Eyewash, I thought; and if he mentions Arbus I’ll kick him in the teeth. But I lit another cigarette to show I was listening.
“Just this picture alone”—he was holding one of Orlando and Phoebe, picnicking with their backs to me—“is enough. It says everything. That sky, those lonely figures, the sea — that’s the human condition.”
Typical browser’s praise, the skinflint critic mooching among the masterpieces: Ah, what have we got here? Nothing less than the human condition! Very nice, he says, jingling his bus fare in his pocket and thinking: It ought to cost an arm and a leg. Out the door: he’s not buying today.
I was tactfuclass="underline" “It leaves a lot unsaid.”
“No,” he said. “This is it. It’s got allegorical thrust, but it can be read as straight naturalism.”
Orlando and Phoebe? Allegorical thrust? But Frank was happy. I wondered if he believed as I had believed once, and that he would have to wait as long as I had to see the trickery. In praising me he was complimenting the craft and making me doubt my decision to mistrust my life as a sequence of photographs. I thought: What a thing to say to an old lady who’s made up her mind!
He was saying, Wait! Look! Hold on there!
It was unnerving to hear someone speaking with such assurance about Orlando’s picture. Though I suspected Frank of having the faith of the believer, an ignorance more unshakable than the priest’s or prophet’s; and saw myself something deeply untruthful in the pictures — overcertain and prying and misleading; though I doubted his barnacle’s grip on my work, I couldn’t let him down. The guy sounded sincere. My pictures mattered to him.
All this happened the day after the Provincetown visit.
I had three days of alarm. I drank to relieve myself of doubt, and between gulps I heard him on the phone. At one point, pompously argufying with a caller, he used the phrase, My retrospective. For a moment, I felt like an intruder on this busy genius’s routine and then I remembered that I had allowed him to poke in my picture palace.
On the fourth morning, at breakfast, he said, “Can you give me a lift into Hyannis?”
“What’s up?”
“I’ve got some things to do in the city.” The city: so he was going to New York.
“Can’t you make it some other time? Things are a bit unsettled at the moment.”
Unsettled was an understatement; I was feeling so bent they could have named a pretzel after me.
Frank said, “I’ll only be there a day or two. I’ve got to contact the designer and start budgeting for materials. The committee wants a preliminary presentation. Life goes on, Maude. I’ve got to prove I’m not up here on vacation.”
“Frank Fusco, you’re going to be the death of me!”
My old biddy act calmed him down. He liked to be joshed, and I could tell he was looking forward to a few days away from me. I had been on the sauce and behaving badly, playing the radio too loud and leaving glasses around the house. And I had spent part of each morning noisily vomiting the night’s damage.
“Bus station,” he said, when we were on the road.
“The plane’s faster.”
“I hate planes.”
“Sure you do.” Why is it, I wondered, that single people are more morbid than married ones? Frank was full of fears about flying, eating, smoking, muggers, riots, swimming after meals, dune-buggy gangs, getting trapped in elevators, breaking the speed limit, not using a safety belt. He read Solzhenitsyn and worried about Russians and labor camps. At the station he bought a Tootsie Roll and the paperback of Jaws— that would cause him a few sleepless nights — and waved out the window of the bus like a ten-year-old.
Back home I poured myself a snort, but to prevent my guzzling it too quickly went into the studio Frank had set up in his room. I decided to have a private view of my Provincetown show.
I slid open the drawers of the filing cabinet. I have always approved of the honor system — no locks, no seals — because if it becomes necessary to snoop there’s no hassle. There were letters in one folder, prints in the others. I found “Provincetown” and pulled out the sheaf of enlargements: Eel in a Toilet on top — I threw down the pictures in disgust and read one of his mother’s letters. I would have thought if she had a heart condition she wouldn’t carry on like that. My peevishness justified my looking further. The nerve! I went through his closet and bureau drawers, and every shirt and wrinkled sock told me that I did not really know this man.
Beside the bed there was a small table: a lamp, an alarm clock, Cancer Ward, and some cough drops. I yanked the drawer open and under copies of Creative Camera and Photography Today found a heavy envelope. I could tell by its density that it contained photographs. Mine?
I sipped my drink, but didn’t swallow. My heart went boom-boom.
Once, I had been commissioned by a magazine to do a series of erotic pictures. It was a challenge I gladly accepted: the anatomy had limits then, suggestion was everything. The idea of spread-eagling a whore on an unmade bed so a subscriber could do a drooling pelvic on her was out of the question. I did a half a dozen: a girl’s face in profile licking a ripe strawberry with the fleshy spoon of her tongue; a bird’s-eye view of a nude on all fours — just the cello of her topside; an angle shot in reticulation of a girl flopped forward over the hood of a car; a delighted thing squatting on a man’s foot, clutching his cigar; another with one breast upturned peering at her nipple; and — my biggest coup, the one that was singled out for praise, my piece of revenge on the creeps who ran the magazine and the men who bought it — a sizzling shot of a leggy nude climbing a pole, which no one guessed was a very humid buttocky boy.
The photographs I found in Frank’s drawer — and they showed signs of handling — were something else. My first reaction was to flick through them, then put them away. I shuffled them quickly and saw great soft bodies, and clearly a snail’s head caught between the stinging lips of a sea urchin; a withered rosebud; a human face with bulging cheeks, feeding; a starved ankle. I sat down mystified and took them one by one: how stupid and weak naked flesh seemed! They looked in close-up like porous giants — huge bums and shanks and dirty toes. They were comic heaps, fooling with punctured dolls. Then I saw their dumb agony, the leers of pain, and I knew they showed, more graphically than I could have imagined, people dying.
It was a dance of death performed by hairy children, only superficially ridiculous: deep down it was intimate treachery. I was outraged and could not separate them from Frank’s praise. Again and again my gaze was drawn to the fingers and feet, the crooked teeth. I was sparing myself the wounds. I saw anonymous flesh being pinched, a man straining over a huddled woman, strangulated faces, desire simulated as grievous harm. Pale hairy buttocks, shadowy faces, mortal wounds: slick injured beavers, veiny swollen probes. Technically, the pictures were a mess. They were to photography what grunts were to human speech, inarticulate terror, almost unreadable cruelty, mournful bullies in piglike postures.
Murder: here was a woman being torn in half by a man clumsily shovelling at her legs; and another woman on her knees pleading with a man who held a lethal squirt-gun against her cheek. There were stabbings, and there was suicide — women choking on furious rats and stuffing themselves with sticks of dynamite. I saw varieties of cannibalism that were unknown in Borneo, people engorging one another with mouths like vacuum cleaners or, conversely, looking as if each person was trying to inflate his partner. I saw simple assault: men ejaculating a kind of poisoned oyster on women’s faces and in a delirium of greed others licking the clotted things off; urination — spattering jets sliming crouched figures. The last showed a stew of women arranged like slabs of fat, head to tail, snuffling.