by Paul Theroux
“Delete the fishnets.”
He had it all worked out: gulls, timber walls, driftwood, lengths of kelp draped like bunting, and my pictures; a reconstruction. It seemed to me an utterly silly idea.
I said, “I hate to say this, Frank. It wasn’t like that at all.”
“But I’ve found all the pictures! They were in the windmill all this time—you didn’t even bother to look.”
“They’re only half the truth,” I said. I refrained from going further and telling him that the least important event that year was my show.
“No, let me handle it.” He wouldn’t be interrupted—wouldn’t pause long enough to find out that there might be more. For him, my pictures were my past. “Your first real show—all those great pictures re-hung. Why can’t you see it?”
“I saw it. It didn’t matter much then. It doesn’t matter at all now.”
“It does.”
“It jolly well doesn’t.”
He said, “You refuse to see the integrity of your early work.”
Normally he rubbed his eye with a nervous shameful bunch of fingers when he was telling a lie, like a child hoping he’s not going to be caught. I stared at him. He was motionless; he meant what he said.
I tapped a cigarette and lit up, puffing it reflectively to demonstrate that I was taking his suggestion seriously and to keep me from laughing in his face.
“It’s all here,” he said, breathing hard. He dealt the photographs importantly onto the table and paced the floor. I had never seen him so excited. His Adam’s apple was plunging with certitude. “Look at these people!”
I obliged him and looked.
“You can see a terrific artistic ego in that one—typical overdressed Twenties writer,” he said, pointing to one of a flounder fisherman who had insisted on wearing his Sunday best. “And this derelict,” he went on, drumming his fingers on a morning-after shot of Eugene O’Neill, “you’ve captured all his hopelessness—the guy’s a mess, he’s dead, skid-row by the sea.”
I didn’t correct him. He believed; perhaps I should have been grateful for that, but he was believing for the wrong reasons. To me the pictures were obvious, and some were grotesque (how could I have had the nerve to do Eel in a Toilet?). And the surprises: I had forgotten that boogie-man on the beach, walking away from the camera, his high buttocks and bowed head and the tide wrack of straw and broken boards: all the grays; Orlando and Phoebe solarized in a sailboat, conferring silhouettes; a Cummings I thought I had jettisoned, grinning with heavy sea-slug lips—what a happy man!
Some needed cropping or touching up, I was reminded of my boast. I used to think: No one will make me change a thing; every detail is mine. “Airbrush flies, remove genitals,” someone at the National Geographic had scribbled in green ink on my Caged Baboon— I had told the editor to take a flying leap. Now the imperfections, the surprises, the successes and embarrassments seemed of no importance whatever.
Still Frank raved. “You were roughing it out, setting yourself on course, looking ahead to refining the shots.”
It is hard to know where true praise ends and the critical leg-pull begins. I felt we were pretty close to the seam. But Frank yammered on without hesitating.
“It’s about people—they’re all foreground. That’s what really knocks me over.”
“I was never big on landscapes.”
“And there’s this insistence that’s never actually stated, on the outdoors. You’ve exteriorized your—”
“Frank, this was well before the flash cube.”
“—nature at the edges, the suggestion of surf here, the broken sapling as a frame for that, um, colored guy’s despair.
Despair? It was Pigga, who ran a numbers game, doing a soft-shoe on a curb near Prospect Park after a rainstorm. The important feature of it was that he was wet—or rather that his skin was wet but that he was bone-dry. I had been fascinated by how water affected black skin. It wasn’t absorbed; it stood in droplets on the oily surface, defying the porousness like a coating of pearls. Pigga’s skin was jeweled with rainwater and his hair was full of whole pearls, too.
Frank had taken Prospect Park for a precinct of Provincetown. He said, “You can put the town together from all the backdrops. The lighthouse, the main street, those cars and dunes. You haven’t missed anything. It’s a whole world—an age! Here, this is one of the best things you’ve ever done.”
I might have known he’d pick a fraud: Slaughter, the blind piano tuner, struggling to find a chord; his fingers spread, his bulging eyes marbled with glaucoma.
