Feast Your Eyes Page 5
What I noticed about Lilly the day I met her was what worked for her out in the world: she looked like she belonged inside a nice quiet house somewhere. She had what you’d call regular features, everything even and proportionate. She always wore solid colors and knee-length skirts, and people paid her no mind. I admired that about her, because she was doing exactly what she needed to do. Even the rare person who did notice her didn’t get bent out of shape. There was no way he could. You couldn’t blame Lilly for taking pictures any more than you could blame a pigeon for pecking at a crumb of bread.
24. Kyle, New York, 1954
I saw this photo for the first time on the back of a book when I was fourteen, babysitting for a neighbor. Rude Poems by Kyle Mackinaw was stashed along with the Kama Sutra: Amorous Man & Sensuous Woman and The Function of the Orgasm beneath some argyle socks in a dresser drawer. I noticed the photo (good-looking, mysterious) without noticing the photo credit. At the time, I’d been more interested in the Kama Sutra, which had dirty illustrations. But six years later, Kyle Mackinaw’s photograph came back as a poster in the college dorm room of a pale boy named Sebastian who I had designs on. At the time, I’d thought the poster meant Sebastian was literary, but then I read Rude Poems and realized it probably meant he was gay.
I had the book half a semester before noticing the name L. Preston in tiny type along the photo’s left-hand edge. When I called Lillian in Cleveland to ask her about it, she said she had a copy of Rude Poems somewhere. No, Kyle Mackinaw hadn’t asked her permission, but she’d given him the photo; and as far as she was concerned, that meant he could do with it what he wanted. I told her about the poster, and she was quiet for a few seconds before telling me that my friend had good taste. When I suggested there might be money in it for her, she laughed. Was I, of all people, encouraging her to take something to court? I never mentioned it again.
DEBORAH BRODSKY: On Tuesdays, a bunch of us would come together to share whatever we happened to have—beans, greens, beer, bread, grass, a can of anchovies—and we’d eat and drink and talk and get high, and if there were friends of friends passing through, they’d come and tell us where they’d been. Occasionally things got pretty wild. People would pair off in combinations that didn’t match the pairs they’d arrived in or that weren’t pairs at all. Sometimes this felt like exploring a new way to live, and sometimes it just felt like a bad idea. Lilly wasn’t part of that. She didn’t drink much, and she didn’t smoke, not even cigarettes. On the nights things got tangled, she’d have wandered back to her darkroom long before, but the way she held herself separate wasn’t judgment. It was just her being herself.
Sometimes I’d forget Lilly was there, which was exactly what she wanted. She didn’t take many pictures. When I asked, she told me she mainly took the camera along for practice. She said it allowed her to focus her eye, but I think it gave her something to do with her hands. Anyway, it was during one of those pre-tangled Tuesdays that Lilly got Kyle. He’d just breezed in from California, he and Juno shooting across Route 66 in that mustard-colored Cadillac in a hurry for reasons that made sense at the time. This was when Kyle was just starting on Rude Poems, though he was already acting like he was famous. Kyle was born big and blustery; he filled up the room. But Lilly caught him. Those big round eyes of his that always saw everything around him are looking inward, and his face is a mixture of fear and pain and hope and wonder at what it sees.
I didn’t see the picture until Lilly gave him a copy. Naturally Kyle interpreted it as a romantic gesture and tried to use it to invite himself downstairs to Lilly’s place, but that’s not what it was about. Lilly is one of the few people I know, gay or straight, who ever declined one of Kyle’s propositions. And when Rude Poems was published, it was Lilly’s photo on the back cover. And of course, like so many iconic images, the people who recognize the photograph never give a moment’s thought to the photographer.
25. Man on fire escape, New York, 1954
Lillian never asked for permission to snap a photo, but if she knew the person—like with Kyle—she’d give him a copy. This picture would have been riskier, since she couldn’t have known whether or not her neighbor wanted to see himself on his decorated fire escape, practicing tai chi in his undershirt. I wondered how Lillian got the shot until I talked to Deb and realized that she must have leaned over her fire escape. This either means that the two fire escapes were really close together or that my mother risked falling four stories, all because she noticed that when her neighbor stretched his arm, he resembled the ink drawing of a tiger that he’d tied to the rails of his landing.
