Picture Palace (24 page)

But that was not my picture, for as the band took their seats under my scaffold (and now I could hear them blowing spit out of their instruments) the steam calliope turned in the ring. I could see an old man stoking a furnace at the back end of the organ, getting up the steam by heaving coal into the firebox. He was reddened by the flames and roasting on his little platform like a pig. So my
Stoker
, which everyone took for a portrait of a fireman on a train, was actually a stoker on a steam calliope, a man feeding a fire to make music: the underside of all art. I don't believe there was a photographer in America who would not have preferred the calliope player to the stoker, but I knew the fickle tyranny of patronage—I had a point of view, and I was aware that at the top of this scaffold I was doing my
magnum o
.

“Good evening, gents!” shouted Millsaps the ringmaster, strutting to the center of the ring as the calliope beeped away. He flourished his whip and said, “Once again, the Millsaps Circus is proud to perform for its bennyfactor, Mister Lamar Carney and his esteemed friends. As in other years, we are privvyledged to be invited to do our stuff for the Pig Dinner—”

He went on in this vein, saying what a pleasure it was, flattering the banqueting cigar-puffers, and I saw Carney beaming with each compliment, the pig's head beneath his similarly grinning. But that was not the only resemblance. There were multiple images: Millsaps was also a version of Carney, and there was something of Stieglitz in his whipcracking swagger—even something of Papa and the rest, gloating in their tuxes. Then and there I decided it was how Jack Guggenheim himself looked, a creature of snuffling assurance who believed moolah was power and power license—and sittin on his fat ass and trafficking in taste.

Carney grew impatient and interrupted Millsaps's arrogant fawning. He didn't shout. He sucked the cigar out of his mouth and said sharply. “Cut the crap, Milly, and start the fucking show.”

“Music, maestro!” said Millsaps, and another crack of his whip brought clowns tumbling into the ring. Among them was Mr. Biker, dressed in a Lord Fauntleroy suit; Mr. Biker—the solemn little person from
Boarders
, who had been so nice to me—with his face grotesquely painted; Mr. Biker—whom I had also done on Mrs. Fritts's sofa with the big tomcat on his lap—now riding a child's tricycle, now leapfrogging the other clowns, his tiny legs working like mad and tipping him from side to side when he ran. One would not know from his work that this fool was a man.

This wasn't what the men wanted. Led by Carney, they booed the clowns; they booed poor Orrie who expertly juggled five oranges—booed so loudly Orrie panicked and dropped them; they booed Digit, they booed Turko the weightlifter, and they howled so furiously at a dog act the little mutts scattered yapping out of the ring.

All the while I was doing pictures: Carney, the pig, the drunks in tuxedos, the catcalling. And it dawned on me that the whole purpose of the dinner, like the purpose of patronage, was a meal ticket to mock, to sit in judgment upon people whom money had made into clowns. They craved a chance to boo, and I saw Papa laughing with the rest of them. I didn't mind doing his picture anymore, because this was the truth. Each picture made me ever more solitary: photography was something that rid me of images by disposing of the visible world, a lonely occupation that made me lonelier.

It was about fifteen minutes after these acts came on, with the band crashing and the men booing, that the others started. There were trumpets and drum-rolls. I saw them enter; I verified them in my viewfinder, then I looked at Monk, who was working a spotlight at them. Monk was nibbling his lip and though I was not in his way he was saying, “Shift, shift.”

I couldn't believe my eyes, but I believed my camera. First, Harvey and Hornette, galloping in on a white horse; then the Flying Faffners, Kenny and Doris, prancing back and forth on the high wire; then a girl named Glory, whom Millsaps introduced, as he had the others, by screaming her name and cracking his whip. The circus ring was in motion and up above, Glory was swinging on a trapeze over the heads of the men at the tables.

The men had gone silent. They craned their necks at Glory. No boos for this; the only sounds were the horses' hooves, the band playing “The Loveliest Time of the Year” in a muted quickstep, and the squeak of the trapeze ropes; and the reason was the costumes, for they had no costumes.

They were stark bare-ass naked, Harvey and Hornette wobbling on their horses, the Faffners upstairs on their wire—their bums shining in Monk's spotlight—and Glory, a stripped doll on her trapeze swooping with her legs open. The nakedness alone didn't shock me; it was their movement—they were endangered white figures and looked unprotected in their skin. Glory flung herself backward, started to fall and caught her ankles on the bar, hung briefly like a side of meat and then came at Carney reaching and so fast her breasts were yanked and I could hear the wind rushing against her navel.

