The Age of Light

by Whitney Scharer

  George is staying at the Saint James Albany, and it has been so long since Lee has been on a bed this comfortable, with fat pillows three deep against the upholstered headboard and little round bolster cushions she sweeps to the floor with one fist. She lolls on the bed while he removes his tie, letting her legs fall open so he can see her garter belt and up her thighs to her underwear—her good ones, thank God, blue with lace rosettes along the edge. He stands above her and struggles with the buttons of his shirt, his suspenders, his belt. She can tell he is already hard. She doesn’t help him undress, but she moves down the bed and puts her foot on his leg and wiggles it up until it is touching him as he unbuttons his fly and pushes his pants down. Once he is undressed he leans over her and says, between kisses as he helps her out of her dress, “You…are the most…perfect…woman…I have ever met.”

  Lee smiles and pulls him on top of her, and he continues to kiss her, soft kisses on her lips and trailing down her neck. She tips her head back and is distracted by the view out the window, where white clouds scud across the dark sky. His kisses are so gentle she can barely feel them. She puts one hand on top of his head and pushes it down and wills him to bite her nipple. He doesn’t do it. She arches her back and presses her chest against his face, but he moves away, so she reaches down and grabs him by the hips and pulls him up until he is inside her. For a few moments the hot slick slide of him is the only thing she’s thinking of. But then he falters, pausing above her with his eyes squeezed shut, and murmurs some sort of apology, and they wait like that, his body unmoving. She kisses him again and pulls his bottom lip into her mouth and bites down before she releases it. He lets out a small moan and begins again, slowly, too slowly, and she wraps her legs around him to be able to feel it deeper. And then he moves faster, but moving to the time of what he wants. Lee feels her mind detach, as it often does when she has sex, and she is floating somewhere above the bed and looking down at herself. She watches from above as he comes and falls over on the mattress next to her. She watches as she takes his hand and pushes it between her legs, watches as he touches her until she comes too. But she doesn’t feel it. She watches these two strangers as they lie next to each other on the bed, and feels nothing. And all the time, while she is watching, what she is thinking about is Man.

  Chapter Ten

  Lee does not mean to spend the night with George, but the champagne sends her into a deep sleep and she wakes to find him rubbing her bare arm and smiling at her. In the daylight filtering in through the organdy draperies, he looks mawkish and needy. He suggests breakfast on the hotel terrace but her head is pounding and she doesn’t want to be outside with him, so they call for a service cart and eat omelets with snipped tarragon in bed while they try to make conversation. The way she feels is familiar: caged, choked, but above all deeply, deeply bored. She knows George’s mind is pinwheeling through thoughts of more lovemaking, followed by a day spent wandering Paris together, but before he has a chance to suggest anything specific or reach for her again across the mattress, she finishes her eggs and gets up, sliding so quickly back into her clothes that she barely gives him time to register that she is leaving. Her apologies are false but firm. Yes, she does have to go to work; no, she cannot be late; yes, she will try to meet him at Le Bateau Ivre again that night and won’t be able to stop thinking of him until she sees him there. And then, like a prisoner emerging from a secret escape route, Lee walks out into the frigid city and lets out her breath in one big exhale.

  The day is bright and her head feels full of last night’s champagne bubbles, which seem to ping against her skull as furiously as the thoughts of Man’s hands, the feeling of him behind her in the dark. She walks quickly back to her room, where she will lock herself in the shared lav and submerge herself in the hottest bath she can manage. She feels as if she hasn’t had a good bath since she left New York—there is always another tenant pounding at the door and rushing her. Not that she blames them, since she herself does the same whenever she is late getting ready.

  Lee splashes water on her face and stares at her reflection in the cracked mirror. Puffy bags beneath her eyes. The beginnings of an angry red pimple in the middle of her chin. She pinches her cheeks to give herself some color and sticks out her tongue at her reflection, then slides the latch on the door and fills up the tub to the brim.

  She is unnerved at the thought of going back to the studio. She could call up Man and say she’s not coming in today. But she thinks of her negatives, hanging on the drying line, and knows she can’t not print them. She almost itches to get back to them and see if they are any good. She’ll print the one of the duck first; that one, perhaps, has some potential.

  When Lee gets to the studio an hour or so later, it is quiet, and for a moment she thinks maybe Man is not there. She goes up the staircase and into the office, which is empty too. But then she hears him in the darkroom, humming loudly, the way one does when one thinks he is alone.

  What will she say to him? She tries things out in her head. I can’t stop thinking about you. I keep remembering your hands on mine. I looked for you last night at your favorite bar. Every option seems absurd, trite. Her previous encounters haven’t made her feel this way, and she has no idea how to go about telling someone like Man that she is interested in him. She’s a little in awe of him, perhaps, or maybe it’s just that she doesn’t know how he would react if she told him. For all she knows, he is still in love with Kiki, or with someone new.

