The Age of Light

by Whitney Scharer

  The thoughts make her melancholy, make her take another swallow of her wine, which is cheap and terrible, as if it were made from raisins. On the other side of the room, Man stands with Soupault and Tristan, and when he sees Lee looking at him, he beckons her. As she approaches he holds out a hand to her and pulls her close, and when she is against his side she feels an easing, the familiar feeling of relief.

  By ten o’clock glasses clutter every surface, overturned bottles have left viscous red stains on the wooden floors, and the air in the room feels humid. No one is looking at the art anymore. Instead, they are knotted into tight groups, arms slung around one another, their conversations slurred. Five drinks in, Lee leans heavily against Man, who absentmindedly rubs his hand up and down her arm. People start to disband, to say good night, and soon there are only two dozen or so of them left. As if responding to the change in the room, Breton claps his hands and announces that the show is at an end. Man kisses Lee’s cheek and she asks, “What’s next?”

  “More drinks, I imagine,” he says, pulling her in closer.

  A few final stragglers leave and Breton locks the gallery door. The remaining group moves upstairs to a private space above the gallery. At the top of the stairs stands Soupault, blindfolded and holding a large wooden box. Lee realizes this must be what Claude and Ilse were talking about, the real festivities of the evening.

  “Forfeits!” Soupault shouts. Lee almost laughs. She hasn’t played forfeits since boarding school, when she and the other girls would gather after lights-out, toss their few pieces of jewelry into a box, and dare one another to do ridiculous things, like throw eggs at the headmaster’s house or eat rotten food.

  The line slows as people decide what to give up. Valuable items—a tiepin, a pocket watch—get cheers; smaller items—a cheap tortoiseshell comb, a pair of dice—get booed. Standing a few people in front of Lee, Tatiana takes off her beautiful hat and places it carefully in the box. A writer whose name Lee can’t remember pulls an ivory fountain pen out of his pocket and tosses it in. Claude pulls a heavy signet ring off her finger and adds it to the collection. Lee rarely wears jewelry and has only a paste clip in her hair, which she drops into the box as she passes Soupault. She waits for people to jeer, but as the line moves forward a few more steps, she hears instead laughter and whoops of approval. They aren’t for her. Lee turns to see Ilse pulling her Leica strap over her head and fumbling at her dress. For a moment Lee thinks she is going to put the camera in the box, but then Ilse unhooks her brassiere, snakes her arms out of its straps, and drops it on top of the pile.

  In the upstairs room, everyone sits on the floor in a big circle, Soupault and the box in the middle. A whiskey bottle makes its way around. When it gets to Lee she circles the neck with her lips and tips her head back, loving the earthy burn of the whiskey as it goes down, loving, in a sudden liquor-fueled burst of magnanimity, these people and the lightheartedness of this activity, that she is here drinking with them just as she was doing the other night on the film set. She feels more relaxed, sits with her legs folded casually, her shoes cast off to the side. Man is to her left, Breton is to her right, and when the whiskey moves a few people away from them, Breton reaches into his jacket and pulls out a flask, which he hands to her with a collusive raise of his eyebrows. Lee takes a nip and whatever’s inside the flask is even better than the whiskey.

  Soupault looks around the room and then picks up the box and sets it on his lap. He peers inside for a few moments before pulling out a bow tie. “I have here a silk bow tie, two decades out-of-date,” he says to ripples of laughter. “Blue with white stripes, and smelling of a certain someone’s gardenia perfume.” More laughter, and Nusch laughs along with them but then covers her face with her hands.

  Paul Éluard, his shirt collar unbuttoned, says, “Mine, of course. What is my forfeit?”

  Soupault rubs his chin. “Go to town with Nusch.”

  This, too, Lee remembers from when she was younger, when she played this game at a birthday party and had to go to town with the boy from a few farms over, Johnny Whiting. Every time he asked her a question she had to take a step toward him, and he chose the easiest questions he could think of so that he could kiss her sooner, his breath smelling of the cucumber sandwiches they’d just eaten.

  Éluard laughs. “That’s too easy.”

