the way. 'In fact the other night, he was telling me when he sold the hotel next door, the Andrea, he could've kicked himself for not waiting, get a better price.'
She said, 'Does he confide in you?'
'I wouldn't say he confides.'
'But you're close. I know he likes you, a lot.'
'Yeah, we get along. We argue all the time, but that's part of the routine.'
'He's an actor, Joe. He plays the crabby but loveable retired bookie, hangs out at Wolfie's, Picciolo's, all those places from the old days.'
'That's his age--he lives in the past.'
'He's a fox, Joe. Don't ever sell him short.'
He wanted to say, Wait a minute, what're we talking about exactly? But now Paco Boza was rolling toward them, his ghetto box playing soul against his body, Paco letting it run up through his shoulders and down his arms to turn the silver wheels of the wheelchair wired to the beat, no hurry or worry in the world.
'Hey, the picture man. When do I get my pictures, man?'
LaBrava told him maybe in a few days. Maybe sooner. Come back when you're not busy.
Paco Boza left them, taking his sound down the street, soul with a kick that got into LaBrava sitting there in his sunglasses drinking Scotch with a movie star on the porch of the Cardozo Hotel.
She said, 'The poor guy. He's so young.' He told her there was nothing wrong with Paco. He had stolen the chair from Eastern Airlines, had his girlfriend push him out of Miami International in it because he didn't like to walk and because he thought it was cool, a way for people to identify him. She said, 'What does he do?' and he told her about two-hundred-dollars worth of cocaine a day. She said, 'You're part of this, you feel it.' She said, 'I love to watch you. You don't miss anything, do you?' He did not move or speak now. Close to him she said, 'You think you're hidden, but I can see you in there; Mr. LaBrava. Show me your pictures.'
'At Evelyn's gallery they sip wine and look at my photographs...'
Looking at them now spread over the formica table, Jean Shaw picking up each print and studying it closely-- in his rooms on the second floor of the Della Robbia. 201. He paid for the rooms, he had been living here eight months, but there was nothing of him in the rooms. They were rooms in a hotel. He had not got around to mounting or hanging any of his prints, or was sure there were any he cared to look at every day. There were other prints in envelope sleeves in the bookcase and among magazines on the coffee table. He told her Aperture magazine had contacted him about doing a book. Call it South Beach. Get all the old people, the art deco look. He was working on it now. No, he was thinking about it more than he was working on it. He wanted to do it. He wouldn't mind having a coffee-table book on his coffee table. It seemed strange though--ask thirty or forty dollars for a book full of pictures of people who'd never see it, never be able to afford it.
'At the gallery they sip wine and look at my pictures. They say things like, 'I see his approach to art as retaliation, a frontal attack against the assumptions of a technological society.'
'They say, 'His work is a compendium of humanity's defeat at the hands of venture capital.'
'They say, 'It's obvious he sees his work as an exorcism, his forty days in the desert.' Or, another one, 'They're self-portraits. He sees himself as dispossessed, unassimilated.'
'The review in the paper said, 'The aesthetic sub-text of his work is the systematic exposure of artistic pretension.' I thought I was just taking pictures.'
Jean Shaw said, 'Simplicity. It is what it is.' Then paused. 'And what it isn't, too. Is that what you're saying?'
He didn't want her to try so hard. 'I heard one guy at the gallery--it was his wife or somebody who said I was dispossessed, unassimilated, and the guy said, 'I think he takes pictures to make a buck, and anything else is fringe.' I would've kissed the guy, but it might've ruined his perspective.'
Jean Shaw said, studying a print, 'They try to pose, and not knowing how they reveal themselves.'
He liked that. That wasn't bad.
'Your style is the absence of style. Would you say?'
He said, 'No tricky angles,' because he didn't know if he had a style or not. 'I'm not good at tricky angles.'
'Some of them look like actors. I mean like they're made up, costumed.'
'I know what you mean.'
'When you're shooting them, what do you see?'
'What do I see? I see what I'm shooting. I wonder if I have enough light. Or too much.'
'Come on. Tell me.'
'I see 'images whose meanings exceed the local circumstances that provide their occasion.' '
'Who said that?'
'Walker Evans. Or somebody who said he did.'
'What do you think about when you look at your own work?'
'I wonder why I can't shoot like Stieglitz.'
'How long have you been doing it?'
'Or why I'll never be able to. I wonder why my people don't look at me the way August Sander's people looked at him. I wonder if I should have moved in closer, taken one step to the right or left.'
There was a silence.
'What else do you see?'
'But it isn't what I see, is it? It's what I wonder when I look at the picture. I wonder if I'll ever have enough confidence.'
She said, 'Yes? What else?'
'I wonder, most of all I wonder what the people are doing now. Or if they're still like that, the way I shot them.'
He heard her say, in the quiet afternoon apartment, 'What do you see when you look at me?'
And almost answered, turning from the table of black and white prints. Almost. But as soon as he was facing her, close to her, he knew better than to speak, break the silence and have to start over. No, they were now where they wanted to be, if he could feel or sense anything at all. So he touched the face he had watched on the screen, bringing up one hand and then the other just before he brought his mouth to hers and felt her hands slide over his ribs.
They went into the bedroom and undressed without a word to make love in dimmed silence, to make love as soon as they were in bed and she brought him between her legs, Joe LaBrava believing this was unbelievable. Look at him. He was making love to Jean Shaw, he was honest-to-God making love to Jean Shaw in real life. He didn't want to be watching, he wanted to be overwhelmed by it, by Jean Shaw, making love to her, but he didn't want to just do it either, he wanted the overwhelming feeling of it to take hold and carry them away. But her eyes were closed and maybe she was just doing it, doing it with him, moving with him, but she could be doing it without him because he didn't know where she was with her eyes closed so tight. He wanted to see her eyes and he wanted her to see him ... so close to her face, her hair, her skin and not a blemish, not a trace of a tiny scar... He had to stop thinking if he was going to be overwhelmed. He had to let himself be overwhelmed...
It wasn't something he would tell anyone. He would never do that. Though it seemed like the kind of thing you might tell a stranger on a train without naming names. On a train? Come on. He was making an old-time movie out of it looking for a way to tell it. Or maybe write it in a diary. Though he could never imagine, under any circumstances, even in solitary confinement, writing or talking to himself.
No, he would never be able to tell anyone there was more to making love to a movie star than just... making love. Or, maybe he should qualify it. Say, making love to a movie star the first time... there was more to it than just making love. The idea of it, the anticipation, the realization, was more overwhelming than the doing of it. Although he could not say that would be true of all movie stars.
What he had almost said to her when she said, 'What do you see when you look at me?' was:
'The first woman I ever fell in love with, when I was twelve years old.'
But the mood, something, had saved him from maybe getting pushed out the window. He was able to move through the next steps letting heavy breathing bring them along, into the bedroom to the act itself. But you see, with all the anticipation, thinking back twenty-five years to the first time you saw her and were knocked out by her, finally when you're there and it's happening, it's almost impossible to quit thinking about how great it's going to be,
