Feast Your Eyes Read online

  Down by the entryway, Lilly had a shopping cart filled with her stuff that she’d wheeled over from her old place. I was on my way to the bookshop, but I helped her with a few things before heading out—partly to be nice, partly because I was curious. Lilly had this contraption that looked like a cross between a drill press and an old-fashioned camera, which she called an enlarger. She told me she was a photographer. For the newspapers? I asked, but she just smiled and shook her head. You see, photography didn’t register with me. I didn’t know anyone who was doing it; that’s how ahead of things Lilly was.

  I spent that whole day trying to think up reasons for her being there. It wasn’t an easy neighborhood back then. It was very, very Polish, and as far as they were concerned, a woman without a man was either a whore or somebody’s mistress, which amounted to the same thing. Walking down the street, you’d be invisible or you’d get remarks. You didn’t have to speak Polish to know what kurva meant, the way they said it. But eighteen bucks a month got you two rooms—a big one with a sink and a bathtub in one corner, the toilet in a closet; and a tiny one that barely had space enough for its own door—with water and heat included. That was why I was there, but I was a poet and just the sort of misfit, self-made orphan that kind of setup would appeal to.

  When I got back from the bookshop, I knocked on Lilly’s door, just to make sure she hadn’t been thrown into some baba’s goulash, and out she came into the hallway, grinning ear to ear. The door across from hers had a cloth stuffed under it, and she was pointing at it like she’d found the end of the rainbow. Her neighbor was this Chinese guy, the only other tenant who wasn’t a Pole. He’d work through the week, then lock himself in his apartment on weekends. Lilly thought the cloth was there to block out the light. She was going on about her neighbor being a photographer, too, her face lit up like the circus. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he was in there smoking opium. Keeping out the light had nothing to do with it; the cloth was there so that the smell of his little hobby could be kept in.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, FEBRUARY 1954: As much as I would like to belong here, this neighborhood has no use for a young single girl who doesn’t speak its language. The women merely eye me with suspicion when they look at me at all, but the men are even harder to take. Just the other day one was trailing me—a square-jawed fellow in a stained shirt and work pants—calling after me in what I think was Polish. When I turned around to ask what he wanted, he slowly looked me up and down. “How much?” he asked in perfectly intelligible English. To my complete embarrassment, I blushed. Deb wouldn’t have blushed. Deb would have burned holes into the man’s chest with her eyes and marched off as if she were leading a parade. I need to be tougher. But it’s so hard to be tough when all I want is to be invisible!

  20. Washing day, New York, 1954

  Lillian thought landscapes were boring. Without people, a picture looked empty to her. That doesn’t mean she never took the odd “empty” photo, but whenever she did, a sense of people fills the emptiness. I’m thinking this clothesline was hanging across the ventilation shaft outside her apartment window, because she would have needed to log some quality time looking at it before catching the wind at such a perfect moment. The breeze is filling the man’s undershirt, making it easy to imagine the kind of barrel-chested gorilla it’s meant for. The stained apron hanging limp beside it on the clothesline gives an ominous feeling, like we’ve stumbled onto a crime scene one moment too late.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: My first visit to her apartment, Lilly took me into the darkroom and explained how it all worked. It was like watching a conjurer produce doves from thin air. I never got tired of that: whenever I needed to escape my own dramas, I’d go downstairs to Lilly’s and knock on the door. If she was in the mood for company, she’d let me in. I’d follow her into the darkroom, standing perfectly still in the dim red light, watching her images rise to the surface.

