The Age of Light

by Whitney Scharer

  Most of the time he paints in silence, but sometimes, if he’s struggling to get something right or needs a break after focusing for a long time, he’ll talk to her about what he is hoping to accomplish with the painting. He tells her that her lips are like their two bodies at rest, that the horizon behind them joins them as it does the earth and sky. Behind her mouth, at the edge of the painting, he paints the observatory they see every evening as they walk home down Boulevard Saint-Michel.

  “I want the painting fixed in space,” he tells her, “so that everyone will know it’s you I’m painting.”

  When Man is silent, sometimes Lee thinks about nothing, or just lets her mind wander. Other times, if she lies there long enough, she starts to think about her life as one long string, all the things she’s done interconnected and stretched out from the past into the future. She finally feels she is here at the prow of herself. All she’s learned. So much that she can see her modeling years as something important, as a way for her to understand the images she now wants to create. The pictures in Vogue or McCall’s whose artistry used to be so impenetrable to her she now views with a critic’s eye. The bones of the compositions feel more obvious to her, and she finds herself questioning the lighting choices or holding her hands to the page to crop an image differently.

  “Man,” she says one morning while he is painting, “what has Tristan said about my pictures? For 221?”

  He looks down at her and a sheepish expression spreads across his face. “You know…I’m so sorry. I haven’t even seen him since you asked me last. I’ll ask him soon—next week.”

  “All right,” Lee says, but she is disappointed. She feels as though she heard Man talking about seeing Tristan just the other day, but maybe she is wrong.

  Man paints for a while, and then he says, “Another thing I forgot—I can’t believe I didn’t mention this to you. The Philadelphia Camera Society liked my essay so much they invited me to submit photos for their next exhibition.”

  Lee knows that the Philadelphia Camera Society is respected worldwide for exhibiting some of the most interesting work of the moment. To many photographers, its annual exhibition is the holy grail, and Lee has long suspected that Man has been annoyed not to be asked to contribute before. “That’s wonderful! What are you going to submit?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I have some ideas, but I want to think about it a little longer. It has to be something really spectacular. Groundbreaking.”

  Lee knows what this opportunity might mean for him and tries to feel a selfless happiness for his success, but the thought of how he has forgotten to talk to Tristan about her work snags in her mind. “Wouldn’t it be fun if we both had work published at the same time?” As soon as she says it she regrets the words, which even to her ears sound petty.

  Man sets down his brush and looks at her. “Lee—I told you, I’ll ask him. Things are fraught for him right now. I have to pick the right time.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry I brought it up again.”

  Lee closes her eyes and lets him paint her, imagines what the finished painting will look like hanging on a gallery wall.

  Chapter Eighteen

  All the squares on the calendar are blank.

  “Nothing? How many days in a row is this now?” Man’s voice sounds tired.

  “Not that many.” It has been three weeks since their last paying client, but Lee knows better than to tell Man this. He has been so obsessed with his painting and his artist statement for the Philadelphia prize that he hasn’t even noticed, and having finances pointed out to him will just make him huffy about how glad he is to have time to spend on his real art.

  Man comes up behind her and stares over her shoulder at the empty white calendar page.

  “I’ll start on the perfume bottle spreads,” Lee says.

  “No, I’ve got a better idea. It’s beautiful outside. No reason to work when there isn’t any. I’ll get the car out and we can drive to Chantilly, have a picnic.” As soon as he says the words Man’s entire demeanor changes, and within moments he has dug a picnic basket out of the closet, along with a pile of blankets and the traveling cocktail set.

  While Man gets the car out of the garage, Lee fetches supplies, stocking the basket with bread and radishes and butter, cold pulled turkey and saucisson sec, their favorite little éclairs from the patisserie down the street. She nestles the food around an iced bottle of Sémillon and is on the front steps of the studio before Man gets back with the car, her coat buttoned to her neck, its rabbit fur collar soft against her cheeks. Man rounds the corner and she waves at him, but just then a young Western Union boy on a bicycle stops in front of the studio and runs up the steps to the door, an envelope clutched in his hand.

