The Age of Light

by Whitney Scharer

  The train whistles in right on time and Theodore is one of the first people to disembark. Lee sees him before he finds her in the crowd, and she is shocked at his appearance—it has been only a year, but he looks much older; the skin on his face seems to sag off the bone. Even bundled in his thick coat he looks skinnier than ever, diminished, perhaps, by his long journey. When he sees her, his stern face breaks into a smile. Lee has planned to kiss both his cheeks, a breezy bonjour, but he walks toward her with his arms outstretched and before Lee realizes quite what is happening they are embracing, she is pressed against his coat, enveloped in the smells of cinder and travel. “My Bitsie,” he says. “I’ve missed you.”

  She has not heard or thought of his pet name for her in ages. The word cracks her resolve to appear independent, and she feels herself give over the weight of her body to their embrace. Though it is not what she intended, she responds, “I missed you too, Daddy,” and hears her voice tremble when she says it.

  Theodore gives his bags to a porter and sends them to his hotel, then he and Lee walk together to the bistro she has chosen. It’s a cozy place, with red paisley tablecloths and wax-spattered candlesticks on every table, but Theodore insists on sitting outside, even though it is so cold they have to keep their coats on.

  “Dr. Koopman says that everyone should get six to ten hours of fresh air a day,” he says to Lee, ignoring the hovering waitress, who is waiting for them to change their minds and move inside. Theodore has always avidly followed the latest diet and exercise fads. For years he has walked six miles a day, not eaten certain foods together. No cheese with meat. No fruit with grains. Lee has almost forgotten, and scans the menu now, trying to imagine how his habits will translate into Parisian dining. Not well, it turns out: he spends five minutes interrogating the waitress in broken French until Lee has to step in and order for him. Roasted chicken and potatoes, a small salad. Once they have finally settled in he looks Lee over.

  “You look good. Healthy. A little plumper, but not too much. I can see it in your face.”

  “So nice of you to say so, Daddy,” she says, frowning.

  “Well, if you want to slim down again, just follow—”

  “The Koopman method. I know.”

  Lee switches to pleasantries, asking about his business travels, her brothers. He tells her that his company, DeLaval, is branching out, and he is here to meet about a potential new separator that a Frenchman has patented. Hoover’s tariff bill is causing problems for the company, and in order to stay profitable, Theodore needs to expand its scope. He saws methodically at his chicken while he talks. Lee picks at her food and then sits back in her chair and inspects her manicure. The conversation is familiar, the kind of talk she used to overhear when she was young, when he would let her slip under the table and sit on the rug with her back pressed against his shins, waiting for the adults to finish dinner.

  Lee wonders when he will bring the conversation around to her, ask a question about her life here, but it is not until they are done eating that he does.

  “Tanja’s parents dropped by for a visit a few months ago,” Theodore says. “They say you’re studying with Man Ray?”

  Lee is surprised that he knows this, but it does explain how he got her studio address. “Not really studying. I work with him.”

  “His fashion work is very impressive.” Theodore considers himself an expert on fashion. Ever since Lee started modeling, he has filled his albums with pictures of Lee and other models he admires.

  “All his work is impressive.”

  Theodore peers at her over his glasses and Lee feels momentarily uncomfortable, then reminds herself that she is a twenty-three-year-old woman and that her relationship with Man is none of her father’s business.

  “I’d love to meet him while I’m here,” Theodore says.

  “He’s—” Lee starts, and then pauses. “We’re very busy at the studio. I’ll see if he can make the time.”

  The next afternoon, in preparation for her father’s visit, Lee tidies the studio, folding drop cloths, filing prints, stacking magazines, and straightening frames. She’s not nervous, but she wants the space to look its best when Theodore gets there. When Man comes in and sees that she has organized his collection of birds’ nests on the mantel, he huffs air through his nose.

  “He’s coming at two?” Man asks. “Is he—what have you told him? Does he think I’m your lover or your employer?”

  “Employer.”

  “Ah. Then while he’s here I’ll refrain from talking about fucking you senseless.”