  But then Lee remembers Man hasn’t seen her negatives yet. They can talk about this, a subject much less fraught than whatever she’s feeling for him. Maybe he is looking at them right now. She wants so much to hear his opinion of them, lets her imagination spool out a different scene in which she walks into the darkroom and he is standing there with her work in his hands, a look of surprise on his face. “These are what we developed?” he will ask. “They’re wonderful. I never knew you were so talented.” And she will offer a few halfheartedly modest refutations, and then she will print the photographs, and soon enough some art collector will come to the studio and see them and offer to hang them in his gallery, and all of them will sell within the first month, and everyone she has ever known, including Man himself, will be jealous of her success.

  She does their special triple tap on the darkroom door, and Man opens it, wearing rubber gloves with his shirtsleeves rolled up. She has been thinking about him so much for the past few hours that when she sees him, there is a vague sense of disappointment. The solid realness of him doesn’t match up with what’s been in her mind, though she doesn’t know what she expected, if the disappointment lies in her inability to have remembered him accurately or in the reality of the person standing before her, his face unshaven and his eyes closer together than she remembered them being. But seeing him eases some pressure in her that has been growing since she left the studio yesterday. He is just a man. There are many men in the world.

  “You’re very late,” he says, his eyebrows crunching together in a frown. Behind him she can see her negatives on the drying line exactly where she left them.

  “I know, I’m sorry—”

  “This is a job.”

  Lee knows she should feel bad—she has no real excuse for being late and should have called him, but she feels anger snap beneath the fug of her exhaustion. “I know. I’m sorry—I forgot to tell you I’d be late today.”

  He sighs. “I’ve been waiting all morning for you to help me with the prints from the session with Amélie.”

  “Have you started on them?”

  “Yes,” he says, his tone softening a bit. Lee goes over to the sink, and floating there is the picture of Amélie with the saber guard. The shot is cropped close, showing only her chin and shoulders, the mesh of the metal crosshatching her skin with geometric shadows. Man picks up the paper at the white border with his tongs, and the water runs off the photo’s edge and plinks into the tray.

  “It’s a good start,” he says. “The way the metal looks ag
ainst the skin. The softness of the cheek and that sharp line of the metal. Startling, I think.”

  Lee is barely looking at the image now, has turned her gaze so that what she sees is Man looking at it, the small smile on his face and his hand holding the tongs over the fix bath.

  “I like it,” she says, which sounds trivial. Embarrassed, she turns away.

  He holds up a second image, similar to the first. “What do you think of this one?”

  Lee comes over and they look at it together. It’s a more straightforward shot of Amélie with her head lying on top of the saber guard as if on a pillow. The composition is beautiful, but Lee knows Man wants something from her, a suggestion or small critique. The truth is she finds the image a bit boring, a bit expected, but she can’t say that to him—she knows already how defensive he becomes when someone critiques his eye. What she needs to do is suggest a darkroom fix, not comment on the artistry. But she does not feel she has the language for that yet.

  She points with a pair of tongs. “It looks too light on this side, where the light from the window is coming in.”

  “Yes,” he says, pleased. “What would you do to fix it?”

  “Print it darker?”

  “Hmm…but then the right-hand side would be too dark. Why don’t I show you dodging and burning?”

  He rattles the darkroom door handle to make sure the door is fully closed. Then he lights the red lamp and turns off the white lamp, and everything is amber, as if lit by a campfire. He sets up the enlarger and Lee watches as he exposes the paper, using a small handmade tool, a stick with a round piece of cardboard taped to the end of it that casts a small shadow on the image. He takes the stick and moves it around quickly for twenty seconds or so, never letting it sit in the same place for very long.

  “People always ask me, ‘How do you get your prints so even?’” he says. “It’s simple, really. Everyone thinks photography is like a magic trick, but there’s no magic involved. There are only two colors to mix together: black and white. Add more of one, take some of the other away. You want both in your picture. True black and true white. If you have those, you can have as many shades of gray as you want and the image will still look good. Most of the time, if you develop a print and it doesn’t have at least one part that is pure white, either the image is unusable or you’ve done a lousy job of printing. You want a white spark on someone’s mouth where the lipstick reflects light back to the camera, or in the whites of their eyes, or in something they are wearing. Not too much white—most of the time, just a little bit to put everything else in contrast to it.”

  Man moves easily through the small space while he is talking, turning off the enlarger and then gently sliding the paper into the developing bath. The same image appears on the paper, first just the outlines, like a footprint in the sand, and then the rest of the image fills in. This time, the print is much more even, and Lee can tell just from looking at it that Man will be satisfied with it.

  “Voilà!” He holds up the print for her inspection, waiting until she nods and smiles, indicating that she feels just as pleased as he does. “Now, you try,” Man says. He turns to the enlarger and hands her the dodging stick.

  It is like the developing closet again, and her nervousness comes back in a rush. He stands behind her, closer, she thinks, than he needs to. They slide the paper into the frame and Man reaches around her to light the lamp. She grips the dodging stick and waits for him to instruct her. The lamp lit, the image glows on the paper, Amélie’s face black in the reversed image. Lee thinks of what he has just said, the need for a pop of pure white sparking on someone’s lips. She fumbles the stick and inexpertly begins to move it around above the paper. She feels suddenly dizzy, swallows and tastes old champagne on the back of her tongue and wonders if Man can smell it on her, the drinks and the cigarettes and even the stranger, George, whose scent she is worried must be lingering on her even though she’s bathed since she was with him. Man is so close behind her she can feel his breath against her cheek.

