“Ah.” It is as she suspected. All the anger goes out of Lee and her legs grow weak beneath her. Man sees the change in her posture and hurries around to her side of the table, where he reaches out to touch her. She flinches.
“Of course I only mean that about the studio work. Just the studio. You know how much you mean to me—how much I love you.”
Lee bows her head and doesn’t say anything, just gazes into the dark shadow of the pool table’s corner pocket.
He tries again. “I should have told you I was submitting those photos. I’m sorry. But it was a busy time, and you were gone a lot, and I suppose I just forgot.”
Still she doesn’t speak. Her eyes fill with tears, and one of them drops and makes a dark spot on the green felt of the table.
“Lee, say something. I’ve forgiven you for cheating on me—I forgave you when I was in Cannes; I can’t stay mad at you—and I can forgive you for whatever this little scene was tonight. I love you, Lee. I love you.”
She lifts her head and stares at him. “What do you see when you look at me?”
Man shakes his head, confused. “What do I see? A beautiful woman. The woman I love.”
A beautiful woman. But what was she expecting him to say? It’s what everyone has always seen. Lee wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. “You don’t see me. You never have.”
“What do you mean? I can’t see anything but you. I’ve told you that.”
“You don’t. You don’t.” Lee is crying harder now, her face crumpling, and instead of hiding behind her hands as she normally would, she stands with her arms at her sides and lets the tears fall. “I can never forgive you.”
Man takes a step back. His face registers his realization that she is serious, that this is more important to her than he first understood. “Lee, be reasonable. It doesn’t matter—I’ll write to the society. Take the photos back. Whatever you need me to do.”
“Will you write to them and tell them they’re mine?”
Man’s eyebrows scrunch together. “I’d rather just withdraw them. I don’t want the society to get the wrong idea…”
It is the worst thing he could say. Lee wipes her eyes once more and then steps away from him. “I’m finished,” she says.
“Finished?”
“Finished. With this. With us.” She waves her hand around the room.
Man looks stunned. “Are you saying that your photos matter more to you than what we have together?”
“Yes, I guess I am.”
At first Man blusters, defending himself, and then he switches to contrition. The words don’t matter to her. When Lee said she was finished, she meant it: by the time he begs her to forgive him it is far too late.
Before she can leave the room, Man sinks to his knees and wraps his arms around her bare legs. She watches him do it and feels no connection to him, bends down and peels his arms away from her, steps awkwardly out of his grasp. Purposefully, she retraces her steps down the maze of hallways and back to the party, where everything is still spinning on just as it was before. Lee goes over to one of the stalled projectors and numbly switches out the reel, then watches as her own hands begin to move over the surface of people’s bodies, her fingers running up a man’s suit jacket and across his cheek before disappearing into shadow. The party lasts for hours, and Lee stays until the end, finally gathering her coat and heading out into the frozen winter air. Who knows where Man is by then? Maybe he is still kneeling, waiting for her to join him on the floor.
Weeks later, when Lee has gathered all her things from Man’s apartment and moved into a hotel, after she has answered the SPACE TO LET sign on the little studio’s window, written to her father for a loan, bought her own studio camera and a gurney to put it on, after she has written up an advertisement—LEE MILLER STUDIO: PORTRAITS IN THE STYLE OF MAN RAY—after she has had her first client, an older woman who saw the ad in the Sunday paper, a package arrives at Lee’s new studio’s door. It is wrapped in brown paper, tied with twine, and it’s clear that it hasn’t come by post.
She knows immediately who it is from, even though they have not seen or spoken to each other since the Bal; Lee made sure to pick up her things from the apartment when she knew Man would not be there.
Lee takes the package inside and unwraps it slowly. Inside the brown paper is a wooden box. Inside the box is Man’s metronome, with something taped to the pendulum. Lee picks up the metronome and sees that what’s taped on is a piece of paper, and on it is a photo of an eye, her eye, staring vacantly out at her. At the bottom of the box is a hammer with a note tied to its handle. Destroy me, it says, in Man’s familiar hand.
