Lee tries to listen to them without their noticing. They speak English with a hard northern bite to it, and though normally she wants nothing more than to put Poughkeepsie behind her, on this night the familiar tones of her hometown have the pleasure of sinking into a warm bath. They are talking about a man named Diaghilev, who is the head of the ballet and has diabetes and lives alone in a nearby hotel. The woman seems afraid of him, but Lee can’t discern why; she clearly isn’t a dancer—even seated it is obvious she is stocky, and her ankles look like saucisson stuffed into her T-strap shoes.
“If you’re going to listen, you should join us,” one of the men says, staring at the ceiling.
Lee sips her wine.
“Hey, Lorelei,” he says, swiveling in his chair and snapping his fingers at Lee. “If you’re going to listen to us, you better join us.”
When she realizes he is addressing her, Lee is so surprised she is almost tempted to decline their invitation, but this is the thing she has longed for—a way to be a part of a world just beyond her reach. For a moment she is scared to let it happen. But her waiter has overheard them, and comes over to carry her drink for her, so the choice is made and she moves over to their table.
Once she is settled, the man who invited her leans toward her. “I’m Jimmy,” he says, “and this is Antonio, and this is my sister, Poppy.”
He holds on to the word sister for a beat too long. Lee knows she is to understand that Poppy isn’t his sister, but she has no idea why he would say she is.
Poppy turns her shiny head and looks at Lee. “We were talking about Diaghilev, but I’m bored of that. I want to talk about a scandal. Do you know any scandals?” Poppy purses her lips and a line appears near her mouth like a delicate question mark.
Lee glances around, suddenly hot from all the wine and food. What does she have to say that would interest them? Her mind goes blank as paper, and the only things she can think of are the physical objects around them: the ceiling light swaying on its chain, the scuffed wood floor, the candle on the table with its small waterfall of wax.
“You’re a scandal,” Jimmy says to Poppy, reaching over and putting his hand on her knee. She ignores him, holding Lee’s gaze, the challenge of her question continuing until at last she looks away and it is over. She turns back to Jimmy and he begins talking again, and just like that the tension eases and Lee is folded into their group.
“We were at the Ballets Russes,” Jimmy offers.
“We had to leave,” Poppy says. Lee wonders if they were kicked out because of how they were dressed.
Jimmy balances on the back two legs of his chair. “Poppy here has a very refined sensibility. She can’t bear to see anyone suffer. The director has a reputation—a temper, let’s say—”
Poppy cuts him off. “The dancer looked puffy. She’d been crying, I could tell. And Goncharova’s set was all wrong.”
“I liked it. I better have, all the time I spent helping her paint it.” These are the first words Antonio has spoken. He doesn’t take his cigarette out of his mouth.
Lee turns to him. “Oh, you paint!”
“No.” Antonio takes a huge drag and then crushes his cigarette in the ashtray and lights another in a unified and graceful motion.
“Antonio does automatic drawings,” Jimmy says, and Lee nods as though she knows what he means. Antonio just sits there, so Jimmy continues. “Incredible work. He really gets to the dream state. Time like gears unhinged. Screwy stuff.”
“The opposite of you,” Poppy says, looking at Lee again, and for a moment Lee is shocked, until she realizes that Poppy is pointing to her camera, which she has set on the table and is surprised to find is doing what she hoped it would do: signal her new identity. Lee reaches out and runs her fingers across its case, still cold to the touch in the warm room.
“I’ve been doing illustration work for Vogue,” Lee says, eager to offer up something that might seem intriguing. “They hired me when I moved here to sketch copies of the fashions at the Louvre.”
It is true, or was: for weeks Lee sat on her little folding stool in the Louvre’s east wing, copying the Renaissance objects they had on display. A lace cuff with a rose point pattern, a belt with a giant silver buckle. She sent her sketches to the magazine, care of Condé Nast, but when she did he told her that they couldn’t use them after all. We have a man in Rome now taking pictures, he wrote. Much faster, and such a good way to see all the details. Lee hasn’t been back to the museum since, and she hasn’t found a new job either.
“Fashion at the Louvre,” Jimmy drawls. “How bourgeois.”
