The three of them smoke for a while. Lee wants to reach out and touch Antonio again to see if the same feeling will happen. She can’t even focus on the small talk they are making, so she moves away from them and walks over to look at one of the set pieces. The panel is dupioni silk, painted with sweeping brushstrokes to give the impression of a forest. Here and there intricately painted birds are just visible within the looser lines of the branches and leaves. A draft from somewhere makes the silk vibrate.
“I remember you,” Antonio says, coming up behind her. The night at Drosso’s rushes back.
“You’re friends with Poppy and Jimmy,” she says.
“Those two. Not really.”
Lee is flooded with the memory of her behavior that night, all the drinks she had in an effort to feel comfortable, to belong.
“I saw Poppy once since then,” Lee tells him. “She pretended she didn’t know me. I still can’t figure out why.”
“You’re probably better off. She’s always putting on some new act.”
“What do you mean?”
Antonio shrugs. “She and Jimmy—there’s always some swindle. I didn’t figure that out until later, but they’re no good.”
Lee wonders if they were the ones who stole her camera. It was the only thing she had of any value. When his cigarette is done, Antonio looks at his watch. “Almost time,” he says, and just as he says it the first dancers and stagehands appear backstage. Lee makes to leave but Jean crooks his finger at her and leads her over to the curtain. It is massive, made out of heavy-pile velvet and edged with dense rows of braided fringe. Jean pulls it open and sticks his head through.
“Come—you have to do this,” he says, so Lee goes over and they swap places. She sticks just her face through the fabric, letting it encircle her like a heavy veil, and she looks out over the still-empty opera house, the rows of seats receding into shadow and flanked by the beautiful gilded boxes. Everything is silent, and the room is filled with a sense of expectation. What would it be like to perform on that stage, blinded by the bright lights and unable to see the hundreds of people you know are there? To feel the orchestra reverberating under your feet? Lee drops the curtain and moves to take one step forward but realizes the backstage has gotten crowded. It is time to go.
As she leaves, Lee glances around for Antonio. He stands in the corner talking to another stagehand, but as she looks over at him, he catches her eye, and a devilish, unexpected grin spreads across his face, as if he and Lee are sharing a joke from across the room. Lee smiles back and a string pulls tight between them.
Lee and Jean are among the first to be seated, and they watch as the giant hall fills up around them. They talk of their film, and of ballet; Jean tells her all he knows about that night’s production. Then the lights dim and the music begins. The dancers fill the stage, their legs and arms hard as marble but moving like ribbons when they dance. They are all so beautiful—Lee has never seen such powerful bodies, men and women both, and as she watches them she feels shivers go down her back. Almost as beautiful as the dancers are the sets, which rise and fall with an elegance that is itself almost dancing. Lee pictures Antonio up in the rafters, his body moving the scenes he has created, the rooms and landscapes he conjured now under his control.
Lee watches in what becomes almost a trance. One part of her mind watches the ballet; the other thinks about how it would feel to be touched by Antonio, like a dancer himself, all hard muscle and bone. The air in the opera house is full of perfume, but beneath it Lee smells Antonio’s tobacco, lifts her fingers to her lips to smell it better. She likes the way his belt sits at his hips, how tall he is, the flex of his thighs when he jumped to the floor. Onstage, two dancers promenade, and then the man’s arm circles the woman’s waist and he lifts her up above him as easily as stretching. As she lands she drapes herself across his body. The thoughts leave Lee plucked and twanging like the ropes behind the stage when Antonio leapt down from them.
At the end of the performance, the entire audience stands, clapping furiously and shouting “Bravo! Brava!” again and again as the dancers return to the stage to bow. Lifar has done it; he is a success. Jean applauds for a while and then puts his arm around Lee. She claps until her hands are burning.
