Man waves his hand. “He’s sent lots of people my way. I made the mistake early on of being helpful, and now everyone feels like they can come learn from me. I don’t have time to support every person who wants to be the next Man Ray. I’m busy. Portraits to shoot—portraits to shoot for Condé’s magazine, actually. He should know better.”
“How would you shoot me?” Lee pulls down her shoulders and lifts up her chin and looks at him directly.
Man gives her a quick appraising glance. “Probably a close-up of your face, with your hand at your throat. Black background.” His tone is clipped, a bit dismissive. Again the sound of the door knocker echoes through the room.
“That’s boring,” she says, to keep his attention.
Man chuckles and crosses his arms over his chest. “Oh? Then I’d put you near a window, half in light and half in shadow, and shoot you nude with your eyes closed, like you looked at Drosso’s.”
“You just want to see my breasts again.”
He stares at her, surprised, then starts to laugh. “You’re not shy, are you?” He takes a step toward the door and then holds up a finger. “Wait there. Don’t go anywhere.”
She can hear him run down the stairs and open the front door, then voices murmuring, footsteps. Man leads a woman past the parlor and Lee catches a glimpse of her, a column of gold-shot brocade topped with a towering pompadour, as they disappear into what must be Man’s studio. Lee sits for a while, waiting, watching the smooth sweep of the second hand on the grandfather clock, taking in the oils on the wall, the crowded bookshelves, the objects clustered on the mantel. A line of birds’ eggs, arranged by size. A similar arrangement of enamel vases, the smallest no larger than a kidney bean. She walks over to the shelves and reads the titles on the book spines. She picks up a porcelain cow figurine and weighs it in her palm. She wants it, all of it. And then she walks out into the hallway where she can see into the studio, where Man is heaving a reflector light into place.
When he notices her standing there, he says, “Can you come help me with these lights, please?”
The studio smells of burning dust and bromine and it is like every other studio she has ever been in: white walls, light filtering in from wide windows, the camera on its platform with the huge black hood. But this time, she walks over to one of the reflectors, grabs a leg while Man grabs the other, and pulls and wiggles it into place. This time, she picks up a glass plate and hands it to him, watching attentively as he loads it into the camera. The woman in her beautiful dress chats with both of them. She is here to get a portrait done for her husband for their twentieth wedding anniversary. When the camera is set up the woman clenches her face into a small, tense smile. Man keeps up a friendly patter with her, clearly trying to put her at ease, and Lee sees immediately how good he is at connecting with his subject. But Lee knows a few things too, and right before Man goes under the camera hood, she tells the woman, “Relax your eye muscles when you smile,” and after a moment’s hesitation the woman does so, her face suddenly more natural. When Man emerges from the hood, he looks at Lee and gives her a nod of approval. She nods back, feeling the way she has hoped to feel since she left New York, as though she has managed to set something good in motion.
Chapter Four
“Bobby!” Man shouts when the man arrives. He is corpulent; his body fills up the doorway and blocks the light. Once inside, he smiles at Man, a gummy smile in a big bald head, like an oversize baby’s. They laugh and shake hands and Bobby pounds Man on the back.
“It’s been too long,” Man says. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw your note. Big Bobby Steiner, in Paris. Never thought I’d see it.”
“When General Electric sets up the hoop, you jump through it. I’m head of the European division now.”
“I heard. Terrific news. And you were smart to come to me. I’ll take a photo of you that’ll make you look like you deserve it.”
“You better.” Bobby laughs again and glances around. When he notices Lee, he stops short and raises his hands in a gesture of mock surrender. “Hello, looker!” he says. He walks over to her and offers his face for a kiss, one cheek, American-style. “This your new girl, Manny? You got yourself a new girl? I liked that last one you brought to New York.”
Lee expects Man to clear things up, but he just laughs and mutters something to Bobby she doesn’t hear and doesn’t want to. She feels her face grow hot, not with embarrassment but with annoyance. Bobby stands looking at her for a few more moments, letting his eyes drift up and down her body, and then the two men walk into Man’s office and shut the door.
