Duck! Here comes Diane Arbus!
by David Finkle
[ fiction - august 05 ]
“Duck! Here comes Diane Arbus!”
Charlie Devlin was speaking, and I was doing a good job of keeping my promise not to laugh. It so happens that until that line, I hadn’t been challenged. The “Duck! Here comes..!” exclamation, however, was too much temptation, and I broke the vow. Shattered it. I tried to hold things to a smile, as a good friend should, or at worst a titter. Maybe venture as far as a sotto voce giggle. But no dice. I had to let go with a full-out guffaw that struck me and very possibly him as if it were bouncing off the nearby buildings like a hard rubber ball.
Dismay spliced with anger invaded Charlie’s expression. His fleshy face turned a piquant shade of red. “You think it’s funny, but it’s not,” he said and momentarily fell silent.
Attempting to recover my composure, I said, “I’m laughing but not because it’s funny.” Feeble recovery, I know.
The setting: Madison Square Park, where we habitually did a lot of our breeze-shooting. Charlie was seated on a weathered bench and in the closest thing to a panic I’d ever seen him. On the phone he’d said he was calling from the street outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art and needed to meet me downtown for a talk. He’d declared as much any number of times but never in that audibly shaky way. I could usually imagine how his face looked from the tenor of his remarks, I knew him that well. But this time, I couldn’t, and it wasn’t just the cell-phone static. So I said I’d drop what I was doing - balancing my checkbook, actually, and relieved to be excused from it - and join him in fifteen.
This, by the way, was late-ish on a triumphant early spring afternoon when the trees are still a bright celadon and the tulips are blaring pride.
Charlie beat me there. As I approached him from the side, he was looking down with his heavy arms resting on his thighs, thick hands and fingers drooping like melting stalactites. He seemed to be examining the ground - for what I couldn’t imagine. When I said hello, he reacted as if I’d threatened to rob him.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said.
“Whom were you expecting?” I asked.
“No one. You. You just startled me.” He certainly looked startled. His deep-set onyx eyes were blank, as if mammoth steel doors behind them had slammed shut. His eyebrows, which had always been florid, sagged like ragged black-and-white bunting. Some people would consider Charlie good-looking in a rugged, unconventional manner; others would not. I remain on the fence. His wardrobe never helped the image, since he dressed as if the concept of fashion escaped him entirely. If Charlie knew about matching colors, he kept it to himself. He only owned three ties. He’d told me so - and with a certain amount of pride. It’d been a while, so maybe he’d come by a couple more. But if so, I hadn’t seen them. At the moment he was wearing a familiar one, and it, too, was droopy as Harpo’s trousers. His trousers, which were also familiar, could have been Harpo’s hand-me-downs.
“Sorry I roused you from your stupor,” I said.
“No time for amenities,” Charlie countered before I even had time to sit down next to him. He resumed scrutinizing the cracked concrete in front of the bench..
“What’s up, then?” I asked.
That’s when he said, “You have to promise not to laugh,” and I said, with the solemnity I realized was required, “I promise. Absolutely.”
“No,” he said, turning to look me in the eye(s), “I mean, really.”
“I promise,” I said. This was sounding a little high school to me, which was a bit much for two people significantly past high-school age. But I went along with it. In my experience, it’s a small coterie of men who completely mature beyond late adolescence - or early adolescence--and I wasn’t convinced either Charlie or I were among them. I remember Andre Malraux once writing something along the same lines about the men he knew, and I figure, who am I to one-up Malraux, whom I’m not ready to abandon as a culture hero even if the years have not been kind to his memory.
But I digress.
“I promise. I promise,” I added. “I won’t laugh.”
“All right then,” Charlie said. “I’ll tell you why I called.” He shifted his ham-like extremities into news-conveying mode. “Do you remember me ever mentioning a guy named Hartley Warren?”
“I can’t say I do.”
“Hart Warren?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I was stretching for the sake of politeness. I’d never heard the name; if I had, I’d forgotten it.
“Maybe I haven’t,” Charlie said. “I don’t think about him much any more. I probably haven’t seen him in twenty-five years. He was someone I was chummy with when I first came to Manhattan.” Suddenly, a little light came into Charlie’s eyes. I could tell it was shining on a memory. “We’d been at school together. Not Princeton. Exeter. And shortly after I moved into Manhattan, I bumped into him again. He suggested we get together, and I said, ‘Why not?’ The thing about Hart is he had these great connections. Those were the days when I believed connections meant something. Well, they do, but not what I thought they meant then. Hart knew everybody. Or if he didn’t know somebody personally, he knew someone who did. He certainly knew plenty about everybody - everybody who was considered anybody. His family was the Warren family. You know.”
