by Paul Theroux
I said, “I would very much like to take your picture, but I can’t. It’s just a cheap folding camera and there’s not enough light in this room, as I’m sure you appreciate.”
“Lights!” he cried in that odd accent. “That’s it! You need the sun blazing. You can’t take pictures in the dark.” He leaned over to me. “I can see in the dark—it’s all darkness where I come from. I hate the dark, I’ve had the dark—I crawled out of it and I’ll never go back. The things I’ve seen would scare the likes of you.”
“It’s the film,” I said, and thought: What is this embarrassing man yapping about?
“We’ll find the sun,” he said. “Come with me.” He turned his back on the plump woman who—almost certainly his wife—had started to rise and restrain him. “This is America,” he said. “There’s a sun here for everyone.”
He stood up. He was one of those short people who don’t gain any height by standing up. On his feet, he looked even smaller and frailer than before.
“Where?” I said.
He said darkly, his beard jerking—and I thought: Oh, come off it!—“Where the sun lives.”
“Try the yard,” said Mr. Seltzer, who had been listening.
“The garden,” said the man, touching me nervously on my knee. “Get your camera, lass.”
The woman looked worried, angry, mystified, impatient; and her seated quaking body made her seem helpless, too. Like his mother, I thought, hopeless and envying, as if she wanted to knock him down just so that she could pick him up and dust him off in her arms.
“Get your camera, Maude,” said Mr. Seltzer in a resigned way, gently trying to get me to cooperate.
“Come into the garden, Maude,” said the man. “For the black bat, night, has flown.”
I got my camera from the hall table and loaded it and thought: If that’s Lord Tennyson I’m going to get my picture in the papers. I hurried into the garden and again saw how small he was and thin, with a terrible cough, like a man who should be in bed. Dark hair, dark eyes, and a pinched face and a beard that wasn’t growing right. I was afraid of him. He reminded me not of Orlando but of my desire, as if it had jumped out of my guts and become that mangy sniffing man. To disguise my fear I showed him the camera and popped it open. It had a lid you opened that made a little shelf for the stiff bellows.
“Queer,” he said, putting his nose near it.
“It won’t hurt a bit,” I said.
He didn’t laugh. He glared at me and then looked at the garden, which was one of those narrow New York gardens surrounded by a high brick wall, with a heavy fig tree and ivy and ferns; like an aquarium without the water, so green, so full, sort of rotting and growing at the same time. The pale late-summer light hovered softly among the thick leaves and the pollen spilling from the hollyhocks and made it seem as if the marble statue of the naked woman was white flesh.
“Stand over there, please,” I said.
“No.”
“The light’s better there.”
“But you’re here,” he said, and his voice was small and vibrant in all those ferns.
“Excuse me, but I thought you wanted me to take your picture.”
Suddenly he said in the same cross voice he had used up stairs, “Have you ever felt it?”
Felt what? I thought. I said, “I don’t rightly know.”
“You’ve never felt it.” He sounded disgusted.
“Not necessarily. Maybe I have and maybe I haven’t,” I said, trying to be businesslike. “Now if you just get into position I’ll snap your picture.”
“You haven’t,” he said, “or else you’d know. You’d remember—the blood remembers. What do you call these flowers?”
“Hollyhocks,” I said.
“We call them hollyhocks, too,” he said, making his voice mysterious.
I said, “Everyone calls them hollyhocks.”
“They’re open—look how they’re parted and dripping with pollen. They want the bees to enter and suck that gold on their hair. They think they’re innocent, but they’re begging to be entered, and gleaming. Did you ever see anything so shameless? They wink and twitch—they’re sex-mad!”
He had made them seem revolting with his nasty descrip tion, and still he leered at them. There were bubbles of scum in the corners of his mouth.
I said, “I don’t know who you are, but I’m sorry, I don’t think they look that way at all.”
“That cat is watching us,” he said.
I said, “That cat is not seeing anything.”
“You’ve got brass,” he said. “You’re a photographer, aren’t you? You want my soul, but you won’t get it. It’s too dark—it won’t show up!”
He took a step toward me. I hated his face.
“I know what you want,” he said. He had halitosis, the vapor from his decaying lungs.