LETTER TO WALTER AND DOROTHY PRESTON, APRIL 1954: It is time I let you know that even though I won’t be taking any more photography classes, I won’t be returning home. I’m sorry if you thought New York was temporary. I suppose I knew from the start that I planned to stay.
DEBORAH BRODSKY: We had a heavy talk one night. Lilly’s classes were winding down in a month, and she was torn up about what to do next. I told her how, in my one semester at college, I’d felt like my brain was shrinking instead of expanding. She laid down how neither of her New School classes had gone the way she’d expected. She’d come to the city thinking she could learn to be a magazine photographer or a photojournalist, but she’d realized she wasn’t interested in making the kind of pictures that magazines and newspapers were after. It was the first time Lilly copped to being an artist.
Somehow it got to be three a.m., but we were too keyed up to sleep, so we decided to hit Ratner’s. When we stepped into the hallway, there was her Chinese neighbor, grinning. Beautiful baby, he said from his doorway as he held out the photo. Beautiful baby, this man. It was the first and only time I heard him speak.
26. Charles in Central Park, New York, 1954
JOURNAL ENTRY, APRIL 1954: The first time I saw Charles, I thought he was you. Even though I’ve said my goodbyes, I still imagine you here, though not as often as I used to. But Charles isn’t you, and I almost stopped noticing him, until one day in class, when Janovic was spreading his usual poison, and Charles spoke up. Charles speaks up often, and unlike some of the other students, he is always worth listening to. “I’ve had about enough,” he told Janovic that day. “Teaching should combine building up with tearing down or there’s nothing left, but you’re not a teacher. You’re brilliant—you may even be a genius—but you’re no teacher.” Then he left. It made me admire him all over again, and I spent the rest of that week chiding myself for still being the spineless girl from Camera Club. Next week, when Charles wasn’t there, I thought it served me right; but the following week after class, there he was, standing outside! Well, I walked straight over and told him how much I admired what he’d said. He told me he was glad I felt that way because the reason he’d come back was to ask if I’d join him for coffee.
The rest, as they say, is history. Charles is already working, and needless to say, it’s without any help from Janovic. He’s encouraged me to bring my work to MoMA on Portfolio Day; other students have gone without success, but he thinks my luck will be different. He’s also invited me to make the rounds of the various art departments, but I doubt any magazine would be interested in my photos, and I’m not keen to take theirs. Speaking of interest, I’m happy to report that I finally understand the fuss about kissing: Charles is quite good at it.
DEBORAH BRODSKY: I only saw the father once, when he wasn’t the father yet; he was just Charles from Lilly’s photography class, who had impressed her by walking out on the cruelty their teacher was laying down. When Lilly invited Charles to a Tuesday night, he showed up in a coat and tie with a bottle of wine. Right away, he was invited to lose all three by Renaldo as he and a friend of his, wearing matching red tunics, performed a dance with a candle and a painted mirror. Lilly tried to make Charles comfortable—she even gave him her camera to hold—but the two of them didn’t stick around. After that, Charles always seemed to have something else going down on Tuesdays. Lilly told me she felt conflicted:
she liked him, but not his photos.
I’m betting the picnic basket in the picture is his. Lillian wasn’t the type to spring for wicker when a knapsack would do. I saw Charles in Central Park for the first time when I was twelve. It was a beautiful fall day, and like a dog whining at the door, Lillian was twitching to get out with her camera. I could come with her, she said, or hang around the neighborhood on my own. I thought both options sucked. If I had a father, I yelled, there would be somebody to do things with me while she was taking her stupid photos; I knew he was out there. When Lillian walked away, I thought she was making for the door. Instead, she came back with the photograph.
