helpful. I have friends in Philadelphia, he said in a threatening tone. I understand the nearby gardens are nice, Mr. Gab rejoined. It was clear to the entire shop (and that included the china cat) that Mr. Gab had regained his courage. Was this freshly shaven man perhaps an officer of the law, the stupid assistant wondered, coughing now behind a stubby hand whose thumbnail was missing as David Smith’s was in that portrait by Penn, the one in which Smith’s mouth, fat-lipped and amply furred, is sucking on a pipe.

  It was necessary to sidle if you wished to approach the wall, and sidle the tall man did, closing in on an image dangling there, gray in its greasy container. Is that, by god, a Koudelka, a Koudelka to be sure. His hands rose toward it. Not for sale, Mr. Gab said. Not for money. No need to remove it. But the deed was done. Slender fingers from a fine cuff parted the clip and slid the photo forth, balancing it under a blast of can light upon a delicate teeter of fingertips. Not for money? Then in trade, the man said, gazing at its darkly blanketed horse, and at the hunkered man apparently speaking to the horse’s attentive head. Ah, what magical music, the man exclaimed, as if to himself. The grays…in the horse, the street, the wall…the tracks of light, the swirls and streaks of gray…melodious as nothing can be. Unless it was Sudek himself, said Mr. Gab. The man’s lengthy head rose from the picture where it had been feeding. Yes, he said, having taken thought. Only Sudek himself.

  The fingernails are especially…Mr. Gab began, because he couldn’t help himself. Ah, and the white above that one hoof, the visitor responded, entranced. Yes, the nails, the gesture of the hand, a confused puff of tail and that wall…such a wall. Hoofprints, Mr. Gab prompted. Dark soft spots…yes…and so…would you consider a trade, the man asked smiling—fully, genuinely—as he laid the cellophane envelope carefully on top of a cardboard box and allowed the print to float down upon it. I might have in my possession—if you have too many, you would know—a Sudek myself I’d be prepared to swap. I couldn’t part—Mr. Gab broke off to repeat himself. Not for trade or sale, though, if the Sudek were fine enough, he, Mr. Gab, might be prepared to purchase…But were you to see the Sudek, the man said, pointing toward his eyes…

  It’s a trap, Mr. Gab’s assistant thought, for he only looked a bit stupid, especially with a little dab of spit moistening the open corner of his mouth. It is the immersement, the immersement of the figures in t
heir fore- and back- and floor ground, that is so amazing, don’t you agree? Mr. Gab, unsure, nodded. He’s an entrapper, the assistant thought. I should show you the Sudek, the visitor said, no longer a customer but now a salesman. It sings, sir, sings. I’m willing to look at anything Sudek, Mr. Gab said, over his assistant’s unvoiced series of “no”s. All right, the seller said, slipping his tall frame toward them. After reading Mr. Gab’s expression, the man left abruptly, without leaving a clue to his intentions, and without closing the door behind him.

  2 THE STUPID ASSISTANT

  Had appeared at Mr. Gab’s shop door years ago with a note from the orphanage…okay…from a welfare agency. The note was in fact in a sealed envelope, and the boy, who was at that time about ten or twelve, and wasn’t yet Mr. Gab’s assistant, hadn’t an inkling of its contents. Nor did he care much. He was not then a very caring child. He had seen too many empty rooms filled with kids of a similar disownership of themselves as his. Mr. Gab looked at the envelope handed him and shook his head warily as if he could read through cream. He then conferred upon the child a similar gesture, as if he saw through him too—clear to his mean streak. Here at last, hey! he said. The kid had a pudgy bloataboy body. Half of him, the right half, though undersized, seemed okay; the leftover half, however, had been severely shortchanged. The head sloped more steeply than heads should, a shoulder sank, an arm was stunted, its squat hand had somewhere lost a finger, and the leg was missing most of its length. The child had consequently a kind of permanent lean which a thick woodsoled shoe did little to correct, though the fellow tried to compensate by pushing off with his short leg, and thereby tipping himself up to proper verticality. The result was that he bobbed about as though fish were biting, nibbling at bait hung deeply beneath whatever he was walking on—a sidewalk, lawn, shop floor, cindered ground.