Picture Palace (7 page)

There was a scrape of feet on the walls, a man walking down the alley. He heard us laughing and looked up, and stared and smiled. Then, I could not have put his thoughts into words, but somehow I knew that if there had only been one of us he would have passed on. He lingered below us. Instinct told him we were brother and sister, not a single image but a double creature, a pair fleetingly but profoundly glimpsed: a dream of love, charming and indivisible. I read his thoughts and saw he was blessing us with his envious approval. We had made his day, he had changed our lives. I took Orlando's hand, drew him to me and kissed his cheek. The stranger was delighted; he watched us until the music knocking on the fire-door called us in. Afterward, I knew he would root for us in his dreams, and dream continually, and as long as he dreamed of us I would love Orlando. If I could assign a date for the beginning of my loving Orlando it would be that afternoon in April, when I saw consent in that stranger's eyes.

I never wanted a pony. Orlando did. I asked for it so that he would want me, and when I got it he did, I could have had anything; I wanted Orlando. And that was how I learned the difference between love and pity. Pity was easy, but love seemed a kind of confusion that made the lover both cannibal and missionary, touched with every emotion except doubt. I loved him, I knew I would be blind without him. He had grace; he was blameless because he was beautiful; he was my missing half, whom I did not in the least resemble. It is not odd that I associate love with childhood. Lovers are always children, because love is ignorant risk-taking—a stifling illusion of the unattainable, most passionate at its most impossible and nonexistent otherwise. I never once remembered what he was, I knew only what I wanted him to be, because together, in Orlando and me, I saw perfection: body and soul.

 

It was another summer—easy for me to prettify with fragrant detail after so long, but memory willfully erases grandeur and sorts what is left: the leather smell of the rumble seat, the cushion stitches, the cloud of dust we raised. Orlando sat between Phoebe and me as we jounced down Great Gammon Road, off to Hyannis and Papa's sailboat. Orlando's face was shining with pleasure. He was happy; I wanted to be happy. He was handsome; I coveted that. Having him I could have everything, and it was as if the bargain had been sealed. I was sure of it when he put one arm around me tenderly—his other he threw around Phoebe—his trust resting lightly on my shoulder. It was a certainty. He could not refuse me, nor would I share him.

I remembered nothing of the sail itself, and my photograph of the afternoon showed Orlando and Phoebe in wet clinging bathing suits. Perhaps they swam, perhaps I crouched under my sun hat: some photographs say very little.

That night I could not sleep. I was fourteen and had my own room—pictures everywhere, curling edges, stuck to the walls, several albums already filled. The child's bedroom is a forcing-house of longings, and there were mine, scattered around and on view, an early intimation of the artist's magpie mind evident in the clutter, my refusal to discard the mountain of trifles my hobby had produced for me. I lay in bed and thought of Orlando and drew inspiration from my pictures: I knew what I had to do.

I crept out of bed and down the darkened hall, then stood inhaling varnish. The house seemed, as it did on dark nights when I was awake and clammy, as if it were going to fall down. I could hear its frantic crickets, the abrupt groanings of its floors, its beams warning me with grunts. At night it seemed empty and unsupported, and now it trembled under my prowling feet as if a phantom occupant was hurrying away. The floor had tilted like a ramp, tipping me forward on my errand. I expected to hear the splintery sigh of woodwork, a little shake, and the whole place on my head in furious collapse. Yet it held: a miracle.

Orlando's door was open a crack and showed more darkness. I rapped twice; I didn't speak.

He did, instantly, in a clear voice: “I thought you changed your mind.”

I entered. He was nowhere. I heard him breathe from the bed, a sound that lit him like a lamp, and I could feel his warmth from where I stood. The darkness that hid him made me small and noisy. I shuffled across the room, my nightgown going
floop-floop
, and got into bed. I felt for him, searched the cool sandwich of sheets with my hand. He wasn't there.

“Over here, silly.”

And then I saw his shadowy outline in a chair just beyond the bed. So he was up! No wonder he sounded so wideawake! He had been waiting for me.

He sprang into my lap. I caught him with my knees and he hugged me gently, steadying my plump damp arms with a caress and saying, “How do you like this?”

