He bursts into laughter as Lee walks away from him. She goes toward the bookshelf but realizes she has no idea how to open it. With one hand still clutching her robe, she feels across the shelves with her other hand, desperately searching for a lever or knob or something that will let her out. But she is trapped.
“Wait,” the man says. “Wait.”
Lee looks around, feeling frantic. “How do I get out of here?” she asks a woman who lies nearby, eyes closed. The woman doesn’t respond.
The man has followed her. He reaches for a small gold handle on the bookshelf, and it slides open easily. As she moves toward the opening, he gently circles her wrist with his hand.
“He’s bent,” he says, gesturing at Drosso. “He’d never try anything with you, or with any woman. Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s all just silly. Theatrics.”
Lee shakes her head no.
“Who are you?” he asks.
She shakes her head again. She doesn’t want to tell him her name, doesn’t want him to know another thing about her.
“It’s all right,” he says. “You’re fine. I’m sorry he scared you.”
“I’m not scared. I just want to leave.”
“I understand. If you ever need anything, you can look me up. I’m Man Ray.”
The pomposity of his statement—not “My name is Man Ray,” but “I’m Man Ray,” as if there isn’t a chance in the world she wouldn’t know of him—astounds her. True, she does know of him: his photography appeared in Vogue right next to her modeling spreads. He is as well-known as Edward Steichen or Cecil Beaton in the fashion world—she heard his name mentioned at many parties before she left New York.
Man Ray reaches into his coat pocket—it is only now that she realizes he is not wearing a robe—and hands her a small card with his address printed on it. All Lee wants is to leave, to be alone someplace where she can pretend none of this ever happened, so she says thank you and takes the card and turns away, walking out as quickly as she can without looking as though she’s running.
It isn’t until she has made her way back to the dressing room, found her clothes and put them on with fumbling fingers, taken a cab all the way back to Montparnasse, and is in her own cold bed, the coverlet pulled up to her chin and tucked hospital-tight around her body, that the black humor of the situation hits her. All these months spent hoping to meet other artists, and she meets Man Ray at an opium den, where she is too embarrassed to do anything but run away. Alone, she cringes at the memory, until she has another thought, much more disturbing: her camera, left behind on the couch in her hurry.
Chapter Two
It is not until her camera is gone that Lee begins to understand how much she has grown to love it. For it is truly gone: the next day, she walked the six kilometers back to the apartment in Montmartre, found the door with its elegant bellpull, clenched her hands until her fingernails bit into her palms, and girded herself for Drosso’s moon face, his wet lips. But it was a servant who greeted her, silently took her up and back through the maze of elaborate rooms. Lee knew the secret of the bookshelf and opened it herself, but behind the shelf the hidden room was empty. The whole place was empty, smelling jarringly of lye.
Without her camera, Lee returns to painting. She lugs her folding easel and stool out into the street, sets up along the Seine, bisects her canvas with a decisive horizon line as she was taught to do at art school. Hours pass. Lee wishes she felt inspired, but instead she is just achingly lonely. She watches two young women browse a nearby bouquiniste, their gloved hands trailing across the rows of book spines. They talk and laugh together, and for a moment Lee wants to join them, to abandon the pretense that she is trying to become an artist, and just while away her hours. But something in her is disgusted by their purposelessness, by the excess of the expat culture, all the rich Americans she sees, content to enjoy the favorable exchange rate and live like the hedonists they are.
As Lee wanders the city, she finds herself composing photographs in her mind instead of paintings. One afternoon she goes to the camera shop near her hotel to ogle the window display. The model she wants, a brand-new Rolleiflex Original, sits on a velvet cushion and costs 2,400 francs. Though she barely has money to pay her rent, Lee goes into the shop, ignoring the way the shopkeeper’s eyebrows raise slightly in surprise when she asks to see the Rollei. In her hands it is lighter and more compact than her lost Graflex. She thinks of the pictures she took before and vows—if she can ever afford to buy another camera—to try harder, take more pictures, learn how to make something that is actually art.
When she has touched the Rollei’s every knob and dial and finally handed it back over, the shopkeeper gestures to an ad for a Kodak Brownie on the wall behind him. In the ad the Kodak girl wears a flapper-style striped dress and stands at the top of a small hill, arms outstretched, her Brownie dangling from one finger. “Perhaps you would prefer something smaller, something a little simpler?” he asks her. “These are what all the girls are getting lately.”
Lee shakes her head. Not this girl, she thinks, and bids him good day.
Instead of taking pictures, Lee reads the instruction manual she took from her camera case and stuffed in the back of her one desk drawer. She will use this time productively, and when she has saved up enough, she’ll deserve the professional camera she wants to buy. Printed on one page of the manual are grainy pictures—sailboats, an excavator, a winding country road—followed by columns of numbers under the headings “Bright Sun,” “Cloudy,” “Hazy,” and “Dull.” Within these columns are more choices, based on time of day, and then there’s a small sentence at the bottom of the page: “Exposures with stops larger or smaller than F8 should be respectively decreased or increased one-half with each succeeding smaller or larger stop used. Third group—May—Bright—9 a.m.–3 p.m. = 160—F8.” Sitting on her bed, staring at the diagrams with no camera to reference, Lee finds it all so technical that it makes her want to scream, makes her feel like the living embodiment of the “Dull” column, too stupid to grasp even these basics of the art form.
