“No, just a stranger.”
“You set this up and took it without her noticing?”
“Yes—is that not allowed?”
Man laughs. “No, no, of course not. It’s fine. I’m just impressed, that’s all.” He says it lightly, as if he doesn’t realize how much it might mean to her.
“You really like it?”
“Well, I think we can tweak the exposure time a little bit”—he points with his tongs at some dark shadows in the woman’s hair—“and burn in this corner a bit, but for a first print? It’s very good.”
If Lee was feeling strange before, now she feels even stranger. His words make her hot and achy at the same time, flushed with pride, and she looks at her print with new confidence and thinks that if she tries she might actually be able to make herself into a photographer. The confidence emboldens her, and her two desires—to work and to be with Man—come together in that moment. There doesn’t need to be one or the other. The way he said “we”—“we can tweak the exposure.” Perhaps someday her work will be on the same level as his. Perhaps they will work together to create it. A partnership of sorts. So she turns around to face him, and she is not sure what she is going to do until she does it.
“I had a different idea for the saber guard,” she says. “If you still want, I could model for you, if you let me set it up.”
Man raises his eyebrows. “Last time I asked you to pose for me you said no.”
“I know. But if we do it together—I could frame the shots. I have an idea about it.”
“Really? Well—yes. Let me just get things cleaned up in here.”
As Lee is waiting for Man to come into the studio, she stands next to the camera and looks around, at the cloths draped over the couch, the half-drawn curtains, how bright and white and clean everything is. She whips the drapes off the table and the wall and replaces them with some black ones, draping the couch too. Then she goes into the office, picks up the saber guard, and turns it over and over. When she goes back into the studio, Man is waiting for her.
This is the first time Lee has done anything but follow his directions. Despite that, or maybe because of it, she feels she knows what he wants to see, has known it ever since she met him, but didn’t realize it until she saw her own work in the developing tank, saw him appraising it as he did his own.
“You had Amélie near the window,” Lee says, and takes the guard over to the couch, where she balances it on the arm, “but what if you had had her here?” Then she goes over to the camera and says “May I?” before lifting up the hood and going underneath it for the first time. The dark cloth smells of tobacco and cedar, a musty, masculine smell. Lee looks into the viewfinder and swivels the camera slightly so that all she can see is the couch and its black coverings. Through the viewfinder the room appears upside down, the couch hanging from the ceiling. It is disorienting, and Lee almost gasps when Man himself appears in the frame, walking across what looks like the ceiling and then sitting, absurdly, higher up than when he was standing.
“You need something to focus on,” he says, and his voice comes to her through the cloth as if through water, murky and indistinct. She turns the focusing knob back and forth a bit, watching as Man blurs and sharpens, blurs and sharpens. Upside down, he is a stranger. She does not recognize his eyes, his mouth; if she saw him on the street she would not know him. It is disorienting. She comes out from under the camera hood and everything is right side up again, Man sitting on the couch, watching her as she walks toward him.
Lee goes over to the changing area in the corner of the room and stands hidden behind the screen. Slowly she undoes her blouse, first the buttons on the cuffs and then the placket, letting it drop to the floor when she is done. Then she undoes her trousers, unbuttoning three of the five buttons at the fly and pushing the trousers down so they hang on her hip bones and expose the full flat expanse of her stomach. And then she reaches behind her back with both hands, thinking of how the shadow of the pose must look silhouetted on the screen, her arms sticking out like a swan’s wings. She unhooks the back of her brassiere before shrugging it off and letting it drop to the floor on top of her shirt. She keeps thinking about swans as she undresses, the ones she photographed in the park the other day, the muscle and bone of their wings and the power it must take them to beat the air into flight. She walks back and sits where Man has been on the couch and settles the metal guard over her face like a veil.
Up until this moment, Lee has felt calm, her actions at a distance from the emotions that prompted them, almost the way she used to feel when her father took her picture. But once she is sitting down, and able to see Man’s face, the slight raise to his eyebrows the only hint of how he is feeling, she comes back to herself and goes cold all over, her nipples puckering into hard points.
