— Easy does it.
They slipped through the window of this great silent palace and were happy again paddling upright and awkwardly until they grew tired and leaned back. Gulping, they ducked under and did not begin to struggle until it was too late. They ceased to move their arms or legs.
They fell slowly, wrapped together and dropping like a harmless spider on a strand of tiny bubbles. Though I passed within inches of them — and now I was rising: their dying had released me from the scrub of purification — they did not see me with their white eyes. Not a look, not one more word. They were below me, simplified to a blur, a pool of lowering light. The moment they were lost I broke clean through the surface.
31. Preview
NEW YORK, a wet November evening. I was walking by the museum when I saw the posters, printed on six square feet of the beatific breast-feeding shot, The South Yarmouth Madonna.
MAUDE COFFIN PRATT RETROSPECTIVE FIFTY YEARS
I was out of habit of seeing my name written so large. It stopped me. Passersby were slowing up near the posters to look. I got a kick out of my anonymity, reading over their shoulders and hearing their grunts of approvaclass="underline" know-it-alls boasted to their dates that they knew my work. I lingered long enough to watch some invited people go in to the preview dressed in fancy clothes, animal pelts on their shoulders, diamonds around their necks, gold on their wrists, — wearing their wealth like the rankest trophy-hunting savages. But they were hopeful, squealing in anticipation, with that just-washed look of partygoers. And they were so intent on making a graceful entrance they were unaware that on the sidewalk, in the lights of the museum marquee, I stood with my face hanging out.
I slipped in by the side entrance so that no one would see me; no one did.
The party was in progress on a second-floor landing. To call it a landing was not to do it justice. It had an immense stone rail on one side which overlooked the staircase, and on the other side an entire wall of glass gave a grand view of the garden courtyard with its floodlit mobiles and imprisoned statuary. On the stairs to the landing people were propped, as if they owned the place, and braying.
‘‘I am perfectly capable of finding it myself,” I had said to Frank over the phone, a week before this preview. I looked for him — we had agreed to meet at the show’s entrance — but if he was there I didn’t see him. I assumed he was lost in the same crowd that had swallowed me.
The poster — the one I had seen out front — was plastered on the landing, rising from floor to ceiling, repeating my name and the picture, so big and numerous, was no longer mine. This was someone else’s red-letter day.
“You made it! Aren’t you thrilled?” screamed a woman with an animal pelt on her head. Thinking that she might be addressing me I smiled. Then she walked past me. Oughtists, she said in that New Yorker way to a beaming midget, ought and oughtists.
“Where’s Maude?” said the midget, looking directly at me. The woman didn’t know. They went on talking about my works of ought.
I had stiffened to prepare myself for their rushing over and saying, “Where have you been hiding?” But no one asked the question, and I would not introduce myself. I rather enjoyed my anonymity in here, as I had outside. I could mooch around, eavesdrop, examine faces and reactions, and not be required to say a single thing. Praise can only be answered with humility or thanks; I didn’t feel modest or grateful.
I was a stranger. It was the funereal feeling I had had earlier in the summer, on my return from London. But this was a joyous occasion, people saying Maude this and Maude that. I had every reason to believe that I had lived through a death by drowning. The death had shown me what I was, what I had done: it was just as well that no one recognized me.
Having entered the museum so obliquely from below I’d had to work my way up the stairs, through the throngs of people who were swigging and yelling. I had counted on seeing Frank on the landing and I winced when I gained it, expecting his shout, Here’s the star of the show! or something equally foolish. I fought forward to the exhibit’s entrance, for the party was outside the gallery proper. ENTER HERE, said a placard, but the mob I had assumed to be lining up for a look was simply gathered there blocking the way.
My impatience tired me. After fifteen minutes I was winded and wanted to sit down, or for someone — where was the peckerhead? — to rescue me. Some people stared at me and I grinned back, assuming they had recognized me. They looked away. I could not explain it, but then, I didn’t recognize any of them either.
A few years before, a place like this would have been full of people I knew — Imogen, Minor, Ed Weston, Walker, Weegee — and I searched the faces for moments before I realized that they were as dead as Mrs. Cameron. In this room was the new generation of photographers and art patrons. I could spot them: that long-legged blonde in the cape, that other ingratiating gal with the sunglasses perched on her hairdo, a pair of black simpering queens, and another black looking toothy and hostile, as if he were going to shriek at me in Swahili. Most of the photographer types were wearing leather jackets, combat boots, itchy shirts — advertising themselves as toughies, men of action. Even the gals looked the bushwhacking sort. The marauders and fuck-you-Jacks of a profession that was a magnet for neurotics, they were deluded by the fear of competition and all wearing their light meters as pendants around their necks. If it was an art, it was the only one in which the artist actually wore something that made him visibly a practitioner.
And there were others, pairs of people, slightly mismatched, whom I took to be photographers hand-in-hand with their subjects. That anorexic gal and her friend, whose face I recognized from a drugstore paperback — surely she aimed to be a credit line on his book jacket? This dapper little man and the wheezing old dame: it could only have been a relationship that started with a studio session (“Look straight at me, dear, and forget your hands for a minute”); the boogie-man and the blonde with her tough twinkle — it wasn’t too far-fetched to imagine that they had launched their romance with a camera and for all I knew kept it airborne the same way (his brutally honest chronicling of ghetto life, her cooperation amounting to human sacrifice). The bearded lout and that girl-child; the virago and her soul-mate into, as they would say, the woman’s thing. I could identify the mediocrities by their catch phrases: the prancing Minimalists, the Deeply Committed crowd, the Really Strange bunch, the Terribly Exciting ones, the Intos, the Far-outs, the Flakys.
These were cannibals’ success stories. But what the hell — they were having a swell time. Photography didn’t matter: they had each other. That was the whole purpose of taking pictures — it won you friends, it got you fame and fresh air. “I’m working on a new concept,” said the bearded lout, and I knew that if he hadn’t been a photographer in the pay of Jack Guggenheim he’d have gotten twenty years as a sex offender for some outrage upon that girl-child’s person. The work was an excuse; the idea was to involve yourself with people, which was giving photography a bad name.
My anonymity made me cynical. Perhaps I was being unfair. It was possible that they had taken pictures and developed them and, like me, at some later date, had drowned in them and known the terror of what they had done.
“He’s into some very exciting things.”
“He hasn’t had a show for years.”
“I consider this an event. He’s a very private person.”
“He’s supposed to be here somewhere.”