by Paul Theroux
“Which one is that?”
“‘The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen.’”
He looked at bit blank, as if he’d forgotten the story, then put on a remembering squint and said, “Oh, yes.”
“One of my favorites,” I said. We left the Ritz and crossed Piccadilly in the dusty mellow light that hung like lace curtains in the evening sky. Greene towered over me and I had that secure sense of protection that short people feel in the presence of much taller ones. He held my arm and steered me gallantly to Swallow Street. I knew the story well. The couple dining at Bentley’s are discussing their plans: their marriage, her book. She’s a bright young thing and believes her publisher’s flattery—believes that she has remarkable powers of observation. Her fiance is hopelessly in love with her, but after the meal, when he comments on the eight Japanese that have just left the restaurant, she says, “What Japanese?” and claims he doesn’t love her.
I heard the waitresses muttering “Mister Greene” as we were shown to our table. Greene said, “I know what I’m having.” He passed me the menu.
He began talking about trips he intended to take: Portugal, Hungary, Panama; and I wondered whether he had people joshing him and trying to persuade him to stay home. Did he have to listen to the sort of guff I had to endure? I guessed he did, even if he didn’t have a Frank. I had the feeling of being with a kindred spirit, a fellow sufferer, who was completely alone, who had only his work and who, after seventy years, woke up each morning to start afresh, regarding everything he had done as more or less a failure, an inaccurate rendering of his vision, a betrayal. But I also saw how different we were: he was in his work—I wasn’t in mine. And perhaps he was thinking, “This boring little old lady only believes in right and wrong—I believe in good and evil.” We were of different countries, and so our ages could never be the same. In the two hours that had passed since I had first seen Orlando in him, Greene had become more and more himself, more the complicated stranger in the fourth dimension that confounds the photograph.
“London’s not what it was,” he was saying. “Just around the corner one used to see tarts walking up an down. It was better then—they were all over Bayswater.”
“I did some of them.”
“So did I,” said Greene, and passed his hand across his face as if stopping a blush. “When I was at university I used to go down to Soho, have a meal in a nice little French restaurant, a half-bottle of wine, then get myself a tart. That was very pleasant.”
I didn’t feel I could add anything to this.
He said, “Soho’s all porno shops now. It’s not erotic art. I find it brutal—there’s no tenderness in it.”
“It’s garbage,” I said. “But there’s an argument in its favor.”
“What’s that?”
“It works,” I said.
“I wouldn’t know,” said Greene. “I haven’t seen any pornography since they legalized it.”
I laughed: it was so like him. And I was annoyed that I couldn’t catch that contradiction on his face. He was surprising, funny, alert, alive, a real comedian, wise and droll. Knowing that I was going to meet him for a portrait I had been faced with the dilemma that plagued me every time I set out to do someone. Against my will, I created a picture in my head beforehand and tried to imagine the shot I wanted. I had seen Greene in a bar, seedier than the one in the Ritz, a slightly angled shot with only his face in focus, and the rest—his long body, his reflective posture—dim and slightly blurred: the novelist more real than his surroundings, special and yet part of that world.
Then I saw him in the flesh, his sad heavy face, his severe mouth, his blind man’s eyes, and I thought: No, a close-up with a hand on his chin—he had a watchmaker’s fine hands. But his laugh changed my mind, and it struck me that it was impossible. I couldn’t do him. Any portrait would freeze him, fix him, give him an eternal image, like Che looking skyward or that tubby talk-show bore everyone forgives because he was once Truman Capote, brooding under a shock of scraped-down hair.
Once, I might have taken my picture and gone, and in the printing seen his whole history in his face, past and future. Tonight, I knew despair. Photography wasn’t an art, it was a craft, like making baskets. Error, the essential wrinkle in the fiber of art, was inexcusable in a craft. I had seen too much in Greene for me to be satisfied with a picture.
I said, “I think I ought to tell you that this is my last picture. I’m going to wind it up. Call it a day.”