Man clears his throat, and his voice, when he speaks, sounds high and thin. “Hold that pose.” He moves over to the camera and goes under the hood.
The saber guard is heavier than it looks, and its sharp scent makes Lee’s mouth go sour. What injury was it meant to protect from? She imagines the curved slice of a fencing sword, the bone-deep bruises from a blunted blade. Lee closes her eyes and holds her head just so.
“Oh, that’s good!” Man shouts, his voice muffled by the cloth. “Hold it just like that.”
Lee doesn’t want to sit still, doesn’t want to do exactly what he asks of her, so she moves instead into different poses, her arms stretched out along the back of the couch and then held tight between her knees, her head tilted so far to the side she feels a hard pull in her neck and the saber guard pressing into her clavicle. She keeps her eyes closed and tries not to breathe in the smell of metal.
“I think you were right,” Man says as he reemerges from under the hood and comes over to her. “Having it over your face like that—it’s good.”
Lee stands up and takes off the guard and sets it down. Standing so close to him, she feels the difference in their heights. His eyes are just level with her jawbone.
“The shots are going to be very good,” he says.
“I know,” Lee says, taking a step closer to him. Her bare nipples graze his linen shirt, sending an ache shooting down to her groin.
Man takes a deep breath. “Lee, I—”
“I know,” she says again, and moves a step closer.
And then their mouths press hard together, their teeth clicking. His arms come all the way around her and pin her own to her sides. They stand that way for what seems like hours, days, just kissing. Man takes her hand and leads her to the parlor. She kicks off her trousers while he does the same with his clothes, hurriedly, and then in the dimness of the falling twilight, Man lays her down on the couch and kneels next to her, running his hands over her bare skin. She arches her back to get closer to him, but it is not close enough, so she pulls him down on top of her and breathes him in. His skin on hers is warm as water, and she is wet with it, and for once her brain shuts off completely, leaving only feeling. The one thought she does manage is that there is no going back from this, and for that she couldn’t be more grateful.
Normandy,
July 1944
France is metal, the smell and feel and taste of it. Hot steel helmet on Lee’s sweat-soaked hair. The scent her field camera leaves on her hands. The nib of her pen when she licks it, ink bluing her tongue. And the hospital. Bone saws. Disinterred bullets in a bowl. The stink of infection in the air, sweet like licked pennies.
Photos everywhere she looks, compositions formed of horrors. Lee shoots and shoots and swallows down the bile that rises in her throat—even that tasting of metal. Her assignment is to photograph the post-invasion duties of the American nurses, so Lee records plasma bags, penicillin, surgical procedures. She takes pictures of American women working side by side with German nurses, tamps the blast hole of her growing loathing for the Krauts down tight.
She sends the pictures back to Audrey accompanied by essays, knows the censor will scissor away most of wh
at she writes. Even her letters to Roland get censored, blank spaces where her words once were. His notes back to her get censored too, and arrive weeks and weeks after he sends them, but the words they still contain are normal, soothing. They tether her to a world outside the war.
At the end of one day Lee hears a voice calling to her from a hospital bed. She turns to see a man bandaged up like some sort of mummy. “Ma’am,” he says, his voice so weak it’s almost a whistle. “Take my picture, so I can have a laugh about it when I go home.”
His eyes and mouth and nose are black holes, obliterations. His hands are bound up as big as oven mitts. “Say cheese,” he whispers, and Lee grips the dark metal box of her camera and tries to focus.
Chapter Eleven
Three months have passed. Man has moved her to a new apartment a few blocks from his in Montparnasse. Paid the first month’s rent, bought her furniture, given her art to hang on the walls. Together they wander through Printemps like an old married couple. Man helps her pick out sheets, coffee cups, lavender sachets to tuck inside her linens. They paper her bedroom with a geometric print and lay an Art Deco rug on the floor, its thick pile soft beneath her feet. He gives her one of his own blankets and when he isn’t with her she burrows into it for comfort. Lee has never cared too much where she lives but she finds that the apartment becomes an extension of what she feels toward Man. It is not a large space—when he spends the night she stacks their shoes by the door, liking how the heels of hers nestle inside his—but it is sized just right for her, and she feels a sense of calm when she is there that she has never felt anywhere else.
