Antonio raises his eyebrows at her and gives her a half smile. “You know? You just might.”
The pink room reminds Lee of a costume party she went to in New York a few years ago, a night that got written up in the Times and talked about for months afterward. Guests were instructed to dress as either devils or angels and to make sure no one could tell who they were underneath. Once there, depending on what identity they had chosen, they were sent to a particular floor of the house. Lee was a devil, of course, with a red silk mask that covered most of her face and tendrils like flames that ran through her hair and curved around her neck. The room she was directed to was illuminated by red lights, had a huge fire roaring in the hearth. She begins to tell Antonio about it and then says, “Oh!”
“What?” He leans toward her, staring right into her eyes, and tension crackles between them like wood popping in a fire.
“It’s just…I took on this big job recently, and being here in this room and thinking about that party, it made me realize what I could do.”
Antonio waits for her to continue.
“It’s a white party. The Bal Blanc. Madame Pecci-Blunt does it every year. But what if we make it the black-and-white party? Everyone dressed in white, with words and images projected on their bodies as they go through the rooms. Like photographs. The guests themselves can be the paper and we can develop the pictures right onto them. Weird pictures, words and phrases—”
“That’s fantastic,” Antonio says emphatically. “Wish I had thought of it.” He doesn’t laugh, doesn’t take his eyes off her, and she knows the idea really is a good one.
A waitress comes over to them. Antonio orders quickly, and she returns with a tray laden with cut crystal. With great ceremony, she lays out a sugar bowl, two Pontarlier glasses, two slotted spoons, a small carafe of ice water, and a green bottle.
“Absinthe!” Lee says.
“Drosso,” Antonio says in explanation.
He fills the bottom bulbs of their glasses, the liquid gleaming like jade against the pink background. They each put their spoons, holding sugar cubes, across the lips of their glasses, and then he pours the water over her spoon in a slow trickle. Coming from him, the gesture is sensual, teasingly slow. In the bottom of the glass the green liquid grows cloudy. Lee takes the carafe from Antonio and does the same to his glass, conscious of his eyes on her. They use their spoons to stir, clink their glasses together, and tip them back at the same time. Lee’s mouth fills with peppermint and licorice; her nose tingles as she swallows.
Antonio sips, coughs, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out his tobacco. In one fluid motion he rolls a cigarette and lights it, taking a deep drag off it so that the ember hisses and crackles. He hands it to Lee, who almost refuses but then thinks, Why not? As she inhales, the smoke sharpens the absinthe in a way that makes her feel as though she’s burning from the inside. As though she is flaying herself and starting over. She takes another long sip of the drink, another drag off the cigarette, and soon they are refilling their glasses and starting the process over. The force of their attraction to each other hangs in the air like a suit of clothes they could step into.
“So,” Antonio finally says, his expression curious.
Lee takes another sip and puts her hand on the table, and he rests his hand on top of it. Her world narrows to a point and he is at its center.
The crowd ebbs and flows. The music gets louder, the beat more insistent. Several couples stand and push aside tables so they can dance in the middle of the room. The dancing women hold up the bottoms of their robes and expose lean unstockinged legs. Lee and Antonio sit close together. Around them swirls the world. It feels like that to Lee, as if this strange room contains everything anyone would ever need. The dancing couples—as she watches them, time slows, and she sits back and just lets details wash over her: a bruise on someone’s knee, the way an earring casts a sliver of prismatic light on a woman’s neck, the expressions the dancers make as they move, both self-conscious and uninhibited, their eyes closed while smiles and grimaces of concentration flash across their faces. Lee catches snippets of conversation from other tables: “I was growing gardenias, of all things.” “We made it down the mountain before it started to really snow, but I had lost a ski.” “Patrice is a real hussy when she’s around him.”
Lee leans close to Antonio so her lips almost touch his ear. “You know what I want? I want to take pictures of this place.”
He pours more absinthe in her glass. “You’re good, aren’t you? Your work. You really care about it.”
