Feast Your Eyes

by Myla Goldberg

  I’d thought I was doing Sam a favor, inviting him to Christmas dinner, but really it was the other way around. What he said about Mother’s cooking almost made up for Jane not eating it. He distracted us from Jane’s behavior and Father’s absence with stories of Christmas with his grandmother when he was growing up. When he sang a Glenn Miller song that he and his meemaw had liked, he even got Mother to join in at “Woo, woo, Chattanooga, there you are.”

  I tell myself this will pass: Jane is still growing up. This is merely the twenty-year-old version of her wearing an ugly blue coat for most of third grade. Meanwhile, my pride and my irritation are constantly banging into each other. I love my daughter deeply, but right now it’s hard to like her very much.

  I know I said I’d come in time for spring, but I’ve already bought a plane ticket to visit Jane in California over Easter, so I think I’d better wait until summer. Also, it would feel lousy telling the Institute on such short notice to find a replacement for the upcoming semester (my fault, I should have said something back in September), and now the chair has asked me to organize an exhibition of student work for the end of the school year.

  SAM DECKER: One night when we were setting up the darkroom, Lilly asked if I ever wished I’d had children. I laughed so hard I almost spilled the stop bath. I told her I couldn’t think of a time when that would have been possible or anything close to a good idea. Lilly nodded. She said she guessed that was the biggest difference between women and men. I asked how she’d liked it. It had been hard, she said, but it had made her a better photographer. Which one, I wanted to know, being a woman or being a mother? Lilly looked at me the way a teacher looks at a kid who can’t spell or tell time. She told me it wasn’t a question she knew how to answer: she’d been one for about as long as she’d been the other.

  I figured out pretty quickly that Clyde boys and Clyde in general were much more interesting than anything or anyone at Holy Mount. Instead of going out for my school’s production of Tartuffe, I acted in so many of Clyde’s contemporary performance projects—as Snake Queen, as the Ocean, as Enoon the Voice of Us All—that some people thought I was enrolled. One day I came out of a rehearsal to a bunch of students sitting in the solarium, passing around a joint. If she was such a genius, one of them said, then why didn’t she do anything after that? Because the system shut her down, said somebody else. Or maybe she and her daughter both got fat, said somebody different.

  What are you guys talking about? I said, even though part of me already knew. This was an art school, after all. There were classes with titles like “Issues in Contemporary Photography.”

  That chick who did the naked photographs of her and her kid, the first one said, who was all over the news back when we were seven or eight. Man, I wish it was still that easy to get famous, he said, and everyone laughed.

  The light—not just in the room but in the world—dimmed and then got really bright, like all the electricity in the universe was deciding whether to snuff itself or blow up. Once it got normal again, I suppose I could have walked out of that room or laughed along with everyone else, but neither of those options occurred to me.

  She wasn’t trying to get famous, I said. Those pictures were personal. They weren’t even the sort of thing she usually did.

  How would you know? the first one asked.

  Because I’m her kid, I said.

  110. Skateboarder, Bicknell Hill, Santa Monica, 1975

  When I walked into life-drawing class the Tuesday after I’d outed myself in the solarium, twenty people were there in addition to the usual fifteen. Instead of everyone talking to each other like usual, it was quiet. Specifically, it was the quiet before the curtain goes up on a sold-out show that everyone in the audience feels lucky to have nabbed a seat for. The light started doing the same too dim/too bright thing it had done in the solarium, and I felt a little like throwing up, but not in a bad way. I was good at playing the part I was about to play, and I liked having an audience. I went behind the screen, got undressed, then came back out and held poses the way I always did, to the sound of thirty-five pencils drawing in thirty-five sketchbooks.

