“No, Iris. There was a wedding.”
“I don’t know who you are, George. I don’t know who the hell you are.”
“Don’t you?” He looked sad. His dark eyes were blood-shot.
“When is the exhibition?”
“Next Friday.”
“So soon? I didn’t know it was possible.”
“Apparently it is.”
“I could ask you to take the picture out, you know.”
“Would you do that?” He gazed straight at me.
I measured his face, but George looked only tired and very pale. He sat collapsed in a chair. All animation seemed to have flown from his body, leaving a still, wax figure. At the time I read this stasis as indifference, and it irritated me. “Maybe,” I said. “Listen, George, I feel that I’ve been tricked, hoodwinked. I don’t know where I am anymore, and that picture is part of it. I think you knew it would hurt me, but you went ahead . . .”
George shook his head.
“You robbed me.” I didn’t know what the words meant, but they seemed to identify an amorphous truth.
He looked at me squarely. “You came here. I photographed you. You came because you wanted to come.”
I stopped breathing. He was right. I exhaled through my nose and listened to the small gust of air rush past my mouth. I breathed again. “Show it,” I said, and stood up. I eased my book bag onto my sore shoulder. “But I won’t be at the opening. I won’t look at it. Stephen can cheer you on.”
George held out his hands to me—his white face looked strangely swollen—but I ignored this gesture of reconciliation and went out the door.
I took a taxi home, watching my money tick away on the meter and remembering I owed Stephen thirty dollars I didn’t have. I rolled down the window and let the air blow over me as the driver sped up Tenth Avenue hitting one green light after another. I read the neon letters that hung in the darkness over the street, suspended in the nothingness of hidden buildings and walls, signs advertising obscure products and places. I knew that some of them were names for things that no longer existed—dead companies, vacant hotels. This thought filled me with sadness, and I cried noiselessly in the back of the cab until it stopped at 109th Street. Before I put my key in the door, I looked up at the sky for stars. There were many that night, and their presence was as reassuring to me as the dreams of heaven I used to have as a child.
• • •
The next morning I was awakened by the buzzer. It was Stephen. I put on my bathrobe and waited for him with the door open. He came up the stairs, impeccably dressed in white, his hair shining in the sun that came through the hall window. He kissed my cheek, took my hand, and walked into the apartment. He sat down on an orange crate that was serving as a chair and put his elbows on his knees.
“George called me last night,” he said. “You went to see him.”
“Yes,” I said.
Stephen bent his head. His chin touched the collar of his starched shirt.
“Too many secrets, Stephen,” I said. “I can’t live like that. They smother me.”
“Everyone has secrets, Iris,” he said.
“I know,” I said, “but some are damaging and some can’t be kept. They’re bound to get out.” I paused. “Like you and George. I feel duped. I feel that you two have been laughing at me all this time. I want to hear you say it, Stephen. Tell me now. Are you lovers?”
His green eyes fixed themselves on a pile of books I was going to return to the library. Then he smiled and shook his head. “George isn’t anyone’s lover, not really. You know that. It’s something else . . .”
I looked at his neck. The first two buttons of his shirt, were opened, and I wanted to put my fingers on the small bones of his chest, but I held my hands back and folded them in my lap.
“He took your picture, though, didn’t he?” I said. “That’s you, your body in front of the window, isn’t it?”
He didn’t reply. He sat with his head down, and I saw him tremble.
“You lied to me about it, when we could have been open. We could have shared it. I felt so bad when I left George’s that day, so abused and hurt, and you only made it worse. I can’t understand it.”
“There’s no cruelty in you,” he said, putting his fingers to my face and then in my hair. His hands smelled of scented soap.
“You’re wrong about that,” I said.
“You’re good,” he said. “I’m not. I’m a fraud.”
“Don’t say that.”
Stephen smiled. “It’s the truth.”
“It’s what you feel at the moment.”
“It’s what I always feel,” he said.
“You always feel like a fraud. I don’t believe it.”
