His cheeks were dusty. Not even nine and he was already perspiring, the sweat stickling his sideburns and smearing his forearms. He looked — rolled-up sleeves, harassed face, trembling Adam’s apple — like the photographer himself, hugging his property to his chest. He had an artist’s preoccupied air, an artist’s petulence. I was bothering him; I had no business wasting his time. He gasped to remind me that he was hard at work.
“That’s a biggie.”
He weighed the box and said, “Some early ones — the Thirties.”
“Mind if I look?”
“I’m pretty busy, Maude. All this sorting.” Gasp, gasp. “Maybe some other time.”
He frowned and tried to get past me.
“What’s this?”
“Trains, travelers, people at stations. I’m cataloguing them by subject matter as well as date. Topical chronology kind of thing. My faces, my occupations, my vehicles—”
I didn’t mind him saying vee-hickles, but what was this my? “Trains,” I said. “You come across any of Harvard? Charles River? Fellow in a boat, full face, rowing?”
“In the windmill,” he said without hesitating. It scared me a little to realize how thoroughly Frank knew my work: he knew what I had forgotten. He went on, “I’m not putting it with this batch. I’m keeping it for my vessels sequence.”
“I don’t know how you do it,” I said.
Sweat drops flew from his chin as he spoke. “I’m working-flat out. You mind moving? This thing weighs a ton.”
But I stayed on the path. “Coffee?”
“Maw-odd!”
On this return trip to the windmill I stopped him again on the path and said, “The rower — get it for me, will you?”
“It’s right inside the door,” he said. “Didn’t you see it?”
“Didn’t look.”
“Well, look now!” He became a hysterical bitch, jerking his sweaty head and tensing his finger bones.
“Not on your tintype,” I said coldly.
“It’s your thing — they’re your pictures.”
“I don’t go in there.”
“How did the pictures get inside?” he shrilled at me.
“I threw them there. Now listen, you shit-kicker, go in there and get that picture and make it snappy.”
“Right under your nose,” he mumbled, hurrying inside and retrieving it. He dangled it, using his thumb and forefinger to ridicule what he would never understand.
I looked at the picture.
“And there’s some more,” he said. He handed over a chunk of prints.
“I forgot I took so many.”
He glanced at the one on top. “It’s not as busy as your best work.”
“I suppose not.”
He pinched the mustache of sweat from his upper lip and said, “I’ll never finish the retrospective at this rate.”
I withdrew to my room, taking the pictures of Orlando. Hold the phone, I wanted to say. Correction.
The sun had not set his hair smoldering, the river was turgid, and the trees I had remembered as streaming with light were bare. Orlando was dark, hunched over the oars as if sneaking ashore for some furtive assignation. His head was tilted, his ear against his shoulder, and his face, a brown leaf, had a whisper of stealth on it, the wary listening expression of someone who has just heard an unusual sound. His jersey was full of muscular creases, but it was his hands which gave him away, his grip on the oar handles like a hawk’s fists on a branch. His straining stance was more than a rower’s posture: it was flight, he was leaving me.
I had been wrong to remember him gliding downriver in a halo of autumn light. There was no shower of yellow leaves. This was a determined boatman one distant afternoon, who knew it was late and was wasting no time. Those shadows on his face gave him a ferocity that could have been impatient hope trying to displace sorrow, or the anger of thwarted lust. He looked heavy and grave and his back was to the riverbank that seemed a sodden frontier. There were a dozen pictures in all. In the last he faced the camera. He was so private, so engrossed in his mood, he might have been rowing alone. I barely recognized him.
The camera lied. And had I been foxed by my memory too? The past, drowned and buried by time, was unverifiable. But I had been fooled all right.
I needed a drink. I made a jug of martinis and sluiced the morning away.
At lunch, I gave the pictures to Frank and said, “These are for the shredder.”
He had a sandwich in one hand. He raised the pictures, raised the sandwich, took a bite of the sandwich, and holding the pictures, chewed. Then he tucked the bite into his cheek and said, “Who’s the guy?”
“Fellow I used to know.”
“If they’re personal we should include them. Otherwise forget it — they won’t reproduce.”
“Like I say, shred them.” I snatched them from him and started to tear them. “Pack of lies.”
“Don’t do that!” he squawked, spattering me with mayonnaise. “They’re primary sources. They’ve got to be catalogued. Nothing gets thrown away.”
But I went on tearing them. “I am executing these pictures.”
“Stop it!”
“Finish your lunch,” I said, and dropped the pieces next to his plate.
“Look what you did,” he said. But his tone was softened by gratitude. He began arranging the photograph pieces like a jigsaw, fitting them and puzzling. He smiled as he chewed. He looked eager; this was like making his own pictures — creation.
“I’ll need information on these for the catalogue.”
“You tell me. They’re no damn good, but that’s your problem. It’s your retrospective, ain’t it?”
He put down his bite-scalloped sandwich. He said, “I know you think I’m a fool. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
“Your pictures, your everything. Who cares what I think?”
“I care,” he said. “I care very, very much what you think, Maude.”
“All right,” I snapped. “I think you’re a fool. So there.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “And this morning you called me a shit-kicker. That’s the thanks I get.”
“What’s in it for me?” I said.
“This retrospective’s going to be the biggest thing—”
“You’ve got to be joking,” I said. “Listen, I’m seventy-one years old. I’ve got more money than I will ever spend and there’s nothing I want in the world that I can’t buy in Hyannis. I’ve had critics eating out of my hand for fifty years, but don’t judge me by my pictures — I don’t give a rat’s ass for them, anyway, burn the lot of them for all I care. I don’t need a retrospective — I didn’t take pictures for people like you. I took them for myself, understand? I’ve had a long fascinating life, and I’m happy, Frank!”
“Then why do you sound so mad?”
“Because you’re pissing me off something wicked, that’s why.”
He swallowed guiltily and looked down at his bitten sandwich.
“You,” I said, wagging my finger in his face, “You say you’re going to make me famous. Well, thanks very much, Frank, but I’ve got news for you—”
“I never said famous. I’m just trying to broaden your appeal.”
“Who the fuck are you trying to impress? I know what you want to do — you want to put your own name in lights. Just like these squirts who make the celebrity scene — they get a hammerlock on the luminaries. Why? Because they want to be famous themselves, and the by-line ends up bigger than the picture. That’s how it happens, you know — any jackass with a two-dollar Instamatic can get billboarded all over Vogue if she does the right people. And you’re doing me the very same way. You’re piggybacking. Deny it.”