Feast Your Eyes Read online

  By the time of the party, Lilly’s photo of the boy selling newspapers had been up for so long that I’d stopped seeing it, but each time I went into the kitchen that night, people asked me about the damn thing. It got so that I was drinking straight bourbon in the living room just to avoid going into the next room for ice. I kept waiting for someone to notice my paintings. Nobody did, so I finally pointed them out to the abstractionist, who said something so terribly polite that I would have felt insulted if it hadn’t been so early in the evening and I hadn’t been so dead set on having a good time.

  That was the only time I ever saw Lilly get loaded. She was smiling, talking everyone’s ears off about her photographer-soldier and their bright future. By midnight, I think she was half expecting him to walk through the door—which he didn’t, of course, since he was still in Korea, but then weeks passed and Lilly still hadn’t heard a word. At first she said how slow the mail was. Then she worried he hadn’t been getting her letters, or that her parents hadn’t been forwarding his. Well, by the end of August, she was spending all her time in the john in the dark.

  One night I brought home a sculptor with tiny hands. It was rather late, and I’d been drinking beer for the past five hours, and the lavatory door was shut. Lilly had me so well trained by this point that I’d gotten used to asking a neighbor, or even using a jar in a pinch; but I wasn’t about to knock on a neighbor’s door at three a.m., and squatting over an empty Maxwell House can in front of my new friend would have spoiled the mood. So I knocked. Lilly asked for five more minutes, which made the sculptor arch his eyebrows. When I told him my roommate was a photographer, his eyebrows fell and he explained in a disappointed voice that he had thought she was shooting up. It took rather longer than five minutes for Lilly to come out. When she finally did, I ran right in, knocking over I don’t know what, but the next morning my white pumps were covered in brown splotches. Look, I told her, stop mooning around waiting for bad news, and find out what happened to your man.

  LETTER TO SAM DECKER, SEPTEMBER 1953: Sometimes we’re splitting an egg salad sandwich at Horn & Hardart. Sometimes we’re heading to the IRT, deciding whether to see a movie or spend a quiet evening at home. Sometimes we’re simply on a city street, our arms brushing as we walk. I wish the dreams were grander; then perhaps I wouldn’t wake up believing them. Instead the truth hits me each morning like a fall from a third-story window.

  The recruitment station looked the same as it had in July, but photographing a place is an entirely different thing from going inside. I was in such a state by the time I stepped through the door that the duty officer had to help me to a chair. He confirmed your absence on the lists of dead, wounded, or missing and was kind enough to explain the difference between an enlisted man and a draftee. I’ve spent so much time picturing you injured, captured, or buried in an unmarked grave that it didn’t feel very different to learn that it will be years before your term of enlistment ends and you are discharged—and still my heart rushes to defend you, insisting that you never lied. The fault is mine: I wasn’t paying attention. Before you gave up hope or changed your mind or stopped writing to me for some other reason that I will never know, I failed to notice that among all the pretty words in your pretty letters was never a promise to join me.

  When I see men in uniform drinking coffee or running to catch the bus or standing on a corner smoking, my heart still leaps in my chest. Even now, as I write a letter that I will never send.

  12. Chair, New York, 1953

  The question is, did she stand on that stretch of empty sidewalk watching it burn, or did she happen to stroll by just after the last flame had died out? Either way, the armchair must have been on fire moments before for her to get that one small white plume of smoke rising from its blackened frame. It’s easy to forget there aren’t people in this picture. Looking at the ruins of that upholstered chair feels like looking at a body, with the scraps of charred fabric scattered on the sidewalk like spatters of blood.

