The Wm. O. Sadlaw Photographic Studio and Gallery
With the eastern range of the Rocky Mountains in the near distance and the smell of creosote and horseshit mingling in my nostrils I sat on the flat rooftop, exposing prints and idly contemplating the great rectangles of glass that comprised the skylight of my studio. This was one of those rare occasions when my lost Maggie’s face surfaced unbidden in my mind’s eye, inspiring the slightest twinge of regret; the steel-sharp print slowly emerging before me of a scowling, bejeweled bulldog of a Denver matron seemed a rebuke to the memory of that evanescent visage. The day was bright and the temperature mild, and the mountains in the short distance looked close enough for a stroll. Ostensibly I was engaged in the making of prints for sale, but the printing-out paper in the frames required only direct sunlight and no attention from me, and in fact I sat cross-legged on the tar paper and basked, thumbing through Aeschylus and wondering how quickly I could rush the afternoon’s scheduled portrait sittings and be gone. Where I went didn’t matter to me, only that I went.
I didn’t look up as the hinges of the trapdoor announced the arrival of Lemuel, my housekeeper’s yellow-haired idiot nephew. She didn’t seem particularly to like him but had worked hard to make me hire him four months before when my previous helper set off for the mountains to prospect silver, and the boy’s eager industriousness made up for his lack of intellect. His eyes were tiny and close-set, and his mouth generally open slightly, and even when it was closed his lower incisors and canines showed against his upper lip, giving him the outward aspect of a particularly dim terrier. I hoped he would see me reading and understand that I didn’t want to answer his question, whatever it was.
“Mr. Sadlaw?” he said. “There’s two ladies downstairs want to see you about something.”
“Hell’s bells,” I said without looking up, concentration fractured. I stood and checked the progress of the prints in their frames, cursing. The boy cringed like a whipped pup at my quiet tirade, and I asked him what was the matter.
“Nothing, Mr. Sadlaw.” His voice had changed but it occasionally still shifted into the higher registers, usually when I was annoyed with him.
“I ever hit you, boy?” He shook his head no. “Why the hell do you always act like I’m about to, then?” He shrugged and scurried down the trapdoor. Upon hiring him I had been struck by his ripe odor, considerable even by the standards of Denver at that time. It called to mind a wound whose dressing badly wanted changing, and after three days working in close quarters I added to his weekly duties a bath, to be taken at Hinshaw’s Barber Shop down the street and put on my tab.
Following the wretch I found two women in the gallery, one of them examining the views in the box stereopticon, letting out little gasps at each new view. Like the studio, the gallery was skylit, and two rows of display counters ran along the walls. At the end of one, next to the stairway leading outside, was a piano, which the second woman had uncovered and on which she tinkled out an air I recognized as Chopin’s, though I couldn’t have named it. I noted with satisfaction their expensive dress and sauntered over to where the first one stood.
“Are you interested in arranging a sitting?” I asked, and she giggled.
“Not as yet,” she said. “We were anxious to inquire about the price of such a sitting.” She was tall and buxom, with an oddly fetching horsey quality and a tendency to overenunciate that seemed newly learned. At her bosom was a diamond brooch, and pearls dangled from her ears. Her petite friend at the piano was more conventionally pretty and less interested in having her picture taken, I thought. As the first of the two explained to me that any such expense would have to be approved by their husbands, the upright clock in the corner chimed two o’clock, time for my first sitters to arrive. The downstairs door opened and my customers mounted the stairs, as though they had been listening outside on the street for the chiming. I explained that I would have to be on my way and handed the lady a printed list of prices.
“Thank you, Mr. Sadlaw,” she said, each syllable slightly too clipped. “I shall discuss the matter with my husband, Mr. Forsyth.”
“I’ll look forward to seeing you both soon, then.” I bowed slightly and made my way with them to the entrance, where a stocky, bald-headed man stood next to a woman built like a broom, close to six feet tall and weighing, I would guess, no more than 120 pounds. They were both dressed for cold weather despite the warmth of the day, and I instructed the boy to begin the preparation of the plates.
When the couple had removed their outer garments they stood awkwardly, uncertain of where to stand or sit. She wore light gray silk with dark gray trimmings, as finely cut as could be had in Denver then, and despite her unusual frame looked quite handsome in the soft light of the early afternoon.
