In the 1970s, the Loud family fascinated Americans with its psychological honesty, so compared with it, today’s reality TV is a joke; it trivializes whatever reality you’re invested in. The Louds fell apart afterward. TV’s exhibitionists challenge credulity, sanity, yet people humiliate and shame themselves daily. Americans can’t shake their Puritan past, so everyone’s hoping to confess their sins and find God’s grace. Still, it’s hard to understand Judge Judy’s appeal to the characters who want to be judged on TV, and those who watch manifest people’s perverse, insatiable curiosity and schadenfreude. Also, some people miss being yelled at as they were in their families. I’m one of them.
Shame is different from thirty years ago, it doesn’t last as long—Pee-Wee Herman, Martha Stewart, Richard Nixon—they bounced back, and, like history, Americans forget their pasts and sins quickly. Americans have several acts, with shame’s mutation, and if they’re televisual, it helps; if they’re not, some can escape the stigma of being “ugly as sin” with plastic surgery—see Paula Jones and Linda Tripp. “Ugly” is bad, it’s evil—remember what the bad guys in movies look like.
Great Uncle Charley lived with a secret, and there are more in my family: my brother discovered he’d been born an androgyne, changed to a boy surgically, a fact hidden from him by my parents, until he began to date and felt weird emotions; the twins had abortions when they were fourteen, and apart from that “sin,” they had sex with the same man, maybe at the same time; and my father hit my mother. Mom was frightened of him when he drank, she cowered, I remember her crouched, it’s an image gelled in memory. We kids didn’t need to be told, Keep your damn mouth shut, we knew. If I ratted, a term I learned from cop shows, I knew I was betraying Us, and I’d go to hell. So you’re implicated in your family, always.
Mostly, my mother took the pictures. My father thought it was beneath him, he felt superior to us. My brother and I stood next to each other in many photos; he loomed over me until I turned fourteen and shot up ten inches. I became taller. He hated that, you can see it, I can, because I know his expressions. You can see, I can, the power balance shift: in later photos, then no photos, except at weddings, when we stood far apart, especially at his wedding. To my father’s disgust, he married Claudia, born Claude, a male-to-female trannie; only close friends and family knew. My sisters loved being photographed together, they still do. The twins are identical, both pretty, one has fuller lips, the other a wider nose; you can tell them apart easily if you know them. Their entire lives they’ve looked at each other, images of each other, maybe wondering who’s prettier, and whether she loves herself and image more or less than the other twin does.
The concept of family resemblance is reasonable, given genetics, but it’s peculiar, because what makes a resemblance isn’t clear, there’s no feature-by-feature similarity. Most of us in families share a resemblance. Fascination with the “family other”—a neologism I used in my first book, You’re a Picture, You’re Not a Picture—is dulled by the other’s being related by blood; yet what’s near can be farther (what’s in the mirror is farther than you think), because up close, we’re less able to see each other. I don’t look like my brother, but everyone says I do. I hate my brother, often we hate our siblings, so a family resemblance colludes against your difference against your will. Blood tells the story, it seems to say, of which you are a part, and like tragedy can’t be escaped.
But what does comedy tell? Like about Great Uncle Charley, the buffoon, comic, teaser, the man who didn’t know that women piss and shit. Or was his life a tragedy? Was there an inevitability to it? In comedy, the only inevitability is surprise, an unforeseen punch line; guess it, and it’s not funny. Uncle Charley—his life’s a toss up, he was always funny, everyone said, then he died and his terrible secret came out that wasn’t funny, and it was a surprise. Tragedy can’t be a complete shock; it must build and build to a foreseeable end, which can’t ever be avoided. I can’t see any of it in the family photographs. But a family resemblance shares that attribute—it can’t be avoided. You can’t escape what it says about you.
