They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber…
There was a hush — he had silenced them with his superb poem, one I had never heard before. And I knew why he was saying it. I was proud: he was declaring his love for me. I saw everyone watching, and even Phoebe, who had criticized him for his somersaulting and acted as if he was showing off — I saw her rapt attention. Her dress was open at her neck and she was breathing hard, her breasts going up and down. I tried to catch her eye, but she faced Orlando, her mouth rounded as if she were saying, “Ollie,”
Orlando’s voice teased and swelled and dropped, became emphatic on one word and nearly sang another. Each syllable had a different weight. Now he was hunched, and seemed to be listening as he spoke.
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”
I heard It was no dream, and I knew, I remembered that summer night when I had stolen along the hall and thought the house was going to fall down, and he was in the dark waiting for me. So it had mattered to him, too, although he had been so young. What a beautiful memory he had made it in the poem. He had cast his spell over everyone, and outside the snow dust sprinkled at the window and the waves gulped as they tucked into the sea wall. He loved me. I stepped back so that no one would see my tears.
Phoebe was beside me. She said, “Don’t cry.”
But she was crying herself. It did not surprise me: we were sisters, and wept or laughed together.
“Let’s take him home now,” I said.
There was applause. Orlando had finished, but before we could get to him a boy stepped between Orlando and us and said to him, “You think you’re something.”
Orlando smiled at him, his bright devastating smile that shut people up.
The boy said, “I loathe the Elizabethans.”
“Wyatt wasn’t an Elizabethan,” said Orlando. “He was dead before Shakespeare was born.”
The boy spoke at large: “He’s a Harvard man!”
Orlando said, “I don’t think I know you.”
“Charlie,” said the boy, and put his hand out, and when Orlando didn’t shake it he said, “It’s trite and sentimental.”
“I like it,” said Orlando.
“Like it? What kind of literary judgment is that? Let’s take it line by line and see if it stands up.”
Orlando looked sad. I wanted that boy Charlie to stop.
Charlie said, “You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means — you’re just seduced by the tumpty-tumpty rhythm.” He looked around for people to agree with him. “It sounds important, but underneath it’s just Dorothy Parker.”
“Lay off,” said Orlando quietly.
“He’s getting mad,” said Charlie.
“Just shut up.” Orlando started to walk away.
“Look at the professor now,” said Charlie.
“You’ve had too much gin, sonny,” said Sandy, trying to quiet Charlie down.
Charlie said, “It’s the cadences that get me.”
I knew Orlando wasn’t going to say anything, because he never talked about poetry like that. He had been so happy, and now he looked as if he was going to walk into a wall.
Phoebe said, “I’ll get his coat.”
But Charlie said in a wuffling critic’s voice, “He wanted to impress us. It sounds very sweet, but it’s just artifice, low cunning, a kind of trick—”
And Orlando, who had been walking in circles, went over to him and grabbed him by the lapels and flung him across the room.
Blanche screamed.
Charlie got to his feet. Orlando hurried over to him and hit him hard in the face, and as he fell back someone opened the door and out he tumbled, doing a frantic tap dance on the steps and struggling into the snow. Orlando descended the steps, waited for him to rise, and knocked him down again.
Orlando said, “It’s time to go.”
Seeing that we were leaving, Charlie picked himself up and laughed — a rueful and defeated snicker. He had snow on his back and snow on his head and looked punished, like a tramp in a storm.
Orlando’s was the best reply I had ever seen, and it taught me everything I needed to know about critics: a critic was someone you wanted to hit.
“I’m sorry,” said Orlando, when we were in the car. He started the engine and chuckled. “No, I’m not sorry.”
I had never loved him more. His poem had kindled a fire in me where there had been warm ashes. It was unlike him to fight, but it was unlike him to do somersaults in public or recite poems. He was full of surprises.
Frank said, “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I said. “You’re sure you want to go to Provincetown?”
“It was your idea.”
We were now beyond Truro, the road had widened, the sky was everywhere, propped magnificently on shafts of sunlight that held the clouds high. And soon we were sailing across the dunes into Provincetown. It had saved me before; it saved me again. I’d done it.
11. Boogie-Men
A PLACE I had plumbed with my camera had few memories for me. The pictures were definition enough, done at so many angles that the photographs were the whole; more was presumption, mere lies. If a person said, “I’ve seen your pictures — now I want to go there,” I knew I had failed. Only bad pictures made you look further. A great portrait to me was intimate knowledge, ample warning that there was nothing concealed, nothing more to say. I knew from Mrs. Conklin, Frenise, and Slaughter that my camera recorded surfaces, but that surfaces disclosed inner states: a person wore his history on his face, past and future, the mortal veil of lines and the skull beneath. There is a self-destruction, suicide’s wince, in the eyes of my Marilyn and my Hemingway, and my Frost shows an utter egomaniac. I never denied the truth of the savage’s complaint about photographers, that in taking their pictures we were stealing their souls.
I had always been interested in what people called savages. I thought of them as boogie-men. They bulked large in my first exhibition, which was held in a boathouse, formerly the Wharf Theater, in Provincetown. Frank wanted to see the place and hear about the show. I could tell he was rather let down by its size, the dinginess that gave it the look of a little chapel. If you didn’t have the faith you wouldn’t hear; you’d just find the acoustics awfully echoic and the stage too narrow and the whole building a firetrap.
Frank said, “Is this all there is to it?” I said yes, and he said, “It’s just the way I imagined it.”
“Sure it is.”
“But I wish I’d seen Provincetown before it got commercialized.”
“Bull-sugar,” I said. “It was always commercialized. It’s been like this for sixty years — vulgar, plastic, phony antiques, windows full of saltwater taffy, queers everywhere, and pennants saying ‘Provincetown.’ It was declared a national monument by President Taft, and he weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. It’s been on the map ever since they started to sell egg-timers with Pilgrims painted on them and ashtrays made out of quahog shells. Don’t knock it — that’s its heritage.”