“I don’t…Just stop.” Lee steps back again, into the shadow of the curtains, and he finally puts down the camera. They stare at each other for a moment.
“I’m done with this,” she says.
“But I’m not.”
Lee walks out of the studio. She is shaking. Man follows her. He is angry; she can feel it rolling off him.
“Your eye is my eye,” he says. There is a tremor in his voice, and he has his mouth clenched so that two curved grooves are cut into his cheeks. “You’re mine in every way. You know that, don’t you? You’re my model. My assistant. My lover.”
She backs away from him.
“Tell me you’re mine. Say it.”
Lee’s throat has closed to the size of a straw and her words when she says them sound strangled and reedy. “I’m yours.”
Even though she has said what he asked her to say, he doesn’t seem satisfied. Lee wonders what it is he does want, if there are any words she could say that would placate him. They don’t break eye contact.
“You’re no one else’s model. Not Hoyningen-Huene’s, not Cocteau’s, not anyone’s. And if you want to go somewhere, back to Biarritz or anywhere else, I will take you.”
Lee has never seen him like this. He holds the camera like a shield in his hands, but she can see he’s trembling. She’s trembling too. He has confused her, filled her with a need to leave but a conflicting need to soothe him.
“I’m yours,” she whispers, the words like stones in her mouth. Her repeating the words seems to satisfy him. His shoulders relax. He lets go of the camera and lets it hang from its strap. The other times she has seen him angry have been like this: brief flares, quickly extinguished. So different from how she is, the embers burning for days. But right now Lee feels a deep sense of relief that she has calmed him.
“Good. Let’s finish the shoot—I have a few more ideas I want to try out.” With that, Man seems to think it’s over. He reaches out and touches her cheek.
Lee nods. As she follows him back into the studio, she has trouble moving her body; she feels as if she is made of wax. Man has to move her into position, and she lets him. But as he picks up his camera she feels her old wild mind. She stares right at him but doesn’t see him, imagines instead that she is a pilot in the cockpit of a plane, flying above the city and looking down at the ribbon of the Seine. The goggles press into the bones of her face; the air is filled with the smell of acrid smoke and burning fuel. Her heart pounds; she grips the yoke and points the plane straight up, to where the atmosphere is thin above the cloud cover. When Man puts the camera near her eye again she squints, closing him out of her view and filling her eyes with sky.
Afterward, when Man is finally done, Lee gathers up her things and leaves without saying goodbye. As she goes down the stairs she keeps seeing his camera looming toward her and feels the heat of his breath on her face. She makes sure Man doesn’t hear her leave, and as soon as she is on the sidewalk, she inhales and lets it out slowly. She loops her Rollei around her neck and walks north with no destination in mind, her only thought to get far away from where she’s been. She walks up Boulevard Saint-Michel, letting the city move past her in an uninterrupted rush. Across the street a young boy clings to his mother’s hand while sucking on a gigantic lollipop that has smeared his whole face pink. A white-haired man tucks his hands into his pockets and hunches against the wind. A woman in front of a bakery trails her gloved hand along all the baguettes before selecting one. Again and again Lee wants to pick up her camera and snap a picture, but she doesn’t. She lets life stream by without inserting herself into it, uninterrupted, uncaptured. Who is she to make herself a part of it?
Lee continues on across the Seine, through the Île de la Cité and across the Pont au Change. She walks and watches. At Les Halles she takes a quick right, wanting to get onto a quieter street, then turns again onto Rue Saint-Denis, where the bordellos are. Lee has walked here before but without her camera. The street has a furtive, debauched atmosphere that suits her mood. The buildings, painted bright colors years earlier but now fading, have paint peeling off in some places and all their shutters closed at all hours of the day. A few women, their stockings sagging down from their garters and their dresses outdated by several years, lean against the buildings or sit on the steps with their legs spread wide. One of them looks familiar. She has a sharp nose, a small mouth, black hair marcelled in tight waves against her scalp. Her flesh stretches against the seams of her thin black dress.
