The Age of Light

by Whitney Scharer

  Finally she says, “You made me sad tonight.” Man moves to hold her, but she puts out her arm and pushes him away. “What happened? Why wouldn’t you tell me…whatever it was you wouldn’t tell me?”

  A car pulls up outside. There’s the sounds of people laughing, the car door slamming. Farther away there is a sharp insistent bleat of a siren.

  “Have you ever…” Man’s voice is pitched high and hesitant. “Do you like…”

  She waits for him to finish.

  “Sometimes I like…to be tied up.”

  The room is too dark for her to see his expression. Part of her wants to laugh, she feels so on edge. But she can hear in his voice how much he has been wanting to say this.

  Lee is so drunk she can barely feel the outlines of her body. Man waits for her to answer. She can hear him breathing; she finds she wants to make him wait. From another floor there is the creak of someone pacing.

  She waits until she knows he is about to say something, to apologize or explain, before she gets up. The floor is cold on her bare feet. She stumbles. On her chair is her striped scarf and she feels for another in her armoire.

  Lee kneels next to him. “Will these work?”

  Her bed has a low brass frame that squeaks when they make love. She holds his wrist between her thumb and index finger and feels their pulses racing.

  With Man’s wrist in her hand she thinks again of the two brothers, the way the one reached out and touched his cheek.

  “Have you been with them, those brothers?” Lee cinches his wrist tight to the headboard.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “How many times?”

  “Not that many. Not once since I’ve been with you.”

  Lee is not surprised at Man’s answer. She doesn’t know why. It is as if she knew the minute the man touched him at the party. If it were women she would be furious, but there is something about the image of these men together that arouses her: one brother or both, Man tied, submissive. The power in it.

  She cinches his other wrist.

  “Did you like being with them?”

  His voice is so low she can barely hear it. “Yes, but—”

  Lee cuts him off. “I don’t care what you did with them. Just don’t do it now that you’re with me.”

  Man still has the covers over him. Lee stands and pulls them off, leaving him exposed. His body and face are in shadow, the whites of his eyes bright spots in the moonlit room. Lee stands looking down at him, waiting for her breath to come more slowly. Then she kneels and takes the length of his penis, already erect, in her mouth, following the motion with her hand. She does it only a few times, then stops and stands up again so she can look down at him. Teasing him, making him wait. His eyes don’t leave her. She puts her hand between her legs and touches herself, loves having him watch her while she does it.

  “Lee, please…” Man says after a while, his voice small.

  She waits to bend down to him again until she cannot make herself wait any longer.

  Later, afterward, what surprises her most of all is how much she likes it. How good it feels to be in control.

  Paris,

  December 1944

  The bennies make Lee’s teeth ache but they also help her get the writing done. Dave has nicked some more for her from the other soldiers and now she’s got a cache of them that will see her through her article. She takes one as soon as she gets out of bed. Cracks open the inhaler and eases the paper strip from inside, rolls it into a pill, and downs it with hot water because no one has any coffee left. Then she sits at her makeshift desk, puts her fingers on the typewriter keys, strokes their curved edges. Soon her veins will start singing and the words will come, the words she sees behind her eyelids when she lies in bed at night, too agitated to sleep but too drunk to get up and start working. Outside her hotel window is her stash of jerry cans, some filled with framboise, others with gin, all within arm’s reach and very tempting. She has to get the draft done first.

  Her most recent photos sit on her desk. On top is the shot of surgeons gathered around an amputee, holding him like some sort of gruesome Pietà. When Lee took that picture she wasn’t able to hide her revulsion, and she was glad the soldier was unconscious so he couldn’t see her face. Looking at it again wakes her up even hotter than the bennies and she types a few lines as quickly as she can. But then she reads them over, black marks on the page that are nothing like what she sees in her mind. The words are not right. Nothing is right. Her photos are shit and the article is going to be shit and she’s a disappointment to Audrey and everyone who has ever put their faith in her. Was she really naive enough to think she could become a writer? The anxiety starts in the pit of her stomach and rises into her throat like a trapped bird, fluttering and frantic. Lee slams the lid of her typewriter case shut and pounds on the wall for Davie. He is there in an instant and she knows he can tell just by looking at her that she’s too wound up, but he doesn’t say anything, just comes over to her and rubs her neck and shoulders until her heart stops racing.