Lee is certainly not Man’s girl, but she’s not his student either. After the woman from the anniversary shoot left that first afternoon, Man asked Lee to stay behind, and explained that he had more work than he could handle and could use her help. Lee is not sure what she did to make him change his mind, but whatever it was, she doesn’t question it. He has had other assistants, he told her. The last one left a few months earlier. The job isn’t glamorous: keeping track of Man’s finances, which he described as a holy disaster; scheduling sessions; setting up the studio equipment; and occasionally helping him print. To his description of all these tasks, Lee nodded her head, bobbing it up and down so insistently she was worried it might come unhinged from her neck. If she was expecting a huge salary, he continued, he couldn’t provide it, but Lee could use the darkroom when he didn’t need it and she could come and go as she pleased. She agreed before he even told her a number. When he did it was shockingly low. But she doesn’t care. It is a beginning, a launching point into what she wants. The idea of working for a famous photographer is so appealing she probably would do it for free.
And now, after a month, she has settled into the rhythm of her new job. Mornings, she arrives at nine or ten o’clock—early by Parisian standards—and lets herself into the studio with the small brass key that Man has given her. She goes to the office and situates herself at his desk. It is her job to balance the ledger, a giant book that usually has to be unearthed from under all Man’s detritus: birds’ eggs, receipts from the tailor, toy soldiers, and, one day, a giant glass jar with a preserved octopus floating in it. He is like a crow bringing shiny treasures back to his nest, and Lee finds she likes the clutter his habits create.
Lee has a head for numbers, but still she does the work in pencil, carefully erasing any mistakes and redoing the figures in her round, even hand. The previous assistant was not as meticulous as she is trying to be, so when Lee has spare time she goes back in the ledger to earlier weeks and tries to untangle the web of errors her predecessor has left behind.
Here is what the numbers tell her: photography pays well. Man’s other creative endeavors, painting and sculpture, do not. He has a lot of money, especially by artists’ standards, but is terrible at managing it. He does not save. Instead, when a big job comes in he treats it like a windfall, an excuse to celebrate or buy something extravagant. There are more entries in the expense column than in the income column, and most of them are for ephemera: oysters at Le Select, two nights at a hotel in Saint-Malo—even, twelve months earlier, a Voisin, which he uses to drive out to the country or when he summers in Biarritz and otherwise has to pay an exorbitant fee to garage nearby.
Lee goes back to the records from 1928, where there were many entries with a single initial attached to them: “K rent,” “Milliner for K,” “Dinner with K,” and sometimes simply a number with the initial next to it, no further explanation. One day she adds up all the K entries and is astounded at how much money Man has spent on this person. It must be the girl Bobby referred to, but who is she? So far Lee cannot ask. The many entries for K’s milliner make Lee picture her as pale, concerned about her skin. Perhaps she is older—at least as old as Man. Lee is not yet sure how old Man is but he is certainly much, much older than she is. But where did K go? Dozens and dozens of entries, and then since January, nothing. A fight? Another man? Lee walks her fingers down the column of numbers and imagines their breakup, Man’s
secret torment. K has not been replaced—there are no initials after January. The only woman to be added to the ledger is Lee herself, and since she is now in charge of check writing, she gets the perverse pleasure of paying herself each week for her own hard work.
Man usually doesn’t come in until eleven, so each morning Lee has a few hours by herself. She loves this time spent putting his house in order, loves having a list of things to tell him each day when he arrives. He usually shows up in one of three moods: distracted, his fingers covered in charcoal or smeared with oils from a morning spent painting; harried, when he knows an important client is coming in the afternoon and is anticipating a day spent doing work he does not enjoy; or gloomy, when there has been a lull in the stream of sittings or he has had to pay a bill he’s forgotten about. Lee navigates all the moods with the same blend of professionalism and detachment, and Man matches her professionalism with his own, treating her with a courtesy she never knew when she was modeling.