At night they lie on her bed, the mattress sagging in the middle so that they continually roll toward each other, their bodies warm and their skin sticking together in the unseasonable April heat. He kisses her toes, her wrists, the cleft of her buttocks. In the mornings she finds that his stubble has chafed her skin and left it stinging.
Always, always, he is photographing her. His camera is a third person in the bedroom, and she flirts for it and for him as he takes her picture. They print the images together, standing hip to hip in the developing room, her body blooming on the paper while they watch. This way they get to have the moments twice, the images calling up the feelings from the day before until sometimes they stop what they are doing and make love again, quickly, her hands gripping the edge of the sink, the pictures forgotten and gone black in the developing tray.
For days at a time Man takes no clients. They lock the studio door behind them. She does not answer the phone when it rings. Instead, they print pictures of Lee, or Man paints or sculpts—he is filled with an almost manic energy that he says comes from her, from being near her. He begs her to stay close when he is painting and often Lee does so, sitting curled in an armchair near his easel, breathing in the smell of camphor and turpentine and watching his expression while he works. Sometimes he paints abstracts; other times he uses her seated figure or one of their photographs as inspiration—the line of her neck becoming a guide for a tightrope walker, her breast becoming a grain silo becoming a mountain. Where he is meticulous in the darkroom, here he has an almost frenzied focus. He wants her close but sometimes forgets that she is there, until Lee grows frustrated and takes the brushes out of his hand to call him back to her, kissing him insistently until he is hers again.
Sometimes Lee looks at him as they are eating dinner, or just sitting next to each other, and wonders how she ever thought this might not happen. It feels inevitable. He looks like a different person than he did when she first met him. He has become dear to her. The fringe of his lashes, the whorl of his ear, all of him now more familiar than she is to herself. His smell—almost piney. Even after she bathes she can smell him on her. She nestles her nose into her own shoulder and breathes him in.
At parties or cafés, she is aware of where he is in the room without looking; they catch each other’s gaze and hold it longer than they should. Their connection feels so obvious, as if everyone around them can see, just from looking at them, what they have been doing in the bedroom. Their need for each other. All the other people in the room must hear her heart thumping, the naked tum tum tum tum tum tum of it.
When Lee is not with Man, she does her own work. She finds herself as eager as he is to create things. As the weeks pass she wants to walk more than she wants to shoot in the studio, so on the days when Man is taking clients, she puts her Rollei around her neck and takes long afternoon strolls through the city, cutting across the wide boulevards and crossing over the Seine, losing her way in the Marais, where the Jews look at her curiously, the tall girl with the camera and the bright blond hair. Maybe she should be fearful wandering the city alone, but the camera not only gives her purpose but feels like protection. She likes the serendipity of shooting street scenes, juxtaposing people and objects in weird positions, playing with perspective. Each time she prints one of her photos and Man likes it, she grows more confident, feels more like who she has always wanted to be.
When she returns from her walks she brings back paper bags full of fruit pastilles, or macarons so light they melt on her tongue, and feeds them to Man. He licks the sugar off her fingers. She comes back as the sun is fading in the west and the light lies like thick striped taffy across the bed, and before it gets too dark Man takes her picture: her neck and torso banded with shadows, her legs tangled in the sheets, the curve of her ribs as she lies on her side. And then he puts aside the camera and spreads out next to her and touches every bit of her, all the parts he’s photographed and all the parts he hasn’t. She closes her eyes and wills her mind to stay in it, the good feeling, and it is better than it has ever been for her. And when her mind drifts, it drifts only to their pictures.
It is spring now, the leaves just pushing their bright green way out of the trees, and one evening when Lee goes back to her apartment, she is stopped at the door by the sight of a woman sitting on the stoop, brown hair bobbed at her jawline, her eyes closed and her face tipped up to catch the warmth of the sun. A valise sits next to her, a small veiled hat on top.
