Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

Teets’s photograph, in stiff robes, a pharaonic profile, was praised for its weirdness — wild eyes and a gobbling mouth full of teeth. But there was a voice, like the “shet” and “bidge” that didn’t go with Frenise’s church clothes, that insisted there was more to Teets than his pose.

That day in the dunes above Edgartown, dressed as an Egyptian and sitting cross-legged in the sand, he said to the camera, “There’s only one book which is the truth, and it’s the Bible.”

Troof, Bahble . I thought: So it comes out at last — he’s a religious nut, a roller or a jumper.

He explained to the camera, holding his hands forward, as if he expected birds to light on his wrists, “Not the Holy Bible, but the other one, the plain old Bible they hit you with when you’re little.”

“Do tell.” I was winding and snapping, winding and snapping.

“It’s the truth about what people do. They cuss. They kill their childrens. They do wrongness. They suffer for years and years and they look around and suffer some more. And sometimes nothing happens for two-three hundred years but begetting.”

I said, “But lots of books are about that.”

“Cussing, yes, and dying, yes, but not begetting with their own daughters and brothers and sisters. But that’s the truth.”

“Brothers and sisters?”

“Doing it hard,” he said. “It ain’t in books — it’s in the Bible.”

I said I wasn’t happy with the pose. I told him to relax and get on his elbows and keep talking and don’t mind me.

He said, “Sure it’s the truth. I know someone that done it, and,” he smiled, “that someone is me, baby.”

“Cussed?”

“Jammed.”

“With your daughter?”

“With my sister. Hard.” He sucked his teeth. “Got no daughter.”

I said, “I don’t think you ought to be telling me this, Mister Teets.”

“It’s the truth, so don’t get vex. The truth is the truth.” He did his crow-squint, lowering his head and saying into the camera, “Know how it come about?”

I didn’t know what to say. His head shook in the viewfinder and swerved at me.

“Sit still.”

“I am setting still, but your camera is vex, jumping up and down, and the reason is you just heard the truth.”

Troof again. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“Here she come then, Harry and me — Harry is my little sister, living in Oak Bluffs, where my father was stewie for the Phippses. That’s where it all come about. It was maybe October, blowy, sand in the streets, all the summer people gone and only us there and a few Phippses. There were town people there, the ones you say hello and thank you to, but you couldn’t do nothing with them and you couldn’t touch the Phippses. We was alone, Daddy, Harry, and me, and Daddy was doing all day, which leaves Harry and me.” He had inched forward. I was on my knees — I took all my best pictures on my knees. His broad black face was not a foot from the camera. I saw a nose and two eyes, like a face pushing through a door I was trying to close.

“Think about it — no one else on the island. We’re the only ones, her and me. Like in the Bible.”

I noticed he was avoiding the words white and black, but I got the picture, the pair of them and their belief, a simpler version of my own family.

“Pretty soon I realize I’m a boy and Harry she’s a girl, and one day in the soft barn loft I lifts up her dress and I say, ‘What you got down under there?’ and I reaches.”

Teets licked the cracks from his lips and looked tenderly at the camera, perhaps using the lens as a mirror. I probed his perspiration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He grinned like a jack-o’-lantern.

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

He said, “I loved that little girl.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s her decision,” Papa said.

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

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

Phoebe said, “I don’t care.”

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

“What’s going on?” I said.

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

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

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