Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“Don’t give me that, Maude Pratt,” she said, repeating my full name again in that judging way, as if to make it sound unpleasant, like that of a prisoner being sentenced. “I’ve heard the stories you’re spreading about me.”

“Stories?”

“About me and Sandy.”

“Oh, that,” I said. “Honestly, you wouldn’t understand.”

“You admit it! You’re shameless.”

“I’ve had my reasons,” I said. “It wasn’t supposed to get back to you, obviously. But no harm done. Drink?”

“How can you be so horrible? What have I ever done to you?”

“Why, nothing, Blanche. I think the world of you. But I’m afraid I had to make up that cock-and-bull story. It would be better all around if you just forgot it, though if you understood why I did it you’d be glad for me, you really would.”

“But it’s a lie,” she said. “And it’s filthy. How would you like it if I said that about you and Ollie?”

I laughed out loud. “Wouldn’t bother me a bit!”

She sat forward on her chair and began to cry. I felt sorry for her, hunched there with her fingertips on her face and that lonesome shudder in her spine, and her toes together making a pathetic angle of her feet, and dampness on the back of her neck making her short hairs into moist spikes and foretelling a lifetime of this. She had come down with grief like an everlasting cold and was practicing a comfortable posture for her sorrow.

I touched her. She reacted as if I had left a sting in her. She straightened, smarting, and stopped weeping and said, “You have no business talking about me like that.”

And I started to wonder if perhaps what I had invented about her was the plain truth and she was taking it badly because of that. Certainly, she and Sandy were capable of those feelings, and I had always suspected that it might be true; but it was my boogie-man, Teets, who had furnished the details. Blanche seemed shocked, as if she’d been found out: I had discovered her secret.

So I said, “You shouldn’t take it so hard. Lots of brothers and sisters have been passionately in love with each other. It doesn’t happen every day, but then great passion is a rare thing at the best of times. Only a lucky few are chosen — for all I know, you might be one of them.”

“It’s an insult,” she said.

This annoyed me. By objecting, she was demeaning my love for Orlando and finding something weird or irregular in it, and in her stubborn way perhaps denying her own love for Sandy.

“You’re confused,” I said. “There are all kinds of love. Simply because you haven’t felt it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Someday—”

“You’ve spoiled everything,” she said. “Why are you so cruel?”

“I haven’t ‘spoiled everything,’ as you say. I told a white lie because it was necessary. Who knows about it? You, me, Orlando — I suppose he told you. He shouldn’t have, but he never could keep his mouth shut.”

She said, “I’m ruined.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. No one really gives a hoot. You’re the same person you always were. I can’t hurt you, but I do apologize.”

“Forget it,” she said. “You’ve destroyed me.”

I thought: Yes, I put it into words and it frightens her to know that she’s been found out. But she’ll recover and she’ll be better off for facing facts. I saw her then, for that little while, as my own sister, waking up to her love, and I felt there must be a whole sorority of us yearning for our brothers, aching for nothing more than that long summer of intimate play, rejoined to our other halves in love — the perfect fit of brother and sister that was celebrated in most families as a kind of passionate chastity.

She said, “You’ve snatched away my lover.”

“Sandy will grow up,” I said. “And when he does he’ll love you and you’ll never be alone again.”

“No,” she said. “It’s Ollie.” And in a small voice that was almost a squeak: “I’ve lost him.”

This was unexpected. “Ollie?”

“And it’s all your fault. We were planning to get married when he gets out of law school—”

“You and Ollie?”

“—we haven’t talked about anything else all summer, how we’d live in Boston and have children. But you knew, didn’t you? You knew why he didn’t spend this past summer on the Cape — you knew we were in that room in Cambridge. I wanted to tell everyone, but Ollie said, ‘No, if you divulge secrets, people spread them like lies.’ I thought we had kept our secret. I should have known you’d come nosing around with your camera and spoil it all.”

I said, “I had no idea.”

And I hadn’t, not the slightest.

“That’s a lie,” she said. “To separate us you made up that horrible story about Sandy and me. Ollie came straight to me and asked me if it was true. I almost fainted. ‘How could it be?’ I said. But he didn’t believe me. For some reason he wanted to believe your lie. Now he’s gone,” she said, her voice cracking, “and I’ll never have him.”

I was not surprised that Blanche had loved him: I had never met anyone who was not warmed by the sight of Orlando. But I found it hard to believe that he had loved her. While he was not selfish, he was usually oblivious of the effect he had on others, and so, carefree, he seemed selfabsorbed. That too was part of his beauty, for his humility was attractive — every mood he had enhanced his magic. How easy it was to think someone so happy could love you! Blanche had deceived herself.

In wishing to convince Orlando of the possibility of us consummating our love I could not have chosen a better ploy. I had, without much thought, cast Blanche and Sandy in my dramatic monologue, and I had accomplished a great deal more than I had attempted. I had rid him of her for good. It was an unexpected picture I’d made, for I had hastened to snap one, but — as with my very best — I had exposed something else and come up with a bloody masterpiece, Blanche’s shadow lurking in something I had thought was all mine.

Not that I hadn’t thought she’d be exposed, but that expecting one Blanche, and guessing that she mattered, I had come up with quite another Blanche, who mattered infinitely more. My best photographs happened in just that way, but I had created this symmetrical thing without touching a camera. By concentrating my attention on her and being singleminded I had caught the soul of her intention and trapped her flat. I had applied the strict rules of photography once again to my own life and discovered the great accident of form.

Blanche was still in the chair. Calmer: sobbing relaxed her. Yet I was still apprehensive. I had never believed that the loss of love was so grievous a thing. She looked ill and was doubled up, as if her heart had been torn out. My consolation was that it had been necessary, because if she hadn’t been stopped in her wild presuming she might have made life hell for me and Orlando.

What was so sad was not that she looked destroyed, but that she had come to within an inch of destruction. The only life in her was the thin warmth of sadness. This in itself was frightening, for the survivor of a tragedy looks twenty times worse in a photograph than the carcass of a casualty. I was thinking that I would rather be dead than blind and crazy and twitching with grief in some stranger’s house.

As if reading my thoughts, she stood up and tried to pull herself together: stretched, yawned, wrung her hands.

I said, “Are you sure you won’t have that drink?”

Her eyes widened. She said, “You haven’t heard the last of this.”

“It’s late, Blanche. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

“I don’t want to see you tomorrow,” she said. “And if you’re smart you won’t want to see me — ever. I won’t be responsible for what I do to you.”