I slipped the film holder in and standing next to the camera grasped the bulb and said, “Here goes,” and squeezed it. I heard that curious per-plunk as of something caught in a small trap.
Bang, I thought, You’re dead.
“Keep going.” He did not change his posture, though with each shot he inched back until on the last one — impatient to be done and perhaps aware that he’d been jacklighted like a porcupine on a lantern — his eyes had grown much smaller, giving his head a ducking tilt varnished with the hard gleam of scorn and envy. He had been holding his breath.
“There,” I said. “Now that didn’t hurt a bit, did it?” I put the exposed film holders in my bag.
He sighed and sat down changed. I knew — not from anything I had seen when I had shot him, but from the way he looked now — that I had succeeded. He was crookeder and stamped with exhaustion, and instead of sneering, naked. It was as if in photographing him I had peeled a layer from his face he now realized was gone.
“If you’re quite finished, young lady, you can go.” His voice struck dull tricked notes.
“Thanks a million,” I said, and at the door, “Would you like to see the prints?”
“I very much doubt they’ll be worth looking at.”
Wrong, I thought. I smiled at the people who had watched it all. I had witnesses.
And the hotel room I had fled for feeling so useless and guilty in seemed on my re-entry like an intimate corner of my soul. I screwed in my red bulbs and drew the shades and stuffed towels against the cracks of light. I padded back and forth in the rosy darkness uncorking solutions and filling the bathroom sink. Then I began that simple and pleasurable chemistry that is like laundering in reverse — producing human stains on clean sheets. I washed the negatives and dunked them in developer and agitated them until they ripened. I fixed them. The mottled result was a perfect image of Stieglitz, the layer of him I had filched, but much better than I had expected. Right between the eyes.
Sunday I spent making three sets of prints, and my only regret was that Orlando was not in the dark room to marvel at these trophies and hug me in congratulation.
Nor was he at Adams House.
“Who shall I say called?” said the voice.
“His sister,” I said. “And I am still waiting.”
I sent one set of prints to Stieglitz, without a note, without a name, and yet in the assured belief that my originality glittered in the work. He was vain: he would hang them.
The other set I sent to the Camera Club as my calling card. I would have more before long, and a show, and the kind of fame that would have Orlando shouting, “You’ve done it, cookie!”
My sense of victory was all the keener for my being truly unknown. I relished my anonymity in this triumph since I knew it could not possibly last. The celebrity’s assassin, no matter how obscure, inevitably gains his victim’s fame: it’s part of the act. There was no magic, but dammit, I deserved that man’s head.
17. Swamp Dwellers
THE PORTER, wearing a crimson pillbox, complained in dusky mutters about the number of trunks he had to carry — the peepshow that was virtually the contents of my darkroom. I couldn’t blame him — he didn’t know me. And I wasn’t pretty enough to forgive on sight. People looked at me with unfocused eyes in a grave lopsided way, as if at a double image.
After I boarded the train no heads turned. The man leaning at the door to the next compartment, seeing me smiling at the door to mine, concentrated his disappointment on my hat and knees. The steward slopped my drink and didn’t say sorry. (Now I was tippling regularly, gin for preference; I thought of it as hypo bath because it fixed me.) I could have been miserable, but — far from it — I was so convinced of my success as a photographer I felt I was traveling incognito — like the original who leaves her triumph behind and rather enjoys her fugitive’s disguise, since she knows that as soon as her true identity is discovered she will be eminent. My deed was inescapable. My own secret for now, soon it would be the world’s.
But I was a photographer for love. Orlando was the reason for my camera, and he would make it superfluous. I had no ambition beyond tempting him to its darkened side, and while my fame was crucial to this it struck me as foolish to pursue the lonely distraction of art beyond the room where we made a sandwich of our passion.
I was at the corner window, looking at my two faces in the double pane. The more distant one was prettier, like a mask behind a face.
“I love trains.” It was the man from the next compartment, propped on his forearms, simpering.
I said, “I wish they went a bit faster.”
“That’s the beauty of them,” he said. “I’m in no hurry.”
“If you’re not in a hurry, what’s the point in going?”
I spent most of the trip in my compartment, drinking, using my hypo to dream. It was the same dream: my surprise. Orlando was waiting in the windmill on a night after my return. Obeying his instinct he had kept this vigil alone. The promise we had made in childhood had matured to a vow.
The meniscus of moon hung between the windmill’s blades and bathed the earth in that exposing dust glow and made the salt marsh and the shore and the whole gray world, floor and ceiling, a flat-sided chamber for this vision. We were two images stealing together, as if we existed as fixed lovers in a field beyond the moon. Our ecstatic light-beams twisted toward earth, brother and sister, to be joined. The crickets, the sea-splash, the tremble of wind. And I knew he was there from the candlepower of his body that made the windmill shimmer like a lantern.
Back from the far side of the moon I crept across the grass and up the steps to where he lay. Somehow I shed my clothes. He laughed softly and folded me in his arms. He prepared me, then covered me and pumped me with life. My chafed skin was alight. Dreams are unspecific tumbling and heat, but I knew what I wanted — for him to burst through my squinting iris and demolish the virgin darkness in the camera of my flesh. Then goodbye photography! Goodbye film! Goodbye—
“Orlando, Orlando, anyone for Orlando.”
I woke and worked the shade up, and I Inew from the look of it where we were.
Florida, rinsed with green, with small sulking bushes, and here and there palms, was a wild garden of aching ferns in a clear yellow sunrise. After the low woods came seepages, fingers of water, then an ocean of hyacinths with birds diving into it and through the tangles of vines. They were not the spindly sandpipers and clumsy gray sea birds I was used to, but ones that had flapped from the dawn of the world, with flashing tails, long beaks, and legs that swayed and folded under them taking off. The white plumes of their feathers fanned out as they spilled again. The morning was so hot there was no dew on the leaves, which made the place look, for all its greenery, very old. Rags of moss dangled from overhanging branches and what flowers I could see were lotus-like, so delicate a photo would sink them.
In places the swamp water had scummy stretches, with black saplings and bitten-off tree trunks standing in them, some like gallows and others like coatracks and drowned knees. Each dead thing had collar stripes of dark tide marks, a decoration that took the curse off them. The green lace of stagnation hit by the morning light exploded like a dish of sulphur with an afterburn of midges sifting in bunches above it. I could not imagine furry things surviving here, but only families of waterproof reptiles pushing their snouts through the warm swamp and depositing eggs.