“Oh, yes,” I said, “sure.” I had no idea who the Warren family is or was. Nevertheless, this was the patch of back-story through which I was keeping a straight face.
“It didn’t matter what field people were in, Hart knew about them,” Charlie barreled on. “You sure I never mentioned him? Tall guy, well-built, rowed on the Princeton crew?”
Now I knew I’d never heard about him. The Princeton crew? I’d have remembered. “You knew someone who rowed on the crew,” I said to Charlie. “I would have thought that was about the last kind of person you’d know.”
“He was in my entry all four years. I never say him row. I just saw him carrying an oar every once in a while.”
“How Ivy,” I said.
“Yeah,” Charlie said, annoyed, I could tell, that we had gotten off the immediate subject. “Anyway,” he said, putting much shoulder into the “anyway,” “Hart knew scientists, lawyers, entertainment people, corporate moguls, editors and reporters, artists. He knew who was hot and who was not.”
“Good friend to have,” I said as a way of indicating I was still with him.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But in some cases - like what I’m about to tell you - you’d be wrong. We’re now talking the mid ‘60s. This was about the time that Diane Arbus was making a name for herself. You know who she is, right? Or was? She died in 1971 - took her own life.”
“Yes,” I said, “I know who she is. Who doesn’t?”
“Right. Who doesn’t?” Charlie said. “Now. Back then I wouldn’t have said she was a household name.”
“She probably isn’t a household name today.”
“You know what I’m saying. She’s a household name in the households you and I know.”
Why argue? “Point taken.”
“Back then she wasn’t. A lot of people didn’t know about her and her bizarre photographs of the everyday weird. Ordinary, everyday people photographed in their homes or on their lawns or in the great outdoors who she somehow gets to look like inmates at a crazy house. I, for one, didn’t know about her, and that’s what I’m moving to.”
He put his fists on his thighs, like a football coach about to give his team what-for. “I was with Hart Warren in Central Park one spring afternoon in 1966 - sitting around like we are now - talking about nothing in particular. And suddenly he turns a different color. Hart, who was a kind of Ur-WASP, was fair-skinned, but he almost always had a tan. Summers in the Hamptons, winters in Antibes or Majorca, whatever. So he usually was brown as a Bosc pear. But suddenly he went - not white, really, but a paler shade of Bosc. Are you with me so far?”
“Yes,” I said, sensing something was about to be revealed.
“I was just going to ask him if something is wrong, when he says--and this is the important part-- ‘Duck! Here comes Diane Arbus!”
That’s when I lose it, when we have our little exchange about the comment not being funny, when Charlie regains his verbal footing and throws me a warning glare. “Hart recognizes her, you see, but I don’t. He knows her - I’d never even heard her name. Not that I’m aware of. He says, ‘Don’t look now.’ But it’s too late. I’d already turned in the direction he’d been facing. I see a short, thin, dark-haired woman - short-cropped hair--coming our way wearing a sleeveless white blouse and dark pedal pushers. She’s carrying something in her right hand that could be a camera. It is a camera. I turn back to Hart, who’s now facing away from me. And her. ‘Who is Diane Arbus?’ I say. Hart doesn’t move. ‘Is she still heading in this direction?’ he says. I look her way, and she is. She’s about ten feet off. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘No time to explain,’ he says. Hart still isn’t moving. ‘Whatever you do, don’t look at her,’ he says. But that’s the wrong thing to say to me, because all it does is make me want to look. I do. She’s practically on top of me. Except she isn’t looking at me. She’s looking at Hart.”
Charlie stops there to let that sink in. I let it sink in as far as it was going to sink, which wasn’t that far. “And?” I said.
