Picture Palace (28 page)

“Shall we move on?” said Umlah in a whisper, clearly worried by the size of the crowd.

“I'm telling you, I smell smoke.”

Someone said, “It's the dame with the glasses. She smells smoke.”

And I heard a weird chattering in the crowd, a chuckle in one man's throat, an arsonist's lunacy:
Hoo-hoo
.

The engines were louder, but neither Umlah nor Randy—nor anyone in the crowd—appeared to hear them. I could tell they were watching me closely, as if I were going to throw a fit. I was the center of attention; no one heard or saw the confusion that was so close by.

Umlah said, “We'll be late.”

But I stood my ground. My face was heating, my nose was full of greasy smoke, there were panicky screams in my ears. I whirled around and pointed: “
Fire!
”

There was a hush, a moment of curiosity—faces peering at mine—and then I heard, “There it is!” and “She's right!” and Randy said, “Hot dog!” and fumbled with his camera.

“Fire engines!” someone cried. The clanging was a block away.

Hoo-hoo
.

“I've got to get a picture of this,” said Randy.

“Hurry up,” said Umlah.

Smoke was now pouring from the windows of the building across the street and filling the sky and turning the sun into a purple Necco wafer. I could hear glass shattering and whoops of excitement, but clearest of all was that solitary
hoo
of the goofball in the crowd. I listened and heard him sniffing and swallowing as he went
snark
and hoicked up the glue in his nose and gulped it down. Because this was so different from the cries of woe around me, it was amplified. I was able to make him out from his sinuses: the old black pea-jacket stinking of kerosene, the whiskery face, the tar on his teeth, the wild eyes goggling in thick glasses: a firebug.

“Let's go,” said Umlah. “For God's sake!”

Randy was doing the arrival of the engines, the traffic jam, and now, as the ladder trucks were wheeled into position, the helmeted men in raincoats and floppy boots chopping the windows apart with axes. The jets of water had no effect on the fountains of flame—there was a splendid picture in the way the hoses seemed to feed the fire.

“There's some people up there!” said a man next to Umlah.

“Where?” said Randy, still jamming plates into his camera.

“Third floor,” I said.

Still the firebug chuckled and snarked, and he pressed forward to the rope that had been put up to contain the crowd.
Hoo-hoo
.

“Give me that thing,” I said, and snatched Randy's camera.

Randy said, “I'll hold your glasses.”

I had forgotten I was wearing my pair of opaque sunglasses. I pushed him aside before he could grab them. “I need them,” I said. “Get out of my way.”

Hoo
.

“What's she doing?” said Umlah.

Randy said, “She's shooting in the wrong direction, for one thing.”

The chuckling firebug was three feet away and he was so interested in the blaze I was almost certain he had started it. He was breathing hard with pleasure; he did not see me. His mouth was open, he was thrilled, watching the action on tiptoe. I knew exactly how he felt: this, for him, was fame. He had stopped traffic and brought out five fire trucks; people were screaming and fainting; and the city was dark—he had blotted out the sun! It didn't matter to him that no one knew his name—if anything, his anonymity was part of his achievement. His face was dappled by fire, his hair was alight, and on his glasses were the reflections of crisscrossed ladders and men in rubber capes swaying on them, making their way to the flaming waffle-iron of windows. This laughing face in the grim crowd was my picture. He went
snark-snark, hoo-hoo
.

I took three shots of the firebug, and each time, the instant I clicked, I saw in a flash, literally that, the whole bright picture, in a sudden spurt, as if the irises of my dead eyes had opened and shut and admitted a jet of light that singed my mind and left a black burn-spot there. In this fleeting cusp of vision the man with the map of fire on his face, snarking. It startled me and I repeated it until three black stars danced in my eyes. It was what my sight had once been—creakily pictorial, like a child's scrawl—but so much less vivid than what my blindness had shown me, I gave it no further thought.

23

“Y
OU'RE DOING
a land-office business,” I said, after we arrived at the Camera Club. There was a mob on the stairs and more people inside, rattling their catalogues and shuffling around the room where the pictures were hung. The usual gallery phonies—horny old men in berets hugging tragically pretty young girls—plus students, housewives, shoppers, joy-riders, mumblers, lens-lice. And in the air that din of appreciation you hear at parties, the noise that seems a special form of heat.

