Picture Palace, Page 2

  “What’s the flick?” I asked two hours later as I handed over my boarding pass to the man at the gate.

  “We don’t show in-flight movies at night,” he said. He winked. “But I’ll do my best to keep you entertained.”

  I said, “Act your age, buster, or I’ll call a cop.”

  The plane was less than half full. I had three seats to myself and, after take-off, got a pillow and blanket and curled up. I had a bad case of heartburn—all that food—but I was dead tired. The last thing I heard was the pilot giving our altitude and saying that in an hour or so we would be flying over Gander, Newfoundland. And we had, he said, a good tailwind. I woke up in a red dawn that was spilling across a snowy sea of clouds, the kind of arctic meringue that wins photo competitions for its drifts of utter harmlessness, impenetrably stylish in soft focus. I rejected it for a clumsy shot up the aisle, forty-five elbows and an infant hanging on the curtain to First Class, like a child face down in a deep well.

  And the next I knew I was in an English taxi, rattling through London traffic, narrow streets, and wooden signs, a damp summer smell of flowers, cut grass and gasoline in the air, and everyone rather pale but looking fairly well dressed in second-hand clothes. It was a bright morning, with the night’s residue of rain still hissing against the tires, and the blue sky stuck on the windowpanes of houses that were otherwise spikes and black bricks.

  The people on the sidewalks had that mysteriously purposeful attitude of pedestrians in foreign cities, a hint of destination in their stride. I wondered briefly why they weren’t on vacation like me; it was as if they were only pretending to be busy. Mine was the traveler’s envy: regretful that I didn’t belong here like them and finding an unreality in their manic motion.

  But the rest looked grand to me and gave me a new pair of eyes that found a rosy symmetry in the red bus passing between the red pillar box and the red telephone booth, a wonderful Bill Brandt nun unfurling in a gust of wind at Hyde Park Corner, and a splendid glow of anticipation—sunlight in the taxi and a vagrant aroma of breakfast cooking—as we raced down Piccadilly. I had the sense of being a dignitary, of momentarily believing in my fame. But that is every traveler’s conceit, the self-importance of flying that dazzles the most ordinary stick-in-the-mud tourist into feeling she’s a swan.

  “Carry your bag, madam?” It was the doorman at the Ritz in his footman’s get-up. I almost laughed. I never hear a foreign accent without thinking, Come off it! They’re doing it on purpose. They could talk like me if they really wanted to.

  Inside, I signed the register and the desk clerk handed me an envelope. Spidery handwriting, flimsy notepaper, almost oriental script, very tiny brushstrokes saying, I shall be in the downstairs bar at 6. Please join me for a drink if you’re free. Graham Greene.

  5

  Greene

  THE RITZ BAR was empty, quiet, but crazed with decoration. I tried to get a fix on it. It was white, with a Bischof gleam, gold-trimmed mirrors that repeated its Edwardian flourishes of filigree and cigar-wrappers, frosty statuettes, velvet, and the illusion of crystal in etched glass. The chocolate box of a whore’s boudoir. I guessed I would have to lie on my belly to get the shot I wanted, but then I noticed in all that tedious gilt a man behind the bar polishing a goblet. He wore a white dinner jacket and was bald; his head shone. I saw at once how the crown of his skull gathered the whole room and miniaturized it, and he wore it like a map pasted to his dome. Shoot him nodding and you’ve got a vintage Weegee.

  “A very good evening to you, madam.”

  I thought: You’re kidding! I said, “A large gin and tonic.”

  “Kew,” he said, and handed it over.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. I expected him to take a swing at me, but he only picked up another goblet and continued his polishing. What a head! It made the wide-angle lens obsolete. But I didn’t have the heart to do him. In fact, since arriving in London I had begun to feel winded and wheezy, a shortness of breath and a sort of tingling in my fingers and toes I put down to heartburn and jet-lag.