“I watch myself live, Iris, like a movie, and that image of myself is everything. I don’t want to betray it. Do you know what I’m talking about? I’m telling you that what I can’t bear is the ordinary. I don’t want to bore myself, to sink into the pedestrian ways of other people—heart-to-heart talks, petty confessions, relationships of habit, not passion. I see those people all around me, and I detest them, so I have to be divorced from myself in order to keep from sliding into a life I find nauseating. It’s a matter of appearances, but surfaces are underestimated. The veneer becomes the thing. I rarely distinguish the man in the movie from the spectator anymore.”
I felt sorry for him and hated the feeling. He had delivered his explanation in a fierce tone of self-mockery and it bruised me. “I do understand you, Stephen, but don’t you think that everybody is finally the same in the most essential ways? Some lives are probably much duller than others, but it’s impossible to know how people live inside themselves, isn’t it? I mean, a life could seem boring on the outside and be tumultuous within. Isn’t cruelty more contemptible than ordinariness?”
Stephen looked out my window. He bit his lip and then spoke slowly without turning back to look at me. “I’m not talking about morality, Iris. I’m trying to be honest with you. I tell you sometimes it’s cruelty that makes me feel more alive.”
“Look at me, Stephen,” I said. He turned his head. The pity I felt had changed me, and I smiled at him. “I don’t want to disappoint you too much,” I said. “But you aren’t that mean. In fact, usually you’re kind and filled with generous impulses.”
He sighed. He looked so beautiful to me, so refined. He’s right, I thought. He bears no trace of vulgarity, even though as the suburban boy of uneducated parents, he had been surrounded by it on all sides. He had made himself.
“And the photograph of me?” I said. “You knew about George’s show that day you found me in your apartment, but you didn’t tell me, and you didn’t tell me either that you had shown the picture around Columbia . . .”
“I didn’t show it to anyone.”
“Someone did.”
“Well, it wasn’t me.”
“And the show?”
“It’s George’s business.”
I looked out the window at the brick wall. Its mortar was crumbling. “We’ll never get past any of this, will we?”
“No,” he said. “We won’t.”
My bathrobe had opened, revealing my legs, and I stared at my knee bones. “You’re never going to come back, are you?” I said. My lungs seemed to close up.
“You don’t have to be so dramatic,” he said. “I’ll see you. We can talk.”
“No,” I said.
“You won’t even have coffee with your old friend?”
I shook my head.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He closed the door very quietly behind him and never came back. I saw him, of course, from time to time—in the library, on the street—but because I went to great lengths to avoid him, our encounters were few. Stephen was out of my life, and yet I would carry around his ghost for months afterward—a beautiful, maddening creature that ate me alive.
• • •
Stephen left on a Sunday, and during the week that followed, I stuck close to home. I took
walks in Riverside Park and continued writing my paper, which had become much too long. When I saw people I knew in the street, I hid from them, turning down another block or darting into a store, but that happened only a couple of times. My loneliness was an enforced indulgence. I left my phone off the hook. The photograph, the gossip, George’s show, took on an unreal quality, as if none of it had ever happened. At night it would come back to me in strange, colorful dreams from which I would wake gasping, sweating, and largely forgetful. My seclusion was a form of burial I imagined would eventually make me well. It was imperative that I be seen as little as possible. I sequestered myself from the eyes of others because I had begun to feel those eyes as an almost physical threat. My skin felt raw, my bones ached, and I nursed my body with long baths and perfumed creams. My world shrank, became a cocoon. This isolation was a kind of punctuation, a way of announcing an ending to myself, and it wasn’t without its pleasures.
Thursday night I was lying in bed with a notebook, outlining the final pages of “Fictions Within Fiction,” when the phone rang. I had put the receiver back on the hook because it was after midnight and I expected no calls. It was George. I listened to his familiar voice and felt a tremor of expectation.
“I’ve been trying to reach you for hours. I’m at a pay phone down the street. I have to talk to you. I’m coming over.”
“Please don’t,” I said. “I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to see anyone—”
“This is urgent. We must talk. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Before I could say another word, he hung up.