  “Is this right?” she asks.

  “You’re doing fine.” She glances back at him, but he has his eyes trained on the print and does not meet her gaze.

  They work together in what seems to be a companionable silence for the next few hours. The room is only marginally larger than the closet where they developed the film. There is an enlarger with a mercury lamp, a large wooden sink for fixing and rinsing the images, and a developing basin that they have to share. The afternoon passes in a blur. Together they print dozens of images from the session, and if Lee were feeling more herself she would be thrilled at all that Man is teaching her. But instead she has to focus on keeping her mind on the task at hand, her wayward thoughts a heavy book she must repeatedly slam shut. The room is small, but does that explain how close to her Man seems to stay? The images are wonderful, but surely he doesn’t usually print so many from the same session? Everything seems to be sending her a message: the way he pulls off his rubber gloves and massages his hands, the way he doesn’t move out of her way when she brushes past him but instead seems to consciously fill up space so that she has no choice but to come in contact with him. She wills herself to focus.

  Finally, after hours of printing, he gestures to her negatives still hanging on the line.

  “Are those the ones we developed last week?”

  “Yes—there’s probably not time to print them today, though.”

  “Why not? We’ve gotten a lot done. Go ahead.”

  Lee checks her watch and sees that it is not as late as she thought. She finishes what she is working on, then takes her strips of negatives and cuts them in thirds and arranges them on a sheet of paper. Man has started singing out loud as they work. “I’m longing to see you, dear Since you’ve been gone Longing to have you hold me / Hold me near.” His voice gets louder and louder, and with his Brooklyn accent the sad lyrics seem absurd. Lee clears her throat.

  “What?” he says, turning toward her. “Oh—was I singing out loud? It’s a bad habit of mine.”

  “It’s okay,” she says, and he starts up again, this time doing it even louder, and adding in some exaggerated dance moves until she is laughing.

  “Do you sing, Miss Miller?” he asks, with mock formality.

  “Only when I’m completely sure no one is listening to me.”

  “Yes. We’ll see about that. A few months of lessons with me and you’ll be ready for the stage.”

  “You’re going to teach me to sing? You do seem to be a true maestro.” As she says it, she thinks of Kiki. Would they sing together? Certainly Man has watched her, hundreds of times, probably. “Is that one Kiki sings? You…know her, don’t you?” Lee keeps her tone light and even.

  He lifts his head from his work and glances over at her. “Kiki? Yes, I know her,” he says, “though I don’t think she’s ever sung that song.”

  “I’ve never heard her…I went to Amélieeau Ivre last night and the bartender was talking about her.” Lee is on a dangerous path but the words keep coming. “I like it there. Nice bar. They make a good Lillet.”

  A good Lillet? Yes, they are so adept at pouring one type of alcohol into a glass.

  Man doesn’t seem to notice. “I like that bar. The spiral staircase and the view from the second floor.”

  “But Kiki doesn’t sing there, does she?”

  “At Amélieeau Ivre? No, Kiki’s usually at the Jockey.”

  “I haven’t been there yet. I should go, to hear her.”

  “Mm,” Man says, and starts singing again, but more quietly. Lee wonders if she shouldn’t have brought up the other woman—perhaps now Man is thinking of her, remembering all the good times they had together. The hats he bought her to protect her delicate skin, the lavish restaurants he took her to.

  Lee makes the contact sheet as Man has shown her, and then, hardly waiting for the fix to drip off the paper, she takes the wet sheet by the corner with her tongs and carries it into the studio, where she lays it down on some newspr
int and looks at it with the loupe. Each image makes her throat close a little with excitement. She wants to see them enlarged, so she hurriedly chooses one and makes an X next to it with wax pencil, then goes back into the darkroom, where she places the negative in the enlarger. It is the picture of the woman at the café, shot from behind and close up on the woman’s hair and neck.

  Lee flicks on the mercury light, counts to forty slowly. Flicks it off. Carefully, she carries the paper over to the developing basin and slides it in, agitating the liquid as she has learned how to do. Within seconds her image spreads across the paper. First there are just the faint outlines of the woman’s hair, then the outline of her shoulders, and then the bright parts of the image show up: the woman’s hand, her nails, the contrast of the light shining on each of her curls. Sparks, Lee thinks, bright white sparks against her hair. Lee looks up for a moment to see if Man is watching. To her it is incredible: her own picture, appearing before her eyes. But he isn’t paying attention. She returns her glance to the image just in time, before it gets overexposed. Once the image has set in the fix, she stares at it. She feels that it is good without knowing how to articulate why. It is just the nape of a woman’s neck, her fingers scratching at her skin, but the image sends a shiver down Lee’s spine.

  Just then Man turns around and sets his own paper in the developer, and she watches as another image of Amélie appears before them. His work sits next to hers and when he doesn’t immediately say something, she starts to panic that hers is banal, amateur. Finally, after what seems like forever, he peers at her photograph in the stop bath and says, “That’s excellent work. Is she a friend of yours?”