Frank was silent for a moment. Then he said, “But the thing is, they’re all so sad, even the ones in fancy clothes—they look like they’re pretending to be happy, putting on faces. Nobody’s doing anything.” He chewed, pursed his lips, and farted. “A kind of deep-structure of rhetorical inaction.”
It was how I had felt, kind of blue. I was so young. I knew nothing of passion or deceit. I was simple, blundering, impatient. Perhaps Frank saw this strange girl’s reflection in the pictures and could not convey it in his jargon. But he didn’t know what I knew, how—far from mirroring my emotions in my pictures—I had always chosen op posites: the old when I was young, the blind when I’d valued my eyes, the black and the bizarre when I’d felt white and ordinary, and in my severest depressions the very glad. It was only confidence and a feeling of well-being that enabled me to do down-and-outs, and my comic shots were done in a mood of near-hysteria.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, trying to surrender. I was touched by his piety: his version of me sounded true. He had faith in my pictures—he was wrong, but his faith would save him. I only hoped I had not misled him. Yet his belief in what I had abandoned called me back. The hesitation I felt was that of the woman who drives her lover away and sees him by chance years later with a new woman and endures the slow panic of regret. What if Frank was right? I had known before that I’d only half understood my best pictures and was humbled when, by degrees, their truth was revealed; and that other fear—how, knowing so little (no one has more immediate ignorance than the picture-taker), I might never be able to repeat my luck.
I had sworn after meeting Greene that I would never take another picture, but here was Frank saying without a stammer, “A kind of deep-structure of rhetorical inaction” and using words like integrity to discuss Pigga. He insisted I had captured an age in a manner I was well aware I had renounced.
Frank, full of his discovery, somehow loomed like the scholar-flunky he was, thinking he was making himself small and useful. He said, “You’ve concretized not only your own vision, but also the elusiveness of the subjects. It’s a triumph over technique. You built the kind of relationship between artist and subject that one only sees in the greatest pictures. Your Camerons, your Bournes.”
Eyewash, I thought; and if he mentions Arbus I’ll kick him in the teeth. But I lit another cigarette to show I was listening.
“Just this picture alone”—he was holding one of Orlando and Phoebe, picnicking with their backs to me—“is enough. It says everything. That sky, those lonely figures, the sea—that’s the human condition.”
Typical browser’s praise, the skinflint critic mooching among the masterpieces: Ah, what have we got here? Nothing less than the human condition! Very nice, he says, jingling his bus fare in his pocket and thinking: It ought to cost an arm and a leg. Out the door: he’s not buying today.
I was tactful: “It leaves a lot unsaid.”
“No,” he said. “This is it. It’s got allegorical thrust, but it can be read as straight naturalism.”
Orlando and Phoebe? Allegorical thrust? But Frank was happy. I wondered if he believed as I had believed once, and that he would have to wait as long as I had to see the trickery. In praising me he was complimenting the craft and making me doubt my decision to mistrust my life as a sequence of photographs. I thought: What a thing to say to an old lady who’s made up her mind!
He was saying, Wait! Look! Hold on ther
e!
It was unnerving to hear someone speaking with such assurance about Orlando’s picture. Though I suspected Frank of having the faith of the believer, an ignorance more unshakable than the priest’s or prophet’s; and saw myself something deeply untruthful in the pictures—overcertain and prying and misleading; though I doubted his barnacle’s grip on my work, I couldn’t let him down. The guy sounded sincere. My pictures mattered to him.
All this happened the day after the Provincetown visit.
I had three days of alarm. I drank to relieve myself of doubt, and between gulps I heard him on the phone. At one point, pompously argufying with a caller, he used the phrase, My retrospective. For a moment, I felt like an intruder on this busy genius’s routine and then I remembered that I had allowed him to poke in my picture palace.
On the fourth morning, at breakfast, he said, “Can you give me a lift into Hyannis?”
“What’s up?”
“I’ve got some things to do in the city.” The city: so he was going to New York.
“Can’t you make it some other time? Things are a bit unsettled at the moment.”
Unsettled was an understatement; I was feeling so bent they could have named a pretzel after me.
Frank said, “I’ll only be there a day or two. I’ve got to contact the designer and start budgeting for materials. The committee wants a preliminary presentation. Life goes on, Maude. I’ve got to prove I’m not up here on vacation.”