I kissed him. He sniffed and sighed.

“Maude?”

Fumbling in my terror I said, “I was afraid of the dark.”

He yanked the light on and we reacted to the brightness that splashed our faces, making wincing masks, squinting as if we had soap in our eyes and trying to swallow the light.

He said, “Let's play cards.”

I thought it was a euphemism for a better game and was aroused. But he meant what he said: he was innocent, in rumpled pajamas, just eight years old.

The moths watched us at the screens where they clung, and at dawn, when they shriveled and shut, deadening themselves for the day, and the birds racketed beneath the window, I took myself back to my room. I thought: I will kill anyone who takes Orlando away from me.

It was an easy vow. A family, if it is large and well-connected, is like a religion. It serves the same purpose—to bewitch the believer with joy and offer him salvation; it consoles, it enchants, it purifies. It is roomy seclusion, a kind of sanctified kinship, as much faith as anyone needs. Many religions attempt, unsuccessfully, to be families, but ours worked: on Grand Island we were fenced in from marauding infidels. We had money, space, a prospect of the sea, and like other Cape Codders we were ancestor-worshippers. We had our own reverences and secrets; we were safe: house, windmill, paddock, orchard, shoreline, jetty, pumphouse, well, summer kitchen, winter parlor, greenhouse, and a private road signposted D
O
N
OT
T
RESPASS
.

We had staked out our territory and we were so secure we seldom ventured to the frontiers. This suggests a savage tribe, hemmed in by menacing jungle; but it was not that—not a small and haunted hand-to-mouth society we'd established—but something much greater, a nearly limitless world of possibility which Papa ruled with kindly intensity. We believed in the pattern we saw; we tried to please each other; we distrusted everyone else. It was a feast. And it was easy for me to turn these loyalties into desire and not want anything to change; to want it all to last forever just the way it was; easy for the passionate virgin I was to see no harm in saying to Phoebe, “When I grow up I want to marry Orlando.”

By the time I recognized my love for Orlando it was too late to do anything about it. But I knew several things: that I would not allow myself to be thwarted; that once I had him there would be nothing left to achieve. So I made my desire a sin because only what was denied me would continue to make me clamor for it. Until then, I had had everything I had ever wanted. It seemed crucial not to have Orlando too soon: the taboo was necessary—it starved me for him and enlivened me with that same hunger.

It was then, by chance, that I learned the value of a camera, how it attracts, persuades, and animates. “Her real love,” Mama had said. I used it on him; I did him all the ways one can do. Orlando was delighted to pose for me, and perhaps he knew that I regarded the camera as my abstracted soul seeking fulfillment. The lens is uncritical; it doesn't make the pictures that desire does, and so the activity itself was my excuse to stay a decent distance from him and yet have him all to myself.

Here he is in the garden in his white suit and boater, showing under the straw lid the jut and nibble of his profile; there, grinning from the window of the summer kitchen with jam on his mouth; making a mouse of his bicep; standing on his head, his flannel cuffs at his knees; streaming with surf in his bathing suit—a set of striped long johns in which his penis showed like a hitchhiker's fist; clamming, with his trousers rolled up; fooling at the windmill, with his legs crossed and his hands under his head, whistling; doing cartwheels in the twilight; lowering his head and peering innocently into my box.

Frank brought me some of these pictures—not all. Where were the others? It was a question Orlando stopped asking. Not lost—I remembered them clearly enough, I could peruse them in the dark, shuffle them like a pack of cards and play them to recreate the past as solitaire. But most did not exist. Again, I had denied myself, for though I took hundreds of them, and fussed over each shot—“a little to the left,” “come forward,” “smile,” “hold it”—often when I trained the camera on Orlando I didn't have any film in it. I wanted more than his picture. The camera was only a stratagem to charm him, a trick that was to turn me into an observer of chance, one of life's onlookers. My instinct told me that a photograph—of which I already had many—only diminished the subject and made it into a trifle. It was something snatched (how apt the term “picture-taking” was!) that afterward seemed much smaller, almost worthless, a feeble duplicate of what I wanted. Photography was in its infancy and so was he.

