Picture Palace

28. Spitting Image

“ALL MANIACS have a spitting image,” I was saying to Frank. “And listen — not only maniacs!”

Our Guggenheim Fellow was still rifling the windmill. Though I had kept pace with him in recalling the circumstances of the pictures he had progressively unearthed, I had paused so often to frame these strange events in my mind that my own retrospective lagged behind the pictorial one he was assembling. I was like a child being led away, but delayed on her journey because she keeps glancing back to remember. Mentally, I was in London, reading the terrible telegram: I had no picture of that. What happened next? I was stuck in grief, and Frank had skipped ahead ten years or more, sorting pictures of yet another European visit. In his hand was the portrait of Ezra Pound which, a moment before, occasioned my remark about maniacs.

It was the crazy-haired old man portrait showing Ezra the ham-bone singing loony tunes with his eyes shut. Ro-hoses are bloo-hooming, Te-hell me troo-hoo.

“What I don’t get,” said Frank, rattling the picture — he had more under his arm, the morning’s harvest—“is why didn’t you have a retrospective ten years ago?”

“Because it would have meant,” I said, and I stopped. I looked at his silly searching face: if I told him some I’d have to tell him all. I said, “I didn’t go into the windmill ten years ago.”

“You don’t go in there now.”

“Troo-hoo,” I said, glancing at Ezra. Or twenty, when I did this European batch; or thirty, when I arrived after the long flight from London — too late to go to Orlando and Phoebe’s funeral. What was the point in my delving? The windmill, however palatial a structure — raised up on our Cape Cod lawn like a Dutch forgery — had become an anteroom of my memory, a catchbasin for my pictures, an attic, a shrine. It was to my work what a corresponding piece of my bunched-up brain was to my life, another set of crenelations and ramparts, containing the past. As a picture-taker I had ruled like a queen, but in this retrospective I wished to be a subject.

I had always been orderly: I threw nothing away. The windmill held my photos and the picture palace of my imagination another set, a different version of the past. I had thought that someday I would chance the windmill — I’d go in and have a good look. But I had not dared: ghosts thrashed on the floor, the double image of lovers who had not known what I had seen in those blinding seconds before the war. It had never been mine, not any more than Orlando had been mine. I could use it like an attic, but like an attic it was not a place I could live in. I would not deceive myself further or disturb those ghosts.

All Papa had said was, They went out too far. Of course: it was why they had been so happy and why they died. I accepted the explanation, and I wasn’t desolated, because a person’s death is easier to take if he had known a great passion. Only the death of children, of the ignorant and inexperienced, is truly tragic, the loss of people who die never having lived. I could not but feel that, out too far and knowing the risks, Orlando and Phoebe had capsized and danced on the waves for a while in each other’s arms. Celebrating their secret, they had known ecstasy.

It had nothing to do with me. They had lived without me and loved and died; and neither had seen me. It had made me solitary, which is the first condition of a photographer. I was, as I had always been, alone, just a peeping picture-taker. Don’t mind me — pretend I’m not here. And the windmill with its stilled sails, once alight with their love, was all that remained. I might stick my head in and leave my pictures behind, but I had no right to linger there. They had consecrated every corner. It was a shrine: I left my pictures as offerings.

Knowing what I knew, it was almost amusing to hear Frank ask me why I had never rifled the windmill myself and assembled a retrospective. Ignoramuses pose the hardest questions!

But I could not be angry with Frank. He was doing the spadework. Interested in my pictures he had interested me in my life, and his sifting and sorting had made it possible for me to re-enter the past without going into the windmill. He preceded me, cued me, triggered my memory; he was the mechanical medium by which I could examine my picture palace. But my work — as I had told him — was the least important thing about my life; and the rest, which had always been separate and impermanent, a source of ceaseless wonder.

The fellow knew nothing. He did not even know Orlando’s name. For Frank, I was my work, and short of autobiography there seemed no way of proving to him that my story was not in my pictures. It was all off-camera, in the pitch of my blind body’s witness. And yet I needed Frank to remind me of that contradiction.

“I’ve always liked this one,” he said, still looking admiringly upon the squinched face of Ezra Pound, that crumpled rubber road map.

“That’s just what I mean,” I said, following my own train of thought. I wondered if I should let him in on the secret. “There’s quite a story behind that picture.”

He became attentive in the cringing way that is characteristic of fellowshippers who are fearful, hearing a secret revealed, that their reaction might be wrong: they might laugh too hard or too soon or not at all, the cash a dead weight on their sense of spontaneity. “I’ve got work to do,” Frank was always saying — but if I found it hard to take my own work seriously, how could I keep a straight face about his?

“I remember when this baby appeared,” he said, holding Ezra up, sort of mounting him in the air. “It caused a sensation.”

“A certain flurry,” I said, and looked at Frank. Over several months, while I had been preoccupied with my life and Frank with my work, he had changed his image. Some wild access of confidence? The Guggenheim money? He had let his hair grow over his ears, he wore bell-bottom trousers with three-inch cuffs, and russet clodhoppers with four-inch heels. His pink shirt was open to the navel, so I could see on his skinny curator’s chest two strings of beads. Beads! They matched the beaded bracelet where his watch had been. Very stylish, but he could not quite bring it off. He looked uneasy in the clothes, like a damned fool in fact, who had gone too far and suspected that I might mock him. But I only found the clothes discouraging. As soon as I saw those beads and platform shoes I knew I could not possibly depend on him.

“Wasn’t it the first picture of Pound to appear after he was let out of the funny farm?”

I said, “One day I was in a magazine office in New York and the editor says, ‘Have a look at this — ever see anything like it?’ It was a picture of a turkey buzzard pouncing on a snake — three pictures, actually, the approach, the snatch, and the getaway. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ he says. I agreed. But it was too amazing — so perfect I didn’t believe it. Anyway, wildlife photography seems as silly to me as talking animals. I says, ‘There’s something about that snake. Doesn’t it seem rather limp to you?’ He was annoyed. ‘You think it’s a fake?’ ‘Just dead,’ I says. He tried to defend the picture. ‘But it’s a fine turkey buzzard!’ he says. ‘What turkey buzzard,’ I says, ‘would want to eat a dead snake?’ We looked at the turkey buzzard, a rigged-up bird with crooked wings. I says, ‘Stuffed. And the mountain looks pretty suspicious, too.’ I thought that man was going to cry.”

“Wait a minute,” said Frank. “Does that have anything to do with this picture of Pound?”

“Everything,” I said. “It’s a turkey, isn’t it?”

Frank said, “You’re always so critical of your work.”

“You’d be critical too, if you were in my shoes.”

“They’re great pictures.”

“They’re stiffs,” I said. “They don’t matter. If you had any sense you’d see that.”

“You know,” he said, fingering the beads around his neck, “I’m glad I’m doing this retrospective. The way I see it, I’m kind of saving you from yourself.”

