Eight Girls Taking Pictures (40 page)

It was in the spirit of the relief (and anticipation) of her decision that, when the magazine editor casually asked to see some of Charlotte’s pictures she took him to her studio, where he quietly studied the kitten + kohl work—portraits and advertisements, some photomontages—as well as some of what they had made in London.

“How old were you?” asked the editor.

“A mere child,” said Charlotte.

“And the other photographer?”

“Also a child.”

“This work,” he said, “it’s new, I think, and exciting.”

As they returned to the party, the editor said, “May I call on you next week? I have an idea that I’ve been wanting to do for some time, and you may be just the person I’ve been looking for.”

Charlotte agreed to meet, since she still had some months to figure everything out before she could arrange her journey to New York.

Idylls of the Queen,
edited by Charlotte’s dinner guest, was a magazine for the middle-class Argentine housewife, the one who had aspirations and longings but who could use practical tips on cooking, cleaning, dressing,
taking care of her husband, and child rearing. The editor wanted to run a column called “Psychoanalysis Will Help You.”

“I want to get someone who knows something about the subconscious—we’ll call him a psychiatrist, even though he won’t technically be a psychiatrist. We’ll ask our readers to send in their dreams, and our ‘doctor’ will offer analyses of the dreams.”

“Am I the psychiatrist?” asked Charlotte.

“No. You’re the photographer. Your pictures already have that strangeness, that feeling of the fantastic.”

“Whose dreams?”

“Those of our readers. You know, the ‘typical Argentine housewife’—you’ll show her her own dream.”

The title of the magazine section was

“Les Son los Sueños de la Ordinario Una alma de Casa”
(Such Are the Dreams of the Everyday Housewife)

The stars can line up for an artist in ways she could never have imagined; Charlotte Blum’s assignment at
Idylls of the Queen
was such a celestial occurrence. Her photomontages were the visual embodiments of all the anxieties and fears of the middle-class Argentine housewife: the lack of identity, the loss of autonomy, no control over one’s fate, the confinement that is home, husband, and child. The worry over society’s reaction to a woman who isn’t happy being married, who may never have desired marriage, who may not want children, or think she is a good wife or mother, or maybe she loves other women. Maybe she wants something other than this life, even if it is a very good life; wrestling those feelings of acting on the stage of another’s life. Imagine going through your day thinking,
This is not me.

Charlotte made photomontages of miniature women putting giant keys in giant doors that opened on deserted, winding mountain roads. A woman gazes at herself in a hand mirror, only to see her husband looking
back at her. A baby lives in an enormous lily held by his mother’s oversize hand, with horses in the background, calmly grazing. A kneeling woman is the base of a lamp (a lampshade held over her head as if to cover her) while a man’s hand turns her light on and off. A secretary is shocked to look away from her typewriter and see that her legs have turned into trees, her feet roots sunk into the floor. Another woman kneels inside her own gigantic open mouth, her hands resting on her teeth.

A woman is stung by a huge wasp. A married couple skate on top of crashing ocean waves. A woman is tied to a chair by a web of string.

Women beseech ancient Greek statues, or try to play a violin with a broom instead of a bow, or try to escape a vat of soap suds, climbing a washboard as if it were a ladder and unable to get traction.

Women in birdcages, sitting on living room chairs. Women window-shopping for husbands posing with price tags dangling from their wrists. A biplane crashes and burns in a garden. A paper boat holds a woman sailing out to sea. The salon drapes are made up of a dozen eyes. A ladder going up leads only to a ladder going down.

There are recurring images of the solar system, boulders, mountains, roads, mirrors, musical instruments, men, violent seas, flying, and falling.

Anselm Cooper was the real name of magazine’s “psychiatrist,” a sociologist called Dr. Roberto Obermann. He was the man who told the women what their dreams meant—it was as if the editor of the women’s magazine still didn’t quite understand that a man interpreting a woman’s subconscious was not that different from the liberal-minded husbands of Charlotte’s friends allowing their wives’ careers as long as they didn’t interfere with their wifely duties. The real dream interpretation was Charlotte’s. Only her photographs captured the experience with whimsy and a wink and a touch of sadness for anyone looking closely enough; it all comes tumbling out.

And the readers of the magazine loved them.

