mathematics colleagues, Hugh had met a Dante scholar, a few psychiatrists, physicists, poets, and several esteemed anthropologists, who’d all shown their slides of Amazonian jungles, the sand-swept Sahara, the mesas of New Mexico. In a matter of weeks, Hugh had met experts in smallpox, Freud, the Tzotzil Maya, and the Nuer. He kept waiting for Charlie Case to walk through the door, but the most anyone could offer were rumors about his completed film; one professor had heard that it was a shoo-in to win a big French prize, another mentioned (with evident distaste) that Charlie Case had become quite comfortable in Hollywood.
Ice clinked and highballs were refilled; the lilac bush brushed against the open window. Hugh watched the men: all sitting, all listening, as an unassuming fellow with thin pale skin (Hugh couldn’t stop picturing it scorching in the African sun) who’d done extensive work in Upper Volta described a tribe called the Mossi as the Japanese of West Africa , due to their numerous rituals and greetings. The man started out speaking softly and grew more and more animated, until Hugh sensed him progressing toward an out-and-out performance. This little pallid man became a skilled—if vaguely campy—mime, bowing and scraping, even lying on the floor.
Hugh ran downstairs, retrieved his camera, quickly returned, and started shooting.
He hadn’t asked Raoul if he might take photographs, he hadn’t thought it through, but he knew that if Raoul admired anything about him it was what (toward the end of Hugh’s first dinner at the townhouse) Raoul had heralded as his independence . Which may or may not have been a euphemism for trust fund , but Hugh had decided to be hopeful. After the first few kisslike clicks of his Leica, he attempted to catch Raoul Merva’s eye, and when he did, Hugh felt nothing short of soaring relief as Raoul smiled and even mugged for the camera.
“Bravo,” said Raoul. “Hugh will document these evenings. What shall we call ourselves?” mused their host. “A good salon needs a name,” he said, with just enough absurdity in his voice for Hugh to realize that he was joking.
Paparazzo , thought Hugh mordantly, that’s me . Though he’d be hard-pressed to discover more substantive and less attractive subjects, as he trained his lens on Raoul Merva and co. he imagined he was Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita , whose palpable self-hatred was somehow completely appealing. He thought of sitting in the Brattle Theatre last spring, staring into the eyes of that final moment’s Umbrian angel and vowing to learn Italian. Which of course he never had. He thought of how he was a Shipley and it didn’t matter what he did, because the peak of the Shipleys had already happened and the point of his existence was nothing more than to ride out the wave of the Shipley name until it dumped out onto the shore.
Although he maintained to Ed that inheritance meant nothing and that the individual self was everything, he often thought that this was bullshit, and if he remembered one thing from his spotty education it would be how the anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown, while doing fieldwork in Australia, went walking with an Aboriginal in the outback and how they met another Aboriginal to whom the first Aboriginal spoke for hours. How after this conversation (of which Radcliffe-Brown understood nothing) the first Aboriginal said to the anthropologist: We’re going to be killed .
Why? asked Radcliffe-Brown.
Because , explained the first Aboriginal, after two hours of conversation we still cannot find a blood link between us. This is why .
Maybe this was all life amounted to. Maybe he was allowed to sit in this room and amuse himself by taking photographs because he was a Shipley and nothing else he might do in this life could ever come close to that.
But as he continued to shoot, he forgot about his pointless fate or even that he was ostensibly supposed to be capturing—for posterity—this
Ice clinked and highballs were refilled; the lilac bush brushed against the open window. Hugh watched the men: all sitting, all listening, as an unassuming fellow with thin pale skin (Hugh couldn’t stop picturing it scorching in the African sun) who’d done extensive work in Upper Volta described a tribe called the Mossi as the Japanese of West Africa , due to their numerous rituals and greetings. The man started out speaking softly and grew more and more animated, until Hugh sensed him progressing toward an out-and-out performance. This little pallid man became a skilled—if vaguely campy—mime, bowing and scraping, even lying on the floor.
Hugh ran downstairs, retrieved his camera, quickly returned, and started shooting.
He hadn’t asked Raoul if he might take photographs, he hadn’t thought it through, but he knew that if Raoul admired anything about him it was what (toward the end of Hugh’s first dinner at the townhouse) Raoul had heralded as his independence . Which may or may not have been a euphemism for trust fund , but Hugh had decided to be hopeful. After the first few kisslike clicks of his Leica, he attempted to catch Raoul Merva’s eye, and when he did, Hugh felt nothing short of soaring relief as Raoul smiled and even mugged for the camera.
“Bravo,” said Raoul. “Hugh will document these evenings. What shall we call ourselves?” mused their host. “A good salon needs a name,” he said, with just enough absurdity in his voice for Hugh to realize that he was joking.
Paparazzo , thought Hugh mordantly, that’s me . Though he’d be hard-pressed to discover more substantive and less attractive subjects, as he trained his lens on Raoul Merva and co. he imagined he was Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita , whose palpable self-hatred was somehow completely appealing. He thought of sitting in the Brattle Theatre last spring, staring into the eyes of that final moment’s Umbrian angel and vowing to learn Italian. Which of course he never had. He thought of how he was a Shipley and it didn’t matter what he did, because the peak of the Shipleys had already happened and the point of his existence was nothing more than to ride out the wave of the Shipley name until it dumped out onto the shore.
Although he maintained to Ed that inheritance meant nothing and that the individual self was everything, he often thought that this was bullshit, and if he remembered one thing from his spotty education it would be how the anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown, while doing fieldwork in Australia, went walking with an Aboriginal in the outback and how they met another Aboriginal to whom the first Aboriginal spoke for hours. How after this conversation (of which Radcliffe-Brown understood nothing) the first Aboriginal said to the anthropologist: We’re going to be killed .
Why? asked Radcliffe-Brown.
Because , explained the first Aboriginal, after two hours of conversation we still cannot find a blood link between us. This is why .
Maybe this was all life amounted to. Maybe he was allowed to sit in this room and amuse himself by taking photographs because he was a Shipley and nothing else he might do in this life could ever come close to that.
But as he continued to shoot, he forgot about his pointless fate or even that he was ostensibly supposed to be capturing—for posterity—this
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