The Age of Light

by Whitney Scharer

  In a secluded corner of Le Dôme, where Lee has taken her for a drink before the party, Tanja leans down and takes a sip from the full rim of her martini. She looks at Lee while she does it, her kohl-blacked eyes narrowed. “He’s paying for your apartment?” she says. “He’s serious about you. Why haven’t you told me?”

  Lee focuses on a group of people over Tanja’s right shoulder. One of the women looks familiar but Lee can’t think where she would have met her. A friend of Man’s? Did she come to the studio? Lee has met so many of Man’s circle now that it’s hard to keep them all straight.

  “Li-Li.” Tanja waves her hand in front of Lee to get her attention. “You should have told me. All those letters and you didn’t tell me.”

  “I know.” Lee tries to sound contrite. “I just felt—it was so new. It was all happening so fast.” She doesn’t want to make eye contact with Tanja, so she keeps looking around the room, and then realizes they are sitting right beneath the portrait of Man and his friends that has hung on the wall for a decade. Pointing to where Man stands glowering in the center of the group of a dozen men, she says, “That’s him on the wall. With his Dada group. They used to meet here.” Man has told her how different Le Dôme was then, pipes and politics instead of gossip and champagne cocktails. Lee points to the grainy picture. “That’s Tristan Tzara on the right—you’ll meet him tonight, I think. He and Man publish a journal together, 221. Have you seen it? Man said—he told me it might be a good venue for my pictures someday.” Lee cannot keep the pride out of her voice.

  Tanja takes another sip of her drink. “I know he’s going to be here any minute, but I…” Tanja fishes out the cocktail onion from her glass and pops it in her mouth, chewing it slowly and looking at Lee with an appraising expression before continuing. “You work for him, the only people you know are the people he knows, and he’s paying for your apartment. Li-Li, just…what happens if it doesn’t work out? You know how you are when you get tired of someone.”

  Lee looks down peevishly at her hands, folded in her lap, and is distracted by a smudge of ash on her glove, which she tries to rub out with her finger. The spot gets larger, a gray smear.

  “Argyle is still pining for you,” Tanja continues when Lee doesn’t respond.

  “How pointless of him.” Argyle. One of Lee’s lovers before she left New York, who flew her out over the sparkling ribbon of the Hudson in his two-seater plane before taking her home with him, his skin smelling of gasoline when they made love. The last in a string of men Lee treated badly. As soon as they told her they loved her she never spoke to them again. Tanja was there for all of them, knows all the details—which is probably, if Lee were to think about it more deeply, part of the reason she doesn’t want to talk to her about Man. If Lee doesn’t talk about him, he can’t be flawed like the other men and Lee can be better too.

  Finally Lee says, “It’s not like that this time. And honestly, can’t a girl grow up? Just because I’ve been stupid all my life doesn’t mean I’m stupid now.”

  Tanja reaches across the table and gives Lee’s arm a squeeze. “You’ve never been stupid a minute.”

  “Well, once or twice, maybe?”

  “All right, possibly,” Tanya says, and laughs before growing serious again. “You really like him, don’t you? When you mention him—there’s something different about it.”

  Lee nods. It is different. When she thinks back on her other lovers, all she remembers is her restlessness, her dissatisfaction. They were always wanting more and more of her and she had no interest in giving it. She would sit across from them at restaurants or lie next to them in bed and most of the time she’d be thinking about how she could get away. It was as if the closer they wanted to get, the less emotion she was able to express, until it felt as if her body was a wooden box she had nailed down tight. She tried to explain this to Tanja once, years ago, but her friend only looked at her curiously, unable to understand. So now it feels impossible to explain what is different about Man, how when Lee is with him she feels open, pliable; no way to explain that the more time she spends with him the more she craves him. “I really like him,” is all she says. “I’m glad you get to meet him.”

  When they arrive at the party, Man is surprised and pleased that Lee has brought a friend. He links arms with both of them and leads them smoothly from conversation to conversation. After some small talk with two of Tristan’s friends, Man takes them over to an older couple and makes introductions.

  “Arthur, Rose,” Man says. “So wonderful to see you.”

