Eight Girls Taking Pictures (43 page)

“I was born in Los Angeles, an only child. My father makes mechanical toys that no one ever buys for their children because they are extraordinary, so much so that adults collect them like art. And they’re not wrong, by the way. They move and make noise and are as delicate as Swiss watches.”

Daisy was tossing her orange peel toward the pigeons in the Borghese Gardens, where the girls sat in the shade, eating a late lunch. They were too hot to do much of anything, and spent by all the pictures and posing. “What type of toys?”

“Birds. Every sort of bird you can imagine.”

“With feathers?”

“Painted metal and enamel work. Also, transportation conveyances—boats, ships, airplanes, trains, cars.” Miri ate a slice of orange. “And my mother’s career—”

“Your mother?”

“My parents have some different ideas about a girl’s life. Independence being one of them.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“As you know, the rest of the country hasn’t caught up.”

The girl placed her head in Miri’s lap as she finished off her orange. “My mother’s life would be ruined if anything changed for women. She’s the mistress of the house, the lady of fund-raisers, a deb who went to Vassar, coming out to the world only to go back in. She may as well live in a tower with servants.”

“Where is her tower?”

“Greenwich, Connecticut. And she’s fine with her gilded cage, except when she’s sober, which is nearly never.”

Miri’s family had enough money but were never rich, she said.

“Oh, so your people decided to be happy instead.”

“As romantic a view as that is, no, but they are happy.”

“And your mother’s not a Los Angeles housewife?”

Miri said, “She started out sewing the occasional costume for the silent movies. Then she began dress and costume design, and everyone loved her work. Esme Esme of Hollywood. She’s won two Oscars and has been nominated for four.”

“I can’t tell you how impossibly glamorous it all sounds.”

“Having a socialite for a mother isn’t exactly being invisible.”

“Did I mention that my mother modeled during college?”

“My parents gave me my first camera when I was a kid, and I would go with my mother and take pictures of the actors and actresses. I even went to a few movie star funerals.”

“Taking pictures?”

Miri shrugged. “I know. What a ghoul.”

“I went to art school. Where I had an ill-advised thing with my professor.”

“An ill-advised thing?”

“A misunderstanding. It was never what it appeared to be, though that didn’t seem to matter when I got thrown out. He, on the other hand, kept his job. Of course.”

“Of course.”

“Did I care?” said Daisy. “No. I did not. I was happy to be out of that mausoleum. Then my aunt died and left me enough to travel on and,
voilà,
as they say.”

“What kind of art?”

“I was mostly a muse. A confession. It wasn’t only my professor who got me into trouble. I wanted to be an Abstract Expressionist, but I think I’m more of an architectural watercolorist. I like patterns. Crazy, huh?”

“And you like traveling alone.”

Daisy smiled.

“You know, I went from Los Angeles to San Francisco on my bicycle the summer I turned seventeen. I took pictures every day.”

“Geez, now I’m impressed. I’ve been knocking around Europe since April, but it’s a little different to be a twenty-four-year-old woman with a trust fund than to be a kid on a bike.”

“Yeah, but don’t you think the impulse and the pleasure are the same?” said Miri.

“What are you doing in Rome?”

“I was returning from Jerusalem, where I was doing a magazine assignment, and was thinking of stopping in Paris, only I came to Rome first and haven’t wanted to leave. So here I am.”

“And you like to see where the day takes you.”

“And you?”

Daisy got up, smoothed her summer skirt. “I’ll be here until I’m not.”

The girls collected their things to head back to the hotel.

Miri asked for her key and waited for her friend to ask for hers. When she didn’t, Miri said, “Aren’t you going to your room?”

“I don’t stay here.”

“But . . . I saw you . . .”

“Oh.
Mon petit chou.
”

When Miri said nothing, Daisy continued, “It’s a French endearment. He’s my little French endearment who likes meeting me here.”

“And at the Pantheon,” said Miri, “about a week or so ago? The day before we met.”

“Maybe,” said Daisy. “It’s possible.”

Miri remembered the day in Trastevere and the handsome boy. And the day Daisy stood her up. She admired the American girl’s unapologetic romantic life, which lacked the coyness and artifice of popular girls back home.

The girl smiled. “I think you got some good pictures today. You’ll have to let me know how they turned out.”

“Wait,” said Miri as Daisy headed for the door. “I don’t know your last name.”

The girl turned slightly to face her, still moving a little. “You first.”

“Miriam Marx.”

“Like the brothers.”

“Well, you know, without the horn and double entendres.”

Daisy said, “You’ll think it’s invented.”

“Is it?”

“Let’s just say my very educated mother had a sense of humor.” The girl now stood perfectly still. “Miller.”

“Oh, God, Daisy Miller? Let’s hope your mother didn’t have the gift of prophecy as well,” said Miri, laughing.

“Isn’t it a kick in the pants? Years from now you can tell your friends that you went to the Colosseum with an American girl named Daisy Miller who had Roman fever, and no one will believe you.”

 • • • 

Miri, unlike Daisy with her trust fund and time on her hands, was a working girl. She’d told the truth about the magazine assignment in Jerusalem but neglected to mention that her leisurely trip home had a purpose other than recreation and his name was David Rose.

