Picture Palace by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online

crackers call “jeezly.” I found him a most unattractive man who, because he thought he was dynamite sexually, taught me something about the artist’s imagination. The rest of us are healthy; it’s the wounded who take to art: no one wins more races than the cripple in his sleep.
    And—to move on—of all the places I had ever seen, this part of the Cape was my favorite, where the pizza joints, pancake parlors, the nautical saloons—all plastic and leatherette—and the drive-in hamburger stands, flanked by salt marsh and pine woods, face the brimming ocean. Orlando was dead, rest his soul, but I often thought of him as I sped along Route 28 in my new Chevy, with the radio going, marveling at how downright frytastic everything looked, this blend of honky-tonk and brooding, swallowing sea—it was pure Pratt, a vindication of vulgarity. I saw the sunset on the Sound through the hole in a giant Styrofoam donut (“Ho-Made Koffee ’n’ Krullers”) and I wanted to holler, “What’s wrong with that!” and to Orlando in Valhalla, “How am I doing!” These were not questions. In the car, tailgating some retired gent who’d come down here in his orange pants and polka-dot shirt and straw fedora to Wrinkle City to check into some beaverboard condominium until there was room in one of our “colonial-style” funeral parlors—tailgating that liniment freak, I had a kind of bottomless reverie about having had the best life anyone could want and how little it showed in the pictures I started to take when, according to Frank, I was eleven.
    It was a summer afternoon in 1917.
    My father hung upside down in the little lozenge of glass; my mother’s chair was stuck in a canopy of flowers where my beautiful brother Orlando’s toes were planted, and he had his arm around my little sister Phoebe’s butter ball waist as if he was holding on for dear life and didn’t want to fall. I had stood them on their heads, but nothing dropped out of their pockets, and I saw at once that they looked even ritzier this way, like angels or Egyptians reflected in an undisturbed pool, wreathed in sunlight from below that showed the sleepless assurance of their wealth. In this reversal, their Yankee chins protruded like hatchets, our white house balanced on its weathervane, our windmill on its sails, and our trees depended massively, showing all their apples—with its foliage sprawling downwards the gnarled plum tree was transformed into a bird-eating spider. My new perspective offered me details: Orlando’s reckless embrace, the dog’s ball with munch-marks on it glued to a sky of grass; the cellar door, my cast-off sweater lightly defying gravity, and the long stripe of my summer shadow narrowing toward my brother, so that between his feet my little head lay, at the top end of my distorted body, like a lover begging for mercy, a sudden monster.
    Gulls flew on their backs, the horizon floated on a cushion of air, and that vapor of glittering winks in the distance was Nantucket Sound, I had never seen anything like it. I was enchanted. Until then, I had been too ashamed to stare—in my family it wasn’t done. But now I could take my time and watch the dog sliding into focus like a fly crossing a ceiling, and see the great trick of light magnetizing my family by their feet into miraculous yoga postures.
    That was when I noticed the tentative darkness near my father’s head, and the more I watched it the further this shadow spread, moving like night from the left-hand corner. The blur hooded them as if for a hanging, four victims awaiting the noose of forgetfulness to tighten the drawstrings and complete the drop: memory’s gallows of nameless martyrs with its expressive foreground of unrelated objects, the ball, the sweater, all those feet, and finally only the windmill. Come back!
    â€œI can’t see!” I cried.
    â€œGet that