  “I’m starting us off easy,” Soupault says.

  Éluard nods and he and Nusch rise and stand in the middle of the circle about eight feet apart. For a few moments they just look at each other. “Do you like rainy weather?” Éluard asks her.

  “Yes,” she says. Nusch is tiny, delicate, dressed all in black with a lace scarf tied in her hair. She stands with her eyes cast down and there is something raw and honest in her voice that sucks the drunken hilarity out of the room. They take a step toward each other.

  “Do you like T. S. Eliot?” she asks in a whisper.

  “Yes.” They take another step toward each other.

  Soupault stands up and claps his hands. “I take it back. This is too easy. I will ask the questions. Paul, do you like Salvador?”

  “Not particularly,” Éluard says, and a wave of knowing laughter goes around the room. Neither Éluard nor Nusch moves forward.

  “Nusch, do you think Paul is handsome?”

  “Yes,” she whispers, and they step toward each other.

  “Paul, do you like being in bed with Nusch?”

  A pause. “Yes.” Another step. The gap between them is only a foot wide now.

  “Nusch, has Paul asked you to marry him?”

  Nusch does not answer, but they move the final foot toward each other and then they are kissing, and Paul lifts her off the ground and holds her in the air, and there is an uncomfortable feeling in the room that this isn’t something they should be watching, but then someone whoops and sets everyone to clapping. Éluard puts Nusch down and raises his arms above his head like a boxing champion and then they both sit down in the circle. Lee moves her hand along the floor until it’s touching Man’s, and watches the other couple, who sit with their arms around each other, their obvious mutual attraction setting them apart from the rest of the group. Lee glances at Man and he smiles at her and squeezes her hand.

  Soupault slingshots Éluard his bow tie and then digs around in the box again. This time he pulls out Tatiana’s hat and says, “I have here a fine example of Russian millinery. This elegant confection formerly graced the head of none other than…?”

  Tatiana raises her hand.

  “Tata, put lipstick on André, blindfolded!” someone shouts, and everyone laughs as she gets up and puts on the blindfold and then fumbles at Breton’s face with a lipstick someone hands her, drawing a second pink mouth a few inches larger than his real mouth.

  A few other people are chosen and the forfeits grow stranger. Max Ernst fashions an outfit out of newspaper for Fraenkel and makes him strip to his underclothes, then ties the outfit to him with shipping twine. The writer whose name Lee doesn’t recall walks across the room with a potato held between his thighs. One man has to sit on another man’s lap for thirty minutes.

  During it all the bottle has made its way around to Lee several times, and she has gone from feeling warm and limber to dazed and floaty. She closes her eyes and thinks how desperately nice it would be to have a glass of water. It has to be getting close to her turn, and she wonders what they will make her do when they pull her clip out of the box.

  As the forfeits have continued the organization of the circle has changed, and now when Lee opens her eyes she finds herself sitting next to Ilse.

  “What do you make of all this?” Ilse asks her, gesturing to the circle.

  Lee blinks her eyes a few times to focus. “It’s all in good fun, I suppose?”

  “Fun. Yes. Do you know I wanted to have my work in this show and André told me no?”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that.” The whiskey makes the words roll like marbles in Lee’s mouth.

  “Of cou
rse you didn’t know. Why would you?” Her tone is strident. “You. Claude has told me all about you.”

  What could Claude have to say about her? Lee looks over at where Claude lies on her back with a cigar between her lips, blowing smoke circles above her head in little puffs.

  When Lee doesn’t answer, Ilse continues. “My photographs are good. They’re as good as anyone’s in here, and André won’t even look at them. What do you have to do—suck a man’s cock to get him to look at your work?”

  Ilse glares at her. Lee has no idea what to say. “I’m not sure…I’m sorry he wouldn’t let you in,” she finally says.

  “You’re sorry. Everyone is sorry. André will be sorry too. Claude and I are going to have our own show.”

  “Good for you.” Even as Lee says it she doesn’t mean it. Jealousy already coils its tentacles through her.