Lee approaches her. “Kiki?” she asks. With a feeling of elation, Lee starts dialing the settings into her camera. But as the woman looks up, her face dissolute, her makeup blurry, Lee realizes it’s not Kiki. Of course not. Up close this woman looks nothing like her. As the woman puts her hand out to stop Lee from taking her picture, Lee puts the camera to her eye and releases the shutter. When she sees what Lee is doing, the woman starts yelling, a stream of French invectives. After she gets the shot, Lee leaves quickly, looking back only once to make sure the woman isn’t following her. As she turns the corner, Lee feels a rush of clarity and power. The photo—Lee does not need to develop the film to know what she has gotten—will show the woman with her mouth twisted into an angry circle, her hand outstretched like a beggar, the fabric of her dress straining as she leans forward. There will be in it a feeling of surprise, of unexpected juxtaposition, as if in taking the picture at the exact moment when the woman’s anger flared, Lee has shown her honestly, both supplicant and whore.
On Rue Pierre Lescot, Lee stops and works to calm her breathing. She holds her camera in both hands and it feels as though it is bonded to her skin and completely connected to her. Getting the shot has erased Man from her mind and hinged her to the present. The people, passing by her, appear in flashes, a film reel unspooling as she walks. She heads back toward Les Halles. The street is crowded. Lee watches the lives around her and begins to come back to herself—or to come to herself for the first time. Her eyelids are like a camera’s shutter snapping; she blinks the motion around her into pictures. Every once in a while, one of the pictures she creates in her mind is worth saving, so she picks up her camera and freezes it on film. Every picture she takes feels alive and unexpected. And Lee herself feels more alive than she ever has, just taking them.
Chapter Twenty-nine
By now it is six o’clock and the last rays of the November light angle across the city, everything gray in the growing shadows. Lee doesn’t want to go back to the apartment, but she must. Her feet hurt; she has walked for hours; she is hungry. She thinks of telling Man about her picture: the woman’s mouth rounded into a perfect O, her emotions as visible as her flesh. But it is not Man she wants to tell. She wants to tell herself, so she plays it back in her mind, reliving again and again the feeling of power she got when she released the shutter at the exact right moment.
Lee dillydallies outside their door, hoping Man is out, but when she finally goes inside, she can hear bathwater down the hall and sees the trail of Man’s clothing left on the floor along his path. Lee even hears him singing. It’s that new song “A Bundle of Old Love Letters,” weepy and sentimental. Hearing him, she realizes she can’t stay. Quickly, Lee pulls open the armoire and looks at her dresses. Which one will make her look her best? She chooses her green crepe georgette and puts it on hurriedly, along with a more comfortable pair of shoes, jams her paste diamond clip in her hair, and leaves without letting Man know she was ever there.
Though she’s been walking for hours already, as soon as Lee is back outside she realizes she’s not remotely tired. She wants to move, wants to be outside, and most of all she wants to be doing something that will turn off her brain, calm the thoughts that fill it.
It is an hour’s walk to the Palais Garnier. A nice walk, as good a destination as any. She knows how long it takes because she’s walked there before, a few weeks earlier. The night is clear and mild, and soon Lee unbuttons her coat and lets it swing out behind her. She picks up speed, moving so fas
t her heart beats hard inside her chest. She walks the hour in forty-five minutes and finds herself at the Garnier at seven o’clock, right when they open the doors to let the crowds in.
She buys herself an orchestra seat, even closer to the stage than she sat with Jean. Pays with a flourish. An extravagance, yes, but it is nice to pay for herself for once. As Lee waits for the dancers to take the stage, she reads the playbill, looking for names she recognizes—the patrons and the dancers and the crew. The set designers and musicians. Sees it printed there. ANTONIO CARUSO, in the same black font as the rest of the names but, to her eyes, burning.
