The Age of Light

by Whitney Scharer

  “All right.” Man’s tone tells her he’s not going to push the issue. He refills his teacup from the pot and plops two sugar cubes in it, then says, “I’ve seen some photos of you. I bought an old copy of American Vogue last week so I could see them.”

  An image of him stopping at the international newsstand on his way to work rises in her mind. Thumbing through dusty piles of magazines in the back of the shop, pausing at her picture. Seeking her out, assessing her—or, knowing him, critiquing the compositions. Pushing down his hat more firmly on his head as he leaves the shop, the magazine with her picture in it rolled up in a stiff tube and stuck into his overcoat pocket.

  “Which issue?”

  “Oh, you were wearing black satin and fur, I think. And there was a spread on pearls—you wore a choker. Nicely composed, actually. In any case, you’ve got clear talent. If you change your mind, I’d love to shoot you.”

  He slurps the last of his tea and sets down the cup loudly, then slaps his hands on his thighs and says, “Well, back to work,” and disappears into his office. Lee sits there a while longer, touching her neck where those pearls had been, trying to remember what she had been thinking when the photos were taken.

  Chapter Seven

  Lee’s new Rolleiflex has a beautiful face, two perfectly round lenses for eyes, and a focusing hood that looks like a chic little hat. Lee wears the camera around her neck on a short strap and can’t believe how light it is—not even two pounds with the film loaded. When she puts her eye to the viewfinder she could swear the glass makes things look clearer than her eyes alone can do, and she finds she prefers the world boxed up, contained inside the camera’s frame.

  Lee still can’t believe it’s hers, bought with the Christmas bonus check Man gave her. Man left the envelope propped up on the fireplace mantel in the office with her name written in huge looping letters across the front. She gasped when she opened it: an almost ridiculously lavish gift, and bizarrely close to the price of the camera she’d had her eye on for months. But when she thanked him—grateful, awkward, the check pinched between her fingers as if she expected him to ask for it back—he waved as if it were nothing.

  “One windfall deserves another,” he said, referring to a new and unexpected commission he had gotten from his patrons, Arthur and Rose Wheeler.

  “It’s too generous,” she protested.

  Now, with her new camera in hand, Lee finds herself wondering if the gift will make her beholden to Man, if there is some subtext to it she’s not understanding. And it is not just the bonus check that is making Lee wonder. Ever since Man asked her to pose for him, something has been crackling between them, a static where there used to be calm air. But what Lee cannot figure out is which of them is generating it. Just a few days ago, Man came up behind her at his desk, leaned over her shoulder to read the contract she was typing up for him, his cheek so close to hers she could feel his skin even though he wasn’t touching her. Imperceptibly, she moved her face toward his, just to see what he would do, and when he did not pull back at all she was disconcerted. But it was probably nothing. He is always leaning toward her or needing to show her something, and up until now she has never thought anything of it.

  The frustrating thing is that she doesn’t want anything to change between them. This was her first thought when she opened the envelope with the check inside. I hope this doesn’t change things between us. But he was so nonchalant when she thanked him that she decided any change she was feeling had to be in her head. And then, as if to confirm that her worries were unfounded, when she came in to work with the new camera a few days later, Man took one look at it and just said, “Good girl.” His eyes crinkled up from his wide smile, and he took the camera from her and ran his fingers over it with the same covetousness she feels every time she touches it, mumbling to himself about its features like a fanatic reciting baseball statistics, the static between them gone silent. Lee pointed out a few features he hadn’t noticed, and after a while Man handed back the camera and said, “Anytime you want to use the darkroom.”

  Lee thanked him and told him she’d let him know.

