Mr. Stu let his eye run back and forth along the light like a squirrel on a wire. His life wasn’t a winner either. Yet he had a job, a room, a library card. And he could open a book as if it were a door and disappear. He could inhale air in his weedy lot. He could look. He’d even learn. Yet he’d already found Sundays a stretch. He was supposed to stay home and pretend to be a person of substance in that slummy brown shoebox space of his. Itemize the alley. When the walls were whisked away? When the window went, what could he count? When his little box of belongings was put on the sidewalk outside, what would he manage? Mr. Gab, Mr. Gab, what were they to do? And when they took Mr. Gab downtown for questioning, and found what they would find in box after box, folder after folder, plastic pocket after pocket, how could either of them stand it?…endure it?…live through it? It was…awful…unrelievedly…foul. Mr. Gab reappeared with a bundle. He wore, for once, a wry smile. Quick as a cat Mr. Stu vacated the chair.
There are signs the dick went up the ladder to my loft, Mr. Gab said, but the dick missed this, wrapped in a sheet, under my cot. He held it out as you would a tray of sweets. There was a great wad of sheet to be clumsily unwound before a photogravure, rubber-banded between cardboards for its protection, was released. Mr. Gab put the print where a streak of sunlight crossed a trestle so they could see it. An Eastern moment, Mr. Gab said softly, and Mr. Stu saw the most beautiful silklike scene he’d ever, which Mr. Gab explained was a Stieglitz from 1901 called Spring Showers. Composed by a god, Mr. Gab whispered, as if the detective might overhear. He also spoke in awe, Mr. Stu knew. Like an oriental hanging, Mr. Gab said, as though the mottled gray surface was that of cloth. Less than half a foot wide, a foot tall, made almost solely of shadow, Mr. Stu saw there in the dimness a street sweeper in wet hat and wet slicker pushing a wide broom along a wet gutter toward the photograph’s wet left edge. Despite Mr. Stu’s despair the image made him feel good for a moment, then worse. Just off-center, though on the same side as the sweeper, so that the right two-thirds of the picture was empty of everything except some soft faint shapes that represented traffic on the street, there grew a sidewalk tree with a gently forking trunk protected, perhaps from being pissed on, by a round wrought-iron fence whose pickets were thin as sticks. Surrounded by the sweetest vagueness, the tree rose from the walk on its own wet and wavy shadow as though that dripping shadow were a root, easing toward its dim thin upper limbs, which were dotted with brief new leaves and one perched bird, to faintly foliate away in indistinctness, though there were hints that tall buildings might block you if you entered the background, as well as shimmers that signified some moving vehicles, and the loom of a large ornamental urn—was it?—the viewer could not be sure.
What was certain was the photograph’s depth, its purity, its delicacy. And the silken faintly hazy and amorphous gray that made up most of this small and simple streetside scene was the most beautiful, most comforting, most expressive quality of all. It was everywhere as wet, Mr. Stu realized, as Mr. Gab’s face had been before his sleeve had swabbed it. Gloom began descending like a jacket hood, because his admiration could not keep misery away, not for long. Beauty eventually increased the pain. Perhaps not in better days. Mr. Stu understood incompleteness for he was plete aplenty. Mr. Gab understood loss because he was its cause as well as its victim. Pictures someone had taken, he’d taken, taken and hid. Now these prints had been wrenched from him in turn, and were nowhere where they might be gratefully seen—pictures that had been selfishly sequestered, then put like bad kids “in custody,” to be examined by eyes that were mean and sharpened by the crude rough looks of criminals.
His shoulders in such a slump they ceased to be, Mr. Gab went with his treasure through the carpet again. Part of the rug had pulled from its tacks so that now its hang was uneven. It bore a diamond design that Mr. Stu had never noticed before, cut deeply into its pelt. In better days he would have dreamed it outlined a playing field where figures the size of small ants might run about. Throughout the shop sunlight flickered for a moment. Someone was passing. In better days the store would still be open. Mr. Stu thought that when masses were made of mist and shadow, as they were in Stieglitz’s painterly picture, and loomed without any consequences caused by bulk or weight, they possessed their own kind of being, and that the photograph, which had so little that was definite in it, nevertheless presented us with a whole world made of fragility and levitation. What would it mean to a man to have made such—there was no other word for it—such beauty? to have drawn it in through rainwatered eyes? to have captured it in a small now antiquated box? brought it to life almost amniotically? (another from his daily assignment of words) and sent it forth in the style of a far-off culture that he had learned about solely from photographic samples. Would it fill his life with satisfaction and achievement, or would it sadden him, since a loveliness of that kind could never be repeated, could never be realized again?
