Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“That’s all you have to say, is it?”

“No. I still want to know how you found out. Just curious, I guess.”

“I’m not telling you.”

“And the other thing. Why does a fellow who has so much regard for the integrity of the photograph waste his time with that kind of pictorial garbage? What do you see in it, huh?”

He panted crossly instead of replying.

“You’re a very mysterious person, Frank.”

“I just want you to know that I’m having serious doubts about this entire project. Yes, it’s a great idea, but if my personal life is in in jeopardy—”

“What about my personal life!” I said and noticed a scream rising in my voice.

I had been calm. I had had a vague desire to re-enter my own picture palace and examine that moment in the rowboat with Orlando. Had he really been so dark, so tense, so obviously deceived, as the picture showed? And what was the sequel to it? Frank’s intrusion shattered my mood, destroyed my calm. But he had given me a notion. He had reminded me that I had endured another unexpected assault, and his heckling — all this woeful indignation — had woken a memory, not pleasant but necessary.

“I’m going,” he said.

“Don’t go.” I needed his indignation now to stir my past and make me remember. Someone had come, just like him, and accused me.

He sat on the edge of his chair and gave his Adam’s apple a workout. Plunge, plunge: it was like sarcasm.

I said, “I want you to know that I didn’t take those pictures lightly. No sir. They worried me. Frank, I was shook. Now I respect you — you’ve always found things to admire in my work. But how do you account for them ? What, may I ask, are they in aid of?”

“It’s a different ball game altogether.”

“Well said. But these horny pictures — are you doing something with them?”

“What do you mean ‘doing something’?” his voice was uncertain and shameful.

“Writing a learned article, that sort of caper.”

He hung his head. “Not exactly.”

“Go get them. I want to look at them again.”

“Never.”

“Don’t be ashamed of them. It’s an aspect of photography that’s been somewhat overlooked.” Frank didn’t budge. I said, “I found them rather alarming.”

“So you said.”

“Photography is all about secrets — the secrets in surfaces. But Kenny and Doris don’t have any secrets that I can see. They’re out of sync, there’s no surface — technically, they’re nowhere, they look like they were bled off by Dracula, so you can’t use the old erotic art gambit to justify them. Or is erotic art just another way of saying tit-show? And doesn’t it scare you to realize that in order to enjoy that sort of thing — Doris double-clutching, say — you have to endure the sight of Kenny’s great hairy ass or his dripping tool?”

“Cut it out,” said Frank.

“All right,” I said. “But I find it odd to think that you have room in your judgment for those pictures and mine. What’s the connection?”

“I’d like to know why you’re so disturbed by them,” he said, turning on me. “That says a lot about you.”

“Good point. I was disturbed.”

“Hah!” He stood up. “See, that’s the real problem, isn’t it? It’s you!”

“And how! But they’re your pictures.”

“They don’t worry me a bit.”

“Amazing,”

He said, “There are worse. Scenes you wouldn’t believe.”

“What are they for , for heaven’s sake?”

He was silent, standing like a crane.

I said, “Tell me how you knew I’d seen them.”

“Leave me alone.”

“I’ll stop razzing you if you tell me.”

He looked at the wall, making his jaw mournful. He said, “Because you messed them up.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Yes — you mixed them up, scrambled them out of order.”

“Oh, my God.”

“That’s how I knew. The sequence was wrong.”

“The sequence!” I started to laugh.

He had gone to the door. “And it better not happen again,” he said. “There’s a word for not minding your own business, for invading people’s privacy and sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

He swung open the door, but he pushed his white face at me. “Treachery, that’s what it is!”

Treachery? I said, “I’ve heard that one before,” and then, “Yes, that’s it! You’re absolutely right! That’s just what I wanted to hear!”

But he was out of the door and down the stairs before I could thank him for his appropriate intrusion.

IN MY VERY ROOM, in those very words, demanding explanations and apologies, but not satisfied with my innocence and using the occasion to be rude and hurtful. People say they want apologies but what they really want is to bite your head off and spit it into your face.

She burst in late one night, a few days after I had seen Orlando at Harvard. She was out of breath and sort of whimpering at me. My memory was of thumps in the hallway and the door to my room suddenly pushed open and her looking as if she were going to fling herself on me. She said, “You — you — you!” and carried each word a step closer to where I sat with my peepstones and a stack of pictures.

Her jump into the room, the way she swung herself at me, had lifted her hair and given her dress an updraft of coarse folds and made her coat sleeves look like beating wings. I caught her pouncing as one explosive instant, an action shot framed by the doorjamb. She seemed in that moment of agile fury — her fists near her bright slanted eyes, her knee raised, all this force balanced on one toe — as if she were about to streak forward and stamp on me. It was the picture Frank, in his indignation, had suggested. I had not wanted to remember this episode.

She had the fearsome nimbleness of the deeply wounded. In my terror I tried to freeze her. I did not see her moving continuously at me, but rather caught her in a series of still leaps, each more exalted than the last, and mounting toward me intimidatingly to howl.

I said, “Blanche, wait—”

I felt a seismic thrill, as if a picture I had been taking had swallowed me in its undertow and made me a subject, too.

“You bitch!” she said.

Profanity from someone who had never used it before, anger in someone who had always been solemn: it was truly thunder to me. And angry, she looked physically different, all sinews, teeth, and hair, like a person animated by an electric current.

“Now, now,” I said, wishing to calm her.

“So help me,” she said, and stepped back, not withdrawing but threatening me the more by giving me a glimpse of the whole voltage of her anger.

“Not so loud,” I said, as reasonably as I could, and moved past her to shut the door. “Phoebe’s asleep.”

“I could kill you, Maude Pratt.” She showed me her hands, which she had crooked into a strangler’s claws.

I said, “Now that wouldn’t do a darn bit of good, would it? Just simmer down and we’ll have a nice long talk and you’ll feel a whole lot better.” I went on in this way, talking gently, plumping a cushion, pulling up an armchair, and easing her into it. Sort of taking the initiative.

I thought I had succeeded, but when I brushed past her to sit down myself she sucked in her breath and stiffened and said, “How could you?”

“Not sure I get your drift,” I said.

“There’s something wrong with you,” she said. “I never would have believed it. I always thought you were so good — a little dull, but good deep down. I was glad when I heard you’d been successful with your photos and making a name for yourself. Now this!”

“Thanks very much,” I said, “but I don’t have the slightest idea of what’s at the seat of your—”