Picture Palace Read online

  “That’s all you have to say, is it?”

  “No. I still want to know how you found out. Just curious, I guess.”

  “I’m not telling you.”

  “And the other thing. Why does a fellow who has so much regard for the integrity of the photograph waste his time with that kind of pictorial garbage? What do you see in it, huh?”

  He panted crossly instead of replying.

  “You’re a very mysterious person, Frank.”

  “I just want you to know that I’m having serious doubts about this entire project. Yes, it’s a great idea, but if my personal life is in in jeopardy—”

  “What about my personal life!” I said and noticed a scream rising in my voice.

  I had been calm. I had had a vague desire to re-enter my own picture palace and examine that moment in the rowboat with Orlando. Had he really been so dark, so tense, so obviously deceived, as the picture showed? And what was the sequel to it? Frank’s intrusion shattered my mood, destroyed my calm. But he had given me a notion. He had reminded me that I had endured another unexpected assault, and his heckling—all this woeful indignation—had woken a memory, not pleasant but necessary.

  “I’m going,” he said.

  “Don’t go.” I needed his indignation now to stir my past and make me remember. Someone had come, just like him, and accused me.

  He sat on the edge of his chair and gave his Adam’s apple a workout. Plunge, plunge: it was like sarcasm.

  I said, “I want you to know that I didn’t take those pictures lightly. No sir. They worried me. Frank, I was shook. Now I respect you—you’ve always found things to admire in my work. But how do you account for them? What, may I ask, are they in aid of?”

  “It’s a different ball game altogether.”

  “Well said. But these horny pictures—are you doing something with them?”

  “What do you mean ‘doing something’?” his voice was uncertain and shameful.

  “Writing a learned article, that sort of caper.”

  He hung his head. “Not exactly.”

  “Go get them. I want to look at them again.”

  “Never.”

  “Don’t be ashamed of them. It’s an aspect of photography that’s been somewhat overlooked.” Frank didn’t budge. I said, “I found them rather alarming.”

  “So you said.”

  “Photography is all about secrets—the secrets in surfaces. But Kenny and Doris don’t have any secrets that I can see. They’re out of sync, there’s no surface—technically, they’re nowhere, they look like they were bled off by Dracula, so you can’t use the old erotic art gambit to justify them. Or is erotic art just another way of saying tit-show? And doesn’t it scare you to realize that in order to enjoy that sort of thing—Doris double-clutching, say—you have to endure the sight of Kenny’s great hairy ass or his dripping tool?”

  “Cut it out,” said Frank.

  “All right,” I said. “But I find it odd to think that you have room in your judgment for those pictures and mine. What’s the connection?”

  “I’d like to know why you’re so disturbed by them,” he said, turning on me. “That says a lot about you.”

  “Good point. I was disturbed.”

  “Hah!” He stood up. “See, that’s the real problem, isn’t it? It’s you!”

  “And how! But they’re your pictures.”

  “They don’t worry me a bit.”

  “Amazing,”

  He said, “There are worse. Scenes you wouldn’t believe.”

  “What are they for, for heaven’s sake?”

  He was silent, standing like a crane.

  I said, “Tell me how you knew I’d seen them.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “I’ll stop razzing you if you tell me.”

  He looked at the wall, making his jaw mournful. He said, “Because you messed them up.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “Yes—you mixed them up, scrambled them out of order.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “That’s how I knew. The sequence was wrong.”

  “The sequence!” I started to laugh.

  He had gone to the door. “And it better not happen again,” he said. “There’s a word for not minding your own business, for invading people’s privacy and sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

  He swung open the door, but he pushed his white face at me. “Treachery, that’s what it is!”

  Treachery? I said, “I’ve heard that one before,” and then, “Yes, that’s it! You’re absolutely right! That’s just what I wanted to hear!”

  But he was out of the door and down the stairs before I could thank him for his appropriate intrusion.

  15

  Treachery

  IN MY VERY ROOM, in those very words, demanding explanations and apologies, but not satisfied with my innocence and using the occasion to be rude and hurtful. People say they want apologies but what they really want is to bite your head off and spit it into your face.

  She burst in late one night, a few days after I had seen Orlando at Harvard. She was out of breath and sort of whimpering at me. My memory was of thumps in the hallway and the door to my room suddenly pushed open and her looking as if she were going to fling herself on me. She said, “You—you—you!” and carried each word a step closer to where I sat with my peepstones and a stack of pictures.

  Her jump into the room, the way she swung herself at me, had lifted her hair and given her dress an updraft of coarse folds and made her coat sleeves look like beating wings. I caught her pouncing as one explosive instant, an action shot framed by the doorjamb. She seemed in that moment of agile fury—her fists near her bright slanted eyes, her knee raised, all this force balanced on one toe—as if she were about to streak forward and stamp on me. It was the picture Frank, in his indignation, had suggested. I had not wanted to remember this episode.

  She had the fearsome nimbleness of the deeply wounded. In my terror I tried to freeze her. I did not see her moving continuously at me, but rather caught her in a series of still leaps, each more exalted than the last, and mounting toward me intimidatingly to howl.