In the afternoons, she assists him in the studio or in the darkroom, and these are by far her favorite hours of the day. Man insists he is a terrible teacher and that she’ll learn nothing from him, but on the contrary, Lee finds him informative and patient. He’s warm, surprisingly open with all the tricks he’s learned. He tells her that photography is more like science than like art, that they are chemists doing experiments in a lab, and it does seem that way to her, as much about the technical work in the darkroom as it is about the original artistic vision.
Man doesn’t print every day, or even every week, but when he does, Lee sets up the darkroom for him, donning rubber gloves and a rubber apron to mix the developer, stop, and fix baths. She places wooden tongs in the trays, uses a turkey baster to blow air off the enlarger, makes sure the safelight is working. She takes older prints off the clothesline and brings them into the studio, placing them carefully in one of the large flat file drawers with onionskin layers between them. As bad as Man appears to be at managing money, he is equally good at printing, and there are hardly ever any prints that have to be thrown away. Rarely, a first effort is too dark, or the contrast too low, but these prints he saves and uses in other projects, cut into ribbons and glued to a wood backing, or simply turned over so the reverse sides can be repurposed for sketching.
Sometimes the pictures are so beautiful Lee pauses in her work just to stare at them. Like the portrait of the dancer Helen Tamiris, whom Man shot dressed in a loose kimono, lying on the ground with her hair teased into a giant black cloud around her milk-white face. It is good, good work, and it is an honor just to be holding it, to know that she will one day develop prints in the same darkroom where it was made.
Lee has not yet broached the topic of her own photography with Man, even though Man mentioned it when he hired her. Above all she wants to keep things professional. But in her travels through the ledger book—and, though she doesn’t want to admit she’s this sort of person, in her early morning snooping through his desk drawers—she knows that Berenice Abbott, one of the former assistants, developed her own prints in Man’s studio, with Man’s blessing, and is now making a name for herself back in New York. Lee figures that there is time, that she is learning by observation, just as a scientist would do. Plus, there is not much to develop. Lee has three rolls of undeveloped film in her stocking drawer, but the last thing she wants is to use Man’s supplies on pictures that any tourist might have taken.
Now, Lee stands in the studio and listens to the rise and fall of Man’s and Bobby’s voices in the office, their bursts of laughter. Her work is in the office too, so Lee doesn’t know where to go or what to do. The situation and the visiting man remind her of the dinner parties her parents used to throw, the way she was shunted into a corner until it was time for her to help mix drinks. When she was young she looked precious, Lee supposes, all dolled up in Chantilly lace, with starched white bows stuck on her head like giant moths. But as she got older, it became discomfiting, the way the men leered at her when she brought them their cocktails, damp cigars clenched in their tight smiles.
Lee is still standing in the studio when the door from the office opens. The two men are in midconversation. “Sam’s working for Lisowski now—did you hear? He made a pile off that property in Flushing,” Bobby says.
“Yes, he wrote to me about it. Said the job doesn’t give him much time for his writing.”
“Minnie’s glad he has some paychecks to send home, I’m sure.”
Man scrunches his eyebrows together. “My mother is glad when any of us gets a real job and stops dithering around with art.”
Bobby chuckles. “That’s true. She told me to ask you when you were going to give all this up and move back home.”
“She never gives up. Making you her messenger.” Man laughs, but there is anger in it. He picks up a stool, walks to the center of the room, and gestures for Bobby to sit. Once Bobby’s bulk is settled, his heavy legs spread in front of him, one ankle crossed over the other in his charcoal-gray spats, he makes a self-conscious face, squinting his eyes in a look of what he must think is confidence or concentration.
“You don’t need much,” Man is saying. “You look good like that, just a simple, powerful shot.”
“Are you sure? This is for GE. We’re not on Forty-Third Street anymore, Manny.”
“Thank God for that.” They both laugh again. Man turns to the camera, and Lee, standing near the door to the darkroom, clears her throat.
“Can I do anything?”
Both men look over. Bobby says, “I could go for one of those little stick sandwiches with the butter and ham.”