  Greene entered the bar at six sharp, a tall man in a dark blue suit, slightly crumpled, with an impressive head and a rather large brooding jaw. I almost fainted: it was my brother Orlando, a dead ringer. Ollie had grown old in my mind like this. Greene’s face, made handsome by fatigue, had a sagging summer redness. He could have passed for a clergyman—he had that same assured carriage, the bored pitying lips, the gentle look of someone who has just stopped praying. And yet there was about his look of piety an aspect of raffishness; about his distinguished bearing an air of anonymity; and whether it was caution or breeding, a slight unease in his hands. Like someone out of uniform, I thought, a general without his medals, a bishop who’s left his robes upstairs, a happy man not quite succeeding at a scowling disguise. His hair was white, suggesting baldness at a distance, and while none of his features was remarkable, together they created an extraordinary effect of unshakable dignity, the courtly ferocity you see in very old lions.

  And something else, the metaphysical doohickey fame had printed lightly on his face—a mastery of form. One look told me he had no boss, no rivals, no enemies, no deadlines, no hates; not a grumbler, not a taker of orders. He was free: murder to photograph.

  He said, “Miss Pratt?”

  A neutral accent, hardly English, with a slight gargle, a glottal stop that turned my name into Pgatt.

  Mister Greene,” I said.

  “So glad you could make it.”

  We went to a corner table and talked inconsequentially, and it was there, while I was yattering, that I noticed his eyes. They were pale blue and depthless, with a curious icy light that made me think of a creature who can see in the dark—the more so because they were also the intimidating eyes of a blind man, with a hypnotist’s unblinking blue. His magic was in his eyes, but coldly blazing they gave away nothing but this warning of indestructible certainty. When he stared at me I felt as if it were no use confessing—he knew my secrets. This inspired in me a sense of overwhelming hopelessness. Nothing I could tell him would be of the slightest interest to him: he’d heard it before, he’d been there, he’d done it, he’d known. I was extremely frightened: I had never expected to see Orlando again or to feel so naked.

  I said, “How did you happen to get my name?”

  “I knew it,” said Greene. Of course. Then he added, “I’ve followed your work with enormous interest.”

  “The feeling’s mutual.”

  “I particularly like your portrait of Evelyn Waugh.”

  “That’s a story,” I said. “I was in London. Joe Ackerley said Waugh was at the Dorchester, so I wrote him a note saying how much I enjoyed his books and that I wanted to do him. A reply comes, but it’s not addressed to me. It’s to Mister Pratt and it says something like, ‘We have laws in this country restraining women from writing importuning letters to strange men. You should have a word with your wife’—that kind of thing. Pretty funny all the same.”

  Greene nodded. “I imagine your husband was rather annoyed.”

  “There was no Mister Pratt,” I said. “There still isn’t.”

  Greene looked at me closely, perhaps wondering if I was going to bare my soul.

  I said, “But I kept after Waugh and later on he agreed. He liked the picture, too, asked for more prints. It made him look baronial, lord of the manor—it’s full of sunshine and cigar smoke. And, God, that suit! I think it was made out of a horse blanket.”

  “One of the best writers we’ve ever had,” said Greene. “I saw him from time to time, mostly in the Fifties.” He thought a moment, and moved his glass of sherry to his lips but didn’t drink. “I was in and out of Vietnam then. You’ve been there, of course. I found your pictures of those refugees very moving.”

  “The refugees were me,” I said. “Just more raggedy, that’s all. I couldn’t find the pictures I wanted, so I went up to Hue, but they gave me a lot of flak and wouldn’t let me leave town. The military started leaning on
me. They didn’t care about winning the war—they wanted to keep it going. I felt like a refugee myself, with my bum hanging out and getting kicked around. That’s why the pictures were good. I could identify with those people. Oh, I know what they say—‘How can she do it to those poor so-and-so’s!’ But, really, they were all versions of me. Unfortunately.”

  “Did you have a pipe?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Opium,” said Greene.

  “Lord no.”