“Listen, buster. I took that picture in Italy around ’fifty-nine or so. I’d been sent to do a photographic essay on Cocteau and Picasso, but Venice wasn’t far from Cannes and my editor was screaming for a glimpse of Pound, who’d just been let out of his rubber room. The only thing was, he refused to see me. His wop servant slammed the door in my face. ‘We don’t want any!’ T. S. Eliot gives me a pep talk and two cups of tea, and Pound won’t even give me the right time. Anyway, a few days later, I’m on the coast in Rimini having some spaghetti and I look up and who do I see walking by the restaurant? Ezra! I whistled down my noodles and rushed off in hot pursuit. Ezra’s just strolling along, tapping his walking stick and singing. It was unmistakably him, whiskery and old, in a floppy hat and jacket. ‘Wait a sec,’ I said, ‘aren’t you Ezra Pound?’ He sort of grins and says, ‘Waal, bless my buttons,’ and shows me his fangy teeth. We start talking about poetry — Eliot, Cummings, Frost, whoever. He names someone and I say, ‘I’ve done him.’ ‘How about a cup of tea at my place?’ he says, and I can’t believe my luck. My picture’s as good as in the bag.

“Up the road we enter the courtyard of a run-down palazzo. He takes me into the study, a funny little room — there’s a small bookshelf with only three books on it. ‘The greatest books ever written,’ he says. Gone With The Wind, The Pisan Cantos, and Picture Palace, by a man called R. G. Perdew. ‘I’ve heard of the first two, and I love the title of the third one,’ I said, ‘but who’s this R. G. Perdew?’ He said, ‘Why, that’s me!’ ‘You’re not Ezra Pound?’ I asked. ‘Occasionally,’ he said.

“Occasionally? It turns out that this guy’s pretending to be Pound — wants people to take him for the poet, even writes letters to him. ‘Do me a favor,’ I says. ‘Ask your friend Pound if he’ll let me do him. I can’t go home until I get a picture of that man.’ Perdew gave me a very Pound-like whinny and leered crazily at me. ‘Looks like you ain’t going home, dearie,’ he says. ‘Ezra don’t pose for pictures.’ ‘Crap,’ I said. ‘Picasso jumped at the chance up in Cap Ferrat.’ ‘Ezra don’t jump no more. And the fact is,’ said this Mister Perdow, ‘even if you did do him, no one would recognize him. They wouldn’t believe you. He don’t look like Ezra Pound. He’s all scrawny and shriveled up with bug juice. Looks like some derelict. I know cause I’ve seen him. He used to look like me, this little bushy beard and sombrero. But now he don’t.’ So I said, ‘All righty then, I’ll do you.’ And I did. He was so pleased he started singing a song. Later on he showed me his pictures. They were a damn sight better than Ezra’s poems and so was my portrait.”

Frank said, “You mean it’s not Pound?”

“No, but it’s a dead-ringer. Now do you still think you’re throwing me a rope?” I let this sink in, then said, “My pictures are worthless, Frank. But there’s a moral. Every maniac has a spitting image. Whose double-ganger are you?”

“Maybe yours.”

“Don’t make me laugh. I’m an original.” Or was he? Was this barnacle my Third Eye, the camera I had renounced? Perhaps even in his necklace and funny shoes he was necessary to me.

“Your Picasso — is it faked?”

One might have thought it was a bit of trick photography, the famous googly-eyed head printed on a naked body. But, “Nope. That’s the real McCoy. He loved posing bare-ass.”

“This one of Somerset Maugham is terrific.”

“The Empress Dowager — he had more wrinkles than Auden, that other amazing raisin. Poor old Willie. He was on the Riviera then, too. The English are so portable. I caught him on a bad day. He was brooding over a case of constipation, but as soon as I did him I knew people would look at him and think he was speculating on the future of mankind. Ain’t it always the way?”

“And that’s when you did your Cocteau?”

“Correct. Looks like a sardine, don’t he? He says to me, ‘Ja swee san doot le poet le plew incanoe et le plew celebra.’ I says, ‘May oon poet — say la shows important.’ ‘Incanoe,’ he says, full of that weepy French dignity. ‘May commie foe,’ I says, and when he starts in again I says. ‘Murd de shovel,’ and keeps on clicking.”

“I love these Fifties shots,” said Frank. “All those faces.”

“I couldn’t stand the landscapes. Venice was waterlogged, the canals full of minestrone. And the south of France, which is supposed to be Shangri-La, just looked like one of the crummier Miami suburbs, except that there was no place to park. You can have all that vulgarity at a third of the price anywhere on Cape Cod. I hated it. What is Europe, anyway? Museums, greasers, winos, toy cars, churches, bum-pinchers, ruins, worthless money — no wonder they’re uncreative. History and religion. Boring? You have no idea. I used to look at Europe and think, Do me a favor!”

“Now I understand why you liked Cuba.”

“Loved it, loved the revolution — that was a real kick in the slats,” I said. “I turned down the José Marti scholarship, but went anyhow, and appeared on TV with Ché Guevara and some American college kids. All those beards! A week or so later I did Hemingway. During the war I had been scared of him — wouldn’t go near him. In Cuba he was just another fisherman, but a damned spooky one. He wanted me to make him look athletic. I made him look like Joe Palooka. He lapped it up. Between him and the Guevara boom in the Sixties I think you could say I got a lot of mileage out of that trip.”

“I’d better get back to work,” said Frank.

“You don’t have far to go,” I said. “I didn’t do much in the Sixties. A couple of weeks in Vietnam doing refugees, a stopover in Hong Kong. Some group shots. Keep an eye out for them — they’re to go with my Woonsocket graduation. The whole John Hancock insurance company, every single employee standing in Copley Plaza — I shot it from the roof of the Boston Public Library. I did a lot of other crowds, too — there’s one of Red Sox fans on the bleachers of Fenway Park. They’re beautiful, three thousand faces — you could spend a week with that picture and not get bored.”

“I’ll put them aside.”

“I can’t believe you’re nearly done.”

“It’s shaping up. The show has to open in a month, Maude.”

“But there must be lots more that you haven’t shown me.” And I tried to think what I had not seen — the ones I had done for the National Geographic, the nudes in which I had slipped the back view of a buttocky boy, some of the steamier Pig Dinner ones.

Frank said, “I haven’t hidden anything.”

“I didn’t say you had.”

He looked offended — more than offended: wounded by my simple statement, and desperate, as if I had found him finagling.

“Everything’s in order,” he said, jerking his head at the windmill. “Go see for yourself.”

“Not on your tintype.”

He said — and I couldn’t help but feel he was deliberately changing the subject—“Are you going to write something personal for the catalogue?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Only a paragraph or so.”

“Who do you take me for — Ralph Eugene Meatyard? The unspeakable Stieglitz? Cecil Beaton? I’m no writer.”

“It would interest people.”

“There’s only one way to interest people. Something really sensational. Do an Arbus. Take a lot of mad crazy Weegee pictures of people you hate, and then swallow rat poison. Then they’d come flocking. Suicide explains everything.”

“Poor Diane,” he said (I loved his use of first names: Alfred, Yousuf, Maggie, Jill, Nancy — I could hear him in New York saying, “Maude—”), but he looked like a clown grieving in those bizarre clothes, like my picture of Emmett Kelly, the sad face beneath the greasepaint. Frank twirled one of his string of beads. “If you’re having trouble writing you could do what I do when I get stuck. I tack sheets of paper on the walls around my room, then whenever I get an idea I just scribble it down — a word, a phrase, anything. I get a body of thought here, a body of thought there. I put them all together and hammer out my piece.”