  The Rollei is her friend when she is walking, a better pair of eyes she wears around her neck. On a frigid Sunday a few weeks after Christmas, Lee grabs it and starts wandering, angling up Boulevard Saint-Michel and taking a left into the Luxembourg Gardens, where the wide gravel footpaths divide the lawn into orderly chunks. A dusting of snow has fallen and covers everything in white. At the lake in the park’s center she stops and watches the mallards swim in the part of the water not yet scrimmed with ice. The day is so still they hardly ripple the surface. One dabbles at the edge, and Lee walks over into the soft mud and watches him bob up and down, up and down. She snaps a picture of his tail, sticking out of the water like a tiny iceberg. She cuts across the park and over to Église Saint-Sulpice, where the columns cast stripes of shade onto the building’s facade. She takes a picture. From there it’s to Café de Flore, where she sits at a table near the window and watches the people go by, bundled into thick coats and scarves. She is glad to have a cup of coffee, warm between her hands, glad to have the money to pay for it, glad for her job and her camera and the feeling that she is learning something from her time spent with Man. Nearby, a thin woman sits alone at a table, facing away from Lee. Her hair is in tight pin curls and she wears a white blouse. Every few moments, she reaches up to massage her neck. Her fingernails are filed into sharp points and painted in a reverse French manicure: black tips and white nail beds. Her hair is a rich auburn. She rubs her neck again; Lee snaps a picture.

  The day is perfect, cold and clear. By the time Lee has walked to Les Halles she has filled two canisters of film, and she can envision each of the images spooled on the rolls: crisp, original, all her own. Lee has never been able to carry a tune, but as she walks home she sings aloud and doesn’t care who hears her.

  London,

  1943

  It is 1943 and British Vogue has a new editor, Audrey Withers, Oxford-educated, who has knuckled her way to her position from the finance department, more political than pretty, more savvy than chic. With her at the helm, Vogue wakes up, smells the cordite, stops treating the war as if it’s not happening. Instead of making Lee chronicle the season’s latest silhouette—cinched waists, sweeping skirts, sweetheart necklines—Audrey assigns her spreads on short hairstyles for factory workers, on staying fit in wartime, on the different cuts of women’s uniforms. Lee ties her models’ hair back in nets and poses them facing away from the camera, legs spread, feet planted in flat-soled shoes. She photographs beautiful women climbing into air-raid shelters, puts them in fire masks so no one will be able to see their pretty faces.

  Lee visits the Women’s Home Defence Corps, the Voluntary Service, the Women’s Royal Naval Service. She takes photos of women carrying rifles longer than their own legs, slung casually over their shoulders like handbags. Takes photos as women pack parachutes, ducking their bodies under yards of hanging nylon, folding and twisting the strings and fabric into bundles. A single tangle could mean a loved one dead. Cord caught, bones shattered. Unthinkable, how it would fill the air with blood and cinder.

  At night, Lee drags Roland to the Whitby, where all the press photographers spend their off hours. This is how they meet Dave Scherman, who shoots for Life magazine and charms them both with his lopsided smile and impish humor. Soon enough Dave moves in with them at Hampstead. He’s broke and already half in love with Lee, and for a while she’s with both of them, Dave and Roland, and all of it—the two men, the new assignments—is almost enough to make her happy.

  But then one night Dave knocks on her door as she is getting ready for bed. Shows her his war accreditation papers and tells her they’re sending him to cover the action in Italy. Lee tries to smile, to say congratulations, but his words bring back the dark black shadow she has never been able to name. She’s furious when she feels her eyes fill up with tears.

  “I wish they didn’t want to send you,
” she says.

  “Can’t stay in London. There’s nothing going here. What am I going to do, teach soldiers how to finger paint at camo school like Roland? I’d go mad. Wouldn’t you?” And then he says, “You should get accredited too. Get Condé Nast to sponsor you. You’re a Yank. Just as legitimate as the rest of us.”

  Lee laughs, a harsh sound in the quiet room. “Me. A soldier. No, I’ll be stuck here, knitting socks or holding scrap drives for the war effort.”

  And then the tears really do spill over. Lee pretends to be coughing so she can wipe at her eyes, but Dave has seen them and moves to hold her. He thinks she’s crying over him, and since it doesn’t matter, she lets him.

  A few days later, Lee is still thinking about what Dave said. Why couldn’t she? She even floats the idea by Audrey, to see if Vogue would publish her pictures. Audrey is noncommittal, but says that if Lee could write some articles to accompany the photos, maybe they could do it.

