Picture Palace (25 page)

With Orlando I could be anyone I wished. It was the feeling I had known as a child, a longing buttressed by hope, and during that brief ride out to Grand Island from the railway station I felt a tide of blood batter my heart and at last a great warmth—though the day was bleak; and a blossoming of optimism—though the mist at the windows had turned to pissing rain. I was drenched in a freshet of joy as we bumped over the sand sludge that rutted the road.

There was the letterbox stenciled
PRATT
and the house snug on its own stretch of coast and surrounded by pines. Behind it, where the bare orchard began, was the looming windmill with its sails anchored, and some straggly dead geraniums blowing in the window boxes. And a maroon car parked near the house: Orlando's Hudson.

“This is far enough.”

“Can't stop here,” said Mr. Wampler. Mr. Wampler had a froggy voice; a tobacco-chewer, he spat often and inaccurately; he was known as “peculiar.” He jerked his thumb at my peepshow in the back of the beach wagon. “Can't carry it all that way—not with my back.”

“Stop the car,” I said. “I want to walk.”

“Too damned much to carry—”

“Leave it here by the letter-box.”

“The rain'll raise hell with it.” He put on his “peculiar” face: puzzlement, glee, incomprehension.

“I don't give a hoot about the rain. I don't need this stuff anymore.”

Mr. Wampler was still protesting as I paid him. I heard the thud of my trunks hitting the roadside as I made my way up the long drive toward Orlando. Instead of using the knocker, I let myself in with my key, and I saw my hand trembling to turn it. I pushed the door open and waited for some responsive sound of welcome. But there was only the grumble of the taxi dying on the road, and the regular slap of the sea, waves emptying on our length of beach.

My dream had been flawed. I knew even then I had been deceived by its moony romance. I was cold. It was a weakly lighted morning, with a storm pushing at the house. My moonlit windmill was fanciful. I corrected my dream: I would find him here, in the house. And he
was
here—there was his car, parked under the leafless birch.

I stepped in and slammed the door, walked from the parlor to the kitchen. Dishes in the sink and a smell of coffee: hope. I went up the backstairs and groped down the dark hall trying the doors, opening them left and right. Then I was at the front of the house again and looking back at the hall brightened with all the doors open. Not a sign of him. The rain simpered monotonously on the windowpanes, the wind sniffed at the eaves.

Of course! He had gone out. He had risen, made his bed, had a coffee, and gone for a walk in the hope that I would be here when he returned. Orlando loved rough weather. I made my way to the parlor and laughed out loud—a great hollow yuck—when I noticed that I was still wearing my huge camera. I had grown so used to its weight and the strain of its strap I hadn't felt it. I did not unharness myself, but rather relished its tender and useless weight.

The parlor mirror showed me this businesslike person which, even as I gazed, I ceased to believe in. And it was then—my image fading almost to transparency—that I saw its reflection.

It was movement, it was white, and it appeared as a little flash in the windmill at the depths of the mirror. A swatch of hair, a hand, a face; I could not tell. But the sudden warmth of this tiny signal stirred a creature in me, and it stretched and shook itself and blinked as I brought my face close to the glass for more. My dream had made me cautious, but this was as I had imagined it: the beckoning stroke of light—he was there, he was waiting, through the looking glass, in the windmill.

I woke from this pause and ran through the house, out the back door and squelched across the grass of the sodden lawn. But even as I ran I was holding back. I had waited so long for this—contained my innocence for so many years—I kept myself from rushing to the windmill's narrow porch and bursting in. My habit of innocence was its own restraint, and the stinging rain from the low cloud slowed me. I was terrified by what I knew was about to happen, as if I were seeing a fuse sparking toward the cylinder of a bomb and anticipating the boom in willful deafness.

And for the first time in my life I knew real fear, a corrosion in my brain that had eaten to a core of panic, shrieking
No! Give up! Go back!
Frightening me with images of insane joy, drooling thunderclouds, the flooded beach, and showing me risk in the great high sails of the windmill—the blades shuddering and the spit of raindrops sizzling on the windows of the black tower. All the trees pulled at my hair and light was bleeding from my eyes as I fought my way to the wall.

