Eight Girls Taking Pictures

by Whitney Otto

  “Tell me about your movie, Madame Cluzet,” said Morris, leaning a little too close to Clara, a little too drunk, with Clara not moving away.

  “Let me see. Ah, yes, I play a Mexican. A sultry Mexican,” she said.

  “With a knife behind your back and a rose between your teeth? How original! And it seems . . . almost prescient,” said Morris, clumsily holding his hand to his chest before having to steady himself. He smiled; she smiled.

  Marguerite paled, just slightly. She had been looking a bit drawn lately.

  (When Clara had asked Morris if Marguerite were ill, he simply answered, “She’s unhappily in love.”

  “Do you know the woman?” Marguerite was a lover of women.

  “It’s not a woman this time—hence the unhappiness. Men make her more miserable because she doesn’t really like them in that way.”

  Clara wasn’t surprised when someone with a defined preference made the occasional sexual detour.)

  “Why not take me with you, Laurent?” said Marguerite in a voice meant to sound flirtatious, but which succeeded only in sounding plaintive.

  “Marguerite, you should come with Pablo and me. We should all go!” said Laurent. “To Obregón’s paradise.”

  “Excuse me if I’m skeptical about anyone’s president,” said Morris.

  “Vasconcelos has promised literacy and art to the people. He has thrown the library doors wide open. I’m sorry for your cynicism,” said Pablo.

  “Just because the United States doesn’t have a minister of public education, like Vasconcelos, someone who cares about the arts—”

  “—and the people,” said Morris.

  “Yes, and the people,” said Pablo.

  “I’m just wondering why the people are always being told what to want,” said Morris.

  “You don’t know how bad it gets,” said Clara quietly, “when no one cares about you.”

  Then, with a lightness, she said, “Having played a Mexican in not one but three movies, I would like to say, Viva la Revolución. And to Señor Martín, and to my wonderful husband, even to my friend Morris, may you never understand what you don’t understand.”

  Morris leaned over to Clara, hovering for a moment before kissing her on the mouth, then pulling away slightly, saying, “Back at you, kid,” before struggling a little to his feet. “The wife awaits. Marguerite, shall you take me home?”

  Marguerite didn’t move. She had been looking at the floor while everyone was talking, and now a single tear made its way down her pretty face. She nodded as she rose, picked up her cape and one of her original little hats, and walked over to the door, which Morris held open.

  The other guests heard Morris say to her in the quiet voice of the drunk (which is to say a voice more audible than the drinker realizes), “You don’t really care about me, M. It’s only something you’ve talked yourself into,” before closing the door behind them.

  For ten years Marguerite Mahler had been the photographer–business partner–object of a slight sexual obsession for Morris Elliot. For those ten years, she had also been his on-again-off-again mistress. He was inspired by her photographs—of fans, flowers, kimonos, shadows, seashells, showers, opera gloves, birds’ wings, and waves of sand—as much as he was by her sunny personality, and her past as a prostitute. It was a spark that ignited in both directions, despite her preference for women. The fact that Morris was an exception for her made the sexual tension deeper and more mysterious.

  A photograph taken by Cymbeline Kelley, on the occasion of Morris and Marguerite visiting Cymbeline and Leroy in San Francisco, shows the pair in profile; Marguerite’s back is against Morris’s chest, her head thrown back in a posture of surrender. He holds her as if to support her. It is an elegant portrait by any measure. Their intimacy is unmistakable.

  Morris would say that it was Marguerite’s intelligence, artistic brilliance, her original way of seeing and being in the world, that was the polar opposite of the domestic life he lived with his wife and five children; it was her eccentricity, her habit of disappearing for a few days at a time and returning to him like an exhausted, satisfied adventurer that made him see the possibilities of a life he was not living. For Morris, Marguerite was the life he longed for, the life that lived inside himself as he listened to his wife talk about the house and the garden and the children, whom he loved but could not, as hard as he tried, make the center of everything.

