The Age of Light

by Whitney Scharer

  Lee wants to go back to bed, to crawl under the blankets and pull them up over her head. She wants Man to get up and see what state she’s in and take care of her. Or better yet, she wants to be back in her childhood bed, her father bringing her cambric tea.

  But today is the last day of filming, and after another glass of water and a piece of unbuttered toast, Lee musters the energy to get dressed and go to the set. Man still lies in bed; he far outdrank her last night, so it is the kind thing to leave him be, and the truth is she doesn’t even want to talk to him. There is no way they can talk without addressing what happened during forfeits and the fight they almost had afterward. She leaves a note in their usual spot on the table, telling him where she’ll be. Signs it Love, L after a moment’s hesitation.

  Filming goes smoothly. They reshoot a final scene in which a guardian angel removes an ace of hearts from a cardsharp’s pocket, and Lee transforms into the statue and walks through fake snow without leaving any footprints. Afterward, as she takes off the complicated costume for the final time, she thinks she might miss it, even though it’s so uncomfortable.

  At the end of the day, Lee, Enrique, and a few other cast members stay with Jean until everything is done and it is time to lock up the set. One by one they leave, until finally it is only Lee and Jean who remain. They walk outside and Jean turns the key in the lock, but neither of them is ready to go.

  Jean has booked a ticket to Rome, where he says he can focus and get his edits done. Enrique is not going with him. Perhaps the men’s relationship cannot be sustained outside the insular world of the film studio. When Jean says goodbye to Lee, his face looks sad and drawn.

  “Take care of yourself, Mouse,” he says.

  “Find me when you get back to Paris.”

  “Of course. And you will be one of the first to see the film.”

  Lee hugs him and is surprised to find tears stinging her eyes. She can’t believe filming took only a few weeks. It feels as though months have passed since she first got there.

  “Ah—I almost forgot.” Jean digs around in his jacket pocket until he finds a small white calling card, which he hands to her. Madame Anna-Letizia Pecci-Blunt, it says in an embossed heavy serif font, with an address in the Trocadéro beneath it. “Do you know her?” he asks.

  Does Lee know Madame Pecci-Blunt? Everyone knows her, or at least her name. She is one of the richest women in Paris, almost royalty, somehow related to the Pope. “I don’t know her personally, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I never know who you are going to know. She has a big party every year. Everyone goes. I saw her out one night recently and she told me this year she is going to do a white ball. The Bal Blanc. All the decorations in white. The guests in white. Everything like a ghost, like purity. She asked me if I would help her make it incredible. I can’t do it, so I gave her your information.”

  “Mine?”

  Jean makes an impatient noise. “I gave her the address of Man Ray’s studio. But it was you I told her about. When she calls, you should be the one to talk to her. It can be your shoot, if you want it to be. With that in your portfolio you could get more business, start your own studio. I spoke very highly of you.”

  “You did? I didn’t even know you liked my work.” When she showed him her photos at the studio a few weeks ago, she felt as embarrassed as she used to feel when showing her work to Man. She didn’t even want Jean to see many of them, and rushed through her portfolio, as if letting him linger on any one image would reveal her as the imposter she always worries she is.

  “Mouse, of course I do. You should already know this, but you are good. Are you as good as you’ll be in years to come? Surely not. But you have that something. I had it too, and look at me now. This business—it favors the bold. It doesn’t favor the assistant. You need to find a wealthy patron. It is the only way to do it. The vicomte—he gave me my million francs. Without him, no film.”

  This is the first time Lee has heard this figure and she is impressed. But more than that she is happy to know that Jean thinks she’s talented. She says, “What would Madame Pecci-Blunt want me to do? Take photographs?”

