“It’s the film,” I said, and thought: What is this embarrassing man yapping about?
“We’ll find the sun,” he said. “Come with me.” He turned his back on the plump woman who — almost certainly his wife — had started to rise and restrain him. “This is America,” he said. “There’s a sun here for everyone.”
He stood up. He was one of those short people who don’t gain any height by standing up. On his feet, he looked even smaller and frailer than before.
“Where?” I said.
He said darkly, his beard jerking — and I thought: Oh, come off it! — “Where the sun lives.”
“Try the yard,” said Mr. Seltzer, who had been listening.
“The garden,” said the man, touching me nervously on my knee. “Get your camera, lass.”
The woman looked worried, angry, mystified, impatient; and her seated quaking body made her seem helpless, too. Like his mother, I thought, hopeless and envying, as if she wanted to knock him down just so that she could pick him up and dust him off in her arms.
“Get your camera, Maude,” said Mr. Seltzer in a resigned way, gently trying to get me to cooperate.
“Come into the garden, Maude,” said the man. “For the black bat, night, has flown.”
I got my camera from the hall table and loaded it and thought: If that’s Lord Tennyson I’m going to get my picture in the papers. I hurried into the garden and again saw how small he was and thin, with a terrible cough, like a man who should be in bed. Dark hair, dark eyes, and a pinched face and a beard that wasn’t growing right. I was afraid of him. He reminded me not of Orlando but of my desire, as if it had jumped out of my guts and become that mangy sniffing man. To disguise my fear I showed him the camera and popped it open. It had a lid you opened that made a little shelf for the stiff bellows.
“Queer,” he said, putting his nose near it.
“It won’t hurt a bit,” I said.
He didn’t laugh. He glared at me and then looked at the garden, which was one of those narrow New York gardens surrounded by a high brick wall, with a heavy fig tree and ivy and ferns; like an aquarium without the water, so green, so full, sort of rotting and growing at the same time. The pale late-summer light hovered softly among the thick leaves and the pollen spilling from the hollyhocks and made it seem as if the marble statue of the naked woman was white flesh.
“Stand over there, please,” I said.
“No.”
“The light’s better there.”
“But you’re here,” he said, and his voice was small and vibrant in all those ferns.
“Excuse me, but I thought you wanted me to take your picture.”
Suddenly he said in the same cross voice he had used up stairs, “Have you ever felt it?”
Felt what? I thought. I said, “I don’t rightly know.”
“You’ve never felt it.” He sounded disgusted.
“Not necessarily. Maybe I have and maybe I haven’t,” I said, trying to be businesslike. “Now if you just get into position I’ll snap your picture.”
“You haven’t,” he said, “or else you’d know. You’d remember — the blood remembers. What do you call these flowers?”
“Hollyhocks,” I said.
“We call them hollyhocks, too,” he said, making his voice mysterious.
I said, “Everyone calls them hollyhocks.”
“They’re open — look how they’re parted and dripping with pollen. They want the bees to enter and suck that gold on their hair. They think they’re innocent, but they’re begging to be entered, and gleaming. Did you ever see anything so shameless? They wink and twitch — they’re sex-mad!”
He had made them seem revolting with his nasty descrip tion, and still he leered at them. There were bubbles of scum in the corners of his mouth.
I said, “I don’t know who you are, but I’m sorry, I don’t think they look that way at all.”
“That cat is watching us,” he said.
I said, “That cat is not seeing anything.”
“You’ve got brass,” he said. “You’re a photographer, aren’t you? You want my soul, but you won’t get it. It’s too dark — it won’t show up!”
He took a step toward me. I hated his face.
“I know what you want,” he said. He had halitosis, the vapor from his decaying lungs.
“I want to take your picture.”
“No,” he said, and he was beside me, not holding me, but pressing against me. It was a kind of canine hostility, like a slobbering mutt with its wet dognose smeared against my skirt. I knew he didn’t like me, I could feel it like dampness. I sensed his fear — woman-hating cowardice: he was trying to make me afraid. And there was something else about him, an ugliness that might have been his shriveled size or his stinking cough on which I smelled his lungs.
“Cut it out,” I said.
“You and your bloody picture-machine,” he said. “What do you see? Go ahead — look! — you won’t see anything, lass. You’re as blind as your camera.”
I said, “This camera sees a lot. It’ll make those hollyhocks a damn sight prettier than you did. It will do you just as you are, and you might be surprised by what you see in your own face, mister.”
He made a grab for me.
I said, “If you won’t leave me alone I’ll call Mister Seltzer and he’ll come down here and fix your wagon.”
“Seltzer’s a bloody coward — they’re all cowards and prostitutes. I don’t belong here.”
“Then why don’t you just go away?”
He said grimly, “Because I want to teach you what a man is.”
I thought: Orlando!
“And what loins are,” he said.
A meaningless piece of meat shaped like a cave man’s club was all I could think of, but before I could do anything he said, “Those are my loins,” and bumped me, “and that’s my willy,” and bumped me again. “Do you feel it now?”
Willy: word was bewitching and I almost laughed out loud. But I cannot describe the effect this had on me. I was clasped in the jaws of his skinny thighs and it was like the bite of some poisonous reptile. He was touching me, making my hands sweat on my camera — trying to violate me. Strangest of all, I had never felt so pure, and this feeling of deflecting his assault with my innocence kept strengthening me.
I thought: This is what happens when you leave home. I sensed a new refinement in my passion for Orlando, a purer urge that I could bring back to him. I understood again why he had suggested I visit New York. He wanted me to know how much he mattered.
Bump, bump. Dusty sparrows chirped on his garden wall but the sun still lit the man’s coarse hair. He went a little distance and started to laugh — a cruel laugh with no pleasure in it, just an angry little bark from his dreadful lungs. His laughter choked him and he coughed — terribly, bending over and shaking, as if he were going to spit out his heart and die.
He seemed ashamed: he had betrayed his weakness to me. He walked into the tent of sunlight and turned away from me. He tried to wipe his mouth with a hanky that was stiff and wrinkled from use, but he kept on coughing, like a cat puking and retreating.
I went behind him and snapped a picture of the back of his head: a narrow hive of selfish lies.
That night I took the Long Island boat back to the Cape and Orlando, to the only person who would ever matter to me. And it seemed as if it would always be this way, everything I felt or did circumscribed by him; I could endure any assault, because I was bracketed by his love.