  It could be said that Marguerite opened the door for him, but Clara was the one who made him decide finally to step through. This was the reason for Marguerite’s tears at Clara and Laurent’s Bryson studio. That evening she knew, as Laurent did not, that Clara and Morris had been lovers for several months.

  By the time Morris and Clara moved to Mexico City, in 1923, Clara had been his sometime model and muse for just over two years. It was an off-and-on thing, fueled by the permissiveness of the times, when politics and relationships were in flux, largely due to the calamity that had been the Great War. The sheer scope and barbarism of the four-year war, not to mention the Spanish flu epidemic that took hold as it was winding down, made an entire generation rethink the expectations that had preceded the war.

  Artists, writers, and wanderers gravitated toward Paris. Political idealists found their calling in the newly revolutionized Russia. Everyone else who felt unfit for or undesirous of “regular life” went to Mexico City. Some thought of them as a lost generation; others, like Clara, would say that they were found.

  The Mexican Revolution had barely ended when the new president, Álvaro Obregón, who dreamt of a literate, artistic epoch for all Mexicans, enlisted José Vasconcelos to implement his programs, including hiring artists wearing workmen’s overalls to paint the most fabulous murals for the same pay scale as the masons they resembled. This, thought Clara, when she had lived in Mexico only a short while, is surely paradise.

  Clara and Morris sailed to Mexico, bringing with them Morris’s eldest child, fourteen-year-old Bryce. If Morris’s wife had thought to foist child-rearing duties on the lovers, she had miscalculated: Morris and Clara were very happy to have Bryce along. This may have been because Clara couldn’t have children of her own and missed her large family, or because she was only now recovering from the tragedy of Laurent’s death from smallpox.

  As had been their plan, Laurent had gone ahead to Mexico while she finished her final movie. Then came the telegram of his illness, then his death while she was en route. She never fully forgave herself for letting him die alone, despite the disease having moved faster than the telegraph service and the public transportation of the time.

  But Laurent’s death did not deter Clara from moving to Mexico.

  When Morris heard the news, he had the splendid idea of the two of them opening a photography studio. She would run the business while learning photography. “I will be your apprentice,” she said, “for room and board.”

  Seldom has the word apprentice been so true and so euphemistic.

  It didn’t take long for discontentment to enter their household. In the beginning, Morris and Clara were caught up in the energy of the city: fiestas, shops, trams, flowers, music, dancing, cooking, fruit, and toys. The clothes. The cathedral. The zócalo. The holidays. The surreal gardens of Xochimilco, floating islands of flowers and willows.

  Their business did well enough, though it didn’t allow them much breathing room; no matter, their new life in the Colonia Juárez was exhilarating. Their new friends were some of the most famous artists, writers, poets, and radicals of the city. There was no one they wished to know whom they didn’t know. Whereas Clara had once given nightly parties in Los Angeles with Laurent, she now gave them in Mexico City with Morris.

  And the days Clara spent running the studio, taking photographs (portraits and flowers, including one of white roses, all crushed together, overripe and erotic), printing, and discovering that she not only loved the work of making pictures but had a talent for it. People began requesting her services.

 
; All of this was punctuated by her nude modeling for Morris, usually on their rooftop, where Clara would pose as pleased and as natural and, to Morris’s way of thinking, as unknowable as a cat in the sun.

  It was not Clara’s enthusiasm and talents that bred discontent in Morris; it was the insecurity brought on by her beauty. He once grumbled that “next time I’ll get an ugly mistress.” It didn’t help that, when his nudes of Clara were exhibited, they brought her more attention (and notoriety) than they brought him. This was all the more galling since they also eclipsed his gorgeous experiments in modernism, as he had finally come into his own as a photographer.

  “I don’t believe in marriage or anything resembling marriage,” said Clara quietly when he complained of her casual lovers. “You knew how it was in Los Angeles. You were part of how it was in Los Angeles.”

  “This isn’t the same thing,” he said.

  “It is exactly the same thing.”

  “Well, I don’t like it.”

  “You said you didn’t care about fidelity. You said if you did, you may as well stay with your wife.”