Mr. Gab had treasured his collection. However acquired. He had gathered good things together that had perhaps been stolen and dispersed once already. He had achieved an Archive, made his own museum in the midst of a maelstrom. Didn’t that count? So Mr. Stu thought maybe Mr. Gab could say he hadn’t known they were anyone’s legitimate possessions any longer, but were the spoils of war, refugees of slavery, expropriation, and murder. Of course they could be returned to their proper homes if they had any, as long as it was their real wish to be rehung on the dour walls of grandiose old estates with their long cold halls given over to stuffily conventional family portraits and other tasteless bragging, to languish in the huge mansions or palaces they’d come from, or to sit in shame propped up on some lectern like a speech no one would give and no one would wish to hear; that would be okay, provided there’d be no further punishment for Mr. Gab, since he’d had pain enough from his loss to surpass that of most lovers. Lover: that was right, because who, Mr. Stu surmised, had looked at them as though they were gray lace, who had weighed a shadow against a substance, a dark line against a pale space, the curvature of a street’s recession against the forefrontal block of a building, so as to feel the quality of judgment in every placement, the rightness of every relation, and how these subtle measures made the picture dance with the ideal gaiety of an ideal life.
We pass through frames, Mr. Gab had said. We walk about our rooms, our house, the neighborhood, and our elbow enters into a divine connection with a bus bench or bubbler in the park, a finial, a chair or letter lying on a hall table, which is, in an instant—click—dissolved. The nose, the earlobe, the bosom, the elbow, the footfall, the torso’s shadow pass in and out of awkward—in and out of awful—in and out of awesome combinations just as easily as air moves; the sublime, the suddenly supremely meaningful and redemptive moment is reached, achieved, left, dissolved into the dingy, only, in a few frames further, to connive at more communities. It is grace and disgrace constantly created and destroyed. The right click demonstrates how, in an instant, we, or our burro, or our shovel, or our eye or nose or nipple, were notes in a majestic symphony. A world of self-concerned things is suddenly singing a selfless concerned song: that was what the fine photographer, over and over, allowed to be seen in solemn apology for what should have been heard.
Nothing had been heard from Mr. Gab in quite a while, though Mr. Stu hadn’t counted breaths; however his employer’s retreat should not have been surprising since he’d just lost a wife, more dear than life, to a bunch of hand trolleys. He’d been in the dark on his garret cot sobbing like a sad child, Mr. Stu bet, why not? In a room fixed to the top of a shabby ladder like a squirrel’s nest in a tree; what could be sillier than where it was? and Mr. Stu had wanted to laugh when he first saw the way the ladder led up through a hole from which coal could once have dropped. Perhaps Mr. Gab could be comforted by the darkness since it might suggest an end to things—no more moving men moving his treasures out, treasures to be treated like contraband—less anxiety, fewer humiliations—dark at midday was what this day deserved—so perhaps h
e’d been somewhat slightly—well, not reassured—but protected from any additional pain, such as being pierced through and through by his unwarranted suspicion of his former employee, Mr. Stu, a feeling that had been turned on—click—like a light, when the strange man had said the phrase—the curdling phrase—“informed upon.”
You have been given up, Mr. Gab. We gotcha. Dead to rights. We got yer goods too. Yer a looter, a despoiler, a thief, a fence, a flown-away father, an ungrateful and suspicious boss. Now you’ll have to bear your loss like just desserts. Go to bed like your boy has, time upon time, to cry inside the pillow till the pillow flats. Go to bed like your boy has, countlessly, to imagine the bitter oncoming day. When you will walk about a barren store. When you will begin to miss me. When you’ll be invited to “come downtown.” Go to bed like your boy has, heart beaten by shame, sore and in despair he is alive. Go to bed like your boy has, angry at all, alone as a bone that has lost its dog. Head screams aren’t effective. Head howls aren’t effective. Headlongs aren’t worth a damn. Seek some solace in the fact that you aren’t being gnawed on at the moment, not being yelled at, at the moment, not being guffaw’d, not being always, at anything, the worst, to be the basket into which everything is eventually tossed. Seek solace we advise…seek solace, don’t we say? The one photograph that remains, had it been unshrouded and claimed, would nonetheless have been engraved on your weeping eyes.
