The Age of Light

by Whitney Scharer

  After a few more exposures, Man comes out from under the cloth and says, “I have to get another plate.” His voice is stilted and professional, and he walks quickly over to the supply closet, his heels thudding hard on the wood floor.

  Lee stands up. “How many did you get?”

  “Five or six.”

  “I’m sure they’re fine,” Lee says, and then to her father, “Man works quickly. You won’t be disappointed.”

  Even though they are done, Theodore wants to linger, but Lee can’t get him out the door fast enough. Man is clearly happy to see him go. Lee escorts Theodore to his hotel, walking so quickly that she grows hot beneath her coat, and even her father, with his long stride, can barely keep up with her. He moves to kiss her cheek at the hotel’s entrance, but she steps away from him and leaves him standing alone.

  A block away she ducks into a bar and takes a seat at the counter, breathes deeply, and orders one brandy and then another, drinks them until her empty stomach burns. It is not until she has finished both drinks that she pays attention to her surroundings, lifts her head and looks around at the other people in the bar. Paris a city full of strangers still. Everyone is paired or in groups of three, their faces round and blank as moons. They talk and laugh around her, their actions exaggerated as if they’re in a play.

  Lee wishes she hadn’t agreed to see her father while he was here. Having him see her new life has diminished it somehow. Diminished her. She remembers the rages she used to fly into when she was young: screaming, kicking at walls, pulling at her hair until it came out in clumps in her fists. All that rage, and in the end it led to nothing. To acquiescence. The submission her father required of her when she was a child—she felt it again when Man was taking their picture, when Theodore’s hand was on her thigh. She thought that part of her life was behind her, but having him here in Paris has brought it back, like two sides of a stereoscope coalescing into one image. And how different is her relationship with Man? She complies with all he asks of her too.

  When she gets back to the studio, she realizes she has forgotten her key, so she rings the bell and Man meets her at the door.

  “I didn’t know if you were coming back until later,” he says.

  “I just dropped him at the hotel, and stopped for a drink on the way home.”

  Man’s face twitches with what seems to Lee like disgust. “I can smell it on you.”

  She climbs the stairs and goes into the parlor, Man following her. “Should we have another?” she asks. “I think we should have another.”

  She busies herself at the bar cart, pours two brandies into matching tumblers. When she hands one to Man, he says, “Thank you, Bitsie.”

  He gives the word a hard edge and Lee winces. “Don’t. Just…don’t.”

  “What was that? You, your father—it was like you were trying to make me jealous.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Letting him pay for the coffees…Making me take your picture…”

  “I didn’t let him do anything. He does what he wants. And besides, you should have offered to take our picture.” Lee doesn’t really think this; she was just as uncomfortable as Man with Theodore’s request for a portrait, but she wants to lash out at him.

  “Oh really?” Man says. “It’s not taking the picture I minded. It’s how superfluous I felt. Like you didn’t need me.” He says the last few words quietly, his voice self-pitying and needy, which makes her even angrier.

  Lee sets down her tumbler on a side table and then takes Man’s from him as well. She hooks her fingers in his shirt collar and pulls him toward her, kissing him on the mouth so hard it almost hurts.

  “Stay there,” Lee says. She goes into the hallway and gets his scarf, the one he was wearing that afternoon. Back in front of him, she runs the length of it through her hands.

  “Lee—”

  With one hand she pushes him onto the couch and then straddles him, putting her mouth back on his insistently. Though at first he resists her kiss, through their clothes she feels him grow hard. It pleases her, how irresistible she is to him. She picks up the scarf and ties it around his eyes, pulling it tight in a knot at the back of his head and then pushing him down so he is lying on the couch. It is the first time they’ve done this. The sight of him with the blindfold on excites her much more than she thought it would. She feels so aroused she is almost ashamed. Maybe it is anger—she wants to hurt Man, wants to cause him pain. Together they strip off his clothes and then she takes off her own. She squeezes both of his wrists so tight she can feel the bones slide. And then she reaches between her legs, pushes him inside her, and begins to move on top of him.

  “Lee, this—I don’t think—” His voice is almost fearful, but she releases his wrists and rests her hand on his mouth briefly so he cannot speak. She grinds against him, paying attention only to what her own body wants, speeding up the tempo, so fast she feels his balls slap against her. He groans and calls out her name as if it’s hard for him to say it, grabs her waist and helps her slam herself down on top of him, again and again and again.

  He tries to move her to a new position, to slow her down, but she won’t let him. She keeps going, faster and faster, until she feels his whole body stiffen and he cries out her name again. Even then she won’t stop, pounding against him, and when she comes she rakes her nails across his shoulders.

  Afterward, she lies on top of him, skin on skin, and reaches around to help him push off the blindfold. Man pulls her closer to him. Now that they are done, she worries he is going to want to keep talking, so she closes her eyes and pretends to be falling asleep. He strokes her hair for a while. When she doesn’t respond, he gently moves her over and slips out from under her. She hears him getting dressed and then feels him lay a blanket over her. She lies there for hours, until the light fades from the windows and the room goes dark, wishing there was somewhere she could go to be alone.

