Picture Palace Read Online Free PDF

talking the food arrived. Novelists, I knew, ate what they wrote about; Greene had lemon sole and a cold bottle of Muscadet. Before he started he leaned over and took my hand gently in his. He had long fragile hands, like beautiful gloves, and a pale green ring. He held on and said, “May I ask why you’re taking my picture?”
    â€œI wanted to, and you agreed,” I said nervously. “It will complete the exhibition.”
    â€œWhat makes you think that?”
    I wanted to say a hundred things. Because we’re both as old as the hills. Because you’ve lived a charmed life, as I have. Because no one wanted me to come to London. Because you’ve known what it is to be rich, famous, and misunderstood. Because anyone but me would violate you. Because you’re alone, blind, betrayed, vain. Because you’re happy. Because we’re equals. Because you look like my poor dead brother.
    â€œBecause,” I said—
because people will see my face on
yours—
“it’s the next best thing to taking my own picture.”
    I was grateful to him for not laughing at this. He said, “I’m afraid you’re wrong. Deceived again, Miss Pratt. You’re an original.”
    I said that was all very well but that I still couldn’t do a self-portrait.
    â€œOf course you can—you have,” he said. “Your self-portrait will be this retrospective, not one picture, but thousands, all those photographs.”
    â€œThat’s what they say. I know all old people are Monday morning quarterbacks, but I also know the life I’ve had, and it ain’t them pictures.”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œNo, sir. It’s all the pictures I never took. It’s the circumstances.”
    He put his fingertips together thoughtfully, like a man preparing to pray.
    â€œWhen I did Cocteau, know what he said to me? He said, ‘Ja swee san doot le poet le plew incanoe et le plew celebra.’ And I know goddamned well what he meant, pardon my French.” I took a few mouthfuls of fish. “When I take your picture, I’m sorry, but it’s not going to be you. All I can shoot is your face. If I took my own picture that’s all mine would be, an old lady, looking for a house to haunt.”
    â€œWith a camera,” he said.
    â€œPardon?”
    â€œI said, if you did your self-portrait with a camera.”
    â€œWhat else would I use—a monkey wrench?”
    â€œYou could do a book,” he said, and dipped his prayerful hands at me as if pronouncing a blessing.
    I said, “What do I know about that?”
    â€œThe less you know, the better,” he said. “You have forgotten memories. What you forget becomes the compost of the imagination.”
    â€œMy mulch-pile of memories.”
    He smiled.
    â€œRenounce photography, the gentleman says.”
    â€œExactly.” He said it with perfect priestlike certainty.
    He made it seem so simple. It was as if he had led me through a cluttered palace of regrets, from room to shadowy room, climbing stairs and kicking carpets, and when we reached the end of the darkened corridor I’d feared most he’d thrown open a door I hadn’t seen and shown me air and light and empty space: hope.
    â€œAll you have to do,” he said, and now he turned, “is open your eyes.”
    He was staring in the direction of the door.
    I saw eight Japanese gentlemen gliding noiselessly in. They wore dark suits, they were small and had that deft, precisely tuned, transistorized movement. They took their places around the large table in the center of the room and sat down.
    Greene said, “There’s my Japanese!”
    â€œI see them! I see them!” I said. They were angels embodying the urgent proof that I write and remember. They were Greene’s own magic trick, eight creaseless Japanese conjured from thin air and seated muttering their gum-chewing language. So the evening had gone from