Lee never talks about the memory, and is usually adept at pushing it away. But tonight the images keep coming. She can tell Man wants her to say something, to explain what is going on. He wants to know how to comfort her, but she can’t bring herself to speak. Finally her racing pulse slows, and Lee is able to pull more air into her lungs. She says, “I can’t—I just don’t want you to do that. To cover my eyes.”
“My God, of course.” He grabs her robe, puts it around her shoulders, then rubs her back through the soft fabric. He has a fine line of worry between his eyes and a look of concern on his face, but he doesn’t push her to say anything else.
She takes a few breaths. “Could you make me a cup of tea?”
Man goes into the kitchen and she follows, needing to stay near him. When the kettle whistles she startles again. He hands her a mug and she wraps her hands around it, the heat a thing to focus on, a small comfort. For a long time they sit in silence, and Lee is grateful for it.
In the familiar gloom of the kitchen, Lee bends her head to the teacup and smells the flowery scent of bergamot. As soon as she does, she regrets it. Another flood of images. Lee in the bathroom with her mother. After the rape, once a month for several years her mother had to swab Lee down there with iodine and picric acid—that was what her mother called it, down there, her lips compressed in a tight line as she administered the gonorrhea inoculations. The acid in the bottle a urine yellow with a bitter scent so strong it made Lee’s eyes water. Her mother on her hands and knees in the bathroom afterward, bleaching any part of the room Lee had touched. Her expression as she did so—a revulsion at the chore that Lee knew extended to a revulsion for her daughter. Thank God for her father—how when he held her afterward the cedar scent of his soap overpowered the bitter smell, how he stroked and stroked her hair until she calmed down.
The teacup has gone cold in her hands before Lee is ready to go back to bed. They do that quietly too, and she pulls Man near and lets him hold her until she falls asleep.
The next morning, Lee watches the sun cast changing shadows on the ceiling. Man sleeps next to her, his hands tucked up under his pillow. She eases herself out of bed, trying not to wake him, and when she is sitting up she notices the scarf lying on the floor, still folded over into the blindfold. Again her heart starts racing. She kicks the scarf under the bed, and then wills herself to think of something different. But no matter what she thinks of, she keeps coming back to last night, her sudden panic. In the bathroom she splashes cold water on her face and looks at herself in the mirror, her hair snarled from sleep, dark hateful smudges under her eyes. There is a low-level electric buzz in her head, and when Man gets up soon after, she waits for him to ask her about last night, about what happened. She is glad when he doesn’t.
They spend the day at the studio working on prints from a fashion shoot Man was hired to do for McCall’s. Their time spent experimenting yesterday has left them behind schedule, and Lee is glad of the urgency of the deadline, the banality of the assignment. Glad too for Man’s gestures of affection, his hand placed lightly on her shoulder as he moves around her in the room. By the end of the day she realizes it’s been several hours since she thought about what happened the night before, and though she’s not sure if Man is trying to give her space or feels too awkward to talk about it, all she feels is relief at his continued silence.
A few days pass, and they neither make love nor discuss what transpired between them. Lee feels her shame about her panicked reaction receding, and she knows that if she lets herself, she’ll be able to pretend it didn’t happen. That soon, in another day or two, she’ll be able to have sex with Man again as if nothing is different. It would be so easy to push the thoughts back down from where they came. To close herself off as she is so good at doing. She wonders if he will let her. But another piece of her knows that if she does not tell him—if she keeps him at the same distance she’s always kept everyone—their relationship will never deepen past where it is now. They will never truly know each other. It is how she acted with every other lover she has had, only letting them in a certain amount, then pushing them away or leaving them entirely. She doesn’t want that. So far she has been able to be different with Man, and she wills herself to keep it up, to create something better and more lasting than what she’s had before.
Three nights later, they lie nose to nose in bed, the room lit only by the little stained-glass lamp Man bought for her nightstand, and Lee looks at him—the familiar contours of his face, his long eyelashes—and closes her eyes and knows that every piece of him exists in her memory as detailed as in reality. She clears her throat, but at first she cannot get the words out. The air grows charged between them. Man takes her hand and pulls it to his chest, pressing it there, warm against his skin.
Finally she whispers, “When I was little, a bad thing happened to me. I’ve never told anyone about it.”
“Tell me.” His voice is calm. He gives her time. Sweat prickles in her armpits. She can feel her heart erratically thumping. Finally she continues.
“I went to stay with friends of the family because my mother was very sick. They lived in New York City. The man, we called him Uncle—” She almost says his name but cannot. “I was left alone with him one day. My parents came to get me. I was seven.” She relates the story as it always comes back to her, disjointed and fragmentary, and by the time she is done she is exhausted.
“My God, Lee. I’m so sorry.” Man squeezes her hand gently.
Lee tries to get her breath. Man waits. “After, my parents took me to an analyst for many years and it was very helpful. The analyst helped me realize that what happened—it had nothing to do with me. I should put the memory in a little box and throw away the key. It worked, but sometimes…the memories come back.”
