The Age of Light

by Whitney Scharer

  “We can charge a lot,” Lee says. “Jean says we can name our price.”

  “We’ll charge aristocracy prices—that’s what we’ll do.”

  Lee laughs. “Ah, aristocracy prices! What’s the going rate for those these days?”

  “Enough that I don’t have to sell the Voisin.”

  Lee is surprised to hear him say it, even though selling the car makes perfect sense. They barely use it, and just keeping it garaged is an expense they really don’t need. Yet she doesn’t want to lose it. She thinks of the drive to Biarritz, the way the wind whipped off her scarf and left her skin tingling, the countryside unspooling past her, framed in the open car window. She wishes, powerfully, that they could be back there right now, lying in the sun and looking out at the sea. Or sitting in the cabaret, her knees pressed tight against his, their forearms touching on the small table as they share a bottle of wine. But then she realizes she could re-create that feeling right here in Paris, that their happiness is not some irretrievable thing; she can create more of it if she wants to.

  She wants to bring it up, to remember Biarritz with him. Just thinking about it eases the tension of the past few weeks, of being away from him on the film set and the fight they should have had after forfeits, the bitterness still simmering inside her. But it’s obvious Man’s head is not in the same place as hers. He squares a stack of magazines on the corner of the desk.

  “Also…Arthur Wheeler called this morning,” he says.

  Lee waits for him to continue. She has met the Wheelers just once, when Tanja was in town. Arthur does something in business—Man is always vague about exactly where his money comes from—but what Lee does know is that the Wheelers have funded many of Man’s more experimental projects and taken Man on several trips, to Italy and the Côte d’Azur, among other places, where he’s done some of his best work.

  “They were hit hard—Arthur’s pulling out of his oil venture. And he’s still on me about making another Emak Bakia.”

  “But you told him you don’t want to, right?”

  “The conversation was more tangled than that. He was rather distraught, actually. But it’s clear I can’t depend on them anymore, film or no film. It wasn’t even clear if there is funding for more work if I was willing to do it. Which I’m not.”

  Man goes over to the far wall and straightens one of the picture frames that gets crooked every time they open or close the door. Lee thinks for the hundredth time that she really should get a little piece of putty and put it behind the frame to keep it steady. There are so many chores like this, and she doesn’t want to do any of them. Sometimes the studio and the apartment exhaust her with their daily requirements, the grind of the mundane. There was none of that in Biarritz, none of it, in fact, on Jean’s film set either, where everything was meant to be transitory. Here, watching Man as he rounds the room and sets things in order, she feels a sudden crushing need to escape. She doesn’t want to talk about the Wheelers or the crash or selling the Voisin.

  “Let’s do something fun. Let’s go to the ballet,” she says. “You know I’ve been wanting you to go since I first saw it, and we don’t have anything to do tonight.”

  Man shakes his head. “You’re like a child sometimes,” he says, but his voice is kind. “I’m telling you we have no money and you’re saying we should go to a show.”

  “Well, why shouldn’t we? We can sit in the back. The tickets aren’t expensive.”

  “I don’t sit in the back,” Man says, but after a little grumbling he agrees and they head home to dress.

  But after they’ve gotten back to their apartment, Man changes his mind. He’s tired. He doesn’t like dance—she knows that. All he wants is a quiet night with her. He misses her, wants to sit across a table from her and just enjoy a simple meal.

  This is not at all what Lee wants—eating together is all they ever seem to do. They have become an old married couple in every sense but the legal one. Well, with the added exception that Man is the only one of them who is old. But she agrees to dinner, because it is not worth fighting him over something so trivial. If she were to force him to go to the ballet, Lee imagines him squirming in his seat, checking his watch as he always does when he is bored. And as it always does, her acquiescence makes Man happy; his mood lifts instantly, lifting Lee’s too.

  He takes her hand. “Let’s go to that bistro in the Fourth that I mentioned to you. They have the most delicious roast chicken.”

