Picture Palace Read Free Page B

him would be of the slightest interest to him: he’d heard it before, he’d been there, he’d done it, he’d known. I was extremely frightened: I had never expected to see Orlando again or to feel so naked.
    I said, “How did you happen to get my name?”
    â€œI knew it,” said Greene. Of course. Then he added, “I’ve followed your work with enormous interest.”
    â€œThe feeling’s mutual.”
    â€œI particularly like your portrait of Evelyn Waugh.”
    â€œThat’s a story,” I said. “I was in London. Joe Ackerley said Waugh was at the Dorchester, so I wrote him a note saying how much I enjoyed his books and that I wanted to do him. A reply comes, but it’s not addressed to me. It’s to
Mister
Pratt and it says something like, ‘We have laws in this country restraining women from writing importuning letters to strange men. You should have a word with your wife’—that kind of thing. Pretty funny all the same.”
    Greene nodded. “I imagine your husband was rather annoyed.”
    â€œThere was no Mister Pratt,” I said. “There still isn’t.”
    Greene looked at me closely, perhaps wondering if I was going to bare my soul.
    I said, “But I kept after Waugh and later on he agreed. He liked the picture, too, asked for more prints. It made him look baronial, lord of the manor—it’s full of sunshine and cigar smoke. And, God, that suit! I think it was made out of a horse blanket.”
    â€œOne of the best writers we’ve ever had,” said Greene. “I saw him from time to time, mostly in the Fifties.” He thought a moment, and moved his glass of sherry to his lips but didn’t drink. “I was in and out of Vietnam then. You’ve been there, of course. I found your pictures of those refugees very moving.”
    â€œThe refugees were me,” I said. “Just more raggedy, that’s all. I couldn’t find the pictures I wanted, so I went up to Hue, but they gave me a lot of flak and wouldn’t let me leave town. The military started leaning on me. They didn’t care about winning the war—they wanted to keep it going. I felt like a refugee myself, with my bum hanging out and getting kicked around. That’s why the pictures were good. I could identify with those people. Oh, I know what they say—‘How can she do it to those poor so-and-so’s!’ But, really, they were all versions of me. Unfortunately.”
    â€œDid you have a pipe?”
    â€œPardon?”
    â€œOpium,” said Greene.
    â€œLord no.”
    â€œThey ought to legalize it for people our age,” he said. “Once, in Hanoi, I was in an opium place. They didn’t know me. They put me in a corner and made a few pipes for me, and just as I was dropping off to sleep I looked up and saw a shelf with several of my books on it. French translations. When I woke up I was alone. I took them down and signed them.”
    â€œThen what did you do?”
    â€œI put them back on the shelf and went away. No one saw me, and I never went back. It’s a very pleasant memory.”
    â€œA photographer doesn’t have those satisfactions.”
    â€œWhat about your picture of Ché Guevara?”
    â€œOh, that,” I said. “I’ve seen it so many times I’ve forgotten I took it. I never get a by-line on it. It’s become part of the folklore.”
    â€œSome of us remember.”
    It is this photograph of Ché that was on the posters, with the Prince Valiant hair and the beret, his face upturned like a saint on an ikon. I regretted it almost as soon as I saw it swimming into focus under the enlarger. It flattered him and simplified his face into an expression of suffering idealism. I had made him seem better than he was. It was the beginning of his myth, a deception people took for truth because it was a photograph. But I knew how photography lied