“I can’t imagine Life running most of these pictures,” I said.
“What they like is that I seem to be present when strange things happen. Keep looking.” She stood beside me as I looked.
A farmer was plowing his field behind an ox that had been branded with a swastika.
“When Stars and Stripes printed this one,” Giselle said, “somebody went out to the farmer’s place and killed the ox.”
To my eye the photos all had quality. The woman had talent for capturing essential instants, for finding the precise moment when the light and the angle of vision allow an act or an object most fully to reveal its meaning or its essence. These pictures set themselves apart from routine photojournalism. Giselle, six months ago an amateur, was suddenly light-years ahead of so many of her peers. Obviously she had a future in photography. Her beauty would open every door of all those male bastions, and this artistic eye, perhaps developed in childhood in her mother’s art gallery, would carry her forward from there.
“This looks familiar,” I said, and I picked up a photo whose locale I recognized: the stage of the Folies Bergère. A dozen near-naked chorus girls and the beautiful Folies star, Yvonne Menard, were in seeming full-throated song, all watching, at center stage, an American-army corporal kneeling in front of a statuesque beauty in pasties and G-string, the corporal wearing a handlebar mustache for the occasion, his face only inches from the dancer’s crotch.
“It looks sillier than I imagined,” I said.
“It is quite humiliating,” Giselle said.
“How did you arrange it? They never allow photos during the show.”
“I told them I was on assignment for Life, and they let me do anything I wanted. I did get others but this is all I really was after.”
On our first trip to Paris, before we married, I took Giselle to the Folies and, because I was in uniform, an easy object of derision, I was dragooned from the audience onto the stage by the beautiful Yvonne, put in the same situation as this kneeling corporal, then pulled to my feet, drawn to the abundant bosom of the dancer who had stuck the mustache on my lip, twirled about to a few bars of music, and then abandoned as the stage went black and the dancers ran into the wings. Like a blind man, I felt with my foot for the edge of the stage (a six- or eight-foot drop if I missed my footing), found the edge, sat on it with legs dangling, and slid sideways toward the stairs that led to the audience level. I was still sliding when the lights went up and I was discovered in yet another ridiculous position. I scrambled down the stairs and back to Giselle, who was so amused by it all that she kissed me.
“You were very funny,” she had said then. “It was just as funny when I took this picture,” she said now. “The poor boy didn’t even know he was being humiliated. Neither did you, did you, my love?”
“If you have a mustache to put on me, I’ll be delighted to be your fool and give a repeat performance,” I said. “I’ll even do it without the mustache. I’ll even do it in public.”
I embraced her and undid her blouse and knew that she and I would separate, that something fundamental had gone awry and very probably could not be fixed. With her every breath she revealed not only her restlessness but her faithlessness. I saw in her that surge of youth and beauty that was so in love with itself and its imagined possibilities (they must surely be infinite in her imagination now) that even the fetters of marriage were not only ineffectual, they were invisible to the logic of her private mystique.
Standing before me in her uniform of love, she was voluptuosity itself: books could be written about the significance of Giselle in her garments, and how, together, she and they communicated their meaning. The word “noble” came to mind. What could that possibly mean? I backed away and studied her.
“Do you think we married too soon?” I asked.
“I didn’t,” she said.
“You seem so certain.”
“I never make a wrong decision on things like that.”
“Are there any other things like that?”
“I know what I want,” she said.
“And do you have it?”
“I have some things. I have you.”
“Well, that’s true enough.”
“Why do you want to talk? Why don’t you make love to me?”
“I’m discovering what a noble creature you are. I understood it at the baths in Wiesbaden but I didn’t put the word to it until now. Noble. How you carried that remarkable body of yours, the way you sliced the water with your arms when you swam, the way you sat beside me on the bench in the steam room with all those other ignoble nudes, enveloped in clouds of love and heat, and you a presence as brilliant as the fire that heated the rocks. The way you looked when you lay on that cot behind the white curtain to take your nap, the erotic extreme of your arched back when I knelt by your cot and offered you worship.”
“Nobody ever made me explode the way you did then. If I said skyrockets you’d scold me for using a cliché. How did you learn so much about women?”
“I’ve been a lifelong student.”
“I wonder what will happen to us.”
“Everything,” I said.
“It must be valuable.”
“Very true. If it isn’t valuable it’s a malaise.”
“I don’t ever want to do anything to hurt you.”
“But you might.”
“You really think I might?”
“Giselle is an undiscovered country.”
“So is Orson.”
“No, not anymore.”
And this was true. I knew what was in store for me, felt it coming. I decided to blot it out and I pulled Giselle toward me.
Three
“I am desperately weary of contemplating the fact that I have nothing to contemplate except the weariness of having nothing to contemplate.”
The sentence took form in my mind as I sat in the anteroom of the publishing house that had hired me to edit the pretentious subliterary drivel of Meriwether Macbeth. On the walls of the anteroom, whose floor was covered with a solid dark red carpet suitable for red-carpet authors, I looked up at the giant faces of writers whose work had been published by this house, and who had very probably trod this carpet, or these bare floorboards in pre-carpet days, hauling in their MSS in briefcase, suitcase, steamer trunk, wheelbarrow, or perhaps only jacket pocket if the author was a poet. A pantheon is what one might call the epiphany on these walls: Dreiser, Dos Passos, Yeats, O’Casey, Wharton, Frost, Joyce, Steinbeck, Sherwood Anderson. We or our work have all passed through these hallowed halls, they say; and we are what hallowed them. Which boards, which carpet will Orson Purcell hallow in his future? None at all should my present frame of mind continue, for I knew that line of mine — I am desperately weary et cetera — was hardly the mind-set required of hallowed hangables.
My editor was in conference but would be available soon, the receptionist said. I waited, trying to conjure a way out of the conversational cul-de-sac any statement about literary weariness would lead me into, and returned always to the magnificence of my morning romp on Giselle’s sacred playing fields. But it is written: one may not raise with one’s editor such uxorious delight unless one’s editor raises the subject first. Better to speak of the upcoming Hemingway, the Salinger phenomenon.