  He said nothing.

  She could’ve explained that her sexual freedom wasn’t simply a product of her time and bohemian choices; it was the tradition of her family. The Argentos were no strangers to common-law marriages, or the child of one man, born outside marriage, being raised by another. Her own parents didn’t marry until three weeks before her oldest sister was born. No one gave much thought to whether a relationship was bound by law or love or both. What she said instead was “I didn’t grow up in some midwestern America. I don’t believe in possessions.”

  “Really? Then explain your marriage to me, because my hopeless midwestern mind seems confused, Madame Cluzet.”

  She was silent. Then, “Laurent and I were ‘married’ because we chose to be married. We lived together, we worked side by side—what else could marriage be?”

  “Then what am I to you?”

  “I’m with you now. No one else exists for me.” Clara placed her hands on either side of his face and said, her voice kind and loving, “We only live in a single moment anyway.”

  Though Morris was uncomforted, he was more than willing when she took his hand and led him upstairs to her room.

  For Clara in Mexico the smells of oil, spices, animals, machine exhaust, cooked sugar, pastries, cigarettes, and the sweat of workers took her back to North Beach, and further back to Italy. Mostly Italy. She belonged to Mexico. She said, “I feel Mexican when I’m in Mexico, unlike the United States, where I feel I’m in a foreign country.”

  On their one-year anniversary in Mexico, as a lark, Morris and Clara went to a traditional photography studio with corny backdrops, and, as they posed like man and wife, Clara said, “El señor is very religious, perhaps you can put a church in the background; and I should like to hold these lovely flowers. But you will have better ideas than we—your pictures are so artistic!”

  They came out into the street laughing, with the promise to pick up the three different wedding portrait prints next week.

  “Are you happy now?” she said, trying to catch her breath.

  “Very,” he said, pulling her into a happy embrace.

  When Clara had her first exhibition, it was a success. Patrons were impressed by the modernism of her composition of glass-paned doors, telegraph wires, rows of concrete stadium seats, convent passageways. Then there were the plants and flowers that, like the architectural details, looked to be pure form.

  The portraits were different. Elegant, expressive, compassionate.

  And the pictures were well-received, even if they were always overshadowed by Morris’s previous two exhibitions of Clara in the nude.

  There was admiration for her intelligence, her generosity, her glamour, her leftist leanings, her peaceful nature, her skill behind the camera, her (eventually) storied, almost mythical love affair with Morris, with its hazy domesticity and creative synergy. Her beauty. Always her beauty. Her image appeared in more than one Diego Rivera mural, including the murals of Chapingo—“the Sistine Chapel of the Americas”—showing her in a languorous pose similar to that in the photographs Morris took on the azotea. For nearly a year she posed; for nearly a year she was Rivera’s lover.

  The men who were given her favors could not keep them.

  Not to mention a certain man who could not garner her favor when he wanted it—that undid her in the end.

  Cymbeline and Leroy went to Mexico to see their old friend Morris Elliot during a break in Leroy’s teaching at his Bay Area college. Cymbeline later said of Clara, “To me she was a performer of real interest. . . . I was never critical of her, never noticed her accent if she had one, just took in her beauty.”

  Before Cymbeline and Leroy returned home, they purchased one of Clara’s photographs, Wineglasses, which had the same modernist aesthetic as the telegraph wires and endless doors, eventually donating it to the Mallory College art gallery.

  There was no photograph of Morris and Clara that even hinted at the swooning closeness shown in Cymbeline’s photograph of Morris and Marguerite; for them the truth would look more like their separate photographs, hung side by side, but always in the same room.

  “Clara Argento—profession: men!”

  She said jokingly at a party where the guests assembled to play a game where you tell something true about yourself, choosing questions from a hat. Only Morris wasn’t laughing. This was the same party where another guest took a photograph of Clara seated between two men, their backs to the camera, their three faces in synchronized three-quarter profile, as one of the men drew pictures on her exposed shoulder and upper back.