“Of course they do.”
“He also told me that what had happened was just my body, and had nothing to do with my…well, he called it my soul. He said when I got older, I would find someone who loved me, and it would be entirely different.”
Lee’s mouth feels numb, and she hears the words as if they are coming from someone else. The room is very dim and she is glad she cannot see Man’s expression.
“This is entirely different,” Man says.
“I know.”
“I am so sorry that happened to you. So, so sorry.” He moves his arm around her waist and she rolls over so that he is holding her. The feeling of his body is pure animal comfort. Lee feels herself relax a bit, feels her heartbeat slow.
“I love you so much,” he tells her.
“I love you too.”
“Has this been hard for you?” Man asks. “Us together? The things I’ve wanted you to do?”
“I don’t think so,” Lee says. She is confused. “But—the blindfold. It scared me.”
“I’m so sorry. We don’t have to do that. Of course we don’t have to.”
“I think part of what scared me is I want you to.”
He wraps his legs and arms around her even tighter and she lets the warmth of his skin sink into her. Very gently, he runs his hand through her hair and kisses her cheek and neck. They lie like that for a long time, and finally she says, “I think I want you to do it.”
“Are you sure?” He sounds as nervous as she is.
“Yes, I think so.”
He gets up to grab the scarf, and then stops. “No,” he says. “Maybe someday, if you really want me to, but not now.”
Lee watches him. He pulls her against him again, and they stay that way for a while, and then Lee finds his lips with hers. She feels hollowed out and hungry, as if she has made room inside herself by telling him. He is gentle with her still, his kisses tentative, but suddenly she wants him closer to her, and she pushes her mouth harder against his and presses the full length of her body to him. When Man moves on top of her, she closes her eyes and puts her arm over them, imagining what the darkness of the blindfold would feel like. With her eyes gone black, all that is left is touch: Man’
s thumbs against her nipples, his thigh between her legs. Behind her eyelids beautiful bright flashes explode. And then as Man starts to move inside her, he is all she thinks about—she could not make her mind think of anything else if she tried. She is alone with him in the darkness she has made and when he calls her name she feels herself dissolving, into sparks, into film grains, and by the time they are done she does not know where she ends and he begins.
It becomes even more than it was before. He cannot get enough of her. In the mornings, he takes her picture as she stretches like a cat getting out of bed. At the studio, he puts her next to the window, he bends her down against the wall. Instead of using the studio camera, he puts a small one around his neck and gets close to her. He runs his hand through her short hair and pulls her head back, takes close-up, blurry pictures of her neck. In the images her skin doesn’t even look like skin but like a river, the muscles turned to water rushing over stones. He runs his fingers over her breasts and takes pictures of the goose bumps he raises on her skin. He cannot get close enough, takes dozens of pictures of just her lips, just her ear, just her eye.
In the darkroom they perfect the technique that she discovered, figuring out the right amount of time required to re-create the haunting, double-exposed effect. And when they try it out on pictures of her, when she sees what they have made together—her torso glowing like a ghost, manipulated into someone she almost doesn’t recognize—what Lee feels is heat and pride and love, all at the same time.
Solarization, they decide to call it. It feels like that to her, dazzling, as if they have untethered her body and brought it closer to the sun.
After a few weeks of experiments, they make one print they both agree is perfect. It’s simple, just a shot of her face in profile. She is set against a gray background, and the solarization gives her face a nimbus of black. She looks like an etching, set out of time. She looks more beautiful than she has ever looked before. Man takes a pen and writes along the print’s white border “Man Ray/Lee Miller 1930,” then puts his signature below and hands her the pen. Lee scrawls her own signature with shaking hands. There is nothing better than seeing their names together on the page.
A few weeks later Lee finishes her bell jar series, a triptych the way she has imagined. The first image shows the model with her eyes open, staring out and past the viewer. In the second her eyes are closed and her head is tipped slightly to the side, appearing to rest against the glass. The third image is solarized and has a submerged, underwater quality to it. The pictures feel very personal. As if they are telling a story or revealing something she hasn’t been able to say.
Shyly, Lee shows them to Man. In her heart she knows they are good but while he looks at them she is stricken with panic. She has no eye; she is a fraud. He spends a long time looking, and she tries to remember that this is what he always does.
Finally Lee can’t take it anymore. “I’m not sure about the print quality—maybe the first one should be darker to balance out the last? Or maybe I should only use two images instead of three? The first and the last, maybe? Or the second and the last…?”
Finally Man says, “These are incredible. The three of them together—they’re what we should print in 221. I’ll talk to Tristan.”
That night, elated, Lee goes to Bricktop to hear the music. She goes alone and chooses a table in the back. Josephine Baker is singing. Her voice is gravelly, the song slow and sentimental. “Blue days, all of them gone / Nothin’ but blue skies from now on.”
