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no desire to be unduly foreshortened, or to look too imaginatively
grotesque by reason of some brute trick of perspective. So. There was
a good chance that what would be seen would be really me. There
is always a problem about what visual version of one is really one–
self; Matilda used to tell me of the time, the only time, she herself
ever sat for a portrait.
It had been when she was still in art school in Boston, and a
fellow-student who wanted to be a society portraitist and who thought
she looked like a Sargent did her painstakingly in oils. "After we'd
agreed on the pose, a sort of a three-quarter-view, I-am-more-subtle–
than-my-more-beautiful-frothy-sisters thing," she told me once, "I be–
gan to feel as if the part of my face he was looking at, trying to get
right,
was gradually roughening up. In texture. It felt like a piece of
concrete block, but from
inside
the face, not as if I'd rubbed my
hand over it. Then it began to swell up, and go ballooning out toward
him, across the room. But he didn't seem to notice." Matilda always
thought that this sort of thing had to do with why people shy away
from their own profiles, whenever they see one that's been decently
drawn.
In any event, I just wanted everything to be nice, as far as my
watchers were concerned. I started groping for routines, but they
all became, under the silly lights, somehow implausible. What to do?
What to do? This could, I realized, lead to panic, and I was already
starting to sweat at the roots of my hairline. I considered picking my
nose systematically, going at it like a miner, assembling one of those
considerable nuggets which, with a half-hour's admixture of dust gets
to be like old plasticine, and surreptitiously (ha ha!) depositing it
somewhere, such as under the wooden lip of one of the benches. But
it hardly seemed worth the effort. I got more and more uneasy, know–
ing all the time that it was an uneasiness that came from being free
of the usual burgherly cares about being seen. I have often made love
by an open window, letting the sound of crickets or sirens wash over
me and mine in waves, feeling the scratches of dropped milk-bottles on
a neighboring stoop against my back. And all this with perhaps a
shaded lamp, filling the room with soft light. All right, so look. Some
girls are nervous, though, but I think that this has little to do with
what Others might see. But in general, pulling shades -down has noth–
ing to do with ensuring privacy. It's a kind of orderly tic.
Here I was, though, unable to do right by my observers. All
around the huge room, the other prisoners were being garrulous,
