It happened like so many of my pictorial flukes as a contrived accident shortly after I arrived in New York. My morale was high. I felt I had freed Orlando and won him back. This was twelve hours after that battle of wits on the Cape with Blanche Overall, and I had intended to keep moving and continue on a train to Florida. Not that I was afraid of Blanche shadowing me and bashing my brains out for exposing her, but largely because I was so suffused with confidence and wanted to prove that I didn’t need the Guggenheim Foundation to get me up the lower slopes of Parnassus, much less to Verona, Florida. But I missed the train, and I found to my annoyance that I would have to spend a whole weekend kicking my heels in New York.
My usual berth was still at the Seltzers’, but I didn’t want to answer awkward questions. I barely knew myself why I had chosen Florida. I didn’t like to think that it was because Mama and Papa were there. The idea of following my parents around struck me as being uncomfortably close to a domestic form of the Guggenheim disease. I was sure that something important awaited me there: jungle, alligators, swamps, Indians, new scenes — sights for sore eyes that I could carry back to overwhelem Orlando with. It was a continuation of the courtship I had been engaged in since the day, twenty years before, when I knew I would have him or go blind. I had turned his head with my camera: photography worked. Now I wished to be triumphant in it and to share my fame with him.
With this mood came a desire to travel. Travel is a funny indulgence, the simple challenge of congenial strangeness to animate portions of the body and soul. Embracing the unknown to find the familiar; a way of remembering.
This was my first taste of travel, and my best. I knew that America had a prodigious madonna’s body, and that though our literature had only hinted at what our photography had made explicit — that landscape was anatomy — no country could touch us in a physical geography lavish with brains, breadbaskets, heartlands, a whole wilderness of visceral rivers — so different from the ailing or infantile islands of the world that prevented us from matching view to mood. A country was not a country until you could lose yourself in it, camera-wise: the vagrant surrender of the eye to something flabbergasting. What attracted me then was that I could disappear for a few weeks in the hot green parts that had always reminded me of America’s appendix.
But Florida would have to wait until Monday. I had missed the train. I checked into a hotel and lay down in my dark room and became anxious. I had not given my going a second thought, but in that square room with its smudges of reproaching dust, its threadbare seams of sealing wallpaper and the dead echoes of lovers stifling their moans against the bedstead — its history audible in cracks and stains and scorchmarks — in that dark room, that ghost-box of crucified passion and lively sorrow, I felt I did not exist. It was a feeling I had often sweated out: alone, I was sometimes invisible to myself; my inner eye was squeezed shut, I’d quickened and vanished into the obscure room’s obscurer dust. It was my art’s highest achievement, was it not? The solitary photographer conjuring with her instrument and disappearing at the tippety-top of her own Indian rope-trick?
It was not what I had wanted. It was no joke. Spirited away from all that was habitual, and hooded by the wholly strange room, I was numbed by a sense of nonbeing and needed a witness. In the usual motion of travel this was no great problem, but every room is a six-sided colony of dark rules. It took wit even to remember your name in such a place, or to dissuade yourself that you might, like any lost soul, be paying an unwelcome visit to someone else’s body — a person you might yourself have invented.
Ordinarily, it was a convenient panic: it had made me a photographer. In that distant doubting frame of mind I was forced to snap pictures to prove my own existence — make a world from my eye, bring it into focus, stop it long enough to say, “I see!”
Because in my lonely love-struck way I had grafted the camera to my body. I was nothing but a two-legged prop for the winks of this Third Eye.
But on that afternoon, in the New York room where I was no more than an atom of dust in a wisp of light, I needed more immediate proof. I called Orlando.
“Adams House,” came the reply.
“Hello there,” I said, as to a rescuer, and instantly was calmed: here I am, alive and well. “I’d like to speak to Orlando Pratt.”
“Just a sec — I’ll get him.”
It’s me! Now you know I love you. Blanche is gone. It’s all ours—
“Sorry, he’s out.”
“Oh.”
“Who shall I say called?”
“His lover—”
Yurble went a noise in the throat of the line, an amiable chirrup of shock.
“—and I am waiting.”
In the rain, as it turned out. For professional reasons, as much as to kill time, I left the room and set out to buy a new camera. The rain was a handclapping sound, like applause at my feet. I made my way to the East Side, staggering as visitors to New York so often do — something about those right angles.
It was a rolling city and not at all the populous and filthy ruin of traipsing photographers who sought children, derelicts, pigeons, Gushing Hydrant in Harlem, or that old favorite of the Guggenheim Fellow: Ragged Beggar on Wall Street. In my pictures, New York was an ocean liner, unsinkable and majestic, with a lovely curvature from port to starboard, steering seaward on the flood tide of its two rivers, New Jersey and Brooklyn the smoky headlands of friendly coasts. I envied New Yorkers as I envied sailors, and always portrayed them as adventurers with iron stomachs and sea legs, who regarded their glamor with irony and treated visitors as faint-hearted passengers who’d soon disembark. Today there was a gale and the decks were awash.
Weston had recommended the shop Camera Obscura on Second Avenue. It was an uncompromisingly dingy place that catered to what he called “real artists like us,” though I doubt that he was including me in that description.
“I want to see a Speed Graphic, please,” I said to the clerk, who had raised his eyes to me and spread his fingers on the counter.
He sized me up, giving me a chance to decode his own features: polka-dot bow tie, elastic bands on the biceps of his sleeves, restless skinny hands, Harold Lloyd glasses, and too many teeth. His face fit his skull tightly like a zombie’s mask and chasing his smirk was a contradiction of irregular bone.
“You don’t want anything as fancy as that,” he said, and plucked from behind the counter a goggle-eyed idiot box the size of a lobster trap. “Take this, madam. It’s so simple a child can operate it.”
“Sounds just the thing for you,” I said. “Now show me the Graflex.”
This annoyed him, and hoping to put me in my place he went to the stockroom and came out carrying an eight-by-ten monstrosity on a tripod. It was something between a whopping doodad for colonic irrigation and a kind of magician’s outfit of mirrors and slots out of which rabbits, boiled eggs, and nosegays of silk flowers were produced. Dangling from its snout was a long hose with a rubber bulb.
“Course if you’re really serious about photography you’ll want one of these.” He piled the equipment on the counter — lens hood, lenses, filters, film, plates, film holders — then pursed his lips at me in smart-alecky satisfaction.
“I said a Speed Graphic. Do I have to sing it?”
“This is the best camera we’ve got—”
He ignored my icy stare that was telling him, in a wintry way, to shove it.
“—get beautiful results with this little number.” He grasped the rubber bulb and, leering at me, gave it a salacious squeeze. “I bet a girl like you could use something like this.”
“Do I look like I need an enema?”