As the first chords sound, the dancers take the stage. Again Lee is transported. It is the purest expression of emotion: feelings made physical and mapped onto the body. Oh, the bodies! Lee would love to photograph them. The hard fact of their bones, the connective tissue visible under their skin, as if she is meant to see how the bodies are made. Lee wants to take pictures of them against Antonio’s sets, the dancers’ sinews and the silk panels in contrast with one another. It fascinates her, the toughness of their bodies, and when they move Lee thinks about the pain of dancing, the ballerinas’ feet crushed and aching as they go up on pointe, the tape and bandages wrapped around the men’s strong calves. Lee’s own body—soft in comparison. The only part of her that is toughened is her hands, the skin dry and flaking from the darkroom. She wishes all of her was thickened up, that her body was a callus, that she got that way through hours of work and training. Lee wants to be someone who exerts effort, tries at things. She does not want to be soft.
At the end of the show the audience members are as ecstatic as they were the other night, leaping out of their seats and pounding their hands together. Lee stands with all of them, claps and claps, waits until she can be the last one to leave.
She does not know what she is doing. Does not know what she wants. No. That is not true. She knows what she is doing and what she wants but does not want to admit it, thinks that maybe if she doesn’t admit it, it won’t be true.
She waits so long at the south door she almost thinks he’s not going to be there. But then she sees him, recognizes him in silhouette, lean, lithe, a scarf thrown over his unbuttoned coat. He sees her too. Stops and stares. Lee stares back with no expression. Her gesture has been made. She wants him to come to her. And he does: he walks over. Stands so close his jacket brushes against her. He is so tall she has to tip back her head to look up at him. The streetlamp casts odd shadows on his face and she can see a starburst of fine wrinkles radiating out from his eyes, the skin tissue thin and delicate.
“Well,” Antonio says.
“Well,” Lee answers.
“Want to go somewhere?”
Lee nods. Without another word he hails them a cab. As she gets in, Antonio says something to the driver that she cannot hear. They sit in the back and watch the city go by, the passing streetlamps casting rippling ribbons of light across their bodies.
Fifteen minutes later, they stop on a familiar side street. When Lee gets out she realizes where she is: he has taken her to Drosso’s. She should feel something, some guilt, she knows she should—at the very least she should be worried that some of Man’s friends will see her there—but she feels nothing. This time when Drosso opens the door and kisses her cheek she pushes her face against him to feel the pressure of his lips more strongly. She and Antonio go into separate rooms to change, and even the act of removing her clothing, of taking off the dress she now realizes she chose for him, feels somehow erotic, as if she is stripping for him even though he’s not there, and she rubs her hands along her body and between her legs before she puts on the robe, the silk cool against her skin. When they emerge into the hallway, both dressed in robes, Lee fills with a powerful giddiness, bubbling up in her throat so that she cannot help but laugh.
The sweet smell of smoke seeps out from under the bookshelves, and Lee hangs back while Antonio moves the lever on the bookcase to let them inside. Tonight, the secret room is crowded, a dozen people sharing the hookah on the bronze table in the middle of the room, all of them curled up on floor cushions and drowsing against one another. On a couch in the far corner, a group of mustachioed men are deep in conversation, their voices hushed but urgent. Someone somewhere is playing the piano, the same phrase over and over again. It takes Lee a moment to realize it’s actually the phonograph skipping. As soon as she notices, she can think of nothing else, but no one in the room seems to care. Lee goes over to it and sets the needle back in place at the start of the record. A pause, and then the room fills with a beautiful series of cascading classical notes. She takes a deep breath. Antonio watches her from across the room, and she gives him a little smile just to see the returned smile spread across his face.
He comes over to her and inclines his head toward the bar cart. “None of that for you tonight,” he says.
“I suppose not,” she says, but part of her wants the cold glass in her hand again, like last time, the oblivion that came after.
A man approaches them, dressed in a Chinese robe with a small fez on his head. He bows and points toward the hookah.
“Do you smoke?” Antonio asks Lee.
“No.”
“That’s a shame. Could be fun.”
