Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“Cheer up, Phoebe.”

“Please don’t go.”

“Orlando will look after you.”

Brave girl: she didn’t say that he’d gone. She shut her eyes and held her breath and hurried into the kitchen with her hands over her face so I wouldn’t hear her cry.

Mr. Wampler saw me to the station in his beach wagon.

And I learned something else: a pair of eyes were handy in New York City, but not essential. The departing passengers steered me out of Grand Central and I followed my nose to the street. As I didn’t have much luggage — no camera, no peepshow — I decided to walk to the Algonquin.

But against my will I was seized by a jabbering taxi driver and whisked to the hotel. My secret was safe — all hotel guests are treated as if they are blind: Sign on the bottom; This way, madam, watch the step; Right in here; If there’s anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable just sing out; Your light switch is here, your bathroom over there, the key’s in the door.

It is the nature of rooms to retain. There is no such thing as an empty room. They have memories. I was not alone in this one; I was ducking images — the boiler noises of the traffic below, the honks and growls in the walls, the misery in the closet, the shushings of the pipes. It was more than I could bear, and I decided to leave not out of loneliness but because the room was too crowded. Outside, trying to get my bearings, I knew what all visiting strangers suspect but hesitate to put into words: that I had forgotten something. Most people, in their anxiety and confusion, reverse this. They cling to the belief that they are taking something away. But no; I knew I was leaving something irrecoverable of myself behind in the room.

The sidewalks were no challenge. They were precisely measured, and the whole city seemed as familiar as home. New York was a perfect place for a blind person, a masterpiece of right angles, all walls and squares on a grid of streets — a labyrinth without a monster. At one corner, bored by waiting for the light to change, I jaywalked. Then I was approached by a heavy man who gave me a sarcastic sigh. He paused; there was that delicious groan of twisting leather and a more severe clank of metal chains.

He said, “What are you, new around here?”

“Sorry, officer.”

“Wait for the light, lady.”

Wait for the light! Just another futile approach to the art of photography. But I didn’t say that I had waited and seen the insignificance of light; that energy was elsewhere. I frowned ashamedly to incriminate myself, and when he released me with another gasp of exasperation, giving his leathers another wrench, I walked on, west, to indulge myself in the old thrill of being on an ocean liner.

It was better than I remembered. The city cruised along at a good clip, putting the gulls to flight, startling the pigeons; and watchers on the passing shore and smaller vessels signaled with toots at the stately ship trumpeting toward the sea. I strolled along the cobblestone deck, giving my brain an airing and delighting in the great swerve of the voyaging city. Behind me, among the giant funnels which were a shadowy heaviness this winter afternoon, I heard the shouts of people, and I could distinguish between the murmurs of salts for whom shipboard here was home, and the fearful squeals of her joy-riders.

The last blaze of reflected sun slipped away and, in the chill that was night falling, voices carried distress to me. Without a further sound, the ship capsized, and sank, and what mattered was not the ship anymore, but the emptiness around it. I saw what I had never seen before, columns of empty air and the tall watchtowers rising in silence. Below, the voices were whispers and the toiling cars suffocated grunts — nothing compared to the soundless heights that made every human noise a watery glug. The city was a steepness of remarkable air masses shaped by the specific columns of granite and fitted like a Jungle gym in impressive bars of voiceless smoke that had displaced the city. The city was unpeopled; it was its spaces, chutes of air, the sky snug in a mammoth mold. It is the secret of canyons, which are not solid things but occasions — amphitheaters for tremendous dramas of empty space. It vanished underfoot. It was without substance. Being alone I could subside in it, have a good night’s sleep, and rebuild it to my own design after breakfast.

I was a bit sorry I hadn’t brought my camera along, because the next morning I hung out the window and heard two men quarreling. I’m on the ninth floor; the street’s full of traffic, the sidewalks swarming with people, and no one’s paying any attention to the quarrelers down the block. One of those chance compositions: apparent order, procession of car roofs, patterns of windows and walls; solemn unity of pedestrians and shoppers undone by two men at each other’s throat — and they’re not going anywhere. Ideal angle: gap of Times Square, and a narrowing again, and then a chink — New Jersey — a slice of light counterbalancing the brutes at the bottom. And the slant of morning sun is a bonus, tidying the concrete and making the cars a file of cockroaches. The rest of the people are exaggerated by their carbon shadows attached to foreshortened bodies and printed diagonally in wedges and stripes up the long street.

At that very moment, some pretentious little shit was posing a noodle-naked girl in the broken window of an abandoned house, getting her tits into focus and thinking, Study in Contrast , click, click. I’m a genius .

I climbed in and closed the window and doused my swell picture, and after coffee and a bun went downstairs to wait for the man from the Camera Club. My bravado in front of Phoebe and my wish to conceal my blindness had made me say on the phone that I’d meet him in the lobby. But he had no idea what I looked like and I did not know his name. The Algonquin didn’t have a real lobby even then. I took a seat behind the partition that separated the desk from the lounge area. Weeks before, I had removed the crystal from my watch. I touched the hands with my finger pads: ten to nine. I was sure that in his impatience to see me in New York, he’d be on time.

He — or rather they — were early. I heard a harsh whisper, “Wait,” on the other side of the partition and the unmistakable sound of a plate being socked into a Speed Graphic.

I said loudly, “Put that thing down!”

There were mutters, a bustling, the suit-brushings and throat-clearings that precede introduction, and then: “Miss Pratt.”

“I told you, no pictures.”

“I wasn’t going to do you.” This was a different voice.

“Bunk.”

“I can’t tell you how pleased we are to see you,” said the first man, and he sounded as if he meant it.

They introduced themselves as Randy Stranks and Fred Umlah. Randy, the one with the camera, was young; Umlah was the back number who had enthused at me over the phone. But they both did the seeing-eye dog routine, guiding me by my elbow, telling me to watch my step, indicating points of interest — this building, that bar.

“Filing cabinets,” said Randy. “That’s what these buildings are. Look at all those people hurrying in. There goes Urgent, and a couple of Confidentials. Him — he’s Pending, definitely Pending—”

“Randy’s little game,” said Umlah.

But he kept it up. A person’s yapping did more than make my head spin. It clouded my vision and finally blinded me and made me helpless. I thought: Perhaps everyone, not only the hotel guest, is treated as if he were blind. We let others do our seeing for us, so we never really learn to use our peepers. People were always trying to sell you their own versions of a place. If photography mattered it was only because so many people’s seeing kept them in the dark. Randy’s New York was not mine.