  “Here is what you do. You meet with her. After proper introductions you ask if you can call her Mimi—it will put you on the same level. You hear what she has to say. She tells her vision. Ghosts, white, purity. You say, ‘What you are saying is so exciting. I have so many ideas—too many to choose from.’ You get her to keep talking until you understand what she wants. These people—they think they want to hire a talented artist, but what they really want is to think they’ve come up with the idea themselves. And then whatever trifling concept she comes up with you take it and make it something worthwhile. Maybe you…I don’t know…put everyone in white and they all have to carry white parasols or wear the same white mask. Or give them white paint and let them paint all over things. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

  Jean loops his scarf around his neck and kisses her on both cheeks. Lee holds the card in her hand and looks at the ornate font of Madame Pecci-Blunt’s name and tries to picture herself in the meeting Jean described. It is easy to turn it into the fantasy she wants it to be, in which she confidently charms the rich woman over a lavish afternoon tea. Lee likes the fantasy very much. She thanks Jean, gives him a hug, and rests her cheek against the soft fabric of his coat. They stand that way for a while and then Lee watches as Jean walks off toward his home. She heads in the other direction, down Boulevard Raspail, and as she walks she rubs Mimi’s card between her fingers.

  The fall air is mild, the sun just beginning to set and turning the light thick and yellow. Lee decides to take a long way home, past the Sorbonne and the Panthéon, its columned facade deep in shadow. When she gets back to Montparnasse she ducks down a side street she’s never been on before, and at the corner of Rue Victor Schoelcher and Rue Victor Considérant there is a small sign in the ground floor window of a narrow building: STUDIO SPACE TO LET: INQUIRE WITHIN. Lee pauses in front of the building and tries to look inside, but it is all in shadow and she can’t really see anything. The windows are large, running almost from the floor to the ceiling, and she imagines what the room might be like, what she could make it look like if it was hers. Like the party she might create, she would paint the studio white: floor, ceiling, walls. She would have a white couch, a white stool. And when the afternoon light came filtering through, the room would glow like a candle and the clients who came for their portraits would be their most beautiful selves, illuminated, the light washing their eyes clear and their skin smooth and creamy. On the door she’d hang a little sign. Simple, small, discreet. Three words: LEE MILLER STUDIO.

  She keeps walking, and by the time she gets home the sky is purple with sunset. In the apartment, she finds Man in the bedroom, painting. His hair is wild and disheveled, and before he notices her he bows his head and rakes his paint-stained hands through it. Lee clears her throat and he turns to her, his expression a mix of relief and anxiety.

  “I didn’t hear you come in. Is the filming wrapped up?”

  “Yes, all done. Jean is leaving for Rome.”

  “Needs to get closer to the muse, no doubt.”

  Lee smiles despite herself, goes over to the bed and flops across the mattress. Man almost loses his balance and scowls at her. Lee stares up at his painting. The canvas is filled edge to edge now. He watches her as she takes it in.

  Before she can say anything, he says, “I’ve gone back to Lautréamont. When I was younger it was the part of the poem about leaving home and abandoning the past that spoke to me, but now I see something different in it. I didn’t make the connection until this morning: these aren’t only your lips. They’re the sapphire lips of Maldoror. The temptress. The devil. But they’re your lips too. I want the viewer to hold both images in his mind at the same time.”

  Man has shown Lee the Lautréamont poem before—she despised it, though she didn’t tell him so. To her it is pure onanism, scene after scene of violence
and bloody sex and destruction. His love of it—they all love it, all his friends; Soupault carries a battered copy of it around in his coat pocket—mystifies her.

  “It’s a fascinating idea,” Lee says. “But to me the painting’s so sensual. I don’t see the violence in it.”

  Man steps down from the mattress and goes over to the dresser, where he picks up a dog-eared book and starts rifling through the pages.

  “This part,” he says. “This is what I was reading today while you were gone. Let me read it to you.”

  A pair of nervous thighs gripped tightly against the monster’s viscous flesh, and arms and fins wrapped around the objects of their desire, surrounding their bodies with love, while their breasts and bellies soon fused into one bluish-green mass reeking of sea-wrack, in the midst of the tempest still raging by the light of lightning; rolling and rolling down into the bottomless ocean depths, they came together in a long, chaste, and hideous mating! At last I had found somebody who was like me…From now on I was no longer alone in life…Her ideas were the same as mine…I was face to face with my first love!