  In his refusal to seem “midwestern,” as Clara had said, Morris took to turning a blind eye to her male guests. Fortunately, her room—the couple had never shared a room, partly to keep an element of truth about their master-apprentice relationship, and partly because of Morris’s boy Bryce, who was too old to be fooled and too young to care—was on the rooftop azotea. In this way, Morris could almost, almost avoid knowing of her “little romances.”

  Morris tried sleeping with women in their social circle and traveling American girls who saw him as one more way to be daring until they returned home to respectability. The women in their circle talked too much about art and about politics; he was particularly sensitive to anything involving the Communist Party (Bullshit politics, as he thought of it), since Clara had become more and more entrenched in it.

  She had begun doing translations for El Machete, since her spoken languages included Italian, German, English, Spanish, French, and a smattering of Russian. Her pictures ran regularly in the paper, and she held editorial and political meetings at the house.

  Morris had no interest in politics, particularly in the Communist Party, to whose rhetoric he was subjected daily by their friends. Who was allowed in, who was thrown out, who allowed their individual, bourgeois needs to come before the collective. And always the Revolution.

  Clara’s pictures reflected her changes. She was no longer interested in studio work, unless you counted her still lifes of a hammer and sickle; or sombrero, hammer, and sickle, or guitar neck, dried corn, and bandolier, its rows of bullets like strung jewels. Instead she took street pictures of workers on strike, rural women nursing their babies, a homeless man sleeping on a curb. People carried flags and banners. And everyone looked weathered and tired.

  Since the women they knew socially wouldn’t stop talking long enough to allow Morris to at least distract himself for a while, he decided to take up with their housekeeper. His Spanish was never any good, and she spoke no English, making them, he thought, a perfect match. Clara paid so little attention to what he did that she said nothing, but he could imagine that, if she did know, he would get a lecture not on infidelity but on the exploitation of the working class.

  He could almost recite it. Which, he thought, may have been the reason he did it.

  His next transgression was when he crept into C
lara’s room while she was out photographing a puppeteer as a “visual critique on the current puppet government of Mexico.” He lingered next to her bed, unable to ignore the sense of sexual excitement it provoked, along with the terrible imaginings of her other men, her bed almost chaste, like that of an ordinary girl. The modest iron frame, the simple coverlet. A tiny, sterling silver cross hung from a deep red velvet ribbon on the wall next to where he stood. He had been present when her admirer gave it to her; he remembered the pleasure in her expression as she held it in her hand, and he remembered how much he loved the touch of that hand.

  Without thinking, he pulled the little cross from the nail on the wall, sliding it up inside his nostril until it hurt. He would pollute this new love affair, give it the disrespect it deserved. He would transfer the warmth of her palm to somewhere deep inside him. Feelings of tenderness tossed him back into feelings of anger, which pitched him back to tenderness.

  He thought about Marguerite back in the States and how she made him feel found, and how all Clara was doing was making him feel lost. And how his unmanageable longing for Clara had him violating her privacy, and making him a stranger within his own heart.

  When she came home that night, Clara was alarmed by his demeanor. He seemed disturbed and defeated. He said, “I have to go home for a while. You’re good enough to manage the studio without me.”

  “Of course,” she said, kneeling by his side, feeling his forehead.

  He gently took her hand from his face, though he didn’t let go. “I’m not sick, but I’m not myself.” He couldn’t tell her about the cross. Nor could he tell her that that action alone made him understand that, on some level, he knew their love affair had shifted completely. “Bryce and I will go, then I’ll be back.”

  She knew that he missed his children. Eighteen months was a long time to be away.

  Clara almost couldn’t get out of bed the day after Morris and Bryce left. The house was hard, but the studio was unbearable. There was no way not to recall the daily conversations, the parties where she could see that Morris was being driven to irritation by talk of “the masses” and “the godless rich” and revolution this and revolution that, the muralists and their Syndicate of Revolutionary Painters, Sculptors, and Technical Workers, and ideas about accessible art for everyone, and equal pay, with Morris ranting later about their “sentimentalizing the people.”