“It sounds a bit”—I wanted to say “stupid.”

“Sure, it’s complicated. But it loosens the thought processes.”

“I think I’ll wing it,” I said. “In the meantime, keep digging, Frank, and if you come up with anything unusual, let me know.”

In the succeeding days the pictures he brought me reminded me of the many magazines that had paid my way and finally crashed — dear old Collier’s, the winning Saturday Evening Post, the all-purpose Look, and vividly illiterate Life. I had always liked the big-format family magazine in which a two-page picture could be bled at the margins, and the photograph itself wrapped around your face, your nose in the staple where it belonged. When television sent those magazines into liquidation, photographs were reduced in size. They either had news value or they didn’t count, and ambitious pictures like my group portraits John Hancock and Red Sox Fans became unthinkable.

It was about then, with the folding of Life, that I abandoned my idea for the panning shot with which I had hoped to fill an entire issue: a sequence of pictures taken from South Yarmouth, Massachusetts, to San Diego, California. Cross Country I had planned to call it, every inch of it in tiny pictures. And if that worked I’d do the ultimate panning shot, around the world in a zillion frames.

I stopped working for magazines. I could not bring myself to do the ghoulish photojournalism that was so much in demand — two children failing ten storys from a burning balcony, the seconds-before-death pictures of executions and ambushes and train wrecks: snuff shots, as they were called. Several publishers offered me contracts to collaborate on picture books, with texts by famous writers, as Agee and Evans had done on the peckerwoods. I probably would have done it if it had meant only pictures, but I could not see how forty pages of tortured prose like Jim Agee’s would have helped my pictures. He wanted to make the reader see the pictures, so he described them, every blessed detail, but before I knew it I was in the dark, stumbling among the subordinate clauses and tripping over semicolons, each word calling to mind a thousand pictures, as I was fond of saying.

The beauty of photographs, I told those publishers, was that they required no imagination. They took your breath away, dragged you under and kept you there. The written word was a distraction, and anyone who wrote about pictures was just showing off. No one got fat reading about food — he just got hungry. On the other hand, my Cheeseburger was as good as a meal. Many people burped after they looked at it.

“Nearly done,” said Frank some days after the Pound business. He showed me an interior shot of my own house.

“Whose Room?” I said.

“That’s what I was going to say.”

“It’s a sequence,” I said. “Objects have memories. Rooms are psychic.”

“I’d love to hear all about it,” he said. “But I have to go down to New York to check the audio for the show.”

“Audio? I thought this was a picture show?”

“The tapes I was telling you about. Sea gulls and waves. Traffic. It’s a new concept I’m working on — atmosphere.”

“If you’re catching the bus to New York, Fusco,” I said, and looked at his beads and those high-heeled shoes, “you’d better go fluff up.”

He left me with the picture. A parlor; but come a bit closer. Look at the cigar butt in the ashtray, the knitting on the stool, the dents and worn places in the chairs, Papa’s reading glasses, Mama’s handbag — she never went anywhere without it. And more: two flower stalks in a vase, with their petals missing, and out the window a fisherman, obviously a trespasser, making his way to the beach: low tide. It is a poem. Two people have just left that picture.

He died first, of a coronary that killed him by pinching one pipe, then another, until finally all his systems failed. It was not the departure he had wished, “leaving the building” on a moment’s notice. He was kept waiting, and he hated that. When we were together, Mama and I were strangers to each other; and she knew it was her turn. She broke her hip, caught pneumonia and finally let go. Her last words: “Pull up the shades.”

The deaths of Orlando and Phoebe, the loss of my parents, only hurt me on cold rainy days, like a football injury, a bad knee.

Though I still took pictures, and was visited by youngsters — every two years or so there was a photography epidemic and I was rediscovered — I did nothing of any importance. The great picture magazines were gone, the galleries were full of conceptual junk (Six Bricks, Doris’s Tit, Untitled #82) and minimals and people doing it with mirrors. I began to doubt that photography was an art. It was a way of life, the best vocation for a single gal to get out and meet people, find a husband, make a few bucks. “I want to be a photographer” was a plea for love.

I could not be too cynical. Photography had taught me to see. It was harmless enough, but it was only a beginning; blindness had taught me much more about vision. My life had been interesting, I had been lucky, and until Frank arrived that summer I believed that I had been mostly happy and had never hurt anyone.

Something short and personal, he had said, after I had returned from London in the summer, when I faced the fact that pictures lied like damnation, and my heart seizure — so like Papa’s — needled home the fear that I might not have much time left to tell the truth.

And even then, after so long, I did not know what the truth was.

29. Bodies of Thought

THERE MUST BE more, but where? Frank was not around to answer the question. And I was glum, the Cape was deserted, the tourists had gone: WINTER RATES said one sign, SEE YOU NEXT YEAR another, and CLOSED FOR SEASON on Kopper Krafts, Pilgrim Laundromat, and the Leaning Tower of Pizza; empty beaches, clear water, hordes of tiny fiddler crabs, and every motel reflecting my depression in its pitiful motto, VACANCY. There is no wasteland like an abandoned resort, no more melancholy sight than drizzle and wind tearing at cheap plastic.

I remembered phrases; I hadn’t seen the pictures that fit them. The captions had stayed, the pictures were gone, so the captions were meaningless. The baboon I had done — under protest — for the National Geographic remained in my mind as “Airbrush flies, remove genitals.” The Marilyn Monroe pictures I had refused to retrieve from the windmill even after the editor had moaned, “Mailer needs them for his book.” The annual winter swim of the L-Street Brownies. The ones I had done of gawkers at the Family of Man exhibition, of Walker in Connecticut, of the shopping mall on Route 28, of the pretty policewoman with the pistol and nightstick in Hyannis (called Move Along); the medium close-up of the elderly bag-carriers at Angelo’s Supermarket in South Yarmouth—“They thought I was going to seed,” one retired soap-powder salesman had said, heaving my groceries into the back of my Chevy and wiping his hands on his apron: I remembered that, but where was the picture? Frank had not shown me that one, or the others.

Was I only imagining that I had done Mailman’s Shoes, Butcher’s Apron, and Harry Truman? I had always believed that I had been fascinated by double images. I had seen a few — but the rest? The Gay Head Indians on the Vineyard? Kennedy on his sunfish? Or the busing pictures I took only a year before in South Boston (negative prints with a difference: the shanty Irish showed up as black monkeys gibbering at white mothers)? Gone.

And where were those so-called erotic pictures I had done for the skin magazine? I was ashamed of them, but I knew that if I had a chance to look closely at them I would remember the weather, the light, the circumstances, an incident, a syllable to grasp, so I could tug memory from its dark hole.

The pictures I had taken were not the ones I studied, not the foreground figures — everything but. Oh, this was curious. My eye tracked around them to slightly-out-of-focus fences and buildings, or to little people far-off watching me work. I found a new alignment in these shots, a back-to-front reality as I traveled deeper into the picture, sometimes surprising myself by seeing new lisps and stammers. Someone watching from a window, laundry blowing from a line I had taken to be empty, or the man in the Ghost Ship sequence — had he been there at the time, or sneaked in at a later date? Boats appeared on seas that had been featureless when I’d photographed them; faces where there had been only shadows; buds had burst into flower and leaf and, over the years, some of the trees I’d shot had died. Most of my subjects’ expressions had changed, grins to frowns, dimples subsided, eyes had grown shiftier, and people who had looked wise had become wicked or smug.