  When he has calmed her down, he picks up the stack of photos from her desk and flops on the bed.

  “This one,” he says, holding up a shot she took in Paris right after the surrender, a picture of a woman modeling a Bruyère coat in the Place Vendôme, framed through the shards of a shattered shop window. “Jesus, that’s a good one. The way you foregrounded the bullet holes.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I know so.”

  His praise brings the words back into focus. Lee turns around and pounds out a paragraph, only stopping once to worry that it doesn’t sound right. When she is done, she pulls the paper off the platen and hands it to him. He reads it slowly, but this time Lee doesn’t need him to tell her it is good. She already knows. While he’s reading, she eases the window open and grabs a jerry can, fills up two glasses to their brims. It’s not even noon, but lately she’s turned everything into an opportunity for celebration.

  Chapter Sixteen

  One hot July night a month or so after the Patou party, when Man is out again, Lee stays late in the studio. She has been working on her bell jar images. There is a small series of them now, and she is very pleased with them. Their framing makes the model’s head appear to float inside the jar, trapped like a specimen under the glass even though she was kneeling behind it. In a few shots the woman has a dreamy expression; in others she has her eyes closed and her head tilted to one side. In all of them, there is a sense of claustrophobia that feels both provocative and familiar. Lee has started to understand her work in this way: she is consciously evoking a feeling rather than just lucking into a successful image.

  Lee decides that if she can get the series done tonight, she is going to show it to Man. It is her best work so far, and she has been waiting until she has all the images printed. Perhaps four of them could be mounted in a frame, or there could be a triptych of them in 221. They work best in a grouping, as if they themselves are a collection of specimens. Maybe, if she ever has a show, the pictures can be pinned to the wall rather than framed, or they can be displayed inside bell jars. That might be the most provocative of all.

  Lee moves through the darkroom easily now. It is almost a second home.

  When Lee is done printing, she goes back into the developing room. There is one roll of film left from the bell jar sessions, and she is curious to see what it contains. She lines up her tools as she’s been taught and turns off the light. It is still a shock to be plunged into darkness. She has her hands on the film and the church key. She peels open the canister and is getting ready to start dipping the film in the developer when she feels a skitter-scratching run across her shoe and dart up her leg. Lee lets out a shriek, drops the film, shakes her leg frantically, and, in her panic, reaches up and pulls the cord to turn on the ceiling light.

  The first thing Lee notices in the sudden brightness is the tail of the mouse as it runs under the table. The next thing she notices is her film, curled in a heap on t
he table and almost certainly ruined. Quickly she turns off the light. What to do? The chances of the film being salvageable are minimal. But she loves the photos so much—they are the final roll of her bell jar session, the one she thought might be the best of all.

  Out of indecision more than anything else, she goes through the motions of developing the film. When the images are finally in the fix, she sees that they aren’t entirely black, as she would have imagined them to be; they are murky, low contrast, fuzzy compared with the others from the session. She feels a crushing sense of disappointment that she knows is related as much to Man and her growing need to impress him as it is to the loss of her work. Hanging from the clothesline to dry, the negatives are like a sad little ribbon of failure, and she goes home immediately, not even wanting to print the other work she has planned to complete. When Man returns, she pretends to be asleep.