  Arthur and Rose Wheeler are Man’s main patrons; they have funded his films and always seem to swoop in with a commission when work is going slowly. Man is very close to them. In past summers, he even traveled with them to Biarritz—Lee has seen some photos from the trip, has heard a story about a day spent shooting pictures of sheep when they blocked the main road and trapped them in the countryside for hours. In Man’s photos the sheep crowd together, the whites of their scared eyes popping like bright marbles.

  Rose turns to Lee, a radiant smile on her face. “You,” she says, “you must be Lee Miller. We’ve heard so much about you—and we’ve seen you too, in Man’s beautiful pictures.”

  Man smiles and pulls Lee closer. “Yes, this is my love. I’m so glad you finally get to meet her. And this is her good friend, Tanja Ramm, visiting from New York.”

  They all continue talking, elegant cocktail patter, and Lee participates in it, but all she is thinking of is Man’s expression as he looked at her, his brown eyes full of feeling. The words he used: “my love.” Lee could swear that people are noticing, their glances filled with admiration and envy. Lee is so lucky to be the one with Man, so lucky that everyone knows it.

  Tanja’s earlier skepticism has dissipated, and within moments of meeting him, Man has charmed her. Lee is not surprised: Man is in a sociable mood, and he is always at his best in a crowd like this, where he knows most of the guests and doesn’t have to posture. He is dressed simply but elegantly, in dark trousers and a white shirt, and he’s wearing the electric cuff links he made, red lights that wink off and on in a random pattern. As he gesticulates in the center of a knot of people, Lee can see them flashing.

  Lee can tell Tanja charms Man just as much as he charms her, but of course Tanja charms everyone. It’s part of what Lee likes about being her friend: her ease in any social situation, her uncomplicated nature. They are opposites inside and out: Lee has always thought Tanja had an angel’s soul, clean and unblemished, whereas when Lee pictures her own soul she sees it as thorny, a dark tangled nest. Unlike Man and Tanja, Lee often feels tense in crowded social settings, too aware of how she appears or how she is supposed to be acting.

  Now Lee scans the room for Tristan. Ever since Man mentioned that he and Tristan might publish her photos in their journal, she has been itching to talk to him. As she looks around she sees someone else familiar: shaved head, corpse-pale skin, baggy suit. “Look—it’s Claude,” Lee says to Man. He glances over and gives a small nod. “I want to tell her how much I liked her poem,” Lee says, excusing herself.

  Claude stands alone in the corner, furiously smoking. Lee goes up to her and smiles. “This was months ago now, but I wanted to tell you I loved the poem you read at Monnier’s.”

  Claude blows a smoke ring and closes one eye, seemingly so she can look at Lee through the circle’s center. “It wasn’t a poem.”

  “Oh. I thought—what was it?”

  “My manifesto. My refutation of the self.” Her English is thickly accented.

  Lee wants to roll her eyes but restrains herself. In the past few months, as lines that Claude spoke continued to ping through Lee’s head, she forgot how odd she is. Now Lee glances around and tries to think how to elegantly get away.

  “You are the one with Man Ray,” Claude states.

  “Yes.” Here again Lee feels a flash of pride.

  “The muse,” Claude says, drawing out the word and waggling her fingers in the air
derisively.

  “I’m a photographer, actually.”

  “Are you?”

  Lee tries to match Claude’s derisiveness with her own. “You are too? I think I heard that.”

  Claude hands Lee her cigarette, the tobacco wet on the end that has been in her mouth, and begins to look through her jacket pockets. She pulls out a stack of small cards and hands one to Lee. On it is a photograph of Claude dressed as a weight lifter and an address on Boulevard Raspail. “I’m having a show,” she says.

  Lee doesn’t recognize the address, but still she’s impressed. Claude must be even better than she thought. “I don’t know this address,” Lee says. “It’s a gallery?”

  Claude curls the corner of her lip into a scornful smile. “Gallery is too much of a word for this. The owner calls it a gallery, but I would call it a hallway between two other buildings. But then again the owner is a—how you say? A son of a cunt. The whole thing has been miserable. First it was just my work; now it’s my work and twenty other photographers. I’ve been thinking of backing out, but I like the idea of seeing my prints on the walls too much. Wouldn’t you?”