  PATRICIA STOKES: By the end of that summer, I’d had it up to here. An apartment with a lavatory I couldn’t use, a roommate who never wanted to go out or even cook a simple meal—well, that wasn’t what I’d signed up for. Lilly’s photographs were her real roommates; I was just there to pay half the rent. Then, all of a sudden, Lilly stopped working on her photos. Whenever I was home, she was in her bedroom with the door closed, and it was quiet as church. I figured it was something to do with her soldier, and that if he was dead she would have mentioned it, so I could only assume he was dead to her. Of course I felt bad for her, but I was also just a teensy bit glad to know that not everything always turned up roses for the artistic geniuses of the world. Finally I knocked on her bedroom door. At first I heard nothing. Then I heard the creak of footsteps walking across the floorboards. Next the doorknob turned, and there was Lilly with such dark circles under her eyes that she could have passed for the love child of Peter Lorre. Oh Patty, she said in a quavery voice that I’d never heard before. Sitting on the living room couch, she wept on my shoulder with heaving sobs. As I stroked her hair and patted her arm, I realized the price for Lilly’s immense talent was an immense loneliness that I would never have to know.

  13. Cynthia Ravitt, New York, 1953

  Lillian kept this one in a manila folder beside her copy of Ravitt’s Methods for Better Photography. She only took it out if she really liked someone. Whenever she showed it, she’d explain in a naughty whisper that Ravitt never knew she was taking it. Then she’d giggle like a kid sneaking a piece of candy.

  It’s another spider shot. You can tell by how it’s framed that Lillian set herself outside the New School and waited for Ravitt to come out. What makes it is how Ravitt leans forward as she walks past the building’s facade, totally screwing with all its horizontal lines.

  LETTER TO DOROTHY PRESTON, OCTOBER 1953: Thank you for the money. It means so much that you would send it, and of course I will keep the secret of the flour bin. I know you don’t approve of what I’m doing any more than Father does, but please know that I would have been miserable doing anything else. It was Father who taught me that the kind of life worth living was one worth working for, even if this wasn’t what he had in mind.

  For the time being I am still waitressing, though I know you and Father disapprove of that as well. The hours are more flexible than office work, and this allows more freedom for my pictures and my classes. Thanks to your flour bin, next semester I’ll be able to enroll in a workshop with the art director of a leading fashion magazine. While I’m enjoying my class with Cynthia Ravitt, it will be good to learn from someone new. Ravitt mostly lectures from her book, which I am already quite familiar with after my time in Camera Club.

  Thank you also for the hat and gloves. I’m afraid I don’t have a picture of myself to send you, but I promise that I’m taking care of myself, and I will try to send a picture soon.

  14. Self-portrait, New York, 1953

  As you might guess, this is not the picture that Lillian sent her mother. The photos on the wall behind Lillian’s head would have been her favorites. They’d go downhill from there, ending with the ones she didn’t like pinned to the wall across from her bed. I saw her do this in every bedroom of every apartment we ever had. I asked once why she didn’t hang the best ones where she could wake up to them. She told me that she wanted to be reminded each morning of what she needed to work on, not what she already did well.

  If you squint, you can see American leg, Bullfrog, Woman at the window, and Woman in curlers all here on the “best of” wall, but Reunion and Times Square recruit aren’t there, even though Lillian included them in Box Two. I doubt her opinion of them changed: I just think that in the fall of 1953, they reminded her of someone she was trying to forget.

  And, yes, she’s naked. As I said before, Lillian was pretty literal. The same way an artist draws from naked models to get a handle on basic anatomy, I think Lillian’s portraits were a way for her to study what lay at the core of people�
�their bodies, but also their fears, hopes, disappointments—to prepare herself for spotting those things out in the world.

  Compared to Mommy is sick, Self-portrait is pretty tame. There’s still a definite look-away-from-the-picture vibe, but it’s not coming from where you might think. Lillian is lying on the bed. Her soft, pale body is like something slipped from a shell, and her face—with its crazy mixture of rebellion, invitation, uncertainty, and pride—is the most naked thing about her. Yet somehow, it’s not her body or her face but the photographs behind her that make you want to cover your eyes. The way they’re arranged on the wall, it’s as if Lillian sliced herself open and that’s what spurted out.