  They debate a taxi but decide to walk, pleased with themselves about this small act of thrift. They walk in silence in the direction of the bistro, a good twenty minutes from their apartment. The wind cuts through Lee’s thin dress under her coat and she can feel the metal in her garter belt go cold against her thighs. Already the lift in her mood is deflating. She can think of nothing to say, and compares how she is feeling now to how she feels when she talks with Jean, how his infectious energy always cheers her. Thinking of Jean makes her think of the ballet, and before she knows it she is thinking of Antonio, of how much she was looking forward to seeing his sets again, to knowing he was up in the rafters behind the stage.

  As they walk, Lee feels her face go warm against the cold. She keeps her eyes trained on the sidewalk and does not look over at Man. Nothing has changed. All she is doing is thinking. She used to think about other men all the time, before she was with Man. But the things she is now thinking: Antonio’s cock inside her. Bruises on her legs from his hands. Her makeup smeared, his fingers hooked into her mouth. She feels the imaginings in her bones. If Man were to look at her, there is no doubt he would be able to see it in her face. She keeps her head completely still and stares straight ahead.

  “We’ll see the ballet another time,” Man says, even though she hasn’t mentioned it.

  Lee sucks in her breath. Has he read her mind? “It’s all right,” she manages to say. “But I think you’d like it.”

  “Oh, maybe.” Man’s tone is dismissive. “You don’t know the intricacies of it because you haven’t lived in Paris long enough. Rouché wants the opéra ballet to matter again, so he hires Lifar. Lifar can probably do it. But why start with Prométhée? The music is so lilting, so flippant. I would have thought he would have wanted to make a bigger start. Giselle, maybe. Or something grittier. Le Sacre du Printemps.”

  “I don’t know,” Lee says, willing her mind to engage with this change of topic. “All I have to compare it to is what I’ve seen in New York.”

  “You don’t need anything to compare it to to be able to gauge its success. It should stand alone. Lifar’s a dancer, and a good one. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into artistry. It’s as if…oh, I don’t know…as if Amélie were to suddenly start taking pictures.”

  They have just turned down another street, and his words make Lee stop in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “Are you being intentionally rude to me?” she asks, pulling her arm from his.

  Man looks at her with surprise. “What? No! I’m not talking about you at all.”

  “So you’re just talking in general terms about a model not being able to be a good photographer.”

  Man lets out a little laugh. “Not everything is about you, Lee.”

  “Not even the things that are exactly about me?”

  Man groans and reaches out to hold her shoulders. “The ballet is probably good. We should see it together. You are a good photographer. I love you. I’m hungry, and tired, and I just want to find this place and sit down with you and relax over a glass of wine.”

  They keep walking and walking, and finally Man admits the bistro might have closed down. Ravenous now, they choose another place, fancier probably than Man intended, and once they are seated several waiters fuss around them with wine lists, napkins, and small adjustments to their place settings. They both get chicken—Man has made her crave it—but when it comes it is disappointing: lukewarm and undersalted.

  They are quiet while they eat. Lee’s mind swirls. Antonio. Man’s comment ab
out Amélie. She wants to probe him, as if Man is an infected tooth she can’t stop touching with her tongue. Or maybe she wants to shock him—wants, suddenly, for him to know where her mind has been, that he is not everything to her. She takes a bite of chicken and wonders what he would do if he knew what she was thinking on the walk here.

  Instead, she says, “It’s been so long since Tristan’s printed 221.”

  Man chews and swallows, his Adam’s apple bouncing in his neck. “I know. Money troubles. Just like the rest of us.”

  “Is he ever going to put it out again?”

  “I have no idea. It’s a bit of a tense subject. And I’m certainly not in a place to help fund it.” Man puts down his fork and rubs his hands together as if he is washing them.

  “So…my pictures?”

  He looks at her blankly.

  “My pictures. In the magazine.”

  Man drops his head. “Lee,” he says. “Now’s not really the time to ask Tristan for a favor.”

  Lee waits for him to continue, to apologize. When he doesn’t, when he just keeps sitting there, she says, “I thought you’d already asked him. And I didn’t realize it was a favor.”