  “They ought to legalize it for people our age,” he said. “Once, in Hanoi, I was in an opium place. They didn’t know me. They put me in a corner and made a few pipes for me, and just as I was dropping off to sleep I looked up and saw a shelf with several of my books on it. French translations. When I woke up I was alone. I took them down and signed them.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I put them back on the shelf and went away. No one saw me, and I never went back. It’s a very pleasant memory.”

  “A photographer doesn’t have those satisfactions.”

  “What about your picture of Ché Guevara?”

  “Oh, that,” I said. “I’ve seen it so many times I’ve forgotten I took it. I never get a by-line on it. It’s become part of the folklore.”

  “Some of us remember.”

  It is this photograph of Ché that was on the posters, with the Prince Valiant hair and the beret, his face upturned like a saint on an ikon. I regretted it almost as soon as I saw it swimming into focus under the enlarger. It flattered him and simplified his face into an expression of suffering idealism. I had made him seem better than he was. It was the beginning of his myth, a deception people took for truth because it was a photograph. But I knew how photography lied and mistook light for fact. I got Ché on a good day. Luck, nothing more.

  “Pagan saints,” I said. “That’s what I used to specialize in. They seemed right for the age, the best kind of hero, the embattled loser. The angel with the human smell, the innocent, the do-gooder, the outsider, the perfect stranger. I was a great underdogger. They saw things no one else did, or at least I thought so then.”

  Greene said, “Only the outsider sees. You have to be a stranger to write about any situation.”

  “Debs,” I said.

  “Debs?” He frowned. “I didn’t think that was your line at all.”

  “Eugene V. Debs, the reformer,” I said. “I did him.”

  “That’s right,” said Greene, but he had begun to smile. “Ernesto wasn’t a grumbler,” I said. “That’s what I liked about him. Raúl was something else.”

  “When were you in Cuba?”

  “Was it ’fifty-nine? I forget. I know it was August. I had wanted to go ever since Walker Evans took his sleazy pictures of those rotting houses. I mentioned this in an interview and the next thing I know I’m awarded the José Marti Scholarship to study God-knows-what at Havana U. Naturally I turned it down.”

  “But you went.”

  “With bells on. I had a grand time. I did Ernesto and I don’t know how many tractors, and the Joe Palooka of American literature, Mister Hemingway.”

  “I met Fidel,” said Greene. There was just a hint of boasting in it.

  I said, “I owe him a letter.”

  “Interesting chap.”

  “I did him, too, but he wasn’t terribly pleased with it. He wanted me to do him with his arms Outstretched, like Christ of the Andes, puffing a two-dollar cigar. No thank you. The one I did of him at Harvard is the best of the bunch—the hairy messiah bellowing at all those fresh-faced kids. Available light, lots of Old Testament drama.”

  Greene started to laugh. He had a splendid shoulder-shaking laugh, very infectious. It made his face redder, and he touched the back of his hand to his lips when he did it, like a small boy sneaking a giggle. Then he signaled to the waiter and said, “The same again.”

  “Isn’t that Cuban jungle something?” I said.

  “Yes, I liked traveling in Cuba,” he said. “It could be rough, but not as rough as Africa.” He put his hand to his lips again and laughed. “Do you know Jacqueline Bisset?”

  “I don’t think I’ve done her, no.”

  “An actress, very pretty. François Truffaut brought her down to Antibes last year. I gave them dinner and afterwards I began talking about Africa. She was interested that I’d been all over Liberia. ‘But you stayed in good hotels?’ she said. I explained that there weren’t any hotels in the Liberian jungle. ‘But you found restaurants?’ she said. ‘No,’ I said, ‘no restaurants at all.’ This threw her a bit, but then she pressed me quite hard on everything else—the drinking water, the people, the weather, the wild animals and whatnot. Finally, she asked me about my car. I told her I didn’t have a car. A bus, maybe? No, I said, no bus. She looked at me, then said, “Ah, I see how you are traveling—auto-stop!’”

  “Pardon?”

  “Hitchhiking.”

  “Bumming rides?”

  “That’s it—she thought I was hitchhiking through the Liberian jungle in 1935!” He laughed again. “I had to tell her there weren’t any roads. She was astonished.”