Lee flushes, but before she can say anything, Antonio says, “Good light. I work there now and then.”
Lee thinks of the slanting shadows cast down from a bank of the museum’s windows, the silhouettes the statues threw onto the ground. “Yes,” she says, and when she catches Antonio’s eye he gives her a smile, warm and genuine. Jimmy twirls a finger in the air to call for more drinks, and Poppy shifts in her seat so that she’s facing Lee and starts to tell her a long, convoluted story about her childhood in Ohio, and just like that, Lee feels she has lifted a chisel to the wall of Paris and tapped the first crack into its surface.
Later. More wine. Poppy’s hand snakes along Jimmy’s thigh, the white tips of her manicure pale moons against his trousers. A warm flush that started in Lee’s stomach rises up to her neck, as if she is a carafe someone is slowly filling with hot tea. By the time the warm feeling reaches her chin, she is leaning back in her chair, her legs spread in an unladylike posture, laughing so hard at the things Jimmy is saying she forgets to hide her crooked front teeth with her hand. So when Poppy yawns, looks around at the restaurant, now half empty again, and says, “Let’s go somewhere—anywhere,” Lee is ready, doesn’t even care where they take her.
“Drosso’s,” Jimmy says with authority, standing and throwing a sheaf of bills on the table—how many Lee doesn’t know, but it seems to her a vast sum, more than enough to cover the cost of her meal—and then they are outside, and it is raining, so they pile into the back of a taxicab, pressed so close together that Lee can feel the stubble on Poppy’s exposed thigh as it pushes against her own. Antonio is wedged against her other side, staring out the window.
“Careful of your glass,” Jimmy says to Poppy, who has brought her wine into the cab and takes small sips each time they stop.
Poppy turns to Lee as if they are in the middle of a conversation, which maybe they are—Lee cannot recall. “A few weeks ago Caresse and Harry had us drive out to Ermenonville. They own a mill there, and we met in the field behind it. I got into Harry’s car and Caresse got into Jimmy’s car. Lavender leather seats, custom work. At first it was the wildest thing. One switch and you’re leading a gorgeous new life. Harry gave me his gardenia—”
Jimmy reaches over and grabs Poppy’s face roughly, pushing her cheeks together so that her mouth distorts into an unattractive pucker. He lets go after a moment and she takes a sip of her drink as if nothing has happened. She is quiet for the rest of the ride. Antonio pays no attention to them, and when Lee glances at him he is cleaning his fingernails with a penknife. Usually this would disgust her. He has huge hands, long tapered fingers. Artist hands, Lee thinks. The knife blade reflects the light of the streetlamps as they drive, and Lee watches him for a while, then looks out at the city, watery and indistinct through her own reflection in the cab’s fogged windows.
Drosso’s turns out to be an apartment on the third floor of an unremarkable building in Montmartre. The exterior gives no hint of the opulent world they find inside, rooms opening one into the next like brilliantly lit jewels, furnished with silk settees and Persian rugs and piles of embroidered satin cushions. Drosso himself greets them, arms outstretched, dressed in the strangest and most fantastic coat Lee has ever seen, a long burgundy jacket with attached silk butterfly wings that flutter behind him as he approaches. He kisses everyone on both cheeks, awkwardly long kisses.
“Magnifique,�
�� he whispers, and holds Lee at arm’s length and makes her twirl for him, ducking her under his wing and letting it brush over her like a curtain. When she has finished twirling, Drosso smiles and puts one arm around her and the other arm around Poppy and shows them to a dressing room, steps outside, and closes the door. A dozen brightly colored silk robes hang from hooks on the wall. Poppy begins disrobing immediately, piling her clothes haphazardly in the corner. At first Lee tries to watch her without looking as though she is watching her, but it doesn’t matter: Poppy is uninhibited, shimmying her way out of her garter belt and stockings the same way she must when she is alone.