“Frank Fusco, you’re going to be the death of me!”
My old biddy act calmed him down. He liked to be joshed, and I could tell he was looking forward to a few days away from me. I had been on the sauce and behaving badly, playing the radio too loud and leaving glasses around the house. And I had spent part of each morning noisily vomiting the night’s damage.
“Bus station,” he said, when we were on the road.
“The plane’s faster.”
“I hate planes.”
“Sure you do.” Why is it, I wondered, that single people are more morbid than married ones? Frank was full of fears about flying, eating, smoking, muggers, riots, swimming after meals, dune-buggy gangs, getting trapped in elevators, breaking the speed limit, not using a safety belt. He read Solzhenitsyn and worried about Russians and labor camps. At the station he bought a Tootsie Roll and the paperback of Jaws— that would cause him a few sleepless nights—and waved out the window of the bus like a ten-year-old.
Back home I poured myself a snort, but to prevent my guzzling it too quickly went into the studio Frank had set up in his room. I decided to have a private view of my Provincetown show.
I slid open the drawers of the filing cabinet. I have always approved of the honor system—no locks, no seals—because if it becomes necessary to snoop there’s no hassle. There were letters in one folder, prints in the others. I found “Provincetown” and pulled out the sheaf of enlargements: Eel in a Toilet on top—I threw down the pictures in disgust and read one of his mother’s letters. I would have thought if she had a heart condition she wouldn’t carry on like that. My peevishness justified my looking further. The nerve! I went through his closet and bureau drawers, and every shirt and wrinkled sock told me that I did not really know this man.
Beside the bed there was a small table: a lamp, an alarm clock, Cancer Ward, and some cough drops. I yanked the drawer open and under copies of Creative Camera and Photography Today found a heavy envelope. I could tell by its density that it contained photographs. Mine?
I sipped my drink, but didn’t swallow. My heart went boom-boom.
Once, I had been commissioned by a magazine to do a series of erotic pictures. It was a challenge I gladly accepted: the anatomy had limits then, suggestion was everything. The idea of spread-eagling a whore on an unmade bed so a subscriber could do a drooling pelvic on her was out of the question. I did a half a dozen: a girl’s face in profile licking a ripe strawberry with the fleshy spoon of her tongue; a bird’s-eye view of a nude on all fours—just the cello of her topside; an angle shot in reticulation of a girl flopped forward over the hood of a car; a delighted thing squatting on a man’s foot, clutching his cigar; another with one breast upturned peering at her nipple; and—my biggest coup, the one that was singled out for praise, my piece of revenge on the creeps who ran the magazine and the men who bought it—a sizzling shot of a leggy nude climbing a pole, which no one guessed was a very humid buttocky boy.
The photographs I found in Frank’s drawer—and they showed signs of handling—were something else. My first reaction was to flick through them, then put them away. I shuffled them quickly and saw great soft bodies, and clearly a snail’s head caught between the stinging lips of a sea urchin; a withered rosebud; a human face with bulging cheeks, feeding; a starved ankle. I sat down mystified and took them one by one: how stupid and weak naked flesh seemed! They looked in close-up like porous giants—huge bums and shanks and dirty toes. They were comic heaps, fooling with punctured dolls. Then I saw their dumb agony, the leers of pain, and I knew they showed, more graphically than I could have imagined, people dying.
It was a dance of death performed by hairy children, only superficially ridiculous: deep down it was intimate treachery. I was outraged and could not separate them from Frank’s praise. Again and again my gaze was drawn to the fingers and feet, the crooked teeth. I was sparing myself the wounds. I saw anonymous flesh being pinched, a man straining over a huddled woman, strangulated faces, desire simulated as grievous harm. Pale hairy buttocks, shadowy faces, mortal wounds: slick injured beavers, veiny swollen probes. Technically, the pictures were a mess. They were to photography what grunts were to human speech, inarticulate terror, almost unreadable cruelty, mournful bullies in piglike postures.