I washed my face, combed my hair, and waited. The buzzer rang, and I let George in. When he came through the door, he looked wild and spoke to me in a loud voice. “It’s been stolen,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” I said this calmly to make his tone appear inappropriate.
“The photograph,” he said. “It’s gone.”
“The one of me?” I said. “Gone from where?”
“From the show. It was hung yesterday and now it’s not there.”
“You’re joking,” I said.
“Don’t play games, Iris,” he said. “You have it.”
I looked at George. His hair was windblown, his beautiful jacket rumpled. My mouth fell open. “You actually believe that I sneaked into the gallery and stole that photograph? I said you could show it, and I meant it. What do you take me for, a madwoman?”
He smiled at me. “Either that or one hell of an actress.”
“You mean you can’t tell? I thought you could see right through me, George.”
He took out a cigarette and lit it, blowing the smoke past my cheek. “Okay, let’s say you didn’t take it. Who did?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. Unlike you, I’m not able to read people’s thoughts.”
George sat down on the orange crate. I pulled the chair away from my table and sat down facing him. He said nothing but continued to smoke and study me.
A mental image of George’s photographs in a large white gallery appeared before me. I remembered the poster girl seen through the diamond grate and the picture of Stephen that had been paired with it. There had to be two pictures. I felt slammed by sudden recognition.
“You’re showing the series I saw, aren’t you?” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
“The pairs?”
He nodded.
“Then there’s another picture,” I said, “the one you matched with mine.” She came back to me as I looked at George. She was writhing on the sidewalk, her legs and arms racked by the spasms, her red face and white eyes, her full, gagging mouth, and I turned my head away from him. I saw the city from the roof, and the clouds that had seemed to come from nowhere after it was all over. Stephen had said something about her body falling apart, and George had been mostly quiet, but he had taken pictures. I had heard the camera’s shutter. I remembered the sound. Then I was crying. The tears ran down my cheeks, and I put my face in my hands. George reached out and touched my knee, but I pushed him away.
“How could you?” I stared at him and wiped my cheeks with my shirt sleeve. “What’s it like,” I said, “the picture of the seizure? I hope the urine stain came out well. You wouldn’t want to miss that. I’ll bet it’s your masterpiece. Nothing like a heavy dose of human suffering to make a terrific photograph.” I spat out the last word and saw the saliva fly from my mouth.
George didn’t move.
“Did they take that picture, too?”
“No.”
“Oh George.” There was a wail in my voice. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He leaned forward and put his cigarette out in a cup on the table. “I meant to tell you,” he said. “I was going to tell you tonight, but you didn’t give me the chance. I wanted to explain it to you. Those pictures, those pairs, are studies in counterpoint. They aren’t meant to be equations. The idea is that they play off each other. I intended them to be explorations—”
I didn’t let him finish. “Garbage,” I said. “Explorations of what? Your own brutal voyeurism?”
For a moment George looked stricken, but he recovered fast. “Listen, Iris. That was uncalled for. Do you really think that I should photograph only children with puppies or lovers in the park? Do you really believe that ‘human suffering,’ as you call it, is outside the domain of photography?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe that. What I believe is that your motives are less than noble, that you will happily risk friendships to get the right shot, that you’re a kind of stage manager. You like to push people around, play with them, pretend you’ve made them. You did it to me the afternoon you took pictures. I think you already had the photograph of the seizure, and you wanted something parallel from me, and you got it. I don’t underestimate your cleverness. I question your ethics.”
“How eloquent.” George folded his arms. “But I seem to remember a young woman who fell at my feet that same afternoon. You, Iris, you who have been moping about Stephen’s unfaithfulness, were ready to jump. Are you prepared to argue that you’re not responsible for your own actions?”
“No,” I said, and fell silent. George was remarkably still, but I could see his chest move as he breathed. “I don’t mean to sound self-righteous, but you’ve kept me in the dark about so many things, both you and Stephen.”
George rubbed his fingers along the side of his face and said, “Maybe Stephen took it.”
“Why would Stephen take it?” I said.
“He wanted me to withdraw it from the show. We fought about it.”