“I want to take your picture.”
“No,” he said, and he was beside me, not holding me, but pressing against me. It was a kind of canine hostility, like a slobbering mutt with its wet dognose smeared against my skirt. I knew he didn’t like me, I could feel it like dampness. I sensed his fear—woman-hating cowardice: he was trying to make me afraid. And there was something else about him, an ugliness that might have been his shriveled size or his stinking cough on which I smelled his lungs.
“Cut it out,” I said.
“You and your bloody picture-machine,” he said. “What do you see? Go ahead—look!—you won’t see anything, lass. You’re as blind as your camera.”
I said, “This camera sees a lot. It’ll make those hollyhocks a damn sight prettier than you did. It will do you just as you are, and you might be surprised by what you see in your own face, mister.”
He made a grab for me.
I said, “If you won’t leave me alone I’ll call Mister Seltzer and he’ll come down here and fix your wagon.”
“Seltzer’s a bloody coward—they’re all cowards and prostitutes. I don’t belong here.”
“Then why don’t you just go away?”
He said grimly, “Because I want to teach you what a man is.”
I thought: Orlando!
“And what loins are,” he said.
A meaningless piece of meat shaped like a cave man’s club was all I could think of, but before I could do anything he said, “Those are my loins,” and bumped me, “and that’s my willy,” and bumped me again. “Do you feel it now?”
Willy: word was bewitching and I almost laughed out loud. But I cannot describe the effect this had on me. I was clasped in the jaws of his skinny thighs and it was like the bite of some poisonous reptile. He was touching me, making my hands sweat on my camera—trying to violate me. Strangest of all, I had never felt so pure, and this feeling of deflecting his assault with my innocence kept strengthening me.
I thought: This is what happens when you leave home. I sensed a new refinement in my passion for Orlando, a purer urge that I could bring back to him. I understood again why he had suggested I visit New York. He wanted me to know how much he mattered.
Bump, bump. Dusty sparrows chirped on his garden wall but the sun still lit the man’s coarse hair. He went a little distance and started to laugh—a cruel laugh with no pleasure in it, just an angry little bark from his dreadful lungs. His laughter choked him and he coughed—terribly, bending over and shaking, as if he were going to spit out his heart and die.
He seemed ashamed: he had betrayed his weakness to me. He walked into the tent of sunlight and turned away from me. He tried to wipe his mouth with a hanky that was stiff and wrinkled from use, but he kept on coughing, like a cat puking and retreating.
I went behind him and snapped a picture of the back of his head: a narrow hive of selfish lies.
That night I took the Long Island boat back to the Cape and Orlando, to the only person who would ever matter to me. And it seemed as if it would always be this way, everything I felt or did circumscribed by him; I could endure any assault, because I was bracketed by his love.
Fr
ank still held the picture.
I said, “D. H. Lawrence.”
He scribbled a number on it with a squeaky felt-tip pen, then he said, “The writer?”
“The sap.”
“Maude,” he said, cautioning me, as if I’d blasphemed. “Phooey,” I said. “He was a peckerhead.”
Frank looked at the picture again and tilted it. He said, “It could be anyone from that angle.”
“No,” I said, “even from the back it could only be him.” And it was true. That year, I was to take many more people from the back, and the name was always obvious from what you could see between the ears. The brain-case and its bumps and beneath it that expressively eroded gully I believed to be the most telling part of the anatomy, the hardest to fake. If I didn’t see what I wanted on a person’s face I said quickly, “Turn around!” and got him retreating.
“Amazing,” said Frank, and I could see he was impressed. He treated the photo with a new reverence.
Long after that day in New York I tried to read Lawrence. I found him dull, repetitive, laboriously vile and evasive. And, as with most fiction I attempted to read, I gave up after a few pages, wondering at its importance, because it was so much less interesting than my life. I suspected that my work was touched with that same failure, for I knew I was nowhere in it.
Frank said, “How about a bite of lunch?”
