I crept out of bed and down the darkened hall, then stood inhaling varnish. The house seemed, as it did on dark nights when I was awake and clammy, as if it were going to fall down. I could hear its frantic crickets, the abrupt groanings of its floors, its beams warning me with grunts. At night it seemed empty and unsupported, and now it trembled under my prowling feet as if a phantom occupant was hurrying away. The floor had tilted like a ramp, tipping me forward on my errand. I expected to hear the splintery sigh of woodwork, a little shake, and the whole place on my head in furious collapse. Yet it held: a miracle.
Orlando’s door was open a crack and showed more darkness. I rapped twice; I didn’t speak.
He did, instantly, in a clear voice: “I thought you changed your mind.”
I entered. He was nowhere. I heard him breathe from the bed, a sound that lit him like a lamp, and I could feel his warmth from where I stood. The darkness that hid him made me small and noisy. I shuffled across the room, my nightgown going floop-floop, and got into bed. I felt for him, searched the cool sandwich of sheets with my hand. He wasn’t there.
“Over here, silly.”
And then I saw his shadowy outline in a chair just beyond the bed. So he was up! No wonder he sounded so wideawake! He had been waiting for me.
He sprang into my lap. I caught him with my knees and he hugged me gently, steadying my plump damp arms with a caress and saying, “How do you like this?”
I kissed him. He sniffed and sighed.
“Maude?”
Fumbling in my terror I said, “I was afraid of the dark.”
He yanked the light on and we reacted to the brightness that splashed our faces, making wincing masks, squinting as if we had soap in our eyes and trying to swallow the light.
He said, “Let’s play cards.”
I thought it was a euphemism for a better game and was aroused. But he meant what he said: he was innocent, in rumpled pajamas, just eight years old.
The moths watched us at the screens where they clung, and at dawn, when they shriveled and shut, deadening themselves for the day, and the birds racketed beneath the window, I took myself back to my room. I thought: I will kill anyone who takes Orlando away from me.
It was an easy vow. A family, if it is large and well-connected, is like a religion. It serves the same purpose — to bewitch the believer with joy and offer him salvation; it consoles, it enchants, it purifies. It is roomy seclusion, a kind of sanctified kinship, as much faith as anyone needs. Many religions attempt, unsuccessfully, to be families, but ours worked: on Grand Island we were fenced in from marauding infidels. We had money, space, a prospect of the sea, and like other Cape Codders we were ancestor-worshippers. We had our own reverences and secrets; we were safe: house, windmill, paddock, orchard, shoreline, jetty, pumphouse, well, summer kitchen, winter parlor, greenhouse, and a private road signposted DO NOT TRESPASS.
We had staked out our territory and we were so secure we seldom ventured to the frontiers. This suggests a savage tribe, hemmed in by menacing jungle; but it was not that — not a small and haunted hand-to-mouth society we’d established — but something much greater, a nearly limitless world of possibility which Papa ruled with kindly intensity. We believed in the pattern we saw; we tried to please each other; we distrusted everyone else. It was a feast. And it was easy for me to turn these loyalties into desire and not want anything to change; to want it all to last forever just the way it was; easy for the passionate virgin I was to see no harm in saying to Phoebe, “When I grow up I want to marry Orlando.”
By the time I recognized my love for Orlando it was too late to do anything about it. But I knew several things: that I would not allow myself to be thwarted; that once I had him there would be nothing left to achieve. So I made my desire a sin because only what was denied me would continue to make me clamor for it. Until then, I had had everything I had ever wanted. It seemed crucial not to have Orlando too soon: the taboo was necessary — it starved me for him and enlivened me with that same hunger.
It was then, by chance, that I learned the value of a camera, how it attracts, persuades, and animates. “Her real love,” Mama had said. I used it on him; I did him all the ways one can do. Orlando was delighted to pose for me, and perhaps he knew that I regarded the camera as my abstracted soul seeking fulfillment. The lens is uncritical; it doesn’t make the pictures that desire does, and so the activity itself was my excuse to stay a decent distance from him and yet have him all to myself.
Here he is in the garden in his white suit and boater, showing under the straw lid the jut and nibble of his profile; there, grinning from the window of the summer kitchen with jam on his mouth; making a mouse of his bicep; standing on his head, his flannel cuffs at his knees; streaming with surf in his bathing suit — a set of striped long johns in which his penis showed like a hitchhiker’s fist; clamming, with his trousers rolled up; fooling at the windmill, with his legs crossed and his hands under his head, whistling; doing cartwheels in the twilight; lowering his head and peering innocently into my box.
Frank brought me some of these pictures — not all. Where were the others? It was a question Orlando stopped asking. Not lost — I remembered them clearly enough, I could peruse them in the dark, shuffle them like a pack of cards and play them to recreate the past as solitaire. But most did not exist. Again, I had denied myself, for though I took hundreds of them, and fussed over each shot—“a little to the left,” “come forward,” “smile,” “hold it”—often when I trained the camera on Orlando I didn’t have any film in it. I wanted more than his picture. The camera was only a stratagem to charm him, a trick that was to turn me into an observer of chance, one of life’s onlookers. My instinct told me that a photograph — of which I already had many — only diminished the subject and made it into a trifle. It was something snatched (how apt the term “picture-taking” was!) that afterward seemed much smaller, almost worthless, a feeble duplicate of what I wanted. Photography was in its infancy and so was he.
No film: my confidence trick. He looked at me more sweetly through the lens. Why spoil it with a photograph? I didn’t want his brown blur in an album. I loved him and I wanted to sleep with him.
I could see no point in anything else in the world, certainly none in taking pictures. I used the camera to get close to him, but I knew that as soon as we were lovers I would take that empty apparatus and drown it in the deepest part of Nantucket Sound.
Going downstairs to Frank after raking over the past I felt awkward, as if I had done some shameful thing alone. Photography had been a companionable if fruitless deception, but this reminiscence seemed so embarrassing when I stopped, as if I had been laboring to uncover some muddy secret, groping for the past on all fours, blundering around in the dark. Already I knew that my retrospective was not his retrospective. He had pictures; I was flying by the seat of my pants. After a morning of it, verifying the pictures he brought me by remembering how inaccurately they portrayed me, I wanted to re-enter the present, just to prove that I existed. I half expected Frank to accuse me with, “What have you been up to?”
He did not say a word. I felt like a jackass. Did he see me?