Picture Palace Read Online Free Page B

was an English sequence: they invite you for a drink; if you’re a dead loss they have a previous engagement; if not, you’re invited to dinner. I was pleased that he hadn’t flunked me.
    I said, “Lead the way.”
    Greene went to settle the bill and ring the restaurant while I tapped a kidney in the ladies room. I met him outside the bar and said, “Bentley’s—isn’t that where your short story takes place?”
    â€œWhich one is that?”
    â€œâ€˜The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen.’”
    He looked at bit blank, as if he’d forgotten the story, then put on a remembering squint and said, “Oh, yes.”
    â€œOne of my favorites,” I said. We left the Ritz and crossed Piccadilly in the dusty mellow light that hung like lace curtains in the evening sky. Greene towered over me and I had that secure sense of protection that short people feel in the presence of much taller ones. He held my arm and steered me gallantly to Swallow Street. I knew the story well. The couple dining at Bentley’s are discussing their plans: their marriage, her book. She’s a bright young thing and believes her publisher’s flattery—believes that she has remarkable powers of observation. Her fiance is hopelessly in love with her, but after the meal, when he comments on the eight Japanese that have just left the restaurant, she says, “What Japanese?” and claims he doesn’t love her.
    I heard the waitresses muttering “Mister Greene” as we were shown to our table. Greene said, “I know what I’m having.” He passed me the menu.
    He began talking about trips he intended to take: Portugal, Hungary, Panama; and I wondered whether he had people joshing him and trying to persuade him to stay home. Did he have to listen to the sort of guff I had to endure? I guessed he did, even if he didn’t have a Frank. I had the feeling of being with a kindred spirit, a fellow sufferer, who was completely alone, who had only his work and who, after seventy years, woke up each morning to start afresh, regarding everything he had done as more or less a failure, an inaccurate rendering of his vision, a betrayal. But I also saw how different we were: he was in his work—I wasn’t in mine. And perhaps he was thinking, “This boring little old lady only believes in right and wrong—I believe in good and evil.” We were of different countries, and so our ages could never be the same. In the two hours that had passed since I had first seen Orlando in him, Greene had become more and more himself, more the complicated stranger in the fourth dimension that confounds the photograph.
    â€œLondon’s not what it was,” he was saying. “Just around the corner one used to see tarts walking up an down. It was better then—they were all over Bayswater.”
    â€œI did some of them.”
    â€œSo did I,” said Greene, and passed his hand across his face as if stopping a blush. “When I was at university I used to go down to Soho, have a meal in a nice little French restaurant, a half-bottle of wine, then get myself a tart. That was very pleasant.”
    I didn’t feel I could add anything to this.
    He said, “Soho’s all porno shops now. It’s not erotic art. I find it brutal—there’s no tenderness in it.”
    â€œIt’s garbage,” I said. “But there’s an argument in its favor.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œIt works,” I said.
    â€œI wouldn’t know,” said Greene. “I haven’t seen any pornography since they legalized it.”
    I laughed: it was so like him. And I was annoyed that I couldn’t catch that contradiction on his face. He was surprising, funny, alert, alive, a real comedian, wise and droll. Knowing that I was going to meet him for a portrait I had been faced with the dilemma that plagued me every time I set out to do someone.