Lee closes her eyes and rests her head on the wall. The song feels exactly right.
Part Two
Chapter Seventeen
Paris
1930
At the end of August, on a suffocatingly hot day, Lee stands at the threshold of her apartment for the last time. She has already sent her boxes to Man’s, has sold what little furniture did not come with her rooms. She looks around the space, emptied of her possessions, and hopes she is making the right decision.
There are a thousand reasons to move in with Man. Money has become a worry in the past few months—things are still relatively inexpensive in Paris, but more stories roll in about the crash from family and friends back home, and some of their acquaintances who have been living in France for years are heading back to the States. Man has fewer portrait bookings, and the magazines are cutting back as well, printing issues with smaller spreads. Man seems unconcerned, but he agrees it will be nice to pay less rent instead of skimping on other things. They are both terrible at skimping; Lee has gotten used to helping Man spend his money, and when he wants to spend it on her, she has a hard time saying no.
They haven’t spent a night apart in months, and before they even talked about living together, more and more of Lee’s possessions had migrated to his apartment. But now, gazing around her bare rooms, she feels a little worried. As Tanja so rightly pointed out when she visited, Lee and Man work together, they socialize together, and now she won’t even have a space to call her own. Their worlds are completely joined. What will happen when she needs to be alone? What will happen when she is irritable or sad and has no choice but to be those things in front of Man? Lee pictures herself doing what she did when she first got to Paris—whiling away the hours at empty cafés—but now she will be going out to find some space for herself, and not because she’s hungry for human interaction.
For Man, living together is a simple proposition. One of their beds sits empty every night—it is a waste. And he loves her. He loves being with her and hates when they are apart. What good does it do to keep two apartments?
They have been living together for several weeks when, over dinner, Lee asks him, “Did you live with Kiki?”
He takes a bite of salad, chews, and swallows before he responds. “Yes, for a few years. You should have seen it. This little place off Rue Didot. It was my studio too. I rigged up a curtain I could pull around the bed when people came for their portrait. It’s a miracle anyone ever took me seriously.”
“How long had you been together when she moved in?”
Man takes his napkin off his lap and dabs his mouth with it. “She moved in with me right away, but you have to understand: Kiki had no money. None. She just stayed with one man after the next, so after we got together, it made sense. I haven’t thought of that place in a long time. You had to walk up four flights of stairs, and it was stifling—even hotter than tonight. No air. I could never go back to living like that.”
“Kiki just traveled around from man to man?” Lee frowns with distaste.
“Lee, this was twenty-one, twenty-two. Paris was wilder back then.”
Lee sighs. “I get so tired of stories about how wild Paris used to be.”
“Well, they’re true.”
“And where did you live with Adon? What was it like?”
“Small. Cramped. Four rooms in a square, with a tiny garret where I used to work. We had a lovely view, though. When it was clear, you could see all the way beyond the Hackensack to Paterson. And Adon put flower boxes in the windows.”
The flower boxes sound lovely, domestic in a way that Lee isn’t and that she can’t imagine Man wanting. They seem wholly out of character for him, and make real for Lee as nothing else has that Man had an entire life before her that she barely knows anything about. The closest the two of them have come to flower boxes is a rose he gave her once, which she left in a vase in the office until it died, the overblown petals dropping in a brown heap on the desk.
She must look worried because Man says, “Another lifetime,” and reaches for her hand across the table.
At their newly shared apartment, Man is painting a picture of her mouth. He hangs the canvas above their bed and paints her lips red, the color of the lipstick Lee wears almost every day. It comes in a cold gold tube with an etched cap that pulls off with a pop, and the lipstick twirls up almost obscenely from the case, moisture beading on its surface in the humid summer weather. When Lee puts it on it has a matte finish that looks nice, but
it’s a nightmare to remove. Dozens of cotton balls in the waste bin, cold cream stained bloody, a stubborn red filigree veining the surface of her mouth.
Man mixes a red paint to match it, a blend of cadmium scarlet and Winsor rose. Pots and pots of it. His canvas is huge—eight feet wide—and on it, her mouth floats disembodied and elongated in a mackerel sky.
Man says she has the most beautiful lips he’s ever seen. But then he says that about her eyes and her ears and her skin and even her snaggly front teeth. When she admits to him that she hates her teeth, he tells her he loves them, rubs his finger along their surface, licks them with his tongue. In a way it is the most intimate thing he has done with her.
Man works constantly on the painting. Lee now understands how single-minded he can be. His behavior reminds her of the first few weeks when they were together: he cancels appointments, skips meals, gazes past the world with bloodshot eyes. But for her it is not the same. Now that she has her own work, she finds she doesn’t want to just watch him, gets jumpy if she sits next to him for too long. He insists that he needs her there. So even though she often doesn’t want to, for hours Lee lies on the bed as he works above her, her head cocked toward him just so. By the end of the day the drop cloth and her skin are dusted with a fine spray of paint spatters.
The Age of Light Page 16