The Investment

This was the famous photograph — a pretty blond girl, dressed as a nurse, who has jumped the police barricades, kissing one of the homecoming sailors on VJ Day in front of the cheering crowd on Broadway.  The sailor, visibly mesmerized by his luck, holds the small of her back with his strong arm.  The two are self-absorbed, as though caught in a dream; there is capriciousness in their unrehearsed, tango-like posture.  The photograph had appeared in LIFE magazine right after World War II, part of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s oeuvre.

Looking at the picture on the wall of the gallery, Paul had a sudden insight, a chill running down his spine.

“I was just five years old at that time,” he said to his wife standing next to him.  “And you – you weren’t even been born yet.  Just think of that!”

“Looking at this really gets you thinking,” his wife said.

“The way she twirls around!” Paul continued. “Her giddiness!”

His wife stepped up closer to the picture, amusement showing on her face.

“I wonder, did they ever get married?” she asked.

“And ruin the moment?” he said, laughing.

Since she remained silent, he looked at her sideways, and saw her biting her lip.  He knew he had again gone too far.  His wife had a habit of reading every remark, every gesture as a comment on her own life.

“Why did you say that?” she finally said, in a hurt voice.

“Say what?” he asked.

“What you just said.  Do you know what I think?  I think you don’t want to be married to me.”

“Honey . . . ,” he said, putting his arms on her shoulder.  “What I meant to say is that the picture is about a moment.  Everything is in that moment.  There is no couch I see here, no TV, no bagels and lox for brunch.”

But for now his wife was arrested in her monosyllabic mood, though she still allowed him to touch her.  Finally she yielded, putting her hand on his shoulder.  This was the way it worked, two people making a life together, a lot of compromises, but never taking away from an undercurrent of affection.

Yes, the tangible picture seemed to speak to him, we are all part of this strange century, on this strange planet of ours.  And, simultaneously, another thought came to him: The sailor comes back from a killing mission, and his first gesture – embrace — alludes to the creation of new life.  If anyone had been asked to stage a photograph conveying the exuberance of victory, the meeting of the future with the past, he’d come up with a sailor kissing a girl, though Paul doubted that imaginary photographer would dream up the body twist shown in this celebrated photograph.

All that was contained in the extraordinary sensation he had as he looked at the photograph.  But this feeling was amplified by the knowledge that Eisenstaedt, the man himself, was here in person. Paul and his wife had come to the retrospective of his work on Martha’s Vineyard.  Eisenstaedt was the one who was able to capture scenes from real life that other photographers could only dream to stage.  The man with the all-seeing, all-knowing eyes.

Paul and his wife made their way through the crammed gallery — which was actually a small converted farm house — past the black-and-white Goebbels, Himmlers, Khrushchevs, Kennedys, Nixons and 50’s White House teas, past Eisenstaedt’s small-town observations, the chat with the barber, parents with the Little League: past his whole life’s work with LIFE magazine. There was even a shot of the current president, Bill Clinton.

Blinded by the light of summer, they stepped out into the little backyard, outside the gallery proper, where the master sat curled up in a wheelchair.  It was difficult to get to see him, surrounded as he was by socialites from New York City.  These were mostly women in shrill-colored summer dresses and expansive hats, glasses of champagne in their hands, who always spoke with voices sure and loud enough to be heard on the other side of the street.  Those women, standing in groups of two’s and three’s, formed colorful scenes that were in odd contrast to the black-and-white pictures displayed inside; as though the gallery housed a bad dream that everybody was happy to escape.

Then Paul caught a glimpse of the man — eyes deeply set in an old, almost ancient, squarish face. It was the face of a witness.  The skin of his face was leathery, laid in deep folds.  The eyes of this man, they were like the lenses of a camera.  Perhaps the way Eisenstaedt looked at him and his wife seemed so distant because he habitually framed what he saw in front of himself: in this case a couple: a tall, ash-blonde man in jeans and tie-dye T-shirt and, at his side, a pretty brown-haired woman in a long black cotton dress, framed by the blue-green awning above, apple trees on the right and left. The background of the scene – Paul was extrapolating the photographer’s line of sight farther back — was a cluster of cars parked at odd angles, some in the ditch, in the inventive style inspired by the draconic parking ordinances of the Town of Chilmark.

The problem was, of course, that the prints were selling at a fortune.  Paul still remembered the time when two grand was all he had in his savings account.  In a way, it was not so long ago.  Even some of the smallest formats started at $1500.

“I mean, is it worth it to be able to say ‘We own a real Eisenstaedt’ if only a few people know who he is?”