Perhaps there were no more pictures, none with secrets, only fixed images with nothing in front, nothing behind, the flat surface absolute as a mirror of ice reflecting my face in a certain light and forestalling my drowning. Perhaps it didn’t matter. I had remembered the important things — my girlhood, my love, my blindness, and the few adventures which, until I examined them, had seemed uncomplicated pleasures.

And yet, since the war, when I had felt like a failure, as if I had seen nothing and what I had done had been strictly private — no one paying any attention — and sensing in my loneliness the selfish widowing of wasted time and trying not to care where my life had gone — at these times, someone, usually a gal, always carrying a camera, would show up and remind me that I had been original or witty, that she had seen something I had done, and I would rejoice and want to stick fifty dollars into her hand.

Though I satirized him for being a barnacle, I felt that way about Frank. I could not mock him without mocking myself. Secretly, holding my breath, I valued him: I needed his esteem. He was the young brash confidence I’d once had, single-minded, bossy, without any misgivings, convinced that photography mattered. I had become his subject: he was doing me.

Frank had my crotchets, my spinster’s secrecies. He was wary of intrusions and kept his privacy private. He didn’t know me; I didn’t know much about him, but what I knew of him resembled the part of myself that I was determined to hide. I needed his esteem, but more, I needed his silly questions. Without him, I would have assumed the myth that others had created around me, and when it came time to reassemble the past, that would have been the version I’d have put forth. But the truth was elsewhere, and in retrospect I saw that the life I had taken to be so happy was incomplete and contradictory. Frank had helped me to see that, because his ignorant curiosity caused him to fling himself on me. He was still a barnacle, but he was plugging a leak, keeping me afloat. Now he was away. I missed the little bastard.

When I had challenged him about photography — the pictures I no longer trusted — I wanted him to fight back. He usually had, and I was grateful. I needed him around to verify that the person he imagined was really me. I wanted to ask him if he was disappointed in me, if there was something I had missed, and today I wanted to ask him what happened to those pictures. Were they fantasy? If so, how else had I deceived myself?

I looked out the parlor window and saw the plumed arms of cedar bushes work their elbows in and let the sea breeze bustle past. A row of dry flowers nodded, a ripple ran through the uncut lawn. And a light came on in the Sound, a bright medallion that surfaced and just as quickly sank. It was like that other time, after Mama died, when I had stood in the same parlor and found the picture of the old folks’ chairs, and took it. And in removing that picture I had deleted one more vision from my world.

I was alone. I didn’t like it. Frank’s absence had left my life ajar. I was overdue for a gal with a camera to make her way to the front door. “Excuse me, are you Maude Pratt?” They always asked: no one knew my face. But she would remind me of a picture I had forgotten and bring me a flattering remembrance of the fact that I had lived.

At the window this fall day I experienced a great emptiness, the yawn of familiar sky and old repeating weather. Wind was wind, sky sky, drizzle drizzle: my pictures not mine. Look out your window, the photography manuals said. There is your picture. In the place you least expected it. Waiting to be taken. That was a lie only beginners believed.

I saw the windmill and said sharply. “Fusco! What have you gone and done with my pictures?”

The memory of my blindness had always kept me out of the windmill. But today, desperate for a clue, I braved the path and walked to the narrow window. On tiptoe I looked in; and I was astonished by its neatness. It had been swept bare — smooth benches on a floor of planks, a gaping trunk, the thick vertical screw and cogwheels of the vane’s machinery: like the stalled flywheel of the narrative in my mind. I peered, as if into my empty head. Frank had been thorough. He had done his work well. Seeing this conical room so stripped it was as if every picture I’d taken had been imaginary.

The past — that darkroom — was illusion. It was possible for me to believe that because it had so completely vanished it had never existed. I was a particle of light streaking through space, leaving no light in my track. In removing my pictures, Frank had taken away my past and tidied the evidence away. I had no life — perhaps I had never had one. The feeling I got in strange hotel rooms, that I didn’t exist, came upon me here on the broad lawn.

He had detached my pictures from me. With the pictures I was two people, the photographer, the person. Without them, I was no one.

Panic sent me back to the house — that sense of exposure woken by the hoot You!, that seeks the reassuring noises of habitation, the clunk of floors and hubbub in pipes. I did not pause. I went straight to his room.

Months before, I had been bored and curious and had poked in his room and felt justified. Wasn’t he doing the very same thing to me? Today I sought refuge there. I wanted to see — what? — another of his mother’s letters; read my name, satisfy myself that I was real. And my excuse, and part of my intention, was that there were pictures I had not seen, incidents bleached on the tide-wrack of memory, years I could not account for. The pictures must have been somewhere: Marilyn, Move Along, Mailman’s Shoes, and more — if I saw them I would be able to continue.

The door was open. After my first intrusion, his threats, my promises, he trusted me. Thank God for that. If he hadn’t trusted me I would not have been able to betray his trust. But what betrayal? My bed, my bureau, my table and lamp, his shoes in my closet, his comb on my dresser, his fusty bachelor smell in the drawers, his calendars—

No, not calendars, but sheets of paper tacked to the wall, just as he had explained to me, his method of writing. Six of them worked over with a felt-tip, “bodies of thought.”

“If people aren’t’thinking it’s impossible to get a good likeness.”

Maude says every picture contains its complete history, past and future. “The majestic echo of image.”

Tape, lettering guides, bird calls, hooks, wallets, stiff cardboard. Extruded mountings. Bus ticket, bank, P.O., Bufferin.

First with golf-ball grain, high contrast, halation, negative prints, available light, etc. Abandoned them when others used them.

“The Bible is in error — in the beginning was the picture or Image.” Photography: “Matter over mind.”

In fifty years of photography, no self-portrait. Why?

Seeing these notations and mottos made me feel better, though I was tempted to pick up the pen and scribble additions to these bodies of thought, meddle with posterity. I resisted. I went over and sat on our friend’s bed — my bed — and felt a queer sensation in my body, the bed’s memory of its occupant’s restless sleep. A residue of heat, his sad story seeping through the blankets. He was weak and lonely, stifled by his own grim company.

The bedside table stood handily by. I recalled my first excursion here, the pictures of Kenny and Doris. Oh, well. Let’s bring ourselves up to date. Did pornography freaks outgrow their infatuation with one sequence of sticky pictures, get tired of leering at the same set of views and move on to fresh batches, as philanderers sought new conquests?

The drawer was shallow. A few photography magazines as before, and seeing them reminded me how for years it was the photography magazines which had printed the nudie shots, all the solemn camera jargon (1/10th, f-8, slight haze) under a pair of tits or a dimpled bum. At the back of the drawer was a chunk of prints with nicked edges: Doris kneeling, twatty; Kenny plugged into Doris; Doris in boots; Doris looking for something on her person; Doris with a grip on Kenny’s joystick; Kenny nibbling; Doris tooting his clarinet; Kenny straining; Doris going woof-woof; Kenny riding Doris; Doris athwart Kenny; Kenny bug-eyed; Doris bespattered. Yuck.