  I said, “Blanche, wait—”

  I felt a seismic thrill, as if a picture I had been taking had swallowed me in its undertow and made me a subject, too.

  “You bitch!” she said.

  Profanity from someone who had never used it before, anger in someone who had always been solemn: it was truly thunder to me. And angry, she looked physically different, all sinews, teeth, and hair, like a person animated by an electric current.

  “Now, now,” I said, wishing to calm her.

  “So help me,” she said, and stepped back, not withdrawing but threatening me the more by giving me a glimpse of the whole voltage of her anger.

  “Not so loud,” I said, as reasonably as I could, and moved past her to shut the door. “Phoebe’s asleep.”

  “I could kill you, Maude Pratt.” She showed me her hands, which she had crooked into a strangler’s claws.

  I said, “Now that wouldn’t do a darn bit of good, would it? Just simmer down and we’ll have a nice long talk and you’ll feel a whole lot better.” I went on in this way, talking gently, plumping a cushion, pulling up an armchair, and easing her into it. Sort of taking the initiative.

  I thought I had succeeded, but when I brushed past her to sit down myself she sucked in her breath and stiffened and said, “How could you?”

  “Not sure I get your drift,” I said.

  “There’s something wrong with you,” she said. “I never would have believed it. I always thought you were so good—a little dull, but good deep down. I was glad when I heard you’d been successful with your photos and making a name for yourself. Now this!”

  “Thanks very much,” I said, “but I don’t have the slightest idea of what’s at the seat of your—”

  “Don’t give me that, Maude Pratt,” she said, repeating my full name again in that ju
dging way, as if to make it sound unpleasant, like that of a prisoner being sentenced. “I’ve heard the stories you’re spreading about me.”

  “Stories?”

  “About me and Sandy.”

  “Oh, that,” I said. “Honestly, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “You admit it! You’re shameless.”

  “I’ve had my reasons,” I said. “It wasn’t supposed to get back to you, obviously. But no harm done. Drink?”

  “How can you be so horrible? What have I ever done to you?”

  “Why, nothing, Blanche. I think the world of you. But I’m afraid I had to make up that cock-and-bull story. It would be better all around if you just forgot it, though if you understood why I did it you’d be glad for me, you really would.”

  “But it’s a lie,” she said. “And it’s filthy. How would you like it if I said that about you and Ollie?”

  I laughed out loud. “Wouldn’t bother me a bit!”

  She sat forward on her chair and began to cry. I felt sorry for her, hunched there with her fingertips on her face and that lonesome shudder in her spine, and her toes together making a pathetic angle of her feet, and dampness on the back of her neck making her short hairs into moist spikes and foretelling a lifetime of this. She had come down with grief like an everlasting cold and was practicing a comfortable posture for her sorrow.

  I touched her. She reacted as if I had left a sting in her. She straightened, smarting, and stopped weeping and said, “You have no business talking about me like that.”

  And I started to wonder if perhaps what I had invented about her was the plain truth and she was taking it badly because of that. Certainly, she and Sandy were capable of those feelings, and I had always suspected that it might be true; but it was my boogie-man, Teets, who had furnished the details. Blanche seemed shocked, as if she’d been found out: I had discovered her secret.

  So I said, “You shouldn’t take it so hard. Lots of brothers and sisters have been passionately in love with each other. It doesn’t happen every day, but then great passion is a rare thing at the best of times. Only a lucky few are chosen—for all I know, you might be one of them.”

  “It’s an insult,” she said.

  This annoyed me. By objecting, she was demeaning my love for Orlando and finding something weird or irregular in it, and in her stubborn way perhaps denying her own love for Sandy.

  “You’re confused,” I said. “There are all kinds of love. Simply because you haven’t felt it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Someday—”

  “You’ve spoiled everything,” she said. “Why are you so cruel?”

  “I haven’t ‘spoiled everything,’ as you say. I told a white lie because it was necessary. Who knows about it? You, me, Orlando—I suppose he told you. He shouldn’t have, but he never could keep his mouth shut.”

  She said, “I’m ruined.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. No one really gives a hoot. You’re the same person you always were. I can’t hurt you, but I do apologize.”

  “Forget it,” she said. “You’ve destroyed me.”

  I thought: Yes, I put it into words and it frightens her to know that she’s been found out. But she’ll recover and she’ll be better off for facing facts. I saw her then, for that little while, as my own sister, waking up to her love, and I felt there must be a whole sorority of us yearning for our brothers, aching for nothing more than that long summer of intimate play, rejoined to our other halves in love—the perfect fit of brother and sister that was celebrated in most families as a kind of passionate chastity.

  She said, “You’ve snatched away my lover.”

  “Sandy will grow up,” I said. “And when he does he’ll love you and you’ll never be alone again.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s Ollie.” And in a small voice that was almost a squeak: “I’ve lost him.”

  This was unexpected. “Ollie?”

  “And it’s all your fault. We were planning to get married when he gets out of law school—”

  “You and Ollie?”