10
Wellfleet Swells
YES, enough—away—forget the picture palace. The sight of Lawrence’s tiny head had shaken a mouse out of my mind. But Frank’s mention of lunch uncoiled a thrill in me that took ten spins, then jammed and made me want to jump. I got an urge—the push of the picture, the pull of the sun—to drop everything and get moving out of memory’s undertow. Besides, I heard the noon siren begin to scream at the Bass River Firehouse, cutting the day in half, and that was always a shrill provocation to feed my face.
I said, “Let’s go to Provincetown.”
“Fine by me,” said Frank.
And we were on the road, breezing along the Mid-Cape Highway. I gave Frank a friendly slap on the thigh and he caught my mood and gave me a chattering laugh.
“Funny,” I said, poking my toe on the gas, “I only like Creedence Clearwater Revival when I’m doing seventy.”
The radio was going boopy-boop, making the dashboard rattle, and I rolled down the window so I could mingle the music with the tires sucking at the road and the whup of passing trailer trucks. Blue skies, sakes alive! I sat back and basked in America’s most underrated pleasure, the big car on a straight road with the radio on and the sun beating in and out of the trees, gold pulses between the boughs, all the light and speed more calming than a square meal, and a kind of glory-bounce of joy in it, too.
I liked the sky’s bottom edge flat and far on the fast-lane ahead, and just stamping the throttle into low and letting it whine for half a minute made the car seat vibrate with a massaging drone and drained my ears of worry. Delicious: and I was thinking, America even at its most grotesque is more fun than anywhere else on earth, so who wouldn’t feel like a sinner and make guilt a duty to pay for that rumble of pleasure? Up the pike for twenty miles I was humming and working the power steering like the dune-buggy freaks on Sandy Neck, with my hands crooked over the top of the wheel and turning it with my wrists, having a field day changing lanes and roaring past a pausing oldster at the Harwich exit.
What is the past then, when you are cruising at seventy in a new Chevy? It is distant and simple and so small it barely belongs to you. One year is so much like another; one season is ten minutes on a bike, the next is a single swing of a sailboat’s boom, another a meal or a face. Try hard at that speed and all you hear is the sound of the Cape in summer, which is a screen door straining its spring and slapping shut with a clatter of sticks and wires; the skirl of gulls, bare knees in wet sand and Miss Dromgoole saying, “More jam?” When I was ten I had fried clams, and that memory of the Seltzers is just a chilly twilight and a quick muscle of fear in my leg. Fragments and double exposure, and not one clear picture but an endless roll of blurs: two seconds of this year, a minute of that one in a train, youth in small pieces, childhood dust. Perhaps there was nothing else?
No. Because past Orleans the highway gave out and my memory became mobbed and I was returned. We weren’t flying anymore and the car slowing on Route 6 caused a stir in my mind. I thought: How impossible it is to be near home and do anything and not repeat a motion of the past. We were approaching Wellfleet, but I might as well have been back at my house on Grand Island and approaching a patch of familiar wallpaper at the turning in the staircase and pausing and going under. And just as a chance word in the parlor I grew up in never fail ad to rouse a ghostly echo, the unerasable wrinkle on the wall, touched with the eye, toppled me headlong into my retrospective. On that wall, in that room, a whiff of winter and how that mirror sees outside to a whiteness in the windmill—this is where memory lies.
There was a yellow blinker. I braked and the planet began to stall and cloud up. Then there was that unmistakable sign that the road had narrowed for delays ahead. The going would be heavy—there was the proof, a wooden-roofed shed with its front flap wide open and its counter stacked with tomatoes and spindles of corn. The roadside stand, snarling traffic, and on a grassy bank, WELCOME TO WELLFLEET, PENALTY FOR STEALING HOLLY $500 OR SIX MONTHS.
“Wellfleet,” said Frank with satisfaction. “Maybe we’ll see some clamdiggers.”
I wanted to punch him in the mouth. This was supposed to be my afternoon off. He snatched at the dashboard as I kicked at the brake again.
It was a Friday, years after the Lawrence episode. But the date wasn’t important: it was the sequence that mattered.
