Picture Palace (12 page)

“Harry doesn't say anything, a grunt like ‘nuh,' but she reaches, too. We start reaching and reaching, and kissing so hard my teeth hurt, then she says, ‘Stop nuh.' This goes on for a few days—no one there, like in the Bible, just Harry and me, boy and girl—and she keeps saying stop. But one day I'm reaching and she's reaching, and I got such a nice grip choking her tadpole she forgets to say stop and we do it, sinning and sweating like holy blazes.”

He raised his speckled eyes and looked at me hiding behind my camera. A great hairy cuddly thing began to carouse in my entrails.

“She cried. I couldn't stop her. But then we knew how to do it, and we kept on, until the summer people came back. I was almost sorry when we weren't alone anymore, and I liked her better than any woman, because she was my sister. That's the truth.'' He thought a moment, then said, “At the end, when she wasn't afraid anymore, she kissed my snake, and I cried I was so happy and pushed her nice little thighs against me ears like I wanted to drown.”

This left me shocked and full of hope. I said, “Weren't you afraid someone would catch you?”

“There wasn't no one, so it was all right,” he said.

For seconds he smiled beautifully, a light filling his face. He dropped his jaw to think, and darkened, and the smile was gone.

I said, “No, like you were before. Smiling.”

He grinned like a jack-o'-lantern.

“Lost it,” I said. “Try again. What were you thinking about?”

He said, “I loved that little girl.”

The smile moved up his face, from his mouth to his eyes, creasing his forehead, making the crystal pimples of sweat meet and run, tightening the skin at his temples and drawing his scalp back, a kind of sorrowing satisfaction.

I snapped the picture and at once the expression passed, as if I had peeled it from his face.

This was my last Provincetown picture. The exhibition, my first, was held in that boathouse on the wharf and Papa and Mama drove up with Phoebe for the opening. Orlando came in the steamship from Boston. I showed them around, introduced them to the gallery owner (who was disappointed by the turnout) and I felt that because of my photographs the place was mine and no one could take it away from me.

Most of all, I wanted Orlando to praise me. Although I did not examine my motives at the time I had gone to all that trouble so he would see I was worthy of him. People praised me for my negative prints of the blacks, but no one remarked on the amorous dazzle on Teets's face. There were murmurs about his perspiration. Subject was technqiue; outrageous truth—the luck of those unusual faces—obscured the fact that on the whole the pictures were fairly ordinary. I knew this and was desolate; and I got no comfort from Orlando.

The real pictures of Provincetown were not to be found in the exhibition at all, but rather at the Town Wharf, not far from where Frank and I had lunch.

Orlando was leaving. He said to Papa, “Well, what about it? Will you let her go?”

“It's her decision,” Papa said.

I said, “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“It's Phoebe,” Papa said. I could see they had been making more plans. While I was going up and down the Cape and to New York, shooting pictures to get them to pay some attention to me there had been some sort of family issue that had nothing to do with me. I was hurt.

Phoebe said, “I don't care.”

“That's not what you said this morning,” said Mama.

“What's going on?” I said.

“The Yale game,” said Orlando in the belittling tone he used when he was embarrassed.

“Some party,” said Papa. “Ollie thinks it would be a good idea if Phoebe went up there. I'm against it myself. I haven't heard anything about chaperones, but you're big girls now and it's up to you whether you want to make something of yourselves or throw your lives away at parties.”

I hated this talk; the hectoring demeaned us, and anyway I
was
making something of myself. We were standing there in the October wind, the gulls clawing at the updrafts, and the waves hurried at the wharf.

“Be a sport,” said Orlando.

“You're more anxious than she is,” said Papa.

“That's a lie,” said Orlando quickly, then he apologized and said, “It's just a weekend.”

Mama said, “I've heard about those weekends.”

“Blanche Overall is going,” said Orlando.

Phoebe said, “So I won't be needed.”

Orlando felt obliged to ask Phoebe, since she didn't have any hobbies and didn't get out much, certainly not as much as I did. The photography I had taken up as a means of attracting Orlando had itself become an activity that displaced him and helped me forget the heartache I felt for him.