“Because of me?” I said.
George turned toward the window. “That may have been part of it, but Stephen was a little crazy when it came to that picture. He kept saying to me, ‘She shouldn’t be displayed like that.’ ”
“Next to the other photograph?”
“No, in a gallery. He seemed to feel that it was sacred or something, that it would lose its power if I put it up.”
“It’s funny how he said ‘she’ when he talked about it. I never knew who he meant.”
George turned back toward me quickly, his eyes small and his expression shrewd.
“Then again, maybe you took it,” I said.
His eyes opened. “Now why would I do that?”
I leaned forward and rested my elbows on my knees, cradling my chin in my hands. “To keep it going,” I said.
“To keep what going?” He spoke patiently, like a person tolerating a young child’s irrational questions.
“The whole thing, George, the whole story of this stupid photograph. I wouldn’t put it past you, generating a little intrigue for kicks.”
“I’m flattered, Iris, really flattered, but I’m afraid you’re wrong.”
“Am I?” I said. “You need to stir things up, don’t you? Your pictures are a record of that energy, that urge, but photography is a weird sort of intrusion. I mean, you’re there and you’re not there at the same time. You’re th
e cameraman ghost, George, a man without a body, a man with subjects but no friends.” I looked at George and wished I hadn’t said it. He seemed old to me just then, his face haggard and his forehead wrinkled in an expression of pain. He was only twenty-six.
“You’ve summed me up very nicely,” he said. “One short paragraph ought to take care of George. No need to give him a second thought. It’s easy for you, isn’t it? It’s easy to write off the poor jerk who loved you from the first moment he saw you.”
I held my breath.
“Don’t look so shocked, Iris.”
“What are you telling me?”
George was buttoning his jacket. He stood up. “I’m telling you there are many ways to live and many ways to love. I guess my way is more roundabout than most.” He reached out and brushed my cheek very slowly with the back of his hand. “Goodbye, Iris.”
I walked him to the door. He opened it, paused on the threshold, and then turned completely around to face me. “I have the negative, but I won’t make a copy. A blank wall might be just as good, after all. What do you think?”
“I think you’re probably right,” I said.
George stepped backward into the hallway. He lingered there and nodded absently. Then he held his hands out in front of him, his palms toward the ceiling, and for a second I wondered if he wanted me to take them, but he let his hands fall and pushed them deep into the pockets of his pants. He swiveled on his heels and walked down the hall, cutting an elegant figure with his black jacket and long curls. I closed the door, locked it, and went back to my bed.
THREE
In the end they put me in the hospital. That was after all the other treatments had failed. The Inderal, the Cafergot, the Mellaril, the Elavil, the little white inhaling box, and the famous Fish cocktail. Every day I took the test and swallowed enormous blue pills of Thorazine at regular intervals. That was where I met Mrs. O. She was in bed three. I was in bed two, and Mrs. M was in bed four. Bed one was empty.
As a migraineur, I had low status. Admittedly, I was a bad case: I had had pain in my head for seven months almost without respite. Sometimes it was mild, sometimes brutal. My bowels were racked. I peed too much. I was supernaturally tired. I saw black holes and tiny rings of light; my jaw tingled; my hands and feet were ice cold; I was always nauseated. My body had become the meeting place for ridiculous symptoms, but what I had was still a headache, and headaches had little clout on the neurology ward. The day I arrived, the fat nurse said, “She’s one of Dr. Fish’s,” and after that, they pretty much left me alone. They changed my bed and filled my water pitcher, but they rarely spoke to me. They seemed suspicious. And I didn’t demand further attention, because I was guilty. It was clear to me that I had made the headache, created the monster myself, and just because I couldn’t get rid of the damned thing didn’t mean I wasn’t to blame. Besides, speaking was difficult. I had to do it through a cocoon of Thorazine. The distance between the place where the words originated—somewhere deep within the headache—and where they had to go—out into the room—seemed impassable. In the beginning I was a quiet patient. It wasn’t until later, after the incidents with Mrs. O., that one of the nurses called me a troublemaker.