Picture Palace (2 page)

“What will you say to Greene?”

“I'll wing it.”

On the way to the airport I stopped at The Pancake Man and had a huge plate of blueberry flapjacks with whipped butter and maple syrup. Halfway through I picked up the menu, rolled it into a tube and peered through it: the melting pat of butter was bright and monumental, a great soft raft—the eye is so easily duped. Then I dropped this tube and went on eating, and as I yanched my way through the flapjacks I thought: Look thy last on all things lovely.

3

T
O GET TO
Y
ERP
from this part of Cape Cod you take a white-knuckler with Smilin' Jack at the controls from Hyannis Airport through sea-fog to Logan Airport in Boston. It was a Friday in June and the plane was full. I was jammed next to a character who objected (by meaningfully shifting his legs) to my hand luggage. Off to see her grandchildren, he was thinking. It didn't occur to him that the little old lady was going to London England to photograph Graham Greene. He was sort of kicking and trampling to make room for his feet. I reached down and took my Speed Graphic out from under his moving feet. I loaded it in my lap.

“Nice camera,” he said. “Take care of it.”

“You took the words out of my mouth.”

Waste of a good camera, he was thinking. Snapshots of her grandchildren. Give her an Instamatic; she wouldn't know the difference. He's a Rotarian, stinking with resentment.

“Bumpy,” I said. Why quarrel? The plane was pitching up and down and I thought I would calm him. “It's always bumpy. We'll be on the ground in a minute.”

“I've been on this flight before,” he said, trying to put me in my place.

The pilot's voice came over the loudspeaker:
I'd like to apologize for this aircraft. You might have noticed that it's a little smaller than our usual one
—

“I thought it was a bit tight,” said the Rotarian, and shimmied in his seat.

“It's a Fokker,” I said.

He looked sideways at me.

“Like the one in the joke. General Patton told it to me. About the airman describing a dog-fight—how he shot down this Fokker and that Fokker. His pal looks a bit embarrassed and says to some ladies present that a Fokker is a type of German plane. Heard it?”

“Not that I remember.”

“‘No,' says the airman, ‘these fokkers were Messerschmitts.'”

The Rotarian looked anxiously out the window.

I sat back and lit up a cigarette and when he faced me again I offered him one. “Care for a choke?”

“I gave them up,” he said, with a kind of desperate pride.

“I suppose I should,” I said, and coughed, as I always do when I talk about smoking.

He said, “You'd be doing yourself a big favor.”

“I'm not in any danger,” I said. “At my age.”

“Maybe not.”

I could tell he didn't want to talk, which irked me. I wanted to tell him who I was, where I was going, why I had this Speed Graphic in my lap. I had prefaced my joke by saying “General Patton told it to me,” but that hadn't knocked his socks off. Granted he was only about thirty, but he might have seen the movie. Somehow, I had the idea that he disliked me, and I couldn't bear that. I wanted to cheer him up, so I could have the satisfaction of him thinking: Hey, she's not as dumb as she looks!

“The truth is,” I said, as the Fasten S
EATBELTS
sign came on, “the truth is, us old folks get treated like mushrooms.”

“Really?” He gave me that sideways glance again: She's bats.

“Right. We're kept in the dark and every so often someone dumps shit on us.”

He started to laugh as we landed at Logan, and I thought: We made it! I raised my camera and snapped his mirthful face.

“Have a good day,” he said.

“You too.”

4

T
HE
L
ONDON FLIGHT
wasn't leaving until eleven. I checked my suitcase, then went upstairs, swinging my camera. It was an amateur's dream: stupendously high ceiling, mostly lighted air, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy girders, some Walker Evans signboards, Paul Strand peasants waiting for the Alitalia flight, Arthur Penn stewardesses, Harry Callahan white areas, and tiny travelers dozing on their bags as in a Minor White manifestation. Shoot down from the catwalk, title it
Departure Lounge
, and turn pro on the strength of your ironic insight into the static crappiness of modern living. But it looked wonderful to me, and though I could have spent a week doing tight close-ups of a nosegay of cigarette butts sprouting from the sand in a magnificent ashtray—ready-made “Pratts”—I spotted a lunch counter and plopped myself down. Move over, Fatso, we've got a live one.