I said, “I hate parties and I can't stand football games, but if it'll help matters I'll go.”

“What a good idea,” said Papa.

“At least I can take my camera,” I said.

Orlando was looking at Phoebe and Phoebe was looking at her feet. The wind blew her hair around her face like a yellow silk shawl and it lifted her skirt slightly and pressed it against her round backside and helped it between her legs.

“Maude can keep an eye on things,” said Papa.

“That's right,” said Phoebe suddenly and she looked up at Orlando. “We can all go together—you'd like that, wouldn't you, Ollie?”

It was as if Phoebe knew how he felt about me and was taunting him in a flirtatious way to get him to admit it. I didn't like her for it, but I was interested to see how he would respond.

He looked at the wind, distance and thought in his eyes.

Phoebe said, “I think Maude should go instead of me. She can keep an eye on Blanche.”

“Maybe we should forget the whole thing,” said Orlando, “I can catch up on my reading.”

My heart snapped shut like a purse, with such a deliberate click I imagined everyone could hear.

Orlando pulled his cap down and tugged his coat around him. He didn't look back at me. He walked down the wharf with the gulls diving at him and screeching their blame.

Papa said, “That boy's got a lot to learn.”

Mama said, “He doesn't know what he wants.”

“Stop talking about him like that!” Phoebe said. Her voice went shrill and broke. She stamped her foot. I looked down: her foot was perfect, and prettier than anything I knew. “It's not Ollie's fault—it's mine! Why can't you see that?”

From where we sat, Frank and I, the wharf was a bar of sunlight and seemed to stretch into infinity. I looked down and saw five regretful phantoms pacing out their departures separately, and the big clouds roaring over their heads and tearing into gray rags as they swelled. Then there were only four phantoms and a steamer's whistle, and the wind carrying apologies away and mingling them with the gulls' cries.

12

W
E KID OURSELVES
best, but just for so long, since our moods are visible in our gestures. It was not until I kicked a wastebasket and saw the dent that I knew the true width of my anger. The way I parked and braked the car—Frank let out a little cry—told me I was boiling.

Home again with Frank and the ghosts, I considered that other homecoming. My house on the Sound was at the margin of time, and I never jounced up the driveway without feeling that I was turning my back on the present and gunning my engine at the past. Orlando overshadowed everything.

My Provincetown show was a critical success, which is the worst of flops. Critics were skinflints and browsers; they praised me with their hands in their pockets; they didn't buy—but critics never do. What counted was cash on the barrelhead and a show in New York, and I was very far from that. I was looking for fame, to win Orlando's love. Yet I was unknown, and I had failed to get approval from the only person who mattered to me. In this failure—a camera to me was something to capture Orlando with—I had begun my career as a photographer; it was only failure that inspired me to continue. As long as Orlando eluded me I would work, and when I had him I would close my eyes on the world and start living.

I suppose I had started to doubt that day that I would ever have him. He had left home; his leavetaking had changed him. The rest of us had stayed the same, but he had other absorptions. He seemed different: bigger, shallowly happy, a bit of a glory-boy with a disloyal attention to strangers; it was as if he was ridding himself of his intelligence, substituting action for thought. He spoke of going to Harvard Law School, he became captain of the crew, he waltzed Mama around the parlor and made her squeal like Jocasta for my mismatched
Dancing Partners
. There was hope in his recklessness: one day he might simply jump into bed with me. But he showed no signs of doing that, and it was too late—I was too old—to pay a nighttime visit to his room on one of his infrequent weekends on Grand Island.

So the Provincetown show had gained me very little, but how to explain this to Frank, who was delighted by the day trip? He rummaged deeper into the stacks of pictures in the windmill, and he sorted them and saw my life as an orderly whole, as if, decades back, I had set out to fill his gallery, room by room, for the retrospective. He invented my past from my photographs: I did not recognize myself as the dedicated picture-taker, but what did he know of the thwarted lover?

