Eyes

by William H. Gass

  Alvin Langdon Coburn came up. After a day of silence, his name seemed a train of words. Alvin Langdon Coburn. As if Mr. Gab had really been talking with his assistant as his assistant had imagined. He was holding a paperback copy of Coburn’s autobiography. With a finger to mark his place, Mr. Gab gave it a brief wave. I shall read u-Stu what Alvin Langdon Coburn wrote about those who do dirty tricks with their negatives. Mr. Gab’s voice assumed a surprising falsetto. His assistant had never heard him read aloud out of a book before this moment—a moment that had therefore become important. “Now I must confess I do not approve of gum prints which look like chalk drawings…” Mr. Gab interrupted himself. P.H. was equally fierce and unforgiving, he said. “…nor of drawing on negatives, nor of glycerin-restrained platinotypes in imitation of wash-drawings as produced by…” You won’t have heard of this guy, Mr. Gab added, letting disdain into his voice like a cat into a kitchen. “…Joseph T. Keiley, a well-known…” Well known, well known—not anymore known than a silent-film star. “…American photographer and a friend of Alfred Stieglitz.” They all claimed to be that—a good, a fond friend of Stieglitz. Let’s skip. “…I do not deny that Demachy, Eugene, Keiley and others…” Heard of them, have we? Are they in the history books? are they? take a look. “…and others produced exciting prints by these manipulated techniques…” Bah bah bah-dee-bah. Here—“This I rarely did, for I am myself a devotee of pure photography, which is unapproachable in its own field.” Unapproachable, you hear? Pure. That’s the ticket. That’s the word. Unapproachable. He snapped the book shut and sank back into a silence which said something had been proved, something once for all had been decided.

  3 FROM THE STOOL OF THE STUPID ASSISTANT

  During the long empty hours between customers, Mr. Gab sat at his desk at the front of the shop and drowsed or thumbed through the same old stack of photographic magazines he’d had for as long as his assistant had been near enough his paging thumb to observe what the pages concerned. Most of the time Mr. Gab sat there with the immobility of a mystic. Occasionally, he’d leaf through a book, often an exhibition catalogue or a volume containing a description of the contents of a great archive, such as Rüdiger Klessmann’s book on the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, over whose pages and pictures he’d slowly shake his head. Once in a while, his back still turned to his assistant, he’d raise a beckoning hand, and u-Stu would leave his stool in the rear where he was awkwardly perched while trying to read books slender enough to be steadily held by one hand, and come forward to Mr. Gab’s side where he was always expected to verify, by studying the picture, Mr. Gab’s poor opinion of the masterpiece.

  The beckoning finger would then descend to point at a portion of a painting; whereupon Mr. Gab would say: look at that! is that a tree? that tangle of twigs? The finger would poke the plate, perhaps twice. It’s an architect’s tree! His voice would register three floors of disgust. It’s a rendering, a sign for a tree; the man might as well have written “tree” there. Over here, by “barn,” see “bush.” And the fellow is said to be painting nature. (It might have been a Corot or Courbet.) See? is that a tree? is that a tree or a sign, that squiggle? I can read it’s a tree, but I don’t see a tree. It is not a tree anyone actually sees. Twigs don’t attach to branches that way; branches don’t grow from trunks that way; you call those smudges shade? To a simp they might suggest shade. To a simpleton. There’s not a whiff of cooling air.

  The finger would retire long enough for the assistant to make out an image and the book would snap shut like a slammed door: I am leaving forever, the slam said. A fake crack in a fake rock from which a fake weed fakes its own growth, Mr. Gab might angrily conclude: we are supposed to admire that? (then after an appropriate pause, he’d slowly, softly add, in a tone signifying his reluctant surrender to grief) that…? that is artistry?

  The assistant spent many hours every day like a dunce uncomfortably perched on a stool he had difficulty getting the seat of his pants settled on because it stood nearly as high as he did and furthermore because the assistant was trying to bring a book up with him held in his inadequate hand. Once up, he was reluctant to climb down if it meant he’d soon have to climb up again. So he perched, not perhaps for as long as Mr. Gab sat, but a significant interval on the morning’s clock: with a view of the shop and its three rows of trestle tables topped with their load of flap-closed cardboard boxes adorned by beanbags as if they were the puffy peaks of stocking caps. The tables appeared to be nearly solid blocks since so many containers were stored underneath each one where with your foot you’d have to coax a carton to slide sufficiently far into the aisle to undo its flaps and finger through its contents. ROME I.

