Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

On the fourth morning, at breakfast, he said, “Can you give me a lift into Hyannis?”

“What’s up?”

“I’ve got some things to do in the city.” The city: so he was going to New York.

“Can’t you make it some other time? Things are a bit unsettled at the moment.”

Unsettled was an understatement; I was feeling so bent they could have named a pretzel after me.

Frank said, “I’ll only be there a day or two. I’ve got to contact the designer and start budgeting for materials. The committee wants a preliminary presentation. Life goes on, Maude. I’ve got to prove I’m not up here on vacation.”

“Frank Fusco, you’re going to be the death of me!”

My old biddy act calmed him down. He liked to be joshed, and I could tell he was looking forward to a few days away from me. I had been on the sauce and behaving badly, playing the radio too loud and leaving glasses around the house. And I had spent part of each morning noisily vomiting the night’s damage.

“Bus station,” he said, when we were on the road.

“The plane’s faster.”

“I hate planes.”

“Sure you do.” Why is it, I wondered, that single people are more morbid than married ones? Frank was full of fears about flying, eating, smoking, muggers, riots, swimming after meals, dune-buggy gangs, getting trapped in elevators, breaking the speed limit, not using a safety belt. He read Solzhenitsyn and worried about Russians and labor camps. At the station he bought a Tootsie Roll and the paperback of Jaws— that would cause him a few sleepless nights — and waved out the window of the bus like a ten-year-old.

Back home I poured myself a snort, but to prevent my guzzling it too quickly went into the studio Frank had set up in his room. I decided to have a private view of my Provincetown show.

I slid open the drawers of the filing cabinet. I have always approved of the honor system — no locks, no seals — because if it becomes necessary to snoop there’s no hassle. There were letters in one folder, prints in the others. I found “Provincetown” and pulled out the sheaf of enlargements: Eel in a Toilet on top — I threw down the pictures in disgust and read one of his mother’s letters. I would have thought if she had a heart condition she wouldn’t carry on like that . My peevishness justified my looking further. The nerve! I went through his closet and bureau drawers, and every shirt and wrinkled sock told me that I did not really know this man.

Beside the bed there was a small table: a lamp, an alarm clock, Cancer Ward , and some cough drops. I yanked the drawer open and under copies of Creative Camera and Photography Today found a heavy envelope. I could tell by its density that it contained photographs. Mine?

I sipped my drink, but didn’t swallow. My heart went boom-boom.

Once, I had been commissioned by a magazine to do a series of erotic pictures. It was a challenge I gladly accepted: the anatomy had limits then, suggestion was everything. The idea of spread-eagling a whore on an unmade bed so a subscriber could do a drooling pelvic on her was out of the question. I did a half a dozen: a girl’s face in profile licking a ripe strawberry with the fleshy spoon of her tongue; a bird’s-eye view of a nude on all fours — just the cello of her topside; an angle shot in reticulation of a girl flopped forward over the hood of a car; a delighted thing squatting on a man’s foot, clutching his cigar; another with one breast upturned peering at her nipple; and — my biggest coup, the one that was singled out for praise, my piece of revenge on the creeps who ran the magazine and the men who bought it — a sizzling shot of a leggy nude climbing a pole, which no one guessed was a very humid buttocky boy.

The photographs I found in Frank’s drawer — and they showed signs of handling — were something else. My first reaction was to flick through them, then put them away. I shuffled them quickly and saw great soft bodies, and clearly a snail’s head caught between the stinging lips of a sea urchin; a withered rosebud; a human face with bulging cheeks, feeding; a starved ankle. I sat down mystified and took them one by one: how stupid and weak naked flesh seemed! They looked in close-up like porous giants — huge bums and shanks and dirty toes. They were comic heaps, fooling with punctured dolls. Then I saw their dumb agony, the leers of pain, and I knew they showed, more graphically than I could have imagined, people dying.

It was a dance of death performed by hairy children, only superficially ridiculous: deep down it was intimate treachery. I was outraged and could not separate them from Frank’s praise. Again and again my gaze was drawn to the fingers and feet, the crooked teeth. I was sparing myself the wounds. I saw anonymous flesh being pinched, a man straining over a huddled woman, strangulated faces, desire simulated as grievous harm. Pale hairy buttocks, shadowy faces, mortal wounds: slick injured beavers, veiny swollen probes. Technically, the pictures were a mess. They were to photography what grunts were to human speech, inarticulate terror, almost unreadable cruelty, mournful bullies in piglike postures.

Murder: here was a woman being torn in half by a man clumsily shovelling at her legs; and another woman on her knees pleading with a man who held a lethal squirt-gun against her cheek. There were stabbings, and there was suicide — women choking on furious rats and stuffing themselves with sticks of dynamite. I saw varieties of cannibalism that were unknown in Borneo, people engorging one another with mouths like vacuum cleaners or, conversely, looking as if each person was trying to inflate his partner. I saw simple assault: men ejaculating a kind of poisoned oyster on women’s faces and in a delirium of greed others licking the clotted things off; urination — spattering jets sliming crouched figures. The last showed a stew of women arranged like slabs of fat, head to tail, snuffling.

I wanted to be sad. I wasn’t. I felt cheated, like a witness to a casual massacre, too detached to mourn the victims I knew to be anonymous. The mangled body without a name was only a sensational casualty, and the bodies were indistinguishable. It was the scandal of it — the scandal of lust, not the lust itself. The wounds were their sex. And it occurred to me that such pictures — the millions of them in the world — showed only the same two people, over and over again: one degraded couple who played all the parts in every picture ever taken. Here they were again, more vicious than the last time I had seen them, dirtier, older, and a little desperate, but the same familiar bums, leaving me shaking my head and saying gosh. I gave them names: Kenny and Doris — they are every fucking couple ever photographed; Kenny with his greasy hair and his I.D. bracelet, Doris with her cheap mascara and her appendix scar.

And they gave Frank pleasure! The man who had praised my pictures could find room in his judgment for this junk. Perhaps more than I, Frank had underestimated the power of the photograph to deceive. He had hidden them, and what worried me most was that he needed this squalid couple, found satisfaction in Kenny and Doris. How then to reckon his praise of me?

He had fooled me for a while. I didn’t matter. But he had fooled himself.

I was not confused. This confirmed what I had felt about my life and work: they were separate, contradictory, as different as Kenny and Doris were from any couple I had done. I had been right to chuck photography. Frank’s surprise — that dirty dog — proved I could not trust him; nor could I trust my own pictures. The ones he claimed said everything, said nothing.

“Frank! You worm — you pathetic liar. You say you care about my pictures, but what about this garbage you keep beside your bed? You weak silly man, you think this is passion! Look at your thumbprints on them and tell me you don’t peer at them when you’re all alone at night — does your willy rise like a snake out of a basket? They’re not even good pictures! They’ve got hypo stains, they’re underexposed, the flesh tones are green, they need to be cropped and airbrushed, the light’s all wrong, they’re sixty percent shadow — trash! Put these in your gallery and worry everyone to death talking about integrity with a Tootsie Roll in your mouth. You’re kidding yourself, sonny boy. And maybe you’re just curious, but if these pictures are a turn-on, you’re in bad trouble—”