After people die, my mother put it, all that remains are photographs, that’s why we take them. Then she said to me, more sharply, Your interest in the family photos is morbid, the photos, videos, you’re holding on to your childhood, it’s sick. I ignored her and still do, even though she’s dead. Often when people die, you reconsider their statements. I just look at their pictures.
Time goes on, your sacred films and tapes of weddings and communions are hidden away, everyone wants to have them, few look at them again, most are just kept images. I hardly knew so-and-so, there she is forever, but I don’t have to look at her, either. The matte or glossy snapshots, in a drawer or album, represent a past, stand as an implacable memory, stored away against time, and even if in time you recognize no one and nothing by them, even if you have the memory only because the photo exists, it’s a kind of elegy to a reality, a fact or document from the distant past, a memento mori. Or, as Claire’s ghost-brother Nate whispered to her in the finale of HBO’s Six Feet Under, when she was shooting their family before leaving home, “That’s already gone.”
When they die, even clowns sometimes morph into tragic heroes. Take Great Uncle Charley. I stare at his photos, ranging from when he was three, posing for a professional in town, sticking his finger up his nose in a high school graduation photograph, his eyes bugging out at a party after his college graduation, looking boisterous with the Not-So-Tall basketball team, or beaming as he cuts the cake with his bride, Margaret, and on and on. Three years before he died, there’s an arresting one of him with his head drooping to the side, a melancholy expression on his face. I want to peel away the emulsion, get under that sad-sack image, and find out his secret. It’s a primitive urge maybe, or a silly or naive feeling, but no matter what I might seem to know about the fiction and illusion of images, I’m also still that little boy rushing around, curious, trying to find out what’s what, and who, like Great Uncle Charley, is shocked at what I see that no one told me would be there. I want other pictures to efface what I do know, to show me another world, I want to kill images, burn them, like some of my brother. Photographs aren’t real that way.
In my next book, I’m broaching treacherous ground and taking up some cultural questions around images, specifically, a photographer’s disposition—the subject behind the camera—and the effects of family resemblance. When an artist pictures a family member, what’s the psychological impact of a family resemblance on the artist? Is the image also a self-portrait, when the shooter “resembles” the one who poses and so also sees himself or herself? How does the sociology of the American family—for instance, sibling order—affect images? Whose “I”/“eye” can be trusted, if trust is an issue in art, and why? From what I learned in my family, I don’t trust anyone in front of or behind a camera, but with a nod to its futility, I’ll try to keep my bias out of it.
The Original Impulse
He appeared in her sleep like a regular. Sometimes she saw the actual him on the street, then he appeared two, three nights in a row; on the street, because he remembered her vaguely or well enough, it was awkward.
Years ago they’d done a fast dance. Back then, when she studied photography, she believed artists were constitutionally honest; but his thrill had its own finish line. She missed classes, stayed out too late, ate too much, and dormant neuroses fired. She expected a man to love her the way her father did, explosively, devotedly. Months later, near where they’d first met, she ignored him; he rushed after her and apologized. Maybe he knew how bad it felt, but she never said anything. He phoned sometimes, they drove around, drank coffee, talked, not about lies, and two years passed like that, haplessly, when something obscene must have gone down, because he didn’t call again. What words were there for nothing. Nothing.
Her time was full, adequate, hollow, fine, and she felt content enough with love and work, but no one lives in the present except amnesiacs. Her history was
a bracelet of holes around her wrist, not a charm bracelet like her mother had worn; that was gone. Someone had stolen it as her mother slipped away. It might be on that woman’s wrist now, the gold rectangular calendar hanging from it, a ruby studding her mother’s birthdate, a reminder she wouldn’t want. It would weigh even more with blanks filled in by anonymous dead people.
Insignificant coincidences—the actual him in a hotel lobby, a bookstore doorway, crossing a street—made loose days feel planned. She moved forward, a smart phone to her ear or its small screen to her face, and anything might happen. She read a story he’d written about an accidental meeting with a woman from his protagonist’s past. First he didn’t recognize her, she’d changed so much from how he remembered her; then he felt something again, maybe for the woman, mostly for himself.