“That’s right. ‘And.’” Charlie says. “And she says to him, ‘Hart?’ Hart turns towards her, as if he’s completely surprised to see her, and says, ‘Diane. Hello. Fancy meeting you here.’ That’s what he says, ‘Fancy meeting you here,’ blithe as a chorus girl greeting a stage-door Johnny. She says, ‘I haven’t seen you since my opening.’ Charlie says, ‘No, that’s right. Quite an opening it was, too. Le tout New York.’ That’s when he brings me into the conversation. ‘Diane, this is my friend, Charlie Devlin. Charlie, Diane Arbus, the photographer.’ He says ‘the photographer,’ not ‘a photographer,’ as if I’m supposed to know who she is. At that, she shifts the camera from her right hand to her left and puts her right hand out for me to shake. Which I do.
“And say - heaven help me - ‘Oh, a photographer? You out here photographing?’ I’m trying to be courteous, because I’m still wondering what she’s done that had Hart so eager to avoid her. And she says, ‘Yes, I am. I’m in Central Park often.’ Then she says, ‘Why don’t I take a picture of you two?’”
“She didn’t!” I said to Charlie.
“She did.”
I had the urge to laugh again, but this time I suppressed it. “And you had no idea who she was?”
“I didn’t know her from Adam.”
“Diane Arbus - and you didn’t know who she was.”
Charlie looked at me as if I were the enemy. His eyes were flashing ooga-booga signals. “I hadn’t been in the City for a year yet. I wasn’t interested in the arts. I hadn’t stepped inside a museum. Unless you consider Yankee Stadium a museum. The way they’re playing this year so far, you could.”
“But in the mid-Sixties Diane Arbus was getting attention,’ I said. “She was flavor of the month. Her photographs were being reproduced in magazines. Life, Time.”
I could see my confrontational mode wasn’t going down well with Charlie. “Maybe I’d seen the photographs,” he said, “but I hadn’t remembered the name. If I had, it hadn’t registered. To me photographs were what my mother took with a Brownie. Who knew they were art?”
Good old Charlie. His field was ancient Middle Eastern history; it was really all that interested him. He’d written his dissertation on some aspect of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And since there were no photographs in the Dead Sea Scrolls, he could be forgiven for not knowing in 1966 what the camera had wrought.
I said, “I think I’ve got the picture, so to speak. Diane Arbus offered to photograph you, and your friend Hart said no, because he knew who she was. He knew the kind of pictures she took and what she did with them.”
Charlie shifted uncomfortably. “That’s right. Hart said no.”
“And you agreed with him, because you figured he had his reasons.” I said, knowing full well I was dead wrong.
“Not exactly,” Charlie said.
“You agreed to have Diane Arbus take your picture.” Charlie gave a nod that wasn’t as good as a wink. It was a mini-nod, an almost-but-not-quite nod. I’d always liked Charlie. As long as I’d known him - which must have been about 20 years by then - he’d been a curmudgeon, but a likeable curmudgeon. He looked menacing but was harmless. Now I knew that the hunch I had while heading to meet him was correct: Charlie would have something to tell me worth hearing.
“Why shouldn’t I say yes to her offer? I had no idea what Hart was trying to get across, and she looked like a perfectly ordinary person. She liked taking pictures of people in Central Park. It sounded like a nice pastime for her. I imagined her heading towards the carousel to take pictures of waving kids for their parents to show off.”
“So you said yes.”
Charlie nodded again, giving it a mite more energy this time.
“And Hart Warren did what? Stood aside while Diane Arbus snapped away at you?”
“She wouldn’t let him stand aside. Looking back on it now, I can say she knew exactly why he’d said no. So she coaxed him into joining me. He couldn’t continue to refuse, because if she asked why, he’d have to say. He couldn’t do that. Manners, you know. Hart had been raised to do the right thing. It was deeply embedded in his DNA. Hurting someone’s feelings was verboten. So he acquiesced. ‘How about over by that tree?’ she said, pointing to a nearby oak. ‘Why don’t we just sit here?’ Hart said. That was as far as he’d go to resist her. ‘The light’s better over there for my purposes,’ she said. Maybe the ‘my purposes’ should have been some kind of tip-off to me, but it wasn’t.
“So we picked ourselves up and stood where she was pointing, but I knew Hart enough to realize something was wrong. His walk gave him away. Normally, he strode around as if he owned the place. A lot of places he did own, by the way. But he was walking as if he was approaching the gallows. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why. Far as I knew we were just having our picture taken by someone who sounded like she was getting something of a reputation for taking pictures. She had to be good, right?”
“So you had your picture taken by Diane Arbus,” I said. “What was that like?”