There were tumblers. They came in a small jalopy and piled out, twelve of them, boys and girls, with springy bodies, doing cartwheels and handstands—such a splash of energy it was hard to tell they were naked except by the tufts of hair between their legs. They tumbled in pairs, linked in a brisk double image, repeating around the ring, miraculously missing the horses' hooves.

Harvey and Hornette drew level on their horses and Harvey vaulted behind Hornette to a corn-holing posture. The watching men found their voices and rooted loudly. At first all the mounted brother and sister did was canter. As they rode into Monk's green light I noticed their flesh and the horse's, the way their straddling legs clutched the blanket-folds of his muscles and looked so frail and damp. The cries increased, and the band's braying; Hornette stood up and raised her arms, and her breasts jogged as Harvey held her flanks. He got to his feet and around they went, one behind the other, naked on the slippery horse.

Glory had swung to a rope. There was a red stripe on her buttocks where the trapeze bar had cut her. She slipped one foot in a stirrup loop and upside down scissored her legs open—and pulled a length of magician's scarves, knotted end to end, out of her mousehole. She arched her back, and as Monk painted her in light she slipped the other foot in and spun herself to a blur.

The young tumblers made themselves into a pyramid. They pitched forward somersaulting and rolling in the sawdust in brief copulatory gymnastics, the girls on all fours throwing their hair from side to side as the boys rushed them from behind making little slaps as they met the squealing girls.

Body on body, naked, pairing—double exposure: two of everything. And how strange it was when they walked on their hands and showed their beaks and cracks as wrinkled fluidy faces in collars of hair between their kicking legs. But I was frightened by the roar of the men and their table-thumping; by the sight of the circus performers stripped naked, and the grunts that reached me in my cubicle; by the heat. What disturbed me most was seeing people I knew so changed—not just Papa hollering, but Harvey and Hornette belly to belly on the tramping horse.

Nakedness speaks in a way no voice can, saying fear and woe and age. But it wasn't naked anymore, nor a show of muscle and damp hair. It was a thin bruised suit, pale enough for me to photograph the stitchings of veins, and luminous in the cigar smoke and dust and paint. Their defenseless skin! Flesh has a tremble that clothes hide: everything they did looked dangerous.

Typically, the nude is shown in repose or making love. But this was against all tradition—Hornette swiveling by her teeth, the tumblers becoming bizarre people with fuzzy shrunken heads, Hornette rejoining Harvey on the horse. It was unimaginable human motion, animated by a crowd of cheering men. I would not have believed it without my camera.

What Harvey and Hornette were doing at a gallop, the Faffners did on their high wire, without a net. I could barely keep my camera steady when I saw them get down on one knee and face each other, mimic a caress eighty feet in the air, denting the wire where their knees pressed it. They remained suspended, swaying slightly, in a risky balance. Their lips touched and their shoulders met: I expected them to be jerked to the ground and to end up in a broken pudding of arms and legs. This danger made its eroticism vividly blacker.

But they stayed on the wire and continued to simulate the sexual duet. The symmetry anchored them. The pair of them were saved by the electric field of their two bodies: the man and woman joined making them a perfect magnet, incapable of coming loose. She chased him; she sat on his face; she hung by her knees, hinged upside down on the wire and, crouching, he gratified her with his finger, while she rocked back and forth in the air, her arms outspread, like spiders at play.

Hornette was doing a headstand on Harvey's own head, repeating his seated posture in a mirror image. The tumblers had gone off. They were replaced by a lion act, six growlers on red stools making mauling motions with their paws at the naked girl with the whip and chair. I could not bring myself to photograph them licking her, and I looked away when she pulled their tails. But I had six tries at them lunging through her legs and rubbing and lifting her as they passed sleekly under the arch of her thighs.

Flesh had never been mocked like this; bravery and invention and skill had never looked so futile. The laughter was a devilish whooping of encouragement. I looked through the lighted smoke in the noisy pit and saw degraded artists and their maniacal patrons burning with pain and pleasure.