The words hang in the air. Lee thinks of her mother. For many years Ellen tucked her Pravaz on a ledge on the underside of her bathroom sink, where she must have been certain no one would see it. Lee found it one afternoon when she was ill; she had gone into the bathroom to be sick and then lain down on the cold tile, liking the way the porcelain felt pressed against her cheek. And there it was, a small black leather case with her mother’s initials stamped on the outside in gold foil, and secured inside with loops of elastic were several slim blue vials and a surgical-looking needle. After she found it Lee would feel under the sink every time she was in the bathroom, just to see if it was still there. For many years it always was, the vials at varying levels of fullness. But after a while, her mother stopped being so sneaky, and the case instead stayed in the pocket of her dressing gown, pulling down the fine fabric with its weight. One day while her mother was napping, Lee went in to see her, and the noise of the bedroom door opening and closing disturbed her so that she turned and stretched a naked arm above her head, the delicate white skin dotted with scabbed marks. Lee stared and stared at that arm, until finally her mother stirred again and Lee snuck out so she wouldn’t be caught.
Now, at Drosso’s, Lee takes a breath. “How does it feel?”
Antonio shrugs. “Like you’re awake but not. Like happiness.”
The man in the fez tugs at her robe and gestures to an unused hookah tube.
“I’m happy enough,” Lee says. It costs her effort to say it, and part of her wonders if by saying no to this she is ruining everything with Antonio.
But Antonio just nods, waves off the man, and puts his hand at the small of her back, where she can feel the warmth of it like a brand through the thin silk. He moves her gently toward another door at the back of the room. They go down a short hallway. A pulsating beat of syncopated jazz vibrates the floorboards under her feet. Antonio opens a door at the end of the hall and they enter a large room, much bigger than the hookah room. Everything in it is a soft washed pink, pink flocked wallpaper and pink velvet banquettes, pink carpet and small pink tables at which people, dressed in blush-colored robes that seem, impossibly, to be coordinated with the surroundings, sit in small groups, talking loudly over the music. Who are these people? They lean in toward one another across the tables, put hands covered in diamonds up to their throats as they throw back their heads in open-mouthed laughter. The women’s robes expose high arched collarbones and deep-colored pendants that nestle in the hollows of their necks. The men have smooth chests, olive skin, hard, sharp shoulders that make their robes somehow masculine. They are impossibly chic. At the far end of the room, a bar is set up, with a female bartender behind it, wearing a silk dress no thicker than a slip. The wall behind the bar is cove
red with rose gold foil, and the bottles are displayed against it on glass shelves so that the entire bar seems lit from inside and glowing.
“Oh,” Lee says, “I will definitely have a drink in here.”
No one pays Antonio and Lee any attention. They move toward a table and before they sit down he says, “I helped Drosso paint this room. We finished it a couple of months ago.”
“It’s gorgeous,” she says, and means it. “Was it your idea?”
“Yes. I wanted it to feel like you were inside a mouth. I thought it should just be plain pink, but Drosso had the idea for the serpent, so I added it.”
Lee looks around again and sees that the wallpaper is actually a mural, painted in gold, of a giant snake that coils around the room, each of its scales the size of a dinner plate and embellished with smaller drawings of snakes and what she thinks must be the Garden of Eden.
She tells him, “I’m not very good at that—making things up. I could take a good picture of it, though.”
Antonio pulls out her chair for her and her knees buckle into it. He says, “It’s not what I want to be doing—none of it is, really, the sets and everything—but I’m good at it. I can take a box and make it look like a palace.”
Lee thinks of his set pieces for the ballet, the forest and ballroom, how real they seem. Imagines what it would be like to have an entire room as a canvas, to place viewers inside what they are viewing. “What do you want to be doing?”
“My own work. Not things I’m getting commissioned to create. But no one seems very interested in what I’m interested in.”
“Which is what?”
“Oh, lately it’s little paintings made out of oil and candle wax. ‘Depressingly murky,’ according to the one critic who’s ever written about my work.”
“I’d like to see them. I bet I’d like them.”
The Age of Light Page 28
