Mao II - Don Delillo [15]
“I’m going to bounce light off this wall and then you can go stand over there and I’ll get my camera and stand over here and that’s all there is to it.”
“Sounds ominous.”
There was a typewriter on a desk and sheets of oversized sketch paper taped to the walls and the lower half of one of the windows. These were charts, master plans evidently, the maps of his work-in-progress, and the sheets were covered with scrawled words, boxes, lines connecting words, tiny writing in the boxes. There were circled numbers, crossed-out names, a cluster of stick-figure drawings, a dozen other cryptic markings. She saw notebooks stacked on the radiator cover. There were drifts of paper on the desk, a mound of crumpled butts in the ashtray.
“There’s something about writers. I don’t know why but I feel I ought to know the person as well as the work and so ordinarily I try to schedule a walk beforehand, just to chat with the person, talk about books, family, anything at all. But I understand you’d rather not go on and on with this, so we’ll work quickly.”
“We can talk.”
“Are you interested in cameras? This is an eighty-five-millimeter lens.”
“I used to take pictures. I don’t know why I stopped. One day it just ended forever.”
“I guess it’s true to say that something else is ending forever.”
“You mean the writer comes out of hiding.”
“Am I right that it’s thirty years since your picture has appeared anywhere?”
“Scott would know.”
“And together you decided the time has come.”
“Well it’s a weariness really, to know that people make so much of this. When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.”
“But this is intriguing to many people.”
“It’s also taken as an awful sort of arrogance.”
“But we’re all drawn to the idea of remoteness. A hard-to-reach place is necessarily beautiful, I think. Beautiful and a little sacred maybe. And a person who becomes inaccessible has a grace and a wholeness the rest of us envy.”
“The image world is corrupt, here is a man who hides his face.”
“Yes,” she said.
“People may be intrigued by this figure but they also resent him and mock him and want to dirty him up and watch his face distort in shock and fear when the concealed photographer leaps out of the trees. In a mosque, no images. In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too. The writer who won’t show his face is encroaching on holy turf. He’s playing God’s own trick.”
“Maybe he’s just shy, Bill.”
Through the viewfinder she watched him smile. He looked clearer in the camera. He had an intentness of gaze, an economy, and his face was handsomely lined and worked, embroidered across the forehead and at the corners of the eyes. So often in her work the human shambles was remade by the energy of her seeing, by the pure will that the camera uncovered in her, the will to see deeply.
“Shall I tell you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m afraid to talk to writers about their work. It’s so easy to say something stupid. Don’t drop your chin. Good, that’s better, I like that. There’s a secret language I haven’t learned to speak. I spend a great deal of time with writers. I love writers. But this gift you have, which for me is total delight, makes me feel that I’m an outsider, not able to converse in the private language, the language that will mean something to you.”
“The only private language I know is self-exaggeration. I think I’ve grown a second self in this room. It’s the self-important fool that keeps the writer going. I exaggerate the pain of writing, the pain of solitude, the failure, the rage, the confusion, the helplessness, the fear, the humiliation. The narrower the boundaries of my life, the more I exaggerate myself. If the pain is real, why do I inflate it? Maybe this is the only pleasure I’m allowed.”
“Raise your chin.”
“Raise my chin.”
“Frankly I didn’t expect such speeches.”
“I