  Lee makes the call, fills out the forms. Four weeks later she gets her papers: she’ll be a war correspondent just like Dave, traveling with the 83rd Division. A few days after that she is fitted for her uniform: olive-drab pants with a button fly, olive shirt, wool jacket thick as a horse blanket and just as flattering. The second she puts on the uniform she loves it, how shapeless it makes her, how little of her skin she can see beneath all the layers.

  Before they leave London, Lee makes Dave get out his camera. She buttons her jacket to the collar, stands near a window so her U.S. lapel pins catch the light. Doesn’t smile, doesn’t try to look alluring. For the first time in her life, she doesn’t need to.

  Chapter Eight

  It’s been several weeks since Amélie was at the studio, coughing all over everything, but Lee has gotten the girl’s cold, she is sure of it. Sandy throat, a viscous pressure behind her eyes. But Lee is out anyway, out with Man, surreptitiously wiping at her watery eyes and willing herself not to sneeze.

  Man offhandedly invited her to the literary salon as if it were a common occurrence for them to spend their evenings together. And even though she is feeling sick, she couldn’t refuse. The idea of being out on Man’s arm is more appealing than she wants to admit, even to herself, and the reality of it is even better: Man pleasingly attentive, guiding her with a hand at the small of her back as they enter the bookstore, helping her shrug out of her coat before hanging it with his on the crowded rack.

  The room is jammed with people and hazy with smoke, the bookshelves pushed to the sides of the room to make space for folding chairs, though no one sits, clustered instead in groups of two or three around the perimeter of the small space. Everyone looks stylish, but few of the men look as good as Man does, in his double-breasted jacket and new trilby hat. Lee has always loved a man who knows how to dress. In fact, she can’t help but think they are the smartest pair in the room—even with her cold, Lee has put herself together. She wears her new panne velvet dress, peacock blue, tight through the hips and flaring out in graduated pleats that twirl around her legs as she walks. She worried before she arrived that it was too dressy, but now that she is here she doesn’t mind standing out. If there is one way to make herself feel better, it is by getting dressed up.

  Man scans the room, and while he is looking away from her, Lee blots quickly at her eyes with her handkerchief. Everyone is a stranger to her—though not to Man—and Lee wonders what they make of her being out with him. If they think of her at all. She is not sure if it is her cold or the cough syrup she picked up at the druggist’s, with its incomprehensible list of French ingredients, but she feels a little more vulnerable than usual, as if her emotions have lodged just under the surface of her skin. Lee moves a few inches closer to Man and wonders what would happen if she threaded her arm through his. Would he like it? He has invited her out, after all. But he is not looking at her, so she, too, glances around at all the people filling the small space.

  “Is that André?” Lee asks, inclining her head toward a man on the opposite side of the room, with thick brown hair swept back off his forehead in an elegant wave. He stands talking to a shorter man and a very tall and striking woman, with a bouquet of blond curls at the nape of her neck. As they walked to the bookstore, Man gave Lee an overview of who would be there, a jumble of men’s names she is trying very hard to remember now. André is André Breton, and Lee stares at him and thinks of the few things Man has told her about him: political, collects masks, self-absorbed.

  “Yes, that’s André,” Man says, “and with him is Tristan. He’s the one I make the journal with. And the girl is Tatiana Ia—Iakovenka? Illokovenka?” Man shrugs. “I can never get those Russian names right. She goes by Tata. She’s around a lot, mostly with Mayakovsky. You haven’t met André? Let me introduce you.”

  Lee follows Man and tries to think of something witty to say. Tristan opens up his circle and shakes Man’s hand. “We were worried you weren’t coming,” he says.

  “Don’t be daft,” Man says, and then turns slightly toward Lee. “André, Tristan—my latest assistant, Lee Miller.”

  Tristan and André nod politely, and Tristan reaches out and picks up Lee’s gloved hand, kissing it and then stepping forward to kiss her on both cheeks. Tata merely stares at her, her bright red lips pursed into a pretty pout.