As he was saying this to his wife he discovered that the champagne glass was made of plastic.  It came in two pieces: the “glass” proper and the stem.  One was stuck into the other.  Did they come apart?  He decided that once he’d emptied the glass he would find out.  With prices like that, why couldn’t the gallery afford real glasses?  But then he stopped himself — it was silly, it was petty to quibble about these kinds of things when surrounded by this exquisite art.

“I do,” she said.  “I know who he is.”

“But that doesn’t count.”

“Says who?  There is also this great thing about photographs: you can make prints forever.”

“Actually, you can’t,” Paul said.  “They destroy the negative after a couple dozen prints, as a favor to the collectors.  Or a pledge.  Call it a pledge.”

“Do they?  God, that is stupid!  But it makes it more interesting to own one.  To own a real Eisenstaedt.”  Paul smiled at his wife, and she smiled back, a member of the same team, and gave him a quick kiss.

They both looked at the old man, who presently was talking to a woman with a notepad in her hand.  She bent down to him; apparently she didn’t catch some of his answers.  Paul found himself in complete agreement with his wife: an authentic Eisenstaedt, my God, in their own house!  It would be something that would add style to their home, authenticity, a reference to the Old World.

“How did he get here?” his wife asked.  “This can’t possibly be the place where he lives.  Do you think?  Think of the dampness in winter!  And when he gets ill: one dingy hospital in Hyannis, is all!”

“Flown in along with the wheelchair, from New York City, I suppose.” Paul pointed at a passage in the little brochure he had picked up at the entrance, that said something about the photographer’s apartment on the Upper West Side and his life-long obsession with Central Park.

It was good to talk about something neutral, to give her space, assure her of her place next to him as part of the world order.  The idea behind the trip to Martha’s Vineyard had been to escape from their cloistered workaholic days in upstate New York.  In the evening, they were always too tired to do anything, though never too tired to bicker.  But here, every day brought the promise of a little adventure. His wife had been in a sunny mood, overall.  He was anxious to keep the boat unrocked.

The idea of a wheel chair on a plane made Paul think of the man’s advanced age.  The little brochure made him 86.  Curled up as he was, he didn’t look as though he would ever touch a tray with developer again.  Paul and his wife looked at each other and Paul knew in that instant that Eisenstaedt would not live much longer, and he knew that his wife was thinking the very same thing.  There had been an unfathomable distance in the old man’s eyes; they had seemed to recede to the point that is marked on the focus setting of a camera by a figure eight that is tired, lying on its side: infinity.

“Prices will go up a lot,” Paul whispered to her, scratching his head.

“What a thing to say!” she said, though Paul was certain she was about to say the same thing.  “But you are right.  It would be an investment.”

“Not really, because we wouldn’t buy it with the intent to sell it again.”

“You know what I mean.  If we want to have an Eisenstaedt at all, we better hurry.”

Paul nodded, deep in thought.  He had to see the pieces in the gallery again, this time with a different look.  And he felt satisfaction knowing that they were embarking on a project together; these were the things that counted for his wife.

It was a difficult proposition.  The Girl and the Sailor were not for sale.  The little Kindergarten Parade had a red dot stuck on it: sold.  There was a Stalin in the right price range but they agreed on one thing: no Stalin in their home.  The Trombone Marching Band was way too expensive.  But then they found a small intriguing picture, half hidden in an alcove of the gallery: a ballerina sitting in the makeup room in front of a mirror. Her head is turned around: she is looking at the camera, as though interrupted in an unconscious, very private moment.  And because of that, her face is pregnant with a smile, though not quite at the point of smiling yet.  A photographer without Eisenstaedt’s eye might have waited a split second longer, for her face to bloom into one of those interchangeable masks of stardom, and missed this moment altogether.

“I like it,” said Paul.

“Let’s get it,” said his wife.

“Can we take it with us right now?” asked his wife in the little office, after they’d paid with a check.

“I’m awfully sorry, madam,” the gallery owner said, “but we are under contractual obligations to keep the exhibit intact until the very end.  We’ll send it to you, insured, as soon as the show is over.”

I could have told you that, was on Paul’s mind to say, but he kept his mouth shut.

As they finally walked back to their car, having made sure that a red dot was firmly planted on their new possession, Paul turned to look back, and saw the upper torso of the old man framed by the yellow and red cocktail dresses of his admirers. The photographer’s face, half-hidden in the shade, was suddenly lit by a speck of sunlight — it might have been a hole in the awning, a stray reflection from a car passing by, or the light bouncing off the makeup mirror one of the socialites used in the garden.  It was as though, in a reversal of roles, the light, realizing the man who’d been its master was immobilized, now sought him out instead.  As Paul again saw his deep-set eye, which seemed to rest on him for a brief moment, he felt a slight jolt, a realization they had betrayed the old man, had entered a bet on his life.

