The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [41]
I don’t recall if on our honeymoon cruise I told my wife how lucky I felt every time we sat on the Lido deck in the moonlight or walked together down one island Front Street or another. I wish I had told her more.
As the years rolled along, we traveled a lot. We took a lot of pictures. We would carefully pack our film in lead-lined travel bags, so it wouldn’t be corrupted by airport X-ray scanners, and once home we raced to the camera store to get it developed. Ten days was a long time, but that’s how long it took. Ten days seemed long. We had an agreement. If we didn’t pick up the slides together, we wouldn’t peek at them until they were in the projector, so we could view them at the same time. We would cuddle on the couch with a tub of popcorn and relive our recent experiences. I knew she cheated. It wasn’t in her not to sneak a look at the pictures before she got home. Sometimes I would notice a number out of order or a slide upside down coming out of the package, or if she had loaded the tray, a slide would appear on the screen upside down or backwards, and I knew she had broken her promise. But I never said anything about it.
In his final years, George Eastman was plagued by a degenerative disorder of his spine. He had trouble standing, and his walking became a slow shuffle. In intense pain and frustrated at his inability to maintain an active life, on March 14, 1932, when he was seventy-seven, he shot himself in his heart.
Sometimes I will be sleeping, other times I will be lying awake in the dark, watching imaginary bursts of light, listening to the click-clack of a nonexistent slide projector. Click-clack. Here is a picture I took while kneeling on the deck of a chartered sailboat, my wife, wearing a scarlet two-piece, smiling against a backdrop of billowing sails and lapis sky. She is very happy. The breeze washes wisps of her silky blond hair across her smile. The warm, clear sea is in her azure eyes, a morning beach in her high, smooth cheeks. She is very happy. In the slide’s outsize projection, colors are so vibrant—reds bursting, magentas pulsing—the images are almost living, breathing beings—three-dimensional creatures hovering long into the night.
I can’t recall now if this was one of our actual pictures or just in my head. I don’t remember.
Clack-click. The slide projector sounds like a semi-automatic weapon. You load a tray like a clip, insert it into its receiver with a sturdy, satisfying clack; you press a button, and, click, a “shell” drops into place and explodes onto the screen. The original Kodak projector trays were rectangular and held only forty rounds. But the projector my wife and I owned, we didn’t have to reload as often. The trays were circular, similar to that of a World War I machine gun’s bullet magazine, and they held 160 pictures.
In the bursts of color and dust-swirling blasts from the projector’s muzzle, there is something else about slides different from ordinary pictures. If they, with their bigger-than-life, dazzling images that, as in Proust’s childhood bedroom, block out the familiar world and blur the distinction between imaginary and real, they might well render the image more real than the original, the actual events inferior to the memory. Slides, then, may create a world where false memory—the illusion of an idealized past—replaces the true experience they represent. A frozen smile, a colonial facade glinting in the sunlight, expensive jewelry, the happy glow of sand-smooth cheeks, become billowing sails of illusion.
Clack-click.