Lee doesn’t know how he’s gotten this impression, but it’s true. His knowing it makes it truer, somehow, than when Man or even Jean has said the same thing to her.
“I do care about it. I feel…” She looks around at the dancers as they jump and hop, at the other couples at the tables nearby. “I feel like I finally understand what I’m trying to do.”
Each time they talk they have to lean in so they can speak at a normal volume, which feels incredibly intimate in the loud room.
“I think the world…,” she continues, “the world just goes on doing what it does whether I take a picture or not. My art—it’s about choosing when I release the shutter. It’s not about setting up a scene and making a picture of it. It’s about being somewhere at the exact right moment and deciding it’s a moment when no one else might think it’s anything.”
He nods. “I like that.”
She feels flushed. She is not sure if he has understood her—Lee has never voiced this thought to anyone. She is still just figuring it out herself. With a trembling hand she picks up her absinthe and takes a long searing swallow, then refills the glass herself. The water hits the absinthe and swirls like smoke in the glass.
What she longs for more than anything is that moment of decisiveness, of clarity. She wants to create moments and capture them on film. Capture lived experience, the feeling of being alive.
From across the room she sees the bartender extend a wineglass to a man as if she is holding out a rose. She sees a man lower his head and rub his neck. The room smells of liquor and perfume and it is humid with all the bodies—exactly, she thinks, as Antonio must have imagined when he wanted it to be a mouth. Lee picks up the bottle and fills his glass again, and then she leans across the table and kisses him.
Hours later, drunk, their bodies thrumming, they stumble down a darkened hallway in a part of Drosso’s apartment that Lee doesn’t think she’s seen yet. Antonio’s hand is clenched around hers; her thumb rubs the round knob of bone in his wrist.
Someone walks toward them in the semidarkness.
“We need a room,” Antonio mumbles.
The person doesn’t answer, staggers away.
They try doorknob after doorknob. Giggling now, simultaneously drowsy and alert. So many doors! They open one on a bathroom, catch each other’s eye. Almost consider it. Antonio puts his arm around her, his big hand wrapped tight around her rib cage. He is so warm she feels as if he is melting her.
Finally, at the end of the hall, double doors with large matching pull handles.
“Are those…?”
They are: two giant erect penises, cast in bronze, curving up from their bases to make the handles.
“Do you think”—Lee begins speaking, then hiccups—“those are Drosso’s?” She starts to laugh again and worries she’s not going to be able to stop.
“Probably.”
“Well, they’re very…impressive.”
But Antonio just gives them a yank and leads her into a large bedroom that must be Drosso’s. Antonio, who all the time Lee has known him has been a man of few words, is whispering things to her, his voice a low rasp in her ear. The things he wants to do to her. All the ways he’ll fuck her.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes.” Lee wants to say more but her mouth isn’t moving right and she doesn’t want to miss what he is saying. They find the bed; he lifts her onto it. Their robes are off, crumpled on the ground, there is just skin on skin on skin. Lee i
s on her back; Antonio kneels between her legs and grabs her around the waist, lifting her up and onto him so that their positions are reversed. With no effort he slides into her. She presses her thighs against him and feels the sharp blades of his hip bones as she moves above him, setting the tempo. Each time she lifts herself up he raises his hips to meet her. As he pushes into her she feels the same as she felt with the absinthe, as if she is scraping herself out from the inside and starting over. She leans forward and runs her hands all over him, feels every inch of his body, puts a hand between her legs and circles the base of his cock so she can feel how hard he is. Soon enough she stops thinking of anything. It is all just smoke and heat and licorice, the feel of their bodies as they move against each other. Her orgasm, when it comes, is a wild and terrible wave. She holds it off for as long as she can but it rolls in anyway, an obliteration, and she is lost to it, senseless, the wave is the blackness crashing over her and she lets it come.