  Pondering what might have been isn’t something I waste a whole lot of time on, but it has crossed my mind that if Lillian had never set foot in the Lacuna Gallery, she easily could have spent her life thinking of herself as a street photographer who did nude pics as a hobby. In which case, instead of writing this, I could very well be married with kids and a cocker spaniel named Good Girl in a cushioned suburb farting distance from Manhattan, getting my highlights redone, with all my naked-kiddie photos in a box marked “Miscellaneous” on a shelf next to Lillian’s cremains in my climate-controlled two-car garage. I’d be much happier, probably, but also a lot less interesting.

  15. The reader, New York, 1953

  Once Lillian showed me five prints of this photograph and asked me to pick the best one. When I told her they all looked the same, she made me look again. After a while I pointed to the middle one. Exactly, Lillian agreed, but why? I had no idea. She pointed to the bench the man was sitting on. In the two on the left, she explained, the bench was too light. In the two on the right, it was too dark. In the middle, it was perfect. Sometimes the eye can see what the brain can’t put into words.

  PATRICIA STOKES: For a little while after the couch episode, Lilly and I were roommates the way I’d always hoped we would be. Not that she approached anyone’s ideal of a social butterfly, but for at least a few weeks she wasn’t allergic to the notion of visiting a bar. Then her classes began, and the fledgling butterfly returned to her cocoon. Lilly was either at the restaurant, at school, locked inside the john, or out taking pictures. She’d never done anything scarcely resembling her share of the housework, but now she hardly washed her own dishes. In those days I possessed a high tolerance for squalor, but even back then I had certain standards; plus, I was getting bored of being Lilly’s personal maid.

  Just when I’d reached my limit, I came home from working the dinner shift and Lilly burst from the john like a kid on Christmas morning, holding out a photograph that was still wet. It took ten tries, she explained, but it was finally perfect. She’d made it for me.

  I recognized the man straight off. I must have walked past that park bench one hundred times on my way to work, though in typical city fashion, I’d never paid the person sitting on it any more mind than a parking meter. It took Lilly’s photo to reveal him to me: the hands holding the book like a dance partner; the face gazing at that page like it’s the whole world; the half-smile that says he’s on the winning end of some grand secret.

  I had seen plenty of Lilly’s photos by now, but this one tipped the balance. Back in Delaware, any slob who painted something that wasn’t a car or the side of a house was considered an artist, but living with Lilly was different. Not that I wasn’t getting a certain amount of praise for my paintings. My professors at the Art Students League said I had promise, and going by what was on some of the other easels, I could tell I was holding my own. But seeing The reader, I realized that nobody looking at my work was ever going to feel one crumb of what I felt looking at Lilly’s.

  Perhaps this explains why, when she gave me the photograph, I didn’t exactly dance with thanksgiving. I suppose I must have known she meant it as a sort of peace offering—to apologize, in her own Lilly way, for falling short of anyone’s standards for shared living. But by this point, I wasn’t feeling terribly forgiving.

  Thanks, I’m sure, I said in the voice I saved for men who didn’t stand a chance, and was gratified to see a wave of confusion cross Lilly’s dopey face.

  For one lovely moment, I had instilled in her a particle of artistic self-doubt.

  16. Balloon man, New York, 1953

  17. Newspaper clipping, “Eyes on Photography,” The New York Times, December 18, 1953, annotated in red, blue, and black ink

  This season’s group showing of student work at the New School is a reminder of the form’s growing popularity, with one standout worth mentioning. In Lillian Preston’s “Balloon man,” the spectrum of grays forms a veritable rainbow in a bouquet of sunlit balloons. While the vendor’s wares obscure his sitting torso, his threadbare trousers and shabby shoes supply a powerful counterpoint to the humor of his balloon body. The sophisticated grasp of form and technique displayed by Miss Preston shows that she is a photographer to watch.

  LETTER TO WALTER AND DOROTHY PRESTON, DECEMBER 1953: You can imagine my surprise when I came to class! I didn’t even know the Times had a camera editor, much less that he had attended the school show. I begged for the copy, as by that time the paper was already three days old, and it seemed so very important that I send it to you. I took the picture one sunny day in Central Park. There’s a zoo there, not nearly as big as Cleveland’s but very popular with children, and there are vendors of all sorts on the path leading up to it. I hope the photo arrived safely. If it didn’t, I will gladly print you another.

