Picture Palace Read Online Free PDF Page B

salutation to reminiscence, subtle, solemn, funny, coincidental, and here it paused at valediction, to show my Speed Graphic as more futile than an eyeball, a box of peepstones that could only falsify this two hours. Any picture I took of Greene would be flat as a pancake. I knew that now; but I could begin again.
    Greene was reddening and laughing that rich laugh, as if he was amazed by his own success, by how perfectly his trick had worked.
    I said, “No one will believe this.”
    And, by a professional reflex, saw my angle: Greene in Bentley’s; his other half on the wall mirror; the sacrificial fish staring up at him; the half-drunk bottle of wine; Greene’s face animated by laughter, all his features working at once, creating light; and in the background, just visible, his triumph, the circle of Japanese, their, tiny heads and neatly plastered hair. The perfect photograph pausing in a gong of light, the artist at the foreground of his own creation: Greene by Pratt.
    There were tears in my eyes as I found the right f-stop and raised my Speed Graphic. I was humbled, just another crafty witness giving permanence to her piece of luck.
    Greene reached over—he had very long arms—and touched the instrument. It went cold in my hands. I lowered it.
    â€œNo,” he said. “Don’t spoil it.”
    â€œPlease.”
    He said, “Let this be your first memory.”
    â€œI want to do you,” I said. There were tears rolling down my cheeks, but I didn’t care.
    â€œDon’t you see? You’ve already done me.”
    I still held the camera in my hand. I had looped the strap over my neck. I weighed the camera, wondering what to do with it. I could barely get my breath.
    â€œDo put it away,” said Greene.
    I let it drop. It jerked my head forward. I said, “I want to tell you about my brother.”
    â€œLater,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
    In the Ritz lobby he kissed me good night. I went upstairs, and as soon as I opened the door the floor gave way under me, the ceiling caved in, and I was rolling over and over, down a long bumpy slope, dragging my heart behind me. Still tumbling I yanked the phone down by its cord and gasped into it.
    Days later, a British doctor said to me, “You’re a jolly lucky girl,” but what I clung to was what Greene had said in the restaurant:
Let this be your first memory
.

6
My Last Picture
    S ADNESS is ramshackle, but mourning is formal, such a buttoned-up ritual of shuffling and whispers that I wished on arrival that I hadn’t cabled Frank about my spot of bother at the Ritz. Wheeled from the little plane across the Hyannis runway and looking towards the terminal with its silly W ELCOME sign, I saw ten of the gloomiest creatures I had ever laid eyes on. I felt like a latecomer to my own funeral, and it struck me that at my advanced age every acquaintance is a prospective mourner. They’re sticking around to bury you. That’s their secret; but you’re not supposed to know.
    The irritating aspect of a mourner is the look of satisfaction. He is not ghoulish enough to be glad, just bursting with relief—that weird self-congratulation over being spared. They had warned me that I might snuff it, but a warning is the cheapest form of abuse: it was still ringing in my ears. And their expressions proved it.
I told you so
is one of the most gleeful expressions in the language, and yet no one actually says it in so many words. It is a cautioning wobble of the head, a suppressed smirk, the fish-1 ips of reproof and a hectoring silence.
    Well, I wasn’t dead, which was even better from their point of view, because the story was that I had had a massive heart seizure (and I could hear them saying, “—all those waffles”). This was a lesson to me; I’d listen to them from now on; I wouldn’t be so fractious. But the advantage was mine. I didn’t like being treated like a stiff;