  “Say no more. I know the type.”

  “But very pretty. You ought really to do her sometime.”

  “I did a series of pretty faces,” I said. “My idea was to go to out of the way places and get shots of raving beauties, who didn’t know they were pretty. I did hundreds—farm girls, cashiers, housewives, girls lugging firewood, scullions, schoolgirls. A girl at a gas station, another one at a cosmetics counter in Filene’s Basement.”

  “One sees them in the most unlikely places.”

  “These were heartbreaking. Afterwards, everyone said I’d posed them. But that was just it—the girls didn’t have the slightest idea of why I was taking their pictures. Most of them were too poor to own mirrors. One was a knockout—a Spanish girl squatting with her skirt hiked up to her waist, sort of pouting, her bare bottom near her ankles. What a peach—there was a beautiful line cupping her bum and curving up her thigh to her knee. She didn’t see me. And another one, a Chinese girl in Hong Kong I did after that Vietnam jaunt—long black hair, skin like porcelain, one of these willowy oriental bodies. She was plucking a chicken in a back alley in Kowloon, a tragic beauty with that halfstarved holiness that fashion models make a mockery of. I weep when I think of it. That’s partly because”—I leaned forward and whispered—“I’ve never told anyone this before—she was blind.”

  ‘You’ve done other blind people,” said Greene. “I’ve seen them exhibited.”

  ‘When I was very young,” I said slowly, trying to evade what was a fact. “I’m ashamed of it now. But the faces of the blind are never false—they are utterly naked. It was the only way I could practice my close-ups. They had no idea of what I was doing—that was the worst of it. But they had this amazing light, the whole face illuminated in beautiful repose. They’re such strange pictures. I can’t bear to look at them these days. I was blind myself. However, let’s not go into that.”

  But as I described the pictures to Greene I saw that he had this same look on his own face, a blind man’s luminous stare and that scarifying scrutiny in his features, his head cocked slightly to one side like a sightless witness listening for mistakes.

  “I understand,” he said.

  “I’ll be glad to show you the others,” I said. “The pretty faces. You’ll cry your eyes out.”

  “There were some lovely girls in Haiti,” he said. “Many were prostitutes. Oh, I remember one night. I was with that couple I called the Smiths in my book. I said they were vegetarians. They weren’t, but they were Americans. He was a fairly good artist. He could sketch pictures on the spot. We were at that bar I described in my book—the brothel. He picked one out and drew her picture, a terribly good likeness. All the girls came over to admire it.” Greene paused to sip at his sherry, then he said, “She was a very attractive girl. If the Smiths hadn’t been there I would have dated her myself.”

  It seemed a r
ather old-fashioned way of putting it—“dating” a hooker; but there was a lot of respectful admiration in his tone, none of the contempt one usually associates with the whore-hopper.

  “Dated her,” I said. “You mean a little boom-boom?”

  “Jig-jig,” he said. “But it comes to the same thing.”

  I laughed and said, “I really must be going.”

  “Have another drink,” said Greene.

  “Next time,” I said. I had lost count of my gins, but I knew that as soon as I remembered how many I’d had I’d be drunk.

  “Will you join me for dinner? I thought I might go across the street to Bentley’s. That is, if you like fish.”

  I was tired, my bones ached, I felt woozy and I knew I was half pickled. I attributed all of this to my sudden transfer from Grand Island to London. But I also had a creeping sense of inertia, the slow alarm of sickness turning me into a piece of meat. I knew I should go to bed, but I wanted to have dinner with Greene for my picture’s sake. I recognized his invitation as sincere. It was an English sequence: they invite you for a drink; if you’re a dead loss they have a previous engagement; if not, you’re invited to dinner. I was pleased that he hadn’t flunked me.

  I said, “Lead the way.”

  Greene went to settle the bill and ring the restaurant while I tapped a kidney in the ladies room. I met him outside the bar and said, “Bentley’s—isn’t that where your short story takes place?”