Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear Read Online Free Page B

worse, the photos that in a sense made me, those self-portraits: they were torture.
    It’s all done with mirrors. And how. Have you ever really looked yourself in the eye? Your self-portraits are so stripped: of course you have. It’s part of what makes you so different from me. I hardly dare to catch my own eye.
    Maybe I’ve arrived too soon in my work. The journey, not the arrival, matters and all that. Gloria Shippen chose me for that “3 Under 30” show because of what she called the “authority” of those self-portraits. What Shippen Gallery, what the critics who boosted me along by singling me out for praise, what even those check-writing collectors who suddenly needed to own a Harriet Rose thereafter, what they all don’t know is that any so-called authority lies in the eye of the beholder.
    And I count myself as a beholder. I don’t mean to say my work isn’t good. It’s damned good. But time and again, when I was printing those pictures, I would see something in thedarkroom that I hadn’t seen when I was setting up those shots. I take credit for those things, but it makes me uneasy. How can I own those inadvertent plays of light or the random objects that made Sanford Schwartz analyze the Balthus references in my oeuvre, for God’s sake? Before last year I didn’t know I had an oeuvre. (Why does a Frenchman have only one egg for breakfast? Because one egg is
un oeuf.
) Has my life changed because
The New Criterion
loves me? I really don’t know. I really don’t even know with certainty about my own criteria for my work, old or new.
    In short, Benedict, my photographs mean more than I knew I meant. Does that make sense? Is this what art is?
    I think of my pictures as decisions about what to show, a diagnosis of what’s beneath the skin: a slice, a biopsy. A pathology report. It’s art that scares me.
    At the moment, I’m not sure I could ever do another series like those relentless mirror self-portraits. I know too much. By that I mean: I know how little I know. I could never put myself out there again like that. But in this month here I intend to call my own bluff. I mean to sneak up on myself, in those shop windows. I’ll be there, if you know where to look.
    But now it’s nearly noon. I’ve got to vacate the love nest. I wish I could hear your voice. I wonder if we have made a mistake, agreeing on this mutual meditative transatlantic silence. I wonder if I have broken the rules, in writing to you this way. I wonder if I will ever have the nerve to show you these letters or journals or whatever they are.
    I just took out the little red-striped-shirt portrait of you that I took two weeks ago. Oh, Benedict. Getting sentimental over you.
    Noon: Love you and leave you—

July 4
    I just realized the date—no big deal here—and picture you at the most uncompetitive tennis camp in New England, surrounded by rich children in tennis whites scarfing down hot dogs while you sweat over the grill. Luckies. They are sunburned and demanding. You are sunburned and patient. There is red clay staining your sneakers and the left pocket of your shorts. You wish you could have a beer. A camper with a bee sting cries. Smoke gets in your eyes.
    Benedict, do you remember everything? Absolutely everything that ever happened to you? In the exact words people used? I do, or at least I believe I do. It is only with you that I forget things, such as whether or not I have told you a joke already. (Frog goes into a bank. Did I really tell you that joke three times? That’s because I was dazed, able to let go. Very rare.)
    Certain experiences have a perpetual effect; if you drop a pebble into water, the outward ripples continue for a long time. Maybe they continue forever.
    Do you have dreams of falling that seem like memories?
    When you said you wanted to marry me, the night before I flew, I felt a rush of love for you and a kind of gratitude you cannot imagine. (You’ve got what gets me.) But I also felt a pang. I felt