“Are you a…dame?” one of them asks.
Lee is surprised he noticed. She knows what she looks like, so grimy she can flake the dirt off her skin with her fingernails. But these men are delighted to be near a bona fide female, and one from New York to boot. Keep talking, they beg her. We miss the sound of our girls’ voices. More gunfire rings out and they take cover in what turns out to be a nearby wine cellar. Crates of wine bottles line the walls: sauternes, Languedoc, Riesling. When the gunfire stops, the soldiers take as much as they can carry, and back at the hotel later that night, during the blackout, Lee and the men drink it out of stolen crystal polished to a shine on dusty sheets.
“What’s a girl from Poughkeepsie doing in a place like this?” one soldier slurs, pointing in Lee’s direction so that liquid from the glass in his hand sloshes out on his pants. Razor burn and pimples cover his cheeks; his jacket has the single chevron of a private first class.
“Didn’t think you should have all the fun,” Lee responds. The other soldiers laugh. Lee keeps her eyes on the private. “You killed any Krauts yet?” she asks him.
“I was at Anzio.”
“But did you kill any? Yourself.”
The other men’s conversation has moved on, so Lee scoots closer to him. He nods, not looking at her. “I shot one fella, a sniper. He killed my friend, sitting right next to me. So I shot him.”
“What did it feel like?”
“Didn’t feel like nothing.” The boy’s voice is thick with wine. “But I keep thinking about him. He had real blond hair, like white hair. I don’t know why, but I keep thinking about how his momma must miss him.”
The sick soup of hatred rises out of Lee’s stomach. “His momma is a monster. They’re all monsters. I wish I could’ve shot him.”
The private gives her a curious look, and then from across the room another soldier tells Lee he wants to show her a picture of his girl back home, so she leaves the boy and goes over to him. In the photo, the girl wears a demure pearl necklace and has a trusting smile, and Lee hates her too, clean and coddled and safe at home in Indiana.
The bottle goes around and around, and they stay up all night, drinking and talking. As the morning sun makes a bright line on the seam of the blackout curtains, the other soldiers start to yawn. Some bed down in borrowed blankets or sleep sitting slumped against the wall. Lee pours herself another drink, stares for a while at her reflection, fish-eyed on the surface of the wineglass. Then she stands, and on unsteady feet she walks over to where the private with the razor burn has fallen asleep, his mouth open like a child’s. Lee kicks gently at his leg with her boot until he wakes up, a confused smile on his face as if she’s part of the dream he’s having. “C’mere,” Lee whispers, and he follows her down the hall to an empty hotel room. She pulls him inside and then pushes him so that he is sitting on the edge of the bed, where he looks up at her with surprise and expectation. He must be fifteen years her junior.
“Ma’am?” he says.
“Shh.” Lee takes off his boots and then while she’s undoing the laces of her own he shimmies out of his uniform and lies back naked on the bed, his skin so pale it’s almost translucent. His chest is smooth and hairless. Lee wants to punch him. She crawls onto the mattress on her hands and knees and motions for him to move behind her, and when he is in the right position she reaches her hand around to help him slide inside her.
“Do it,” she says, her voice in the quiet room like an angry stranger’s. Adrenaline courses through her, and she conjures the image of the blond soldier this man has killed and lets the hate boil her blood. Lee doesn’t know when she became this person, fueled by rage, but she loves how it feels not to hold back, to let her emotions judder out of her uncontrolled.
“Harder,” she says.
The boy is happy to oblige, but it’s over before it’s hardly begun, and when he rolls away from her on the mattress and whispers that he’s sorry, she can barely stand to look at him.
When Lee gets outside again a few hours later the sun is hot in the cloudless sky. With all that smoke from yesterday, it doesn’t seem possible that it could be so bright. Around her the whole city is a crater, the buildings empty shells of rubble. Lee is empty too. She walks for miles to get back to her convoy. Nothing she passes seems to have been spared the bombs’ destruction.
Chapter Fourteen
By now it is June again, and Lee realizes she’s been in Paris for an entire year. The city is still fresh to her, but she has settled in, found her haunts, and begun to feel as if she belongs. On balmy days, she wanders through the Cimetière du Montparnasse, just a few blocks from her apartment, or spends an afternoon at the Bois de Vincennes, watching the rowboats and the swans float across the placid lake. She always brings her camera, and loves taking pictures of the carousel with its carved pigs, the fierce expressions on the children’s faces as they wait to spear the iron rings. In the early evenings, she and Man take a sidewalk table at Le Select or La Coupole and nurse aperitifs, often so content they don’t even feel the need to speak. One particular toy vendor Lee likes often stations himself in front of Le Select, and whenever he comes to their table Man buys her one of the toy dogs he is selling. Lee has a whole collection now that she keeps on top of her dresser.
She barely ever gets hit with the dark moods that were so frequent when she first arrived in Paris. When she thinks back to those early days in the city, the memories are tinged with loneliness: wandering the city with her arms crossed tight across her chest, sitting cross-legged on her bed with her sketchbook on her knees, catching the reflection of her wistful face in a store window. Moving here was harder than she thought it would be. But now, the memories feel as though they are from much more than a year ago, and the girl she was then is distant and unfamiliar.
