Picture Palace (19 page)

Blanche was still in the chair. Calmer: sobbing relaxed her. Yet I was still apprehensive. I had never believed that the loss of love was so grievous a thing. She looked ill and was doubled up, as if her heart had been torn out. My consolation was that it had been necessary, because if she hadn't been stopped in her wild presuming she might have made life hell for me and Orlando.

What was so sad was not that she looked destroyed, but that she had come to within an inch of destruction. The only life in her was the thin warmth of sadness. This in itself was frightening, for the survivor of a tragedy looks twenty times worse in a photograph than the carcass of a casualty. I was thinking that I would rather be dead than blind and crazy and twitching with grief in some stranger's house.

As if reading my thoughts, she stood up and tried to pull herself together: stretched, yawned, wrung her hands.

I said, “Are you sure you won't have that drink?”

Her eyes widened. She said, “You haven't heard the last of this.”

“It's late, Blanche. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

“I don't want to see you tomorrow,” she said. “And if you're smart you won't want to see me—ever. I won't be responsible for what I do to you.”

“There now,” I said. “You shouldn't threaten me.”

In a terrible voice, colder than the one she had used for
I could kill you
, she said. “I'll harm you.”

“I'm going on vacation,” I said, although until I heard myself saying it I had no intention of doing so.

“It better be a long one.”

“Florida, actually. To do some pictures. The folks are there.”

“Just keep out of my way, Maude Pratt,” she said. “I'll never forgive you for this treachery.”

With that, she went, sideways and silent, for she had left all her whimpers and tears and threats in my room. I looked out the window and saw her crossing the nighttime lawn. It was a picture no camera could take. There was no moon, though there was a bulge in the sky, a great pillow of lunar brightness in the heavy clouds that lit her. Seen from my upper window she appeared to be fleeing for her life, dying and disappearing as she ran, like an inkblot that was once a word. She was silver-black on the silver-black grass and the Sound was striped with wicked white froth. She had the movement of a flightless bird and I knew I was responsible for this grounded owlet careering into the dark.

I'll never forgive you
is an absolutely meaningless sentence; but her threat was real. People kill for love, perhaps only for love or the loss of it. And I knew better than to press my luck. So far I had cleared my way toward Orlando, and though I was relieved that he had used my story as an occasion to dismiss Blanche—what was it she'd said?
For some reason he wanted to believe your lie—
I was hurt that he had had an affair with her in the first place.

I decided to go away for a while, as I had said. Florida was the easiest destination, since Papa and Mama were there, soaking in dejection like runaways. I had an inkling that some great fortune awaited me there, just as I was certain that on my return to the Cape Orlando would be here with his arms folded and his hair blazing like a coronet and saying, “I've been looking all over for you!”

And yet, already, I had begun to know regret. So much had happened to me, but I had so few pictures of it. I stood on a crack that divided my life from my work, perceptible only to me. Beyond the crack everything was lighted wonderfully, behind it was the shadow in which I lived, for which I had no photograph or permanent record. I could chuck my camera away and march forward and melt into art; or I could step back from the thin line that would become an unbridgeable canyon, to give my eyes a chance, in shadow, to gladden with light. I stepped back and loaded my camera.

16

O
R RATHER
not my camera, which was why for a while I was celebrated but remained unknown.

It happened like so many of my pictorial flukes as a contrived accident shortly after I arrived in New York. My morale was high. I felt I had freed Orlando and won him back. This was twelve hours after that battle of wits on the Cape with Blanche Overall, and I had intended to keep moving and continue on a train to Florida. Not that I was afraid of Blanche shadowing me and bashing my brains out for exposing her, but largely because I was so suffused with confidence and wanted to prove that I didn't need the Guggenheim Foundation to get me up the lower slopes of Parnassus, much less to Verona, Florida. But I missed the train, and I found to my annoyance that I would have to spend a whole weekend kicking my heels in New York.