And Marilyn, and two Pig Dinners, and my half-dozen erotic ones, done — I now remembered — not for a “man’s magazine” but for a photography annual which, because it was for professionals, could get away with murder: strawberry licker, cello torso, sprawler, squatter, nipple examiner, and the leggy nude climbing a pole — the buttocky boy.

There was one more picture, of two people, neither Kenny nor Doris. Nor was it deliberately erotic. I tried to put it away. I brought it near my face, and it brimmed like a rising tide of light.

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. It was a dream I had dreamed: the two bodies creased, light on light, in a spasm of completion, nearly one.

The photograph matched my memory perfectly, but how had it occurred?

The day was not so dark through the far window, though the room was small and that flywheel like the intimation of eclipse. God, they looked so young! Hurry was implied on their faces, but they were caught in a penetrating embrace, eternally coupled in thought and body, like a pair of lovers on the weedy sea-floor where they had fallen.

No, I gulped. But I had started to go under.

30. Drowning

AFTER the first shock of bright airless matter slapped my mouth and masked my eyes and flushed me in sudden liquid, I stopped fighting for breath and bobbed like a cork. Then I fell again. I plummeted through a pipe of watery laughter and as I sank became lighter and the curvature around me more luminous and expressive. I was clearly drowning.

As I surrendered to this silly descent I slowed down. It was easy for me to see the jets of turbulent zeros bubbling past my face. This clouded cream-soda gave way to foam, to parcels of color, green and yellow-blue, like silks tossing a little way off, striping me as they moved. I made a fishy motion and the formless pressure of the fountain wrung me apart, scale by scale, and I glittered, sifting down in pieces like sequins from a torn gown.

If I had not known better I should have said I was flying. But I had been here before, drowning in the wayward magic of the eye, stricken by glory — long ago, when I had still believed in the power of the photograph to drag the victim into its depths. Now I was ashamed of my helplessness at having pitched forward into one of my own photographs. I plunged toward a whimper of light.

It was a drunken experience of dying — separation and the sucked-down sensation of finality — like someone stretching me out of my tights. Shapes were clarifying below me, but I was conscious that the vision that was animating me would destroy me — I was being tickled to death. I knew that it was too late to do anything but endure it. I would not have a second chance.

The photograph (once through the floodgate I scarcely remembered what it was) had worked. It had defied and drowned me, and for those first instants upside down I thought damn, because I was learning the hard way what I had always known. And the deeper I went the more convinced I was that beyond this fatal blinding light there was only darkness and no one to tell.

My ears roared with the racketing laughter of the torrential water. This decreased in volume, but I was still aware of sound — of sound fading — as if I were being deafened by it. Then the silence was perfect. There was a room down here, and bodies, and voices — marine whispers.

— I was supposed to guard it with my life.

— She’s in London. She’ll never know.

I tried to reply, but nothing happened. I wasn’t there — my body wasn’t. I had shrunk to a vivid speck suspended in circular time.

— Look at all the pretty pictures. Lengthened voices, ribbons of them repeating ictures, ictures. The conical echo of that room.

— I’ve seen them all before.

— Cookie saved everything. That’s a sign of loneliness.

— Put them away.

— No. There you are. Your white dress. Your hat.

— And you showing off.

— There’s Papa.

— That’s all.

— Wait. Her boogie-men. And this must be Florida.

They were children in danger. I wanted them to stop, to go away, for their own good. But they were stubbornly playing, toying with risk. I thought: The past is not illusion — it is ignorance, it is all needless danger; inaction saves us. But they would not go away. They continued to sift through the trunk of pictures, compelled by their curiosity and the love that made them foolishly bold.

— Oh, God. Look.

In that moment they were lost. The water surrounding me rubbed their moans in my ears.

— How could she?

— It can’t be us.

— It is. I won’t look at it.

— We’ll have to do something.

— Put it away. Pretend we didn’t see it.

— It’s too late. She knows. She always knew.

— Put it back!

— She wanted us to see it.

The speck I inhabited trembled tamely touching bottom.

— We’re sunk.

— I won’t give you up.

— It’s impossible.

— I don’t care if they find out.

— They’ve found out.

— They’ll have to forgive us.

— No. There’s only one way they’ll understand.

— Tell me.

— Don’t make me say it.

A chance current disturbed the ribbed sea-floor and took their voices away. I was still listening, but their voices were gone. Ploop, ploop— a fish tank’s murmur. There was a shadow, time turning blue; day, night; light, dark; the light changed, nothing else did.

— You’re wrong. It’s not a choice. It’s the only thing left.

— But so soon. You!

— Don’t cry.

But they were both crying and I knew that this sea I was lost in and had no hope of leaving was made immense by their tears. In this moonstruck tide I was pushed by their sorrow.

— I can’t live without you. So I’m not afraid to die.

— What they know won’t die.

— I want them to know everything.

— Then we’ll leave the picture and go.

— I’ll go anywhere with you.

— There’s only one place for us. There.

Now a small flare of heat in that ocean of tears, the winking deception of this depth in which nothing solid moved — only the light invading from above and losing itself at this motionless limit. I had died. I knew what they didn’t. But I couldn’t save them. His courage was partly pretense — he had gone too far to deny it. And she who had been quick to love was impatient to die, recklessly believing her passion to be reason enough.

— People kill themselves for less.

— Maybe they only kill themselves for less.

Not even worms lived here. The dust-motes and droplets of color simulated life among the shell splinters, stirred like me in the shallow troughs of the sea bed. Did they know that beneath the erupting waves the sinking light was pulverized to dust and darkness?

— We’ll show them.

And they showed me I deserved this death for my blind treachery. They were whispering, excited, full of plans, setting sail. Soon they were tacking toward the open sea. In all that buffeting they were silent and the voyage out was over before they knew it — too soon. Already he was dragging the sail down, paying out the sea anchor, comforting her as they bobbed madly in the little boat, prolonging the moment.

— Let’s wait till it gets dark.

— Then I won’t be able to see you. I want to hold you. Will it hurt?

— Not if you keep swallowing.

— I’m afraid. I want it to happen, but I’m afraid. Help me.

— I love you.

— Yes, yes.

— What’s wrong?

— I just thought of Maude.

— Poor cookie.

— Poor everyone.

A boom ran through the sea, causing a swell, lifting the boat, tipping it and rattling the lines. The shoreline, lightly penciled on the horizon, was indifferent. Neither earth nor sky mattered. So they kissed, their feet already in the water.

— It’s cold!

— Easy does it.

They slipped through the window of this great silent palace and were happy again paddling upright and awkwardly until they grew tired and leaned back. Gulping, they ducked under and did not begin to struggle until it was too late. They ceased to move their arms or legs.

They fell slowly, wrapped together and dropping like a harmless spider on a strand of tiny bubbles. Though I passed within inches of them — and now I was rising: their dying had released me from the scrub of purification — they did not see me with their white eyes. Not a look, not one more word. They were below me, simplified to a blur, a pool of lowering light. The moment they were lost I broke clean through the surface.