The studio had one glass wall in addition to its glass ceiling, and a series of thick, moveable black curtains. I adjusted the draperies until I had an agreeable light, then I had her sit down on a bench. I placed him behind her and instructed him to place his hand affectionately on the lady’s shoulder. She looked as though a large pink spider had crawled there, and he as though he were fondling a cadaver. As I focused I tried to lighten the mood with a joke or two, but the upside-down image on the ground glass didn’t get any happier.
“What’s the occasion,” I asked, thinking that a discussion might relax them a little. Instead his scowl intensified, and she turned away as though anxious to avoid provoking him further.
“We just want a goddamned picture to remember each other by,” the man said. “You hurry up and take it.”
At that moment Lemuel returned with the loaded plate holders; I ordered the boy upstairs to check the progress of the prints, smiled my most conciliatory smile at the curmudgeonly old bastard, and began taking pictures.
After the dyspeptic couple had gone and I had developed the plates, I prepared those for the next sitting and emerged from the darkroom. I was confronted then with a second couple, spooning like a pair of sixteen-year-olds on the upholstered bench opposite the piano, and it seemed a shame that the woman playing it hadn’t stayed behind to serenade them. As young Lemuel was engaged on the roof and they hadn’t seemed to notice me, I sat before the already exposed keyboard and gently began to coax “Beautiful Dreamer” from it. After a few bars I glanced over my shoulder and found them sitting bolt upright and embarrassed.
“Ready for your sitting?” I asked, and they both nodded. Despite their adolescent comportment they appeared to be in their thirties, the woman pretty and round-faced with corn silk hair and green eyes, the man heavy about the jaw, with wavy black hair and muttonchops. He wore a patch of white silk over his left eye, and when I moved them back into the studio he sat down and took it off. He seemed quite at ease as he extracted a box from his vest pocket and opened it to reveal an eye of glass. He stuffed the thing into its socket with a liquid pop while his wife, with no sign of squeamishness, tended to her hair. When their grooming was finished I arranged them together on a bench and asked them their preferences regarding pose and mood. He shrugged and she looked blank, and I suggested they move in closer to one another and look into one another’s eyes. When I had shot two of those I had them look straight at the camera, and then I amended the suggestion.
“Mr. Gill, why don’t you look over at her as she faces the camera?” It was less an aesthetic suggestion than a means to avoid wasting a negative on a grotesque pose that would result in no print orders. He understood my intentions better than I thought.
“Mr. Sadlaw, I don’t care a damn who sees I’ve got a marble eye.”
His wife nodded her enthusiastic assent. “I want to see his whole pretty face, if you don’t mind.” I shot the picture as requested, satisfied that I would sell it, and a few more besides that I wouldn’t have chanced without his blessing.
Finishing the plates in the darkroom afterward I found my thoughts wandering, for the first time in a very long while, in the direction of my old one-eyed friend Herbert Braunschweig of Cottonwood, Kansas. Over the years I had noted the town’s continuing presence on railroad maps as a stop on the milk run and nothing more; what had happened to any of its inhabitants after May of 1873 I couldn’t have said, nor whether I entered their thoughts at all, except as the killer of the town’s foremost citizen and, by extension, of its aspirations to greatness.
My third sitter of the afternoon failed to show up on time, and after half an hour’s wait I elected to leave. “What’ll I tell him if he shows up wanting his photograph made?” the boy asked.
“Tell him to take the sitting fee and invest in a goddamned timepiece,” I grumbled, straightening my necktie and preparing to leave. The boy was unsure whether to take me literally or not, and I clapped a friendly hand on his shoulder. “Or tell him I was called away by an emergency.”
The only emergency lay in the fact that the lady in question lived in Golden, ten miles away, and refused on principle to receive any unannounced suitor after the hour of five in the afternoon.
My housekeeper was just returning from the Chinese laundryman’s with the day’s clean load when I met her on the stairs, and made no response when I told her I wouldn’t be home for dinner. A widow of fifty-five winters, hard ones by the look of her, she didn’t approve of my courting habits, though she knew no details. She was round as a medicine ball, and in the course of her daily labors she regularly worked herself up into wheezing fits the sound of which terrified me; she assured me that they were nothing extraordinary and continued to work harder than any woman or man I ever saw.