“Whatever for?”
“I’m too old to travel, for one thing.”
“Which Frenchman said, ‘Travel is the saddest of the pleasures’?”
“It gave me eyes.”
“I understand that well enough,” said Greene. “Not long ago I saw an item in a newspaper about Kim Philby.”
“Always wanted to do him,” I said.
“I worked for him during the war in British Intelligence. Anyway, in this item Kim said what he wanted to do more than anything else was split a bottle of wine with Graham Greene and talk over old times. I fired off a cable saying that I would meet him anywhere he named if he supplied the wine. I felt like traveling—it’s as you say, an awakening. Kim cabled back, very nicely, he was busy. Some other time. I was sorry. I was quite looking forward to the trip.”
“As soon as I leave home my eyes start working. I can see! It’s like music—I don’t really listen to it, but I can think straight while it’s playing. It starts things going in my head.”
Greene was listening carefully, with his fingers poised like a pianist’s on the edge of the table.
“But there’s something else,” I said. “They’re thinking of getting up a retrospective—fifty years’ accumulation of pictures! I have a fella digging them out. It was his idea. I don’t dare look at them—I know what they’ll add up to.”
“Oh?” he said, and started to smile, as if he knew what I was going to say next.
“Nothing,” I said in a whisper, “nothing. They’re failures, every last one of them.”
“The long defeat of doing nothing well,” he said, and sounded as if he was quoting. But he was still smiling. “Does that surprise you?”
“Goddamit, yes!” I said. “I don’t want to be famous for something I’ve failed at.”
“It’s all failure,” he said, speaking a bit too easily for my liking, as if he’d said it before and was getting so bored with it he suspected it of being untrue. Perhaps he saw my scepticism. He added, “Why else would you have started again so many times?”
I said I saw his point, but that I expected more than that from all those years of work. It was a bit late in the day to talk so easily about failure, I said, and it was obnoxious to me to realize that while I thought I had been truthful I had only been deceiving myself. I said I felt like an old fool and the worst of it was that no one else knew, and that was a sadness.
While I had been talking the food arrived. Novelists, I knew, ate what they wrote about; Greene had lemon sole and a cold bottle of Muscadet. Before he started he leaned over and took my hand gently in his. He had long fragile hands, like beautiful gloves, and a pale green ring. He held on and said, “May I ask why you’re taking my picture?”
“I wanted to, and you agreed,” I said nervously. “It will complete the exhibition.”
“What makes you think that?”
I wanted to say a hundred things. Because we’re both as old as the hills. Because you’ve lived a charmed life, as I have. Because no one wanted me to come to London. Because you’ve known what it is to be rich, famous, and misunderstood. Because anyone but me would violate you. Because you’re alone, blind, betrayed, vain. Because you’re happy. Because we’re equals. Because you look like my poor dead brother.
“Because,” I said—because people will see my face on yours— “it’s the next best thing to taking my own picture.”
I was grateful to him for not laughing at this. He said, “I’m afraid you’re wrong. Deceived again, Miss Pratt. You
’re an original.”
I said that was all very well but that I still couldn’t do a self-portrait.
“Of course you can—you have,” he said. “Your self-portrait will be this retrospective, not one picture, but thousands, all those photographs.”
“That’s what they say. I know all old people are Monday morning quarterbacks, but I also know the life I’ve had, and it ain’t them pictures.”
“No?”
“No, sir. It’s all the pictures I never took. It’s the circumstances.”
He put his fingertips together thoughtfully, like a man preparing to pray.
“When I did Cocteau, know what he said to me? He said, ‘Ja swee san doot le poet le plew incanoe et le plew celebra.’ And I know goddamned well what he meant, pardon my French.” I took a few mouthfuls of fish. “When I take your picture, I’m sorry, but it’s not going to be you. All I can shoot is your face. If I took my own picture that’s all mine would be, an old lady, looking for a house to haunt.”
“With a camera,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“I said, if you did your self-portrait with a camera.”
