Something to Do with the Hands

I once paid a man to take a photograph of me looking as though I didn’t need money. It was for the back of a book. I had brought a jacket, and I kept the receipt in its pocket. If literature failed to require the jacket after all, I wanted my options open.

The photographer had a stool and a gray background. He told me to sit. Then he told me how.

My hands were the difficulty. On my knees they looked submissive. Folded, they suggested I had been waiting a long time for a doctor. One under my chin was out of the question. I knew that photograph. A man pressing his own face upward while the thoughts presumably accumulated on top. I had seen it on books I had put down without opening.

“Just let them hang,” he said.

I let them hang. Now I looked unemployed.

He was patient. He moved a light. I was beginning to sweat in the jacket, which complicated the matter of the receipt. We were both working, but only one of us knew what a finished job would look like.

Between photographs I could move. I could wipe my mouth, pull at a cuff, reach for the glass of water. My hands became tolerable again. They had small jobs. Then he would tell me to hold it and I would have to occupy the position they had reached, like a man ordered to live in a railway station.

Six fingers ought to be an easy thing to settle. Stop the picture, count, announce the machine. I like a task which can be completed before anyone asks whether I know how to draw.

But suppose the extra finger is arriving, or leaving. A hand opening like a fan, with part of the journey still visible.

I can imagine a drawn man waving from a train. I want his hand to open enormously. I want it to be too much hand for his wrist. He has seen somebody on the platform and there is very little time. A respectable anatomical specimen would be no use to him. He is trying to throw the greeting out through the window before the train carries off his arm.

Perhaps the person on the platform doesn’t wave back. Perhaps it is the wrong person. There is plenty to draw after that.

What I don’t want is to spend the departure measuring him for gloves.

At readings I used to keep one hand on the table beside the pages. The other had to turn them. This seemed a sensible division of labor until I reached a passage I wanted somebody to like. Then the free hand would rise. I wasn’t conducting anything. I was asking for something, and the hand had gone ahead of me to ask.

I would notice it in the air and bring it down too quickly. The audience had now been shown an unsuccessful little event that wasn’t in the manuscript. Nobody needed to be a connoisseur. I had practically underlined it for them.

A drawing could have made something of that. Let the hand go on rising while the man below it tries to appear unconcerned. Let it become an enormous begging flower. It would be ugly and accurate. A photograph of me with four perfectly accounted-for fingers and a thumb would have been much kinder.

The photographer finally found a position he liked. He showed me the picture on his camera. The jacket had done its work. There was a shadow along one side of my face which suggested that part of me was unavailable to casual inquiry. I was pleased by this. I hadn’t known a lamp could provide privacy.

My hands were outside the picture.

I bought the photograph. I sent it off and returned the jacket. The book came out. In the little square on the back I looked settled, a man who had said what he intended to say and could now be consulted about it. I tried to let him handle the business end.

But people brought the book to readings. They wanted a signature under the title, which was reasonable enough. I had sold them the thing. The least I could do was interfere with a clean page.

One evening a woman held her copy open while I wrote. She kept her finger against the paper to stop it closing. I had made the first letter too large and was trying to reduce the rest of the name without making the retreat obvious. Her finger moved. I followed it with the pen and nearly wrote on her nail.

“Sorry,” she said.

“It’s your book.”

She laughed and took her hand away, and the cover began to close. I caught it with my wrist. For a moment we were both holding the thing, neither of us where we had meant to be, while the ink dried.

Original interviews: Sylvain Chomet Denies Using Generative AI in Dior Animated Film.

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