Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

Something short and personal , he had said, after I had returned from London in the summer, when I faced the fact that pictures lied like damnation, and my heart seizure — so like Papa’s — needled home the fear that I might not have much time left to tell the truth.

And even then, after so long, I did not know what the truth was.

THERE MUST BE more, but where? Frank was not around to answer the question. And I was glum, the Cape was deserted, the tourists had gone: WINTER RATES said one sign, SEE YOU NEXT YEAR another, and CLOSED FOR SEASON on Kopper Krafts, Pilgrim Laundromat, and the Leaning Tower of Pizza; empty beaches, clear water, hordes of tiny fiddler crabs, and every motel reflecting my depression in its pitiful motto, VACANCY. There is no wasteland like an abandoned resort, no more melancholy sight than drizzle and wind tearing at cheap plastic.

I remembered phrases; I hadn’t seen the pictures that fit them. The captions had stayed, the pictures were gone, so the captions were meaningless. The baboon I had done — under protest — for the National Geographic remained in my mind as “Airbrush flies, remove genitals.” The Marilyn Monroe pictures I had refused to retrieve from the windmill even after the editor had moaned, “Mailer needs them for his book.” The annual winter swim of the L-Street Brownies. The ones I had done of gawkers at the Family of Man exhibition, of Walker in Connecticut, of the shopping mall on Route 28, of the pretty policewoman with the pistol and nightstick in Hyannis (called Move Along); the medium close-up of the elderly bag-carriers at Angelo’s Supermarket in South Yarmouth—“They thought I was going to seed,” one retired soap-powder salesman had said, heaving my groceries into the back of my Chevy and wiping his hands on his apron: I remembered that, but where was the picture? Frank had not shown me that one, or the others.

Was I only imagining that I had done Mailman’s Shoes, Butcher’s Apron , and Harry Truman ? I had always believed that I had been fascinated by double images. I had seen a few — but the rest? The Gay Head Indians on the Vineyard? Kennedy on his sunfish? Or the busing pictures I took only a year before in South Boston (negative prints with a difference: the shanty Irish showed up as black monkeys gibbering at white mothers)? Gone.

And where were those so-called erotic pictures I had done for the skin magazine? I was ashamed of them, but I knew that if I had a chance to look closely at them I would remember the weather, the light, the circumstances, an incident, a syllable to grasp, so I could tug memory from its dark hole.

The pictures I had taken were not the ones I studied, not the foreground figures — everything but. Oh, this was curious. My eye tracked around them to slightly-out-of-focus fences and buildings, or to little people far-off watching me work. I found a new alignment in these shots, a back-to-front reality as I traveled deeper into the picture, sometimes surprising myself by seeing new lisps and stammers. Someone watching from a window, laundry blowing from a line I had taken to be empty, or the man in the Ghost Ship sequence — had he been there at the time, or sneaked in at a later date? Boats appeared on seas that had been featureless when I’d photographed them; faces where there had been only shadows; buds had burst into flower and leaf and, over the years, some of the trees I’d shot had died. Most of my subjects’ expressions had changed, grins to frowns, dimples subsided, eyes had grown shiftier, and people who had looked wise had become wicked or smug.

Perhaps there were no more pictures, none with secrets, only fixed images with nothing in front, nothing behind, the flat surface absolute as a mirror of ice reflecting my face in a certain light and forestalling my drowning. Perhaps it didn’t matter. I had remembered the important things — my girlhood, my love, my blindness, and the few adventures which, until I examined them, had seemed uncomplicated pleasures.

And yet, since the war, when I had felt like a failure, as if I had seen nothing and what I had done had been strictly private — no one paying any attention — and sensing in my loneliness the selfish widowing of wasted time and trying not to care where my life had gone — at these times, someone, usually a gal, always carrying a camera, would show up and remind me that I had been original or witty, that she had seen something I had done, and I would rejoice and want to stick fifty dollars into her hand.

Though I satirized him for being a barnacle, I felt that way about Frank. I could not mock him without mocking myself. Secretly, holding my breath, I valued him: I needed his esteem. He was the young brash confidence I’d once had, single-minded, bossy, without any misgivings, convinced that photography mattered. I had become his subject: he was doing me.

Frank had my crotchets, my spinster’s secrecies. He was wary of intrusions and kept his privacy private. He didn’t know me; I didn’t know much about him, but what I knew of him resembled the part of myself that I was determined to hide. I needed his esteem, but more, I needed his silly questions. Without him, I would have assumed the myth that others had created around me, and when it came time to reassemble the past, that would have been the version I’d have put forth. But the truth was elsewhere, and in retrospect I saw that the life I had taken to be so happy was incomplete and contradictory. Frank had helped me to see that, because his ignorant curiosity caused him to fling himself on me. He was still a barnacle, but he was plugging a leak, keeping me afloat. Now he was away. I missed the little bastard.

When I had challenged him about photography — the pictures I no longer trusted — I wanted him to fight back. He usually had, and I was grateful. I needed him around to verify that the person he imagined was really me. I wanted to ask him if he was disappointed in me, if there was something I had missed, and today I wanted to ask him what happened to those pictures. Were they fantasy? If so, how else had I deceived myself?

I looked out the parlor window and saw the plumed arms of cedar bushes work their elbows in and let the sea breeze bustle past. A row of dry flowers nodded, a ripple ran through the uncut lawn. And a light came on in the Sound, a bright medallion that surfaced and just as quickly sank. It was like that other time, after Mama died, when I had stood in the same parlor and found the picture of the old folks’ chairs, and took it. And in removing that picture I had deleted one more vision from my world.

I was alone. I didn’t like it. Frank’s absence had left my life ajar. I was overdue for a gal with a camera to make her way to the front door. “Excuse me, are you Maude Pratt?” They always asked: no one knew my face. But she would remind me of a picture I had forgotten and bring me a flattering remembrance of the fact that I had lived.

At the window this fall day I experienced a great emptiness, the yawn of familiar sky and old repeating weather. Wind was wind, sky sky, drizzle drizzle: my pictures not mine. Look out your window , the photography manuals said. There is your picture. In the place you least expected it. Waiting to be taken . That was a lie only beginners believed.

I saw the windmill and said sharply. “Fusco! What have you gone and done with my pictures?”

The memory of my blindness had always kept me out of the windmill. But today, desperate for a clue, I braved the path and walked to the narrow window. On tiptoe I looked in; and I was astonished by its neatness. It had been swept bare — smooth benches on a floor of planks, a gaping trunk, the thick vertical screw and cogwheels of the vane’s machinery: like the stalled flywheel of the narrative in my mind. I peered, as if into my empty head. Frank had been thorough. He had done his work well. Seeing this conical room so stripped it was as if every picture I’d taken had been imaginary.