My usual berth was still at the Seltzers', but I didn't want to answer awkward questions. I barely knew myself why I had chosen Florida. I didn't like to think that it was because Mama and Papa were there. The idea of following my parents around struck me as being uncomfortably close to a domestic form of the Guggenheim disease. I was sure that something important awaited me there: jungle, alligators, swamps, Indians, new scenes—sights for sore eyes that I could carry back to overwhelem Orlando with. It was a continuation of the courtship I had been engaged in since the day, twenty years before, when I knew I would have him or go blind. I had turned his head with my camera: photography worked. Now I wished to be triumphant in it and to share my fame with him.

With this mood came a desire to travel. Travel is a funny indulgence, the simple challenge of congenial strangeness to animate portions of the body and soul. Embracing the unknown to find the familiar; a way of remembering.

This was my first taste of travel, and my best. I knew that America had a prodigious madonna's body, and that though our literature had only hinted at what our photography had made explicit—that landscape was anatomy—no country could touch us in a physical geography lavish with brains, breadbaskets, heartlands, a whole wilderness of visceral rivers—so different from the ailing or infantile islands of the world that prevented us from matching view to mood. A country was not a country until you could lose yourself in it, camera-wise: the vagrant surrender of the eye to something flabbergasting. What attracted me then was that I could disappear for a few weeks in the hot green parts that had always reminded me of America's appendix.

But Florida would have to wait until Monday. I had missed the train. I checked into a hotel and lay down in my dark room and became anxious. I had not given my going a second thought, but in that square room with its smudges of reproaching dust, its threadbare seams of sealing wallpaper and the dead echoes of lovers stifling their moans against the bedstead—its history audible in cracks and stains and scorchmarks—in that dark room, that ghost-box of crucified passion and lively sorrow, I felt I did not exist. It was a feeling I had often sweated out: alone, I was sometimes invisible to myself; my inner eye was squeezed shut, I'd quickened and vanished into the obscure room's obscurer dust. It was my art's highest achievement, was it not? The solitary photographer conjuring with her instrument and disappearing at the tippety-top of her own Indian rope-trick?

It was not what I had wanted. It was no joke. Spirited away from all that was habitual, and hooded by the wholly strange room, I was numbed by a sense of nonbeing and needed a witness. In the usual motion of travel this was no great problem, but every room is a six-sided colony of dark rules. It took wit even to remember your name in such a place, or to dissuade yourself that you might, like any lost soul, be paying an unwelcome visit to someone else's body—a person you might yourself have invented.

Ordinarily, it was a convenient panic: it had made me a photographer. In that distant doubting frame of mind I was forced to snap pictures to prove my own existence—make a world from my eye, bring it into focus, stop it long enough to say, “I see!”

Because in my lonely love-struck way I had grafted the camera to my body. I was nothing but a two-legged prop for the winks of this Third Eye.

But on that afternoon, in the New York room where I was no more than an atom of dust in a wisp of light, I needed more immediate proof. I called Orlando.

“Adams House,” came the reply.

“Hello there,” I said, as to a rescuer, and instantly was calmed: here I am, alive and well. “I'd like to speak to Orlando Pratt.”

“Just a sec—I'll get him.”

It's me! Now you know I love you. Blanche is gone. It's all ours—

“Sorry, he's out.”

“Oh.”

“Who shall I say called?”

“His lover—”

Yurble
went a noise in the throat of the line, an amiable chirrup of shock.

“—and I am waiting.”

In the rain, as it turned out. For professional reasons, as much as to kill time, I left the room and set out to buy a new camera. The rain was a handclapping sound, like applause at my feet. I made my way to the East Side, staggering as visitors to New York so often do—something about those right angles.

It was a rolling city and not at all the populous and filthy ruin of traipsing photographers who sought children, derelicts, pigeons, Gushing Hydrant in Harlem, or that old favorite of the Guggenheim Fellow: Ragged Beggar on Wall Street. In my pictures, New York was an ocean liner, unsinkable and majestic, with a lovely curvature from port to starboard, steering seaward on the flood tide of its two rivers, New Jersey and Brooklyn the smoky headlands of friendly coasts. I envied New Yorkers as I envied sailors, and always portrayed them as adventurers with iron stomachs and sea legs, who regarded their glamor with irony and treated visitors as faint-hearted passengers who'd soon disembark. Today there was a gale and the decks were awash.