Was this what her father was doing when he took her picture? Lee remembers him fiddling with the knobs on the camera’s face, how he’d pace off the steps between her and the camera mount, which she realizes now he must have been doing so he’d get the focus right. But she remembers more the way he’d run his finger along her cheek to move her face toward the light, his pleased expression when he knew he had gotten the shot he wanted.
One session in particular stands out. Lee must have been nine or ten. The day would have fallen into the “Bright Sun” column in the manual, the contrast too high for shooting outdoors. Her father set up his camera in the parlor, drew the gauzy curtain liners across the windows, and endured her, with diminishing patience, as she ran through the room, asking him again and again, “Are you ready yet? Are you ready yet?,” whipping the pocket door open and closed each time she came full circle.
When he was finally set up, he called to her and shut both doors, entirely cutting off the room from the rest of the house. With the wide doors shut, it was a small, close space, with such high ceilings the perspective seemed skewed, as if the furniture were clustered together at the bottom of a dumbwaiter shaft. Everything was dark, opulent, a wide band of mahogany wainscoting on the walls and heavy, low-lying mahogany furniture to match. Against the dark wood, her father’s white hair gleamed, his body looked as thin and tough as a piece of jerky.
“Stand by the drapes,” he said, and there are a few pictures of her in the first pose, clad in a knee-length organdy dress with a drooping bow at the waist and a sailor’s collar. She wore black stockings, and all her running around had left them smeared with dust. Her expression in these first shots was insouciant; she stared at the camera with heavy-lidded eyes.
Now, running her finger along the grid of numbers, Lee understands how laborious the process was, why it was after only one or two exposures that he came over to where she stood and studied her w
ith a puzzled, searching expression.
“Li-Li,” he said, “the dress is too bright against the draperies. Let’s try it without, shall we?” He helped her undo the fussy covered buttons that marched down the back of her bodice, unknot the sash cinched at her waist. His hands were warm and rough. As he helped her, his calluses caught on the band at the top of her delicate stockings; his fingernails left light scratches on her dry pale skin.
“That’s going to be much better,” he said, and he was right. Lee remembers the picture so clearly it’s as if she just saw it. In it, her naked body is white and almost glowing, and she looks like a deer emerging from a dark forest, her eyes wide and startled like a deer’s, full of all her love for her loving father.
Chapter Three
As she does every few nights, Lee goes to Bricktop to hear the music. It is September now, two months since she was at Drosso’s. The bar is small and dark, choked with smoke and packed with people. The jazz band sits on a small stage in the corner, the sweat making sparks of light on their dark faces. The music is loud, metallic; the high notes shake her eardrums.
Lee is down to just enough for three more weeks’ rent if she is frugal. She thinks of the expensive clothing she brought with her from New York, already out-of-date, and wishes she were the sort of person who saved. A few days ago, Lee sent a telegram home and asked for a loan. She has wanted to be independent, but she knows her father will help her; he always has, even though he has also always insisted on being in charge of her finances. But the response she received this afternoon was a shock. Kotex ad a scandal, his telegram said. Humiliated. There was no mention of sending the money she requested.
On her way to Bricktop this evening, she stopped at the international newsstand and thumbed through the latest magazines until she found it: her picture in the August issue of McCall’s, clad in a white satin dress, the words “Wear the pad even under the sheerest, most clinging frocks” written in looping script beneath the picture.
Lee remembers the photograph, one Steichen took of her, but had no idea it had been sold to Kotex. She can imagine her father’s fury. He abhors social impropriety, loathes even more any discussion of the workings of women’s bodies. Lee is mortified: by the picture, but also because she disappointed him. When she felt this way as a child he was the one she would run to, but now she is far away and he is the one she has offended.
Now, at the club, Lee taps her fingers on the table in time to the music’s beat. What is she going to do? She cannot imagine going back to New York, but she doesn’t know how she can stay here in Paris if she doesn’t have a job or a purpose, and she feels paralyzed with indecision. It is all she can do not to start crying.
And then she sees them. Poppy and Jimmy. They come in a rush, trailed by another couple. All four wear matching black suits, bow ties. Lee is so lonely she is happy to come across anyone she knows, can brush aside the circumstances of their other evening together. She gets up and walks over to them.
“Poppy!” Lee says. “Can I join you?”
Poppy looks back with a face as expressionless as a Kabuki mask. “Pardon? You must have me confused with someone else.”
“We met at a restaurant near here. We shared a taxi, we went to Drosso’s together.” Lee shouts to be heard over the trombone.
“So strange,” the woman murmurs, and turns back to Jimmy and snakes her arm through his, and together they push their way up to the bar and leave Lee staring after them.
Poppy and Jimmy stand together at the bar with the careless quality of people who don’t question their place in the world. They seem so casual, so relaxed, and Lee remembers that in New York she was like them, a girl who took what she wanted from life when she wanted it. This new version of herself—sad, alone, embarrassed—is not who she really is. The old Lee would have laughed off any whiff of scandal, made the Kotex ad into good gossip, found a man or three to pay for her drinks if she was short on funds, and not given Poppy and Jimmy another moment’s thought.