 

*    *    *

 

Little more than three weeks went by, every day a struggle to keep the Vineyard mood alive, when Paul and his wife one morning found themselves looking at Eisenstaedt’s obituary in the New York Times.

She discovered it first.  She said to him, “Listen to this: ‘He is survived by two granddaughters, both living in Santa Fe.’  And then it goes on like this: ‘He took his first pictures when he was fourteen.’”

“Jesus Christ,” Paul said.  “Can you believe this?  They barely got his wheelchair back to the City, then bang!”

“Poor guy,” his wife said, looking up from the newspaper. “But rich life.”

“To think that we almost shook his hand!” he said.

By now, the photograph they’d bought had a firm, negotiated place on one of the walls in the living room.  They’d discovered they had different notions about the role of the picture in their house.  To his wife, it seemed to be mostly to show off their exquisite taste to friends.  “It goes with the Rosenthal vase; it goes with the Hibiscus tree,” she would say in all seriousness.  To Paul, the photograph was like a window into another world.  Looking at it was an intensely private experience.  “It goes with me,” he might have said.

Now, after reading the obituary, he caught himself walking up to the picture, as if acting out a magical belief that it had acquired a different quality, a different sheen.  And this was the spooky part: the woman in the photograph kept on looking at Paul as she was looking at the camera of the photographer.  It was as though he’d been put by her into the dead man’s body.  At that moment Paul felt disgusted with himself, having been involved in a pact on the old man’s life, a pact that now had become irreversible.

“It’s old age he died from,” his wife said, as if defending herself against a hidden accusation.  “Of course everybody knew he was going to die soon.  You know, at that age, all it takes is a wrong step.  A cold.  A mere pimple sometimes.”

“Yeah, I know,” Paul continued the thread.  “You are absolutely right.  Even lack of faith.  There is a point when you need faith to go on.  Perhaps he suffered from image overload.  The century has been so violent.  Still, one thing followed the other too closely for my comfort. One day he sits in the courtyard, happy as a clam, next day he’s reduced to an article in the New York Times.  I wished he could have let us enjoy that picture some more.”

“Enjoy the picture more?  Speak for yourself!” his wife exclaimed. “As far as I’m concerned, I intend to enjoy that picture.  Are you kidding?  We paid good money, and he was the one, after all, who decided to part with it.”

It was a defensive reaction; Paul decided she must feel just as bad as he did.  He had a sudden, incongruous vision, of Eisenstaedt in heaven, peeking down from behind a cloud.  A chance for ultimate photography, Landsat-style.  Had they buried his camera with him?  It would be a touching thing to do.  Bury the carpenter with his plane, the tailor with his needle.  Pharaoh with his meal. Jack the Ripper with his knife.

Two days went by.   Paul went to work, sat at his desk in the office, and managed to get through the day half-way productive.  Yet whatever he did, wherever he went, he saw the accusing eyes of the old man.  He knew it was downright silly, on the face of it. Many transactions had been conducted in the gallery on that day, and he remembered the sighs of delight from the elderly couple who had bought the picture with the trombones, just ahead of them.

It was an article about Eisenstaedt which appeared in the arts section of the New York Times a few days later that brought relief.  The article dwelled on the artist’s humble upbringing, his apprenticeship, his early mastery of the medium, but then took an unexpected turn.

“Listen to this,” his wife said to Paul at the breakfast table as she was skimming through the paper.  “‘Detractors,’ it says here, ‘have questioned compromises he was apt to make throughout his life, that made him socialize without qualm with the likes of Heinrich Himmler and Leni Riefenstahl.’  Can you believe this?”

Paul felt a weight being lifted from his shoulders.  It was as though a balance had suddenly shifted; whatever wrong they’d done to that man, betting on his demise, was a trifle compared to the sin that lay in tolerating or even inviting evil companionship.  To think of Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, the man directly responsible for the Holocaust!  And Leni Riefenstahl, who had put her rolling camera in the servitude of Nazi propaganda.

Paul got up from his chair and walked over to the photograph, the investment that had probably tripled in value the exact moment the old man’s heart had stopped.  He took another look at the ballerina — her pale visceral presence, the flimsy straps of her black leotard running over her shoulders, her helpless posture in the makeup room.  He tried to see her with Eisenstaedt’s eyes, and discovered there was just no way to do that, as much as he tried.   And he realized that the dead man behind the camera, with all his ingenious framing, his exquisite shepherding of prisms, lenses and filters, his exacting eye, was part of a century that had terribly failed.

“Yes,” he said, turning back toward his wife, her question still in the air. “I think I can.”