Immediately upon arriving in Denver I’d advertised for a housekeeper; it had been years since I lived alone, and I knew I would require daily help in the running of the household if I were to get any work done. I was specifically looking for a woman of the least enticing physical type, with the hope of avoiding temptations that might lead to distracting complications, and Ralph Banbury, the editor of the Denver Bulletin and the owner of my building, had recommended Mrs. Fenster. She had worked in his house for some months before Mrs. Banbury decided she would be happier without her scowling presence and replaced her with a young Bavarian girl, whom Banbury bedded within the week.
Much later, in his cups, he admitted that if Mrs. Fenster’s brother-in-law hadn’t been one of the Bulletin’s pressmen, he would have joined the chorus of the town’s other papers in calling for her arrest upon the death of Mr. Fenster, ten years previous. Her story was that she had returned from a visit to her sister in Georgetown to find her husband shot to death in their bed, but the opinion of the U.S. Marshal was that she had come home and found him alive and well and in flagrante delicto with the lonely wife of the greengrocer downstairs. Her refusal to pantomime either shock or grief did little to help her case in the public’s mind, but neither the press nor the police ever succeeded in getting a word out of the other lady, who according to Banbury was so terrified of Mrs. Fenster that she left her husband and the state of Colorado six months later, never to return. Eventually the matter faded away without Mrs. Fenster ever having to spend a night away from her own blood-soaked bed, and a decade later the incident was largely forgotten.
Mrs. Fenster received three dollars a day from me six days a week (exactly twice what her sister’s boy collected), and on Saturdays she went off into the night with another sister who was even fatter and more dyspeptic than she was, returning Sunday evenings subdued and moodier than usual. I had no idea what they got up to apart from the suspicion that it involved church; every Saturday night before leaving she laid my good black suit out, and every Sunday she returned to find it still laid out, unworn.
I MADE MY way to the roof and then down via the ladder to the courtyard below, the quickest way to the livery stable on the street behind mine. The studio and gallery were previously operated by a melancholy Prussian by the name of Ernst Nielander who, after three quarters of a decade of operation in Denver, documenting the layers of its social sediment from the opium fiends and harlots at the bottom to the silver tycoons at the top, had found himself yearning to practice his craft in his suddenly peaceable native land. His desire to return was so strong that I was able to purchase the business as a going concern for less than it was worth; when he returned a year later, disillusioned and disappointed, and wanted to buy it back for the same price, I laughed in his face. He left Denver again and, so far as I know, was never heard from thereafter.
Though the building was nearly perfect for the purpose it generally served, several eccentricities of design made it a less than ideal place to live. Among these was an outdoor johnny that could be accessed only by a ladder from the rooftop, for no access to the rear courtyard was provided from the interior of the building. The arrangement’s only advantage was that it allowed me to exit the property via a gate behind the outhouse into an alley that ran between my property and the livery stable, though reentry via the gate was impossible.
It was nearly three when I drove my carriage out the door of the stable, bearing a bottle of nerve tonic, in case milady was still mad at me from last time, and foolishly dressed for the warmth of a spring day. When I reached Golden at 4:20 I was sorry for that, as there was still snow on the ground at that elevation, and the air on the drive up had chilled my face to what I imagined was a deep, salmon pink. I drove to a neat, two-story brick building among a row of similar structures, climbed down, and tied my animal to the post outside it, ignoring the clucking of a pair of passing women as they looked back and forth between me and the house with equal measures of disapproval. One of them muttered something that sounded like “harlot,” and I turned to face them directly. In my hand I held a garland of bluebonnets I’d stopped to collect on the way up; I separated two blooms and brazenly proffered them to the horrified ladies, treating them to my most disarming and ingenuous smile.
“Bel après-midi, n’est-ce pas, mesdames?” I said, and they hurried on their way, sputtering at the vile and dissolute ways of the heathen French. I strode to the door, lifted the upcurled trunk of its brass elephant knocker, and dropped it to our rhythmic signal: one, two, three, then half a rest before four and five. Priscilla opened the door and looked me up and down with mild contempt. Dressed and coiffed with her habitual demure elegance, she looked as fresh-scrubbed and wholesome as a minister’s wife on her way to teach a Sunday school class on chastity.
“I suppose you’ve come all the way from Denver looking for a piece of ass,” she said.