  But Mr. Gab or his stupid assistant, whoever was closest, would rise or fall and wordlessly rush or rock to the box and lift it quickly or awkwardly up on top of the ones on the table, deflapping it smartly or ineptly and folding the four lids back before returning to chair or stool and the status quo. Mr. Weasel would occasionally come in and always want a box buried beneath a table in the most remote and awkward spot; but at least he’d pick on a container up front where Mr. Gab would have to say good day in customary greeting and then push cartons about like some laborer in a warehouse to get at PARIS NIGHTLIFE or some similar delicacy that Mr. Weasel always favored.

  Customers who came to the shop more than once got names chosen to reflect their manner of looking or the shapes they assumed while browsing, especially as they were observed from the stool of the stupid assistant. Weasel slunk. He was thin and short and had a head that was all nose. His eyes were dotted and his hair was dark and painted on. The first few times Weasel came to the store the stupid assistant watched him carefully because his moves produced only suspicion. After a number of visits, however, the Weasel simply became the Weasel, and the stupid assistant shut down his scrutiny, or rather, turned it onto his page.

  Part of the stupid assistant’s education was to study books which Mr. Gab assigned, not that they ever discussed them, and it would have been difficult for Mr. Gab to know, ever, if his assistant was dutiful or not, or was reading filth and other kinds of popular fiction. When he thought he had caught the Weasel, u-Stu was wading through Walter Pater. And Pater held a lot of water. U-Stu was wading waist-deep. Mr. Gab had not recommended any of what the assistant later found out were Pater’s principal works, but had sent him to a collection of essays called Appreciations where u-Stu learned of Dryden’s imperfect mastery of the relative pronoun, a failing he misunderstood as familial. All Mr. Gab asked of his assistant regarding the works he assigned (beside the implicit expectation that it would be u-Stu who would withdraw them from the library, now he had his own card) was that u-Stu was expected to select a sentence he favored from some part of the text to repeat to Mr. Gab at a suitable moment; after which Mr. Gab would grunt and nod, simultaneously signifying approval and termination.

  It was not clear to u-Stu whether there were designs behind Mr. Gab’s selections, but Appreciations contained essays on writers whose names were, to u-Stu, at best vaguely familiar, or on plays by Shakespeare like Measure for Measure for which slight acquaintance was also the applicable description. The first essay was called “Style” and u-Stu supposed it was Mr. Gab’s target, but, once more, the piece was larded with references that, from u-Stu, drew a blank response of recognition. U-Stu resented having his ignorance so repeatedly demonstrated. To Mr. Gab he said: “this book is dedicated to the memory of my brother William Thompson Pater who quitted a useful and happy life Sunday April 24, 1887.” Quite to the quoter’s surprise, this sentence proved to be acceptable, and u-Stu was able to return the volume a week ahead of its due date.

  This is not to say that u-Stu didn’t give it a shot, and in point of fact he was in the middle of trying to understand a point about Flaubert’s literary scruples (all of Mr. Pater’s subjects seemed to be neurotic) when his head rose wearily from the page in time to see the Weasel slip a glassine envelope, clearly not their customary kind, into the stock
of a cardboard box labeled MISCELLANEOUS INTERIORS. Skidding from his stool he rocked toward the Weasel at full speed. Sir, he said, sir, may I help you with anything; you seem to be a bit confused. This was a formula Mr. Gab had hit upon for lowering the level of public embarrassment whenever hanky-pankies were observed. However, as u-Stu took thought, as Mr. Gab turned to locate his assistant’s voice, and as the Weasel looked up in alarm, u-Stu realized that the Weasel, so far as he had seen, was adding to, not subtracting from the contents of the container. Had u-Stu perhaps missed an extraction? Was this the latter stage of a switch?

  It’s all right, Mr. Stu, Mr. Gab said urgently. Mr. Grimes is just replacing a print for me. Oh, said Mr. Stu, stopping as soon as he could and calming his good eye. Mr. Grimes, the Weasel, winked in surprise and backed away from Mr. Stu in the direction of the door. Something is up, Mr. Stu thought, thinking he was now Mr. Stu, an improvement surely, a considerable promotion, a kind of bribe, but an acceptable one, coming as it did at long—he thought—last. But what was up? what? Mr. Stu retreated to his stool and Mr. Grimes slid out of the shop with never a further word. In fact, Mr. Stu couldn’t remember a first word. But he’d been inattentive while tending to Walter Pater’s work, and to the peevish Flaubert, who had just vowed, at the point Mr. Stu had reached in his reading, to quit writing altogether.

