Then craftily she went inside to the phone and asked for two menus to be sent up, without letting him near her.
“What’re you doing?” he said to her, when the waiter showed up at the door.
“I’m ordering dinner for us,” she said sleekly.
He half rose to his feet in protest, but she could see that he was flattered. “I can’t let you do that—!” And then, “Well, only if you’ll let me buy it—”
“I live here,” she said firmly. “The next one will be your buy.”
In the end they compromised, went downstairs and sat at the corner table she usually occupied, and she signed the tab and he paid the tip.
Once dinner was taken care of, it was easy to get him back upstairs again. He could not have left her right after the meal without being guilty of the classic “eat-and-run” offense.
And he had a very strong sense of social responsibility, she could tell that much about him already.
Once upstairs and with a symbolic rather than utilized cognac in front of each of them, they found themselves on more intimate terms than before. The dinner and the predinner drink had mellowed him, and she found it easy, with an adroit question or two for a lead, to get him started talking about himself. Not the private inner self that Starr had known, of course. She didn’t dare reach for that. It was too soon, it would only have evaded her. But the self of his outer life, his work, his experiences.
“How did you get started in photography?”
“It was born in me,” he told her candidly. “I couldn’t have been anything else.”
At ten or eleven his father had given him a camera as a birthday gift, one of the elementary Kodaks of those days. Nearly all boys are given cameras at one time or another, and to nearly all boys it becomes a hobby for a while, just like collecting stamps or coins or things of that sort. And then it passes and is forgotten.
But from the minute he first put his hands on it, something happened.
“I knew right then what I was going to be. I knew right then what I wanted to be, had to be. I was holding my whole life’s work in my hands.”
He quickly learned the mechanics of the thing, the developing of his own prints. Most boys do, anyway, and it cost too much to take them down to the corner drugstore, even at those days’ thrifty prices.
But there was much more than that to it. It was as though there had been pent up in him until now this force, this drive, this reservoir of creative ability, and this outlet came along and released it, acted as catalyst to it, so that it poured forth unslackening from then on, for the rest of his days.
From the beginning he wasn’t interested in snapping his friends’ grinning faces, or their pups, or their little sisters. Or the school team in their baseball togs.
Odd shots and angles. That was all that ever interested him. He was always looking for new and different angles. That intrusion of self between the lens and the object that transmutes a mere mechanical process into art.
There was a lamppost across the street and down a little way that he could see from his bedroom window. But from there it was nothing at all. In the summer it cast a soft hazy light, almost blurred by the humidity. In the fall it had dried leaves swirling about its base. But in the winter it was best of all, with snowflakes softly sifting down past it, lighting up for a minute like sparks, then going out again in the dark.
He wanted to get it from below, from directly underneath, nothing else would do.
So he waited patiently, and finally just what he wanted came along: a whopping big snowfall, about three feet deep. He sneaked out of the house about midnight, when there was no one much on the streets anymore. He lay flat on his back in the snow under it, focusing straight up. It was two o’clock in the morning before he finally got the shot he wanted, the one perfect shot, and the imprints his body had made in the snow were like the spokes of a wheel going all around the base of the lamppost.
His mother rubbed his back with alcohol for the better part of an hour, but he went down with a light case of pleurisy the next day anyway. The only thing that kept his father from whaling him was that he was so sick. But the one punishment that would have really been a punishment they didn’t inflict. They never withheld his camera from him. They must have sensed somehow what it would have meant to have it taken away from him.
Then another time he wanted to get a shot of lightning flashing in the sky. This too he wanted to take from directly underneath, as if it were coming down on him. Again he lay on his back, this time in a meadow in the park in the middle of a walloping summer shower, his camera tucked under his chin and a tarpaulin wrapped around the two of them. Most of the flashes bleached the entire sky, they were worthless to the lens, there was no darkness left to differentiate from. Several times it must have struck nearby, he could feel the ground reverberate under him, but he was too taken up to have any time for fear. He must have used up three rolls of film, trying to get what he was after. But, as in the other instance, he finally did get it. Lightning that could be printed and made to last forever.
“Like a live wire, like a filament — you know what I mean? — corkscrewing across the sky.” Then he added wistfully, “I still have it, somewhere.”
And that was the way it went, all those young years of his. A man wielding a blowtorch, in a puddle of sparks, a fountain blown awry by the breeze, an iron demolition ball at the moment of impact as it sundered a wall, a man riding a crane as seen through the black frame of the opening at the end of a pier. He’d hang around such potentialities by the hour, until he had his shot made. Even drunks sleeping it off in doorways didn’t escape his visual voracity. He kept a patient vigil beside one one late afternoon until a certain slanting ray of sunlight had caught and kindled the empty bottle he held cherished in his arms, and that in turn sent a reflected highlight up into the sleeping face above it. Like someone hovering over the afterglow of the fire that has consumed him. The story the picture told was implicit, but only he had known how to add the one little touch that gave it full expression.
Once he almost lost his life, lying full-length under a parked car making a series of montages of the feet of pedestrians coursing along the sidewalk, when the owner unexpectedly got in and started it.
At the end of his basic schooling, he went to vocational high school and took a course in photography, but there already wasn’t very much they could teach him. Just a little more up-to-dateness in the equipment used and in the processing methods, that was all. He could have taught his teachers how to take an unforgettable picture. But at least it gave him the necessary credentials.
He found the going very hard at first. He got a few jobs as assistant in other people’s photo studios, but the pay wasn’t enough to get along on, and the interesting part of the work, the creative part, wasn’t thrown his way. Sometimes he was little better than an errand boy, bringing back coffee, sweeping the floor, emptying out trays of solution.
He had to take odd jobs, whatever he could find, to tide himself over. Then one summer he managed to get hired on as a stagehand at a summer-stock theater in the country. He’d gone up there originally to work as a waiter at the resort hotel. One week the man who had charge of lighting the plays (they used to do one a week) was hurt in a car crash coming out from the city and stood them up. Herrick talked them into letting him pinch-hit for the absentee, and he turned out such an eye-fluttering job (the play was a natural for trick lighting exercises, anyway: Berkeley Square) that they kept him on from then on.