Some evenings—more now that there are so many stories about money and its lack, so much more anxiety—Man has been going out with his circle. To Drosso’s, where they try to ingratiate themselves to their host in the hope that Drosso will buy their work. To Tristan’s opulent apartment, paid for with a family fortune that is never mentioned. Sometimes to Le Dôme, where Man mutters darkly about the prices and the atmosphere.
Lee tried to go to Tristan’s with him once, but it was a disaster. She was the only woman in the room, and her presence set the men off-kilter. Even Man was different—brash and boastful. The talk revolved around sex: fellatio techniques, homoerotic desire, the depiction of penetration in Surrealist art. Everyone kept looking to Lee as if for her opinion, referring to her as Madame Man Ray, but she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to act. At first, she went along with the conversation, laughing gamely. She has always been adept at double entendres and loves the visual ones Man creates in his work—his photo of an eggbeater that looks like genitalia, or the close-up he shot of the peach—but when she tried a bawdy joke with the group, Man cast a disapproving look at her that made her unsure what he wanted from her. She wondered if she was supposed to act shocked, if having a woman there as a foil to the conversation freed up the men to not act shocked themselves. By midnight, with everyone tittering like schoolgirls and sloppily drunk, Lee decided she was ready to go home.
So now on most of the nights when Man goes out with his crowd, she stays in, or goes back to the studio to get in a few more hours of work. That is part of the beauty of the darkroom for her. Completely sealed off from the rest of the world, time loses meaning there, measured only by the metronome as she guides her prints from developer to stop bath to fix. The transition from the amber-lit darkroom out into the city at night is an easy one, and often she goes home and straight to bed, diving deep into a dreamless sleep from which even Man, returning late, cannot rouse her. Other times she is antsy, filled with energy, and on those nights she pulls her hat down low and walks the blocks around her apartment until she wears herself out. The sun doesn’t set now until almost ten o’clock, and after it does the sky retains its echo, bluing the clouds and obscuring the stars for hours. On
the nights it rains, steam rises from the pavement and curls around Lee’s ankles as she walks.
Man has put off writing his essay for 221, but now the deadline is looming, and with every passing day, his anxiety grows. It turns out that as a writer Man is insufferable. In his office he sweeps aside papers and pounds on his big Remington in noisy bursts. Sometimes he poises his fingers over the keys for five or ten minutes, and then types furiously for a while, only to later rip the paper off the platen and toss it on the floor. Lee’s work is relegated to a small side table, where her concentration is interrupted by his sighs and constant questions.
“How about this?” he says, and reads out loud. “‘The mode of the artist is one of perception. In perceiving, in replicating, reality, the artist comes to create automata of his experiences, that are simultaneously new modes of reality as seen through the eyes of the artist, and also ultimately inferior simulacra of lived experience.’”
“Hmm,” says Lee, putting down her pencil. “What are you actually trying to say?”
He groans, stands up, and crushes the paper into a ball. “I’m trying to say that when I look at a picture of you, I want to feel exactly as good as I felt when I was taking the picture. Photography can capture reality, but how does it capture emotion? Isn’t the emotion what makes reality real?”
“So why don’t you say that?”
“I am saying that! Or at least I’m trying to.”
“Sometimes a direct approach works better,” Lee says, and goes back to her correspondence.
One night when Man is out with friends, Lee goes alone to the little gallery on Boulevard Raspail to see Claude’s pictures. The show is called Masks and every photographer has interpreted the word differently. Claude has three photos in the show, and in each she is dressed in a different costume: the weight lifter outfit from the show’s postcard, a swimmer with spit-curled hair, a matron in a Parliamentary wig and burlap dress. The work is good. Arresting, even. Lee walks up and down the narrow cramped hallway a few times—Claude was right: the gallery is less a room and more a passageway between two buildings—and takes it all in, her body aching with envy as she looks at all the pictures.
When Lee leaves she decides she is hungry, that she will plug the ache she feels with food. A small bistro down the street has a seat at its marble-topped bar; Lee orders a thick slab of pâté studded with pistachios that comes with a little pot of mustard, and washes it down with white wine. The meal is delicious but leaves her feeling bloated and tired. Instead of going home she goes back to the darkroom, where she prints from the same negative a dozen times, each attempt marred by something different: one is underexposed, the next has a hair on the surface, another a dark patch in the corner. Each time it comes out wrong, Lee growls with frustration and sets up the negative to print again.
It takes Man right up to and past the deadline to finish his essay. That night he stays at the studio until 3 a.m., and though Lee has gone home she imagines him in the office, drinking and running his hands through his hair until it stands up like a feather duster.
As he is quietly slipping off his clothes so as not to wake her, she murmurs sleepily, “Did you finish?”
“Yes. It’s done. I called it ‘The Light of Our Time.’”
“‘The Age of Light,’” she says. “That would be better.”
“That’s good,” he says admiringly. “You’re good at this.”
“I’m good at lots of things.”
“You certainly are,” Man says, and lies down next to her. Lee snuggles up against him until she has fit her body completely against his.