So I did not go in, and I was weeping before I raised myself to the spattered window and saw him. He was on his knees, the veins standing out on his forehead, marble and blood, in a posture of furious pagan prayer, his mouth fixed in demand. There were clawmarks on his shoulders. He might have been swooning, dying in a fit, he looked so tormented.

His reflection blazed on the floor, a white shadow struggling under him, his double heaving at him. This was my dream exactly: the two bodies creased, light on light. I raised my knees and clasped my ankles at the small of his back and thrust and we were almost there, in a spasm of completion, one body. I twined my hands on his neck and lifted to press myself against him and print my body on his. It was better, wilder than I had imagined, and it refuted the conceit I had carried home about nothing more to see, for there was more and more, a limitless vision that mocked my certainty. The eye was a palace and the world inexhaustibly lovely. I was humbled—terrified—and then by an old reflex I was seeing it all through the intense light of my Third Eye; and at last I understood that it was not me panting against him and raising my throat for him to kiss—not me, but Phoebe.

She called out and the next instant passed into him with a sob and was lost: they were one. Throughout, a clicking had sustained me. But each click was a subtraction of light and finally my feeble effort to see caused a last click and I was blind.

And yet, as if sighted, I went back to the house, to my room, and put my camera down. I hadn't stumbled. I hardly knew what had happened. Everything was in order. I heard the rain, the waves breaking on the beach, my gasps. But my doubt would not leave me—something was undone. To the mirror, then. I took four steps to the far wall and gazed. And tried again. It was hopeless. I had no face.

 

 

 

 

21

T
HE TELEPHONE
was ringing again, a clanging that caused an itch in my finger joints, the tip of my nose, my tongue. My eyes were in mourning. Blindness, the black sparks of light in its infancy, had stimulated my other senses, given me a responsive circuit of naked nerve ends to compensate for my blindfold. My scalp told me the temperature; my ears were photosensitive; I followed my nose. My retina was a blur of glaucous shoes, and beyond it, in my eye socket's depthless jelly, I swam and tried to surface. But I was slow, and though my being never ceased to throb with the slurred tatoo of time, I felt submerged and misunderstood. Imagine a lovely pellet of amber trapped in a dead fly. I was bashed with energy and suffered a continual buzz of sensation. Imagine a worm squeezed in its burrow, or a clam in a gale.

I was blind, but my body was alight.

“It's another cable from the Camera Club,” said Orlando.

They had stopped delivering them; they were phoning them through. From across the room I could feel the receiver heating in Orlando's hand.

“That makes twenty,” said Phoebe. “Aren't you thrilled?”

“What'll I tell them?” said Orlando.

“If it's money, say yes. If it's more congratulations, say thank you. If they haven't paid for a reply, forget it.”

Phoebe said, “You're a hit, Maude! Won't Papa and Mama be pleased!”

They were still in Florida. What was keeping them? I said, “They'll die when they see me like this.”

Phoebe was approaching me. I heard the crunch of her petticoat. I could practically taste her oncoming hair. She had started a warm draft that reached me when she was still ten feet away.

She said, “It's just temporary—eyestrain or something. Think of all the pictures you've taken. You'll see.”

Her tone was confident. But Phoebe had bought me a pair of smoked glasses and urged me to wear them. I knew it was because she couldn't stand my staring eyes.

“Sure I will.” They did not know why I was blind, what I had seen. My success had caused my breakdown: fame, overwork, exertion. It's only natural, they said. They had no idea that I had had two lives, that the one I had valued most had failed me, that it had nothing to do with my career.

“Won't she, Ollie?”

Now Orlando was approaching Phoebe. I heard his wink, like an aperture shutting; heard the skid of his cheek on hers, and their soft soap-bubble kiss, and his disguising heartiness: “You're going to be all right, cookie.”

“I'm all right now,” I said. “It's high tide. The gulls are sunning themselves on the roof. Scallops and mashed potatoes for lunch. And I love you in that green dress, Phoebe, with your new petticoat all stiff and crackly.”

Orlando said, “How does it feel to be famous?”

I wanted to say,
Quit looking at me like that
. But I didn't want him to know that in our games of Blindman's Buff I had learned to see.

I said, “Remarkable.”