  She’d made her darkroom out of the tiny room. Really it was more of an alcove with a door, no bigger than a walk-in closet. Mine had my desk, a chair, and a small bookshelf that left me just enough space to slip inside and sit down. Lilly had her enlarger in there, shelves to store her chemicals, and a table for her trays, with a big bucket beneath the table for dumping her used chemicals and a jug for carrying in hot water from the sink in the main room. That didn’t leave much space for anything or anyone else, but in the dark, the sense of smallness fell away. Whether I stayed thirty minutes or three hours, I felt better going out than I had going in. Spending time with Lilly in the dark that way felt intimate, like being in bed minus the sex. I could see how easy it would be to devote your life to something like that. Suddenly it was obvious to me that Lilly was doing the same thing with photos that I was doing with poems, Leon and Cass with theater, Judy with paintings, and Renaldo with dancing: we were all seekers and revealers of truth.

  LETTER TO WALTER AND DOROTHY PRESTON, FEBRUARY 1954: Perhaps you noticed from the address on the envelope that I’ve moved. I have learned the only way to work properly is to rent an apartment of my own. Don’t worry, my new upstairs neighbor is a woman named Deborah, who has been living on her own for years, so you see, it’s really not so unusual! She’s been very happy to show me around, so I feel quite comfortable and welcome.

  21. Legs, New York, 1954

  A basic description of this photo would make it seem boring: half a step stool and the bottom portion of a sitting man. Because of how Lillian framed it, it’s not boring. On the left side of the picture, the two legs of the step stool mirror the seated man’s legs on the right in a way that’s funny, except the joke is made complicated by his tragically skinny ankles and weather-worn hands, which rest on his thighs like lost gloves. More complicated still, the photo somehow makes me feel as much for the stool as for the sitter.

  When I was little, I remember Lillian moving orphaned mittens from the middle of sidewalks to the spiked uprights of the iron railings that fronted buildings. She’d tell me she didn’t like the idea of them being left alone. Once when I was around sixteen, after one of our endlessly repeating fights, Lillian told me that more than anything else, she had hoped to spare me that lonesome feeling. The way I’d laughed made her flinch, which felt pretty satisfying at the time. No mother can save her child from loneliness, but for a mother like Lillian, it was truly futile.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: When Lilly first moved in, she was pulling lunch shifts six days a week up on Madison. She said she liked it because the tips were good, plus the midday light was lousy for taking pictures anyway, and she and her old roommate, who worked there, too, looked out for each other. When she told me how much she made, I laughed. With that kind of bread, I asked, why live here? At that point I was getting away with ten hours a week at the bookstore, which covered rent, oatmeal, rice and beans, and vegetables from the produce stand on East Second. The rest of my time belonged to me—for wandering, for writing, for working on the magazine. Lilly said she needed the money for film, darkroom chemicals, and paper to print her pictures on. She couldn’t afford to think twice before she snapped the shutter. If the picture was there, she had to grab it without worrying if there would be film for tomorrow.

  22. Deb [Deborah Brodsky], New York, 1954

  JOURNAL ENTRY, MARCH 1954: When I got back from class last week, I looked so blue that Deb took me out for a chocolate egg cream, and I told her what I’ve finally admitted to myself: I don’t like Mr. Janovic. Once a week, we all gather round while he looks through our portfolios, and it’s like a ring of vultures picking at fresh meat. Mr. Janovic is very smart about what makes people want to look at images. His criticisms are almost always correct, but he gives them in such a cutting way! Each week, he seems to take pride in bringing his students to tears. The ones who don’t cry make me even sadder because they don’t react at all, as if he’s turned them to stone.

  I didn’t bring the photo of Deb to class, though I think it’s quite good, because I wanted to spare even her image from that unkind man. I don’t r
egret it one bit. After looking over my photos, Janovic told me to “Carry on,” which is the closest he’s come to paying a compliment. Still, I felt so poisoned by him that it was several days before I wanted to do anything at all.

  Living with Patty taught me the importance of solitude, but I don’t know how long I’d have lasted here if Deb hadn’t made me her friend. I’m embarrassed to admit I would have avoided someone like Deb back in Cleveland—even assuming anyone like Deb could exist there!—but friendship for Deb is instinctive. Her openness teaches me as much as anything I’m learning in class. I was rather scandalized by her at first, and more than a little disapproving, but that ended the moment I glimpsed myself in the mirror and saw Father staring back.

