The night the photographer won the prize, she called the writer. From the bar where her colleagues took her to celebrate. A very prestigious bar in the country of the war zone, in a city big enough to be untouched by the violence, at least not visibly. One of those cities of money and bars and galleries and governments and five-star hotels, all over the world, that sit next to human atrocity. Later, she would send each of their friends their own framed print of the black-and-white photo. But that night the writer was the only person she wanted to tell. In a phone booth inside the bar. A phone booth with strange faux gold paneling all over the door and walls. A little golden box. And she was drunk as a monkey. Little bleating voice of an operator. Little buzzings and ringings. Crackling. Then, hello from America, voice mail.
Later, they would argue, the photographer and the writer, about the girl in the photo. What about her? the writer demanded. What became of her? How could you leave her to fate? The words would sting the photographer’s eyes and throat.
But in that booth, in that smoke-filled, not-American, crowded bar, she’d hit what was supposed to be the zenith of her career, and she felt . . . more empty than a shell casing. Having reached the only voice in the universe she ever loved—even just her voice-mail recording—all she could think was, What a voice. Even knowing there was no category for her love, or might never be back home in America, land of coupling, land of sanctioned marriage and two-person twined knots, land of tireless good-citizen living, land of the happy family, land of the free and the brave and the locked imagination, land of ignorant homeowner masses lined up in twos. Why can’t I just be gay, her head went, or why can’t we just live with the people we love and not worry about the sex, or why is sex such a big deal when it’s so cluster-fucked anyway, her head tumbling thoughts until she was cross-eyed.
“I’m sorry,” she said into the phone, and rang off.
As she moved back to her table of colleagues she thought, They will give her this. They will allow her this one night to act out. But tomorrow she will need the pumps and the black skirt and a crisp button-down white shirt, French or Italian, and her vinyl black hair captured in a tight ponytail. Because The New Yorker will be interviewing her by phone tomorrow. Because Vanity Fair will. All because of this award. The award.
I don’t feel anything.
Remember what Virginia Woolf said: Give back the awards, should you be cleverly tricked into believing they mean something. Do not forget that the door you are being ushered through has a false reality on the other side. Do not forget that the door is opening only on someone else’s terms, someone else’s definition of open.
Then someone pulled her cheek and the whole table seemed to burst into whooping laughter, so she released her mind, these endless thoughts, and slid back into the booth.
This drunk successful woman making her choices.
She wanted to take her clothes off. She wanted to start a revolution. She wanted to give the prize back. Instead, she wiped her mouth to the recognition and celebration and alcohol, and with a great, swollen swagger she raised her glass and offered a wrong-mouthed toast:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled mazzes . . . yearning to breathe free,
The wrejjed refffff . . . use of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tozzedome,
I lift my lamp be(burp)zide the golden door.
There she was, a towering woman with people looking up at her, toasting her, a woman who had peed upright, a woman falling back into applause and laughter and adulation and dessert. Would it end there? Or would her momentum do what it does with drunk successful women, catapult her toward some man who would come inside her, an American six-footer maybe, between her legs as if her legs were meant for that opening up, her pussy meant for that entering, and all night inside her would he maybe say, You are so great, oh baby, god baby, you are greatness itself, yeah baby, let me give it to you, and would he? Give it to her? As if that’s what she was made for, as if her body itself was brought to full height by the sexed-up flattery and hard prize of an American man?
Keep drinking.