Lee sets the metronome on the table in front of her and considers it. The emotion that fueled its creation is tangible in the jagged scissor marks where the eye has been cut from her face. The image is underexposed, as if the print was pulled from the developing bath too quickly. Her eye is vacant, depthless, the iris thin as water. Lee stares at the image and it stares back. What picture did Man cut it from? Which version of her face jigsawed into the trash from the scissors’s slicing? With a finger Lee sets the metronome in motion, sits down and watches as her eye rocks back and forth.
And then Lee looks around the space—her space, all her own, her sparse white room, as clean and bright as she imagined it would be when she first saw it—and at the photos she’s been working on lately, some of them still hanging on the line to dry. She’s begun a new series, semiabstract street scenes that are carefully composed but have the energy of snapshots. They are some of the best pictures she’s ever taken. Lee gets up and goes into her darkroom to get back to work, leaving the metronome on the table to tick out the last of its spring-wound power.
Sussex, England,
1946
“Liberated”: the word was bound to degenerate. Lee wrote those words and sent them off to Audrey with all the rest. She wrote them with Dave Scherman, right after they liberated a case of Gewürztraminer from another Nazi storeroom. The word became hilarious. “I’m going to liberate your pants,” Davie said, and they laughed so hard they knocked over their wine bottle, but it didn’t matter because they just liberated another.
Vogue has stopped sending Lee on assignment, but she is still working. She travels throughout Europe and photographs what freedom looks like. In Denmark it is an outpouring of repressed gaiety despite the lack of power, people creating elaborate cardboard facades to hide the damage done to their city. In France it is big hats, a flagrant use of fabric now that rationing is through. In Luxembourg—a country whose war strategy could be summed up as “Whistle and hope they don’t notice us”—it is polite small-scale parades, harvest celebrations.
Lee is the only photographer still there. After Munich, after Dachau, after Hitler’s suicide in his Berlin bunker, the press corps leaves, called away to other countries, other projects. Even Dave leaves, when Life sends him on assignment in the States. He urges Lee to come with him, but she cannot imagine languishing in a country the war barely touched. Instead, she continues on to Eastern Europe, hoarding petrol and brandy, driving alone across the cratered landscape in a jeep she’s liberated from the 45th. She misses Dave’s company so much that as she drives she starts talking to herself in an imitation of his deep voice, but she resents him too: for abandoning her and going home to take comfortable photographs of socialites and public works projects.
Somewhere in Romania the money runs out, and the telegram Lee sends to Audrey is answered tersely. Her accreditation has been revoked. There’s nowhere to go but home.
When she gets back to London, Lee reunites with Roland Penrose. After all the years of letters, at first his corporeality disturbs her: the warmth of his body next to hers, how clean and well-dressed he always is. But lots of things disturb her, and she finds he is the only person she can bear to be around for more than a few hours. He doesn’t ask anything of her—unlike Man, who asked for everything, and unlike the war, which took it all. Together she and Roland trav
el to Sussex, near where he was born, and rent a small farmhouse, walk along the gravel drive. They talk about moving there permanently someday. He takes her hand in his, and squeezes.
The farm is green and pastoral and so quiet Lee’s ears won’t stop ringing. Once they’ve unpacked, she collapses on their bed and sleeps for days, waking only to drink brandy from the bottles she keeps by her side. Roland brings her sandwiches, the crusts curling up and drying out when she doesn’t eat them. One night she wakes up screaming, and Roland rubs her back until she pretends to fall asleep again. She waits until he starts to snore before she reaches for the bottle.
Lee can’t shut off the pictures, the endless film loop of her brain, but brandy helps, and cognac. It also helps to sleep, to let nightmares replace her memories for a while.