31. Preview

NEW YORK, a wet November evening. I was walking by the museum when I saw the posters, printed on six square feet of the beatific breast-feeding shot, The South Yarmouth Madonna.

MAUDE COFFIN PRATT RETROSPECTIVE FIFTY YEARS

I was out of habit of seeing my name written so large. It stopped me. Passersby were slowing up near the posters to look. I got a kick out of my anonymity, reading over their shoulders and hearing their grunts of approval: know-it-alls boasted to their dates that they knew my work. I lingered long enough to watch some invited people go in to the preview dressed in fancy clothes, animal pelts on their shoulders, diamonds around their necks, gold on their wrists, — wearing their wealth like the rankest trophy-hunting savages. But they were hopeful, squealing in anticipation, with that just-washed look of partygoers. And they were so intent on making a graceful entrance they were unaware that on the sidewalk, in the lights of the museum marquee, I stood with my face hanging out.

I slipped in by the side entrance so that no one would see me; no one did.

The party was in progress on a second-floor landing. To call it a landing was not to do it justice. It had an immense stone rail on one side which overlooked the staircase, and on the other side an entire wall of glass gave a grand view of the garden courtyard with its floodlit mobiles and imprisoned statuary. On the stairs to the landing people were propped, as if they owned the place, and braying.

‘‘I am perfectly capable of finding it myself,” I had said to Frank over the phone, a week before this preview. I looked for him — we had agreed to meet at the show’s entrance — but if he was there I didn’t see him. I assumed he was lost in the same crowd that had swallowed me.

The poster — the one I had seen out front — was plastered on the landing, rising from floor to ceiling, repeating my name and the picture, so big and numerous, was no longer mine. This was someone else’s red-letter day.

“You made it! Aren’t you thrilled?” screamed a woman with an animal pelt on her head. Thinking that she might be addressing me I smiled. Then she walked past me. Oughtists, she said in that New Yorker way to a beaming midget, ought and oughtists.

“Where’s Maude?” said the midget, looking directly at me. The woman didn’t know. They went on talking about my works of ought.

I had stiffened to prepare myself for their rushing over and saying, “Where have you been hiding?” But no one asked the question, and I would not introduce myself. I rather enjoyed my anonymity in here, as I had outside. I could mooch around, eavesdrop, examine faces and reactions, and not be required to say a single thing. Praise can only be answered with humility or thanks; I didn’t feel modest or grateful.

I was a stranger. It was the funereal feeling I had had earlier in the summer, on my return from London. But this was a joyous occasion, people saying Maude this and Maude that. I had every reason to believe that I had lived through a death by drowning. The death had shown me what I was, what I had done: it was just as well that no one recognized me.

Having entered the museum so obliquely from below I’d had to work my way up the stairs, through the throngs of people who were swigging and yelling. I had counted on seeing Frank on the landing and I winced when I gained it, expecting his shout, Here’s the star of the show! or something equally foolish. I fought forward to the exhibit’s entrance, for the party was outside the gallery proper. ENTER HERE, said a placard, but the mob I had assumed to be lining up for a look was simply gathered there blocking the way.

My impatience tired me. After fifteen minutes I was winded and wanted to sit down, or for someone — where was the peckerhead? — to rescue me. Some people stared at me and I grinned back, assuming they had recognized me. They looked away. I could not explain it, but then, I didn’t recognize any of them either.

A few years before, a place like this would have been full of people I knew — Imogen, Minor, Ed Weston, Walker, Weegee — and I searched the faces for moments before I realized that they were as dead as Mrs. Cameron. In this room was the new generation of photographers and art patrons. I could spot them: that long-legged blonde in the cape, that other ingratiating gal with the sunglasses perched on her hairdo, a pair of black simpering queens, and another black looking toothy and hostile, as if he were going to shriek at me in Swahili. Most of the photographer types were wearing leather jackets, combat boots, itchy shirts — advertising themselves as toughies, men of action. Even the gals looked the bushwhacking sort. The marauders and fuck-you-Jacks of a profession that was a magnet for neurotics, they were deluded by the fear of competition and all wearing their light meters as pendants around their necks. If it was an art, it was the only one in which the artist actually wore something that made him visibly a practitioner.

And there were others, pairs of people, slightly mismatched, whom I took to be photographers hand-in-hand with their subjects. That anorexic gal and her friend, whose face I recognized from a drugstore paperback — surely she aimed to be a credit line on his book jacket? This dapper little man and the wheezing old dame: it could only have been a relationship that started with a studio session (“Look straight at me, dear, and forget your hands for a minute”); the boogie-man and the blonde with her tough twinkle — it wasn’t too far-fetched to imagine that they had launched their romance with a camera and for all I knew kept it airborne the same way (his brutally honest chronicling of ghetto life, her cooperation amounting to human sacrifice). The bearded lout and that girl-child; the virago and her soul-mate into, as they would say, the woman’s thing. I could identify the mediocrities by their catch phrases: the prancing Minimalists, the Deeply Committed crowd, the Really Strange bunch, the Terribly Exciting ones, the Intos, the Far-outs, the Flakys.

These were cannibals’ success stories. But what the hell — they were having a swell time. Photography didn’t matter: they had each other. That was the whole purpose of taking pictures — it won you friends, it got you fame and fresh air. “I’m working on a new concept,” said the bearded lout, and I knew that if he hadn’t been a photographer in the pay of Jack Guggenheim he’d have gotten twenty years as a sex offender for some outrage upon that girl-child’s person. The work was an excuse; the idea was to involve yourself with people, which was giving photography a bad name.

My anonymity made me cynical. Perhaps I was being unfair. It was possible that they had taken pictures and developed them and, like me, at some later date, had drowned in them and known the terror of what they had done.

“He’s into some very exciting things.”

“He hasn’t had a show for years.”

“I consider this an event. He’s a very private person.”

“He’s supposed to be here somewhere.”

This “he” I kept hearing about was certainly not me. I had stopped basking. My fatigue turned complacent and then panicky. I had not introduced myself, so I was temporarily forgotten. They would be justified in thinking that I was spying on them. They might round on me and say, “At least you could have had the courtesy of telling us who you were!”

But no one in that jammed room asked.

“Isn’t that him?”

More than that (“Excuse me, lady,” a man said, yanking a tray of drinks out of my reach), I noticed a distinct irritation when my glance met one of these wild-eyed talkers, as if I were a gate-crasher who had no right to listen. I could have put up with being ignored; I could not bear being strenuously shunned. I was in the way! And there was a lot of shoving when the real celebrities showed up, various people I had seen on television talk shows, mainly hideous novelists who had written frank autobiographical books about their unnatural acts.

“Mind moving?” This from one of our photographer friends with a chunk of expensive apparatus in her mitts, a motor-driven Voigtländer aimed at my earhole.

Someone famous had just entered. Who it was, I could not say. But there was movement, a prelude to stampede, people beating their elbows to get past me.

“Pardon me.”

A man’s hand squeezed my shoulder. About time. I turned and smiled.

“Are you Lillian Hellman by any chance?” The man bowed to hear my reply.

“Sorry, buster. I’m her mother.”