  Mr. Gab’s back was soon bent over MISCELLANEOUS INTERIORS. From his stool where he was perched once more like some circus animal, Mr. Stu couldn’t see a single interesting thing though he knew that rummaging was going on. He felt in his stomach a glob of gas, a balloon filled with rising apprehension. Mr. Gab, having done his dirty work, returned to his desk empty-handed, allowing the store to become as law-abiding as before. With his Pater closed, Mr. Stu, as he would from this morning on be called, began to fill the back of Mr. Gab’s head with his own thoughts, enjoying a vacation in another body, even old Mr. Gab’s, which had to be a low-rent cottage in a run-down resort, but—hey—several limps up from the ramshackle where he currently was.

  Other eyes, both reasonably well off, saw through gray glass into the street where the world would scarcely pass. He imagined he was sixteen, which was perhaps his age. He had the legs of that Caravaggio cupid which had so exercised Mr. Gab when he’d come upon them the other day in Rüdiger Klessmann’s catalogue of the paintings in the Berlin Museum (remember that liar’s name, Mr. Gab had commanded). Naked, the kid was. Very naked. A pornpainting, Mr. Gab said in sentence. It is written here that this is the figure of a boy about twelve. Sitting on a globe. The posture is contorted, but not like Mr. Stu on his stool, Mr. Stu thought. Look, this Klessmann fellow says that every wrinkle and fold of the skin is reproduced with the utmost realism. Ut-most. Look. What do you see?

  U-Stu saw a cupid with arms and thighs wide apart, as wide as full sexual reception might require, and musculated like a twenty-five-year-old wrestler, though wearing the weenie of a boy of six, one nipple showing in a swath of light which flew in conveniently from the left to dispel a general darkness; in fact to fling it aside like a parted robe and reveal a creased and belly-buttoned stomach below a strong broad chest where the nipple lay, as purple as a petal fallen from a frostbitten rose (Mr. Gab had said as if quoting). The head, however, bore a leering drunken grin as salacious as they are in Frans Hals. Those huge thighs, though, Mr. Gab fairly growled, how are they rendered? See the way they are rounded into a silk-soaked softness? (Was he quoting still?) An amazon in the guise of a baby boy. Holding the bow of a violin! What allegorical gimcrackery! But no! another masterpaint, Mr. Gab announced, as if introducing a vaudeville act. And Klessmann dares to call this pornographic pastiche realism!

  Caravaggio was simply a ruffian. His darks were merely dramatic, his colors were off, his attitudes appropriate to saloons. He was a pretender in front of reality, and reality had made him a murderer and a convict. Tenebrist indeed. Remember that word. (His assistant tried, but he understood it to mean “tenuous.”) Mr. Gab could be relentless. Carrahvaggeeoh, he’d growl. For him darkness is never delicate. Carrahvaggeeoh didn’t understand what a shadow was—an entire region of the world. Ah…we know where to go for shadows.

  By now Mr. Stu was able to interpret Mr. Gab. Realism—truth—was the exclusive property of the photograph. He regularly ridiculed paintings that presented themselves as lifelike. About trompe l’oeil compositions he was particularly withering. What kind of streetcar accident has caused this rabbit, that jug, this—hah!—hunting horn, that—hah!—hat, that knife, that—hey?—horseshoe, and that key—a key!—those two dead birds?—to hop to run to fly to get carried in a carriage to see the smash, rehear the crash, and enjoy the bloody scene? What drew them to this place? These dots of detail? That’s the real? reality is a stupid collection? trophies of a scavenger hunt? Whose eye would they fool?—hey?—whose?

  Mr. Stu, now in the guise of Caravaggio, stretched his grand legs wide, even if he wouldn’t fool anyone, and flaunted his cute little sex. Those few who might pass would never look in. Anyway. He wondered, as he had so often, what it would be like to be ordinary and have had an ordinary childhood, not one in a Home where everything had to imitate shoes in a line. And nothing had ever been his: not his bed or blanket, the table at which he drew, not a wall, not a window, not a fork or spoon, lent instead, shared, maybe his underclothes had been his, but only because they wouldn’t let anyone else soil them. He’d left with the clothes on his back as the cliché maintains, so they had to be his: his shoes, and his socks and his bulbous nose. Even now his room was rented, his books were borrowed, his stool belonged to his employer, as did the boxes of photographs, presumably they weren’t all stolen. At the moment, though, he owned a violin and sat heavily on his own globe.