 • • • 

Six months passed in which Charlotte had the success she didn’t even know she wanted until it finally found her. The column was renewed
for another year, announced at a party given in honor of Charlotte Blum and Anselm “Dr. Roberto Obermann” Cooper. The upper-class women readers were clamoring for Charlotte to take their portraits. A handful of companies, looking to change their images, came calling. Charlotte spent her days taking pictures to cut and paste into her montages, as well as searching for images in newspapers and magazines. She thought of Hannah Höch, the artist she and Ines loved, as she looked and cut and looked and cut.

She wondered why it was that a woman’s life—whether it’s a single life or a general experience—could so effortlessly be told using collage. As if women could never be anything but the sum of their parts. The products of their many desires.

“Are you going to New York?” Ignacio asked, holding what Charlotte knew was a letter from Ines, the one where she told Charlotte that she had found the perfect studio. Maybe they could even live there, like in Berlin, like in London (the first and second times). Rainier Ermler would envy the natural light. Seeing Ignacio with the letter was a relief. It also scared her. “God, don’t make me ask you a second time,” he said.

Charlotte said nothing as she thought about the previous six months and the unexpected collision of her decision to be with Ines in New York and her national fame in Argentina. She knew that she loved Ines, but she also loved making her photomontages of female fears and fantasies. She liked being known, liked being taken seriously as an artist, and to leave Buenos Aires would be to leave the demand for her work and start all over. She had known what it felt like to have zero interest in her work, she knew the silence of the telephone—and now she knew the thrill of the flip side of that silence. Could she go back to that place where no one called and no one cared?

“Have you thought about Barrie?” asked Ignacio, still clutching the letter. “Have you thought about me?”

She thought about them more than she thought about her photography, but only slightly. It was her secret shame that, once she was a wife
and mother, those roles didn’t eclipse her passion for her work. Who can say why we love the things, or the people, that we love? At a point very early in her life—before Ignacio, Barrie, Ines—she fell in love with the camera, and everything since then had been a way of integrating her love of Ignacio, Barrie, Ines with that original love. And guilt? Always guilt.

“Ignacio,” said Charlotte.

He opened his hand, the letter fluttering to the floor. “You’ll think me slow, but I didn’t know always about you and Ines.”

She went to him. Placed her hand on his arm.

“You’d think I’d stop loving you, knowing that you didn’t love me.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Even without Barrie, I still want you. Even with the other women, I’ve still wanted you.”

Theirs was never a grand love affair, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t love. And she appreciated his discretion when it came to his other women—not many, not serious, not yet—often hoping that he would find what he didn’t have with her and also dreading that he would find it.

“I thought you knew,” she said.

“I don’t even know my own heart, so how am I supposed to know yours?” he asked her. “I know you hate being a wife.”

But she didn’t hate being a wife. If she hated it, she would’ve hated it with Ines too. She didn’t hate being a wife any more than she hated being a mother. What she hated was the way that wife, mother, and photographer created an unsolvable equation. What she hated was trying to solve the mathematics of her various roles. Factoring in her love and artistic connection to Ines was nearly impossible. Factor in fame and success, and she was no longer certain about anything.

She saw Ines on the deck of the ship as she left London. She saw Ines standing on the dock as Charlotte gazed down at her from the ship taking her to Buenos Aires. She imagined leaving Barrie, or Barrie leaving Ignacio. She imagined herself leaving Ignacio, realizing how much she would miss him. She imagined leaving the photography career she’d always wanted only to realize that she knew what it was like to be without Ines, just as she knew what it was like to be away from Ignacio,
but she never knew what it was like to walk away from the thing she had most wanted. Years later she would say, “Photography allowed me to make the world and be in the world.”

“You still haven’t answered my question: Are you going to New York?”

Ines Ines Ines, she thought, will understand better than anyone that a woman always has to choose.

The Morning Was Marked by the Reappearance

The eighth morning of Miri Marx’s stay in Rome was marked by the reappearance of a young woman with whom she had shared the hotel bar that doubled as a breakfast room for the first four mornings, before the girl’s absence on the fifth. Miri’s breakfast companion had caught her attention for a couple of reasons, not the least of which was the young woman’s complete lack of interest in anyone, or anything in the room as she sat, for four mornings in a row, reading the paper and drinking her coffee. From time to time, Miri glanced over at the girl as she drank her own espresso, tearing off little bites of her breakfast roll and working the crossword puzzle from an English-language newspaper, her Leica another object on the morning table, with the girl never glancing back. A tourist, Miri reasoned, would not be so completely disengaged from her surroundings.