  It should have been obvious, since there was only one photograph on display at my grandparents’ place, but not until I was settling Grandma Dot’s affairs did I realize that the framed photo on her bedroom wall was one of Lillian’s. While cleaning out the house on Fernvale Street—which included finally dealing with the three boxes that had been waiting there for me eleven years—I also found the newspaper clipping inside the Bible on Grandma’s bedside table. At first I assumed that Lillian had drawn the black circle around her name, afraid her parents would otherwise miss the mention. Then I changed my mind. Next to the black circle was that blue ballpoint arrow; and next to the arrow were the words “Our Daughter” in red, in my grandmother’s perfect schoolgirl cursive. Her pride hadn’t been appeased until she had made three annotations in three different colors, even for a clipping kept somewhere only she would ever see.

  18. Couple standing outside the BMT, New York, 1953

  This picture is a Rorschach test: what I see in it depends on my mood. The way the guy is holding her shoulder could be intimate, but then there’s the hard look on his face, and that woman! Sometimes I think she’s just told him she’s in love with someone else and is waiting for him to stop talking so she can swipe his hand off her shoulder and finally leave him. Other times I’m positive her thousand-mile stare comes from listening to the same crappy excuse she always accepts before walking down the station steps to go home with him once again.

  PATRICIA STOKES: It started mid-fall. At first, it was nothing terribly momentous, just three or four of the Art League gang swapping the usual gossip. None of us had money, and drinking at home was less expensive than drinking out. Somewhere along the way it became a weekly arrangement, and people started bringing their friends. It wasn’t long before word got out that on Thursdays, there was always something doing at the apartment above the grocery at the corner of West Fourteenth and Sixth.

  Lilly hated it, of course. After all, she couldn’t very well commandeer the john in an apartment filled with strangers expecting a certain basic level of hospitality. Not that she didn’t try, but early on there was an unfortunate incident when someone literally burst down the door, ruining several of Lilly’s prints in the bargain. After that, she became scarce, either staying out somewhere or barricading herself in her room.

  Thursdays really took off when I started handing out invitations to interesting types I happened to meet: a man sitting with his pet monkey in Union Square; a casting agent; a woman singing opera in front of the Washin
gton Square fountain; a philosopher in red robes standing beside a hotel taxi stand and extolling the virtues of simple living. After I elevated the group beer kitty to a mandatory door donation, I realized that my weekly soirees had more potential than anything else I was doing.

  By that December, anyone who saw Lilly and me in that apartment would have taken us for a pair of deaf-mutes, considering how thoroughly we weren’t speaking to each other. By this point I had asked her to move out innumerable times in my mind, but I wasn’t sure who Lilly knew in the city other than myself. I wasn’t at all sure where she would go, if and when I did build up the wherewithal to say the words out loud. At the same time, I was already considering the musicians I could start inviting once her room became available, and how quickly a slightly larger door donation would cover her half of the rent.

  Lower East Side, 1954–56

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  19. Window-shopping on Fifth Avenue, New York, 1954

  No one in this picture knows they’re being watched: not the dreamy-eyed woman gazing at the smart mannequins, or the smiling man eyeing the dreamy-eyed woman. Lillian wasn’t big on themes. She said she took pictures of whatever grabbed her, but around this time there sure are a lot of watched women filling up her contact sheets. The way Deb describes it, Lillian would have had a pretty good reason for that.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: There I am, coming down the stairs, and coming up is a gigantic box with legs. Then the box reaches the landing, and this prim-looking thing steps out from behind it, and that’s Lilly. This is February 1954, East Sixth Street—stained walls, cracked tiles, the smells of frying fat and boiled cabbage—and here’s this clean-cut girl in a pale blouse with little gold earrings in her little pale ears, looking like she belongs on a nice suburban lawn somewhere. I ask is she lost. She says she’s my new neighbor in a voice that reminds me of glass animals. I think to myself: this kid hasn’t got a chance.