When she sees Lee watching her, she says, “Everyone changes at Drosso’s,” as if that explains things. After debating it for a few more moments, Lee follows her lead. She fusses over the buttons of her dress, folds the garment extra neatly before setting it on the floor, and after she sees Poppy remove her brassiere she does the same, feeling as though she is back in the dressing room at a modeling studio. Once Lee is undressed, she chooses a sky-blue kimono and ties the belt tight at her waist, the silk cool and almost wet against her skin. She cannot bear to leave her camera—what if it gets stolen?—so she picks it up and tries to ignore how absurd she feels carrying it while wearing the robe.
As they emerge from the dressing room, Lee hears muted voices and low music coming from down the hall. Drosso is waiting. He leads them to the back of the apartment, to a library with gilded bookshelves, and then walks over to the shelves and pulls a lever. The bookshelf swivels open to reveal another huge room, this one painted deep eggplant, with several dozen people inside, most dressed in robes, reclining on sofas and the floor. In the center of the room is a low brass table with a hookah and a few opium pipes on it. A dark-skinned man sits cross-legged next to it, dressed in a brocade military jacket and a small close-fitting hat. He leaps to his feet as they come into the room and bows deeply. In a corner, a couple lies entwined, sharing sips from the valve of a hookah tube that snakes toward them from the table. The man’s hand rests in the woman’s hair, unmoving, and her eyes are closed. As Lee watches, the woman’s head starts to droop forward, and his hand clenches shut in her hair and holds her steady. The woman opens her eyes and smiles sleepily at him.
It is as if they have stepped out of Paris and into a Bedouin camp, the room a tent whose curtained walls muffle sound and throw great distorted shadows when people move around the space. A Moroccan screen in a corner half hides a kissing couple. One man lies facedown near the center of the room, so completely still Lee wonders if anyone is worried that he might be dead.
Lee does not know what to make of this place, these people, the thick smoke that hangs low in the room and curls around her ankles like a silent gray cat. Everything is disorienting: the smell, cinnamon and something harsher, a scent like unwashed bodies that makes her surreptitiously sniff her own damp armpits to make sure it isn’t her; the crouching man near the hookah, who has been staring at her since she came in and holds up one of the hoses each time she makes eye contact with him; the musician playing in the corner, a sort of low, droning cello that gives everything a nihilistic quality.
No one is paying attention to her, but Lee cannot stop thinking about herself: the way she’s cinched her kimono, the cumbersome camera case still clutched in her hand as if she is some kind of gawking tourist on Indian holiday.
She is drunk, but not drunk enough to consider smoking opium. That was her mother’s pastime—morphine, actually, the little blue vials lined up on the window ledge in her dressing room and glowing like sapphires in the sun. Lee looks around the room and sees her mother in all the drowsing women. “Go ’way, Li-Li. I’m tired.” There were times when her mother locked herself in her bedroom and ignored Lee for days at a time, emerging puffy and haughty, her eyes smeared with the remains of her makeup.
Lee has been high just once: she and her best friend, Tanja, tried laudanum together, and sometimes when she is sick she can still taste it at the back of her throat, cloves and bitter herbs and alcohol, the numbness of her tongue and the floating giddiness that came after it. She hated it, had panicked, as if her life were a balloon and she had just let go of the string.
Now she is trapped. Thinking of Tanja has made her miss her friend, and she wishes there were someone here who knows her. The bookshelf is closed behind her. Poppy has reunited with Jimmy, and Lee sees them embracing in a far corner. Drosso kneels next to a young man and helps him steady a needle into his arm. Only Antonio remains nearby, so Lee turns to him and he catches her eye and gestures to a bar cart she hasn’t noticed yet. She nods, grateful, and lets him fix her a glass. The truth is that she probably shouldn’t have more—she lost track of how much wine she had at the restaurant—but along with her nervousness she is filled with a reckless feeling.
Antonio brings her brandy, a man’s drink, and the bitter liquid cuts through the fug and instantly makes her feel better.
“You ever been here?” he asks her, his voice low. He was so silent at the restaurant it is a surprise to hear him ask a question.
Lee shakes her head. “I’ve only lived in Paris for a few months.”
“It’s not all just this.” Antonio gestures around them. “Drosso is an art collector. He’s very wealthy.”
“What does he collect?”