But though I was furious for being mistaken for Lily (is there any old lady on earth who is flattered by the suggestion that she resembles another old lady?), I hoped the man would pause long enough for me to tell him who I really was. Rebuffed, he fled sideways into the mob.

Already I was sick of the party. The people had stopped talking about me and on their third or fourth drink were just whooping it up, paying no attention to the posters with my name on them.

“He’s done it as a multi-media event. I’m going in as soon as they shut this wine off.”

I had no business here. This was a spectacle of the kind I had avoided for thirty years. There was no reason why anyone should have recognized my face: professionally I had no face. I was for most only a name and Twenty-two White Horses and celebrated for a period of blindness when I had done Firebug. For one person I was the Cuba pictures, for another the Pig Dinner sequence; blacks knew me as the creater of Boogie-Men, New Englanders for The South Yarmouth Madonna, Californians knew only my Hollywood work, the British were aware of my London phase but nothing more, literary people my Faces of Fiction, and for some camera buffs I was the young gal who had done Stieglitz with his own peepstones.

To be famous is to be fixed — a picture, a date, an event, a specific and singular effort. To be fixed is to be dead, and so fame is a version of obscurity. One appeared at one’s own party only to haunt it. If Frank had been around he would have steered me into the crowd and made the usual introductions, as the custodian of my reputation. But I did not see him.

Nor did I see the show. There was still a mob at ENTER HERE and it was the same bunch I had seen earlier, a bit rowdier and more drunken than before. They had found a cozy place to gather and were ignoring the exhibition — plenty of time for that when the drink ran out. The party was the thing. Yet it burned me up to think that they had come here to see each other and were not paying the blindest bit of attention to my pictures.

I wondered if I should throw a fit — wave my arms and bellow at them, maybe embarrass them with a hysterical monologue about the meaning of art; or do something shocking, make a scene that they would talk about for years afterward.

Bump.

“I’m awfully sorry.” The jerk who had taken me for Lillian Hellman rushed away. The party was starting to repeat, to replay its earlier episodes in tipsy parody.

Several people, assuming my black dress to be a uniform, demanded drinks from me. They howled when they saw their mistake, but it inspired me. I found a tray of drinks and began to make my way through the room, handing them out and sort of curtseying and taking orders, saying “Sir” and “Madam” and “I’m doing the best I can.”

All my photographer friends who in other times would have been here — dead. The people I had photographed: Mr. Slaughter, Huxley, Eliot, Teets, R. G. Perdew, Lawrence, Marilyn, Harvey and Hornette — dead. Editors and journalists and gallery-owners — dead. Orlando and Phoebe: now I knew I had driven them into the sea. I had killed them with a picture. I deserved this contempt — the people shunning me or treating me like a waitress; I deserved worse — to be treated like a criminal bitch who had hounded my brother and sister to death. I put the tray down and lurked in the crowd like the murderess I was.

Scuffing paper underfoot I bent to pick it up, although my first thought was to leave it so that one of these partygoers would trip and break his neck. It was the catalogue, a thickish manual with my name on the front just above Frank’s and a different picture (Negro Swimming to a Raft—but “Negro” had been changed to “Person,” making nonsense of the picture). I had refused to write the personal statement Frank had requested and had told him that I would have nothing to do with the rest of the catalogue either. I should have gone further and said that I wouldn’t be at the preview party. I felt ridiculous — guilty, stupid, ashamed — having come so far on false pretenses. I belonged in jail.

I had made a virtue of being anonymous. I had abided by it; and why not? Anonymity had done for me what a lifetime of self-promotion had done for other photographers. It was too late to reveal myself, for there was a point in obscurity beyond which exposure meant only the severest humiliation. It was better to continue anonymously and finally vanish into silence. I had spent my life in shadows as dense as those that hid me at this party. I had entered this room as a stranger — I had to leave as one. If the place had not been so impossibly crowded I would have done that very thing.

Acknowledgments, I read, opening the catalogue. There followed a list of money-machines, not only the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, but the National Endowment for the Arts and five others, including the Melvin Shohat Photographic Trust. If Frank didn’t make a go of his curatorship there was always room for such a financial genius in the International Monetary Fund.

My career, spent in attacking patronage, ended with these cash-disbursing bodies footing the bill. But I had forfeited the right to object. I was dead. They were all dancing the light fantastic on my grave.

Maude Coffin Pratt, Frank’s Preface began, is probably one of the most distinguished American photographers of our time—

“Probably”? “One of”? “Our time”? He was pulling his punches. Quite right: I had blood on my hands.

But there was, after all, a message from me, titled Statement from the Artist:

The Bible says, “In the beginning was the Word.” The Bible is in error. In the beginning was the Image. The eye knew before the mouth uttered a syllable; thought is pictorial.

Photographic truth, which I think of as the majestic echo of image, originated in the magic room known as the camera obscura. This admitted the world through a pinhole. Man learned to fix that image and photography was born with a bang. Painting never recovered from the blow. It began to belittle truth and, faking the evidence, became destructive.

One knows a bad picture immediately. All you can do with bad pictures is look at them. The good ones invite you to explore; the best drown you and keep you under until you think you will never return. But you do. I have had this experience myself.

Photography is interested solely in what is. What am I? you may ask. I can answer that question. You are a “Pratt.”

On a more personal note, I was born in 1906, in Massachusetts.

Frank’s work, the catalogue shorthand that left my life in the dark and my crime unstated.

“There he is,” said a man next to me to his lady friend. They nearly knocked me down as they moved past me.

I got behind them and followed them across the room and saw, at the center of the largest huddle of people, the Veronica Lake hairstyle, the white fretful face, the string of beads. He wore a torn denim shirt and under it a T-shirt saying It’s Only Rock and Roll; and bright green bell-bottoms and, I knew — though I could not see them — his platform clodhoppers. He had come a long way since the day he had turned up in a barnacle-blue three-piece suit on my Grand Island piazza. “I’d be deeply grateful if you’d allow me to examine your archives.” And I had thrown the picture palace open to him.

Edging forward, I caught some of the chatter. The people surrounding Frank were talking in low voices, trying to lend sincerity to their guff by whispering it.

“It’s perfectly marvelous, Frank, every last bit of it. It’s got density, it’s got life, and it’s just about the most exciting thing I’ve seen for ages.” This from a purring pin-striped heel, obviously a foundation man.

Frank said, “I couldn’t have done it without your support. It was a long haul, but I think you’ll find that your money’s been well spent.”

“The whole committee’s here to give you a good send-off.”

“It was a risk, of course, but from my point of view”—Frank made howdying haymakers with his free hand—“Hi, Tom. Hello there, Charlie. George. Norman, good to see you. Susan, glad you could make it — a risk worth taking.”

His face’s fretfulness had a pinch of pride. He wore a tight little smile, as if he were sucking a cough drop. His eyes were vacant with self-love.

“It must have been quite a summer up there on the Cape.”

“Pretty unbelievable,” said the peckerhead. “But I feel we’ve broken new ground.”

“It’s certainly a great coup for the museum.”

Frank said, “The work was crying out to be seen. She had no idea.”

“The presentation—”

“Presentation is incredibly important,” said Frank. “I knew the minute I saw the pictures that I was on to something very big and very exciting.” Saying this, he shook his head, rattling his beads, and took a tango-step forward to plant a kiss on an admiring hag.