  “For Man Ray?” Lee asks him.

  The boy squints at the typed name. “No, for Monsieur Lee Miller.”

  “That’s me.”

  The boy’s eyebrows push together in confusion, but he holds out the telegram and receipt book so Lee can sign for it, and then rides away on his bicycle. Man is idling in front of the door, the growl of the car engine loud on the quiet street. Lee holds up her finger to Man and opens the telegram, already expecting the worst: someone dead or sick or maimed in some horrible accident. But instead,

  LI-LI COMING TO PARIS OCT 1 ON THE SS ALGONQUIN FOR BUSINESS AND YOU STOP

  ERIK AND JOHN SEND THEIR LOVE STOP

  YOUR LOVING FATHER

  Man honks the horn a few times in a row and Lee shoves the telegram in her bag and runs down to him, strapping the picnic basket onto the back of the car and then settling herself in the passenger seat. She pulls her beret lower over her ears.

  “Anything important?” Man asks her.

  “No, not really. I’ll tell you later.”

  “Okay, then off we go!” Man shouts, his voice full of the joy of abandoned responsibility. As he drives he keeps up a steady stream of chatter. Lee is quiet. She has her handbag on her lap, the telegram inside it. Impersonal typeface, the message stilted, nothing like her father, but still it is enough to bring him back to her. Your loving father. For business and you. He will be here in less than a month, in their apartment, poking around the home that she and Man have made together. She has imagined how her new life might appear to him, but now the thought of him actually being here makes her uncomfortable. What will she tell him? How will her world look through his eyes?

  Man continues north out of the city, and soon the road opens up into farmland, alternating fields of pasture and plantings, punctuated here and there with stands of beech trees, their leaves not yet turned to fall colors.

  “This is wonderful,” Lee says, and rolls down her window a little so she can breathe the air, tinged with the smell of a distant controlled burn that smudges the sky with gray.

  Lee is aware of how it could appear: she has moved from one man taking her photo to another. This new man is not her father, of course. Still, she cannot bear the idea of having her father see their apartment, where many of the pictures Man has taken of her hang.

  In Chantilly, Lee and Man visit the château and spend a while in its gorgeous library. By early afternoon they are famished, so they drive farther onto the château grounds and park the car next to a stream with a view of a pretty little footbridge. The day is still, the water so placid it reflects the trees and clouds above it. Lee sets out the picnic blanket, cuts thick slabs of butter and presses them into rounds of bread, tops them with razor-thin radish slices, and shakes salt on top from paper pouches. Man eats with his eyes closed, blissfully, and they wash down the meal with the Sémillon, not cold anymore but still delicious.

  “Sometimes I think about being a chef,” Lee says, popping a slice of Morbier in her mouth and loving the way the ashy rind tastes against the radish and the wine.

  Man opens his eyes and looks at her. “I’ve never seen you cook anything.”

  “I cook! Well, I would if I had any of the right things. Pans, a larder. I used to cook when I was growing up.�
�

  “What did you make?”

  “All sorts of things. I never used a recipe. Soups and stews—I’d just throw things in a pot until it tasted good.”

  “And were you successful?”

  “My father always thought so.” Lee remembers serving him at his desk, the walk down the hallway with the tureen clutched between two pot holders. She’d set it at his elbow and hover nearby until he put down his newspaper or pencil and took a bite, waiting for the moment when he’d look back at her and smile. Oh, how she used to adore her father.

  “Maybe I’ll cook for you sometime,” Lee says to Man.

  “Maybe. I like taking you out, though.”

  “We’d save money,” she says, and then, after a pause, “He’s coming to visit—my father. That’s what the telegram this morning said.”