“Everything, I guess, though he loves modern work. He funds Littérature. That’s why we’re all here so often, suckling at the teat of our potential patron.” He nods his head toward a few men arranged around a hookah.
“All who?” Lee takes another swallow of the brandy, which is opening up her chest in a strange way, pulling like a hot knife through her breastbone.
“Éluard, Tzara, Duchamp. All the Surrealists. Here to channel the unconscious.” Antonio makes quotation marks in the air and smirks conspiratorially.
She knows these names, has heard them mentioned at New York parties, read them in literary magazines. Hearing Antonio say them is like feeling a key slide into a lock. “Do you know them?”
“Sure I do.”
The drone of the cello stops and Lee looks at Antonio, looks him straight in the face and realizes how attractive he is. His mouth is full, his lips dry, almost papery. His eyes are a beautiful soft gray, ringed with black lashes.
“Can you introduce me to them?” she asks, leaning toward him and wavering unsteadily on her feet. “I know them—I mean, I want to know them. I want to meet them.”
Lee is having trouble making sense, her words as wobbly as her legs, so she reaches out a hand and puts it on Antonio’s arm, hard and warm beneath his robe. She hears everything now that the music has stopped: the burble of the hookah, the click and hiss of smokers’ lighters over their pipes, the tink-tink of ice in her brandy glass. She takes another sip and then another.
“Now’s probably not the time,” Antonio says, his voice kind, and even though she tries to pull him in the other direction, across the room to where he said Duchamp is sitting, he gently leads her to an empty couch against a far wall and tries to take the brandy glass out of her hand. She won’t let him. She needs the cold crystal, the warming bite of the liquor.
“Can you get me another?” Lee asks him, and he looks at her for a while and then shrugs and does as she’s requested, trading her a fresh glass for her empty, and she lifts the new one to her mouth and takes a giant swallow.
“I’ll be right back,” Antonio says, or at least Lee thinks she hears him say it. In any case, he leaves her there, and the couch is deep and overstuffed and upholstered in a slippery fabric that’s just begging for her to slide down on it, so she finishes the new brandy and makes herself more comfortable.
Just before Lee thinks of nothing she thinks of this: That brandy is not just brandy. The voice inside her head is indignant, and then she passes out.
It could be minutes, it could be hours. Lee wakes up, still on the couch, her cheek pressed into a heavily embroidered pillow. She rubs at her eyes, opens them. Drosso stands ov
er her, his butterfly wings hanging at his sides and his big shiny face inches from her own.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Lee mutters, batting her hand at him as if she is brushing away a fly. She lifts her head and looks around the room for Poppy or Antonio but doesn’t see them anywhere.
“I must tell you a passionate secret,” Drosso says in French. Lee is too confused to understand him, so he repeats himself a few times until finally another man comes over and says in English, “He says he has to confess something to you.”
This man is smaller than Drosso, with thick curly hair springing away from his temples.
Drosso speaks to the man in rapid-fire French. He holds a champagne coupe in his hand and points at Lee, talking so quickly that even if she were fully cogent she wouldn’t be able to follow him. The smaller man laughs and looks at her.
“He says…” The man pauses, seeming to debate whether or not to say what comes next. “He says that he’s never seen such beautiful breasts. He says your breast is like a more perfect version of the glass he holds in his hand. He wants to draw it and then have it made so that he can drink champagne from it. He wants to drink champagne from your breast while touching your breast.”
Through the whole statement, Drosso nods in furious agreement. Lee sits up. Looks down. Her belt is loose. Her kimono gapes brazenly from sternum to hip bone so that even in her fog she knows that Drosso must have been able to get a good look at her. She clutches the kimono’s fabric to her chest, crunching the blue silk in her fist as tightly as she can, and then stands up and pulls the absurd robe even tighter around herself.
The small man is smiling at her, and though his expression is friendly and almost apologetic, Lee wants nothing more than to be far away from him.
“Please tell your friend,” she says to him, twanging her American accent as imperiously as she can, “that he will never touch my breasts, not if I was falling from a burning building and my breast was the only thing he could hold on to, to save me from dying.”
The Age of Light Page 3
