Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“So you’re interested in photography, eh? Know anything about it?”

“Enough,” I said. “I get a real kick out of it.”

“Gets a kick out of it,” he said to the puzzled watchers. “Hear that? It’s important.” He waggled the bulb at me. “Think you can handle that?”

I took it and gave it a hard squeeze and heard the shutter plop.

A sly look returned the parentheses to his mouth and he said, “All right, make it snappy.”

Humoring him, I had let him think he could humor me. If I had introuced myself as Maude Pratt of the Negative Boogie-Man Prints I would have been out on my ear. But who was I? Just a plain-looking gal in a wool hat, with a handbag full of film holders, saying gosh and gee . If he had known who I was — his meticulous assassin — he would have given me the bum’s rush; but as a beginner, fumbling with her sleeves, I posed no threat. And the fact that I was a woman probably had something to do with it, too: he had nothing to lose. It was the secret of our success. As woman photographers we were either ignored to the point where it did us absolute good, or else courted in that sexually testing way that turned every approach into a flirtation. The business with the rubber bulb: this simulated hand-job was supposed to make me flinch. American photography, with very few exceptions, is the story of a gal with gumption aiming her camera at a man with a reputation.

Stieglitz had caved in, but any inkling that I was a photographer, his equal, ambitious, with nothing but contempt for his magician’s bluff — the slightest hint that I was more than I seemed, and he would have kicked me into the middle of next week.

He had moved over to the wall and rocked himself back and fixed his face into that grim little look, as if he had just noticed the roof leaked, posed like Steichen’s Gordon Craig . The dirty window filtered a lemon light across one side of his head and gave the rest of him inkstains of shadow, black arms, black coat, one black ear. He was more than ever the vain magician refusing to reveal the unsurprising object on his person. I knew as I opened the back of the camera and saw his face flickering there that this was how he wanted to look, disliking everyone and everything. It was the expression I tried to catch, his weak challenge of malice.

“It’s shaky,” I said, aiming the camera. “And what’s this?”

“The lens,” he said. “It’s a Goerz Dagor. Best there is.”

“It’s so darn oxidized I can’t read it. Gosh, this diaphragm’s really illegible. I don’t know how you do it—”

As I criticized his camera he forgot his face and started to think. If people aren’t thinking it is impossible to get a good likeness. Now I could see, upside down on the frosted glass, uncertain thought starting to snarl his mouth, and his eyes pricked with suspicion sighting along the bridge of his nose.

I slipped the film holder in and standing next to the camera grasped the bulb and said, “Here goes,” and squeezed it. I heard that curious per-plunk as of something caught in a small trap.

Bang , I thought, You’re dead .

“Keep going.” He did not change his posture, though with each shot he inched back until on the last one — impatient to be done and perhaps aware that he’d been jacklighted like a porcupine on a lantern — his eyes had grown much smaller, giving his head a ducking tilt varnished with the hard gleam of scorn and envy. He had been holding his breath.

“There,” I said. “Now that didn’t hurt a bit, did it?” I put the exposed film holders in my bag.

He sighed and sat down changed. I knew — not from anything I had seen when I had shot him, but from the way he looked now — that I had succeeded. He was crookeder and stamped with exhaustion, and instead of sneering, naked. It was as if in photographing him I had peeled a layer from his face he now realized was gone.

“If you’re quite finished, young lady, you can go.” His voice struck dull tricked notes.

“Thanks a million,” I said, and at the door, “Would you like to see the prints?”

“I very much doubt they’ll be worth looking at.”

Wrong, I thought. I smiled at the people who had watched it all. I had witnesses.

And the hotel room I had fled for feeling so useless and guilty in seemed on my re-entry like an intimate corner of my soul. I screwed in my red bulbs and drew the shades and stuffed towels against the cracks of light. I padded back and forth in the rosy darkness uncorking solutions and filling the bathroom sink. Then I began that simple and pleasurable chemistry that is like laundering in reverse — producing human stains on clean sheets. I washed the negatives and dunked them in developer and agitated them until they ripened. I fixed them. The mottled result was a perfect image of Stieglitz, the layer of him I had filched, but much better than I had expected. Right between the eyes.

Sunday I spent making three sets of prints, and my only regret was that Orlando was not in the dark room to marvel at these trophies and hug me in congratulation.

Nor was he at Adams House.

“Who shall I say called?” said the voice.

“His sister,” I said. “And I am still waiting.”

I sent one set of prints to Stieglitz, without a note, without a name, and yet in the assured belief that my originality glittered in the work. He was vain: he would hang them.

The other set I sent to the Camera Club as my calling card. I would have more before long, and a show, and the kind of fame that would have Orlando shouting, “You’ve done it, cookie!”

My sense of victory was all the keener for my being truly unknown. I relished my anonymity in this triumph since I knew it could not possibly last. The celebrity’s assassin, no matter how obscure, inevitably gains his victim’s fame: it’s part of the act. There was no magic, but dammit, I deserved that man’s head.

THE PORTER, wearing a crimson pillbox, complained in dusky mutters about the number of trunks he had to carry — the peepshow that was virtually the contents of my darkroom. I couldn’t blame him — he didn’t know me. And I wasn’t pretty enough to forgive on sight. People looked at me with unfocused eyes in a grave lopsided way, as if at a double image.

After I boarded the train no heads turned. The man leaning at the door to the next compartment, seeing me smiling at the door to mine, concentrated his disappointment on my hat and knees. The steward slopped my drink and didn’t say sorry. (Now I was tippling regularly, gin for preference; I thought of it as hypo bath because it fixed me.) I could have been miserable, but — far from it — I was so convinced of my success as a photographer I felt I was traveling incognito — like the original who leaves her triumph behind and rather enjoys her fugitive’s disguise, since she knows that as soon as her true identity is discovered she will be eminent. My deed was inescapable. My own secret for now, soon it would be the world’s.

But I was a photographer for love. Orlando was the reason for my camera, and he would make it superfluous. I had no ambition beyond tempting him to its darkened side, and while my fame was crucial to this it struck me as foolish to pursue the lonely distraction of art beyond the room where we made a sandwich of our passion.

I was at the corner window, looking at my two faces in the double pane. The more distant one was prettier, like a mask behind a face.

“I love trains.” It was the man from the next compartment, propped on his forearms, simpering.

I said, “I wish they went a bit faster.”

“That’s the beauty of them,” he said. “I’m in no hurry.”