  I’m thinking the whole naked thing also influenced Lillian’s decision not to bring the photo to class. After sorting through Box Two, I spent a lot of time looking at this picture of Deb (at her face, anyway), waiting for it to spark memories of someone who apparently knew me from birth through my first fourteen months of life, but nothing caught. When I called to interview her, I used the same fake name I used with everyone: a stab at anonymity that had mixed success, but was a sure bet with Deb, who had last known me when my spoken vocabulary was limited to “hi” and “ball.” After the interview, when I came clean about who I was, Deb laughed in a way I’d only ever heard in cartoons. Then she sang “Little Rabbit Foo Foo” into the phone in a cracked, atonal voice that sent shivers of recognition down my spine.

  This is the first nude picture Lillian took of someone else. What I love about it, which is what I love about all of Lillian’s portraits, is that it’s not posed. I mean, sure, Deb is sitting in a chair in front of a camera, but the whole in-front-of-a-camera thing seems coincidental. Despite the way Deb is sitting—buck naked, feet spread, right arm resting across the chair back, left hand waving a cigarette—you can tell she’s not being provocative. Basically, no pun intended, she’s just hanging out. I’m sure that part of Deb’s comfort has to do with Deb being Deb, but I can vouch for the fact that Lillian really did make you forget you were in front of a camera. Sometimes she did it by talking to you, but other times she did it by fading away, leaving you to do whatever you would have been doing if she hadn’t been there. Despite years of being the one she did it to, I’m still not sure how she pulled it off. Rather than it being something she learned, I think it was just part of who she was.

  If the nineteen-year-old Deb in this picture seems like a slightly seedy wood sprite, the fifty-four-year-old Deb who invited me to visit her in Arizona was more like a friendly bear. She wears her hair long now, in a messy bun. Her freckled face is lined with over thirty years of bright desert sun and all the things she’s done under it. In the portrait, she’s looking off to the side, and because of that it’s hard to appreciate her eyes, but when I saw them for myself, I knew how she and my mother had stayed friends. Deb Brodsky has the eyes of a loyal hound.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: I think of Lilly’s time on East Sixth as a golden era. If someone had told me I would be moving west in two years, I’d have laughed them out of the room. At that point, New York was everything: my cosmos, my dharma, my whole way of life. After years of seeking and struggling, I was enmeshed in this vital, creative clan that was stronger and more loving than my “real” family in Woodmere had ever been. I was too young to think any of it would ever change. Renaldo wasn’t using yet, Leon was writing his plays—creating these compelling, complex roles for Cass—and the two of them were on fire with each other, this passionate creative engine. Judy and I were trying each other on for size, and I felt like I’d discovered a wonderful secret, thought that we’d avoid the usual traps since a man wasn’t involved. Lilly didn’t fit in with us right away—she looked like she was going to fall over the first time she saw me with Judy—but I could tell she just needed time to shrug off the last bits of Ohio still clinging to her. And once she did—well, it was Renaldo who put it best. She looked like she was on the outside, he said, but she was more inside than us all. Renaldo had a sixth sense for people; it was part of what made him such a beautiful dancer.

  The way Lilly sat at the edge of the collective energy made her easy to overlook, but pay attention and you could tell that deep things were going down. The way she watched, she was like a lizard on a rock soaking up the heat, only Lilly was soaking up the people. And this was all before you even saw the camera. Once you did, you realized Lilly existed for that camera, as a living extension of it.

  Later, I saw the same thing when she was holding Samantha. It was the first time I thought being a mother could be a positive force, something loving and artistic—though that was an idea I wouldn’t do anything with for many years. Anyway, when Lilly first showed up, I was reading every Sunday at the Zenith, and the idea of a journal wasn’t something I was just fooling around with in my head anymore. People were starting to submit work: friends from the Zenith scene, friends who read in other places, and friends who weren’t reading anywhere and wanted a way to put their words on the wind.