  Back when I was nine, if someone had said, Samantha, the thing making your life a daily misery will one day make you the coolest kid in school, I would have called him a dog-breath dipstick and kneed him in the groin. Under no circumstances would I have imagined a future in which being Samantha Preston would mean free liquor or weed for the asking, a standing invitation to every art party in Los Angeles, and a distinguished-artist boyfriend who liked to eat me for dessert. Leo’s whole thing was paintings of animal-headed people working in factories, or actual factory machines with animal-headed people painted onto them. Pretty soon it was the rare evening he wasn’t taking me somewhere. Naturally, in a place where everyone went by first names, it wasn’t hard to miss that Leo always introduced me as S. Jane Preston, but I liked how it sounded. S. Jane was more sophisticated than Samantha or Jane alone; and if that name meant a dedicated toothbrush in Leo’s bathroom and people who looked at me instead of past me when he brought me around, I had no problem with that.

  Had my mother visited Los Angeles earlier, she just would have been Jane’s mom. Now that I was S. Jane, she was Lillian Preston. I was tormented by the thought that wherever we went, I’d be demoted from headliner to opening act, if I was still written into the program at all. At thirty-five, Leo was much closer to my mother’s age than mine. My twenty-year-old self conquered these fears by disappearing on Leo the weekend of Lillian’s visit, telling him I’d be out of town, and then carefully dividing the time between photo walks in Santa Monica—which was far enough from Clyde to preclude being seen—and the Holy Mount campus, where I was practically as much a stranger as my mother.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, APRIL 1975: When you told me your new friends knew who you “really” were, I didn’t know what to think, but from the moment I arrived, you seemed so confident and happy that it felt like my wishes for you, after all these years, had been granted. But Squirrel, if it’s true you’re so liberated from your past that posing for artists is “no big deal,” why am I still not allowed to take your picture or to meet these friends?

  Thank you for showing me your city. In the back of my mind, I thought I knew what to expect, but Los Angeles is quite different from San Francisco. There’s a hardness beneath its surface that scares me a little, but also an excitement and a sense of freedom, a feeling that important things are happening. I hadn’t heard of skateboarding before you took me to Bicknell Hill, but I’ll never forget the feeling of watching those boys speeding down that asphalt slope. Passion manifests in such a beautiful variety of forms.

  Considering that when I was twenty, I wasn’t on speaking terms with my mother, perhaps it’s a victory that you tolerated a visit from yours, but you revealed so little of yourself that I couldn’t help wondering if you wanted me there at all. Certainly you’re old enough to live how you like. What breaks my heart is that you don’t think you can—or just don’t want to—share the details of that life with me.

  111. Sam Decker with an undeveloped film cartridge containing photographs of his friend Private Kevin Conway, Cleveland, 1975

  LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, JUNE 1975: According to Mother, who, since last Christmas, has made a Sunday habit of asking Sam to dinner and then interrogating me about him once he’s gone, Sam hasn’t asked me to marry him because I haven’t been trying hard enough. When I tell her that Sam and I are simply good friends, she smiles and offers to treat me to a makeover. In truth, I feel closer to Sam in the darkroom than I ever felt to Charles or Ken. It’s both wildly different and at the same time exactly what I imagined when I began writing letters to the boy whose photographs I fell in love with at seventeen. I’m no longer in love with Sam’s work, and I suppose I was never in love with the man, but what we do in the darkroom goes deeper than either of those.

  The portrait wouldn’t have happened if Sam hadn’t asked me to grab us some pop, then told me w
here in his refrigerator to find it. The film canister blocked my hand’s path. Sam must have known I’d be curious about that single undeveloped roll, but I understood him well enough not to ask questions when I returned with our drinks. Instead I simply handed him the film canister, then snapped the shutter as he spoke.

  SAM DECKER: All those years when I wasn’t sure where I was or what I was doing, that roll of film stayed in my pocket. Not the best storage conditions, I told Lilly, so that was one reason not to develop it: all the shots would be fogged or faded. But even if the roll was still good, I wouldn’t do it. No one needs a picture of Conway dead, especially not me. Broad daylight, the two of us hoofing it back to the battalion from the MLR for our first hot meal in ten days, waxing grandiose over the showers and beds calling our names. Suddenly, there’s a whistling sound; I’m knocked off my feet and flat onto my ass. When I stand back up, there’s Conway looking the same as before, only on the ground. It’s a sunny, peaceful morning. If there wasn’t a crater where the Chinese artillery shell had just hit, there’d be no reason to think Conway wasn’t getting a jump on all that sleep we’d just been jawing about. He bragged he’d go fourteen hours straight, maybe sixteen. Twenty, I boasted back, maybe twenty-four. I was getting ready to lie down next to him when I saw the medics.