  Man makes a sound that is half growl, half laugh, and covers his face with his hands. “It’s not a favor. That’s not what I meant. I just—I have a lot on my mind right now. You would have known that if you’d been around lately.”

  He is done with his chicken. Even though it wasn’t very good, he has decimated it. The bones are so bare they seem almost boiled, stacked neatly at the edge of his plate. Lee takes slices out of the center of hers and doesn’t care how much she wastes.

  “I had an idea,” Man says. “You know how you asked me this afternoon how you could be helpful? I saw George Hoyningen-Huene at Le Boeuf sur le Toit the other evening. He’s working for Vogue and he said he’s bored with all the models he’s been using. He wants someone new, modern. Of course I thought of you.”

  Lee sits back in her chair. “I’ve told you I don’t want to model anymore—”

  “Oh, I know. But they pay so well. And you did ask how you could help.”

  “I meant…What about the Bal Blanc? Should we phone Madame Pecci-Blunt? You said we could charge a fortune.”

  Lee wonders if he can hear the frustration in her voice, or if his own worries are drowning out hers. She does not want to model again; he knows that. He must.

  “The party’s in six weeks,” Man says. “We won’t get paid until the new year, if we’re lucky. Hoyningen-Huene is looking for someone now. How about this: I’ll call Madame Pecci-Blunt and you’ll drop by Vogue. Just see how it is. He’s supposed to be really good, actually. It might be fun.”

  “How about this: I call Madame Pecci-Blunt.”

  “Don’t you think the call would be better coming from me?”

  Lee puts down her fork and crosses her arms. “Jean recommended me. He also said she wanted to work with a woman on this, so I think I should call her. I’ll explain that you and I work together.”

  The “woman” part isn’t true, but Lee figures Man can’t refute it. He drums his fingers on the table. “I think I should call her,” he finally says. “But I’ll use both our names. I’ll present us as a team.”

  Lee considers this. “Fine. But I want to be a team. I want to come to all the meetings, and I want to help come up with the concept. And I want my name in the papers next to yours.”

  “I can’t control what they put in the papers.”

  “Well, you can try. We can call it a Man Ray–Lee Miller production, or something like that.”

  Man nods and uses a piece of baguette to sop up the last of his drippings. “All right,” he says.

  On the way home Lee insists they stop for a drink in the hope that there is something they can salvage from the evening. They choose a place where they’ve never been before, with a crowd that is mostly men, as if they are all there in the bar to do business deals. Lee downs her first martini and flags the waiter for another before Man has finished his. She lets the gin warm her and looks around the room at all the other patrons, trying to find a way for each of them to remind her of Antonio: the way one man has a silk scarf looped around his neck, the way another’s hair brushes his collar, the way another’s legs spread wide in front of him. She finds herself imagining that they really are Antonio, all of them, that she could simply sit down at another table and be with him instead of Man. Her thoughts embarrass her but she doesn’t stop herself. After a few moments, Lee forces her attention back to Man, to his wide forehead and the two little lines between his eyebrows, to the small patch on his chin where stubble doesn’t grow, to the bright whites of his eyes and the memory of how they made her feel just a few short weeks ago, when she couldn’t think of another man in the world she wanted to look at but him.

  Munich,

  Prinzregentenplatz 16,

  May 1, 1945

  It is Lee’s idea to stage the picture. She sits on the wicker chair next to the tub and unlaces her boots, leaving them where they land, then unbuckles her uniform and slips out of it, Dave watching from the door with that smirk on his face. He’s seen it all before and she’s seen him too. It doesn’t matter. What is shocking right then is how white her skin is under her clothes, pale and tender in the hard overhead light. It will be her first bath in three weeks and in the little vanity mirror her neck and face are army issue brown, the dirt almost topographic where it has dried on various layers of sweat.

  “Dirty auslander,” Dave says in a fake German accent, and they both laugh.