No film: my confidence trick. He looked at me more sweetly through the lens. Why spoil it with a photograph? I didn't want his brown blur in an album. I loved him and I wanted to sleep with him.

I could see no point in anything else in the world, certainly none in taking pictures. I used the camera to get close to him, but I knew that as soon as we were lovers I would take that empty apparatus and drown it in the deepest part of Nantucket Sound.

 

Going downstairs to Frank after raking over the past I felt awkward, as if I had done some shameful thing alone. Photography had been a companionable if fruitless deception, but this reminiscence seemed so embarrassing when I stopped, as if I had been laboring to uncover some muddy secret, groping for the past on all fours, blundering around in the dark. Already I knew that my retrospective was not his retrospective. He had pictures; I was flying by the seat of my pants. After a morning of it, verifying the pictures he brought me by remembering how inaccurately they portrayed me, I wanted to re-enter the present, just to prove that I existed. I half expected Frank to accuse me with, “What have
you
been up to?”

He did not say a word. I felt like a jackass. Did he see me?

“Hi toots!” I was falsely hearty and wondered if he noticed.

Frank looked up, surprised with handfuls of my photos. His jacket was off, sleeves rolled up, all business. He was shuffling around, thinking with his feet, and there on the parlor carpet like a leaf-storm his latest batch from the windmill. He did not have the slightest idea who I was and what, apart from those damned pictures, I had done.

“Anything more you wanted to see?”

“Not at the moment. I just came down for a whizz.”

He recoiled at my vulgarity, then smacked his lips at an old photo and said, “We'll lick it into shape.”

Not the slightest idea.

“Sure will.”

“Say, Maude, what's this all about?”

And my heart almost stopped. Orlando? Had Frank guessed what I had just disclosed to myself, the sentence I had discovered in the picture palace of my memory:
I loved him and I wanted to sleep with him
? No. It was a rear view, an old shot, the back of a head. It might have been a weasel.

9

M
Y FATHER
was a broker. I was afraid of the word; it suggested damage, like something he did with a pick and shovel, or a sledgehammer—certainly a destructive job. Whatever it was, he sometimes did it in New York, saying “Abyssinia!” and setting off for his “orifice” and now and then including a visit to the “uproar.” In New York he knew some folks (“good scouts”—Papa's highest praise) called the Seltzers who, being publishers, knew everyone. They gave parties where, so Papa said, you might meet people like Scott Fitzgerald and Bunny Wilson and ones even more famous than they at the time, whose names might ring some bells now but don't open any doors, such as Franklin P. Adams. When I told my father I was going to New York he said, “Then you must stay with the Seltzers,” and I was too naive to guess that what he really wanted was for them to keep an eye on me. I was seventeen, still a passionate virgin, had never been to the city and did not know what to drink. Beer made me throw up, and I hated the smell of my parents' whisky lips when they kissed me, as they did at my bedtime. My usual tipple was a glass of expensive burgundy mixed with ginger ale, but even that gave me cramps and dizziness and made me want to lie down. Orlando used to say, “You're a cheap date, Maude.”

But I was no one's date, least of all Orlando's, and he was the reason I went to New York. We had spent the summer of 1923 together on the Cape, which had thrown me into confusion. All that winter and spring I had been there with my mother and Phoebe, studying with Miss Dromgoole, the Anglo-Irish tutor Papa had hired to prepare Phoebe and me for the girls' school in Switzerland. Orlando was at boarding school—Andover—and I had not seen him for months. When he wasn't around, which was more than half the year, I could believe that I was imagining it, that feeling of having a sleek animal in me gnawing my guts so hard I couldn't breathe. In June I felt the creature tear around inside me. The three of us swam, Ollie beat us at croquet, we bicycled over to Hyannisport to help Papa with his boat; and I wanted to tell him about this hungering thing within me. But instead of telling him, I pretended I was angry—to provoke his sympathy, so that he would put his arm around me and ask me what was eating me. Yet I knew I could not tell him the real reason, because that would have been to obligate him with our secret. The next move had to be his.