“Ah yes, some food would be good. Do you mind, Miss Miller?” Man says, and even though she does mind, she tells him that she doesn’t.
It is hot outside and the café is a few blocks away. Lee buys three jambon-beurre and eats hers on the street, like a gypsy. When she gets back to the studio, they have already finished the session. The door to the parlor is closed and the sweet stench of pipe tobacco seeps from the threshold. Lee plops the sandwiches on a tray and raps hard on the parlor door. More laughter and talking before Man opens it. She hands him the tray with a blank look on her face that she hopes subtly expresses her annoyance.
Man takes the sandwiches and turns away, then pauses and turns back to her. On his face is an expression she hasn’t yet seen there, a sudden awareness mixed with gratitude. “Miss Miller,” he says, “what did I do before you?”
“Got your own sandwiches, I imagine,” Lee says, and feels his eyes on her as she walks away.
London,
1940
During the Blitz, bunked down with Roland in Hampstead, Lee wakes more than once to find her bed brown with menstrual blood. Something about the surprise of waking to the scream of the air-raid sirens sets her body off, starts her cramping. In the morning when the blackout lifts she rinses out the sheets in the sink, but stains remain, light copper blotches.
What Lee can never tell anyone is that she feels almost giddy when she hears the whistle of the bombs dropping, when she feels the room shake, when plaster dust coats her face and makes her sneeze. Can never tell them how much she looks forward to the mornings after, picking her way through the city with her camera, the bombed-out tableaux arranged before her like the work of some Surrealist set designer. A church destroyed, but a typewriter balanced on the rubble before it, perfectly unharmed. A statue completely decimated except for one beseeching arm. The wicked side of her loves the lawless nature of the blasts.
One night she and Roland wake to a different noise, a giant rustling, as if the house is a parcel being papered over. Lee pulls back the curtain and with a whoosh through the open window comes a ghostly silver fabric, almost consuming her, so much of it that she has to beat it away from her face in order to breathe. A barrage balloon, Roland tells her, laughing, and they go outside and work together to pull all the fabric back out of the house. The next day, she spends hours photographing it, the balloon’s carcass draped over trees or
twined around her body. None of the shots are right, but then a week later she is walking through Hampstead Heath and sees another downed balloon, pinned to the ground but still half filled with air, like a giant egg, two geese standing proudly before it. The photo she takes of it is a marvel, the war’s first gift to her, and Lee feels buoyed aloft herself, filled with the promise of all that the coming days might offer her.
Chapter Five
It doesn’t take Lee long to learn that Man thrives on change and gets itchy when days settle into a pattern. He does things Lee would never think of doing, like calling her up if his painting is going well and telling her to reschedule an afternoon’s session, even if the client booked weeks ago. When she asks him what to tell them, he says “Gangrene!” or “Bus accident!” or “Surprise trip to Pamplona!,” so Lee ignores him, and always says a family member has suddenly taken ill. Man’s family, clients must think, is vast and constitutionally unsound.
One day, Man comes in and looks at the calendar: the afternoon is blissfully free. “Lovely day,” he says.
He’s right. As Lee walked to work that morning she’d felt sad she had to go inside, had stood on the stoop and filled her lungs to bursting with crisp air before she turned the key in the lock.
Man continues, “If I don’t get that new cabinet, I think the whole operation is going to fall apart.”
“Excuse me?”
“The flat file we need for extra storage.” Man picks up his coat and puts it on. “The Vernaison will have one. Want to join me?”
So less than an hour later, Lee finds herself at the city’s biggest flea market, where it seems there is nothing that’s not for sale. Piles of empty gilded frames, giant Chippendale dressers, bundles of old letters, yellowed petticoats, war medals, brandy snifters, boxes of broken clocks, rusted skeleton keys, rows of prams filled with tattered silk pillows. Lee stops wonderingly at a hut where empty cans of denture powder balance on top of a motorbike. Man is a few yards away before he looks back to find her behind him. She smiles and hurries to catch up.
The Age of Light Page 5