  Man sits up and grabs the wine, refilling first her glass and then his own. “I didn’t even know you were in contact with him.”

  “I’m not.” The last time Lee heard from Theodore was when she received his letter about his photos being published, which she didn’t answer. She mentions him now and then, but each time she does Man never seems interested. He has purposefully cut off contact with his own family, and doesn’t ever seem to regret it. It’s a philosophy he shares with many of the other members of his circle. Like them, he says he wants to be free of the tangled alliances of his past, because being free will help him focus on his art.

  “Do you want to see him?”

  Lee watches a bird poking around in the mud at the edge of the stream and ponders his question. “I’m honestly not sure. I’ve been angry at him for not contacting me, but I’m to blame for that too.”

  “You just have to decide if being in touch with him will make you happy. And if it will, you should see him.”

  Lee nods. After a while, she says, “When I was little, my father had this album—actually, lots of albums—and he kept records of everything I did. My first steps, my first visit from the doctor when I got a fever as a baby. All my school papers, and these silly little poems I wrote and gave to him. He was always so proud of me. And he took so many photos. Sometimes I think every memory I have of my childhood comes from looking at those pictures.”

  “Did he make the albums for your brothers too?”

  “I think so, but I was clearly his favorite. And I needed him more than they did.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because…because of what happened.”

  “Of course. God, I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t need to be sorry. It’s just that I…I miss him. He was always there for me. He loved me.”

  Man shifts on the hard ground and then winces as he stretches out his legs in front of him. “Well. Of course he loved you. That’s what parents do. But I only meant you don’t have to see him when he visits if you don’t want to. You’re a grown woman. You’re not beholden to him.”

  Lee nods again. Part of her agrees with Man: just because Theodore has finally sent her a telegram doesn’t erase all the months that they haven’t been in contact. And he’s not even coming to see her, if she’s reading the message correctly: the trip is business and she’s just tacked on. But “loving father” keeps running through her mind; there was a whole childhood when those words were true.

  Man stands up, stretches, and pats his belly. He walks down toward the bank of the stream, picks up a stone from the water’s edge, and sends it bouncing a few times over the surface of the still water. Lee joins him, starts collecting stones and fills her pockets with them.

  “Want me to teach you?” Man asks.

  Lee pulls a stone from her coat. She palms it for a moment, remembering, then with a neat twist of her wrist launches it smoothly toward the stream, where it skips almost twice as far as Man’s before sinking. “Ha!” she shouts, pleased.

  Man whistles. Lee throws another stone and another, the technique coming back more fully each time she does it. She and her brothers spent whole afternoons down at the pond on their property, skipping stones, catching fish, Lee’s pants rolled up over her calves, the ladylike white bows her mother insisted she wear in her braids drooping and mud-splattered. Man stops throwing his own stones to watch her, and she revels in his attention, a different kind of attention than when he takes her picture.

  “You were a wild child, weren’t you?” Man asks.

  “I suppose I was.” Lee knows he means wild like free, and she was that way, especially when she was very young. Back then there was no difference between her and her brothers. Whole days were spent outside, exploring; she remembers feeling as though she could hoard the whole world and eat it with a spoon. Before what happened with—she almost hears his name inside her head but stops herself as always. Her childhood is split that way, two neat halves, before and after. It was after when she went truly wild, but not in the way Man means. When her wildness became a thing she felt she had to hide from everyone.

  Lee stops skipping stones and stands staring at the water. Maybe Man knows what she is thinking. She’s not sure. All she knows is he is quiet, and she appreciates it.

  After a while he says, “Can you show me how you do it, that little flick of your wrist?”

  She goes up behind him and puts her small hand on his larger one, their fingers joined around the cool round stone, and she demonstrates a couple of times before Man tries it on his own. His first attempt goes plunking into the water, but it is not long before he has it mastered, the elegant snap that Lee learned all those years ago. When they tire of the diversion, they walk over to the footbridge, where they stand together and look down at the water, its surface smooth as a mirror once the ripples of the stones have disappeared.

