'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've been saving it up.'
'I expected you to stand here a few minutes and then get restless and walk off.'
'One of my failings is that I say things to strangers, women passing by, that I've never said to a wife or child, a close friend.'
'You talk candidly to Scott.'
'I talk to Scott. But it becomes less necessary all the time. He already knows. He's at my brainstem like a surgeon with a bright knife.'
She finished the roll and went to her case for another. Bill stood by the desk shaking a cigarette out of the pack. There was mud crust and bent weed stuck to his shoes. He didn't seem to be putting across his own picture, his idea of what he wanted to look like or who he wanted to be for the next hour or two. It was clear he hadn't bothered to think it out. She liked the feel of the room with him in it. It was his room in a way in which this wasn't his house. She asked him to stand near one of the wall charts and when he didn't object she moved the lamp and adjusted focus and started shooting. He smoked and talked. He thought he was suffering like the rest of them. They all thought they were bungling and desolate and tormented but none of them ever wanted to do anything else but write and each believed that the only person who might possibly be worse off was another writer somewhere and when one of them mixed too many brandies and little violet pills or placed the nozzle of a revolver just behind the ear, the others felt both sorry and acknowledged.
'I'll tell you what I don't exaggerate. The doubt. Every minute of every day. It's what I smell in my bed. Loss of faith. That's what this is all about.'
Space was closing in the way it did when a session went well. Time and light were narrowed to automatic choices. Bill stood before the odd notations on his chart and she knew she had everything she might want or need. Here was the old, marked and melancholy head, the lost man of letters, and there was the early alphabet on the wall, the plan of his missing book in the form of lopsided boxes and felt-tipped scrawls and sets of directional signs like arrows scratched out by a child with a pencil in his fist. And he was animated, leaning and jabbing as he talked. His hands were blunt and nicked. There was a doggedness to him, a sense of all the limits he'd needed to exceed, getting on top of work that always came hard. She was trying to place him in context, fit the voice and body to the books. The first thing she'd thought, entering the room, was wait a minute, no, this can't be him. She'd expected someone lean and drawn, with eyes like hex signs on an Amish barn. But Bill was slowly beginning to make sense to her, to look reasonably like his work.
'I'm forced to steal one of your cigarettes,' she said. 'I've been giving up cigarettes for twenty-five years and I've made a lot of progress in that time. Okay? But then I see the little glisten of the package.'
'Tell me about New York,' he said. 'I don't get there anymore. When I think of cities where I lived, I see great cubist paintings.'
'I'll tell you what I see.'
'That edginess and density and those old brownish tones and how cities age and stain in the mind like Roman walls.'
'Where I live, okay, there's a rooftop chaos, a jumble, four, five, six, seven storeys, and it's water tanks, laundry lines, antennas, belfries, pigeon lofts, chimney pots, everything human about the lower island-little crouched gardens, statuary, painted signs. And I wake up to this and love it and depend on it. But it's all being flattened and hauled away so they can build their towers.'
'Eventually the towers will seem human and local and quirky. Give them time.'
'I'll go and hit my head against the wall. You tell me when to stop.'
'You'll wonder what made you mad.'
'I already have the World Trade Center.'
'And it's already harmless and ageless. Forgotten-looking. And think how much worse.'
'What?' she said.
'If there was only one tower instead of two.'
'You mean they interact. There is a play of light.'
'Wouldn't a single tower be much worse?'
'No, because my big complaint is only partly size. The size is deadly. But having two of them is like a comment,