  Ilse says, “You know, I gave up everything when I moved here. My studies, my family. I’m alone except for this”—she points to her camera—“and when I got to Paris, I thought: I should meet other women. We can help one another. And then I heard about you, and I thought perhaps we could join together. That you would be interested in doing something with me, in saying piss off to all these men. But I can see just from looking at you that you wouldn’t want to do it.”

  Lee straightens up, fights off the fug of drink. “How can you know that?”

  Ilse shrugs. “You—you’re like a piece of pretty glass, with your pretty eyes and your pretty face, but that’s all you are. Just clear, through and through.”

  The woman’s harshness shocks Lee. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”

  “I know that Kiki hit you in the face the other night. Everyone knows that story by now. I don’t blame her. She must hate you, how you stole Man Ray from her.”

  From the floor, Claude, who Lee didn’t even know was listening, says, “She does hate you.”

  Lee is trembling. “That’s not at all how it went,” she says, but Ilse has turned away dismissively and is bent down and whispering something to Claude. Lee strains to make out what they’re saying but can’t.

  Kiki, now Ilse—these women are crueler than the men. At least Lee knows how to manage men, how to flirt with them and get them to do what she wants. But these women are entirely different. Judging her before they even know her.

  In the center of the circle, Soupault stands up again. He pulls something sparkly from the box. “I have here a triangular clip. Diamonds, maybe, but”—he puts the clip between his teeth and clamps down—“probably not.”

  Lee gets to her feet, still buzzing from her conversation with Ilse, and says loudly, “Me. What’s my forfeit?”

  “Oh ho!” Soupault says. “Madame Man Ray.”

  As always, Lee wishes they wouldn’t call her that. Éluard stands up too, his bow tie drooping crookedly around his neck, and the two men confer and then laugh. Man is now all the way on the other side of the circle, and Lee can tell how drunk he is by how he’s slumping, practically lying on the floor.

  Finally, after a dramatic pause, Éluard says, “We want you to tell us if Man Ray is a homosexual.”

  Drunken shouts and whistles. Man sits up quickly from his slumped position. People look at him and Lee, waiting for one of them to do something. Lee has no idea what to do, so to ease the tension she says, “Can’t I just walk across the room with a potato?”

  This gets a laugh, but Éluard shakes his head and reiterates the question.

  This is not the first time homosexuality has come up; in fact, Lee heard them discussing it the one time she joined the men at Tristan’s. Together they are preening, frightened roosters. Lee thinks they should all just fuck one another and get it over with; their childish ridiculing of what they desire disgusts her. Even Man, still sitting on the ground, suddenly disgusts her. Why not ask him this question? Lee is not his mouthpiece. And what does Man expect her to do? She knows his secret—what he has done with the Mdivanis, who luckily aren’t here anymore. Lucky for Man. But what Man has told her in their bedroom is for the two of them to know; she would not break that trust for all the world. So she’ll say no, and then she’ll walk across the room and kiss him, and the night will go on as it was meant to. Because it is none of these men’s business who Man has loved, or how, or why. It is none of their business how he loves her, how different he is when they are alone together. But before she can speak, Man stands up and goes right up to Éluard, his spittle catching the light as he shouts boastfully.

  “All these rumors swirl around because I don’t discriminate at my studio. Are you a whore who wants her picture taken? Are you an addict? I will take your picture. I will do it.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question,” Éluard says, his voice hoarse. “Are you a homosexual?”

  Man has a crazed look on his face and a bottle in his hand, which he swigs from before wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “I answer your question with a question. If I were bent, how would you explain Exhibit A?” He points to Lee and all eyes turn back to her. Ilse snorts with laughter.

  Anger fills her. Man’s arms are outstretched as if he’s a preacher in a two-penny tent, the wine bottle still clenched in his fist. His clothes are rumpled and there is a big streak of dust on his pants from where he was lying on the floor. Lee glares at him and his gaze slides away from her. She can tell he’s embarrassed, but something seems to have taken him over, caught him in this strange male posturing. She is even more angry than when she left him with Kiki the other night.