She’d met David at an impromptu exhibition of student work held in a New York gallery of no importance to the larger art world. Every month, a group of students of various ages, who shared a largely unloved brownstone in the Village, cleared all the furnishings out of the high-ceilinged living room–parlor–dining room, slapped a fresh coat of white paint on the walls, and hung an art show. Someone played cello at the opening. Or a kind of jazz drum solo with brushes. No normal adult would be able, even as part of a group, to pull together any sort of art show this often, but they were young and enthused and had it down to a science. The art was usually the work of someone who would never be great, with the occasional appearance of work that would one day be great; work with a glimmer, a spark, a line, a color, a form that could give the game away, but for that you must have the other half of the art equation, which is a discerning audience. One cannot be its best without the other.

These art shows were as much rent parties (asking for donations at
the door) as they were exhibitions. The spirit of the enterprise (along with music, the cello eventually giving way to records; alcohol being accompanied by reefer) often had the effect of people meeting and believing themselves, even if just for one night, “in love.”

It was in this art-scented atmosphere that Miri met David Rose, an aspiring filmmaker. Mutual love of movies drew them together, prompting them to speak in the shorthand of the film-besotted. It was kismet that David should meet someone with a mother who had distinguished herself in wardrobe design and was on speaking terms with almost everyone (especially the stars whom she measured and draped and knew intimately), and who saw the world as a story. It was kismet that Miri would meet a young man who loved movies and filmed stories as much as she and saw in her a kindred spirit who, by the end of their first night together, wanted to make movies with her.

Meeting one’s mate, Miri thought, was really a problem when one really liked traveling alone.

Their courtshipfriendshipcourtshipfriendship was exactly that: a thing that bounced from one sort of attachment to another then back again. Sometimes it was work that took over and pushed love aside, taking up all available space in each of their lives. It didn’t always happen in perfect symmetry; sometimes Miri was more caught up in work than David, and sometimes it went the other way. Often it made Miri happy to have both David and work, not to mention a man who understood her work. Other times, she was happier to have him as a friend, the romantic momentum stalled. Sometimes there was someone else. After all, she was twenty-seven when they met, and she had been on her own for a decade. During those years she had had the occasional encounter without anything blossoming into something more profound, everyone parting amicably. When she thought of what she loved, it was her work. People, too, but also her work, as if it was another lover she barely had enough time for.

Then came the Jerusalem assignment. Then came her decision to stop in Rome and Paris, just to make sure that she still liked traveling alone as much as she always had.

There had been no sustaining drama during the two years of their life of courtshipfriendshipcourtshipfriendship, and what Miri wanted to know was if there was sustaining love.

The day she left Israel, there, in her hotel mailbox, was a sterling silver charm bracelet of four sterling silver cameras, each with a tiny hinged back where one would load the camera, and a note that said,

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!

You really are beautiful! Pearls,

harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!

She recognized the opening lines from the Frank O’Hara poem “Today,” which David would recite to her—not the entire poem, which was only two verses—sticking only to the opening, which struck him as silly and joyous and because, as he said, he thought her beautiful.

The other lines he would recite to her were

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me that understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.

1959, New York City, Central Park West

Miri Marx was positioned at her dining room window, her Leica in hand, the camera trained on the Sheep Meadow of Central Park, across the street from her apartment. At fifteen stories up, Miri could shoot straight across, capturing the panorama of park and city skyline; or she could concentrate on the immediate view below, a section of street and sidewalk. On this day, it was the panorama of sky, structures, trees, and field.

It was a spring afternoon, with rain clouds gathering and bouncing light above and below, reminding her of the English countryside. The fullness of the leafy trees contrasted with the clean, angular geometry of city buildings crowding behind. The expanse of the empty meadow
spread out in front of the buildings and the greenery. Miri waited for the sun to shift ever so slightly before making three exposures.

Two months after Miri’s return from Rome she and David Rose quietly married, then spent their honeymoon in England, driving around the country, laughing more than she thought she could laugh, each in love with the other, and writing their first movie. It was the story of a nine-year-old boy who gets into a fight with some other boys on the street. As he miraculously pins one of them, the pinned boy blurts out that the first boy’s father has a girlfriend. The boy is shocked and disbelieving, except he realizes that he doesn’t really know his father’s life outside of their home.

The next day, Saturday, he follows his father all over New York City—jewelry store, flower shop, barbershop, ending up at the Plaza—beginning to believe that his father does have a girlfriend, only to discover his father rendezvousing with the boy’s mother. “Oh, my God, we’re already planning our escape from our own children,” joked David.

In England they had traveled on a budget, staying in guesthouses, eating plowman’s lunches in pubs, sometimes driving through the night to save on lodging. Though the landscape was gorgeous and the long walks they took led them from one picturesque place to another (evocative Hardy country, the Cobb at Lyme Regis, the lush Lake District, the ugly duckling beauty of the Brontës’ moors), the mark of the war could still be found. Not just in London but in Coventry, where they stayed one night, marked by new construction, the consequence of Luftwaffe bombings that had destroyed the historical city center.

Mostly, Miri loved her walks with David and the way the sky could go from cloudy to sunny to golden to purpleblue. It was the same quality of light and weather that she was looking at on this day in New York.

Miri and David’s movie about the nine-year-old boy garnered praise and awards at home and in Europe, inspiring young directors like Truffaut, influencing the New Wave, showing how a smaller story over the course of ninety minutes could be transformed into a love letter to a city. Miri believed her life to be so ideal it seemed one more Hollywood confection.

As Miri gazed out her window, she saw four teenagers, dressed up as if they were on a double date. She leaned out a little, her knee on the chair pushed up to the sill, framing the shot as the teens stopped to awkwardly light cigarettes, so desperate for adulthood and sophistication; she had just focused, when—