“Tanja?” Lee asks, incredulous, and Tanja hops up and they are embracing, jumping up and down and making small squeals of happiness.
“Oh Li-Li,” Tanja says, “I missed you!”
Lee takes Tanja upstairs and settles her in a chair in the corner of her room. Tanja starts recounting her latest travels, and Lee lets the stories wash over her, a sweet river of words. She has always liked how easy it is to be with Tanja, and it does not take long for Lee to revert to the old version of herself, cracking jokes and talking in shorthand with her friend.
“You should have seen it, Li-Li. We get to Milan later than we would have liked, it’s already dark, and we take a cab to the hotel my friend Ruth had recommended—remember Ruth? Well, it’s called the Casino Hotel and Ruth had told me it’s right in the center of all the action. She was wrong: it was the action. I’ll never forget Mrs. Basingthwaite’s face, standing there in the lobby, surrounded by what I’m fairly certain were ladies of the night. She hustled me out of there so fast it made my head spin.”
Lee laughs. “How long can you stay in Paris?”
Tanja grimaces. “Just the weekend. Mrs. B won’t let me out of her sight longer than that. Please say there’s somewhere desperately seedy you can take me.”
Lee hesitates. She is supposed to go to a party with Man that she has been looking forward to for ages. It would be easy enough to include Tanja, but the idea of sharing Man with someone is unappealing. Yet, another piece of her wants to show him off—to show her life off—so eventually she says, “There’s a party I was planning on going to tonight, at an apartment just a few blocks from here. Do you want to come?”
“Do birds sing?” Tanja says, and dances around the room, trilling, “A party! A party!”
Lee gets dressed and they walk together to Tanja’s hotel. When Tanja used to come down to New York for visits, they joked that their sightseeing was merely a backdrop for their chitchat: th
ey talked about the same things at the Met as they did at a cabaret. And now, Paris is no different. They stroll along and talk and talk. This time, though, Lee has her camera with her, and every once in a while she breaks free from Tanja’s arm and takes a picture. She feels her mind operating on two levels and she loves it: she listens to her friend, but there is another track in her brain and it is focused on what she is seeing, on getting the last of the evening light, images composing and dissolving as she moves her gaze around. Some images she wants to keep, they tug at her, so she frames them, focuses, releases the shutter. She decides to take a picture of Tanja, her hands gesturing as she tells a story, and watches in amusement as Tanja realizes what Lee is doing and gets self-conscious.
“So will Man Ray be there tonight?” Tanja asks her. “Is it still going well with him?”
Lee opens her mouth to tell her friend about what has happened between her and Man and finds she doesn’t know what to say. Both Man and the pictures—her pictures—feel so new. Lee doesn’t want to answer questions; she wants to keep it all to herself, a little pearl locked in a shell.
After a long pause, Lee clears her throat and says, “I haven’t told you yet, but Man and I—we’re…” Her voice trails off.
Tanja’s eyebrows go up. “Really?”
“Yes.” Blushing, disconcerted, Lee turns away and takes a picture of one of the gargoyles on Notre Dame, silhouetted against the iron-gray sky. When she puts down her camera again Tanja is still giving her a look, but doesn’t say another word about it.
At the hotel, Lee can’t help but covet the outfits Tanja has collected as she’s traveled across Europe, day dresses with fuller skirts than Lee is used to seeing, and little bolero jackets with shoulder pads sewn in. The two women are practically the same size, so while Tanja gets dressed Lee tries on her crepe de chine and pearls, and when her friend sees her she tells her she should borrow them. Lee stands in front of the mirror, admiring herself: the flush in her cheeks from the walk and the anticipation of seeing Man, the way her lips always look now, tender and swollen. Tanja comes up behind her and examines her with a critical eye, then turns the necklace backward so that the pearls hang down Lee’s back like a cape, and as they go outside, Lee feels more Parisian than she has the entire time she’s been here.
The Age of Light Page 11