“What was it like? It was like nothing. Hart and I stood by the tree. She directed us this way and that. A foot to the right, a few inches to the left. We did as told.”
“What did she say?” I asked. “Enquiring minds want to know.”
“Not much,” Charlie said. “Mostly, she was concentrating. She asked Hart about his brother. Brad, his name was. She asked about a few people they knew that I didn’t.”
“Did she say, ‘Say, “cheese”?’”
This rankled. “No, she didn’t say, ‘Say, “cheese.”’ She didn’t need to. I figured I’d give her a smile. That’s what you do when you’re having your picture taken in the park, right? But when I did, she said there was no need to do that. I should just be myself. So I did what I thought being myself was, and I think Hart was doing the same, although I could sense he continued not to be thrilled with any of this. I couldn’t understand why, because at school he was always sitting for team sport pictures.”
“And then what happened? Did she just take the one picture? I’m interested in Arbus’s process.”
Charlie wasn’t going to dignify that remark with a lengthy reply. “I don’t know. She took a couple pictures, near as I could tell. People were walking by. Dogs were smelling the grass for places to piss. She was snapping photos. It was like any other day in the park. When she was done, she told Hart it was nice to run into him and he should say hello to so-and-so and so-and-so, and then she said she needed to move on, and she went.”
“Then what?”
“Then Hart told me who Diane Arbus was and why he thought letting her take our picture wasn’t the smartest thing in the world. Let’s just say, he filled me in.”
“So Diane Arbus took your picture. I’ve heard of worse fates,” I said.
“Easy for you to say,” Charlie said.
“Maybe she never developed it,” I said, knowing as I said it that if Diane Arbus had never developed the roll of film, there would be no reason for our sitting together that sumptuous afternoon.
“I’m getting to that.” Charlie said. “That’s why I called you. She developed it, all right.” He let the sentence float in the air.
“I’ll bite,” I said. “When did she show it to you?”
“She never showed it to me.”
“Then what’s the problem? Did you ever even see it?” I knew as I said this that I was dealing in quasi-rhetorical questions: There had to be a problem; Charlie had to have seen the photograph - or heard about it, at the very least.
“Yes, I’ve seen it,” Charlie said. I was about to ask when, but Charlie beat me to it. “About an hour ago.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You saw it in the Arbus exhibit at the Met.”
“You knew about this?” Charlie asked.
“Sure,” I said, “I know about the exhibit. It’s gotten plenty of press.”
“I don’t follow the arts press,” Charlie says. “You know me. I’m still not much of a museum-goer.”
“But you went today.”
“I went today, because I had a call from Carole Restow.” I knew about Charlie’s friend Carole, although I’d never met her. “She called me late this morning to ask whether I was the guy in the photograph, because it looked a lot like me. Like what I might have looked like forty years ago. She didn’t know me then. And I said, ‘What photo?’ And she said, ‘The photo in the Diane Arbus exhibit.’”
“And you said, ‘What Diane Arbus exhibit?’”
“That’s right, because to tell you the truth, I’d practically forgotten about Diane Arbus. Hart Warren has carried on about her that afternoon - telling me I should never have agreed to be photographed. He’d even dragged me to a bookstore to look at some of her pictures. I saw what he meant. The pictures of young girls looking deluded - or Qualuuded, young boys looking demented. On the other hand, I knew I wasn’t demented. That’s what I said to Hart. He said I didn’t understand. Arbus could and did make anyone she came into contact with look like a candidate for the loony bin. I remember him saying she could make Grace Kelly look like Lizzie Borden.”
“You didn’t believe him.”
“Not really,” Charlie said. “I thought, What the hell. Diane Arbus took a picture of me. So what? Hart said, ‘Wait until you see the picture. You’ll know what I’m talking about.’ But I never did see the picture. I forgot about it. I didn’t see Hart either. Not long after that he went to California. One of his Hollywood chums said there was a part for him in a movie. He’d never acted, but that wasn’t going to stop him. Or them. Apparently, when he got out there, he took a gander at the movie biz, didn’t like it, begged off his screen test and started buying real estate instead. I hear he owns a lot of Orange County now. So that was that until today.”
Reminiscing about Hart Warren and his escapades, Charlie had lightened up. Not that his craggy face ever took on the aspect of a day at the beach. But now the storm clouds rolled back in. “You’re always in museums,” he said to me, as if he were accusing me of a major crime. “You haven’t seen this exhibit? Or you have, and you’re just sparing my feelings.”