I knew there could be nothing beyond this. My last picture showed a row of men, Papa among them, on their feet behind a table holding the remains of their pig dinner, jugs, and bones; and damnation on their faces and on the tent wall near their heads, like smoke, the crooked shadow of Harvey skewering Hornette. The picture was partly accidental: I was photographing a sorry cry.

Yet I was calm. Pictures are supposed to reflect the photographer's mood, but nothing could have been further from my somber mood than this frenzy. Though I had caught my breath more than once, the only sound I made was the barely audible click of my Speed Graphic's blink.

I had never felt more alone. I had found what I was looking for; and what Hornette had said was true—it was indescribable. The speaker heaves images around, his telling simplifies the truth until simplicity makes it a lie: words are toys. But my camera saw it all, and my photographs were memory. With equipment far clumsier than words, my trap for available light, I could portray what was unspeakable. And now I had the ultimate picture, a vision of hell.

I couldn't face them after that—not Papa, not any of them. It only remained for me to develop and print the pictures and hang them over my name and await celebration. I left that night, before the circus folk got back to Mrs. Fritts's: a taxi to St. Pete and the train to New York.

I spent five days and nights in my darkroom at the hotel, processing the stacks of negatives and printing them. They were even better than I expected: I had snapped a sturgeon and come out with pictures of caviar. I knew when I delivered that portfolio to the Camera Club that it would cause a sensation. Anger is a knowledge of failure; I was happy, calmer than I had ever been. My part as a photographer ended when the pictures were out of my hands—then they belonged to the world. I wanted that, but I wanted more.

20

I
WAS
innocent for the last time, and shivering with cold. The weather contradicted my dream: was there significance in this chilly reality? I had seen myself arriving on a hot evening in dry moonlight; a whisper of wind; a landscape banked like a room. But in my hurry to reach my brother I had boarded a night train in New York after delivering my Florida pictures to the Camera Club. The canal crossing from Onset to Bourne, a mile of metaphor, confounded me by plunging me into dark early-morning mist. The Cape was imprisoned in freezing sea-fog, and dawn was far off. The spikes of mist continued until we were halfway to Yarmouth-port—Sandwich or thereabouts—where it began to lift on the crewcut marshes and revealed in flecks of escaping light nature's frostbitten eyesores.

The Cape was bare and looked assaulted. It was that naked spell in late autumn between the last fall of leaves and the first fall of snow. Damp fields in Barnstable, an exposed farm house in Cummaquid, a frail soaked landscape of harmed hills and squashed grass and sunken meadows. In this stalled season, without muffling foliage or insulating snow, the brooks were louder, the rasp of crows noisier, and the sea-moan a despairing lament some distance inland through the dripping fingers of naked trees. That amplified racket, and the excluding cold, made me a stranger.

In those years, Hyannis was one street—a white church, a post office, a filling station, ten shops. That wet morning its off-season look was gooseflesh and senility, and it wore its shreds of fog like a mad old bride in a torn veil. It jeered at my homesickness and reminded me that home is such a tragic consolation of familiar dullness—that tree, this fence, that shrinking road.

Yet I was as happy as a clam. The photographer's habitual impulse is to go on shooting, despite her incredulity. The camera—her most private room—must be used for memory. But I had taken care of that. On my Florida sojourn I had found the limits of the eye and I believed there was no more to see on earth. I had done air, earth, fire, water, and flesh, and now I could dispose of the world as I had disposed of photography and Blanche and Papa—my obsession, my rival, my patron. What I saw of Hyannis looked ridiculous and insubstantial, but with Orlando all things were possible. I was determined to begin again. It only remained for him to embrace me, for a return home was a return to childhood: a beginning.

I sat in Mr. Wampler's old taxi—a beach wagon with wood paneling on the outside—my camera in my lap, my hands over its eye. We passed
CLOSED FOR SEASON
and
SEE YOU NEXT YEAR
signs. I was lucky. I knew this: we are offered not one life but many, and if we are alert we can seize a second or third. Sorrow is for those who expect too much from one; who, having exhausted all the possibilities of a single life, turn inward and refuse to see that schizophrenia is merely a mistake in arithmetic. When I heard someone described as a split personality I thought,
Only a schizo
? Why choose two lives when so many are available in us? My life as a photographer was over—there were no more pictures to take—but I had other lives in me, and there would always be others as long as I was in love. Wasn't love the chance to lead another's life and to multiply his by your own?