Picture Palace by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online Page B

bounce on the sofa in impatience: How long is the old girl going to take? No one said she was a fucken ree-tard!
    These believers in the immortality of the photograph wanted to deal with my life in a single afternoon. They could not even pronounce Niépce. They were eaten up with haste. It was their conceit: their speed, the speed of light.
    They had all the equipment—what was the problem? These faddists of high contrast and golf-ball grain could shoot fly spit, the smell of an onion, sunspots, a virus picking its nose, bazooka shells bursting out of gun muzzles, indigestion, a fart in a mitten. With their motor-driven cameras—a lens for every occasion—they could do it underwater, with mirrors, twenty thousand feet over Rangoon. That shotgun was no shotgun; it was a Hasselblad with a telescopic lens on a shoulder rest, “for combat situations,” as the kid said, and it really did look lethal. And what of that Japanese capsule, the size of a tranquilizer, with a tiny pinhole eye? It was a camera so small you could swallow it at noon and photograph your breakfast.
    I brushed these trinkets aside. I didn’t tell them I used a box camera until 1923, a folding camera until 1938 and only then broke down and bought a Speed Graphic for Florida. Instead, I said a few words on man the picture-maker—erect, sketching his fears on a cave wall—which left man the tool-maker on all fours, hunched over a nut he was bludgeoning with a rock some fool scientist would enshrine. The mind is made of pictures, I said, not words; thought is pictorial, the eye is all art, get the picture? And, sure, sure, they said—saying no meant saying why. They were in a big hurry to see
Twenty-two White Horses
and my contacts of
Ché
Guevara and my blacks. Never mind Orlando and Phoebe or myself when young. They didn’t have time for that. They took pictures hanging by their ankles, their light meters could detect glowworms in the next county. And at this point they were haywire with curiosity.
    â€œMind if we turn the page, Mi$s Pratt?”
    I jolly well did mind. My hand held it down. There was that windmill with its narrow window. They wouldn’t understand me unless they looked in and saw what I saw.
    Impudently, they reached. I didn’t say
Patience, children
or
Oh, no, you don’t
. I didn’t slap them—they would probably have hit me back. The old person who blows her top all of a sudden has been furious for years—I said what I had to and hoped they would see: “Shit and derision!”

8
Orlando
    B UT even if they had slobbered over every blessed picture in the place they would not have understood, for Frank was in the windmill doing that very thing, and not a day passed without his dragging some forgotten shot to the room that had become my camera obscura and screwing up his face and saying, “What’s this one all about?” It helped me remember the pictures I never took, or if I did, the ones I never showed anyone.
    I feared that the Maude Coffin Pratt Retrospective, scheduled to open in New York in November, would give little idea of the woman I was or the times I had. I was behind the camera, cheating, not in front of it. I hinted to Frank that I wanted to write something and he humored me with “Might be just the ticket—something short and personal for the catalogue—paragraph or so about your life.”
    Fuck your catalogue, I thought. A life is too messy and random to be summarized so neatly. It gets out of hand, it haunts, it sprawls beyond the periphery of a single picture, casting shadows every which way. I needed a little latitude if I was going to do complete justice to my life, which I felt had been happy on the whole and fairly interesting if not remarkable. The picture palace on the lawn held half the story, but the mind had its own picture palace, much grander, like a mad queen’s extravagance—not the museum show of pictorial