  He says it jokingly, but Lee can tell he is troubled. “Love,” she says, going over to him and wrapping her arms around him from behind, “we can tell him if you want. I just—he has this way of asking a thousand questions, until you find yourself wishing you hadn’t said anything in the first place.”

  “I’m worried you’re embarrassed of me.”

  “What? Why on earth…?”

  Man pulls away from her embrace and turns to face her, gesturing at himself from head to toe. “How old is your father? Fifty? You realize I’m closer to his age than I am to yours?”

  “I don’t care how old you are. Besides, you’re wise. Not old.”

  “Wise.”

  “Yes, wise. I love that you’re older than me, that you’ve done more than me. And anyhow, my father is fifty-six.”

  “That still puts me closer to his age.”

  “You’re nothing like my father,” Lee says. “This is a perfect example of why I don’t want to tell him we’re together.”

  “Fine.” Man pulls her close to him again. “We won’t tell your father I’m your wise, ancient lover. I’ll stay ten feet away from you at all times, and if he asks any questions, I’ll just pontificate at him. Wisely.” Again his tone is joking, but he leaves the room soon after and goes into the developing room and stays there while she is cleaning.

  Lee’s father is punctual as always. She brings him inside and notices how he has to stoop when he stands in the low-ceilinged foyer. He looks around appraisingly, pausing at the Braque and Léger on the walls, mixed in with Man’s own work.

  “Cubists,” he says, sniffing and reaching into his pocket for his handkerchief and blowing his nose. “It’s not what I’m interested in but it’s very popular.” He puts away the handkerchief. “I’m fairly certain I’m getting sick. I find the air in Paris to be quite fetid.”

  “What does Koopman have to say about it?”

  Theodore doesn’t pick up on her tone. “Oh, I’ve been eating more cruciferous vegetables since I’ve been here to counteract it. But it’s hard to do it right—so many potatoes on these menus.”

  He is such a hypochondriac, a trait he’s passed on to her. Even hearing him talk about getting sick makes her throat tickle.

  Just then Man comes down the stairs. “Mr. Miller!” he shouts. “What a pleasure. My lovely assistant here has told me so much about you.”

  Lee feels a rush of gratitude for his hospitable manner.

  “Mr. Ray, the pleasure is mine,” Theodore says. He pumps Man’s hand up and down a few times. They are dressed similarly, in high-waisted black pants and white shirts. After Man’s earlier comments, Lee has to force herself not to make comparisons.

  Man leads him upstairs, making small talk as he would with a client, and as they ascend, Lee lags behind them, purposefully slow, trailing her hand along the banister.

  In the office, her father has already moved their conversation to photography, and Lee hears him peppering Man with technical questions, the sorts of things she would now be able to answer if he asked her.

  “You know,” she hears Man say, “I spent a lot of time fiddling with exposure times. When I was working on one of my series, these images I called rayographs—”

  “Objects laid directly on the photographic paper. Yes, I read about it.”

  Lee doesn’t even have to look at Man to know this pleases him. “You must be quite knowledgeable about the field. Not
very many people in the States have heard of them.”

  “Oh yes. I always like to stay up on the latest technologies. Photography is a particular passion of mine.”

  Theodore wanders around the office, inspecting the photos hanging on the wall. Most are older work—Man is lazy about changing them—but a few of them are of Lee, and she feels a growing agitation as Theodore moves around the room. By the fireplace there is a portrait of her looking over her shoulder, her back bare, her expression loving. She desperately wants her father not to see it.

  “Daddy,” Lee says. “Let me show you the darkroom equipment.”

  Theodore turns and seems surprised to see her standing there. “Oh, of course, Bitsie,” he says, and then, with an almost apologetic glance at Man, follows her into the other room.

  Lee knows Theodore has never seen equipment as professional as Man’s. He seems particularly interested in Man’s photoflood prototype on the stand in the corner, with its rheostat controller, and he inspects it from all angles. He’s also intrigued by the xenon unit, saying, “I should get one of those. Or a klieg light. Does Mr. Ray have one of those?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “They’re so bright it’s like having the sun there when you shoot indoors. I read about it.”