  He’d noticed how Mr. Gab did it: how he studied a picture (this one, another Sudek, had showed up out of the blue to be held under Mr. Stu’s nose) until he knew just where the darks went (had he bought it from that haughty high-hatter? that would not have been wise); dark filling almost the whole road except for the wet and glistening dirt that still defined some wagon tracks (the temptation would have been far greater than for another piece of cake), the sky, too, setting with the paling sun, and walls and buildings nothing but edges, tree trunks rising into the dying light, crisp and unconfused (had it been dropped off by the Weasel? God forbid), rows of insulators perched like birds for the night on faintly wired poles, but so composed…made of mist…composed so that the bushes at one end of the panoramic rhymed with the tree limbs at the other; thus the blacks beneath held up the grays above, so the soft glow of the failing sun, which could be still seen in the darkening sky, might lie like a liquid on the muddy lane…and Mr. Gab would inhale very audibly, as if a sigh had been sent him from somewhere, because only once had the world realized these relations; they would never exist again; they had come and gone like a breath.

  An image had been etched on an eye.

  Mr. Stu had made Mister, all the same, even if he didn’t have a childhood; and he had a job—a job that was his job, no one else’s, as stooled to its heights as an accountant’s—and he had his own room even if it was rented, even if it was paid for by his father figure; and he had a market where he could swipe fruit, a weedy field to sit in now and then, a library card for borrowing books; and a worry which was ruining his reveries. If the cops got Mr. Gab, what would become of Mr. Stu? No job then. No room. He could read in the weeds. But the authorities didn’t like the appearance it gave the neighborhood when he flopped down in the empty lot and looked up at a clutter of clouds or saw inside a deeply receding blue sky a scented silent light.

  With Walter Pater parked, Mr. Stu settled on his stool and set his sights on the back of Mr. Gab’s head, and bore into it with his whole being until he felt he was looking out into the empty sun-blown street where now and then a figure would pass, moving more often left than right, while he wondered what was to be done, what he should do to defend them from the calamity that was coming. After closing, afte
r, as he imagined, still wholly inhabiting Mr. Gab, he’d taken that body to bed in the Chinese flophouse where Mr. Gab’s somewhat resourceful assistant had found a curtain made of mediocre lace at the market—near that stall from which, by using the crowd, he’d appropriated fruit—just a cloud of thread to tack to the wall above his window so that now when Mr. Gab’s hand drew the curtain the room grew gray and a few of the city’s lights spangled the frail netting where, bed-clothed, u-Stu in the garb of Mr. Gab could still see, till sleep, a kind of sky, and pretend he was napping in the weeds or smelling space like a moth; so after closing, Gab gone to the flop, what was left of Mr. Stu would go through the boxes one by one and systematically, if there was a system, hunt for pictures that were likely pilfered in order to hide them…yes, by reswapping bodies for the task, putting Gab back in his own boots—maybe too many switcheroos to seem dreamable—and subsequently to slide the suspicious photographs into such other boxes as he’d have collected under his so far fleabagless bed, where no one would ever think to pry, thus cleansing the premises of the taint of loot and securing the safety of what was looking more and more like a possible life.

  He swore that were he able to do it, he would work earnestly to improve himself during the remaining existence he’d been given, giving up both fruit and stealing; he’d pass out flyers to stimulate the store; he’d memorize a new word every day and read it—one two three four—like a regiment on the march; he’d—

  What, though, could be done about the ones which perched in plain view upon the walls, yet tried to lie about their presence like the purloined letter, even though they could be seen to be what they were: Koudelka, in an instant, glorious, an icon worth worship, or an Emerson, swimming in silence through reedy weeds, or that damn Evans with the foursquareface outstaring stone, or the Abbott tucked away near the rug-hugged doorway; because Gab would feel their loss even if Mr. Stu just replaced the prints and not the hangers; put up at some risk a Harry Callahan or Marc Riboud instead, since who knew if Gab had thieved them too; he’d feel their loss like a draft through a door left ajar, the hairs on the back of his neck would whisper their names in his ears; yet the Koudelka, the Feininger had to go, guilt could not be more loudly advertised. Looking at Lake Michigan Mr. Gab had muttered placement, placement, placement, three times, u-Stu supposed, to honor the three figures standing in smooth lake water, water which merged imperceptibly with a grayed-over sky, three figures perfectly decentered, and the wake of the walking bather…well…as if there’d been some calculation…if not by nature than by Callahan…alas, not a serious name. Yet Callahan, said Mr. Gab, would do.