Paul Theroux: Picture Palace

He blinked.

“That’s how all good pictures get taken, Frank. Whip it out when no one’s looking. I’m a pioneer of the straight approach. You should know that. Pull down vanity and start blazing away. Velocity. The high-speed method — forget your Stieglitzes and your Strands and all your other failed painters. Snatch up your Speed Graphic and shoot from the hip.” I was moving around the room, hunched like a cowboy that hears a rattler. I jerked my hands: “Bam! Bam! Bam! Like that. I was the first photographer to shoot ten rolls of film on one face — never mind whose. But remember, nuance is everything. As soon as your subject remembers he’s got a face you’ve lost your picture.”

“Fine, fine,” said Frank, trying to get me to simmer down, treating me like a “ree-tard.” “But what about the retrospective?”

“This is for the retrospective, you cluck. My last picture. Can’t you see it, hanging near the exit, eight by five, a blow-up of Greene? It’ll round it off, send them away smiling.”

“True,” he said.

But it jolly well isn’t, I thought. Frank gave me his funereal expression. Your curator, your archivist: they’re undertakers. And I had sensed these morbid intimations ever since he came to suggest mounting a retrospective. It was taxidermy, the artist and her work laid dustily out like a museum turkey stuffed with dead grass and old newspapers.

I said, “I don’t aim to stop living just for this precious retrospective.”

He went silent.

“Anyway, I’ve always wanted to meet Greene,” I said. “I almost did on that Cuba trip, when I did Ernest. Forget the banana skins and make it literary. Our man in Havana — what a picture that would have been!”

“You might not get a seat,” said Frank. “It’s a weekend — those planes are always full.”

I showed him my confirmed ticket and made a saucy face.

“You won’t get dinner, you know,” he said, his last gasp of opposition, warning me about starving to death the way my old tutor Miss Dromgoole used to. “They’re puddle-jumpers. They don’t serve anything to eat on those flights.”

“I’ll stop at The Pancake Man on the way and grab a bite. Maybe do a picture of some waffles while I’m at it.”

Frank shook his head, and I knew he was worrying about my dignity. The Pancake Man — how can she! He favored a phony English place in Hyannis run by a Greek, with a menu full of mistakes in French: the American reverence for broken-down foreigners and expensive cuisine. He said — it was his last challenge—“What’ll you do with your car?”

“Park it,” I said crisply.

“You’ll run into traffic on Twenty-eight.”

“Then I’ll sit there and listen to the radio,” I said. “One of life’s unacknowledged pleasures, Frank. Listening to the car radio in heavy traffic is nearly as good as watching TV in bed.”

He was still hedging, but I thought: He’s not worried about me at all — he’s worried about himself. He’s half my age and twice my size and he can’t drive, he can’t cook, he can’t hold his liquor, and he wouldn’t say shit if he stepped in it. If I stick around he’s okay; if I go he has to look after himself and he doesn’t know how. So much for my welfare. Thanks, fella.

He pretended to be busy while I packed my suitcase and my peep-show. At five I said, “Want some pancakes?”

“How will I get back?” he whined.

I gave him a kiss and thought: Starve, you bugger. He smiled, then he looked thoughtful, concentrated hard, and farted.

“What will you say to Greene?”

“I’ll wing it.”

On the way to the airport I stopped at The Pancake Man and had a huge plate of blueberry flapjacks with whipped butter and maple syrup. Halfway through I picked up the menu, rolled it into a tube and peered through it: the melting pat of butter was bright and monumental, a great soft raft — the eye is so easily duped. Then I dropped this tube and went on eating, and as I yanched my way through the flapjacks I thought: Look thy last on all things lovely.

TO GET TO YERP from this part of Cape Cod you take a white-knuckler with Smilin’ Jack at the controls from Hyannis Airport through sea-fog to Logan Airport in Boston. It was a Friday in June and the plane was full. I was jammed next to a character who objected (by meaningfully shifting his legs) to my hand luggage. Off to see her grandchildren, he was thinking. It didn’t occur to him that the little old lady was going to London England to photograph Graham Greene. He was sort of kicking and trampling to make room for his feet. I reached down and took my Speed Graphic out from under his moving feet. I loaded it in my lap.

“Nice camera,” he said. “Take care of it.”

“You took the words out of my mouth.”

Waste of a good camera, he was thinking. Snapshots of her grandchildren. Give her an Instamatic; she wouldn’t know the difference. He’s a Rotarian, stinking with resentment.

“Bumpy,” I said. Why quarrel? The plane was pitching up and down and I thought I would calm him. “It’s always bumpy. We’ll be on the ground in a minute.”

“I’ve been on this flight before,” he said, trying to put me in my place.

The pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker: I’d like to apologize for this aircraft. You might have noticed that it’s a little smaller than our usual one —

“I thought it was a bit tight,” said the Rotarian, and shimmied in his seat.

“It’s a Fokker,” I said.

He looked sideways at me.

“Like the one in the joke. General Patton told it to me. About the airman describing a dog-fight — how he shot down this Fokker and that Fokker. His pal looks a bit embarrassed and says to some ladies present that a Fokker is a type of German plane. Heard it?”

“Not that I remember.”

“‘No,’ says the airman, ‘these fokkers were Messerschmitts.’”

The Rotarian looked anxiously out the window.

I sat back and lit up a cigarette and when he faced me again I offered him one. “Care for a choke?”

“I gave them up,” he said, with a kind of desperate pride.

“I suppose I should,” I said, and coughed, as I always do when I talk about smoking.

He said, “You’d be doing yourself a big favor.”

“I’m not in any danger,” I said. “At my age.”

“Maybe not.”

I could tell he didn’t want to talk, which irked me. I wanted to tell him who I was, where I was going, why I had this Speed Graphic in my lap. I had prefaced my joke by saying “General Patton told it to me,” but that hadn’t knocked his socks off. Granted he was only about thirty, but he might have seen the movie. Somehow, I had the idea that he disliked me, and I couldn’t bear that. I wanted to cheer him up, so I could have the satisfaction of him thinking: Hey, she’s not as dumb as she looks!

“The truth is,” I said, as the Fasten SEATBELTS sign came on, “the truth is, us old folks get treated like mushrooms.”

“Really?” He gave me that sideways glance again: She’s bats.

“Right. We’re kept in the dark and every so often someone dumps shit on us.”

He started to laugh as we landed at Logan, and I thought: We made it! I raised my camera and snapped his mirthful face.

“Have a good day,” he said.

“You too.”

THE LONDON FLIGHT wasn’t leaving until eleven. I checked my suitcase, then went upstairs, swinging my camera. It was an amateur’s dream: stupendously high ceiling, mostly lighted air, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy girders, some Walker Evans signboards, Paul Strand peasants waiting for the Alitalia flight, Arthur Penn stewardesses, Harry Callahan white areas, and tiny travelers dozing on their bags as in a Minor White manifestation. Shoot down from the catwalk, title it Departure Lounge , and turn pro on the strength of your ironic insight into the static crappiness of modern living. But it looked wonderful to me, and though I could have spent a week doing tight close-ups of a nosegay of cigarette butts sprouting from the sand in a magnificent ashtray — ready-made “Pratts”—I spotted a lunch counter and plopped myself down. Move over, Fatso, we’ve got a live one.