Afterward Lee lies next to him, her head resting on his shoulder. The room is dim, and she stares at the wallpaper, letting her vision blur so that the pattern of vines and flowers seems to undulate on the wall. Or perhaps the flowers are undulating; in the gloom she watches, fascinated. Then she shifts her gaze and stares at Antonio’s profile. He is looking up at the ceiling, unblinking. Lee rubs her hand along his arm until he looks over at her.
“What are you thinking?” she asks.
He props himself up on an elbow so he can look right at her. “You know? I’m thinking I don’t really even know who you are.”
In her drunken, sated state, Lee considers this. She could tell him that she doesn’t know who she is, that she never has, that sometimes she just feels like an empty vessel to be filled by whoever she is with or whatever she is doing. She has the sense he might understand.
But instead she says, “Does it really matter?”
He rolls toward her. “I think it does. Because I want to see you again. Can I see you again?”
Lee feels herself sobering up. In an unwelcome rush, she pictures the list of excuses and alibis she will have to create to keep this from Man. It is exhausting just to think about. And yet she cannot imagine herself not doing this again now that she has done it.
She looks at the way the shadows play over Antonio’s chest, the dark line of hair that runs down his stomach. “Of course you can,” she says.
“You’re not with Man Ray? I thought I’d heard…?”
“What if I were?”
Antonio raises his hands above his head in a conciliatory gesture. “You don’t have to explain to me. I remembered you from that other time we met, and then once I thought I saw you with him at the Dôme. You looked…I thought you looked happy.”
Lee pictures what Antonio might have seen. The camera lens zooms back and she is in the middle of the shot, smiling, Man’s arm around her protectively, possessively. Man sees someone he knows, smiles and waves, goes over to say hello. If Lee were to snap a picture of that scene, in it she would be watching Man without wanting anyone to know she was watching him, sidelong and hungry. But what might Antonio have seen? Under the surface, love? There is no way for her to know. The moment is gone; the moment never existed in the first place.
“We were happy,” Lee says, and swings her legs over the side of the bed and searches for her robe until she finds it tangled with Antonio’s by the door. She picks them both up and tosses his to him. He roots around in its pocket and finds his tobacco, then scoots up to the headboard and starts rolling a cigarette on his thigh.
Lee walks over to him and gives him a long kiss, neither of them wanting to break it off first. He tastes like smoke and sugar cubes. The nerve endings in her tongue pull taut a knot in her stomach, and it is all she can do not to lie down beside him again. But instead she moves away.
The truth is that Antonio is a stranger. It is Man she knows; Man the one she has built a life with, who made her into the person she is today. Lee thinks about what it would be like to leave him. She would take all her things from their apartment—and go where? To stay with Antonio? This man here is just another Man, but one she doesn’t know and who doesn’t yet love her. But Man loves her. His anger this afternoon, the camera pressed into her face, is a reaction to her pulling away when what she should be doing is getting closer. She cannot imagine her life without him.
“I said the wrong thing. I can’t see you again.”
Antonio laughs an incredulous laugh. “You are a mysterious woman.”
“I guess I am.”
“If you change your mind…” His voice trails off. She walks over and kisses him again, and rubs her hand down the length of his body. Then she gets up and pushes through the doors toward home.
The sun is spreading pink across the sky by the time Lee gets back to the apartment. In the changing room at Drosso’s, after she left Antonio, she saw herself in the mirror. The only word she could think of was ravaged: lips puffy, eyes ringed with smudged liner, hair greasy and disheveled. In the small lav she turned on the cold tap full blast and pushed her face into it, the water spurting up her nose and in her eyes. She rubbed at her face with her fingers until the remains of her makeup came off, ran her wet hands through her hair to tame it. Then she wadded up her robe and ran it under the water, and scrubbed and scrubbed between her legs and at her armpits as hard as she could. But the rest she could do nothing about: the smell of tobacco on her fingers, the bruised appearance of her face, the scrim of guilt covering her like a thicker, blunted version of herself.
