Glass Grapes (14 page)

Thus, whatever distance might have developed between them would be warded off by the increasing enlargement of the eye in the photograph, and, given what she believed to be her genuine desire for reparation, she had it enlarged until first only the eye and eyelid were visible and then finally only the pupil itself, round and black and firmly situated as if it were looking back at her through the lens of a camera, magnified and clear. The pupil was a firm black spot, a perfect circle. She moved in and in on it, both by the technical process of enlargement and by imaginative endeavor. She was so far in finally that there was no longer any way to conceive of the discrete letters or images which had haunted her all summer. All was blackness: a relief, a refuge, a familiarity so profound as to be unnerving, as if, she thought in the midst of staring, once the envelope was closed and sealed, addressed to the man to whom she would eventually send it, she was no longer on the outside, but, blissfully, surrounded by the blackness at
which she focused and to which she was able, finally, to give herself completely, on the very inside itself.

The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually, re-presented, before us.

—Andre Bazin

When she arrived at his house after some days alone, she moved awkwardly and started sentences at the front door which began in an artificial and stilted register. Whatever intimacies of their affair had been in the air were gone. She couldn't see where the skin of his face might meet hers if she leaned towards him, so she backed into the kitchen in a kind of awkward dance, having made certain to bring in bags of groceries for their usual Friday night dinner so that their bodies would be occupied in carrying, lifting, unpacking. She folded the shopping bags along their creases and made a comment that was meant to sound polite.

She seemed stripped of memory, her body gone neutral and suspicious, as if she hadn't spent nights in his bed. She was, she was proud to say, a skeptic, sophisticated in her sense of how deeply time affected all emotional connections. I am, she thought, someone who has been through more and I am certain of this as he cannot possibly be, living here in this suburban house with the pastel wall-to-wall carpeting, what can he know about how people betray one another. I have only, and she thought this somewhat smugly, taken up with betrayers, and she counted them. She tried to explain to him that everything always changed and that he wouldn't, once time had passed, think of her in the same way ever again.

It turned out he never quarreled and when there were differences between them, usually slight, he sat under the Chinese lamp by the stone fireplace to talk about them and see where they would get to. Despite this, she found herself unable to give up the habit of opposition. That she geared up for argument, walking about the room, crossing and uncrossing her legs, superstitious and unwilling to let go any advantage, seemed to matter to him not at all. He simply went to the corner of the large room, sat down under the Chinese lamp, and waited for her to say something. She made up a story. Last night, she said, she had been at dinner with two friends who were going to China. They had eaten knotted tofu. It was the Chinese lamp that set her going this time, she realized after two sentences in, but by then it
seemed so plausible and was after all analogous to the truth (she had eaten tofu one night last week) that it sounded, as specific information tends to, true.

On the lamp were fading figures of monks climbing up a faded mountain, a craggy line that jagged up the porcelain. The lamp was old, had belonged to his mother whose second husband had been a missionary, and he had inherited it along with, oddly enough, the posture of his stepfather. No genes, just the crook of their backs and the quiet of their voices. The story of the Chinese restaurant came out of her mouth in a line of sentences that seemed plausible; the paragraph made a certain amount of sense and avoided, so she hoped, clichés. Clichés were far worse than lying. Indeed, lying seemed these days not only interesting but closer to something she was trying to get to. It reproduced a kind of etched reality, like a photograph of a crime scene that could catch the clues the scene itself would obscure.

Sometimes she thought she was trying to get close to childhood. Didn't psychologists speculate that childhood was a placeholder for authenticity? Ironic, she thought. She looked at a snapshot of herself as a ten-year old. She had never looked at the camera and she never, so far as she could remember, told what she believed to be the truth, although the adjustments were so small as to be undecipherable and, more importantly, completely irrelevant. The pact of honor she made with herself was that none of her lies should count for anything, should bring her any gain, should hurt anyone, and they didn't,
she thought, unless the act itself counted as transgression, but she thought or rather hoped, not. Perhaps her parents always knew she was making things up. Perhaps the little games she played were not of the consequence she had thought them, but simply the insignificant games of children. The gap between what was going on and what she said was going on seemed enormous at the time, but perhaps not.

What words might there be for a child of nine for the mixture of emotions she felt when she watched her little brother move slowly from room to room. His head was too large for his body and he moved with maddening if rather graceful attention to his efforts as if without that attention to his foot pointing forward into the next step, he might wobble, though he never lost his balance and he never fell. She, on the other hand, ran from room to room, sped through corridors, smashed up elbows and shins. She watched him as if he were a gelatinous being from a far-off world she could never inhabit.

Her feelings about all this did not present a moral problem exactly, but neither was it a problem simply of movement. When she had said to her brother,
Come with me,
knowing that he would and that he would move in his slow underwater way with his feet pointing out towards the space in front of him, it was a false premise really, a denial, since she didn't mean
come,
but more like
stop, who are you, why do you do that?
But her brother would simply come as if she had said the simplest thing in the world, whereas she knew that it was not.

The man she sat next to on the couch by the Chinese lamp moved this way as well, with slow and quiet attention to his movements as if the air were thick. She looked at him and tried to remember what it had been like two nights ago in the warmth of his bed, but time had betrayed her and she couldn't remember a thing. She looked at him, his head always bigger than she remembered. Sometimes she wanted to bang up against him as he moved from room to room to jolt him out of his reverie, to see if she could find out something. Sometimes she wanted to move so quickly that he would be forced wide awake, his hair standing on end and glistening.