Chapter Twenty-four
When Lee wakes up the next morning, she reaches for Man across the bed, their two bodies warm beneath the blankets. They haven’t made love since she started working on the film, and she misses him, kisses his shoulder and then his neck. Her body hums with longing. Man returns her kiss, and Lee presses against him, but she can tell his mind is elsewhere. Hers is too: the ballet still fills her thoughts. So she tells him about it. Lifar’s first production. What she does not mention is Antonio, the way she can still feel his fingers on her face as he held the cigarette to her lips.
“I forgot how much you love dance,” Man says. “I should have thought to take you.” He untangles his body from hers and gets out of bed, throwing on the shirt and pants he has draped across a chair. “I’ve been so distracted—this painting is taking everything out of me.”
“It’s all right,” Lee says. “We’ve both been busy.”
Later that day, Man stands barefoot on top of their mattress, facing his painting of her mouth. The bedsheets are covered with drop cloths. Lee is sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, contemplating the inverted V of the painting she can see between his legs. A swatch of cirrus, a blob of her lower lip. From this angle his body bisects the giant canvas.
Her mind is still on the ballet. “Let’s go see it tonight,” Lee says to him. “Come with me.” Lee thinks the match the dance lit inside her will light him up too.
“Tonight? We can’t,” Man says. “It’s the salon.”
Lee has forgotten. Breton’s big hoopla. Posters hang all over the neighborhood, the names of the featured artists printed in one big curve running the length of the page: DALí~ERNST~RAY~ARP.
“Do I have to go?” Lee has not been able to parse the difference between this salon and the other weeknight gatherings Man’s been going to lately. Gatherings where, if she goes with him, she is never sure what role he wants her to play: coy ingenue, faithful mistress, bawdy tomboy. She tries out all of them and none feel like a fit or seem to fully please him.
“Of course! Everyone is going. Éluard wants that new girl of his to be included—what’s her name? Nusch?—and got Breton to agree. And this is a public event, not just one of Breton’s regular things.”
“So Nusch and Paul—who else?”
Man ticks off names on his fingers. “Tristan, Soupault, Aragon. Most likely Tatiana, and Ilse Bing—have you met Ilse yet?”
Lee can’t remember. She knows the core group of Man’s friends, but the more peripheral members, the ones who come and go depending on the group’s shifting alliances, leave her befuddled. Especially the women, whose entrée into these evenings is entirely dependent on whatever man they are attached to at the time. But Lee has gotten to know Tatiana, the blonde from Moscow whose accent is so thick it sounds as though she has sponges stuffed in her mouth. And she likes Nusch, a birdlike woman with whom Paul Éluard has recently fallen in love.
The rest of the women connected to Man’s circle Lee can do without. Recently, Lee bumped into a group of them at Le Dôme; they were gathered close around a café table like buzzards around carrion. Lee pulled up a chair but none of them moved to give her room, so she sat for a while on the outskirts of their group, her martini balanced on her knee because she could not reach a surface on which to set it. Lee realized then—and tells Man now—that the other women don’t like her because she is too pretty; they are intimidated by her, all of them except Tatiana, who has a certain regal beauty of her own.
Man shakes his head. “They acted cold to you that day because you were supposed to buy them a round of drinks,” he says.
“I don’t have the money for that!” Lee says, shocked.
“They think you do, and that’s all that ma
tters. Besides—one round. You do have the money for that.”
As always, Man’s loose hold on finances annoys her. “Well, whatever the reason, they don’t like me and I don’t know how to fix it. And I don’t see why I should have to fix it.” Lee’s mouth sets in a moue of disappointment.
“They like you fine. Everyone likes you. Éluard loves you. And Breton is showing a film of mine tonight. I want you to see it.”
“A film? You gave that up.”
“It’s an old one. It’s really Dada, but everyone was so drunk when I showed it that I can show it to them now and call it Surrealist, and what the hell will they know?” Man smiles.
Lee stands up, stretches, goes into the bathroom. In front of the mirror she executes a faulty little pirouette, wishing she were going back to the Garnier.