“I don’t see everything,” I said by way of defending myself. “I mean to see this one, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I take it your friend Carole was right when she thought she recognized you. You might as well tell me what I’m going to see.”
“She recognized me, all right,” Charlie said and put his heavy head into his heavy hands. I waited. “You got to understand, this exhibit is huge. I can’t tell you how many photographs are in it. It seemed like thousands. Rooms of them.”
“There you go,” I said, intending to be positive. “Too many for everyone to take in.”
“Don’t try to make me feel better,” Charlie said.
“I thought that’s why I’m here,” I said. “Something’s upset you, and I’m supposed to talk you through it.”
“I’ll never get over this,” Charlie said. With that, he stood up and produced a paper bag he’d been sitting on. It had the Metropolitan Museum of Art logo on it. I could tell there was some sort of book inside. “You’ll see what I’m talking about,” he said as he removed the bag’s contents. “The catalogue.” He held it aloft as a guerilla might hold up a rifle at a photo op. “See this,” he said, sitting down and paging furiously through the book which had Arbus’s famous photograph of identical twins on the cover. “Where is it, where is it? It’s towards the back.” He dragged out the last sentence in his guttural tones. “A-ha! Look at this.”
He regarded me expectantly, as if he were waiting for me to do something I didn’t understand I was to do. The penny dropped. He wanted me to uncross my legs, straighten up and make a flat lap. I did as tacitly bid. He set the catalogue down, held the left side down with one hand and with the pudgy index finger of his left hand pointed at the lone photograph on the right page. “Now do you see what I mean? Huh? Huh?” Quick as he indicated the picture, he turned away. “I can’t look at it,” he said.
I could; I knew I must. It was in large part why I was there. Saw I applied myself.
What I saw in the black-and-white world Arbus had made her own was two young men standing in front of a tree. An oak tree, as advertised. One of the men was tall and blonde; the other was medium-sized and heavy. They both looked awkward, as if they’d been caught doing something they oughtn’t be doing. The taller one, whom I took to be Hartley Warren, was on the left and was looking off to the left. Because of the way he was gazing, he seemed slightly cross-eyed. His sneer made him appear as if he were aiming for nonchalance but failing badly. He was wearing a short-sleeved, striped jersey and had his arms folded over his chest. He also wore pressed khaki trousers, but his left pant leg was caught in his sock. It was hiked up inadvertently, that was clear. The overall effect was upper-class superciliousness. For him, the photograph amounted to a caustic statement on male swagger.
The heavy, medium-sized one - Charlie - had a large Jewish afro, sloping shoulders and arms that seemed longer than his legs. If Charlie, in a shapeless denim jacket and shapeless denim jeans and patterned scarf knotted around his neck and dangling over his bare chest, had been trying to accommodate Arbus’s request to be himself, the result fell short of the intention. He looked as if he had no idea who he was - or where he was. She’d caught him looking directly at the camera as if he were about to ask for a hand-out or directions to the nearest homeless shelter. An eerie aspect of the dreaded snapshot was that not less than a few minutes before, I had seen an expression on his face not unlike the one Arbus captured for all time - the hanging full lower lip, the eyes like a cornered animal. If Arbus had ventured upon a lost tribe and gestured for one of its members to pose for her, she would likely have prompted the same apprehensive gaze.
The caption under the photograph read as follows: “Two Men Friends, NYC (1966).”
The caption was misleading, however, because in addition to Hartley Warren and Charlie there was someone else in the photograph. Approximately seven or eight feet behind them to the right was a toddler in a soiled shirt and bib and what looked like a full diaper. The tow-headed boy, who was peering quizzically at the two men, had his thumb in his mouth. Reaching in from the right side of the photograph was a disembodied arm. Perhaps it belonged to a mother running to snatch her toddler away from the action. If so, she hadn’t arrived speedily enough to keep her child from serving as unwanted commentary: it was as if what he was witnessing dumb-founded him. The child’s presence raised the level of the photograph from grim to devastating.
“You’re not saying anything,” Charlie said when he decided I’d remained quiet for too long.
“What do you want me to say?” I replied, “That it’s a good likeness? That it’s not a good likeness?”
“You don’t have to say anything,” Charlie said, “I’ve heard enough smart remarks already.”