When he spotted her, she wondered if he felt sick alarm too. One Saturday, she didn’t notice he was walking by, watching her, and when she looked up, aware of something, she half-smiled involuntarily. That could have meant anything, there was no true recognition from either of them. Without it, she couldn’t perform retrospective miracles, transform traitors into saviors. When ex-friends’ faces arose, stirred by the perfume of past time, they looked as they did back then. One of them, she heard, did look the same, because she’d already been lifted. But some things can’t be lifted.
Abysses and miseries called down their own last judgments upon themselves. Katherine could recite many of her bad acts; it would be easy to locate her putative wounded and apologize like someone in AA, but what substance had she abused. Love, probably. Most likely they’d claim they had moved on and forgotten her. Besides, they might say, you never really meant that much to me. Or, let’s be friends on Facebook. When the 20th-year reunion committee of her high school found her, she didn’t respond. Formal invitations, phone messages. They insisted her absence would destroy the entire reason for the event. The date approached. She wondered if showing up might help adjudicate the past, and curiosity arched its back. She caught a ride with a popular girl who’d gone steady with a future movie star who’d had a pathetic end. The woman wore the same makeup she’d worn then, her eyes lined slyly with black. Startling, what gets kept.
The reunion was held in the town’s best country club, and in front of the table with name badges, she sank, just the way she had growing up. Someone called to her, “Kat, Kat,” and another, “Kat,” while another fondly blasted “Kat” into her ear, someone whose name she didn’t recognize even looking at the name badge. Indignant, the girl/woman pronounced her unmarried name as if the tribe were extinct. “And I’m called Katherine now,” she answered. Throughout the night, they called her Kat as if she were still one of them.
Faces had been modified, some looked aged; all the boys looked older than the girls. Provincial, well-off, neither sex could believe she wasn’t married, and she encouraged their bewilderment, eventually admitting she lived with someone. But no, no, she wasn’t married. The girls especially looked at her pityingly, the boys lasciviously. One had been her sixth-grade boyfriend; he’d been pudgy but now his girth wasn’t boyish or expectant. During cocktails, she huddled with the black kids, the minority in town, and sat at their dinner table, still a minority. Days later, some of her former friends telephoned. One announced gravely, “I told my daughter to be like you, not me.” She didn’t ask why. Her pudgy sixth-grade boyfriend decided he’d ruined her life, that’s why she hadn’t married. He thought because she hadn’t married, she must be a tormented lesbian. Katherine remembered breaking up with him for a seventh-grader.
On an accidental corner, the nighttime man’s spectral presence tugged at her, a leash pulling in the wrong direction. If she existed as a translation from an unforgiving past, he must, too, but translation was too dainty for what had happened to her, or him, she supposed. Words weren’t patches, and the nights didn’t let up, repetition after repetition, but how many ways could he appear, in how many iterations: his cheek pressed against hers, his glance, like a pardon from their past, his sexy compassion—they both had been alive then.
She heard he treated his wife badly, but they might have an open marriage, blind oxymoron. She supposed he lied to his wife, a famous rock singer past her prime, the way he was. On an impulse, he might abandon the singer, no longer the blooming girl who’d obliterated his mortality. The singer might want to divorce him but won’t, because of their child, or because she doesn’t care about his infidelities, since she’s had her own, or none, or because she can’t bear another split when suturing wouldn’t hold after so much scar tissue. What had their life meant, and, anyway, he always returned remorseful or defiant, or both.
Sometimes, passing a building or café, Katherine would recollect a doorway encounter like the one on Fifth Avenue where Lily Bart was spotted by Lawrence Selden and doomed. Behind that red door, in that bodega, in that high-rise on the eightieth floor, strangers and intimates lavished attention or withdrew it, or she did. She had entertained various kinds of intercourse, and the words spoken lay redacted under thick, black lines. She retrieved bits through the interstices of nodding heads.