  I wouldn’t have taken the picture if he’d been anyone else. Up until then I’d been grabbing shots of grunts in the chow line, or writing letters, or playing cards, or sleeping off last night’s patrol—because what the hell else would I be taking pictures of? What kind of asshole puts himself in the middle of a war and, instead of trying to do something about the fighting or the bleeding, frames the explosions or the bodies just right to supply the folks back home with some vicarious excitement, some token image to make their lives feel more informed or lucky or safe or whatever else passes for meaning? Forget all that noble gas about bearing witness: anyone who takes war pictures likes doing it. They like it or they wouldn’t be there, because there are plenty of better and easier ways to make a buck. None of them are making a difference. Picture or no picture, people will keep killing each other using methods old and new—day after day, year after year, centuries of killing—until one way or another we’re all dead, and all the guns and cameras of the world are just so much garbage lying in the dirt. The only thing a war photographer does is make the killing look beautiful. He distorts it into a moment frozen in perfect clarity, when an honest photograph would be messy, blurred, and hard to read. No one wants honesty. No one will frame it or print it on a cover or a front page, because honesty is ugly. And once I realized that, a few days into digging my first foxhole, I didn’t want to be a war photographer anymore.

  Around the time Lillian was taking Sam’s picture, I was cast in my first non-student production, at a theater in Silver Lake. I wouldn’t have spent the summer after my sophomore year back in Cleveland no matter what, but the play made it easier to break the news to Lillian and Grandma, who made me swear up and down that I would come home for Christmas. Silver Lake was too far to bike, so Leo taught me to drive, allowing me to conquer the Santa Monica Freeway.

  With the excitement of getting my first professional acting gig and my driver’s license, I kept forgetting to refill my prescription, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was a week late. Technically, I knew that the previous five pregnancy-free years were thanks to the little white pill I’d been swallowing nightly. Then again, the unlikelihood that something the size and shape of an aspirin could prevent something so world-altering as a baby made it seem equally plausible that my body wasn’t the pregnancy type, a theory replaced by self-accusation as soon as my period didn’t come.

  I called in sick to rehearsal the day of my clinic appointment. Leo gave me cab fare, since I wasn’t supposed to drive after the procedure and he was too busy to go with me. I didn’t mind. With Leo there, I might have felt compelled to share my thoughts, and I wasn’t in a sharing mood. There were few things I wanted less than a baby, but I couldn’t help doing the math: my mother was nineteen when she had me; here I was, twenty and knocked up. What I was doing at that clinic would have canceled me out had Lillian made the same choice. I wasn’t sure whether getting an abortion made me a shittier, more selfish person than my mother, or just luckier. By the time the gentle clinic doctor was done with me, I did know that because I wasn’t pregnant, I landed a play downtown after the one in Silver Lake; and after that show closed, I got a call from a casting agent, who said the director John Bradshaw had seen my performance and wanted me for his next film.

  112. Pages from private journal (No 24), March 1976

  The play I did after Bradshaw finished shooting was having its cast party the same night that Leo was invited to a dinner party at the home of some big-time art collector. Cast parties always went late, Leo told me; I could head there after the dinner was over. Roger Creeland didn’t buy single pieces, he bought whole series. Leo said if I cared at all about him or his career, I would come.

  I figured it would be a house in the hills or on Mulholland, but Leo started driving north on 101. I squawked when I learned we were in for a three-hour drive to Santa Barbara, but Leo told me to can it. This guy was one of the biggest, richest collectors on the West Coast. When he invited you to dinner, you came.