Here he is, she said. I was so keyed up I almost ripped the thing from her hand. It’s probably true no picture could have scratched my itch, but this one didn’t come close. Charles was a perfectly ordinary guy who looked nothing like me (how could he—I look exactly like Lillian). On top of that, Charles’s last name was Roberts. By 1967 Charles Roberts could have been anywhere: there were three pages of Robertses in the Brooklyn phone book alone. Even I had to admit there was no chance of a shared custody arrangement in my future.
For a while, I kept Charles under my pillow and imagined myself filling the empty space on his checkered blanket. When he got too ragged to handle, I stuck him inside a book for safekeeping and gave up on that picnic. I’m sure Lillian would have printed me a fresh copy, but a “new” father would have diminished the old one, and the old one was diminished enough.
It would be a simple snapshot if not for the shadows. I didn’t notice them at the time (at age twelve, subtlety wasn’t my thing), but Charles’s shadow overlaps the tree’s, making his gray outline look like dangling fruit. This lends the whole thing an erotic undertone that was pretty daring, coming from a girl photographer in 1954.
27. Bow, New York, 1954
Welcome to Lillian’s version of landscape photography: woman’s wool coat as mountain, her back filling up the bottom two thirds of the picture, a straw hat resting on top like a boulder. The woman inside the coat is probably old: check out the sloping shoulders and the size of the hat’s bow, which only a little girl or an old lady could pull off. Not to mention Lillian would have had to stand right behind her to get so much fine-grained texture in the frame, which means this represents a rare violation of Lillian’s fixed-focus rule, and that the ears under the hat in question were probably a little hard of hearing. Before I read my mother’s journal, I wouldn’t have thought twice about the photo’s title, but I guess getting laid liberated Lillian’s sense of humor.
JOURNAL ENTRY, JUNE 1954: Now that I’ve spent the night with Charles, the notion of “losing” my virginity seems silly. I’ve gained much more than I’ve lost. For example, leaving Charles’s apartment this morning, I decided to hail my first taxicab, but what seemed like a fitting occasion on Ninety-sixth Street had become a bad idea by Twenty-third, because I worried that neighbors who saw me arriving home at such an hour and in such a manner would take the taxi for the announcement it was. I had the driver drop me at Eleventh so that I could walk the rest of the way, which was when I came across the old woman in her spectacular hat. Sure enough, once I arrived home wearing yesterday’s clothes, Mrs. Dudek peered out her door to give me the hairy eyeball, but it was no different from the baleful look she gives me when I pass her door loaded down with laundry or groceries. It struck me that those who assume the worst of people are predisposed to assume it, just as those who suppose the best are predisposed in that direction. Any given assumption has more to do with its assumer than with the people they’re assuming about. This revelation was so liberating that I laughed all the way to Deb’s door, and when she wasn’t home, I laughed my way back down to the darkroom. There I forgot all about “the great event” (or rather, series of events, the greatness of which improved with repetition) until I finished printing Bow and discovered I was half an hour late to meet Charles. I changed into fresh clothes before charging down the stairs to catch the subway. While waiting for the Lexington Avenue line, I realized that the previous night with Charles, my cab ride home, and my emancipation from the Mrs. Dudeks of the world were like taking a personal bow of a completely different sort from the bow I’d just photographed.
Charles is gallant and sincere and very camera-smart. He can size up the look of a magazine in ten minutes and shoot a roll that feels tailor-made for its pages. Some might argue that his passion for photography is purer than mine: for him, the style of a photograph is secondary to the act of taking it, while I’m only interested in making certain kinds of pictures; but I think that passion, properly defined, describes only one of us. Unless he’s on assignment, Charles prefers to stay above Fourteenth Street. He’s been in New York two years and doesn’t think he’ll stay. He has gentle hands, brings me a rose every second Sunday, and has told me he wants me to meet his parents. It’s funny: the girl I was in Cleveland would have depended on this, but the girl I’ve become expects more from herself and depends on less.
28. Pennsylvania Station, New York, 1954
If all we saw was the couple, this could be a romantic goodbye. Instead they’re huddled against a row of lockers in the middle of the train station, with blurred outlines of passing strangers in the foreground. He’s got his back to the escalator; she’s facing away from the camera, her foot frozen in a half-step behind her. His profile looks out over the lobby; she’s just a head of hair. Because of this, instead of seeming tender, his hand on her back looks like him holding her against her will.