  Leipzig,

  April 20, 1945

  It takes the 83rd forever to reach Leipzig after the Germans surrender the city. Lee is hobbled by her regiment. She knows Margaret Bourke-White has gotten to the city ahead of her, probably others have as well, while Lee sits in the mud in the GI jeep and urges it to go faster. In the end they are only half a day late. Old women in dirty brown dresses greet them in the streets with flowers; they wave and smile and hold up their children. Around the corner the fighting continues, and the sound of gunfire intermittently drowns out the women’s cheering.

  Lee hears stories of what the Nazis will do to avoid capture, but she doesn’t know if she should believe them. Poison, gunshot, hanging. A factory director invites a hundred guests for dinner. When the 69th takes the city, he pushes a button, sets off an explosion that kills everyone at the table. Friends point guns at one another, counting to three and pulling the triggers. Someone tells her every Nazi in Leipzig’s Neues Rathaus has committed suicide, and it makes her loathe them even more, the cowards.

  When Lee gets there, the Rathaus is quiet, everything coated in thick white dust. She goes from office to office, alone. A bomb explodes somewhere outside and more plaster drifts down from the ceiling. On the second floor, she pauses at the threshold of an opulent room. A window hangs open. Oiled leather furniture is the only thing not completely covered in dust. A mother and daughter lie sideways on the couches. A man sits in the desk chair, his head resting on the blotter before him. Lee feels for a moment as if she has walked in and caught everyone napping, but on the desk an empty bottle of cyanide serves as the paperweight for the family’s documents.

  The daughter must be almost twenty. She wears a nurse’s cap, a Red Cross armband on her black jacket. Her hands are folded over her stomach. Lee takes a wide shot and then gets in closer, so that the girl’s face almost fills the frame. Blond hair cut like Lee’s. Cheekbones sharp as bird wings. Her lips are parted, her jaw relaxed. Her teeth are extraordinarily pretty, and after Lee takes the picture, she reaches out and touches them, just so she can feel th
e bone.

  Chapter Twenty

  The posters start appearing all over Montparnasse, pinned to signposts, stacked near café entrances, taped up in the Métro station. On them is the image of a woman in a gigantic feather boa and a low-cut dress, her mouth open, smiling ecstatically. LE RETOUR DE KIKI is printed beneath her image. Lee cannot escape them. Every time she walks by Le Jockey—which is often; it is only a few blocks from their apartment—she watches the raucous crowd spilling out of the doorway, seemingly having the time of their lives, and she wonders anew what all the fuss is about.

  It is embarrassing the amount of time Lee spends thinking about Kiki. Man has insisted he isn’t in love with her anymore, that the only person he loves is Lee, so why does Kiki still fill her imagination?

  One day a cold October wind rips a poster off the side of a building and it wraps itself around Lee’s shin, and she peels it off her leg and takes it home. When she walks in the door, she holds it up and says to Man, “I want to go. Tonight.”

  He groans. He is already in his dressing gown, sitting on the couch with a large book on his lap. “I thought we were staying in.”

  Lee scans the dates on the poster. “Okay, not tonight. Thursday?” With a sigh, he agrees. She puts the poster on the table in front of him, and he glances at the image.

  “That photo is about ten years out-of-date,” he says.

  “Really?”

  “Kiki looks older now. She’s gotten too fat to dance.”

  Lee is pleased. “I don’t care how fat she is. We’re going. Besides, I thought you liked a little jiggle in the middle.”

  When Thursday arrives, Man keeps his word. He is quiet as they walk to Le Jockey. He wears a new pair of flannel trousers and his beret, which he keeps fussing with while they walk. Lee wears her smartest dress and imagines herself shimmying on a café table—Lee of Montparnasse.

  “How long has it been since you’ve seen her?” Lee asks as he takes her arm and threads it through his.

  “I saw her just last week, at Éluard’s.”

  Lee thinks back to the previous week. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “I see Kiki now and then. She poses for a lot of people. I run into her. We’re still friendly.”

  “I thought you said she was jealous.”

  Man looks over at her, an amused expression on his face. “She was. I was too. It was a part of it. Actually, it’s how I knew we were in love.”

  “Because she was jealous?”

  “Because we were both jealous. For a time at the beginning we had an open relationship, but that didn’t work out for us. And even when we agreed not to be with other people, I still imagined her with other men whenever we weren’t together.”

  Man says this lightly, but Lee does not love this side of him. She is reminded of how displeased he was when she left him on the beach at Biarritz and went for a walk on her own.

  “Let’s never be jealous.” Lee’s voice is firm.

  “Sometimes jealousy is a good thing.” There is some trash on the sidewalk, and Man pulls her closer as they sidestep it. “I remember Kiki onstage one night. She was singing some old chanson—I could barely understand the words—and I looked around and every person in the room had stopped what they were doing to stare at her. When she dances she has this one move: she gets really low, her knees pushed together, and somehow she shakes her hips and makes her dress fly up a bit. It’s hilarious, and sexy…You can’t stop watching her. I knew that night that I was in love with her, and I remember thinking that I knew it because I saw how badly all the other men and women wanted to have her and that she was mine. I was jealous of them getting to watch her, but really they should have been jealous of me. And maybe they were.”

