by Whitney Otto
“I wish you wouldn’t,” said the distinguished gentleman.
Pedestrians moved around the stationary couple as if they were water rushing around jutting river stones.
Lenny hesitated.
“I love the hair—very gamine—and your neck, well, I’m sure you’re very aware of its length and perfection. Small bustline—a nice echo with your hair—and your height is rather ideal. Five eight?”
She nodded.
“Can’t quite make out the legs, but with a face and figure like yours, one can work with the legs. Don’t you think?”
The man’s familiar appraisal of her physical self was nearly devoid of sexual interest, an aspect that threw her off a little.
“I’m not wrong in assuming that you’re a model, am I? That is to say when you aren’t—what?—painting houses?”
“Scenery.”
“The blond looks natural. I can already see you in print.”
“Do you see me in print for money?”
He laughed. “Not for love, though I’m always open to suggestion.”
“I’ll just bet,” she said.
“Is it a wager if you know you’ll win?” The man checked his pocket watch—a small, jeweled miracle as expensive as the rest of his attire—before handing her a business card that said “Kristof Nash.” Even ordinary people who never even read any of Nash’s several high-end magazines knew his name.
As Lenny read it, she smiled. “I guess it’s lucky that I still smoke, Mr. Nash.”
“You will use it, won’t you?”
Amazing to think that her life could completely change course in the space of a single encounter; then again, the impact of chance encounters was something that she had known about for a very long time.
Her first modeling assignment involved a silk dress as light and airy as a butterfly’s wing, in a shade of pink so pale it was scarcely a color at all. The back of the dress dipped low enough that a fabulous brooch of winter white diamonds was strategically placed, obscuring the cleavage at the base of her spine.
Eder, the highest-paid fashion photographer in New York, believed himself to be akin to the common man. He was a champion of all things modern, including photography over painting (Lenny said, “A man after my own art”) and declared that everything must be aesthetically pleasing and useful. The machinery of the camera was far more twentieth-century than a pigment-loaded sable brush.
Lenny arrived at the thirty-room penthouse belonging to Kristof Nash, currently in Capri with a young brunette, to find a small army of assistants waiting to make up her face, fasten her into the tissue of a dress, and try to do something with her short, side-parted hair until the photographer barked “Leave it alone,” calling it “modern and sexually undecided.” There were people in charge of the lights, the props, and the drapes of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Distant sounds could be heard from behind the doors of the formal dining room, where the table remained set for whenever “the emperor” (as they called Eder behind his back, this man who aligned himself with “the people”) demanded his meal.
The rooms of the penthouse resembled imagined historical wealth. That is, there was nothing surprising in the Renaissance cassoni, the Louis XVI furniture, the indoor pool with Grecian fish plated in gold, whose mouths served as fountains. There were the Victorian velvets in shades of ruby, sapphire, saffron, and emerald in one study contrasting with the Versailles silks in the parlor. A conservatory’s garden competed with the exterior garden, a wild English affair on the terraces arranged as if it had been lifted directly from Dorset. And the windows, miles of windows with nothing beyond them but the glittering city below and the blue sky above, were the truest luxury—all that open air.
Eder had Lenny lean against a wall next to a modernist sculpture that echoed the slim curve of her body. Lenny, a slightly bored beauty at the wrong party.
He asked for jeweled bracelets and placed them himself snaking up her arm. The lights hit the gems and exploded.
He shook his head and had an assistant slide them off.
He tried flowers, pearls, and fur. All of it he declared wrong. “I’m hungry,” Eder said as he strode from the room.
The chef had prepared a meal as elaborate and fabulous as the penthouse, but everyone had only had a few bites before Eder leapt from his chair, nearly knocking it over, to say, “Now!” leaving the room with the same determined stride with which he had entered it only ten minutes before.
Every finger of Lenny’s hands wore a diamond ring. “Lean on the wall, but face me—no, turn more toward me—no, too much—yes, there—and”—here he took his own hands, crisscrossed them over his chest, his fingers resting on his shoulders—“you see? Like so.”
The modernist statue was less prominent in the frame as Lenny filled more of it; and the diamonds on her fingers caught and threw light, the explosions smaller than before and more precise.
It was perfect.
• • •
It wasn’t long before other photographers at BelleFille magazine wanted Lenny, even though she was most often photographed by Eder. She liked Eder. Though twenty years separated their ages, neither one felt attached to the past, leveling the field of their friendship. Eder occasionally instructed her, or allowed her into the darkroom along with his assistant. Once or twice, when he was feeling less imperial, he allowed her to sit in on a shoot and take a picture or two.
“This is what makes the camera a perfect machine,” he said, “anyone can operate it.”
“Yes, but not everyone can take a good picture,” she said.
“No,” he said, “not everyone can make an Eder, it’s true, but that’s because they see the process all wrong. The picture isn’t a result of whoever releases the shutter—it’s in the vision. That’s why I can have you take all the pictures today, if I want, because I decide. And because I decide, they will still be my pictures.”