The gallery is set up with folding wooden chairs and a projector aimed at the back wall. It is more than half full by the time Man and Lee arrive. People clap for Man when he walks in. He waves modestly and finds them chairs near the center of the room. Two poets walk back and forth in front of the projector, their silhouettes moving in strange distorted patterns behind them as they recite. The room is full of smoke and men and low, hushed chatter, and it is impossible to hear the reading over the audience; no one seems remotely interested in listening to the poets. Lee catches sight of Fraenkel—she can always recognize him from his little caterpillar mustache—sitting in a corner reading a newspaper and intermittently ringing a large brass cowbell.
After a while the audience quiets. Onstage, Philippe Soupault, a fierce, bony man whom Lee has met at several previous gatherings, gives an affected bow, closes his eyes, and begins reciting.
“No matter, no matter,
Animal cracker
The dish ran away with the quadroon.
When all was a clatter
Spitter spitter spatter
The bride
a groom
Room
Room
Room
I took the lettuce off the wall
and ate it.”
Someone in a middle row launches a crumpled ball of paper at him, and soon everyone is booing and whistling. Lee is surprised they don’t like it; the poem sounds to her like much of the other Surrealist writing she’s heard, which to her ears is all a bunch of gibberish. Soupault is unperturbed by the booing, keeps going, but finally Tristan gets on the stage and drags him off. A few moments of nothing, and then there is the hiss of film moving through the projector and the audience settles again. Tristan announces Man’s film, Le Retour à la Raison, and images project on the wall. Silhouettes of screws and pliers. The front of a Bugatti with a woman’s eyes where the headlights should be, blinking. More tools, scissors and hammers, dark black against a white background. Riotous and weird like all of Man’s work. As the film continues, some people in the audience, which quieted down initially, cough and shuffle. Chair legs scrape the floor. The combined rustle of restlessness. Beside Lee, Man sits coiled tight.
He leans toward her and whispers, “They don’t understand it.” Lee takes his hand. Though she’d never tell him, the truth is that Lee doesn’t understand it either. It feels to her as though she is sitting in the studio flipping through a stack of unrelated photographs. But maybe that is the point? Lee grows hot with embarrassment on Man’s behalf. She wants everyone to love the film. To love him.
Suddenly, there is the snap of nitrocellulose breaking. Man jumps up and moves to assist Breton, who kneels beside the projector and runs his hand along the film reel to stop the strip from unfurling further. The audience’s murmur becomes a din. People relax in their seats or turn around in their chairs to talk to the people behind them. Lee scans the room for people she knows. A few rows up and over, the Mdivanis sit together, impeccable in plus fours. Lee has not seen them since Patou’s party, and once she notices them she keeps her eye on them, wondering if and when they will talk to Man. She wonders if Man knows they are here, if he has seen them since he told her about them all those months ago.
Tatiana is wearing a trim hat with a veil and, perched on top, a small stuffed bird. Lee catches her eye and they nod at each other. A row up is Claude Cahun, looking more normal than usual in a black suit and red bow tie, and next to her is a dark-haired woman with a small camera hanging from a strap around her neck. Her hair is short, cut like Lee’s, and she has a perfectly centered mole at the nape of her neck, just above the collar of her white linen dress. She looks familiar, and Lee realizes she’s seen a picture of her before, posing with a Leica in the latest issue of Das Illustrierte Blatt. It must be Ilse Bing, the woman Man mentioned earlier. In the photo—and now, as she turns and scans the room—she wears an expression of calculating intelligence, and Lee is almost as intrigued by her as she is by her expensive camera.
Lee is just about to get up and say hello to Tatiana when the film starts up again. Man stands at the front of the room with Breton. More of the same images appear, tools and shots of a stark landscape, and this time the audience doesn’t settle. People continue to murmur as the film projects in front of them. Man’s gaze roves around the room, but he doesn’t look perturbed that they are talking; he’s more curious than anything else. Lee wonders if anyone—Man included—could explain the point of the film.