  The next morning when Lee comes into the studio, she takes down the negatives to inspect them under the loupe. They’re altered, certainly, but when she sees them magnified, she notices that they seem almost reversed, as if the light and dark crystals on the film have switched places. Intrigued, she chooses one and prints it. As the image appears in the developing tray, she draws in a sharp breath. She was correct—there has been some sort of reversal, and all around the image, where the light and dark areas of the composition meet, there is a fine black line, as if someone has traced it with a soft pencil. The image itself is extremely low contrast, which is unfortunate, but paired with the ghostly effect of the black outline, it is like nothing she has ever seen.

  Rushing, Lee prints another few images from the series. In each the effect is subtly different—perhaps, she thinks, because of where that particular frame was positioned when the light came on—but they all have the black outline and the same ethereal quality. By the time Man arrives, she has printed several more and cannot wait to show him.

  He comes over and kisses her, but she has no time for kisses.

  “Look.” Lee shows him the prints and explains what happened in the developing room. He takes one of them, still dripping wet, out into the light so he can see it better.

  “Very curious,” he says. His finger hovers just above the surface of the print and traces the outline along the bell jar. “So you mean to tell me that you turned on the light—the overhead light—in the developing room, and this is what you got? That really doesn’t seem possible.”

  “I know. I thought I had completely ruined them, but for some reason I developed them anyway, and here we are.”

  “Lucky mistake,” he murmurs, and Lee clenches her teeth in annoyance. He looks at all the other prints, holding up one image and saying, “You know, we could experiment with this. See what would happen if we exposed it to light for longer or shorter times. How long do you think the light was on?”

  “Maybe ten seconds?”

  “We could try five, twenty—and we could lay the film out on the table purposefully so that the exposure is uniform.” He is moving from print to print as he talks.

  “I was thinking that if we underexposed the film to begin with maybe it wouldn’t be so murky.”

  “Ah, yes—we should try that!” His face fills with excitement. “All we need are some terrible pictures we can experiment with.” She follows him as he leaves the darkroom. He grabs both of their cameras from the office and throws his coat back on, and then fills his camera bag with extra film.

  Outside, Lee poses on bridges, makes funny faces, takes pictures of Man doing the same. Since the goal is to use up the film, they take pictures of pedestrians, shadows, signposts, trash cans, antique store windows. Soon it devolves into a game to see who can do the oddest pose in a shot with a stranger, so Lee goes and sits behind someone at a café, puts a napkin on her head like a babushka, and stares at the camera with a look of surprise. Man leans on the back of a car that someone has just parked; Lee takes a picture of him sticking out his tongue while the driver, not noticing him, opens the car door. For each roll, they experiment with under-and overexposing, making careful notes about which roll is treated which way. After less than an hour they’ve used all the film, and they head back to develop it.

  In the studio, they are methodical. There are twelve rolls of film; they make a chart and hang it on the wall, marking out how long they will expose each roll to light and if it was underexposed to begin with. Only one roll of film can be in the developing bath at a time, so they work as a team: Man does the exposures and dips them in the developer; Lee agitates them in the stop and fix and hangs them up to dry. When they speak, they speak only about the work.

  “This one is twelve seconds.”

  “I think we should mark them with tape once they dry so we don’t get confused, and then we can match that to the chart.”

  When she and Man make eye contact, she can tell he feels it too: a sense that they are doing something momentous. To be able to manipulate the negative itself, its chemical properties, the very nature of it, rather than to alter it manually by scratching or cutting—it feels as if they are creating a new medium altogether. She hopes so much that it works, that it wasn’t some weird fluke when she did it the first time.

  Without acknowledgment, it seems that they have both decided to wait to look at the images until they develop all the film. Lee hangs them up and marks them with tape without even holding them up to the safelight. Finally, after several hours, all twelve strips hang together on the drying line, and Man rubs her back as they stand there looking at the film.

  The three little words come unbidden out of the ache she feels in her stomach. “I love you,” she says.

  Man puts his arm around her shoulders and pulls her tight. “I love you too,” he whispers.