“What else would I use—a monkey wrench?”
“You could do a book,” he said, and dipped his prayerful hands at me as if pronouncing a blessing.
I said, “What do I know about that?”
“The less you know, the better,” he said. “You have forgotten memories. What you forget becomes the compost of the imagination.”
“My mulch-pile of memories.”
He smiled.
“Renounce photography, the gentleman says.”
“Exactly.” He said it with perfect priestlike certainty.
He made it seem so simple. It was as if he had led me through a cluttered palace of regrets, from room to shadowy room, climbing stairs and kicking carpets, and when we reached the end of the darkened corridor I’d feared most he’d thrown open a door I hadn’t seen and shown me air and light and empty space: hope.
“All you have to do,” he said, and now he turned, “is open your eyes.”
He was staring in the direction of the door.
I saw eight Japanese gentlemen gliding noiselessly in. They wore dark suits, they were small and had that deft, precisely tuned, transistorized movement. They took their places around the large table in the center of the room and sat down.
Greene said, “There’s my Japanese!”
“I see them! I see them!” I said. They were angels embodying the urgent proof that I write and remember. They were Greene’s own magic trick, eight creaseless Japanese conjured from thin air and seated muttering their gum-chewing language. So the evening had gone from salutation to reminiscence, subtle, solemn, funny, coincidental, and here it paused at valediction, to show my Speed Graphic as more futile than an eyeball, a box of peepstones that could only falsify this two hours. Any picture I took of Greene would be flat as a pancake. I knew that now; but I could begin again.
Greene was reddening and laughing that rich laugh, as if he was amazed by his own success, by how perfectly his trick had worked.
I said, “No one will believe this.”
And, by a professional reflex, saw my angle: Greene in Bentley’s; his other half on the wall mirror; the sacrificial fish staring up at him; the half-drunk bottle of wine; Greene’s face animated by laughter, all his features working at once, creating light; and in the background, just visible, his triumph, the circle of Japanese, their, tiny heads and neatly plastered hair. The perfect photograph pausing in a gong of light, the artist at the foreground of his own creation: Greene by Pratt.
There were tears in my eyes as I found the right f-stop and raised my Speed Graphic. I was humbled, just another crafty witness giving permanence to her piece of luck.
Greene reached over—he had very long arms—and touched the instrument. It went cold in my hands. I lowered it.
“No,” he said. “Don’t spoil it.”
“Please.”
He said, “Let this be your first memory.”
“I want to do you,” I said. There were tears rolling down my cheeks, but I didn’t care.
“Don’t you see? You’ve already done me.”
I still held the camera in my hand. I had looped the strap over my neck. I weighed the camera, wondering what to do with it. I could barely get my breath.
“Do put it away,” said Greene.
I let it drop. It jerked my head forward. I said, “I want to tell you about my brother.”
“Later,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
In the Ritz lobby he kissed me good night. I went upstairs, and as soon as I opened the door the floor gave way under me, the ceiling caved in, and I was rolling over and over, down a long bumpy slope, dragging my heart behind me. Still tumbling I yanked the phone down by its cord and gasped into it.
Days later, a British doctor said to me, “You’re a jolly lucky girl,” but what I clung to was what Greene had said in the restaurant: Let this be your first memory.
6
My Last Picture
SADNESS is ramshackle, but mourning is formal, such a buttoned-up ritual of shuffling and whispers that I wished on arrival that I hadn’t cabled Frank about my spot of bother at the Ritz. Wheeled from the little plane across the Hyannis runway and looking towards the terminal with its silly WELCOME sign, I saw ten of the gloomiest creatures I had ever laid eyes on. I felt like a latecomer to my own funeral, and it struck me that at my advanced age every acquaintance is a prospective mourner. They’re sticking around to bury you. That’s their secret; but you’re not supposed to know.