Sometimes he tried to talk to her about the “equality” of photography, the “democracy” of the camera, but she had worked with him enough to know that what he truly loved, what he always depicted, was glamour. All his bluff and workman’s clothing could never hide his love of the rich.
He liked to think that Kristof Nash paid him more than anyone else to shoot models—all those expensively attired, louche girls, alone at parties, or just arriving back at their posh homes, dropping an emerald cuff into an ashtray by the front door with as much concern as they dropped their keys—because of Eder’s modern, workingman ethos, when the opposite was true. Kristof Nash valued Eder because no one lavished as much affection on all the trappings of wealth as he, nearly to the point of pornography. Kristof Nash knew, as Lenny came to know, that for a high-fashion magazine that trades in all the things money can buy, there was no better man than Eder.
On weekends home, she still posed for her father.
The other photographers, nearly all foreign-born, lower-royalty immigrants, made genetically fortunate American girls look worldly and sophisticated and of indeterminate origins. And no one was easier to transform than Lenny. It was as if her dream of living in other places showed in her face, dominated her posture.
With each photographer, she presented herself to the camera, unafraid.
Count Almeida, with his melodic Hungarian accent and his refinement, took a different approach. Whereas all the other photographers predictably portrayed Lenny as the Modern Girl, with her short hair, vogue figure, and romantic independence, Count Almeida saw something else. Even Eder, with whom Lenny shared a progressive sensibility, gave his New Girls a poetic twist, as they emerged from chauffeur-driven cars, shedding mink wraps and floating toward their palatial dressing rooms; all that surrounding luxury, of which they took no more notice than they would of a bathroom sink, was essentially romantic and much less modern than Eder realized.
The count was not a handsome man by conventional standards, but he had a quiet charm and lovely manners; one felt that he had lived the sort of eventful life that gave him grace
. There was a formality about him that was comfortable, as if one always knew where one stood, though that mannered quality never dampened the bit of sparkle that flashed when he was amused, which was often. He was seventy years old. His work was more fundamentally modern than that of the other photographers, including Eder.
Lenny, wearing a wide-legged, soft cotton jumpsuit, with straps that crossed over her bare back, was posing for him.
“Miss Van Pelt,” said Count Almeida, “while your bosom is exceptionally fine, we need for you to keep it within the garment,” for one breast kept finding its way out the side of the loose bib.
She smiled and made a show of tucking it back in.
“Ah, let’s hope it doesn’t make a second run for freedom,” said the count.
But when Lenny bent her back, she was again exposed. She shifted her pose. “Not that I care,” she added, referring to her partial nudity.
“It isn’t only that,” said the count. “Perhaps—” and he made a gesture to direct her into another position.
And so the afternoon went on, with Lenny and the count subtly at cross-purposes about how Lenny should model. It didn’t matter if it was the shirtless jumpsuit or a small bathing garment of thin material and no structure that was all slack and straps, or a short sundress with no back and not much front.
The count sighed. “I think that if they would dress a grown woman like a grown woman and not like a little girl on holiday we would have better luck.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” said Lenny.
The count wasn’t satisfied with the pictures. “We’ll try again,” he said. And at the end of the next day something still troubled him, though he didn’t say what it was.
On the third morning, at a much earlier hour than Lenny was used to, her phone rang.
It was the count inviting her for coffee and sweet rolls, in about an hour?
When she arrived at his studio, he greeted her at the door. He kissed her hello, then guided her to the table set with coffee and crème-filled pastries. “Miss Van Pelt,” he began. Lenny didn’t ask him to call her Lenny, as everyone else did, because she liked the way he said “Miss Van Pelt.” She also liked the trace affection in it; he had the strangest way of making her feel genuinely liked even though they hadn’t spent but a pair of days together, albeit twelve-hour days. “We must retake yesterday’s pictures.” He reached for a small folder next to his chair.
“It’s the breast, isn’t it?”
The count smiled. “They are lovely.”
He came to where she sat, standing behind her and to the side. “If you don’t mind,” he said as he leaned over to show her the pictures from their session the day before.
Being invited to look at herself was an infrequent occurrence. It was different from opening the magazine and seeing herself wearing dresses she couldn’t afford, in locations she also couldn’t afford. Even with her father’s dimensional nudes, she mainly glanced at them as they sat on a table instead of peering through the stereoscopic viewer. And what she saw this day, on this table set with silver and china, coffee and sweets, was a gorgeous girl who knew she was gorgeous. Funny how seldom she revealed just how aware she was of her physical affect.
“It’s modern,” she said.
“It’s modern, yes, this bold girl who dares one to stare at her. But there is something else.” He was patient, polite, and Lenny sensed what he was seeing—what he wanted her to see—what made him slightly uncomfortable.
She picked up the photographs and examined them carefully. She wanted to say, “I look like me,” and toss them back onto the table. When she had studied them without speaking for several minutes, Count Almeida sat in a chair next to her, pulled it away from the table and faced her. He hesitated, then said, “I’m not your lover.”