  It is the first time they’ve said the words to each other, and it should be huge, but it just feels of a piece with the work they are doing together. Lee hugs him back quickly and then moves away, grabbing one of the still-damp negative strips and taking it out into the main room. Immediately, it is obvious that they’ve re-created the effect that Lee produced accidentally. Lampposts glow white, outlined against white streets. Man’s hair against the parked car is traced with a black edge. Lee’s eyes are shockingly dark against her ghostly skin. She feels as if she is looking at pictures from another planet. Together, she and Man choose twelve images, one from each roll, and print them, moving around each other in the darkroom as smoothly as dancers.

  When the prints are laid out side by side, it’s clear that there’s a pattern—that their experiments with underexposure have created subtle variations in the effect. They talk about the images for a long time, appraising them. Which effect works best with which image, what they would tweak if they did it again. They both scrawl copious notes, and after a while, Lee puts down her pencil and stretches, rubbing at her neck where tension sends threads of pain into her shoulders.

  “Are you hungry?” Man asks her, moving her hands aside and placing his own on her neck to dig into her muscles.

  She rolls her head back and closes her eyes. “Mm. Starving. But I don’t really want to stop.”

  “It will be here later,” he says, and they grab their coats and walk to Le Dôme, where Man orders a dozen oysters and champagne. Lee is almost too worked up to eat, but the first oyster hits the back of her throat like a gulp of the sea and suddenly she is famished. Brine and lemon, the delicate fizz of the champagne when she swallows, Man’s hand on her leg, the hum and clatter of the restaurant around them, everything amplified, larger and better than it was before.

  “Can you work after we drink this?” she asks, gesturing to the bottle.

  “No—but let’s be done for the day. It will be there tomorrow.”

  So they drink the bottle and order another. Around them the crowd ebbs and flows, new faces replacing old. They see people they know and ignore them. The longer they sit there, the less Lee hears the noises and clatter, as if a thin shell separates them from everyone else. They see no one and no one sees th
em.

  When they get home, electrified, tingling from liquor, they hurry to bed. Man starts at her feet and begins kissing her, delicate kisses all along her body. When he gets to her mouth, he lingers, and then he stops and reaches for the nightstand and gets out one of the scarves they have been using. Lee lifts her arm to let him tie it. But he shakes his head no and folds the fabric on itself to make a blindfold, then moves to put it on her.

  She pushes her hand against his chest to stop him. All of a sudden her heart is racing, she is sweating, she cannot breathe.

  Man freezes. “What’s wrong?”

  Lee cannot speak. The blindfold has terrified her. She swings her legs over the side of the bed and sits with her arms crossed over her stomach. Man runs a gentle hand across her back. Her heartbeat thumps in her neck, and she tries to take a deep breath to calm herself down, but she can only manage little sips of air. Man gets up and brings her a glass of water. She drinks it down. He waits for her to speak.

  Lee holds the empty glass in her lap, and closes her eyes. Fragments of memory come, unbidden and unwanted. Uncle—Lee never allows herself to think his name, but the outlines of the word catch in her mind like a burr. She was seven, staying at a family friend’s house in New York City. Everyone else had gone out ice skating, but Lee had had a fever, and even though she was feeling better, he was called to mind her while they were gone. He gave her a giant stick of horehound candy and watched Lee while she ate it, the flavor not so dissimilar from the medicine she had been given before he arrived. He took her into the parlor and asked her if she wanted to play sardines. “But there are only two of us,” she remembers saying. “That’s all right. We’ll hide together.” He found a scarf, tied it tight over her eyes, spun her in a circle. She heard his footsteps receding as he went to find a place to hide. Lee remembers counting, remembers taking a first step, stroking blindly at the air in front of her; remembers how worried she was she’d break something in the pretty, cluttered parlor. After a count of twenty, Lee found him in the butler’s pantry, and he caught her around the waist and settled her on his knee. The rest is a blur, flashes of sensation Lee does not want to let herself recall: the wet sound of his breath in her ear, a cloying bittersweet scent in the air, the pressure of his huge hot body between her thighs.