“Frank’s an amazing guy,” said a young man on my right.

“Don’t I know it,” I said.

“He’ll make a fortune out of this, but you’ve got to hand it to him.”

“Sure do.”

“Hassles? He’s been getting a hand-job all summer from our friend whatsit.”

“Jack Guggenheim?”

“No, um, the one who took the pictures. Pratt.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Frank’s the one who took the pictures.”

“Yeah.”

The party had thinned out. The remaining people gravitated over to the crowd around Frank, where I was lost. Two of the photographers I had spotted earlier were snapping pictures, and Frank’s face was briefly incandescent as he said, “I just hope people pick up on it in the right way.”

He loved every minute of it and seemed so engrossed that he surprised me a moment later by saying, “Hey, has anyone seen Maude?”

“No,” I said, and I meant it. No one heard me — they were also saying no. I crept across the room to the retrospective.

32. Retrospective

I WASN’T HERE, either. The place was empty, a vestibule with a stack of catalogues, more posters, a passageway like a funhouse labyrinth, and beckoning sounds: Twenties music, surf, gulls, traffic, clangs; and the sharp smell of strong light on fresh paint. No people. I looked for myself among the pictures.

The first room was book-shaped, my early shots pasted on the walls as if into an album. They were family scenes, done long ago, the boat, the beach, the house — full of wonder which, because it was innocent, looked clumsy and appealing. Not here.

A trolley bell gonged in the next room; city noises, voices half smothered in traffic. New York, 1923, said Frank’s sign, and there was Lawrence Retreating, Mott Street, The Battery, Broadway, Chinese Grocery, Wolfpits Furriers, and my Grand Central sequence.

The surf I had heard on entering the show was now so loud it seemed to be pounding on the adjoining wall. I walked in expecting to be dragged away by the undertow, but it was a mock-up of my Provincetown exhibition — Mrs. Conklin, Clamdiggers: Wellfleet, O’Neill at Peaked Hill, and the fifty or so negative prints I had called Boogie-Men: Teets, Doolum, Pigga, Frenise, and more.

The sea-sounds poured isolation upon me. I could not hear the party. I had entered my own world, but I felt ghostly in it — I did not exist there among Stieglitz, Boarders, Stoker, Alligator Wrestler, Thunder over Boca Grande. An entire art-deco room was given over to the Pig Dinner. There was Papa and Mr. Carney, Harvey and Hornette, Mrs. Fritts, Mr. Biker, “Digit” Taft, and Glory. They were slightly smoked and blurred, as they were in my memory, and yet they were less than I remembered. I was touched by their trapped faces, by the naked ones’ nakedness. And I knew what was coming.

A blind wall, nothing, then Firebug. I did not go close. I feared entering any of these pictures and being submerged to suffer them again. I strolled, keeping my distance, and saw Frost, the Hollywood pictures of Huxley and Mann and Alan Ladd crying, the creepy pieta of Ray and Cissy Chandler, the other actors in tears. Stiffs.

The Whose Room? shots Frank had retitled London Interiors, rather spoiling the point. But what a rogues’ gallery it was! The rooms and then the faces: Eliot, Ackerley, Waugh, Forster, and further on Patton, G. Stein, Cocteau, Maugham, Picasso. They were not looking at me — not surprising: the subject does not see the photographer, only the peepstones of her Third Eye.

I was not here, not here, nowhere, and yet I knew that I had entered the picture palace of my own memory. I regretted my absence, but I was astonished by how much there was here — all the forgotten pictures Frank had not troubled himself to show me: Apple-Seller, The Sneeze, Junk Shop Window, Phil Rizzuto, Mailman’s Shoes, Orthodox Jewish Boys, the impoverished glamor girls series, scores of blind people, and the picture that had been inspired by an old cartoon, Man Eating Peas with a Knife. Spendid stuff, but where was I? Not in the group photos—Graduation: Woonsocket High School blown up across one whole wall, John Hancock across another — and not in Dancing Partners, Deliverance, Busing, Refugees, Butcher’s Apron, Move Along, Baggers, or the twelve pictures of Vietnamese refugees hurrying toward the door. I looked for more and saw Exit.

But I didn’t want to leave. I headed back through the exhibit and it occurred to me how many were missing. Although to the casual viewer it was complete, an entire life, I knew there were gaps — years and years missing. Frank had left out my six erotic pictures, Eel in a Toilet, the ones of my family that I knew best (vivid in my mind because they were snapshots, set for infinity). Was he trying to save my reputation because he found them amateurish, or prettify his own because he thought they were vulgar?

And the murderous one of Orlando and Phoebe naked in the windmill — the only one in fifty years that truly mattered: suppressed! How like a masturbator to hide his imagery in shame.

“What retrospective?” I said aloud. To see this show, one would have thought, as I so often had, that my life had been rich and happy, full of travel and excitement, fifty years of achievement. No failures, no tears. But this was the lie of perfection imperfectly concealing that it was mostly failure. And it was hardly surprising that no one at the party had recognized me. I was not one of my pictures, or even the sum of them.

I wandered back to the Provincetown room. Frank had mounted a slide projector behind a wall, and as the sorrowing gulls cried and the waves sloshed the timbers of an invisible jetty (and was that a whiff of saltwater taffy in the air?), the pictures changed: Dunes, Clamdiggers, Cummings, Pigga, Sunday Bonnets, Hurricane Damage. Not mine — they were the world’s property and the experience of whoever cast a glance at them. But no life was this neat.

Footsteps in the vestibule. I listened hard. One pair of clodhoppers.

“Maude!”

I turned and tried to smile.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding. I’ve been looking all over—”

“Dry up,” I said.

Yet I wanted to reassure him, to hug him and say, Forget it — it’s all yours! You’re welcome to it! Then I saw his smugly patronizing face and cough-drop sucker’s mouth. I had the impression he wanted to kiss me.

I said, “I’d like to be alone.”

“You’ve been drinking again.”

To spite him, I burped, bringing the gas up from the depths of my gut. Then, pleased with this piece of theater, I wanted to go.

“Come on out and take a bow.”

“No. It’s time I went home.”

He looked relieved. He cleared his throat. “Say, what do you think of the show?”

“Very nice, but it ain’t mine. Anyway, there’s one missing.”

He blushed and touched at his face and left a chalk-white fingerprint of pressure on his cheek. His eyes were glazed with shame. He said, “Give it to me. I’ll make room for it.”

“Get a job, Frank!” I said, and couldn’t help laughing. I started to walk away — and my mind raced ahead of my feet: I was home, in my room, drinking alone in my nightie and reflecting that if the pictures were his so was the guilt; and I was at last free.

“Which one?” he asked, but he didn’t want to hear.

“You wouldn’t know,” I said. “Besides, I haven’t done it yet.”

I chose to leave by passing once again through the exhibition. And it struck me that the pictures told me more about Frank than about myself, for the mind was revealed by the way it distorted, or suppressed, or seized upon a particularly telling travesty. Literally that: a man in a dress spoke volumes, while a woman with a camera seemed to have few secrets. I was merely a spectator, stinking of chemicals. I had to be seen to be believed.