The last photos of Arbus, taken just before her suicide in July 1971, show her looking thin, tense and uncertain. She’s dressed in black leather pants, her hair is cut short and there are dark shadows under her eyes…Where did her stubborn neutrality come from? Rena suddenly wonders. Her refusal to find one thing better than another? Her blindness in the face of injustice? Arbus was interested only in the particular: each, each, each.
She said yes to everyone, Subra puts in. Just like the payphone.
Right. Accepting other people to the point of non-existence. Diane diaphanes, a transparent film that allows light to pass through it. ‘I just want to stay with my eye to the keyhole forever,’ she once wrote to a friend.
What had that Maisie seen? What had she endured as a little girl, growing up in New York in that wealthy Jewish family whose privileges she detested? What evil had she been forced to construe as good, so irrevocably that she would spend the rest of her life blurring the nuances between the two?
I, too, Aziz, am something.
She bends over the sink and splashes her face with cold water, scattering droplets in all directions.
All right, so you’ve lost your boyfriend, whispers Subra, forever loyal. But you’ve found your Dad again. And the minute you get back to Paris, you’ll buy a new camera…
Aspetto Secondo
It’s eight p.m. by the time she re-enters the waiting room. She sees Ingrid sitting there, not flipping through a magazine, just waiting, handbag on lap, hands folded on handbag. Determined to imitate her, she goes over and sits down next to her. No longer having a bag, she sets her hands directly on her knees.
‘No news?’ she asks.
‘Not yet. Don’t you think it’s a bit strange? They took him away two hours ago.’
‘You’re right, it is strange. Maybe there was a queue in the X-ray room. People with more serious problems that had to be seen to first.’
‘Maybe. What about you? Everything A-OK in Paris?’
‘Mmm…No.’
‘Oh, Rena…’
Without warning, Rena turns to her stepmother and bursts into tears.
‘Rena. Oh, my poor dear,’ Ingrid says, stroking her stepdaughter’s hair as she sobs on her shoulder. ‘Look!’ Rummaging in her bag, she pulls out a Kleenex and two fifty-euro bills. ‘This is for your runny nose, and this is for your little expenses when you get back to Paris — don’t get them mixed up now! Come on, give us a smile.’
Her attempt at humour is so puerile that Rena can’t help laughing as she blows her nose.
‘Maybe you could ask them what’s going on? You speak Italian…’
‘Okay,’ Rena says, borrowing a second tissue to wipe her eyes with. ‘Sure. I’ll go ask.’
The receptionist at PRONTO SOCCORSO knows nothing.
‘Couldn’t you try to get in touch with the doctor who’s looking after Mr Greenblatt?’ asks Rena.
‘No, we can’t bother the doctors. Wait, though — I can check with the nurses on that floor. He’s in radiology, you said?’
The woman puts the call through. Rena savours the music of their patronym pronounced in Italian. She observes this exhausted-looking woman who keeps tapping her pencil nervously on the desk as she waits for the answer to her question. Fiftyish, probably attractive when young, she wears reading glasses and presses her lips together far too often. Though her eyes stare up at the high window on the wall across from her desk, it’s clear she sees neither the evening sky outside (deep violet) nor the sixteenth-century moulding (black with dust); her mind is on her own troubles, which have dug deep creases in her brow…Is she aware that Timothy Leary is still up there, revolving around the Earth? Has she heard Leonard Cohen’s new album? Would she be interested to know that my brother Rowan Greenblatt is a peerless jazz violinist, a true genius of improvisation?
‘Signora.’
‘Si.’
‘They tell me to tell you to wait.’
‘But we’ve already waited two hours! What’s going on?’
‘Madame. They’re looking after your father. He needed some extra tests.’
‘What kind of tests?’
‘They didn’t tell me anything else. They said only that they will do more tests over the next few hours, and can you please be patient. You have time to go out for dinner.’
‘We have time to go out for dinner?’
‘Yes, it will take some time. There. That is all I can tell you.’
Aspetto Terzo
This time when she enters the waiting room her step must be different, for Ingrid’s eyes leap at her the minute she crosses the threshold. Rena puts an arm around the older woman’s shoulders, repeats what she has just been told…and feels her stepmother’s body seize up in shock.
‘What does that mean?’
Over the ensuing hours, they will reiterate countless variants of that question. (‘What’s going on?’ ‘Why are they keeping him?’ ‘What gives them the right…?’ ‘What are they doing to him?’ ‘Did she tell you what they were doing to him?’ ‘What can it possibly mean?’) Every once in a while they make an enormous effort to change the subject (‘Isn’t Italy beautiful?’ ‘Gorgeous!’) but it swiftly peters out and they go back to the old refrain. (‘Everything will turn out all right.’ ‘Of course it will.’ ‘But what are they doing to him?’)
Rena drifts off to sleep.
I’m in a large café somewhere, seated at a table with a dozen strangers. Among them I suddenly recognise the famous Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn. Though he doesn’t actually look like Goldwyn — he’s tall, thin, greying and alcoholic, a sort of ageing beau—I know it’s him. He insults me a little, to sound me out, and I answer sweetly and humorously, thinking, Boy, if he knew who he was talking to…He asks me to dance and gradually we start to pick up each other’s signals. Rubbing up against me, he finds me pliable and malleable, I receive his body totally, perfectly, melting at his touch. He picks me up and spins me around in the air. I’m careful to conceal my ‘true’ identity from him so that he’ll go on desiring me and playing with me — oh, this is paradise, I feel light, weightless—I wish it would never end…
Waking up with a start, Rena instantly recognises the ‘famous’ man’s initials.
Ingrid hasn’t slept a wink.
At eleven p.m., they force themselves to go down the hallway and purchase sandwiches from a machine. Each of them is now mothering both the other and herself: mothers know you can’t think clearly on an empty stomach. You get nervous and irritable when you’re hungry; you overreact.
The sandwiches stick in their throats. They wash them down with water.
‘Go out and have a cigarette if you feel like it,’ Ingrid says, ‘I’ll tell you the minute somebody comes.’
‘Thanks,’ Rena answers, ‘but I’m not going anywhere.’
Puma
At midnight, having dragged its heels unbearably all evening, time suddenly pounces on them, the way a puma pounces on a gazelle.
A doctor sticks his head through the door and motions Rena to join him in the hall. He prefers to talk to her, he says, because his French is better than his English. He can’t fool her, though: the truth is that he dreads the wife’s reaction more than the daughter’s.
‘What happened is this,’ he says. ‘We started off with an X-ray… just a routine thing, you know…your father’s injury isn’t serious…I mean, it’s always impressive to see a big bump like that…but it’ll go away in a few days, it’s nothing at all…Anyway, what happened is this…’ The man is in his early sixties; his tone is calm and professional. Rena can tell he has fulfilled this obligation countless times in the past and learned to keep his voice low, firm, and especially continuous. Yes, it’s of the utmost importance that he keep talking: his voice is like a rope the patient’s loved ones have to be able to hang onto and follow, step by step, with crystal-clear logic, from start to finish. ‘We noticed something else on the X-ray — a shadow. You never know, it might have been simply a light effect, but we figured it was worth putting him through a few other tests in case it was something more serious. Your father had his insurance papers on him and he signed all the authorisations, so we went ahead and did a TDM and then an MRI. The results just came back and… well, unfortunately, madame, to put it as simply and directly as possible, unfortunately, madame, we were right: it was serious. We discovered a glioma in your father’s brain, a sort of primitive tumour of the nervous system. I’m very sorry to have such bad news for you. For the time being, we’ve told him nothing, naturally. He’s resting up. Your father is a very nice man. A very nice man indeed.’