Picture Palace Read Free

of modern living. But it looked wonderful to me, and though I could have spent a week doing tight close-ups of a nosegay of cigarette butts sprouting from the sand in a magnificent ashtray—ready-made “Pratts”—I spotted a lunch counter and plopped myself down. Move over, Fatso, we’ve got a live one.
    The waitress in the fluffy cap and calico “Puritan” frock looked up from a five-gallon jar of mustard, and I did her, wham, wham, before she could blink. I couldn’t decide whether to have a fishwich or a pizza, so I had a cheeseburger and thought about London. It was exciting to have an assignment, a problem to solve, and no one breathing down my neck. This was life, the camera part of my anatomy, a glimmer in my guts that helped me see. It was June, I’d be staying at the Ritz—what could be cushier? Yerp! I remembered what Frank had said about my going, how he had tried to invent reasons for my staying home. Admit it, he was saying, you’re dead; and in the retrospective—a word I was already beginning to hate—I saw my obituary in pictures. I found myself loathing Frank for his interest in my work and dreading what my pictures would add up to. This thought affected my digestion: grumbling ruins one’s taste buds. I concentrated on London. I would be there a week—a long time between cheeseburgers. I laughed out loud and ordered another one.
    â€œWhat’s the flick?” I asked two hours later as I handed over my boarding pass to the man at the gate.
    â€œWe don’t show in-flight movies at night,” he said. He winked. “But I’ll do my best to keep you entertained.”
    I said, “Act your age, buster, or I’ll call a cop.”
    The plane was less than half full. I had three seats to myself and, after take-off, got a pillow and blanket and curled up. I had a bad case of heartburn—all that food—but I was dead tired. The last thing I heard was the pilot giving our altitude and saying that in an hour or so we would be flying over Gander, Newfoundland. And we had, he said, a good tailwind. I woke up in a red dawn that was spilling across a snowy sea of clouds, the kind of arctic meringue that wins photo competitions for its drifts of utter harmlessness, impenetrably stylish in soft focus. I rejected it for a clumsy shot up the aisle, forty-five elbows and an infant hanging on the curtain to First Class, like a child face down in a deep well.
    And the next I knew I was in an English taxi, rattling through London traffic, narrow streets, and wooden signs, a damp summer smell of flowers, cut grass and gasoline in the air, and everyone rather pale but looking fairly well dressed in second-hand clothes. It was a bright morning, with the night’s residue of rain still hissing against the tires, and the blue sky stuck on the windowpanes of houses that were otherwise spikes and black bricks.
    The people on the sidewalks had that mysteriously purposeful attitude of pedestrians in foreign cities, a hint of destination in their stride. I wondered briefly why they weren’t on vacation like me; it was as if they were only pretending to be busy. Mine was the traveler’s envy: regretful that I didn’t belong here like them and finding an unreality in their manic motion.
    But the rest looked grand to me and gave me a new pair of eyes that found a rosy symmetry in the red bus passing between the red pillar box and the red telephone booth, a wonderful Bill Brandt nun unfurling in a gust of wind at Hyde Park Corner, and a splendid glow of anticipation—sunlight in the taxi and a vagrant aroma of breakfast cooking—as we raced down Piccadilly. I had the sense of being a dignitary, of momentarily believing in my fame. But that is every traveler’s conceit, the self-importance of flying that dazzles the most ordinary stick-in-the-mud tourist into feeling she’s a swan.
    â€œCarry your bag, madam?” It was