Picture Palace by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online Page A

thumb of yours off the viewfinder, Maude,” said Papa calmly.
    I did not look up. I experimented with my thumb and stared at the glass lozenge on the edge of my Brownie. My family reappeared, laughing. But upside down their mockery didn’t matter. They swayed as if they were about to be dislodged, the laughter shaking them out of their pompous practiced attitudes and giving them life.
    I snapped the picture. I had caught a decisive moment of the past in my mousetrap. I held it in my hands, in that rinky-dink camera (everything further than eight feet was in focus), and I rejoiced.
    The best pictures are seldom good pictures. This was the one I always started with when freeloaders like Bushrag and Grippo came out to see me. They had cameras slung around their necks, and their shoulder-bags were crammed with equipment. They wanted to see my work. I offered them the first look I ever had of my own family, and I waited until they saw what I did that hot afternoon.
    But they crowded me, they looked over my shoulder and did not see anything. To them I was an antique, like the lobster pots and cranberry scoops they found in West Barnstable and took home to varnish and venerate. They were rediscovering me; it was a big favor—wasn’t I lucky? Each one treated me as if he’d invented me and would show me his Count Esterhazy shots, lingering too long on the ones he wanted me to admire, saying, “This one’s pretty incredible—I do some pretty incredible things,” a dazzling derivative sunset that was pure vomit, the inevitable park bench, a dead squirrel, a wino. Another, whose love of cement and rivets surpassed Berenice Abbott’s, would heave his tonnage of New York at me. There would be the shooter of tropical slums, his pictures telling me nothing more than that he had the air fare to Caracas: the one with the most expensive equipment always seemed to concentrate on starving natives—I could tell the price of a camera by the rags in a picture. Jostling for my attention they would have my head spinning with their fisheye lenses or nauseate me with mood pieces they’d developed in their own bathwater. The girls would be, as they put it, “into freaks, because it represents how I feel as a woman.” They came to see me and they did all the talking, pretending an interest in me to invite my admiration for them, the kind of coy blackmailing flattery that is a hungering for praise. I looked at their work. It may not have been tragedy but it certainly was murder. They were like amateur assassins whose parents gave them a gun for Christmas: they brought me their victims. I told them: A camera isn’t a toy, remember that. I didn’t add that it is, but just more dangerous than other toys.
    â€œYour pictures,” I said, “are works of subversion. Are you proud of that?”
    Sure, sure, they said. They had shown me theirs; now they were itching to see mine: my Pig Dinner sequence, my
Faces of Fiction
, my crying series, my pictures of empty rooms, my Hollywood shots,
Firebug, Stieglitz, Slaughter, the Piano Tuner, Huxley
, my blacks—I was the first to exhibit them: no one had ever seen them before.
    The album was on my lap. There were others in the windmill, stacked to the ceiling, and trunks full of contact sheets. But I refused to go in there. My freckled hands remained on this old family photograph, that summer day I saw up side down through my Kodak Brownie. They did not want to look. They made the mistake all young people do when visiting the very old: we’re easy game, we’re deaf to sarcasm and can’t see them wink. They made funny faces behind my back: you can needle an oldster! They talked too loud and nudged each other and didn’t think I knew they were being insincere. As if I had never seen them before! Still, I wanted them to see this picture, my clumsy lyric stuck on the first page of my first album. I said nothing until they began to