  Lee doesn’t answer, but an image rises in her mind: her own work, framed and mounted. A crowd of people clustered in a room, moving silently from print to print. The pictures—her pictures—staying in their minds afterward, haunting them.

  Claude scans the room. Lee follows her gaze and sees she is looking at Man, who is still holding court in the corner, his cuff links blinking in the dimly lit space. Claude flicks her eyes pointedly between him and Lee, suggestively enough to express that she can envision everything that is going on between them. “Big man,” Claude says, but her tone says she thinks the exact opposite is true.

  It occurs to Lee that she can walk away, so she does, stamping out Claude’s cigarette in a heaping ashtray and helping herself to a glass of wine from a passing tray.

  It is a relief to be near Man again, and Lee leans into the familiarity of his rumpled jacket, his solid arm that comes around her waist and holds her tight. Tanja gives Lee the dazzling smile she always has when she is drunk, all gums and teeth. The Wheelers have left, and Man and Tanja are talking with an older woman who has ten or twelve strings of pearls looped around her neck, her drink held high above her head like a torch.

  “And I said to Rémy,” the woman shouts, “I said that what is going to ruin art isn’t the young people, the young people are fine, no matter what anyone says about their heads being completely empty. What’s going to ruin art is commerce.” The last word is said imperiously, with the hoisted drink waggled for emphasis, liquid sloshing.

  Tanja leans toward Lee and in a whispered imitation of the old woman says, “Commerce.”

  But Lee is interested, and waits for the woman to continue.

  “If you think that Americans are going to be sitting for portraits now,” the woman says, pointing a long maroon fingernail at Man, “you are very mistaken.”

  Man clears his throat. “Is it that bad? We haven’t felt the effects here yet. In fact, I was just talking to Arthur Wheeler about this very subject—”

  The woman cuts him off. “I’m from Pittsburgh,” she says, shaking her head. “I went to get money out for this trip, and can you imagine, but they told me they didn’t have it. My bank! Didn’t have my money.”

  Man nods, frowning, and questions the woman again, his voice pitched lower so Lee can’t hear him. Tanja turns toward Lee and says, “Who was the bizarre person you were talking to before?”

  “Claude Cahun. She’s a photographer. She’s going to have her own show at a gallery near here.” Lee hands Tanja the card. She looks at it for a brief moment and then hands it back. Tanja has never cared much about art.

  “Lord, I hope she does something about her hair before then,” Tanja says, and they both laugh.

  “She’s actually very talented,” Lee says. “It’s not everyone who gets to show their work in this city.”

  Tanja raises a shoulder in an elegant half shrug. “Soon enough it will be you.”

  “I hope so,” Lee says, but only part of her believes it could really happen. She remembers a snippet from her father’s last letter. “My father’s photographs are being published,” she says.

  Tanja looks at her, surprised. “His photos of you?”

  “Some sort of architectural shots he took.”

  “Ah.”

  Tanja has known Lee’s father since their girlhood, and has never liked him, though she sat for art portraits with him just as Lee did. They even did portraits together, which Lee is still a bit embarrassed by, her father’s staging making them look more like women in love than friends. Lee still has not responded to his letter; she has just stuffed it in the bottom of a drawer and tried not to think about it.

  “I like Man,” Tanja whispers now, changing the subject, her voice smelling of wine as she leans in close to Lee.

  “You do?”

  “Yes. He seems to really love you.”

  Lee reaches out and touches Tanja’s forearm. “What did he say?”

  “He spent almost our entire conversation—before that woman joined us—telling me how talented you are. Some picture you took of a broken umbrella? He went on and on about it.”

  Lee flushes with pride and takes a sip of her drink to cover it up. She didn’t know that Man liked that photo, though she herself was quite happy with it. Man is still talking to the woman, so Lee asks Tanja if she needs another drink, and they set off together for the bar, where they stand for a while, nibbling on pickled eggs and downing their drinks so that they can grab fresh ones. When they get back to Man, Tristan Tzara has joined him, and the conversation seems much the same as it was when they left, though a larger crowd of people has gathered around them. Every time Lee sees Tristan, he is politicking, and she can tell by his deeply earnest expression that tonight will be more of the same. He is a man who should travel with his own soapbox.