Weston had recommended the shop Camera Obscura on Second Avenue. It was an uncompromisingly dingy place that catered to what he called “real artists like us,” though I doubt that he was including me in that description.

“I want to see a Speed Graphic, please,” I said to the clerk, who had raised his eyes to me and spread his fingers on the counter.

He sized me up, giving me a chance to decode his own features: polka-dot bow tie, elastic bands on the biceps of his sleeves, restless skinny hands, Harold Lloyd glasses, and too many teeth. His face fit his skull tightly like a zombie's mask and chasing his smirk was a contradiction of irregular bone.

“You don't want anything as fancy as that,” he said, and plucked from behind the counter a goggle-eyed idiot box the size of a lobster trap. “Take this, madam. It's so simple a child can operate it.”

“Sounds just the thing for you,” I said. “Now show me the Graflex.”

This annoyed him, and hoping to put me in my place he went to the stockroom and came out carrying an eight-by-ten monstrosity on a tripod. It was something between a whopping doodad for colonic irrigation and a kind of magician's outfit of mirrors and slots out of which rabbits, boiled eggs, and nosegays of silk flowers were produced. Dangling from its snout was a long hose with a rubber bulb.

“Course if you're really serious about photography you'll want one of these.” He piled the equipment on the counter—lens hood, lenses, filters, film, plates, film holders—then pursed his lips at me in smart-alecky satisfaction.

“I said a Speed Graphic. Do I have to sing it?”

“This is the best camera we've got—”

He ignored my icy stare that was telling him, in a wintry way, to shove it.

“—get beautiful results with this little number.” He grasped the rubber bulb and, leering at me, gave it a salacious squeeze. “I bet a girl like you could use something like this.”

“Do I look like I need an enema?”

“Hey, watch it,” he said. Anger made his face a membrane.

“Ask the top photographers, if you don't believe me. Stieglitz has one. He tells all his people to buy them.”

“I'm not one of his people,” I said. “Anyway, it doesn't look very portable.”

“You don't look like you're going very far.”

I picked up a film holder, a metal sandwich with German words on the crust. “So Stieglitz has one of these, huh? I thought he was still in jail.”

“That's not funny. Stieglitz isn't just a photographer. He's photography.”

I stepped back unconvinced. The clerk had that sour breath I couldn't help associating with baloney, the liar's inevitable halitosis.

“If you believe that, you'd believe anything.”

“Who are you?” he cried.

But I kept my temper and demanded to see the Speed Graphic, and when I found the model I wanted, I said, “Wrap it up—and I'll take a half a dozen of those,” indicating the film holders.

“I've got news for you,” he said nastily. “They don't fit that Graphic.”

“I've got news for
you
, buster. I said I want six of them and some film, and if I get any more of your sass I'll have a word with the manager. Now start wrapping.”

 

It had been Stieglitz who'd refused to exhibit my work in New York—the Provincetown show I had had such hopes for. It seemed to me that Stieglitz in denying me this exposure was trying to thwart me in my courtship of Orlando. Of course, he knew nothing of Orlando, but the fact remained that my sole intention in studying photography was ultimately to persuade my brother that his proper place was with me in my darkroom. Stieglitz had spurned my photographs and in so doing had belittled me as a lover.

If Stieglitz didn't like it, it wasn't photography. Though I considered him of small importance—simply a man who had bamboozled a doting group of people with his lugubrious attentions—I knew that when Stieglitz loaded his camera the world said cheese, or at least his sycophants thought so. He was enthroned in New York in An American Place, his own gallery, and no one could call himself a photographer who had not first wormed some approval from this dubious man. I supposed I could be accused of bias, but I believed the clearest example of his complete lack of judgment and taste was his failure to recognize me as an original.