“It’ll get easier,” Roland tells her, patting her hand, rubbing her arm. He spent the war in Norfolk, running the army’s Eastern Command School of Camouflage. He touches her too often—sometimes she has to grind her teeth to stop herself from flinching—but it is easier to tolerate it than to tell him to stop.
A few years later, they get married. It is a mistake, but at the time Lee doesn’t care; she just wants someone who accepts her as she is. Roland wants to be in the country, so soon they buy Farley Farm. She arranges to have her things sent down from London, and the crates arrive while Roland is away on business. Boxes and boxes of negatives and old discolored prints. Lee doesn’t even bother opening most of them before she heaves them up to the attic.
She puts the boxes in a far corner behind an old bed frame, where no one will ever find them. Roland won’t ask questions, and with him she can move on, become a different person, let the years erase the past until all that’s left is clean and empty. Once she’s locked the attic door behind her she feels a sense of release, a crack of light in the darkness. What is the name for what she’s feeling?
She wishes it were liberation.
Epilogue
London
1974
You wouldn’t know from looking at her that Lee is dying. She looks beautiful as she walks unescorted through the front doors of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, where Roland has recently been promoted to director. It is the first time she’s been in the ICA’s new building here on the mall, and if anyone were to ask her she’d say it is atrociously ugly, a squat structure covered with an excess of fat Grecian pillars, like a child’s rendering of high culture. Lee vastly preferred the old space—drafty and cantankerous as it was—but no one has asked her. Certainly not Roland, who never asks her opinion on anything anymore.
Lee wears a dress, the first she has put on in months. Dying has, ironically, brought back her love of fashion, as well as her hips and cheekbones, and before she pushes through the museum’s glass front doors she catches a glimpse of her reflection in their surface and for once likes what she sees. Face flushed from the unseasonably cold air and the coughing fit she had a few blocks earlier. Bouclé wool sheath with a smart matching jacket in a blue that brings out the color of her eyes. The suit may be démodé but it’s Chanel, and it fits the way it fit when Lee bought it years ago—a victory of sorts.
Roland promised Lee a private viewing of the new exhibit before the opening party scheduled for that evening. Lee deserves it—deserves, in fact, far more than she’s gotten from him, especially since she is part of the reason the exhibit is even happening. The Vogue article she wrote about her time with Man Ray—she counts back and can’t believe it’s been seven years since it was published—sparked the interest of the ICA’s former director, and Roland weaseled his way into being part of the team that put it all together. This exhibit is probably why they promoted Roland when the other director retired. He has Lee to thank for his new role, though of course he’d never say so.
She needs this time alone before she is forced to hobnob with all the museum people. And before she sees Man. At first Roland told her Man wasn’t going to be able to come, that he was too frail to make the trip from Los Angeles, but then a few weeks ago he idly mentioned that he would be there after all. Forty years since they last saw each other. Try as Lee might to imagine what it will be like when he is standing in front of her, she can’t make the image of him come together. Her memory has reduced him to impressions: the line of his jaw against his jacket, the slouching way he liked to stand. She’s not even sure if those remembered fragments are real, or if they all come from a photo, that one she took of him on the bridge in Poitiers, the only one of him she saved.
Lee pushes through the groups of schoolchildren and tourists thronging the lobby, and takes the stairs to the second floor and past a temporary barrier. She almost laughs when she sees the exhibit’s entrance. Hanging above the closed doors is a giant silk-screened sign, with Man’s signature printed on top of a picture of Lee’s naked torso. It’s one of the many shots Man took of her against their old bedroom window, her body striated with evening light. Lee shakes her head and wonders if the museum’s marketing people knows it is the director’s wife they’ve printed on their banner.
She opens the doors and enters. No one is there. The room is completely quiet, dimmer than she would have expected. Small monolights illuminate framed prints, and some of Man’s sculptures stand on pedestals in the center of the room.