“They're all here for your show,” said Umlah. “It's been like this ever since we opened.”

“Cash customers?”

“There's no entrance fee,” he said.

“I mean, are they buying the pictures?”

Umlah said, “I suppose they would, if they were for sale.”

“Of course they are!” I snapped. “Don't tell me you're not selling them.”

“I had no idea,” he said disgustedly, “no idea you were doing this for the money.”

“I do it for my health. It's expensive.”

“I understood you enjoyed taking pictures.”

“Back up,” I said. “That's the oldest trick in the book for exploiting artists—capitalizing on their sense of fun. Anyway, what's it got to do with paying the rent, wear and tear, overheads?”

Randy said, “We thought you were on a Guggenheim.”

“Fuck you, Jack—don't patronize me.”

“Please,” said Umlah. “What is it you want us to do?”

“You,” I said, poking my finger at Randy, “you're playing with yourself. Lay off the pocket pool and go over and put price tags on them.”

“I'll take care of that,” said Umlah, sounding pretty shattered by my outburst.

“Yeah,” said Randy. “I want to go upstairs and process these plates of the fire.”

“We'd better price them together,” said Umlah.

“That's easy,” I said.

“There are quite a few of them.”

“I always say, if you're vulgar enough to put a price on things you're vulgar enough to price them by size. Me, I do it by the inch. The eight-by-tens are a hundred apiece, anything smaller is sixty. There are a few big ones—I think we can ask a hundred and fifty for those.”

Umlah's face was lit by indignation and greed, the hot twisted look of a celibate's lust: he was aroused by the money-value of my pictures. He said, “And where does that leave the club?”

“Ten percent for you.”

“Twenty is standard.”

“Okay, I'll split the difference—fifteen. I'm no Arab,” I said. “But, my, you learn fast, Mister Umlah. I knew the minute I laid eyes on you that you were a practical man. Now let's get those prices on before everyone clears out.”

“Come along with me, just to make sure I don't make any blunders,” he said. “We may as well start at the beginning. Here—oh, this is a perfectly marvelous one—that porch scene.”

What porch scene
? I leaned forward and looked, and though I was aware of the wall returning my murmurs to me, and quite conscious of a group of admiring people nearby, I could not make out a picture for the life of me, I had had no difficulty perceiving the city, my hotel room, two men scrapping nine floors below, the fire in the building, or the arsonist. But the pictures were another story entirely: they were impossible to see. Indeed, as far as I was concerned, they were indistinguishable from the wall's featureless din.

“What do you say, Miss Pratt?”

The wall was pale green; a vein of stress ran down the plaster, splitting the paint; fingerprint whorls near the door, kickmarks on the baseboard, a horse hair prickled in an old brushstroke. But the picture? I couldn't tell whether it was big or small, dark or light. Was it
Boarders
? Or Hornette on the glider at Mrs. Fritts's? Or what? I said, “Hadn't we better measure it?”

“Fred,” said a man to my left, “mind if we tag along? We're doing a piece on Miss Pratt's show.”

“That's up to Miss Pratt,” said Umlah.

“Feel free,” I said. But I was wondering how I was going to plow through the whole exhibition without revealing my blindness. So far, I had been lucky; but my pictures baffled me, and might betray me. I could not see them.

Umlah said, “I'd like you to meet Iris Clinch and Dick Shuggery. Reporters.”

“Critics, actually,” said Iris. “We're
Time-Life. Life's
giving you a spread. We're going to use a whole raft of your pictures.”

“First I heard of it,” I said.

“Aren't you pleased?”

“Tickled pink,” I said. “But there's a little question of copyright.”

“We'll come to some agreement,” said Shuggery, his voice all Crisco with confidence.

“Hold on—I don't do any horse-trading where my pictures are concerned. I call the shots around here, get it? If you don't see things my way”—which was ironic, because I couldn't see a blessed thing—“the deal's off.”

Iris stiffened, probably thinking: The avaricious little so-and-so, ain't she ever going to be satisfied?
Life's
giving her a spread!

She said, “We were hoping to buy some outright.”

“You going into business?” I said. “Out of the question. You can buy these prints—hang them up and admire them, hide the cracks on your walls. But I keep the negatives and all reproduction rights. I've got to look after my interests, toots.”