Lee walks up to the bar and leans against its rounded corner. A finger snap is all it takes to get the barman’s attention. As she waits for him to make his way over and take her order, she catches sight of her reflection in the murky mirror behind the bar. The humid room has flushed her cheeks. “Smile,” Lee whispers, imitating a man’s stern tone, and watches herself in the mirror as she does so. Her face is as beautiful as ever, her smile just how she wants it. Right now, she thinks, she’ll get a gin martini, cold and clear as a glass of diamonds, and after she’s finished the drink she’ll go out into the crowded center of the dance floor and find someone to spin her around. And then tomorrow she’ll take the card Man Ray gave her that she’s been carrying around in her pocket and pay a visit to his studio. Ask him if she can be his student. Get him to teach her everything he knows.
It is just after two o’clock the next day when she arrives. She raps on the door and considers all the things she could say. Man Ray probably won’t even remember her from that night at Drosso’s, but if he does, she can laugh it off, or pretend to be someone else entirely, as Poppy did.
Time stretches out long enough that she begins to regret being there. Finally the door opens, and Man Ray stands in front of her, drying his hands on a dingy rag, his hair springing out from his head just like the first time she saw him.
“You’re not supposed to be here until two thirty,” he says.
Lee takes a step back. “I—I’m not supposed to be here at all.”
He shades his eyes with his hand. “You’re not my two thirty?”
“No, no…I’m…We met before—” The minute it’s out of her mouth she regrets it but pushes on. “We met at Drosso’s.”
He steps out onto the doorstep and takes a better look at her, then laughs. “You! ‘I wouldn’t let you touch my breast if I was falling out of the sky.’”
“That’s me,” Lee says, smiling despite herself.
Man motions for her to come inside with him and shuts the door behind them. The foyer is filled with paintings and photographs in mismatched frames tacked haphazardly all over the walls, and a wide wooden staircase hugs the edge of the room and leads to a landing. Without another word he heads up the stairs, and she follows him. They enter a small parlor and Man walks over to a cart that holds an electric kettle and begins to make two cups of tea. Lee sits in an armchair studded with unnecessary buttons and watches him. He’s as small as she remembers him, but this time he’s dressed stylishly in wide-cuffed wool pants and a matching vest, and his body has a coiled, wiry energy to it. As he pours the water over the tea bags with one hand and arranges spoons and sugar cubes on saucers with the other, Lee likes how efficient he seems, some part of him in constant motion. He brings over the tea and sits on the settee across from her, and she likes, too, his dark brown eyes, the intelligence and humor she sees in them as he looks her over.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” he says, his voice light. “You seemed rather angry.”
“Well”—Lee leans forward and picks up her teacup with nervous fingers—“I lost my camera that night. I know you’re a photographer. I thought maybe, when you left, you might have seen it?” She glances around the room as if she expects her camera to be sitting on a shelf nearby.
“You had it with you at Drosso’s?”
“Yes. But I lost it.”
“Not the best place to take something valuable. Lots of unsavory people go there. Addicts.” He picks up his cup and slurps from it noisily. When he sets it down he scrunches his eyebrows together, as if concerned for her safety.
Lee switches tactics. “I’m a photographer—well, not really. I’m a model. I was a model in New York before I moved here, and I know Condé Nast and Edward Steichen. I know you know them.”
“Has Steichen done you?” She can feel Man’s gaze resting on her throat, her hair, her mouth.
“Of course. For Vogue and other places.” Lee feels the familiar ground of modeling beneath her, sits up straighter and tu
rns her good profile toward him.
“I’m better. After this two thirty I don’t have any more appointments. I’ll take your picture, you can use it here, get started. I know some people at Laurent’s—they’re always looking for new girls.”
Lee sets down her cup. “I don’t want you to take my picture. I want to take pictures. I want to be your student.”
“I don’t take students. I don’t know what Condé told you. But you’re luminous, truly. I can see why Vogue wanted you. I’ll do you for free. You can put it in your portfolio.”
Behind him a grandfather clock tolls once and is followed by the pound of the door knocker. Man rises. Lee knows this is her only chance to make this work. He thinks she’s beautiful, that much is clear, and it would be so easy to flirt with him and keep his interest. But she doesn’t want him to think of her that way.
“I’ve been thinking of how I’d take your picture,” Lee says, just before he reaches the door. He turns to look back at her. “I’d lay you down on a table and put the camera at your feet. I’d make you look like a landscape.” She blurts out the words quickly. As she says it she can see it: the ridges and folds of the fabric on his body like mountain ranges, the features of his face flattened to abstraction.
Man pauses at the door and considers her. “It wouldn’t work. There’s no way to get the focus right on a shot like that.”
Of course not. Conviction and confidence, in an instant, replaced by the wide void of all she does not know. Lee stands up and clasps her hands together like a schoolgirl. “That’s why I want to be your student. You can teach me these things. Condé mentioned I might come to you—”
The Age of Light Page 4