The waitress in the fluffy cap and calico “Puritan” frock looked up from a five-gallon jar of mustard, and I did her, wham, wham, before she could blink. I couldn't decide whether to have a fishwich or a pizza, so I had a cheeseburger and thought about London. It was exciting to have an assignment, a problem to solve, and no one breathing down my neck. This was life, the camera part of my anatomy, a glimmer in my guts that helped me see. It was June, I'd be staying at the Ritz—what could be cushier? Yerp! I remembered what Frank had said about my going, how he had tried to invent reasons for my staying home. Admit it, he was saying, you're dead; and in the retrospective—a word I was already beginning to hate—I saw my obituary in pictures. I found myself loathing Frank for his interest in my work and dreading what my pictures would add up to. This thought affected my digestion: grumbling ruins one's taste buds. I concentrated on London. I would be there a week—a long time between cheeseburgers. I laughed out loud and ordered another one.

“What's the flick?” I asked two hours later as I handed over my boarding pass to the man at the gate.

“We don't show in-flight movies at night,” he said. He winked. “But I'll do my best to keep you entertained.”

I said, “Act your age, buster, or I'll call a cop.”

The plane was less than half full. I had three seats to myself and, after take-off, got a pillow and blanket and curled up. I had a bad case of heartburn—all that food—but I was dead tired. The last thing I heard was the pilot giving our altitude and saying that in an hour or so we would be flying over Gander, Newfoundland. And we had, he said, a good tailwind. I woke up in a red dawn that was spilling across a snowy sea of clouds, the kind of arctic meringue that wins photo competitions for its drifts of utter harmlessness, impenetrably stylish in soft focus. I rejected it for a clumsy shot up the aisle, forty-five elbows and an infant hanging on the curtain to First Class, like a child face down in a deep well.

And the next I knew I was in an English taxi, rattling through London traffic, narrow streets, and wooden signs, a damp summer smell of flowers, cut grass and gasoline in the air, and everyone rather pale but looking fairly well dressed in second-hand clothes. It was a bright morning, with the night's residue of rain still hissing against the tires, and the blue sky stuck on the windowpanes of houses that were otherwise spikes and black bricks.

The people on the sidewalks had that mysteriously purposeful attitude of pedestrians in foreign cities, a hint of destination in their stride. I wondered briefly why they weren't on vacation like me; it was as if they were only pretending to be busy. Mine was the traveler's envy: regretful that I didn't belong here like them and finding an unreality in their manic motion.

But the rest looked grand to me and gave me a new pair of eyes that found a rosy symmetry in the red bus passing between the red pillar box and the red telephone booth, a wonderful Bill Brandt nun unfurling in a gust of wind at Hyde Park Corner, and a splendid glow of anticipation—sunlight in the taxi and a vagrant aroma of breakfast cooking—as we raced down Piccadilly. I had the sense of being a dignitary, of momentarily believing in my fame. But that is every traveler's conceit, the self-importance of flying that dazzles the most ordinary stick-in-the-mud tourist into feeling she's a swan.

“Carry your bag, madam?” It was the doorman at the Ritz in his footman's get-up. I almost laughed. I never hear a foreign accent without thinking,
Come off it!
They're doing it on purpose. They could talk like me if they really wanted to.

Inside, I signed the register and the desk clerk handed me an envelope. Spidery handwriting, flimsy notepaper, almost oriental script, very tiny brushstrokes saying,
I shall be in the downstairs bar at
6
. Please join me for a drink if you're free. Graham Greene
.

5

T
HE
R
ITZ BAR
was empty, quiet, but crazed with decoration. I tried to get a fix on it. It was white, with a Bischof gleam, gold-trimmed mirrors that repeated its Edwardian flourishes of filigree and cigar-wrappers, frosty statuettes, velvet, and the illusion of crystal in etched glass. The chocolate box of a whore's boudoir. I guessed I would have to lie on my belly to get the shot I wanted, but then I noticed in all that tedious gilt a man behind the bar polishing a goblet. He wore a white dinner jacket and was bald; his head shone. I saw at once how the crown of his skull gathered the whole room and miniaturized it, and he wore it like a map pasted to his dome. Shoot him nodding and you've got a vintage Weegee.

“A very good evening to you, madam.”