Murder: here was a woman being torn in half by a man clumsily shovelling at her legs; and another woman on her knees pleading with a man who held a lethal squirt-gun against her cheek. There were stabbings, and there was suicide—women choking on furious rats and stuffing themselves with sticks of dynamite. I saw varieties of cannibalism that were unknown in Borneo, people engorging one another with mouths like vacuum cleaners or, conversely, looking as if each person was trying to inflate his partner. I saw simple assault: men ejaculating a kind of poisoned oyster on women’s faces and in a delirium of greed others licking the clotted things off; urination—spattering jets sliming crouched figures. The last showed a stew of women arranged like slabs of fat, head to tail, snuffling.
I wanted to be sad. I wasn’t. I felt cheated, like a witness to a casual massacre, too detached to mourn the victims I knew to be anonymous. The mangled body without a name was only a sensational casualty, and the bodies were indistinguishable. It was the scandal of it—the scandal of lust, not the lust itself. The wounds were their sex. And it occurred to me that such pictures—the millions of them in the world—showed only the same two people, over and over again: one degraded couple who played all the parts in every picture ever taken. Here they were again, more vicious than the last time I had seen them, dirtier, older, and a little desperate, but the same familiar bums, leaving me shaking my head and saying gosh. I gave them names: Kenny and Doris—they are every fucking couple ever photographed; Kenny with his greasy hair and his I.D. bracelet, Doris with her cheap mascara and her appendix scar.
And they gave Frank pleasure! The man who had praised my pictures could find room in his judgment for this junk. Perhaps more than I, Frank had underestimated the power of the photograph to deceive. He had hidden them, and what worried me most was that he needed this squalid couple, found satisfaction in Kenny and Doris. How then to reckon his praise of me?
He had fooled me for a while. I didn’t matter. But he had fooled himself.
I was not confused. This confirmed what I had felt about my life and work: they were separate, contradictory, as different as Kenny and Doris were from any couple I had done. I had been right to chuck photography. Frank’s surprise—that dirty dog—proved I could not trust him; nor could I trust my
own pictures. The ones he claimed said everything, said nothing.
“Frank! You worm—you pathetic liar. You say you care about my pictures, but what about this garbage you keep beside your bed? You weak silly man, you think this is passion! Look at your thumbprints on them and tell me you don’t peer at them when you’re all alone at night—does your willy rise like a snake out of a basket? They’re not even good pictures! They’ve got hypo stains, they’re underexposed, the flesh tones are green, they need to be cropped and airbrushed, the light’s all wrong, they’re sixty percent shadow—trash! Put these in your gallery and worry everyone to death talking about integrity with a Tootsie Roll in your mouth. You’re kidding yourself, sonny boy. And maybe you’re just curious, but if these pictures are a turn-on, you’re in bad trouble—”
Frank was of course in New York. I spoke to the wall.
I had barely finished congratulating myself on how pure I felt surviving these pictures. It had been quite a shock to my system, but I had understood Frank’s complexity and the whole pictorial conundrum more clearly—somehow, this trash was crucial, I couldn’t dismiss it. I didn’t want to eat or drink—not after what I’d seen. But I was vindicated! How right I had been to doubt what Frank had said about my Provincetown pictures and photography in general. I’d had a glimpse of the underside of his enthusiasm—not a pretty sight—and had begun to pity him.
Then it became small and unimportant, kid stuff, as my memory woke and yawned, reddening its tonsils at me. I remembered my own deceit.
13
Charades
IT WAS the day I stopped the fracas in Boston. That gave me the courage I needed, because until then I had wobbled badly when I thought of deceiving Orlando. But I thought: It’s for his own good and he’ll appreciate it afterward, and better me than one of those shrill Radcliffe tramps who smoke stogies and stink of gin and use the Harvard men as dildos.
By now Miss Dromgoole was gone. Frenise was old and walked around with batter on her fingers. The day Miss Dromgoole left us we gave a family lunch party for her—Orlando came down for the day and presented her with a box of her favorite glazed fruit. Then, when she got into Mr. Wampler’s taxi, we dashed into the house and tore our clothes off and ran around naked, whooping in celebration and relief, though Papa stayed in his BVDs and Mama kept her bloomers on. My Deliverance—half-naked folks at the windows of a white house, shot from the lawn—is a record of that day.