She kept a photograph of her brother in her wallet and took it out to show him.
Come here and look at this,
she said and he did. The man in the photograph had indeed a quite large head, beautifully shaped with hair long and flat enough to curl around his ears. He looked as thoughtful as a mathematician ought to look.
I bought him that Batman tie for his twenty-first birthday,
she said. It was, however, despite the seemingly obvious evidence at hand, not her brother but a man who was not the first but the most skillful of her betrayers. She carried it in her wallet and always said it was her brother although she didn't know why since it wouldn't have mattered to anyone who it was and she needn't have ever opened her wallet to anyone except for purposes of identification to clerks who didn't, of course, care. Even the man himself under the Chinese lamp wouldn't have cared or wouldn't, even if he had thought of it, have asked
why she had the photograph and what it meant. But that was for her the point: its meaning was contained in its lack of meaning, its very ordinariness and banality. She had helped make it more than that, she would have argued, by the additional fillip of the lie. The man looked slightly to one side of her face and listened, as he always listened, to her talk. He took the photograph in his hands and pushed his hair behind his ears.

A lie seemed, she thought, although she couldn't explain why, less intrusive than the truth, less insistent because less obviously connected to the world. It was lighter than air and therefore, like words which in no way corresponded to the things themselves,
perfect.
From time to time she thought she was being cruel—not dishonest, since that seemed a concept so difficult to define that she simply brushed it to the side—but perhaps, she thought, perhaps cruel. He might think, as she was certain she wasn't, that she was purposefully lying to him for some reason, but it was simply her way of showing him the nature of the world, of providing him a way of seeing more clearly or around corners.

You must understand,
she said, returning to her usual point,
that things won't always be the same; you won't always, as I am sure you must know, be glad to see me or miss me when I am not sitting here next to the Chinese lamp. Things are always changing, and just because something seems fixed, it might, one day, be quite otherwise. I mean, for example, you know,
and she sounded, even she knew, preachy,
things aren't always what they
seem—even photographs are doctored, you know, they simply scan them in and erase whatever they don't want for the story or whatever. They take things out and put things in.
He sat quietly listening to her and she found herself telling him that when she was a child her parents had needed to tame her speed, her
hyperactivity
they called it, and had thrown her against the wall. She looked over at him to see if he believed her.
Yes,
she said,
they took me by the shoulders and threw me against the wall. I rocked myself to sleep in a corner, humming and banging my head on the wall.

When she had been in her twenties she spent time looking at photographs of autistic children who didn't make eye contact, who refused to speak, who banged their heads against the wall. She remembered clearly how it had felt but she didn't know if remembering made it true. It hurt some, but in truth that was nothing compared to the relief of hearing a steady and rhythmic sound that blotted out everything else. What was
everything else,
she wondered now, and what was wrong with those children that they had to muffle up the world with so odd a manner of rocking, swaying, banging. Now that she had told him she also told him that the person she was describing, the child she had in tow, seemed more like a character in a book than herself.
It was so very long ago,
she said,
it can't really be true, but simply a story I have made up.

The man sat quietly and listened to her. He felt, so it seemed to her, no great need to comment on these
stories of her childhood, or for that matter, to analyze their meaning, their relation to him or even to her. He heard every word she said, but he didn't need, as she certainly did, to make them make sense or to fit them into his sense of her, whatever that might be. He always said he was glad to see her when she returned for the weekend with bags of groceries, but she wondered what it might mean since she had told him so many stories that there was no way for him to know who she really was. What did he see when he looked at her and how, she wondered, could she manipulate his seeing without his knowing she had done so, and how would she want, in any case, to look.

She told him she had been a photographer,
in a former life,
but what she didn't tell him was that it was her brother who had been the photographer and that the photographs she passed off as her own were ones she had taken from him. She entertained him, or at least believed she did, with stories about Nadar's portrait photographs, their deliberate solidity, the way the folds of a person's skin were like the marbled folds of the curtain in the background.
We can't help it,
she said,
we just can't help believing that what's in a photograph is real, no matter what.

She gave him a photograph of herself to put on his bedside table, a photograph that made her look completely
natural
—unposed, uncropped, undramatic. She did not look especially good or even as good as she might have looked if she had chosen more carefully. Yet in truth,
she had had many photographs of herself taken and had torn up most and chosen not the one that showed her at her best, but the one that seemed most randomly selected, as if it were just left over or just the one she happened to find lying about to give him. She was looking out into space and her face was slightly, although only slightly, blurred as if she were in the early stages of flight. Such a gift, if one could call it a gift, was, she knew, another falsity, although she was as yet unable to name for what. She so wanted to give him something, some iconic disruption that would, so she convinced herself, ultimately please him or reorient him in ways he would surely embrace, if not quite yet. It was the artifice of the unaffected, the pose of the unposed. She had had a purposefully bad haircut, so short she looked like a boy, not unlike her brother at a young age. She said she was afraid he would forget her if he didn't have the photograph to remember her by.
You might forget me,
she said, sitting under the Chinese lamp, knowing all the while that she wasn't telling the truth.

In truth, it was she who would forget him, would forget after a short time what his eyes were like, and would be, therefore, in spite of the ploy of the groceries and the carefully prepared and polite questions, unable to return, and who would tell those who asked that he was, like the others, one of the betrayers who wasn't, she had come to discern and despite appearances to the contrary, at all what he seemed. And she would continue to say to those who still would listen that it was a classic
case of betrayal (
You can never tell about appearances, she'd say
) and would, somewhat to her credit, know that it was no such thing.