  “Aren’t they mainly for movies?”

  “So far, but their advantages for studio work are obvious. Remember all the times I made you shoot outside when you didn’t want to?”

  Of course she remembers. A whole childhood of it. Indoors, outdoors, hundreds of photos. Her fourteenth birthday, when he had a vision of Lee as a modern dryad, stolen from the pages of Ovid, her head crowned with branches as she stood next to the small creek just south of their house. She’d been so sad that whole year—nothing could shake her dark mood—and he told her the shoot would be fun, like acting. “It will cheer you up,” she remembers him saying, but it didn’t. He meant well, but that day she felt uncomfortable in front of the camera. She couldn’t find the words to tell him. In the photos she is hunched and shivering, her arms crossed over her naked torso, her eyes round and dull as the river stones that cut into her feet while she was posing.

  Lee doesn’t want to spend any more time thinking about the past. “Let me show you something,” she says, and takes her father over to the flat files and pulls out some of her recent pictures, including one from the bell jar series and an abstract shot she took recently of a sailboat in a child’s regatta. She lays them out on the table and gives her father time to look them over. He picks up a few photos and inspects them more closely, holding them carefully by their edges. Lee stands expectantly on the other side of the table. They’re good, she thinks. She waits for him to say it. Theodore picks up the sailboat print and stares at it for a long time. Lee bends down to another drawer and pulls out more of her work, street scenes and studio shots, her whole portfolio. Taken in total, the collection is impressive, but the longer they stand there, and the longer Theodore spends picking up a print, setting it down, picking up another, the more off-kilter Lee feels.

  “Elizabeth,” he finally says, “all of these are yours?”

  Lee nods and starts to respond, but just then Man comes into the room, a scarf looped around his neck. He glances at the table and then at Lee. “I thought I’d step out for a quick coffee. Would you two like to join me?”

  Embarrassed to have Man see her showing off her work, but relieved again that he is being friendly, Lee begins to hurriedly push the prints into stacks and shove them back into their folders. “I’d love one. Daddy?”

  “Certainly. I wouldn’t miss a chance to get more advice from Mr. Ray here.”

  As they walk outside, Lee pulls Theodore aside and whispers, “Just call him Man. Or Man Ray. No one calls him Mr. Ray.”

  They go to Café de Flore and sit crowded around a small outdoor table. Man orders a double espresso and a pastis, then turns to Lee. “Same for you?” It is what they always drink when they come here together.

  “Alcohol during the day is terrible for digestion,” Theodore says to both of them, then turns to the waiter and, in his broken French, says, “I’ll have a hot water with lemon, and my daughter will have black tea.”

  “Actually,” Lee says, “café crème, please.”

  The waiter nods and moves away, and into the silence that follows, Man says, “Pastis is a digestif. For digestion. It always calms my stomach—isn’t that the point?”

  Lee sighs. Man has given Theodore a perfect opening to explain his eating habits, and as he launches into a lecture, the mood at the table grows tense. Lee can tell Man is annoyed; he thinks all theories on diet are from charlatans, which he actually says out loud.

  “Taking care of yourself is not hoo-ha,” Theodore says with dignity.

  Man coughs, then busies himself pouring water from the jug into his glass and stirring the clouded liquid with a long-handled spoon. “But only eating certain things together? It all ends up in the same place in your stomach the moment you swallow. It seems, if you will forgive me, absurd.”

  Lee has thought the same thing, many times, but still she wants to smooth things over. “I think people should do what feels right for them.”

  Man gives her a sharp look. “You do?”

  “Yes,” Lee says, then raises her eyebrows at Man before she turns to her father and, pointedly changing the subject, says, “How was the opera last night, Daddy?”

  Theodore smiles. “Wonderful. Just wonderful. I’ve always wanted to see Guillaume Tell. And the Garnier is so much more ornate than the Collingwood. Have you been yet, Bitsie?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “That surprises me. You used to love the opera.” To Man he says, “You’ve never seen a little girl so focused. Her brothers got bored after twenty minutes, but Elizabeth was in love with all of it. She said she wanted to be Sarah Bernhardt when she grew up. Or a film star.”