  Later, as they drive home, Lee takes off her shoes, tucks up her feet on the seat, and lays her head on Man’s shoulder. She feels content, warm, and drowsy. She thinks that it will not be so hard to have her father here. To show him her new life. She is about to say this to Man when he says, “Those albums your father made—did your mother help him?”

  Even in Lee’s contentment the mention of her mother fills her with sourness. “I doubt she ever looked back on pictures of me, even when I was little.”

  “You never talk about her.”

  “I never want to talk about her. I told you how we never got along, not even when I was really young. And then the older I got…I could never make her happy. I kept getting into trouble at school. Everything I did was a disappointment to her. And she was jealous of me.” As always when she talks about her mother, Lee can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice.

  “Jealous of you?”

  “It’s true. When I was young she was jealous of all the photo shoots my father did with me, and when I was older she was jealous of my modeling career. She was a beauty when she was young, but I was always prettier than her, and she was scared of getting older and losing her looks.”

  They are getting closer to the city, and Lee looks out at the modest homes that dot the landscape. Man says, “I don’t wonder that your mother took issue with the photo shoots.”

  He keeps his hands steady on the steering wheel. Lee lifts her head to look at him. “Yes. She hated that my father and I were so close.”

  Man opens his mouth as if to say something, then closes it. They drive in silence for a while. Then he says, “I would just think, after what had happened to you, that your father would have been a little more protective. It just seems odd, what you’ve told me about those pictures.”

  “No no no,” Lee says, and sits up and untucks her legs from beneath her. “You see, he did those shoots with me to make me feel better. To help me regain my confidence.”

  “Ah.”

  Man doesn’t say anything else, so Lee continues. “I’m sure it’s why I was able to be successful as a model so quickly. And then modeling led me to Paris, and then to you.” She leans over and kisses Man’s arm and rests her head on him again.

  They have turned onto a smaller road, and a horse-drawn wago
n blocks their way. Man has to focus to keep the car from stalling. The air, now that they have lost the breeze, is thick and heavy, and Lee fans herself ineffectually. Finally they reach a place where the wagon can move into a ditch to let them past, and once it is well behind them, Man accelerates quickly, sending a spray of gravel out from under the tires. They crest a hill and then Paris is spread out before them, even from this distance seeming to teem with life after the calm of the country. At first the buildings are low-slung against the horizon, but as Man drives farther into the city, taller buildings crowd out the sky, the sloped lines of the mansard roofs more beautiful to Lee than a mountain vista. Cars choke the road, people press up against one another on the corners. As Man turns onto Boulevard Raspail, Lee realizes how comforting the city is, how much it feels like home. The smell of their neighborhood, granite and garbage—she lifts her head and breathes it in.

  “I think I will see my father while he’s here,” she says.

  Man squeezes her knee. “Whatever you want to do.”

  “I want him to see—I want to show him what I’ve done since I left New York. That I’m fine here on my own.”

  “Better than fine.”

  “Yes, so much better.”

  Lee watches the buildings vibrate past them and pictures her life through her father’s eyes. How far she’s come. How proud she will have made him.

  Chapter Nineteen

  When Theodore gets to town, Lee goes to meet him at the train station, arriving almost an hour early. The October day is blustery and cold, and the wind cuts between her hat and collar, making her wish she brought a scarf.

  Lee has spent the past few weeks envisaging exactly how Theodore’s visit will go. The things she’ll do and say to impress him. Now, as she waits for his train to pull in, she runs through the activities she has planned for them, the carefully curated examples of her artistic life in Paris. A visit to a bistro, where she will introduce him to dishes he’s never tried. A tour of Montparnasse, complete with casual references to streets and buildings where artists and writers she knows he admires work and live. A visit to the studio, so that she can show him the darkroom equipment, maybe even some of her photos if he asks to see them.