  Lee pulls away and stops on the sidewalk, facing him. She bends her knees and starts to twist her hips, and her dress climbs up her thighs until her garter clips are showing. “Like this?” Lee asks. “Is this what she used to do?”

  “Hmm…sort of. But your version is more…Yankee.” He reaches out and grabs her arms and pulls her toward him. They are standing in the middle of the sidewalk, which is filled with people out for their evening strolls. They become a logjam in the river of the crowd: people behind them have to stop and go around them, bumping up against one another and then adjusting their course.

  “Do you think all these people are jealous of us right now?” she asks.

  “I think anyone with eyes would be jealous of me with you.”

  “And what if I wanted to be with one of them? Like that man, over there.” Lee points across the street to where a fat man is just getting out of a taxi.

  “You and that man?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  Man laughs, uncomfortably. “I don’t want to think about that.”

  His tone is final, but Lee doesn’t want to let it go.

  “We never talked about it, whether we could take other lovers. Not even at the beginning.” Lee has not thought through what she is saying. All she knows is that they are going to see Kiki, and what she wants is for Man’s attention to be on her, Lee.

  “I don’t want you with other men.” They are still standing in the middle of the sidewalk. She wonders if they are about to cause a scene.

  “And what about you?”

  “I haven’t wanted to be with anyone else since I met you. Not for one minute. I want to spend my life with you, Lee.”

  Man doesn’t break eye contact, his expression serious. Lee knows his words should please her, but she finds herself thinking of what this means in a literal way, all the other men she will not get to go to bed with, strangers to her now and always, and then she pictures a different future, those men standing in her bedroom and shrugging off suspenders, their hard stomachs, her hands pulling at the top button of their pants and bringing them down to lie on top of her, the way their tongues would feel, soft and hot as her own. She pictures dozens of them—a hundred, even—all in a line stretching into her future, and then replaces the image with Man. Almost as a test, she leans forward and kisses him on the mouth. He kisses her back, and it feels as good as every time they are together—better, even—and the pedestrians on the sidewalk continue to slip past them like water, and Lee doesn’t care even a little bit that these people are seeing them, not even when Man grabs the back of her thigh under her dress and tucks his fingers inside the top of her stocking. She finds that she wants the other people to see them, so she wraps her leg around him to pull him closer.

  After a little while they separate.

  “Should we go to the Jockey?” he says, and puts her arm through his again.

  Inside Le Jockey every table is full and every person looks interesting. The room is spacious but divided up by large columns, each painted with a different scene of cowboys and Indians. In the corner is a small stage where a man with an accordion and a feral-looking monkey are performing a chanson Lee actually knows. A visible haze of cigarette smoke hangs in the air. Man turns to her and asks a question, but it is so loud she can’t hear him.

  “What did you say?” she shouts.

  “Do you want a drink?” he shouts back, miming someone sipping from a glass.

  “Yes. Get me a drink!” He merges with the crowd and she moves over to lean against a column painted with a picture of an Indian warrior rearing on his horse.

  Soon Man is threading his way back to her with two gin martinis, perfect corkscrews of lemon peel suspended in the glasses. On the way, though, he gets stopped by a pair of men, and he talks to them for a minute and then gestures with a cocktail in Lee’s direction. Just then the accordionist stops playing, and the noise level in the bar lowers slightly. Lee walks over and Man introduces her, two names she does not recognize. The men look her over wolfishly. Man finds two empty chairs and pulls them up to the table. As soon as they are sitting, Lee takes her martini and downs most of it in one big gulp. She wants to get another but Man and the two men are deep in conversation, hunched over the table and practically excl
uding her. Then she feels a tap on her back and turns around to find a seated man holding out a Tom Collins glass filled to the brim with bright fizzy liquid. He stares at her intensely and she takes the glass from him.

  “I make films,” the man says in accented English. He has thick brown hair curling back off his forehead, a long straight nose, dark brown eyes. He is sitting backward in his chair, and his lips are so close to her ear and his voice so deep that she can hear him perfectly.

  “I take photographs,” Lee says back, and takes a swallow of the drink.

  “I am making a new film. I’ve been inspired by the paintings here and I need someone to play a statue. Have you been in films? You’re very beautiful.”

  His directness is unnerving, and his gaze never wavers from her. Man is still having his own conversation with the two men at their table, but his glance keeps sliding toward her too, which makes Lee feel that no matter where she looks she will accidentally meet the eyes of someone. She takes another sip of the gin fizz. It is delicious, light and lemony—a shock since all she can smell is smoke.

  The man doesn’t blink, which is disconcerting. “I don’t see why you need someone to play a statue,” Lee says. “Can’t you just get a statue?” She makes her tone teasing.

  “The poet is looking for a muse. The statue comes to life. You have the look.” He leans back and seems to compose himself. “I’m Jean Cocteau,” he says, grabbing her hand and kissing it lightly. “Have you heard of me?”