I had no answer to that question. The truth wouldn’t have been gallant and she would have seen through a lie, so I handed her the bluebonnets. She raised an eyebrow and frowned, but when I showed her the bottle of laudanum she moved aside to let me in.
Fifteen minutes later we were in her squeaking iron bed, hammering away at it like we’d only just met. She heightened my arousal with throaty cries that crescendoed and decrescendoed slowly, though whether expressing either real passion or a simple desire to gratify my amour propre only she knew. After such a long period of chastity the physical sensation of intercourse was nearly overwhelming, and shortly I discharged with a slightly piquant sensation what felt like a pint and a half of spunk. I resolved before withdrawal never to go that length of time again without a proper ejaculation. After we’d lain there for a while she spoke.
“You know I’ve been going to church, Bill?”
I sat up and took pains not to laugh. “You’ve seen the light?”
“Don’t be smart. I just go to be sociable.”
I thought about the biddies on the street and wondered what churchgoing ladies in Golden would welcome her in their homes. “Which church is that? The Methodist or the Baptist?”
“I take my carriage into Denver and go to the Presbyterian services and let it be known that I’m a widow. Last week some of the ladies invited me over to a tea.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“Well, for a bunch of ladies taking tea after church services the talk got pretty vile, I’ll tell you that.”
Now I did laugh. “How vile could it get?”
“I’m getting to that. One of the ladies was talking about a fellow from Denver who abandoned his wife for a banjo player.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Well, this fellow apparently traveled the country as a sort of saltimbanque, he’d go into saloons and do a little tumbling, then he’d play his banjo and pass the hat.”
“This is the fellow who left his wife?”
“No. The one who left his wife, left her for this banjo player here. Two gents, if you see what I’m getting at? So one of the ladies at tea manifested the same misunderstanding you did just now. But the more we explained it to her politely the more confused she got. And finally Mrs. Halliwell, the lady whose house it was, explained to her that the nature of the rapport between the two men was of . . . of love. Of a physical kind.”
I nodded again.
“And the poor thing just wouldn’t understand. I think there were several of them that didn’t, quite, either, but this one kept asking and asking until finally Mrs. Halliwell broke down and explained that the one stuck his pecker in the other one’s mouth.”
I was thinking right then that I’d have given a thousand dollars to hear that Mrs. Halliwell explaining to her poor demure friend about cocksucking. “She said ‘pecker’?” I asked.
“I think she said ‘manhood.’ Anyhow, having said it, Mrs. Halliwell brought up the fact that it’s illegal, putting your mouth on someone else’s reproductive parts.”
“No, it’s not,” I said, though I knew it was most places, and probably here as well.
“Yes, it is. The law went after these two fellows and not just because the one deserted his wife.” She took a deep breath and paused before expelling it. “Mrs. Halliwell, who was enjoying our ill ease, shocked the other ladies by saying there were women deviates who practice a form of the same vice. Pussy-licking. Well, if you don’t think that got them all indignant. Most of them thought she was having us on. So it got me thinking.”
“About me tonguing your pussy?”
She got red and looked off toward the doorway. “I don’t know of anybody else who does that. I’d never even heard of it until you did it to me that first night.”
“I thought you liked it,” said I, knowing perfectly well she did.
“I do.” She was quite flushed now. “But it’s not natural, is it?”
“Sure it is.”
“But it’s not. Where did you learn it, anyway?”
“A lady whose husband wouldn’t. He thought it was unnatural, too.”
“Well. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it. But I feel so ashamed, just lying there and feeling lips and a tongue on it. Think of what else goes on down there.”
I shrugged. “If you want me to quit it, I will.”
“No,” she said. “I’ve just been thinking, is all.” She sat up, as though just remembering something. “And where exactly have you been all these weeks without a word?”
“In Denver, taking pictures. You could stop by and see the studio sometime if you wanted.”
“I meant why’ve you not been by to see me?”
She sounded genuinely puzzled and a little wounded, and I wondered if she possibly could have forgotten the vicious tongue lashing she’d given me the last time I’d stopped by for a quick one. Among other things she’d expressed a wish never to see me again, a wish I’d promised to fulfill. I’d meant it, too, but I hadn’t counted on the effect of weeks of celibacy on my stability and resolve, or on the contents of my scrotum. I’d had no desire to patronize the whores on Market Street, and the sin of Onan, which practice had been my sole sexual release for so many weeks, never provokes a sufficient volume of ejaculate to properly evacuate the nuts. (I remain convinced that the inevitable putrefaction of that residual semen is the cause of what we used to call in the army “blue balls.”)
