Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“Tell me,” said Phoebe to Woody, and shining with flirty curiosity, “what was the scariest thing that happened to you?”

“Scariest? Gee, I don’t know. Maybe that landing in the Marshalls. I mean, I could have gotten killed. I was in the first wave, see, and we were under fire from the Jap positions. But I didn’t care!” He let out a huge reckless laugh. From the way he talked I could tell he wore white gym socks and loafers, had red ears and spiky hair and spaces between his teeth. I could not understand what Phoebe saw in him.

“Ollie was with you, though?” she said.

“No, he was way the fuck back. The photographers were the last ones on the beach.”

“Photographers?” said Phoebe.

Orlando said, “When they heard my name was Pratt, they gave me a camera.”

“I don’t think much of that,” said Phoebe, and to Woody she said, “You’re kind of cute.”

Orlando said, “You saved my life, cookie. Everything’s going to be all right. You’ll see.”

“Is that a promise?”

“You bet it is.” He stood up and yawned. “It’s late. Past our bedtimes. Let’s go, Woody — lights out. I’ll show you to the spare room.”

“Don’t go away,” said Phoebe. “You don’t have to listen to him.”

Woody said, “I’m having a real good time. I want you to know that. It means a lot to a guy.”

Phoebe said, “Sleep tight, soldier. Night, Ollie.”

When they had gone I said to Phoebe, “Shame on you. I think you got a crush on him.”

“Who?”

I had always known that only Orlando could save me. Giving the house an hour to settle down, waiting for the pipes and floors to be still, I lay in my bed and thought how simple my art had been, compared to the endless complexity of my life. My photographs were at the windless center of the storm, the eye of the hurricane. I was celebrated but unknown — the curse of art, for the storm was too great and contradictory a thing to compress in one picture or a thousand. Anyway, one word was worth a thousand pictures.

My vision was partial. That was as much as I could manage alone. I needed Orlando’s help, his love, for my eyes. Love was sight, and lovelessness made creased bats of us all, suspended in hiding folds in the daytime, and jarring at night. I had willfully blinded myself and given up. But he made me believe; he wanted me: You’ll see .

Already I saw — my bed, my room, the padlocked trunk. I put on my robe and the darkness was not within me, it was merely the hour — veiled moonless midnight in early summer. My movements were brisk with hope. I knew where I was going, and I swept from my room and down the corridor as confidently as if the whole house were lighted. I was not nervous, and yet before I had gone ten steps I was out of breath. My heart pounded with joy; a numbness in my fingers and a great cracking in my skull bringing me a deranged lucidity in which the walls and floor seemed to be moving past me, carrying me to Orlando’s room.

Long before, on younger legs, I had made other forays and surprised him. But now, like an adult shadowing a bold child, keeping a few paces behind to protect her, I was guided by her. I overtook this ghostly figure at the door, where she paused. Inside the room I unfurled my robe and threw it on the floor.

He was asleep, but no sooner had I slipped into his bed than he was awake, embracing me, dragging my nightgown up, kneeling above me and kissing and biting me. All this was new and nearly brutal, and for the first minute or so — before I felt the whole of his weight — I thought, No, I can’t and wanted him to stop. I was being manhandled, pushed roughly to the edge of a precipice. But I was helpless in his rolling hands and his determination overcame me. He forced my legs apart fiercely, like someone tunneling, fighting for air, planting a candle of explosive in me to blow me to bits, so he could struggle past me. He was huge and impatient, and I wasn’t ready. Sooner than I wanted, the pain began, and the pain was, intensely, its own anesthetic.

It was like no picture I had ever seen, the palatial halls of dawn, a blood-red dome of sun piercing the distant sea and boiling there in a corona of its own flames and sending light all the way to the shore along the yellow furrows, until the tiniest wavelet of sea-changed surf jumping limply to the sand was drenched with heat.

My heart stopped. His face was on mine, but I felt only that star rising in me and scorching the backs of my eyes and making me bleed tears. I was confined within my own body and yet freed of it, as if I had been flayed alive and covered with gore. I cried out — not knowing whether I wanted him to stop or continue. He took my screech for encouragement and worked harder. The pain passed through me and left me in pieces, in a deliquescence of light that was like a happy death. I was perfectly still; I wanted more, I dreaded more. Now the light leaked to a pinprick, just that, as if he had caught me in my fluttering and fixed me with a pin in my tenderest spot.

He never spoke a word. He slipped beside me sighing and I realized that though my eyes blazed they were tightly shut.

I woke in my own room. It was my first sunrise. It was inaudible. I gave it time — still, it was something of a letdown. Each twiggy tree and tremulous bud, the wallpaper florets, the candlewick bedspread, that smug trunk. I appreciated the detail, but the scale alarmed me: had the room always been that small? The whites so tinged with gray? I opened my eyes on a tinier, shabbier world that seemed at once temporary and perpetual, and on the Sound a sailboat blowing this way and that like a mad hanky.

A cramp was twisted in my abdomen, the ache of a wound between my legs. My bruised flesh was fragile and then I saw the beetles of crimson-black blood on my thighs and I ran to the bathroom.

“Scrambled eggs,” said Phoebe, busy watching the tin doors of the old-fashioned toaster. “Papa’s making them for everybody.”

I said, “Just what I feel like.”

Woody was sprawled at the table with his hands behind his head. His face was a muffin, puffy with sleeplessness. He yawned and didn’t cover his mouth. He wallowed in his yawn, showing his gappy teeth, and said, “I don’t care if I ever go back.”

Papa said, “Give Maude a hand, will you?”

“I can manage,” I said. I was still wearing my dark glasses, partly because I didn’t want to shock anyone so early in the morning and partly because they had the effect of diminishing the light, which I found oppressive. I had emerged from a darkroom. This brightness had an intolerable voltage, and yet, for all its luminosity, it revealed nothing new to me.

Mama said, “Someone ought to call Orlando.”

She was little and brown and looked fussed and feathery like a guinea hen.

“Ollie!” yelled Papa, carrying the pan of eggs to the foot of the hall stairs. “Probably dead to the world. He’ll be here in a minute.”

But he did not come.

Phoebe said, “We can start without him.” She looked tired and tarnished and had lost the winking flirtatiousness of the previous night. It was not lassitude but repose: she had a secret. I wondered if she had gotten up to something with Woody in the night. He certainly looked as if he was luxuriating in slyness, enjoying a kind of lover’s heartburn.

“You look real nice today,” he said, touching the frilly cuff of Phoebe’s calico frock.

“Thanks,” she said, and jerked her arm away.

Mama handed Woody a mug of coffee. “No sign of our son.”

I could not take my eyes from the window, the prospect of garden and sea which on this cool morning had a sodden cardboard truth — damp and downright and weatherbeaten.

Then it leaped away: Orlando appeared between a pair of lilacs, treading the dewy frost-blue grass in his bare feet, a muscular sprite with his hair keenly bleached and his khaki shirttails out. He was brisk and sheepish, a shoe in each hand.