  Suddenly, Claude stands up and stomps her foot on the wood floor. The sound brings everyone to attention. “You people,” she says, her words a slow drawl. “You people are all so fucking boring.” She stubs out her cigar in an empty wineglass and then saunters over to the doorway, where she turns back to face them and slaps down her hand on her biceps, raising her other hand in an obscene gesture. Then she disappears down the stairs.

  The room is quiet for a moment. Then Aragon says, “I always liked her,” and everyone erupts in drunken laughter.

  No one seems very interested in forfeits after that, and soon someone puts on a record, the needle shrieking across the shellacked surface before the song begins. Nusch and Paul start dancing, and others join in, but Lee and Man stand still, sizing each other up. Finally Lee pulls the bottle out of his hand and takes a big slug from it, wincing as the brandy sears her throat.

  “‘Exhibit A’?” she says, crossing her arms over her chest and glaring at him.

  “Not here, Lee.”

  “Not here?”

  Man reaches out for her, then stops himself. “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice so low she can barely hear him over the music.

  “For which part?” Lee gestures around the room. “For all of it?” The anger is dissipating and she does not like the new feeling that has sprung up in its place: a gulf between them.

  Lee turns from him. As she walks away, someone turns out the lights, and in the darkness the music sounds louder. The thin wooden floor booms with all the stomping feet. Lee could go—this could be the second time in as many weeks that she leaves somewhere without him—or she could stay. She contemplates the shadows of the dancing figures around her. Right in front of her is Ilse, dancing by herself, all limbs and elbows. Lee kicks an empty bottle out of the way, sending it jangling across the floor, and puts one hand on Ilse’s side, damp with sweat, and pulls her close. Together they move around the floor with ease. As they dance Lee moves her hand up from Ilse’s back to her neck, to the place where her hairline is razored neatly against her soft skin, not with longing, but with curiosity. Since the ballet yesterday it seems all Lee has thought about is the feel of strangers’ bodies against her own, and right now holding Ilse makes Lee feel as though she’s taking charge in some small way, showing this woman—showing her and Man and everyone—that she’s someone they should pay attention to.

  The song ends and they step away from each other, and as another begins, a man—Aragon, or the w
riter, maybe; Lee can’t make him out—steps up to Ilse. She looks back at Lee but moves away from her and starts dancing with him.

  Lee dances by herself for a while, a lazy shimmy. Somewhere in the room Man is watching her. She twirls around, slowly, and then she sees him, standing off in the corner. Lee goes over to him. “Puttin’ On the Ritz” starts playing, a song Lee finds ridiculous, but she doesn’t care: she dances with Man watching her and she can tell he wants to join her but isn’t sure if she wants him to. Lee isn’t sure herself, but it is so natural to be with him, so when the next song starts, a slower number, she pulls him to her and they start moving together.

  They dance for minutes or hours—later she will not remember. Everything is fogged with whiskey, reduced to snapshots of emotions, snippets of disjointed sound. At the end of the night, or practically morning, Lee and Man stumble out of the room. At the doorway leading to the stairs, Ilse blocks their way, smoking a cigarette in a long silver holder. As they push past her, Lee leans woozily into the other woman’s face. She clamps her fingers around Ilse’s arm. “You’re wrong,” Lee says. “I would have worked with you.”

  Ilse lifts one slim shoulder. “Perhaps,” she says.

  As they descend the stairs, Lee looks back: Ilse above them, her nipples, freed from the brassiere she never put back on, casting pointed shadows through the light linen fabric of her dress. On her face a hard proud smile.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The next morning, after the salon, Lee’s mouth is as dry as cotton batting and her head is pounding. She gets up before Man and sits in the kitchen, gingerly sipping a glass of water. The night comes back in flashes—the paintings in the gallery, Claude’s smoke rings, Man embarrassing her, Nusch and Paul, the feel of Ilse’s hair—and connecting all the fragmented memories is a sick feeling of failure, as if there was a test and Lee didn’t pass it. Of all that happened, it is her exchange with Ilse and Claude that bothers her the most, their view of her as empty, nothing more than Man’s companion.