  “How do we justify making art when class is still such an issue, when people are struggling?” Tristan shouts.

  “Art is always justified!” someone shouts, and a few people rap their knuckles on the tables in agreement.

  Lee moves over to Man and kisses his cheek. Tristan nods at her, then continues talking, switching to French and speaking quickly and loudly: they must liberate people from bourgeois concerns; under the rod of the capitalist system people are exploited; exploitation is death. Lee tugs on Man’s sleeve, wanting to ask him about the journal and whether or not they can ask Tristan to include some of her photographs, but before she can speak, Man says to her, “We’re going to make the entire next issue of 221 about this. A new manifesto about the role art and photography play in freeing the mind from complacency.”

  More manifestos. Talk, talk, talk. Perhaps all their talking makes a difference, but so far Lee hasn’t seen it. She likes the conversations she has with Man about art when they are alone much better than these public shouting sessions, when confrontation and conflict seem to be the point. At the studio, they talk about desire, how much it is like hunger, how love is as important to art as revolution. Lee has found this much more interesting, but even those ideas struck her as slightly false. Or perhaps it isn’t that the ideas themselves are false, but that she doesn’t quite believe that art always needs an underlying message. Her favorite pieces of Man’s are the ones that don’t require an explanation or larger context, the ones that simply make her feel when she looks at them.

  Still, there is something energizing about what Tristan is saying, the passion that guides his thinking. Lee looks back at where Tanja stands behind her, obviously bored, and realizes that over these past few months some of what he and Man are saying has begun to affect her own work. That having a reason and purpose behind the photographs she creates is important, even if she doesn’t quite know yet what that purpose is.

  But tonight she is here with her friend, and as Lee looks at her she feels the lifetime of their affection for each other. She s
teps slightly out of the circle of people surrounding Tristan, throws her arm around her old friend’s shoulder, and clinks her glass against Tanja’s with a smile.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lee lies with Man on the couch in the studio. She has smudges of paint on her stomach and thighs where his hands have been. He rests his head on her, tells her the past months are the most creative he has known. The photographs, the paintings, the sculptures—they are the best work he’s ever done.

  “It’s you,” he says. “All you.”

  “What about with Kiki?” she asks him. In the four months they’ve been together, Man hasn’t mentioned her, so until now neither has Lee, but she has wondered about her again and again. Lee has never cared about any man’s former lovers, but with Man she finds herself dwelling on his past more than she’d like to admit.

  “It was different.”

  “Different how?” Lee sits up and starts buttoning her shirt.

  “She was young—”

  “I’m young.”

  He looks at her, starts again. “She was young. I was young. I met her at a café. There was a misunderstanding—you don’t care about this.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Lee drags the story out of him. He had just arrived in Paris. He went to La Closerie des Lilas and saw a woman sitting in the corner with a friend. He knew, even fresh off the boat from Brooklyn as he was, that she didn’t belong there. She wore no hat, had her hair unpinned and cheeks rouged to a consumptive brightness, and was speaking too loudly in a fast stream of words with a guttural rasp to them. Back home in New York, Man had been doing nude studies, and Kiki’s loose hairstyle reminded him of the prostitutes who often posed for him, easy in their bodies and grateful for a job for which all they had to do was stand still. From the moment Man first saw her he wanted to protect her. He watched as a waiter approached Kiki and told her that she must leave the restaurant if she did not cover her hair. Kiki screamed that she would not leave. The waiter insisted, and she rose from her seat and stepped up onto and over the table. In two quick steps she was down and walking toward the door. As she was passing, Man reached out and grabbed her arm, offering her a place at his table so that the waiter would not bother her anymore. He spoke hardly any French and Kiki no English, but somehow they enchanted each other. He took her to dinner and then a show and then his studio and then his bed, and they were together for ten years before he left her.