Frank was striding up and down, rubbing his hands.

“Don't you see?” he said. “That show contained the germ of everything you did afterward.”

“Germ is the word,” I said. “It made me sick.”

But he had found the pictures, every last one, not just the prints I remembered—boogie-men, the blind, the negative prints, the early New York excursions, my Brownie miniatures—but pictures I had no idea I had taken, which showed me experimenting with halation and flare: they were daring and now I saw new features in them, a significance I had missed before. The windmill appeared as a bulky fan in nearly every family shot; there were pictures within pictures—mirrors, windows, reflections on water tumblers; the toes of Phoebe's patent-leather shoes showed a seductress's petticoats—and had she always been a wallflower in
Dancing Partners
? The foregrounds were dated, the shadows were eternal. My camera had seen more than I had.

Frank said he had a great idea: “One room in the retrospective will be your Provincetown show. I'll do a mock-up of a wall in the boathouse—weatherbeaten boards, cracked window, a tape of the surf going
sploosh.
”

“There was no surf.”

“Gulls then, a tape of gulls—
kwahl kwah
!”—so help me, he flapped his arms—“and fishnets. And all your pictures, just as they were. Can you see it?”

“Delete the fishnets.”

He had it all worked out: gulls, timber walls, driftwood, lengths of kelp draped like bunting, and my pictures; a reconstruction. It seemed to me an utterly silly idea.

I said, “I hate to say this, Frank. It wasn't like that at all.”

“But I've found all the pictures! They were in the windmill all this time—you didn't even bother to look.”

“They're only half the truth,” I said. I refrained from going further and telling him that the least important event that year was my show.

“No, let me handle it.” He wouldn't be interrupted—wouldn't pause long enough to find out that there might be more. For him, my pictures were my past. “Your first real show—all those great pictures re-hung. Why can't you see it?”

“I saw it. It didn't matter much then. It doesn't matter at all now.”

“It does.”

“It jolly well doesn't.”

He said, “You refuse to see the integrity of your early work.”

Normally he rubbed his eye with a nervous shameful bunch of fingers when he was telling a lie, like a child hoping he's not going to be caught. I stared at him. He was motionless; he meant what he said.

I tapped a cigarette and lit up, puffing it reflectively to demonstrate that I was taking his suggestion seriously and to keep me from laughing in his face.

“It's all here,” he said, breathing hard. He dealt the photographs importantly onto the table and paced the floor. I had never seen him so excited. His Adam's apple was plunging with certitude. “Look at these people!”

I obliged him and looked.

“You can see a terrific artistic ego in that one—typical overdressed Twenties writer,” he said, pointing to one of a flounder fisherman who had insisted on wearing his Sunday best. “And this derelict,” he went on, drumming his fingers on a morning-after shot of Eugene O'Neill, “you've captured all his hopelessness—the guy's a mess, he's dead, skid-row by the sea.”

I didn't correct him. He believed; perhaps I should have been grateful for that, but he was believing for the wrong reasons. To me the pictures were obvious, and some were grotesque (how could I have had the nerve to do
Eel in a Toilet
?). And the surprises: I had forgotten that boogie-man on the beach, walking away from the camera, his high buttocks and bowed head and the tide wrack of straw and broken boards: all the grays; Orlando and Phoebe solarized in a sailboat, conferring silhouettes; a Cummings I thought I had jettisoned, grinning with heavy sea-slug lips—what a happy man!

Some needed cropping or touching up, I was reminded of my boast. I used to think: No one will make me change a thing; every detail is mine. “Airbrush flies, remove genitals,” someone at the
National Geographic
had scribbled in green ink on my
Caged Baboon—
I had told the editor to take a flying leap. Now the imperfections, the surprises, the successes and embarrassments seemed of no importance whatever.

Still Frank raved. “You were roughing it out, setting yourself on course, looking ahead to refining the shots.”

It is hard to know where true praise ends and the critical leg-pull begins. I felt we were pretty close to the seam. But Frank yammered on without hesitating.