There is nothing right she can say to Man—no good excuse she can devise for where she’s been. As she walks into their apartment she is not so much trembling as vibrating, every inch of her alive with worry. Perhaps Man is still asleep or has already left for the studio; perhaps she can delay their meeting for a little while longer.
But he is sitting at the table drinking espresso when she walks into the kitchen. He looks up at her curiously, as if he hasn’t seen her for several months. Calmly, he brings the espresso cup to his lips and takes a sip.
“Where have you been?” he asks.
Lee takes off her coat and folds it over the back of a chair, wondering if this is what she would usually do. She clears her throat. “Jean is back in town. From Rome. I bumped into him on the street as I was headed to the studio and he wanted to show me some of the film. It’s so good. I can’t wait for you to see it. I’m sorry if you were worried.”
It is a plausible lie. Jean is back. He wrote to her from Rome to tell her he was coming home, but she hasn’t found time to visit him; she could easily have run into him in the neighborhood. Lee was practicing before she arrived, but now her words sound stilted even to her own ears.
“Ah,” Man says, and places the espresso cup back on its saucer so gently it doesn’t make a sound. “I look forward to seeing it.”
“Yes, I can’t wait to show it to you. It won’t be long now—Jean says he has just a few more edits to do, and then it will be ready. The parts I saw, they were good. Really good. I want you to see it.”
Lee is talking too quickly. Man gets up and puts his espresso cup in the sink and walks into the foyer. He grabs his coat, his keys. He opens the door, looks back at her.
“I’ll see you later, when you get back from Vogue?” he asks. The look he gives her is mild; his lips curve up in what might be a smile.
Before she can even say yes, the door clicks closed behind him.
Vienna
September 1946
Lee names the kitten Warum, the German word for why, when she finds him in the gutter in Vienna. He fits snugly in her coat’s breast pocket, purrs against her chest like a motorbike engine while she waits in line to get her clearance to move on to Moscow. Everywhere she goes she needs triplicated permits, and every bureaucrat she talks to is disorganized and incompetent. Of all the former Nazi strongholds, it is Vienna Lee hates most of all.
The liberated city is a study in contrasts. At night, the Austrians gorge on m
usic. Frothy harpsichords and lilting violins tinkle through the streets. Concert halls are packed with people, but the operas Lee used to love no longer move her. One night she goes to a marionette show and the loose bodies of the dancing puppets remind her so much of Dachau she has to run from the theater to keep from screaming.
She’s been trapped here for weeks, long enough for her mail to catch up to her, a stack of letters from Roland as thick as her thigh. She reads them in bed and laughs when Warum bats at the pages. Roland’s tone is worried and insistent. He wants her home. The war is over, Hitler is dead, he can think of no reason for Lee to still be gone.
In the light of day, all Lee sees are signs of privation. Austrian girls in dead men’s coats, begging for food in the rubble of their city. Malnourished babies dying in Viennese hospitals, their rib cages delicate as pick-up sticks, chests rising and falling as they struggle to keep their breath. If she were to write to Roland, she would say, This is why I’m still here, to shine a light on the suffering that didn’t end with the war. But instead she doesn’t write to him at all.
One afternoon, Lee is startled to find Warum missing from her pocket. She retraces her steps, stops at checkpoints she went through hours earlier to show the same permits the guards have already seen, each passing minute making her more convinced she’ll never find him. She looks until the sun is setting before she gives up and heads back to her room. Something in the road by the hotel’s door catches her eye. There he is, in another gutter: hind legs crushed, back arched like a fighter, his body already cold and stiffened. Why? Lee thinks. She picks him up, rocks back and forth. It is hours before she is ready to leave him. She uses her scarf as a shroud and buries the bundle in some nearby rubble. It is pointless to love things when in the end they’ll all be taken.
Chapter Thirty
After Man leaves the apartment, Lee is alone with her betrayal. She goes through the motions of getting ready for work, walks to Vogue with her head down, focusing her full attention on her feet. The air is bitterly cold, but she doesn’t feel it. All her mind will do is replay scenes from the night before.
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