Free Picture Palace by Paul Theroux Page B

the crowds and wanted to photograph those trembling smells, that rapid movement, the laughter of picnickers in Battery Park, the early-morning stables. I tried and turned it into blurs, the kind of crudity that saddened me at the time but later, as memorable imprecision, fed me keenly each vivid line: the ice man in the rubber cape kneeling over a tombstone of frost and dividing it into bricks with the needle-point of his stiletto—the chips flying into his face; the men in aprons mounding sawdust with pushbrooms and the woman screaming “Waldo!” at a weeping child. The sun struck the signs Saloon and W OLFPITS F URRIERS and filled the street with smoldering paint; the trolley cars rattled and sounded their gongs at corners; and I fought to photograph the oddness of it—the mucky gutters, the woman smoking a cigarette, an urchin whacking a ball with a stave, the Chinese grocery, the horses munching out of the trim canvas buckets that fitted their faces like masks. I did not feel I was alone; I believed that the whole world squinted with me through my camera’s lens and that I could call up a stallion from a clumsy hoofprint.
    And yet I was alone. I got unexpected strength from this—being able to cover huge distances because there was no one with me. If I went far enough I would get the picture I wanted. Even then I didn’t take the view that one opened one’s eyes and there was one’s masterpiece: that goddamned tree. That was the consolation of laziness (
Just look out your own window
, the photography handbooks said). It had to be more than that, a quest which after great exertion and occasional luck brought me without sight of my shot; the next few steps composed the picture. My photographs were miles away. I stalked them and saw at the moment of discovery how temporary they were, and how the instant I snapped them they changed and vanished like smoke, or ceased to sing, like a lark in a snare. The life of a picture was that stinging second: there was nothing more.
    I was sad over Orlando and had the sad person’s dull stamina, a cranky concentration, as I went about harvesting these split-seconds. One picture showed a huddled family on Mott Street, horses and clutter, Chinese characters splashed down a wall and a window of skinny stretched chickens; but what I remembered best was a song and the smell of frying and the ache of my swollen feet and how Orlando had said, “Don’t forget to come back.” These failures, so irksome then, gave me back the past. I could enter these pictures and start drowning and relive my life.
    The back of that head Frank had showed me; it had a face.
    It was after I returned from one of these exhausting outings that Mrs. Seltzer opened the front door and said in a hostess’s obliquely warning way—as much for the people inside as for me—“We’ve got company, Maude.”
    I looked beyond her and saw six or seven people arguing furiously. They’re just prostitutes,” one man was saying at the top of his voice.
    Mrs. Seltzer said, “Watch your language.”
    She steered me inside and she introduced me to everyone so fast I just heard my own name six times and didn’t catch anyone else’s. I was glad to sit down in a corner—I didn’t want to stick out and be noticed. Besides the Seltzers there were four men and one plump woman who kept her feet flat on the floor and didn’t say a word or even smile. She reminded me of a throbbing potato. And the small dark whiskery man who had been practically screaming turned to me and said in an accent I could not quite place, “What do you do, lass?”
    They had been having tea. This activity stopped with a sudden swelling pause and the room became big and still. Everyone looked at me. I looked at my knotted fingers. I didn’t know what to say.
    Mr. Seltzer said, “Maude’s a photographer.”
    And saved me.
    â€œAre thee?”