I must have arched an eyebrow, because Charlie raised his voice and said, “Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I haven’t gotten to that part yet - the part where I listen to what people say about Hart and me. That’s right, Charlie. I found the photograph only after looking at hundreds of examples of Diane Arbus’s art. Carol hadn’t told me it was in one of the larger rooms towards the end. And when I walked into the room, I knew the instant I spotted the photograph that it was me. - is me. I knew from fifteen feet away. Hart Warren and me, forever linked. Two Men Friends placed between a photo of four world-weary swells at a fancy ball they now probably wish they’d never bought a table for and a photo of three sisters sitting on a bed in communion outfits and looking like a festival of recessive genes. After I got to this large square room with what? - sixty photographs arranged in a line around the four walls, I took a good long look at myself almost forty years ago. Then I stepped back while other people - the lucky ones spared Diane Arbus’s attention - filed past.”
“Did you overhear anything worth hearing?” I asked.
“Depends on what you mean by ‘worth hearing.’ Is ‘Look at these two saps!’ worth hearing? Because I heard it.” I tried not to react. “How about ‘That baby sucking his thumb has the right idea’? My favorite were the three school girls in short skirts and showing their pupiks the way all school girls do today - uniforms or no uniforms. They remained quiet as they passed the photographs on the way to mine but completely broke up when they saw me and Hart. They never said a word - just gales of laughter. This went on for minutes. Every time they seemed about to pull themselves together, one of them would point at the picture, and they’d all collapse again. Holding each other up, putting their hands over their mouths to stop themselves. There’s more, if you want to hear it.”
“How much more?” I said. “How long did you stand there?” I had to agree with Charlie that the Arbus photograph was not, um, flattering. But I didn’t want to put it in so many words. I could tell he wanted me to agree with him about it, yet also to disagree. I was in a lose-lose situation. I didn’t want to mention his vigil was masochistic, but it was.
“I was there for about fifteen, twenty minutes.”
“That long? Did anyone notice you and connect you with the photograph?”
“I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as I could. So I stood back from the photograph as if I were analyzing it. I kept my hand over my mouth, as if I were serious about the scrutiny. Nobody paid attention to me. Well, there was one young woman, who I think was with her husband or boy friend. When she finished looking at the photograph, she looked over at me. Something registered. As she was walking away, she whispered in the boy friend’s ear, and he looked back at me. Then the two of them chuckled. They definitely knew I was the shlemiel in the photograph.”
“Maybe they were just commenting on the way you seemed to be paying such close attention to it,” I said, making a stab at a soothing observation.
“They weren’t,” Charlie said. “They were laughing at me. The whole world is laughing at me.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” I said. “The whole world has not seen Diane Arbus’s entire oeuvre. I’ve seen plenty of Arbus’s photographs, and I’ve never seen this one.” I still had the catalogue on my lap and open to the incriminating page. “It’s obscure. And of those who have seen it, most of them have forgotten it. Nobody can retain that much.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ve seen it,” Charlie said. “And I remember the slogan they used to put above fun-house mirrors. ‘See yourself as others see you.’ I have seen myself as others see me. The camera doesn’t lie.”
He paused, having given me an opening to observe that the camera does lie. Or at least the opportunity to say something that skirted a Pollyanna level reply but was nevertheless comforting. I thought I might expound on Arbus’s work being exhilarating - as all genuine art, no matter what the content, is exhilarating. If you could think of it that way. But I knew Charlie couldn’t.
I thought to say, “Maybe forty years ago you looked like the man Arbus shutterbugged in Central Park, but you’ve changed, you’ve matured.” But I kept mum, because as the remark was forming in my head, I realized that Charlie still looked enough like himself four decades earlier - and knew he did - not to believe me. It’s not that the camera lies. If it did, we’d all be off the hook. It’s that at minimum it tells partial truths, and there’s the rub: Partial truths can be mistaken for whole truths.
As I sat looking at Charlie and he sat looking at the ground, I knew nothing I could say would convince him that Arbus had committed a miscarriage of photographic justice. So I sat there saying nothing.
He did, too, for another five minutes or so. Then he stood up and said he had to get going, but he was grateful for my having met him.
This all happened a few years ago. Ever since that day, whenever I arrange to see Charlie or bump into him, he finds some point in the conversation to look at me and moan, “The Diane Arbus photograph, the Diane Arbus photograph.”
It’s not funny.
Well, not entirely.