This made Lenny laugh. “Good that we’ve settled that.” When he said nothing, she again looked at the pictures, more as a way to stall before asking the count what he meant by “I’m not your lover.”
It was then that she saw it: She wasn’t naked, but it was in her eyes, her expression, her posture; it was all over the picture. She was her father’s model, and it was there to see, only no one, even Lenny, had ever seen it, until now.
This girl in the picture was brave, brazen. All the other photographers picked up on her bravado as modern, so au courant, so young and fresh and bold. She was beautiful and a little tough and a touch androgynous, and they liked that. And maybe, just maybe, they liked the way she looked at them through the lens.
Lenny knew that the count knew that she knew. He gently took the pictures from her hands, then said, “We’ll begin again, yes?”
There were always men in Lenny’s life, the number increasing tenfold once she began modeling and attending all those New York parties where she understood that often she and her model friend, Claire, were part of the decor. The best parties were the ones held at Kristof Nash’s penthouse, since he was, as Frank Crowninshield once called him “the man who knows more celebrities than anyone else in New York.” The irony was Nash’s lack of ease when in attendance at his own soirees.
The men in Lenny’s life were publishers, lawyers, trust funders, aviators, physicians, painters, college boys, writers, department store magnates, titans of industry, and a man who made ice cream.
But there was no one she’d rather spend time with than the seventy-year-old, well-mannered Count Almeida.
After that morning when he showed her the photographs, after they retook the shots, he asked if he could take some pictures for himself. The result was Lenny as a girl. Not the fast, fearless girl indulging almost every impulse. There was a softness, a sweetness to these pictures, as if she was again Ellen, with her heart on her sleeve. The boyishness was still there, but infused with an openness that was rarely present in her pictures or her life.
It was like seeing herself for the first time—or like someone finding some essential part of her that she thought never showed.
It was like being known.
This was the start of their New York friendship. He photographed her not for her neoteric image but for her timelessness; not for the boy but for the girl in her. It was the most avant-garde act of all.
The count and Lenny sat together in her apartment, small and spare but wholly hers in decor. A bouquet of tulips, bent over and beautiful in creamy shades of white, pink, yellow, and the palest orange imaginable, sat on the table in front of them. For two years Count Almeida and Lenny had been friends and photographer and model. Though she was never his muse; he didn’t take any more private pictures of her after that first time.
“I will miss you terribly,” she said as she took his hand in hers, there, side by side on the secondhand sofa.
In this moment, she wondered how she would get by without his friendship. Many afternoons and evenings he would visit, and she would get food from a little Italian place down the street, and they would talk about art and Europe and music and photography. On warm summer mornings, when neither had slept well due to the heat, they would walk for miles, impressive for a man of his age.
“I know,” he said.
“I love you,” she said.
“I know.”
It occurred to her that this was the only pure affection she had ever experienced, this old man who knew her more intimately than anyone had ever known her. And the love was innocent, chaste. Love had often felt constricting to her; there was too much want on one side or the other, too much bartering. There was pleasure as well, but everything felt glancing, as if it touched the surface of her skin, electrifying her without ever leaving a mark.
“Will you miss me too?” she asked.
He smiled. “Paris is a marvelous place. I remember my second visit there, when I was about your age, and I remember that it was where I most felt like myself.”
“Why not come with me?” she said. “We could travel together and maybe find a place together. How grand would that be?”
“I must work.”
&
nbsp; “You can work there. I’ll work with you.”
“No. I think this is my New York time of life. But you’ll write to me, and we can compare our respective Parises.”
“I hate this,” she said, starting to cry.
“Some people say the only thing worse than not getting what one wants is getting what one wants. How long have we talked about Europe?”
“Will you see me off at the ship tomorrow?”
“Can’t. I have a job tomorrow: ‘Every Woman Can Be the Artist of Her Own Beauty.’ Cosmetics advert.”
She wanted to plead—Postpone it, get out of it, oh, please, please don’t let me go—but she knew that his having an assignment on the day she was to sail to France was no accident.
He took her hands in his, turning them over, at first saying nothing, then reciting:
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
At the pier were four of Lenny’s lovers, who had all argued over who was to escort her onto the ocean liner. As they went back and forth, Lenny’s attention was taken by a biplane flying low overhead. She followed the path of the plane, leaving behind her lovers, so immersed in attaining the prize of saying farewell to Lenny that none of them noticed her quietly walking up the gangplank.
As the ship pulled away, away from the well-wishers on the pier, away from her lovers, who now all felt cheated and would agree to get a drink together in commiseration, Lenny wandered to the uppermost deck, gazing out at the open sea, still watching the little biplane as it appeared to follow the ship.
Just as the liner was a distance from the dock but still not too much into the open sea, the plane seemed to catch sight of her, standing alone on the deck, and it dipped, then dropped a shower of red roses at her feet. The voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.