We hadn’t gone to the school in Switzerland, and it wasn’t me, it was Phoebe who had first refused, then taken sick. She sat down pale and wouldn’t budge. Miss Dromgoole was kept on, and I was glad it had all happened that way, because I had never wanted to leave Orlando. “Maude can’t go alone,” Papa said, and that was that. He said to Phoebe, “But if you’re too sick for Switzerland you’re too sick for Florida,” and they went to stay with a rich crazy man—his friend Carney—who played at being Lorenzo the Magnificent in a fake palace near Verona, on Florida’s Gulf coast. They left Phoebe and me at home with Miss Dromgoole and Frenise, the pair of them fighting most of the time about what we should eat: “greens,” said Frenise, “stodge,” said Miss Dromgoole. “People in China would be glad to have that,” said Miss Dromgoole, using the hunger of these poor people to get us to eat. It was illogical and cruel: she was in fact threatening us with starvation.
Then Orlando—who was certainly at Harvard, because he had his driver’s license—Orlando showed up one Friday afternoon like an angel and said he was taking us to a party. He was red and out of breath and stamping from the cold and looked snorting and healthy in his fur coat.
“The roads are bad,” said Miss Dromgoole.
Orlando took no notice of her. When she repeated it he simply smiled and sort of leaned toward her like a bright light until she left the room. The next thing we knew she was shouting at Frenise, who was muttering “basset” and “bidge.”
Phoebe started to cry. She said, “I wish Papa was here.”
Her tears gave her color and made her look like a saintly doll with a pure face and a crumpled dress. Orlando put his arm around her and hugged her and I felt like weeping, too.
“Look,” I said. “It’s snowing again.”
It seldom snowed hard on the Cape—a few inches, no more, was all we got. But that day it made pillows on the lawn and was piled against the house, and though I had not gone out I had spent the day photographing icicles at the window. From my room the great stiff scooped-out drifts at the windmill were like the chalky curves of sea-worn clamshells. There were dragons of ice on the drain pipes and glassy gargoyles bunched at the gutters, and white sugarloaf mounds over the flowerbeds. The property was subdued and rephrased by the snowstorm, an
d none of my pictures came out, which was why I remembered it so clearly. I took them from inside the house; I hated the cold—it stung my toes and froze my eyes.
Orlando said, “It’s beautiful out.” Now it was darkening and the flakes were shifting slowly past the parlor window, made gold by our lights and swaying like feathers as they fell.
“Where’s the party?” asked Phoebe.
“Wellfleet,” he said. “At the Overalls.”
We had always known the Overalls. Like us, they were year-round residents of the Cape, and had a house on Chip-man’s Cove. My parents went to the uproar in Boston with Mr. and Mrs., and we played with the two children. I think they looked down on us a little because they swam in the cold water of the Bay and we had the warm water of the Sound; the implication was that they were hardy and we were effeminate and sissified, Standish Overall was about Orlando’s age, and Blanche was somewhere between Phoebe and me. Papa didn’t think much of Standish, and in fact said, “He looks like a girler,” which in Papa’s eyes was the worst thing you could be (“I hear this Frank Sinatra’s a fearful girler,” he said some years later. “How I wish that man would leave the building!”). Standish, who positively honked with confidence, was good at everything, had an athlete’s bounce and like other wealthy boys I knew had begun to go bald at twenty. Blanche was a vain prissy thing who behaved like his wife and who had occasional fits of aggression, like a person who knows deep down her feet stink.
Orlando said that Mr. and Mrs. Overall were away for the weekend and that Standish—or Sandy, as he was known—had got his hands on some bootleg liquor and was giving a party.
“I can wear my new dress,” said Phoebe.
“Miss Dromgoole’s not going to like this,” I said.
“I’ll take care of the Ghoul,” said Orlando.
“What’ll you say?”
“That I can’t go to a party without my sweethearts.”
Phoebe smiled, but I knew what he meant.
The Ghoul raged, but off we went in the winter dark, the three of us in Orlando’s car, the snow curling wildly in front of the headlights. And though we weren’t that young anymore, I felt we were all about ten years old, because no matter what age you are, if you are related like that you feel truant and reckless if you’re all sitting in the front seat of a car in a blinding snowstorm. Brothers and sisters never outgrow their past if it’s been happy. Orlando told us about his English poetry course and how he liked Harvard, and then we sang “Clementine” and “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain.”