  Man’s reading quickens as he goes along and when he is done he looks at Lee expectantly. The whole poem repels her. It is like all that is evil and dark in the world, and when she hears it she can feel herself teetering on the edge of her own darkness, where she does not want to go.

  In the painting above her head, her red mouth floats calmly in the cloudy sky. No matter how hard Lee tries she can’t connect the painting to the murky shipwreck of the poem. Finally she says, “Is that how you see me? Like some sort of…monster?”

  Man goes over near the wall and gestures at the painting. “No, of course not. In the painting your mouth is your mouth. But there’s the devil from the poem there too. Good and evil. Pain and pleasure.”

  Man has a delirious look in his eyes that reminds her of how he looked last night during forfeits. Lee gets up and goes over to the vanity and starts running her hairbrush through her hair, pressing the bristles so hard against her scalp it’s almost painful.

  “I don’t like it. You using me like this.” In the growing gloom, her reflected face in the mirror is a pale orb, like one of the white shapes on the beach in Dalí’s painting.

  “I would think you’d be flattered. This painting—honestly, I think it’s my greatest work.”

  “Do you think that’s what Salvador said to Gala when he made that painting of her?”

  Man looks confused at the change in subject. “The one at the gallery last night?”

  “Yes. Did you look at it? I loved it, actually. It was so evocative.” Lee says this just to provoke him—he hates when she compliments other artists’ work.

  “There’s no comparison.”

  “No comparison between the merit of your painting and his, or between Salvador using Gala and you using me? You told me yourself about Salvador’s painting, that he made it when he was persuading Gala to leave Paul. And there are elements of her in it—it’s obvious. So I don’t see what the difference is. And what I’m saying is that I don’t want you using me and then telling me I’m a monster.”

  “I’m not using you, Lee. You inspire me. You know that.”

  Lee holds her hairbrush to her mouth like a microphone. “And here we have Exhibit A,” she intones, “the woman who inspired Man Ray to produce his greatest work.”

  Man gets a knowing, almost condescending look on his face. “Ah. So that’s what this is about. I was drunk. I needed to shut Paul down. And it worked. I’m sorry if I offended you.”

  “You did offend me.”

  As often happens, when Man realizes Lee is really upset, his demeanor changes. He comes over to her, pulls the hairbrush out of her hand, and wraps his arms around her.

  “Lee, my darling. I’m sorry,” he whispers. “They were just words. You know how I feel about you.”

  She lets herself be held by him. For a moment she pictures his arms as the tentacles from the Lautréamont poem, gripping her body as they sink to the bottom of a stormy sea. She feels her pulse quicken, but shakes her head to focus on what is actually in front of her. Man. Her Man, who loves her. He kisses her neck, right behind her ear as she likes him to do, and the image dissipates. Lee relaxes into his arms. He smells comforting and familiar, of turpentine and pipe tobacco, vetiver from yesterday’s cologne. In his embrace the poem and the events of last night seem less important: they are all just words.

  After a little while he pulls away from her and goes over to his palette. He picks up a paintbrush and daubs it in some red paint. “Come here,” he says.

  He hands her the paintbrush and they both step up on the mattress. He points to a section where he has painted her bottom lip, and Lee reaches out and swipes the brush across the canvas, at first with hesitation, then with growing confidence, the red he’s given her adding a touch of brightness to a darker section of her mouth. She hasn’t painted since she got to Paris.

  “The Lautréamont,” he says. “I’m the monster, you’re the temptress. That’s what I meant. That part I read to you about not feeling alone—finding someone the same as me. That’s what I want the painting to convey.”

  Lee keeps painting. “I see.”

  “I get a little crazed when you aren’t here,” he says with a laugh. “My imagination gets the best of me. And you’ve been gone a lot lately.”