The irritating aspect of a mourner is the look of satisfaction. He is not ghoulish enough to be glad, just bursting with relief—that weird self-congratulation over being spared. They had warned me that I might snuff it, but a warning is the cheapest form of abuse: it was still ringing in my ears. And their expressions proved it. I told you so is one of the most gleeful expressions in the language, and yet no one actually says it in so many words. It is a cautioning wobble of the head, a suppressed smirk, the fish-1 ips of reproof and a hectoring silence.
Well, I wasn’t dead, which was even better from their point of view, because the story was that I had had a massive heart seizure (and I could hear them saying, “—all those waffles”). This was a lesson to me; I’d listen to them from now on; I wouldn’t be so fractious. But the advantage was mine. I didn’t like being treated like a stiff; however, since everyone knew that I’d croaked in London there was nothing they could decently refuse me.
“Here I am,” I said. “The Dong with the Luminous Nose.”
Frank gave me a kiss and introduced me to the other mourners—neighbors, well-wishers, shutterbugs, characters I scarcely knew. They were all trying to buck me up and at the same time were touching me and peering into my face as if attempting to discover whether I had learned my lesson. In my anger I mentally named them: Grippo, Saliva, Shuffles, the Beeny sisters, Bushrag, Cootie, Prickett, and Munt; and Frank, who had been Thunderbum to me ever since his farty farewell. Naming them was like portraiture and made me feel better.
I said, “I feel like a pizza.”
Prickett grunted, but Frank said, “She’s the boss” and helped me out of the wheelchair the airline had provided.
“Look,” said Shuffles, “a Garry Winogrand.” He pointed to the pathetic wheelchair stenciled New England Airways.
At the Leaning Tower of Pizza I drew out the envelope I had carried from London and put it on my lap.
“What’s that, sugar?” asked the hairy one I thought of as Bushrag. He was wearing army gear—flak jacket, khaki shirt, combat boots, everything but the medals. Dressed as a soldier in the insincere fashion this racket considered stylish. He wouldn’t have been able to fight his way out of a pay toilet.
But he had risked fragging me with the question the rest of them had wanted to ask. I pretended I didn’t understand. I sipped my Shasta.
“That,” he said, jabbing
with his finger, “down there.”
“Don’t point that thing at me. There’s a nail on the end of it.”
Cootie snorted, and Grippo—who had nearly broken my hand to show me how glad he was to meet me (quite a problem there: I’ve never trusted hand-squashers)—Grippo said, “In the folder.”
“What folder?”
“Looks like a picture, Miss Pratt,” said Munt. Another untrustworthy one. It was his dark basted-looking skin: the vanity of the sunbather. I could almost hear him saying, I think I’ll go work on my tan.
“Sure does.” This from Saliva, smacking his lips.
I picked up the envelope. “This? You wouldn’t be interested in this.”
Bushrag said, “Yeah, but what is it?”
“Souvenir from London,” I said. “Just a picture.”
“I’d be very interested,” said Frank, putting on his studious Thunderbum expression.
“Came out with fur on it,” I said.
Bushrag nodded. “Flaky. Sometimes they’re the best kind.”
“It wasn’t deliberate,” I said.
“What’s the difference?”
“Pretty big,” I said. “I’ve never held with your blurry photographers. Some characters have lenses that cost three grand, maybe more. They shoot their cuffs, then exhibit them and call them—what?—mood pieces, fragments, dream-sequence, textures, or some nonsense like that. They don’t know what they’re doing. That’s fatal—they’re fogbound Guggenheim art.”
“Maude’s right,” said Frank, and in a matter of seconds they were all agreeing with him, fueling my argument so strenuously I couldn’t get a word in. They were making off-the-wall generalizations and overstating everything I had said. Running dogs, wagging their tails at me. It is the worst danger of fame: everyone agrees with you, even when you’re wrong. But maybe, I thought, they were doing it because I had come unstuck in London, and that made me feel like a bigger dope.
“You can spot the phonies,” I managed to put in. “Untitled—that’s a cry for help. All my pictures have titles.”