“You told me not to come back, ever,” I said.
She slapped her hand down on my chest, playfully, but hard enough to hurt. “I was mad at you, you stupid man. That doesn’t mean I truly didn’t want you to come back,” she said, in an absurdly coquettish tone for a naked woman speaking to a man who has recently had to extract one of her shortest and curliest poils from between his incisors.
I was about to dress and make my excuses, hoping to avoid another screaming fit, when a loud rapping came from the door downstairs: one, two, full rest, three four, full rest, five, six, and seven. Priscilla went rigid and sat straight upright, eyes wide and nostrils flared.
“What’s the matter?” I asked her, and she hissed to quiet me down, then crept to the window on her knees. She lifted the corner of the curtain, then turned back to me in a panic.
“Isn’t this Wednesday?” she asked.
“It’s Thursday,” I said, and she covered her mouth up with her hand. She kept shaking her head and crawled back to the bed. From outside came a cry, a man’s voice. “Cilla!”
I went over to the window and peered through the edge of the lace curtain. Downstairs at the door stood my friend and landlord Banbury. He stood patiently and didn’t act as though her failure to answer promptly was anything unusual. He consulted a pocket watch and continued to stand, facing the street.
“Well, for Christ’s sakes, it’s just Ralph,” I said with some relief, tempered by a growing realization of the complexity of the situation facing me. “I thought he came over on Tuesdays and Fridays.”
She shook her head. “Thursdays and Mondays, now.”
“No use getting into a knot about it. I’ll go let him in.” I was already half dressed and buttoning my shirt.
“Are you crazy?” she said, trying to whisper but betrayed by her anger into half shouting.
“What else do you want to do? Turn him away? Have me stay here and listen from the wardrobe while you make the two-backed beast?” I moved toward the door and when I took the knob in hand the pitcher containing the bluebonnets shattered on the wall next to the jamb, dousing me with water.
“Son of a bitch!” That was said loud enough for Ralph to hear, at least the last, explosive word of it, and I made my way quickly down the stairs.
She was close behind me but she stopped cold when I opened the door. “Evening, Banbury,” I said.
If he was surprised at the sight of me in his lover’s doorway at the hour of their regular weekly assignation, he maintained his aplomb. “Sadlaw,” he said, as nonchalant as if we had come across one another on the street.
“Come on in, I was just on my way. Cilla took today for Wednesday.”
“I see. Perhaps I ought to come back another time.”
“As I said, I was already on my way.” Peering around me he saw her on the stairs, her dressing gown hurriedly wrapped about her shoulders and her feet accusingly bare, her auburn hair winding damningly down past her shoulders. His grin grew tighter and I shouldered my way past him with a faint apology. I heard her door closing and the sound of shouting, followed by those of a heavy object hitting a wall or the floor and glass breaking. Her curio cabinet, most likely, and certainly at her own hand; whichever of them had upended it, though, it would be Banbury who bought its replacement after the fighting had given way to tearful apologies, declarations of love, and finally to urgent copulation, likely as not right there on the downstairs canapé. I climbed aboard my buggy, sorry for their trouble but happy to be temporarily drained of the source of my own.
I STOPPED AT the dining room of the Wentworth House Hotel for a dinner of steak and fried potatoes, then made a visit to the Occidental Hall to have a glass of beer and see the miners and prospectors get themselves fleeced at the gaming tables. I watched one prospector in particular lose spin after spin on the roulette wheel, dropping a dollar or more on each try. His face was dotted with fresh scabs that suggested he’d tried to save money by shaving himself after a long abstinence, and he grew slightly more crestfallen with each successive failure of his luck to change. I watched the operator, too, and the cruel glimmer in his eye each time the wheel slowed and refused again to hand the wretch a small win, defying the laws of probability; fortunately for him the prospector’s familiarity with mathematics was probably limited to the simplest arithmetic. After a while it stopped being funny, and I left the poor fellow to it and hoped he wouldn’t lose his entire fortune trying to prove a point about luck.