Mr. Stu felt a wadded sheet at his uneven feet. He picked it up, to unwrap and refold, only to find his arms weren’t long enough, so he spread it out on a trestle where bright slivers of sunshine from the shutters fell in lively white streaks. Mr. Stu drew a roll of masking tape from Mr. Gab’s desk drawer, tape Mr. Gab used now and then to repair boxes, and began to block out the light, initially not easy because it bled through the thin tape, and it took several layers to make the glow even faint. By biting the tape into thin strips and making its stickum cling, Mr. Stu gradually darkened the room. Now there was only a halo to see by. It ran around the rug and apparently came from a light in the kitchen. Bring a pin, Mr. Gab, please, Mr. Stu called out. Though he thought he heard in his head the beating of a desperate heart, Mr. Stu boldly drew back the rug and entered the kitchen where he found, after a few minutes of pawing about in drawers which otherwise yielded little in the way of contents, a roll of stout picture wire. Bring a pin, Mr. Gab, please, Mr. Stu shouted up the ladder at the hole that was even darker than the inside of a hose.
Mr. Stu was feeling his way to his idea. He realized, while groping between trestles, that he was performing the steps of his project in the wrong order. Consequently it was with difficulty that he found the nails he wanted on opposing walls, and with difficulty that he finally fastened one end of his wire to a conveniently big nail, and with difficulty that he unrolled the wire—held over his head—to the other side and found another roofer to wind his wire around, allowing the remainder of the roll to dangle. Now he had a firm line across the room to fling the sheet over, but he was unsure of what came next. Bring a pin, please, Mr. Gab, he called, suddenly weary and useless.
It took some time—and after the slow return of resolution—to hang the sheet, though he should have been more expert, having hung a lot of laundry out to dry in his day, even standing on a short stool to do his pinning when the line was beyond his reach. He stared into the dark, making nothing out. What’s the idea, Mr. Gab asked. They stood in pitch now that Mr. Gab had turned the kitchen light off. I just thought we might—. Mr. Stu began. Ah, of course, you’ve occluded the shutters. Tape, Mr. Stu said. Something to do. You might have thought I was crying, Mr. Gab said. I was not. I was at a loss even for that. I didn’t, Mr. Stu said, think. You might have thought I was huddling, Mr. Gab said. I was not. I was too tired to lie down. I didn’t, Mr. Stu said. There is nothing for my eyes to adjust to, Mr. Gab said. It’s as dark as the hole in a hose, said Mr. Stu.
They both stood without the whereabouts of the other. Say something more so I’ll know where you are, said Mr. Gab, clearing his throat as if he were warning a boat about a shoal. I thought if we pinholed a bit of the tape, we’d get here, on this sheet you can’t see, a bit of picture. Something to do, said Mr. Stu. Mr. Gab bumped gratefully into his desk. Mr. Stu heard its drawer being withdrawn. I’ve a hatpin here somewhere. Rats—ouch. No. I didn’t stick myself, just thought I might have. Mr. Gab had to get close up because the tape on the shutters was barely visible even close up. If I were to put a hole, say, here—what—
Suddenly there was a faint loose smear on the sheet. Needs to be closer up, was the opinion of Mr. Stu. Needs to be farther back, Mr. Gab decided. In the sheetlight it was easier to find the tightly fastened wire and unwind it from its nail, Mr. Gab doing one side, Mr. Stu the other. They moved in concert slowly toward the rear of the room, watching an image grow and slowly brighten. Now, cried Mr. Gab, and they both scrabbled for nailheads, feeling the wall gingerly as though it were flesh not their own, holding the wire as high as they could, which wasn’t very, in Mr. Stu’s case, because the sheet dragged on his left side. Shouldn’t let it get dirty, Mr. Gab said in his familiar cross voice which was suddenly reassuring. The sheet, however, hadn’t hung clear for many feet before it rolled over tables and caught on their crude edges. The image, now rather sharply focused, ran like a frieze across the top of the screen, but then the sheet tented toward the front of the shop as though there were a wind gusting from its rear and filling it out like a sail.