The idea comes to Lee one afternoon while she is walking. A woman, not Lee herself, kneeling behind a desk. On the desk’s surface a bell jar, with the woman’s head lined up so that it appears to be floating inside the glass. Lee likes the idea so much she makes sketches of it, and soon she has filled an entire notebook with ideas. Until she composes it through a camera’s eye, though, she can’t be sure it will work, so she tries it out in the studio without a model. It is then that she begins to understand the allure of an Amélie, an interchangeable person she can bring in to pose for her. For some reason, she doesn’t want to tell Man about her project, wants it to belong just to her. So she puts up a note at the art school where he has advertised before and a few days later gets a response.
Lee makes the model come to the studio at seven in the morning, long before Man arrives. The light is good, the model compliant and pretty, though seemingly surprised to find another woman behind the camera. Lee feels herself grow decisive and directorial. It takes only an hour to get the shots she wants.
Chapter Fifteen
The dress is borrowed. Somehow Man has finagled it. Acid-green moiré, with an intricate bodice of pieced silk shaped like overlapping leaves. A smart row of buttons marching down the front to a trim waist, higher and tighter than the styles have been lately. The gown sweeps the ground and falls into a short train, and it fits Lee as if it was made for her. When she puts it on Man cannot stop staring, and now that they have arrived at the House of Patou she feels the eyes of everyone else on her as well, men and women both. Someone once said to her that dressing up is done mainly for other women, and as her eye is drawn around the room to where the women stand out like hummingbirds against the background of men, casting sidelong glances at one another, Lee believes it to be true.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Man mutters to her. He takes her elbow and guides her through the lavish room. He has done a lot of work for Jean Patou over the years and has said before that he does it just for the parties. “You’d think they could pay me a little better. Let’s drink our weight in champagne to make up for it.”
It doesn’t seem as if that will be a challenge. Dozens of waiters circle the room, their trays laden with champagne flutes, and at her first opportunity Lee takes one and moves off to an alcove, thinking how pretty she must look framed against the windows.
This is actually more her type of crowd than Man’s. He is a bit awkward in his tuxedo, and she wants to tell him to stop pulling at his bow tie. If she were in New York she would know lots of people, but there is something nice about knowing no one. Across the room Lee notices two extremely handsome men, so similar they must be brothers. She tries to look at them without being obvious, but they are scanning the room as well and she realizes that they seem to be heading right toward her. They wear their suits as though they were born in them. She admires the way their narrow tuxedo pants break over their shiny shoes.
Lee searches her mind for a quip to respond with when they compliment her—it is clearer than ever that they are coming over expressly to talk to her—but before she has thought of something to say they are in front of her.
“Man! We have missed you!” one of them says, speaking English with a thick but very polished Russian accent.
They barely glance at Lee. Man tugs at his shirt collar. The other one—they are so alike they could almost be twins—says, “We are meeting at Dmitri’s house next Thursday. You will be there?”
When he asks the question, the man reaches out and helps Man adjust his crooked bow tie. Then he runs his fingers up Man’s cheek. The movement takes only a moment, and it would have been easy for Lee to miss it. But she doesn’t. The gesture is careless, intimate, like accidentally using a lover’s pet name in front of strangers, and something in it makes her wonder.
Man looks visibly uncomfortable, and tells them maybe he will come. For what seems to be the first time, the brothers glance over at her. They say a few more things to Man, none of which makes much sense to her, and then they excuse themselves.
“So nice of you to introduce me,” Lee says after they go.
Man gives her a look. “Alexis and Deni Mdivani. I assumed you knew them—or knew of them.”
“I don’t.”
He relates a convoluted story about a prank the brothers played at a recent party, where they changed into dungarees halfway through dinner and insisted they had
to leave early to get to their jobs at the factory.
“They work at a factory?”
Man huffs air through his nose. “They’re related to a czar or someone. They just did it to be funny.”
“Sounds hilarious.”
Lee’s mood has soured and it is clear Man’s has too. They both finish their champagne and reach for more.
“What were they inviting you to?” she finally asks.
Lee can tell he doesn’t want to answer her, but she stares at him, silent, patient, until he is forced to respond. “Paul and Tristan—they both come from money; you know that—so they travel in the same circles as the Mdivanis. We get together once a month or so and discuss art.”
“You discuss art.”
“Yes,” Man says, but as he says it he tugs again at his collar. The room is hot. He is sweating. She cannot understand what he could possibly be lying about, or why.
It is late by the time they get back to Lee’s apartment, where she has insisted they stay because of how complicated it is to take off and store her dress. Man fumbles with the covered buttons. She raises her arms and he helps her shimmy out of it. As he pulls the stiff silk over her head, Lee realizes just how drunk she is, champagne sloppy, and before she goes to brush her teeth she sits on the floor for a few minutes, hiccuping at her reflection in the mirror and listening to Man stumble around in the other room. The sour mood still lingers, and for the first time that she can remember, when they get into bed they pull the covers up to their chins and keep a wide distance between their bodies, even though Lee has to brace herself so as not to roll toward the middle of the mattress.
The Age of Light Page 14