Middlesex

I can feel how the house changed in the months leading to 1933. A coldness passing through its root-beer-colored bricks, invading its rooms and blowing out the vigil light burning in the hall. A cold wind that fluttered the pages of Desdemona’s dream book, which she consulted for interpretations to increasingly nightmarish dreams. Dreams of the germs of infants bubbling, dividing. Of hideous creatures growing up from pale foam. Now she avoided all lovemaking, even in the summer, even after three glasses of wine on somebody’s name day. After a while, Lefty stopped persisting. My grandparents, once so inseparable, had drifted apart. When Desdemona went off to Temple No. 1 in the morning, Lefty was asleep, having kept the speakeasy open all night. He disappeared into the basement before she returned home.

Following this cold wind, which kept blowing through the Indian summer of 1932, I sail down the basement stairs to find my grandfather, one morning, counting money. Shut out of his wife’s affections, Lefty Stephanides concentrated on work. His business, however, had gone through some changes. Responding to the fall-off in customers at the speakeasy, my grandfather had diversified.

It is a Tuesday, just past eight o’clock. Desdemona has left for work. And in the front window, a hand is removing the icon of St. George from view. At the curb, an old Daimler pulls up. Lefty hurries outside and gets into the backseat.

My grandfather’s new business associates: in the front seat sits Mabel Reese, twenty-six years old, from Kentucky, face rouged, hair giving off a burnt smell from the morning’s curling iron. “Back in Paducah,” she is telling the driver, “there’s this deaf man who’s got a camera. He just goes up and down the river, taking pictures. He takes the darndest things.”

“So do I,” responds the driver. “But mine make money.” Maurice Plantagenet, his Kodak box camera sitting in the backseat beside Lefty, smiles at Mabel and drives out Jefferson Avenue. Plantagenet has found these pre-WPA years inimical to his artistic inclinations. As they head toward Belle Isle he delivers a disquisition on the history of photography, how Nicéphore Niepce invented it, and how Daguerre got all the credit. He describes the first photograph ever taken of a human being, a Paris street scene done with an exposure so long that none of the fast-moving pedestrians showed up except for a lone figure who had stopped to get his shoes shined. “I want to get in the history books myself. But I don’t think this is the right route, exactly.”

On Belle Isle, Plantagenet pilots the Daimler along Central Avenue. Instead of heading toward The Strand, however, he takes a small turnoff down a dirt road that dead-ends. He parks and they all get out. Plantagenet sets up his camera in favorable light, while Lefty attends to the automobile. With his handkerchief he polishes the spoked hubcaps and the headlamps; he kicks mud off the running board, cleans the windows and windshield. Plantagenet says, “The maestro is ready.”

Mabel Reese takes off her coat. Underneath she is wearing only a corset and garter belt. “Where do you want me?”

“Stretch out over the hood.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah. Good. Face against the hood. Now spread your legs just a bit.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah. Now turn your head and look back at the camera. Okay, smile. Like I’m your boyfriend.”

That was how it went every week. Plantagenet took the photographs. My grandfather provided the models. The girls weren’t hard to find. They came into the speakeasy every night. They needed money like everybody else. Plantagenet sold the photos to a distributor downtown and gave Lefty a percentage of the take. The formula was straightforward: women in lingerie lounging in cars. The scantily dressed girls curled up in the backseat, or bared breasts in the front, or fixed flat tires, bending way over. Usually there was one girl, but sometimes there were two. Plantagenet teased out all the harmonies, between a buttock’s curve and a fender’s, between corset and upholstery pleats, between garter belts and fan belts. It was my grandfather’s idea. Remembering his father’s old hidden treasure, “Sermin, Girl of the Pleasure Dome,” he’d had a vision for updating an old ideal. The days of the harem were over. Bring on the era of the backseat! Automobiles were the new pleasure domes. They turned the common man into a sultan of the open road. Plantagenet’s photographs suggested picnics in out-of-the-way places. The girls napped on running boards, or dipped to get a tire iron out of the trunk. In the middle of the Depression, when people had no money for food, men found money for Plantagenet’s auto-erotica. The photographs provided Lefty with a steady side income. He began to save money, in fact, which later brought about his next opportunity.