Without a further word needed, Mr. Gab and Mr. Stu began to shove the tables—not an easy thing to do—toward the sides of the store so there’d be a space for the sheet to hang and its image to cohere. Sawhorses don’t roll; they wouldn’t even skid; and beanbags were treacherously everywhere. Mr. Stu knew not to curse, but he nearly cried. It was futile. Why were they doing this? What had his idea been? Mr. Gab would go to prison. Mr. Stu imagined this might take place tomorrow. And homeless Mr. Stu, whose deforming birth marks bespoke bad begetting, would get the heave-ho from every eye, from every back a turn, and even from those on pleasant picnics.
Quickly, quickly, your stool, Mr. Stu, you mustn’t miss this. Mr. Stu dragged his perch awkwardly forward. Beanbags bore him malice. Mr. Gab had turned his chair to face the screen, and there…and there…there was their street, clear as clean water. There bloomed a building of red brick. Of a deep rich rose they had never before seen. It was…it was as if the entire brick had been hotly compressed the way the original clay had been, yet each brick was still so supremely each because the mortar between them was like a living stream, and the pocking was as crisp as craters photographed from space, individual and maybe named for Greek gods. Where the brick encountered a lintel of gray stone, the contrast was more than bugle calls in a basement. The gray had a clarity one found only in the finest prints. Mr. Gab’s hand rose toward the scene in involuntary tribute. Where the glass began its passage through the pane, light leaped the way water encircles the thrown stone, though now they were seeing it from below like a pair of cautiously gazing fish. Further on, in the darker parts, were reflected shades of such subtlety that, still a fish, Mr. Gab gaped.
The sheet bore creases of course. It would have to be ironed. The hang of the cloth over the wire could use some adjustment, perhaps a little weight attached to the bottom edge might improve the stretch, and the wire itself might be profitably tightened. Nevertheless, toiling in the dark, they’d done a good job.
We’ll keep watching. Someone will be along soon. In a red sweater maybe. How would a red sweater look passing that brick, Mr. Gab wondered. Such a spectacle. Well, Mr. Gab, it is upsidedown, Mr. Stu said. I should say “thank you” to you, Mr. Stu, Mr. Gab said. You’ve given me quite a gift. And upsidedown will be all right. Like reflections from water. We shall adjust. I guess it will be, Mr. Stu said, but not even his ears knew whether he spoke in earnest agreement or out of sad acceptance of it. It…it’s colored through. Yes, Mr. Stu, and what colors, too. Have you ever seen such? And look at the contours
, so precise while staying soft and never crudely edgy. Never…you know…I never saw this building before. I never observed our street. We might wash the window—that bit in front of the pinhole, Mr. Stu suggested. Splendid idea, Mr. Stu, agreed Mr. Gab. But it is upsidedown, Mr. Stu ventured. They gave one another looks which were gifts not quite accepted. In color, Mr. Stu reminded. Sweet as rainbow ice cream, insisted Mr. Gab. A car…a cab…flashed by. The chariot of the sun, Mr. Gab exclaimed. Oh, Mr. Stu, this will indeed do. The bricks reddened to the color of rare roast beef. It will do just fine.
Charity
Dear Sir/Madam,
I understand you have helped people like myself in the past and I would like you to consider helping me at this time. My situation has changed drastically in the last several years and I have lost all that I have with the exception of my home. At this writing I have after all this time just started a part time position with the hope that will eventually lead to a full time employment.
The reason I am writing you this letter is I am in desperate need of money to replace my roof so that I may continue to have a roof over my head. I have struggled to do repairs but have run out of money to complete the roof.
I understand that you may have been in a similiar situation some time in your life and my promise to you is “I will in turn help someone as you have helped me, once I am financially stable”. All I need is $7900.00 to replace the roof and will be in your debt should you find it in your heart to help me.
Eyes Page 7
