Free Picture Palace by Paul Theroux Page A

had once set her own hair on fire; Slaughter, the piano tuner, and one of Frenise’s squiffy-eyed nieces named Verna, from Martha’s Vineyard. It was outrageous, I was ashamed of the pictures, I had the prints. I knew I had done it only for the distraction, and I remember Mrs. Conklin demanding suddenly from her darkness, “What are you doing, child?”
    One hot day in August I went out to the orchard behind the windmill and sat under a tree to fret. It was damp there, a dark green moisture on the thickness of uncut grass. In rage and frustration I jumped up and pulled on a branch and shook down thirty apples. They hammered from the limb, dropping plumply with skin-splitting plops and I could taste their bitter bruises in the air after they fell. Then I saw Orlando’s face rising from the tall grass near the windmill. It was, all at once, blank, curious, defensive, drained of color, and when he stood up I could see the grass stains on his trousers.
    â€œWhat’s wrong, cookie?” he asked gently and squatted and tumbled to his knees.
    I was too startled at first to tell him why I was in such a state. But I calmed down. I decided to tell him the truth, to say,
You’re the only person I’ll ever love—
it was the perfect place, secluded and smelling of smashed apples and dusty flowers. The lush place itself was my excuse; and there was that rumpus in my vitals.
    â€œOllie, you’re the only—”
    I heard a noise and looked up to see if the windmill was turning. The sails were anchored, but sometimes they broke loose and spun all night. Today there was no feel of wind, only the silken rustle of its sound.
    â€œDid you hear something?” I said, worried that we’d be caught alone, discovered like plotters and perhaps accused.
    This took seconds. I saw Phoebe in her white dress spring up out of the grass and toss her hair and take a dance step toward us.
    â€œIt’s only me,” she said.
    Orlando said, “It was Maude—fooling with the tree.”
    Snap: Orlando kneeling innocently on his grass stains with a slash of sunlight on his face and a kind of eagerness in his eyes; and behind him—Pre-Raphaelite, like the paintings Millais did from Rupert Potter photographs—Phoebe in the dress that gave her a moth’s fragile wing-sleeves, a brittle sprite fluttering over him as if she was learning to fly and about to droop on his wrist in exhaustion. Two pretty creatures wondering who I was, and in the foreground a mass of fallen apples like the windfalls on the morning after a storm, with white reflections printed on their upturned sides, and the birds’ mad tweeching and the sawing of insects’ teeth and the wind in the boughs and leaves that made a sound like surf.
    Phoebe said, “We couldn’t find you anywhere, Maude.”
    I smelled a rich odor of apples and summer, bees and blossoms and tomato vines and the fish and salt of the sea, maddening and hurtful.
    At dinner that night Orlando said, “If I were you, know what I’d do? I’d take my camera to New York City.” He touched my hand and set a growl going in me. “Yes, I would.”
    The next day I went and stayed with those people, the Seltzers.
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    New York then was stink and noise, the dung of dray horses steaming in the sunlight and dogcarts jumping on the cobbles, Irish families, all woolens and shoes, toting patched bundles and pausing in the reek of beer to turn their white faces toward the fumes of the harshly honking cars. Half the city seemed to live in the street, jostling among the fruit and cats for room. Orlando had ordered me here: I wondered if this descent was a retreat. I had never been so close to such loud strangers—screwballs, swill-pails, fancy signs—and it amazed me to think that I had the same right they did to stare.
    I took pictures—bad blundering work that I recall with great tenderness, because I was overwhelmed by