“You mean we can't use them?”

“Sure, on a one-time basis, for a fee, if you dig deep enough. But let's leave the dickering for later. We've got to get on with this pricing.”

“Suit yourself,” she said.

Shuggery said, “It's a truly amazing show. Something scandalous and at the same time very artistic. It's an unbeatable combination—genius vindicating the almost unlawful. The virtuosity in the outdoor shots, all those prehistoric swamps and dead trees, and the total aridity and nakedness of that banquet, sort of stylized savagery—”

“Shall we say a hundred dollars for this porch scene?” said Umlah.

“Fine,” I said.

“In a sense,” said Iris. “But—correct me if I'm wrong—there's something deeply European about them, old world and, oh, pagan. I'm talking about intensity, I guess—it's rare in American photography, which is so preoccupied with space, no naively naturalistic. But your landscapes have a terrific indoor quality—I mean, that foliage looks like parlor drapes and hunks of furniture and you've sort of hidden the people, haven't you? And, as Dick said, the banquet is breathtaking and, well, it's Roman—you've got a beautiful little grudge there. Maybe it's because I'm devoted to Brassai, but I never thought we could produce the same thing, the decadent skin-tones, the effect of squalid pleasure. Let's face it, Florida's not France—we can't match their old-fashioned rituals, but your photographs pass the hardest test of art—”

“Sixty?” said Umlah, moving along.

“All right by me,” I said.

“—I mean, the toughest criterion. They're
news!
Dick and I think they're intimations of war.”

“And sixty there,” said Umlah, “and another sixty and a pair of hundreds.”

“Slap on the tags,” I said.

Shuggery sidled up to me. “Walker Evans was here the other day—
the
Walker Evans. Know what he said? Tell her, Iris.”

Iris said, “You.”

“He said, ‘These are classics. I don't care who took them or how it happened, but this is art—it is experience. This photographer has broken the code and instead of simplifying it has translated the message into the calligraphy of art. Shapes, and beneath the shapes an intelligent pattern, and beneath that, flesh and blood—and behind it all, truth. It is pictorial language, the mirror we all have to pass through to see the world as it is. I will walk out of here a different man. Everyone who sees this will be affected. It is the highest art—the kind that changes your life. Nothing will look the same after this—the world will have a light in it that wasn't there before. A light, and of course a shadow. It helps me to understand religious art, it makes me want to get down on my knees.' That's what he said. Walker Evans.”

Music to my ears, exactly what I had intended, if a bit florid in the retelling. But all I said was, “Sounds to me like he was having an art attack.”

Umlah said, “A hundred apiece for these four?”

“You bet.” And to Shuggery: “I think Walker was pulling your leg.”

“She thinks Walker was pulling my leg,” he said.

“All those arts. Arts and flowers. Art strings. Art and soul. Bleeding art. He gave you the business. The world's the same, more or less,” I said. “Ain't it? Besides, Walker Evans is employed by the Farm Security Administration, They pay him to say things like that.”

Umlah said, “From here to the fire alarm on that wall, all sixties.”

“You're the boss,” I said. I heard him hungrily licking the labels and I thought: I'll never take another picture in this condition—it's money in the bank.

“They're as timeless as paintings,” said Iris. “That's what he was really saying.”

“Shit and derision,” I said. “That's a silly comparison. People are always saying that, but what's so great about paintings? Paintings look so confounded
wet
to me, as if you'd get sticky stuff on your fingers if you touched them—ketchup, axle grease, marmalade and jam. I'm not talking about your Van Goghs and your Rembrandts, though some of those Van Goghs drip like crazy and I've seen Rembrandts that look like melted cheese on burned toast. But this modern junk! Rotting candy, discombobulated people, Cubists with rulers! They're decorations, aren't they? They're supposed to match the color scheme in your breakfast nook. Don't talk to me about Steichen—I know he's a painter, too, but if his house caught fire you can bet your bottom dollar he'd come rushing out with an armload of his own negatives. Look, paintings are for museums—museums are just churches, all that tiptoeing around, everyone whispering. Or the decoration angle—‘Let's brighten up that corner with a nice blue Winslow Homer'—that sort of thing.”