  Lightly, she says, “Well, as I said, filming’s done. I’m all yours again.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “Yes.” Lee hops off the bed and loads her paintbrush with more paint. “What’s the painting going to be called?”

  “It’s called The Lovers.”

  “No devil in that,” Lee says, and steps back up on the bed. They paint together for a while. She gets her face so close to the canvas her lips are all she sees.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  With filming over, Lee and Man return to their old schedule and habits. As the weeks pass there is comfort in the familiarity of the work. When occasional clients come, Lee falls back into assistant mode, setting up lights, fetching diffusers, swapping out the drop cloths before Man takes the shots. Now and then she suggests a tweak to the framing, and almost always he agrees; she can tell his heart’s not really in the work, which always happens when he spends a lot of time painting.

  At the end of one shoot, Man says, “Lee, can you collect payment from Miss DuBourg?”

  “Now?” Lee is surprised. Usually they bill later, long after the pictures have been delivered.

  “Yes. Just bill for the session time and we’ll follow up for the rest of the fees when everything is done.”

  So, with embarrassment, Lee explains to the client that they do require payment that day. Miss DuBourg doesn’t hide her shock, but she pulls a checkbook from her purse and dashes off a check, handing it to Lee pinched between two fingers.

  After Miss DuBourg is gone Lee goes into the office and gives Man the check. “Was that really necessary?” she says.

  He rubs his hands through his hair and coughs. “I’m in a bit of a bind,” he says. “Nothing too bad, but we need to drum up some more business, get a commission. Something.”

  Lee thinks back to her recent accounting. “We have a lot outstanding, but most should come in by the end of the month, and with the Patou catalog work—”

  “Patou just dropped me.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “They’re hiring someone in-house. Blumenfeld. So expected.”

  Lee grimaces. “I hate his work.”

  “I know. Me too. There’s no energy there, nothing provocative. The models may as well be taking pictures of themselves while they look in the mirror.”

  “That would be more interesting, actually.”

  Man laughs, but then his face falls again. “I need a big commission—a Rothschild or a Rockefeller who wants their portrait done. But I’m worried I’m falling out of favor with that crowd. If I were to win the Philadelphia prize, I think I’d get some attentio
n.”

  “Can I see the pictures you’ve chosen…or help you with the artist statement? I was helpful last time, with your essay…”

  Man stares at the check. “I don’t know. I still haven’t decided what to submit. In the meantime, the most helpful thing you could do would be to see if there’s anyone we haven’t billed or who hasn’t paid.”

  Lee thinks of Madame Pecci-Blunt’s card. She had been intending to listen to Jean and keep it a secret, figure out if there is some way she can do the party herself, but the moment is too perfect. She can’t help herself.

  “Well,” Lee says, smiling slyly and walking over to where she’s hung her handbag, “it’s not a Rothschild, but look at this.” She hands Man the card.

  He reads it and shakes his head, confused. “Where did you get this?”

  “Jean gave it to me.”

  “Does she want her portrait done?”

  “No. Apparently she has a party every year, and she’s looking for an artist to help make it really memorable. Jean can’t do it so he passed it on.”

  “Never thought Cocteau would do me any favors,” Man says.

  Lee takes the card back from him and returns it to her bag. “I think he’s doing me a favor.”

  “Hmm.”

  Lee waits for him to say more and when he doesn’t she continues. “Jean gave her my name”—she puts a slight emphasis on the word my—“so hopefully she’ll call soon.”

  A smile spreads across Man’s face. “Oh, this is good. This is very, very good. If there’s one thing we can do it’s make this party interesting. I did something like this for the Wheelers once—did I tell you about it? They were having a dinner party and I made sculptures for the table and took film footage when everyone was dancing after dinner.” He stands and wanders around the room as he talks, picking up some of the clutter and organizing it, as he often does when he is agitated. It is the only time he tidies anything.