Feast Your Eyes
Page 28
118. Self-portrait, Cleveland Clinic, January 28, 1977, 5:04 a.m.
SAM DECKER: The morning after she died, I brought the exposed film back from the hospital, thinking I’d develop it straightaway, but I didn’t. For weeks I’d been working in the darkroom without her, waiting for her to get better, and seeing that film on Lilly’s shelf made it easier to pretend she’d be coming back. Then came the funeral. I didn’t cry until I got to the darkroom, where it was something private between her and me. After that, working got hard. The smallest things left the biggest gaps. The missing sound of her breathing or the floor shifting under her weight. The feeling that if I stepped to the right, I’d brush against her arm. At some point, I started resenting that four-inch-thick roll of undeveloped film. Every time I came into the darkroom, I felt it staring at me, waiting for me to do what Lilly had asked. Maybe I would have felt different if I didn’t already have an unfinished job of my own, but Lilly was the only one who knew about the canister I’d been holding on to, and it felt like she was testing me. I took her out of the darkroom and put her in the fridge next to Conway, where I knew she would keep.
One night I’m drinking beers with Conway in a dream and he says, Don’t be an asshole, Decker, who else could she trust? You’re the only one as fussy as she is. Fine, I told him, but I’m still leaving your roll alone. Why would I give a shit what you do with that? Conway said. I’ve been dead twenty-three years.
The next night I closed up the coffeehouse at the usual time, but instead of catching the sunset, I went upstairs. First golden hour I’d skipped since I started the place. Over the next eight hours, I made contact sheets for all 680 shots. I was wrong to think it’d be quiet work. Anyone standing outside the darkroom door would’ve thought I was cracked, but I was just dictating one last letter to the air. I told her when I was arranging the negatives on the photo paper, and when I was placing the paper in the developer. I told her what I missed about her as I put each sheet in the stop bath, and what I remembered about her as I rinsed it and hung it to dry. Inspecting each exposure, I described what was beautiful in each of those last pictures she had taken, and what was difficult to see.
I’d assumed she’d be staring at the camera the whole time, and she was; but I’d also thought it’d be easy to tell when she died, and it wasn’t. For the first 120 shots, Lilly’s face is tense the way it had been that whole week because of the pain. After that, she gets a look like when she’s trying to explain something about camera technique, only stronger, and that look stays with her for the next 86. Then, starting at frame 207, her face starts to change. The pain and focus are still there, but by frame 229, it’s clear you’re seeing a record of that pain and focus stored within the face’s stillness, and that Lilly has left that face behind.
Acknowledgments
* * *
As I wrote this book, I was inspired by the work and lives of many people, including Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Amiri Baraka, Judy Chicago, Louis Faurer, Harold Feinstein, Robert Frank, Helen Gee, Hettie Jones, Leon Levinstein, Helen Levitt, Vivian Maier, Sally Mann, Lisette Model, Alice Neel, Ruth Orkin, Grace Paley, Diane di Prima, and Garry Winogrand. Steven Millhauser’s novella Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810–1846) introduced me to the enormous potential of the museum catalogue as a way to tell a story. I could build a small habitable cabin of all the books I read for research, but I’m especially thankful for The Choices We Made, edited by Angela Bonavoglia, which helped me wrap my post–Roe v. Wade mind around the pre–Roe v. Wade era; and for Hellhole, by Sara Harris, which detailed conditions inside the New York City House of Detention for Women in the 1960s. In my various research quests, several people generously allowed me to interview them or otherwise shared their work and knowledge with me: thank you to Jennifer Bernstein, Mary Engel, Harold Feinstein, Chloe Mills, Ruthann Robson, and Charles Spurlin.
Many thanks to the Sustainable Arts Foundation for their ongoing support of artists and writers with families, and for their grant, which provided me a much needed boost in material and immaterial ways.
Thanks to Jin Auh for becoming my ally and my agent, and for fighting for me and this book. Thanks to Kathy Belden for the care, intelligence, and acuity of vision that allowed this book to achieve its final form. Thanks to Wendy Schmalz for twenty years of agenthood and friendship.
Thank you to David Gassaway, Tim Kreider, Anthony Tognazzini, and Ellen and Mark Goldberg for reading. Double thanks to Jason Little, Ellen Twaddell, and Megan Kelso for reading . . . and then reading again.
Thank you to my daughters for expanding my idea of what love is and for teaching me what it means to be a mother. Thank you, Jason, for us.
About the Author
* * *
Myla Goldberg is the bestselling author of The False Friend, Wickett’s Remedy, and Bee Season, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a winner of the Borders New Voices Prize, a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and was adapted to film and widely translated.
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The False Friend: A Novel
Wickett’s Remedy: A Novel
Time’s Magpie: A Walk in Prague
Bee Season: A Novel
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