  “Oh, remember when we saw her?” Lee must have been ten when Bernhardt’s farewell tour came to Poughkeepsie. She still remembers everything about it: the immense arrangement of lilies in the lobby, filling the air with their syrupy scent; the people of Poughkeepsie crowding the tiers and theater boxes, almost unrecognizable in their finest clothes; the domed ceiling that rose above them with its beautiful Italianate frescoes. Lee sat rapt through the entire performance: the silent film they showed as a curtain-raiser, the tableaux vivants, and then finally the divine Sarah herself, resplendent in thickly draped maroon velvet, making her way around the stage with the help of an ivory cane before reenacting the death of Cleopatra by swooning onto a chaise longue the exact color of her dress.

  Theodore chuckles. “Remember how afterward you had to act out the locomotive scene from the film they showed?”

  “Did I? I don’t remember that.”

  Theodore turns to Man. “Elizabeth’s brother built a child-sized locomotive in the barn behind our house, including a wooden track that went down the hill into a field. Quite impressive. He’s an aeronautical engineer now. After Elizabeth saw that silent, she insisted on riding on the engine, backward, holding her Brownie like the camera stuntman in the movie.”

  “That’s right!” Lee says. “I had forgotten all about that old locomotive. I wanted you to pay me danger money, just like a real cameraman.”

  “And I did. I gave you three dollars after we developed your pictures.”

  Lee laughs with the pleasure of the memory. Man watches the two of them but doesn’t say anything.

  “One could say I was your first paying client.” Theodore reaches out and pats Lee’s leg, then leaves his hand resting on her thigh, a self-satisfied look on his face. Lee drains her coffee and grows silent. Man’s gaze keeps moving from Theodore’s face to where his hand is lying in Lee’s lap.

  When they’ve finished their drinks, Man gets up to pay, but Theodore waves him off. “Allow me,” he says, and makes a big show of signaling the waiter. Man puts his billfold back in his pocket and doesn’t say a word.<
br />
  When they’re outside the studio, Lee figures it is time for her father to go. It’s four o’clock, and he will want to rest before dinner. But when she says this to him, he doesn’t answer, turning instead to Man and saying, “Before I go, I would love to have my portrait taken with my daughter. Do we have time for that?”

  Lee is mortified. It is so presumptuous. “Daddy…” she says.

  But Man, who also has a startled expression on his face, says, “No, of course! I should have thought to suggest it.”

  “It’s getting late,” Lee says. “There’s probably not enough light.”

  Man stands on the step below her before the studio door, and just for a second he puts his hand on the small of her back. “It’s fine, Lee. We have enough time to get it in.” Lee looks at her father to see if he’s noticed Man’s touch, but he is fiddling with his scarf, not paying attention.

  Together they go into the studio. Man drags a high-backed chair into the center of the room and seats Lee’s father in it, then runs some light tests. Lee stands off to the side with her arms crossed. Her father sits with his back ramrod straight, and she stares at his profile, his aquiline nose, his meticulously razored sideburns.

  Lee moves to take her place beside him and tries to relax her face into a less tetchy expression. Man makes a couple of exposures of them like this, and then Theodore says, “Bitsie, this is a portrait, not a foot drill. Come, sit with me.” He takes her hand and pulls her toward him, and she complies, and before she knows it she is sitting on his lap as she used to do when she was young, her head resting on his shoulder.

  From under the dark cloth Man calls, “Ready?”

  Her father’s jacket is scratchy against her cheek and smells familiar: herbs and loam, the cedar from his soap. Lee stares directly at the camera, almost through it, and then she is floating outside herself and seeing the picture from Man’s perspective: the bodies upside down in the viewfinder, Lee clinging to her father’s neck. Docile, passive, exactly who she does not want to be. The pose feels so normal—she has sat on his lap a thousand times—but having Man as a witness is suddenly intolerable. Lee tries to pull free but her father’s arm at her waist holds her steady, and instead she stiffens inside his grasp.