Blindness was not oblivion—not here, at home. I knew every inch of the house, every chair and table, the position of the radio, the ashtrays, the clock, the nap of every carpet. Experience was the same as sight, and my blindness made the touch and smell of the house much keener. I could walk from room to room without faltering or sticking my hands out. And my blindness made me see what my pictures never had—that it was a creaking wreck of a place, with musty and moth-infested corners, a cupboard of family intimacies. Nothing had changed in the house, but I had not understood its secrets until now. In a way, I had been blind before. I ought to have seen, years ago, that Orlando and Phoebe were lovers. But, then, I'd had only my eyes.

All the pictures I had taken were diminished by what I discovered to be true. I hadn't begun to be a photographer. I had once thought, when I had done blind old Mrs. Conklin and Slaughter the piano tuner, that blindness was serene, like sleep. But it was not that at all. It was ceaseless vision, a babble of voice: the floors spoke, the walls, the potted plants, the books on their shelves, every phase of daylight—nothing was more audible than dawn, or Orlando's look of pity, or Phoebe's skin. Shouts and whispers; and each sound was a vivid picture, reminding me that I had seen nothing.

I remained shut in. I was in the ultimate darkroom, my body. It is every desperate soul's best refuge, and its darkness gave it a startling size, the dimensions of a cathedral, and the iron and stone echoes of an oubliette. So my body seemed a camera obscura conceived on a vast scale—not the hot little chamber I had sometimes dwelled in, but a great thing, with space for the most complete pictures, memory's cyclorama towering at the back of my mind. But this one had no pinhole, no meniscus lens. It was in utter darkness, a total absence of light, the original darkroom, before the slightest puncture of violation.

Sealed by this virginity I ought to have been wrapped in silence, entombed and mummified by my thwarted sensuality, and remorsefully lonesome. But I wasn't. I had remained motionless in my chair; I had heard the distant whispers saying
shock
and
breakdown
. I knew the words—they went with “nerves,” they made you cry, they embarrassed your family. You were pitiful. You couldn't cope. You apologized. You said, “I don't know what's got into me.” You were drowning: everything had gone black.

I shed many tears before I realized that I had been turned inside out. I was restored. This darkness revealed like light. The victim of a breakdown is speechless. The vocabulary of despair is so limited; indeed, despair is the end of language, merely sobs and babytalk. And here visions begin. The pictorial faculty, the mind's picture palace, has nothing to do with language, and in an inward way the images came so fast I could barely get a fix on them. I had been deceived by my eye; I was not deceived by my blindness. All my senses but one informed the pictures. There was in my vision a purity and sharpness found only in the symphonies of deaf composers and the eloquent monologues in the minds of dumb statesmen.

Blindness is not simply a loss of sight, a shade drawn on the world. It is a void. It makes you vanish. You are invisible to yourself. Its onset is darkness, within and without, like the start of the long swim from the womb where one's suffocated soul bawls out of terror. Much worse than the outer darkness is this inner state of gloom which seems deaf and mute and everlasting and lifeless. I couldn't reason. I had turned into a bat, and if—as I imagined—I killed myself, I would bleed spurts of ink. Blind things were blind inside and out: the clam a muscle of sand and sinew, the worm crammed with dirt.

I was sludge.

“What happened?” Orlando had said that morning. “Why are you looking like that?”

I had no reply. I lay shut and sealed on the floor like an ugly box without an opening. For that was how they found me—in my room, with rain on my face, stiff and sightless. I had just banged down and didn't care.

Then, with the first phone call from New York, I began to stir, like a bean-shaped fetus in a sac. I kicked timidly to discover I was buoyant. I rummaged in the darkness and gasped. I could make out shapes—shades of black—inviting passages, praises carrying from unexpected quarters. I risked the journey over nearly familiar paths made wonderfully dangerous and exciting by their new feel. A great river ran through me and I followed its fury to a landscape of crystalline voices raised in sweet song. It was a world of the permissible, a kingdom without demons or monsters, better than the one I had known. Children played here, the boy and girl in their nakedness; there were lambs; it was the world before the fall. It was dark, but the darkness did not threaten. I absorbed it and found it kind. I had tunneled serenely beyond fear to be reborn and to recover my innocence. My blindness had taught me to see.