Lillian always swore there was no connection between her photographs and her life, but there’s a reason people notice what they do. Knowing what I know, I can’t look at this one without thinking of my mother as the woman trapped by that man’s arm. Just because Lillian would have hated that idea doesn’t make it any less true.
DEBORAH BRODSKY: It was the beginning of September. Judy and I were collating the first issue of On the Wind, and it was around two a.m. We had the windows open because summer hadn’t let up. To keep the page spreads from blowing around, we had each stack weighted down with a piece of silverware or an ashtray. Judy and I were down to our underwear, partly from the heat and partly from sexiness. Due to that first issue having begun back around the same time we had, we made quite a few of those finished pages unfit for postage, Judy and me and the magazine scattered across the bed, our neat piles all askew, the breeze from the window having its way with things.
I knew from the knock it was Lilly, because it was three soft taps like always. She and I both liked to work late, and she knew she was welcome so long as she saw light under my door. I didn’t bother to put anything on, since it was just Lilly, and Judy didn’t bother putting anything on because everyone had a crush on Lilly at one point or another. Lilly wasn’t holding her camera. What’s wrong? I asked. When she said it had been six weeks, I dug her meaning right away.
In those days, if you didn’t do it in the first eight weeks, it became much more difficult, and if you hadn’t done it after sixteen weeks, you couldn’t do it at all. But in the first eight, you could at least go to someone, and if that someone knew what he was doing, chances were pretty good that you wouldn’t die. Lilly told me that Charles didn’t know, and she thought it would be cruel to tell him, which made sense considering how hard he’d taken it when she’d broken up with him the month before.
I’d never needed an abortion, but Cass had, so the next day I got the number of the person she had used, who was an actual doctor, a Viennese gynecologist who used anesthesia and only charged three hundred dollars, but when Lilly called the number, it was disconnected. The best kind of abortion to get was a therapeutic one, because then it could be done legit in a hospital. For one of those you had to get a shrink to say you needed it for mental health reasons, and none of us had the kind of bread shrinks required. Even if we had, a lot of shrinks wouldn’t prescribe them; you never could tell.
Tuesday, I spread the word that a friend of mine needed to know whe
re to go. By Wednesday I had a number. Lilly had to call after five p.m., and then she had to ask for Mike and say she wanted a haircut, and if she said anything different, the person would hang up. It cost five hundred dollars and Lilly only had two hundred. I gave her a hundred and fifty that I’d been saving for the second issue, and Renaldo got a hundred and fifty from a married banker he was seeing. When I gave the money to Lilly, she asked would I come with her, so of course I said yes.
29. River of No Return, New York, 1954
The four women standing in front of this movie poster make it impossible to read without the title’s help. Obviously, once you violate the art/life connection ban, knowing the photographer’s situation at the time changes everything; but even if you’re clueless about Lillian’s personal history, this one’s got power. Four women all with their hair fresh out of hot rollers, all waiting for their dates while twisting their gloves in their hands, four versions of the same black handbag dangling from their wrists. Not one of those women is certain her man is going to show. Marilyn Monroe looks like she’s smirking at them from the poster. A different photographer would have had you laughing along with Marilyn, but because this is Lillian’s photograph, your eyes dart back and forth, scanning the street, your gloves clenched in your hand.
DEBORAH BRODSKY: The day we took the BMT to Canarsie was the only time I saw Lilly in the world empty-handed. I was a Long Island girl, and Lilly hadn’t ever crossed the East River, so heading into Brooklyn felt to both of us like traveling to a foreign country. Then we got there, and except for the Virgin Marys on the front lawns instead of mezuzahs beside the front doors, it was exactly like where I’d grown up in Woodmere. Lots of small brick houses, kids playing kick the can. The familiarity made it feel like one of those dreams where you’re back in school and everyone’s staring because you’re in your underwear. Not that anyone was staring, which only added to our paranoia, because we felt conspicuous as hell.