  When I saw Lilly’s photography, I wanted her images to be part of the mix, but Lilly said no, photos had to be printed on high-quality paper or else they’d be compromised, and I was running a real shoestring operation, without that kind of grease. I was grateful to her for that. Letting the images go kept the magazine a pure voice for poetry, which is what it was meant to be.

  As for the portrait, it was all my idea. Asking wasn’t Lilly’s style. One day when I came to her place, I simply shucked my clothes and told her she could take my picture if she wanted, which I meant as a test and two kinds of invitation. The Lilly who had first moved in downstairs wouldn’t have known what to do with something like that, but the Lilly she had become sure did. In moments she’d set up her camera. As for the second kind of invitation, it didn’t take me long to realize how silly that was. Art as a means toward another end wouldn’t have crossed Lilly’s mind, even if she’d been at all curious about women, which I don’t think she ever was.

  23. Woman on park bench, New York, 1954

  Deb’s description here is as good as anything I could come up with, since Deb was paying attention and I generally wasn’t. First I was too young; then I was too embarrassed; and then I was too busy being absolutely anywhere else.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: I remember one of a woman sitting. She’s wearing a little hat and a nice dress, and you can tell she lives in a swank apartment somewhere, only at that moment she’s got her shoes off and she’s using one foot to massage the other. Her face broadcasts fatigue but also bewilderment, and you can tell she started out life in a place where there weren’t little hats and nice dresses. When I asked Lilly how she did it, how she found people in these moments, she looked at me like I’d asked her how to tie a shoe. I wait, she said.

  So one day, I followed her to Washington Square. Sundays it was all guitars and young men singing folk songs, people collecting for righteous causes, and willowy girls wearing macramé belts and dangly earrings. But on Mondays, when Lilly went, the park belonged to everyone. I made sure to stand at a distance so Lilly wouldn’t know I was there. In a way, it was like being in the darkroom—I was still watching her conjure an image, only this time we were out in the world, and her images were rising to the surface of the moment instead of the paper.

  Lilly would sit for a while in one place; then she’d get up and sit somewhere else. She told me she used a 35mm viewfinder camera because it was small, fast, and quiet; and out in the park, I saw what she meant. She held that camera the way you’d hold a drink at a party when you’re busy talking, with a relaxed arm bent at the elbow, always at the same place by her hip. Lilly never looked down, almost as if she’d forgotten the camera was there, but really it was just part of her. She’d taken so many pictures holding it at her hip that she didn’t need to look down to use it anymore, the same way any other person doesn’t need to look at their hand to open a door.

  Even watching her, it took me a while to catch on that
she was taking pictures. She would look off into the distance like she was daydreaming, and this was how she’d find what she wanted. If her subject was far away, she’d walk herself into range. She’d pre-focused her camera to a focal range of ten feet. She’d internalized this distance over countless hours of practice. Any time, anywhere, she could tell you what was ten feet away from her at any given moment, and she was always right. This helped her take pictures quickly, without anyone noticing. For each picture, she’d position herself at that same ten-foot distance, always keeping the camera in that one spot at her hip.

  The way I’m describing it makes it sound slow, but it happened fast. Next, she would turn her head without turning her body, like she was interested in something else. It seemed so innocent, just a young woman in a quiet moment, but that was when she was really looking. She was doing it the way a bird does, with one eye. The real action wasn’t there, though. If you kept watching her face, you’d miss the whole thing, because she never raised her camera to look through the viewfinder. The camera stayed down around where a belt buckle would be, and while she was looking with one eye, she was making small tilts of her wrist, tiny adjustments to compose the shot. That eye and that hand were connected by countless hours of practice, perfect coordination built shot by shot over a small eternity of trial and error. Then the adjustments would stop, and the shutter would click, and if you were looking at her face, you would miss it.