Lisette was seventy-one when I met her.
I was living with my family in Chattanooga. I didn’t know how to successfully develop my own film and was mailing it to Modernage lab in New York. I had been making photographs for five years. A Christmas party at Modernage happened to coincide with a time that my husband and I were in the city. Someone at the party suggested I speak to Henrietta Brackman, a photographers’ consultant.
I contacted Henrietta and took two suitcases of work to show her. She suggested that I study with Lisette Model. Lisette’s name meant nothing to me until Henrietta told me that Diane Arbus had been her pupil. Lisette agreed to meet, telling me to bring all my photographs. We met in a room at the Plaza Hotel. She spent six hours looking at my pictures and slides. After midnight, when we were both exhausted, she agreed to give me private lessons.
Her absolutism could be terrifying, but it was bearable because she gave so much.Lisette always dressed in the basic colors of black-and-white photography: black, white, red, and green. The white walls of her basement apartment had touches of the same colors in various shapes and forms, along with slivers of mirror. I could not get enough of her. She always spoke with total authority. She never wavered. She was demanding. Her absolutism could be terrifying, but it was bearable because she gave so much. She had limpid, piercing eyes that seemed to look through you. She never hesitated to ask jolting questions and to make personal commentary.
Every time I went to New York with Jay, I had a private lesson with Lisette.
She taught me to be bold.
She taught me to follow a path of honest expression.
She taught me to live with unpopularity.
To reach the raw, receptive state which could lead me to passionate connections.
Lisette appreciated what I did. A few weeks before she died, she came to my apartment and looked at my new work. As always, she was encouraging.
Go for what attracts you. One picture from a trip is enough.
I peeled back the outer coatings of my being.
*
A group of us from the League of Women Voters offered to help on election day. Bookie Turner, the police commissioner, called a meeting. He looked around at the gathered group and asked, How are we going to roll the vote on election day? We didn’t know what he was talking about but we found out that it was customary to pay off drivers who took voters to the polls. After voting, the voters were given cash or alcohol.
My husband, my son, and my daughter worked in the Jimmy Carter campaign. As a result, Jay was appointed to a sub-cabinet position by President Carter. He was named Administrator of the General Services Administration. Ron Kessler, an investigative reporter from the Washington Post, gave Jay background information about the extensive corruption within the GSA. Jay did not discuss his intentions with the Carter administration but he encouraged Kessler to expose the situation in a Washington Post article. After a picnic on the White House lawn, Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, came close to me and whispered in my ear, Watch out, don’t let him fall.
It was already too late.
My husband was sent to pasture by Carter and then castrated by his cousins.Two years before the end of Jay’s term, President Carter asked for his resignation. Jay was not concerned. He expected to return to the family business in Chattanooga. However, his cousins deposed him like a king of old while he was away doing battle in Washington. He so trusted them that he had made no contract with them regarding the terms of his absence and return. After his resignation from the GSA, the cousins told him they didn’t need him in the business.
My husband was sent to pasture by Carter and then castrated by his cousins.
*
Jay lost his position in the company as well as his closest family
We moved to Manhattan where we had no family or community support
My daughter, a journalist, was working in Africa, meeting and interviewing women leaders
My son was watching the whales in Canada Jay worked with some Manhattan business
associates He was on dialysis twice a week for polycystic kidneys After each treatment,
his old personality returned briefly but the blood poisoning soon affected his brain
No matter how bad things got, he refused to talk to a therapist
He fell into a deep depression and never came out of it
We were alone and all of his crazy rage was vented on me
The marriage was an empty shell
I had chest pains
I had discovered pot and was smoking alone at night
I thought I might go mad, jump out a window, or kill us both
Jay wouldn’t hear of a separation It was all or nothing
I could no longer live with him and survive
The marriage had to end
During those hard days, deep frown lines appeared on my forehead
The dialysis machine, pride of modern medicine, precipitated the tragedy of his life and mine
It kept him alive, but reduced him to a hollow, enraged walking cadaver
It almost destroyed me
Before the divorce, a letter to both of us arrived
Lillian Feinstein, wife of the Chattanooga rabbi, wrote,
Jay, you’ve had a wonderful career It is time for you to support Rosalind as she pursues her work
Peggy Collins, recently divorced, had always loved Jay I told him to date her
The day after our divorce, Peggy and Jay married
He died seven months later
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From A Woman I Once Knew by Rosalind Fox Solomon. Copyright © 2024. Available from MACK.