  She runs the tap as hot as she can get it, even pours in some Epsom salts from a little container on the nearby counter, and the bathroom fills with steam and a sharp saline smell that reminds her of the ocean and makes her realize how long it has been since she’s seen anything beautiful.

  Dave putters with his camera and tests the shot. He leaves the room and comes back with a small portrait of Hitler, which he places on the rim of the tub.

  “Too much?” he asks.

  “There’s so many goddamn pictures of him in this house I’m shocked he doesn’t have one in here. Leave it.”

  She steps in and the water is so hot it gives her goose bumps.

  “You’re going to leave a ring around that tub, rub-a-dub,” Dave says, referencing an ad for a cleaning product they made fun of a few years earlier. Dave is drunk. So is she. They’ve been nipping slowly at their stash since leaving upper Bavaria, their stomachs sour from what the Krauts call wine. Here at 16 Prinzregentenplatz they rejoiced when they opened a bar cabinet and found it full of Braastad, a luxury they haven’t seen since before the war. They pour it into snifters etched AH and emblazoned with swastikas and get properly ossified.

  Lee sits down in the tub and Dave hands her a washcloth and a bar of soap. There, under the accusing eye of the Führer, his hands on his hips in a pose that Lee is sure is supposed to look commanding but instead looks priggish as a schoolmarm, she scrubs at the dirt of Dachau until her skin stings.

  “Wait till Life gets their eyes on these,” Dave says.

  “You wouldn’t.”

  He laughs. “No. These are just for us. To commemorate—”

  “Not commemorate. To bury that fucking monster.”

  Dave takes enough shots to fill a roll and Lee sits in the bath until the water gets cold. Then she steps out and puts her uniform back on, the buckles and buttons as familiar to her now as her own body, and she picks up the framed picture and lets it drop facedown on the bathroom tile. In one quick motion, she pivots her foot on top of the frame, the glass screeching on the ceramic, and leaves the room.

  They spend three more hours in Hitler’s house before the rest of the regiment arrives. Lee feels as though she knows the Führer a little bit by this point. She’s sat at his desk, read his letters from Eva, looked through his sketchbooks, seen his bedroom and his sock garters and his headache tonics. The more normal he seems, the more she despises him. She is filled to th
e brim with hatred, choking on it.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Frogue, as everyone calls it, is more than Vogue. To say it is more French is to miss the point. It is more everything. Epicenter, nexus. Here in the ornate cluttered offices, the editors are choosing the fashions that American Vogue copies; they are setting the trends instead of emulating them.

  When Man asks her how it is going, Lee talks dismissively of it, but to her surprise she loves being there. Does she wish she were behind the camera? Of course. Does she have to stop herself from shouting directives in the middle of a shoot, bite her tongue when the photographer makes a choice she doesn’t agree with? Mais oui. But at Frogue she and all the other models are treated with a respect never shown to her in New York. From the moment Lee arrives at the main office, foul-tempered, feeling forced into being there by Man, she has been treated as if she is important. In the waiting room, the assistants’ obsequiousness saps the grumpiness right out of her. They usher her directly to a studio to meet the photographer; they do not keep her waiting. They seem, in fact, to be honored to have her, to be reacting to a reputation Lee did not fully recognize she had. And the reputation is not from her connection to Man Ray: it comes from her, from her past work for Condé Nast, from Steichen’s pictures of her, and because everyone at the magazine knows she will make the clothes more beautiful. Here the clothing matters above all. Fashion made totemic. Lee has not forgotten that she is beautiful, of course, but it is nice to have an outside reminder, and from such a place as this.

  Her life suddenly has a balance to it. Madame Pecci-Blunt has hired them, but she’s been impossible to pin down on details, so Lee and Man spend a few hours a week making preliminary plans on their own. Then Lee spends a few days at Frogue, and the rest of the week in the studio. She likes the rush of a day spent modeling: fitting in lunch, the way the Frogue employees have their favorite bistros only steps away. And she likes George Hoyningen-Huene, the photographer she works with most closely when she is there.