Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

Then I started to play, and when I emerged from this darkness by winning the games of Blindman’s Buff I saw that I was whole. Though I had caught sight of Orlando, I had lost him; and yet I had found the world. And I had, myself, been discovered. Waking, I realized I was in demand. Dealers, editors, auctioneers, jobbing patrons rang at all hours to ask me to work for them. Would I go to Europe, where a war was beginning? Would I walk up and down the earth, whacking away with my camera? They offered me permission, protection: I could do anything I damn well pleased as long as they had a claim on me.

But I didn’t need them. The exhibit itself was proof of that. They had only to look at my pictures to see my contempt for patrons, and how this whole Pig Dinner series constituted an attack on the pimping known as patronage. I hadn’t needed them when I was unknown — how could I possibly need them now that I was on top? The naked truth was that, like all pimps, they wanted to get into my act — not to enhance my work but to justify theirs. They persisted in their requests and tried to engage me.

Nor was this all. There was a bizarre aspect to my fame as well. Although my pictures quite clearly had the liquefaction, the “drowning quotient” that made them “Pratts,” I was now pestered by people who wanted me to do other things — crazy things, pointless, unworthy, demeaning, vulgar, or plain silly.

It made Jack Guggenheim seem like an angel. Every person of achievement gets these proposals: Madame Curie must have been asked a thousand times to open drugstores or lend her name to brands of aspirin, Dr. Schweitzer to endorse mosquito repellent, or William Faulkner to write the copy for bourbon ads. I know the whisky people were always after Ernest to pose with a bottle of their juice in his hand. Most people are now too young to remember how Eleanor Roosevelt promoted Blue Bonnet Margarine on television, but the Shakespearean actor who’s reduced to doing a number about the Polaroid instant-print camera — photography’s answer to frozen pizza — is a good example of what I mean. The worst wanted to involve me in the selling mechanism, making me a fund-raiser if not an outright accomplice in extortion: take pictures of cars, women wearing false eyelashes, men in expensive pajamas, people smoking cigarettes. With my first artistic success under my belt, my genius was complimented by a manufacturer of ladies’ underwear, who promised me five thousand dollars to photograph his latest range of bras and girdles.

“Never,” I said.

I was offered the anonymous hackwork of photojournalism, sports and news, travel features, fashions, family portraits — Junior in his sailor-suit, Sis and her hubby, Buddy in his khakis, Mom and Dad beaming. No, thank you. One Hyannisport millionaire demanded I do his daughter’s wedding pictures: he had the cash, I had the camera — what was wrong with me?

They assumed I was for hire. This intense recruitment, with its origins in patronage, is a feature of American cultural life; it is related to the grant, the fellowship, the endowment, and every other boondoggle associated with sugar-daddy creativity. It was the height of insolence, presuming on my imagination. I did not even reply to them. They didn’t know who they were dealing with. Anyway, I was blind!

And nearly every day, the Camera Club in New York rang to ask when I would be free to make my visit.

“You really should go down there,” said Orlando, who I knew was trying, with the best will in the world, to get rid of me.

“Like this?” I faced him and lifted off my dark glasses and showed him my blind staring eyes.

“Why not?” he said. “You could bask.”

“I’d just bump into walls.”

“Don’t give me that,” he said. “I’ve been watching you, cookie. You don’t miss a trick.”

Phoebe said, “I don’t know how she does it.”

Instead of replying directly, I said, “Your slip is showing, Phoebe.”

I heard her tug and snap it into place.

All this happened in the misty weepy weeks of November, when Orlando should have been at Harvard. But he stayed on; Mama and Papa remained in Florida, unaware — as far as I knew — of my success; and Orlando and Phoebe made love in the windmill at least once a day. Though it excited me to be on hand, there was something distinctly melancholy about us three still inhabiting the family house, like children who couldn’t outgrow their youthful ghosts. Because we hadn’t left home we remained children to each other. Consequently, those phone calls from New York seemed an extraordinary intrusion. The more Orlando kidded me about the bonanza at the Camera Club and all those requests for photojournalism (“They might send you to Mashpee!”), the more I reminded him that he was playing hooky and might just flunk his bar exam.

“I work better here,” he said. “And don’t worry — I’m keeping up with my reading.”

“I make sure he’s on the ball,” said Phoebe.

I said, “So I see.”

And though it drizzled, and the raindrops hit the withered grass with a sound like unvarying grief, and the fog rolled in from the sea and cast its wet shreds around the house and made the starlings roost and drip — there were, suspended in this funereal curtain of dampness, threads of brilliant light; and all around me the magic of fresh fire.

But early one morning I was quickened by a premonitory hysteria, an urgent intimation of change that was a draft blowing across my soul. I knew when I went down to breakfast that Orlando was no longer with us.

As usual, I betrayed nothing of what I felt.

“You’re up bright and early,” I said.

Phoebe, who was at the table, had not spoken, and she had grown so accustomed to my second sight that she didn’t even ask how I knew she was in the room. But I knew more: she was alone, in her nightie, her hair still braided, and she was biting on one of the twisted ends.

“Coffee?” she said.

She had been crying. Her tears had dried, but I could see the rags of sorrow in her, a destitution of spirit. Beneath that svelte exterior was a waif with goosepimples and chilblains, a poor abandoned child shivering in the gray morning.

She tried to be bright. She said, “You’re lucky you can’t see what an awful day it is.”

“Not too bad,” I said. “There was a snow flurry last night. It looks pretty in the yard, like moonlight on pelts of speckled ermine. And that frost on the window, like ferns etched on the glass. It’s a nice old contraction, all this ice. But don’t worry — it’s going to be sunny. I can feel it in my bones.”

She was looking at me in astonishment. “Golly,” she said, “you’re amazing.”

She didn’t mention Orlando. But her grief showed in the way she crunched her toast and had difficulty swallowing it. At nine-fifteen the telephone rang.

“It’s those people again,” she said, holding the receiver against her stomach so she wouldn’t be heard.

“If it’s the Camera Club hand it over. Otherwise hang up.”

“Just a minute,” she said into the instrument. She gave it to me, wrinkling her nose. She was puzzled.

A wide-awake man at the other end said, “We were wondering if we can expect you down here anytime. We’d be delighted to—”

“Listen carefully,” I said. “I’m leaving this morning for New York—”

Phoebe said, “No, Maude, you can’t!”

“—and I’m staying at the Algonquin tonight. Meet me in the lobby tomorrow at nine and I’ll put in an appearance at the show. No publicity, no pictures, no autographs, no speeches.”

“If you gave us a little more time we could make an occasion of it.”

“Save your money,” I said and clapped the phone down.

Phoebe was staring fixedly at me. Knowing I was blind, she did not attempt to conceal her alarm, and this made it all the easier for me to read her face.