A delicate young man trembled at the edge of recognition, but his face was now speckled like an old photograph.
She was eighteen and lay in the arms of a married man who respected, he said, her innocence, and held her close, saying he’d always remember this moment, but she wouldn’t, because she didn’t know how beautiful she was. There was a cool slip of a rough tongue on an inner thigh and a sensational confession. There was a Southerner whose sexuality was fiercely, erotically ambiguous. He stayed in her bed too long. She roared here and soared there, dwarfed by three massive white columns as she and her best college friend mugged before a filmless camera.
People often move away from cities and towns when reminiscences create profound debt and mortgage the future. They visit occasionally and discover that the debt has multiplied. Katherine stayed where she was, in her city, along with a majority of others who resolutely called it home and became teachers, therapists, florists, criminals, food professionals, homeless, or worked with immigrants and refugees, the way she did.
Her photographs had been in two one-person shows and several group exhibitions, but Katherine stopped taking her work seriously because, primarily, she couldn’t convince herself that her images were better than anyone else’s. The decisive moment was an indecisive one for her. She earned a degree in social work and dallied with becoming a psychoanalyst, but decided she didn’t want to work with people too much like herself. The agency where she spent five days a week, with occasional nights of overtime because of the exigencies of desperate people’s lives, suited her. The agency was respected and privately funded by well-known philanthropists. Every day people entered the office with foreign-born stories of violence, terror, and humiliation; her shame was nothing compared with theirs.
Two months after the high school reunion, one of the girls telephoned to remind Katherine, agonistically, of why their friendship had ended—remember, the friend urged, senior year. The friend cited her mother’s dying of cancer, her boyfriend’s betrayals–-she married him anyway—but all this pain had forced her to abandon their friendship. “I couldn’t help you,” she said, “we couldn’t help each other.” The friend talked and talked until her voice fell off a cliff. So that was that.
Katherine never thought about that friend or her dying mother, but now she pretended to stroll from her childhood house on Butler up Adelaide Avenue to the street—Randolph—and the door of her friend’s home. The lawn was wide and green, so it must have been spring, when sad things occur ironically. She didn’t open the front door, she didn’t want to walk up the carpeted staircase and see her friend cradling her dying mother. The front door swung open, anyway. Her friend’s father had his back to her, at the dining room table, his old head supported in her young friend’s hands. Now the friend turned toward her, disrupting the image, and Katherine ran home. Did that happen?
There h
e was again. Katherine was sitting on a couch in a lobby, waiting for a friend. She heard his voice, he strode to the elevator, and she didn’t move, her face averted. He looked her way; she didn’t relax her pose. It didn’t matter if the nighttime man knew her as she was now. He was a thorn pricking her side, that’s all. Another of his stories appeared, and she read about the protagonist’s having once received a postcard from a girl he’d been cheating with; his wife found it, and it ruined things between them for a while. He never saw the girl again. How true was he being, or could he be. He was faithless, but probably he didn’t think so, not in the obvious ways. He bore an unfathomable loneliness, and he was faithful, in his way, to that.
At the agency, she listened to stories more terrible than the Greek tragedies she loved. When she learned that some friends didn’t return to the books they’d cherished in school, she understood that some people lived as if the past were over. Been there, done that—she didn’t know how. The Greeks would have his wife lose her voice, never to sing or even speak again. He’d suffer a downfall, realizing his hubris necessarily too late, and kill himself. The wife might kill herself too, but not harm their beautiful daughter, who would turn vengeful, without knowing whom to blame, unalterable fate swallowing her whole.
The nighttime man played his role in her romance, reciting his few lines. She told no one, because dreams signify nothing to anyone else, and their accidental meetings were psychic jokes—those sidewalk and doorway scenes, the questions they raised, when she compared her life with his, what had occurred between then and now, all to test her self-made being. Startling, what gets kept.
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