  “Charmed,” Lee says to both men, smiling, but in truth she is disappointed. Man’s latest assistant. One in a long string of assistants, no doubt, and probably all of them female. Lee thinks that perhaps she should flirt with these men, so that their interest in her will make Man notice her, but before she can act on this idea, a tickle begins in the back of her throat. She wills it away, swallowing and swallowing, but the feeling gets stronger, and after a few more swallows she can’t stop herself: she steps away from the group and bends double, coughing violently into her handkerchief. Man looks concerned, asks if he can get her a glass of water, but she waves him off, unable to speak. Finally she manages one word—“Lav,” in a strangled voice—and Tata points her elegant finger in the right direction.

  Lee locks the door to the lavatory and coughs in glorious solitude. When she has finally pulled herself back together—doing what she can to her face, the eyeliner that has smudged into dissolute halos around her eyes, her blotchy pink skin—she opens the door and sees a line of people stretching down the narrow hallway, obviously annoyed at how long they’ve been kept waiting. Lee stands sideways to edge her way past and wants to apologize to each of them in turn. At the doorway back to the bookstore’s main room, a man stands slouching against the wall, blocking her way. He wears a white jacket, buttoned to the neck like a chef, and has a sign pinned to his chest on which is written messily Ask me about my reasons.

  “Pardon,” Lee says to him.

  The man doesn’t move.

  “Pardon me,” Lee says again, and when the man still doesn’t move, she squares her shoulders and says, “All right. What are your reasons?”

  He has a long beaked nose and dark purple bags under his eyes, and his hair is trimmed close to the scalp but tufted here and there as if it has been hacked off with scissors. He looks at her intently. “A childhood dream. A mask. A lie,” he says, his voice deep and raspy, and Lee, confused, takes a step away from him.

  “Yes, well,” Lee says.

  “Art. The dance of the invisible.” His mouth moves in a strange sideways oval when he speaks, his lips so pale they almost blend into his white face and disappear.

  Lee wonders if he’s insane. She fakes a cough as an excuse to get away from him, and pushes past to the main room, where Man spots her almost immediately and makes his way over to her. “Are you all right?” he asks. “You were gone quite a while. The reading is about to start.”

  “I’m fine.” Lee is glad to see his familiar face. “Except I just met the strangest man in the hallway—he has on this suit that says ‘Ask me about my reasons,’ and I made the mistake of actually asking him. I think he might be crazy.”

  Man goes up on his tiptoes to
look back at where Lee came from. He laughs. “You don’t mean Claude?”

  Lee follows his gaze and sees the man, clearly visible, making his way around the perimeter of the room toward the small stage. “Yes—that’s him. I guess it’s easy to spot the only person who has things written on his clothing.”

  Man chuckles. “Claude’s a woman.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” His expression becomes almost gleeful. “I didn’t know either, not at first. That’s how she wants it. She’s constantly performing. André keeps trying to bring her in, but she won’t officially join. She’s quite talented. Writes, takes pictures. I admire her self-portraits quite a bit, actually.”

  Before Lee has a chance to respond, André gets up on the makeshift stage at the far end of the room, and the crowd shifts, finding seats and settling in. A few poets perform one after the next. Lee tries to pay attention, but even when she isn’t sick she has trouble focusing on poetry: her mind can lock in for a few lines, but then wanders, and minutes can pass before she realizes she’s been thinking about what she ate for breakfast, or a conversation she had with a cabdriver, or a pair of shoes she saw in a shop window a few days ago. She looks over at Man surreptitiously. He is leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, the pockets of his jacket sagging with the weight of all the things he stuffs into them. His hands are folded together and he rests his chin on them, and there is something about the attentiveness of his posture that Lee admires, that makes her snap her own attention back to the readers. A murky sea, Odysseus, sirens’ songs like bells ringing out across the water. The poem is quite beautiful, now that she is hearing it. Odysseus twines the sirens’ hair around his neck, the hair is music, but then it’s choking him, the sea pulls him down, and the poem ends.