  “—we haven’t talked about anything else all summer, how we’d live in Boston and have children. But you knew, didn’t you? You knew why he didn’t spend this past summer on the Cape—you knew we were in that room in Cambridge. I wanted to tell everyone, but Ollie said, ‘No, if you divulge secrets, people spread them like lies.’ I thought we had kept our secret. I should have known you’d come nosing around with your camera and spoil it all.”

  I said, “I had no idea.”

  And I hadn’t, not the slightest.

  “That’s a lie,” she said. “To separate us you made up that horrible story about Sandy and me. Ollie came straight to me and asked me if it was true. I almost fainted. ‘How could it be?’ I said. But he didn’t believe me. For some reason he wanted to believe your lie. Now he’s gone,” she said, her voice cracking, “and I’ll never have him.”

  I was not surprised that Blanche had loved him: I had never met anyone who was not warmed by the sight of Orlando. But I found it hard to believe that he had loved her. While he was not selfish, he was usually oblivious of the effect he had on others, and so, carefree, he seemed selfabsorbed. That too was part of his beauty, for his humility was attractive—every mood he had enhanced his magic. How easy it was to think someone so happy could love you! Blanche had deceived herself.

  In wishing to convince Orlando of the possibility of us consummating our love I could not have chosen a better ploy. I had, without much thought, cast Blanche and Sandy in my dramatic monologue, and I had accomplished a great deal more than I had attempted. I had rid him of her for good. It was an unexpected picture I’d made, for I had hastened to snap one, but—as with my very best—I had exposed something else and come up with a bloody masterpiece, Blanche’s shadow lurking in something I had thought was all mine.

  Not that I hadn’t thought she’d be exposed, but that expecting one Blanche, and guessing that she mattered, I had come up with quite another Blanche, who mattered infinitely more. My best photographs happened in just that way, but I had created this symmetrical thing without touching a camera. By concentrating my attention on her and being singleminded I had caught the soul of her intention and trapped her flat. I had applied the strict rules of photography once again to my own life and discovered the great accident of form.

  Blanche was still in the chair. Calmer: sobbing relaxed her. Yet I was still apprehensive. I had never believed that the loss of love was so grievous a thing. She looked ill and was doubled up, as if her heart had been torn out. My consolation was that it had been necessary, because if she hadn’t been stopped in her wild presuming she might have made life hell for me and Orlando.

  What was so sad was not that she looked destroyed, but that she had come to within an inch of destruction. The only life in her was the thin warmth of sadness. This in itself was frightening, for the survivor of a tragedy looks twenty times worse in a photograph than the carcass of a casualty. I was thinking that I would rather be dead than blind and crazy and twitching with grief in some stranger’s house.

  As if reading my thoughts, she stood up and tried to pull herself together: stretched, yawned, wrung her hands.

  I said, “Are you sure you won’t have that drink?”

  Her eyes widened. She said, “You haven’t heard the last of this.”

  “It’s late, Blanche. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want to see you tomorrow,” she said. “And if you’re smart you won’t want to see me—ever. I won’t be responsible for what I do to you.”

  “There now,” I said. “You shouldn’t threaten me.”

  In a terrible voice, colder than the one she had used for I could kill you, she said. “I’ll harm you.”

  “I’m going on vacation,” I said, although until I heard myself saying it I had no intention of doing so.

  “It better be a long one.”

  “Florida, actually. To do some pictures. The folks are there.”

/>   “Just keep out of my way, Maude Pratt,” she said. “I’ll never forgive you for this treachery.”

  With that, she went, sideways and silent, for she had left all her whimpers and tears and threats in my room. I looked out the window and saw her crossing the nighttime lawn. It was a picture no camera could take. There was no moon, though there was a bulge in the sky, a great pillow of lunar brightness in the heavy clouds that lit her. Seen from my upper window she appeared to be fleeing for her life, dying and disappearing as she ran, like an inkblot that was once a word. She was silver-black on the silver-black grass and the Sound was striped with wicked white froth. She had the movement of a flightless bird and I knew I was responsible for this grounded owlet careering into the dark.

  I’ll never forgive you is an absolutely meaningless sentence; but her threat was real. People kill for love, perhaps only for love or the loss of it. And I knew better than to press my luck. So far I had cleared my way toward Orlando, and though I was relieved that he had used my story as an occasion to dismiss Blanche—what was it she’d said? For some reason he wanted to believe your lie— I was hurt that he had had an affair with her in the first place.

  I decided to go away for a while, as I had said. Florida was the easiest destination, since Papa and Mama were there, soaking in dejection like runaways. I had an inkling that some great fortune awaited me there, just as I was certain that on my return to the Cape Orlando would be here with his arms folded and his hair blazing like a coronet and saying, “I’ve been looking all over for you!”

  And yet, already, I had begun to know regret. So much had happened to me, but I had so few pictures of it. I stood on a crack that divided my life from my work, perceptible only to me. Beyond the crack everything was lighted wonderfully, behind it was the shadow in which I lived, for which I had no photograph or permanent record. I could chuck my camera away and march forward and melt into art; or I could step back from the thin line that would become an unbridgeable canyon, to give my eyes a chance, in shadow, to gladden with light. I stepped back and loaded my camera.