I thought: You're kidding! I said, “A large gin and tonic.”

“Kew,” he said, and handed it over.

“You're welcome,” I said. I expected him to take a swing at me, but he only picked up another goblet and continued his polishing. What a head! It made the wide-angle lens obsolete. But I didn't have the heart to do him. In fact, since arriving in London I had begun to feel winded and wheezy, a shortness of breath and a sort of tingling in my fingers and toes I put down to heartburn and jet-lag.

Greene entered the bar at six sharp, a tall man in a dark blue suit, slightly crumpled, with an impressive head and a rather large brooding jaw. I almost fainted: it was my brother Orlando, a dead ringer. Ollie had grown old in my mind like this. Greene's face, made handsome by fatigue, had a sagging summer redness. He could have passed for a clergyman—he had that same assured carriage, the bored pitying lips, the gentle look of someone who has just stopped praying. And yet there was about his look of piety an aspect of raffishness; about his distinguished bearing an air of anonymity; and whether it was caution or breeding, a slight unease in his hands. Like someone out of uniform, I thought, a general without his medals, a bishop who's left his robes upstairs, a happy man not quite succeeding at a scowling disguise. His hair was white, suggesting baldness at a distance, and while none of his features was remarkable, together they created an extraordinary effect of unshakable dignity, the courtly ferocity you see in very old lions.

And something else, the metaphysical doohickey fame had printed lightly on his face—a mastery of form. One look told me he had no boss, no rivals, no enemies, no deadlines, no hates; not a grumbler, not a taker of orders. He was free: murder to photograph.

He said, “Miss Pratt?”

A neutral accent, hardly English, with a slight gargle, a glottal stop that turned my name into
Pgatt
.

Mister Greene,” I said.

“So glad you could make it.”

We went to a corner table and talked inconsequentially, and it was there, while I was yattering, that I noticed his eyes. They were pale blue and depthless, with a curious icy light that made me think of a creature who can see in the dark—the more so because they were also the intimidating eyes of a blind man, with a hypnotist's unblinking blue. His magic was in his eyes, but coldly blazing they gave away nothing but this warning of indestructible certainty. When he stared at me I felt as if it were no use confessing—he knew my secrets. This inspired in me a sense of overwhelming hopelessness. Nothing I could tell him would be of the slightest interest to him: he'd heard it before, he'd been there, he'd done it, he'd known. I was extremely frightened: I had never expected to see Orlando again or to feel so naked.

I said, “How did you happen to get my name?”

“I knew it,” said Greene. Of course. Then he added, “I've followed your work with enormous interest.”

“The feeling's mutual.”

“I particularly like your portrait of Evelyn Waugh.”

“That's a story,” I said. “I was in London. Joe Ackerley said Waugh was at the Dorchester, so I wrote him a note saying how much I enjoyed his books and that I wanted to do him. A reply comes, but it's not addressed to me. It's to
Mister
Pratt and it says something like, ‘We have laws in this country restraining women from writing importuning letters to strange men. You should have a word with your wife'—that kind of thing. Pretty funny all the same.”

Greene nodded. “I imagine your husband was rather annoyed.”

“There was no Mister Pratt,” I said. “There still isn't.”

Greene looked at me closely, perhaps wondering if I was going to bare my soul.

I said, “But I kept after Waugh and later on he agreed. He liked the picture, too, asked for more prints. It made him look baronial, lord of the manor—it's full of sunshine and cigar smoke. And, God, that suit! I think it was made out of a horse blanket.”

“One of the best writers we've ever had,” said Greene. “I saw him from time to time, mostly in the Fifties.” He thought a moment, and moved his glass of sherry to his lips but didn't drink. “I was in and out of Vietnam then. You've been there, of course. I found your pictures of those refugees very moving.”

“The refugees were me,” I said. “Just more raggedy, that's all. I couldn't find the pictures I wanted, so I went up to Hue, but they gave me a lot of flak and wouldn't let me leave town. The military started leaning on me. They didn't care about winning the war—they wanted to keep it going. I felt like a refugee myself, with my bum hanging out and getting kicked around. That's why the pictures were good. I could identify with those people. Oh, I know what they say—‘How can she do it to those poor so-and-so's!' But, really, they were all versions of me. Unfortunately.”