When it is over, there is a light smattering of applause. Man clearly expects some sort of follow-up, some questions, but Tristan just shouts from where he stands in the corner that it’s time to go into the gallery, and the audience stands and moves en masse into the next room. A few people start closing the folding chairs to make more space. Someone sets out bottles of wine and immediately a cluster of people forms around the table. Lee sees Man across the room but decides to get a drink, finding herself pushed up behind Ilse and Claude in line.
Lee hasn’t seen Claude since she had her gallery show, and she has heard through Man’s circle that Claude traveled south in the summer with some of the painters and set up a studio in Antibes. The coastal weather has agreed with her. Her cheeks aren’t as sallow, and she’s let her hair grow in so that she looks like a stylish little boy. Claude stands close to Ilse, and as they shuffle forward in the slow-moving line they link arms and whisper secretively. They don’t notice Lee until they’ve been handed their wine, and then as they pass Claude leans toward her, her breath hot against Lee’s ear. “Are you coming tonight?”
Lee is not sure what Claude means. Aren’t they already here? “Yes,” she says.
Ilse looks Lee up and down, considering her, and then says, “Good,” before reaching out and pinching Lee’s nose between her fingers. Before Lee can register surprise, Ilse and Claude have moved away, and Lee is at the front of the line, being handed a glass, filled gauchely all the way to the brim.
In the gallery Lee looks at the art. Of everything displayed she likes best Dalí’s canvas, The Accommodations of Desire, which she has to wait in line to view. It is a small piece, white lumpen shapes on a beach, covered over with lions’ heads, a toupee, ants, and shells. The shapes look to Lee like labia, the red paint at their centers like menstrual blood, and this both titillates and horrifies her. She knows from Man that Dalí made the painting for Gala, Éluard’s now-estranged wife; knows, in fact, that Dalí’s creation of it coincided with the end of the marriage. Lee wonders how it feels to Éluard to have it hanging here, a visual representation of his wife’s infidelity. If Lee were in his shoes she would be mortified, she thinks, but then she looks across the room and there is Éluard with his arm draped across his new lover, Nusch, his expression sanguine. Nusch looks carefree as well, though she must know the drama about this painting. Gala herself is absent, but then again Breton has always despised her. Dalí stands surrounded by a circle of men in the far corner, untouchable, his hair wild and his mustache waxed to angry points. Lee gulps down her wine and goes to get another.
All these people, each with his or her private drama. Over the past year Lee has worked to get to know them—at first bec
ause she was hungry for their fame, to be in their orbit. And then she wanted to know them because Man knew them. As she spent more time with them they morphed from intimidating ciphers into real people, with the same quirks and foibles as everyone else. And now Lee is part of it. This is her set, for better or worse. She feels they have accepted her begrudgingly, because she is Man’s girl, and it is such a different feeling than how she feels with Jean’s crew, with which she was immediately at ease. Perhaps it’s because she showed up at the film set unencumbered. None of that group had any preconceived notions of how she would be. She wasn’t Man’s girl there—she was just another actor, working as hard as everyone else.
Lee wishes she was at Jean’s studio right now instead of here. She closes her eyes and is backstage again, passing around the bottle of brandy. When she was there, she was thinking about Man. Now she is with Man and she’s thinking about the film set. Lee can’t believe it was just yesterday that she was at Jean’s, just yesterday that she saw the ballet—and Antonio.
Lee needs to stop the thoughts that lead back to Antonio, so she begins to walk around the gallery again. Max Ernst is showing a few of his forest paintings, the paint textured with metal and sticks. Jean Arp has a sculpture and a strange painting that Lee likes, black-and-white blobs cut out of wood and arranged in a random pattern. Perhaps these people are sometimes ill behaved, but here in the gallery, their beautiful work hanging on the walls, Lee is reminded that they are serious about their art, and talented too. If only Lee’s work were hanging here also. She’s wanted this so many times, but what has she done to make it happen? Most of these people probably don’t even remember that she’s a photographer—that she’s serious, just like them.
The Age of Light Page 23