  The collector’s house was all glass and white brick at the edge of a cliff. As soon as we arrived, a man with thick white hair and lots of rings kissed my hand and said, Samantha Preston, it is such a great pleasure to meet you. And you must be Leo. Please make yourselves at home. The living room was four times bigger than Leo’s apartment. The two walls that weren’t glass and sticking out over the cliff were covered in paintings and photographs. The paintings didn’t look like the sort of stuff Leo did, and I wondered if Creeland had whole wings of his house devoted to different art styles or what. I recognized a few people from L.A., including one of the painters I sometimes modeled for. I kept trying to ignore that Leo wasn’t introducing me as S. Jane, like usual, but as Samantha Preston, the way Roger Creeland had. I’d needed to pee for the last hour in the car, but I stayed with Leo long enough to drink one drink before making for a bathroom.

  I was halfway past the wall paintings when I suddenly felt like puking, which was strange since I hadn’t eaten anything, and I’d only had the one drink. It took my brain a split second more to realize what my body already knew: I recognized the photographs on the next half of Roger Creeland’s living room wall. There were eight of them, all black and white, arranged in a nice straight line leading to the bathroom, the way family photos are displayed in houses where photographs are photographs and not trophies. I walked past each print as if it weren’t a hammer to my head. When I locked myself inside Roger Creeland’s bathroom, I sat on his Carrara marble floor because my arms and legs weren’t working. I was in Mrs. Barkley’s class all over again, after eleven years of thinking I was free. I focused on pressing the coolness of the white stone onto my knees and my palms. I stood up. I splashed cold water on my face until I looked mostly normal.

  Leo was still working the room. Samantha! he said, there you are. Everyone’s asking about you. Babe, I said, I left my bag in your car. Give me your keys and I’ll be right back, and I pursed my lips in a promising way.

  The longest I’d ever driven before that night was the forty minutes it took to get to the theater in Silver Lake. Three hours later, I threw Leo’s car keys through his studio window, grabbed my bike, and stopped at the first motel where it didn’t look like I’d get jumped checking in to a room. When I signed the register, Monica Kay was what came out: Monica after the freeway that had brought me to my first real acting gig, and Kay after the friend who’d put on a mask at Halloween and showed to me the power of becoming someone else.

  SAM DECKER: I knew it was photography money paying for Lilly’s medical bills and Jane’s tuition, but I never considered which photographs, and Lilly never said. Sunday at Dorothy’s, I was at the sink washing dinner plates when the phon
e rang. Dot’s voice lit up when she said she’d accept the charges. Dot was a nice old lady. She loved Jane the way my meemaw loved me, with about as little to show for it. When she handed the phone to Lilly, the next thing I knew, Lilly was sitting at the kitchen table looking like a bleached-out version of herself. She’s gone, Lilly said. I’ve lost her for good.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, MARCH 1976: The question isn’t whether I should have sold the photographs—that was a matter of survival—but whether I should have tried harder to tell you. I know what I meant to say all those years ago, the last time you visited me in the hospital before we left New York, but I was so sick then. It’s possible I said only part of what I intended, or nothing at all. At the time, I consoled myself with how careful I’d been with Mr. Wythe in setting the terms: the photographs could never be resold, donated, or otherwise placed in anyone else’s possession; the purchase was never to be publicized in any way; and the photos could only ever be shown privately in Mr. Creeland’s home. I told myself that you were protected. Would things have been different if I hadn’t been so sick the night you took the train from Brooklyn? If I’d had the strength to tell you properly? If you had learned the truth at fifteen, would you have reacted the way you have at twenty-one, or would you have found a way to make peace with what I did? In the days after your call, I dialed and redialed the only number I had for you. Finally, a man answered and told me that you were gone.

  113. Franny Panic, Agora Ballroom parking lot, Cleveland, 1976

  LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, AUGUST 1976: I hadn’t heard of Ms. Panic, but when my students explained about the song, I thought it’d be interesting to go. She’s popular enough that I’m sure my students would have gone anyway, but at the club, most of them seemed just as interested in watching me. When I stepped outside for some air, I saw a woman sitting cross-legged on the hood of a car, picking at a scab on her knee like a girl half her age. I didn’t realize until I saw that same young woman growling into the microphone that it was Ms. Panic whose picture I’d taken. The song’s anger reminded me of you. In our East Seventh Street days, I didn’t know myself well enough to say it, but you were someone who knew how to get angry, which was something I both feared and was wild to learn.