The exhibit is set up chronologically, and the first few rooms are easy: artifacts from the life of the young Emmanuel Radnitzky, sketches and doodles, a mezuzah from his childhood home, early nude studies, even a copy of a term paper he wrote at school. And then a room of 1920s Paris: Kiki with the violin markings on her back, another of her sleeping. In an alcove Emak Bakia loops, already playing in preparation for the party later on.
It is not until Lee gets to the next room that she starts to have trouble. Painted on the wall by the door is 1929–1932, EROTIC PARIS. Photos are clustered in large groupings, and as Lee knew they would be, almost all the pictures are of her body. But knowing this in advance does not make it any easier. She walks slowly along one wall, taking it all in: her thighs and arms and breasts, boxed up in thick black frames, the harsh lights flaring off the glass as she moves past them.
Here they are, all those parts of herself she let Man photograph. All the parts he touched and painted and loved. She looks and looks, waiting for it to coalesce into a whole, but of course this does not happen. Why would she expect it to? In her attic there are dozens of self-portraits—Lee Miller par Lee Miller—and even those have never satisfied her. She knows why. It is because there is no whole to be found. No center. Or maybe that’s not true. Maybe Lee has just never known how to find it.
Man’s photos look old—they are old, Lee realizes, with a stab of sadness—and the girl in them has been lost to her for so many years. Here is her beautiful eye, her beautiful sternum. Lee wants them back, all the pieces of herself that have been taken. Her lips. Her wrists. Her rib cage. As she looks at the disembodied sections of herself she thinks of the X-rays the young pimply-faced doctor splashed up on the screen: the illuminated moth’s wings of her lungs inside her chest, shot through with cancer. In the negative, there was a reverse effect, and the tumors appeared as bright white spots, but Lee knows what color they really are. In the examination room she had a small feeling of vindication: finally, proof of the blackness she always knew she carried inside.
Lee pauses in front of a print she remembers well, her solarized face in profile, a thin black line separating her skin from the white background. A small placard hangs next to the print, and Lee leans in close and squints to read it. SOLARIZATION, A JOINT DISCOVERY BETWEEN ARTISTS MAN RAY AND LEE MILLER, IS A PHENOMENON IN PHOTOGRAPHY IN WHICH THE IMAGE RECORDED ON A NEGATIVE OR ON A PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINT IS WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY REVERSED IN TONE. Lee reaches out and rubs her thumb over the words, leaves a smear on the plastic cover, and then smears it more when she tries to polish it away. A joint discovery. Artists Man Ray and Lee Miller. How much those words would once have mattered. All she gave up because she didn’t h
ear them. How little meaning they hold for her now.
Lee gathers herself and moves to the next room. In it there is only one painting. Gigantic, eight feet in length, it hangs at eye level, vibrant and sumptuous. OBSERVATORY TIME—THE LOVERS she knows the placard says. It is like viewing a memory forgotten and then half remembered. The lips lying like bodies one on top of the other, spent and sated. Where did that girl go, the one who surrendered herself fully to sensation, to her lover, so close it wasn’t clear where her body ended and his began? Lee wants that back too, that feeling.
The rest of the exhibit is a blur. Lee wanders through room after room of paintings and sculptures from later in Man’s career. A room devoted to his time in California, another to the portraits he took in Europe in the 1950s. Lee has seen most of them in journals over the years; she has followed his career and so has Roland.
Before too long Lee reaches the end of the exhibit. She stands at the exit for a while, not yet capable of venturing out into the noisy mess of the rest of the museum. There is a bench against the wall, and Lee sinks onto it with relief. She’ll just rest her feet before she goes home.
Lee is sitting like this twenty or so minutes later, eyes closed, when she hears a noise behind her, the squeak of rubber on the hardwood floor. Someone in a wheelchair is rolling into the room. And then as the person gets closer there it is: a voice, his voice, gravelly and thin now, but still familiar, a voice she wasn’t able to recall until she hears it. She draws the deepest breath she can and turns to meet him.
“Lee?” Man says.
The Age of Light Page 33
