by Dana Gynther
“Is that blood?” he asked, his nose wrinkling. “Is it a dead animal?”
“No, George,” she said, her eyes sparkling. “It’s a woman’s breast.”
“Lee, you are disgusting!” He flew out of the room.
She had taken two shots when Michel de Brunhoff crept up behind her. “What’s the matter with George?” he asked, then looked down at the table. “And what the hell is that?”
Lee turned around, blocking the place setting with her body, trying to come up with a plausible story.
“Oh, hello there, Michel. Yes, well, I’ve been doing a stint at the Sorbonne, taking medical photographs. One of the surgeons asked me if I could get a good close-up of this severed breast—”
“With a knife and fork?” he cried. “Who do you take me for? Get that thing out of here at once.”
He stood sternly by as she picked it up with her thumb and forefinger, tucked it back into the dirty mask, and went to chuck it into the bin.
“Out!” de Brunhoff shouted, pointing dramatically to the door.
In the street, she hesitated; it seemed outrageously disrespectful to just toss out a human body part. This breast, which had hung so close to a heart, could have lured lovers or fed a child. She considered burying it next to a tree, below the reach of dogs, but she hadn’t any tools. She looked down at her manicured nails, then back at the studio door where Michel was waiting. With no ceremony, she let it drop from her hand; it fell into the gutter among leaves and wisps of paper. She slumped back to the studio.
“George and Tatiana are waiting for you. It’s swimwear today. But afterward, I want to see you in my office. We need to talk,” Michel said, then swept out.
Lee walked into the dressing room and found Tatiana Iacovleva looking at bathing costumes. Tall and blond like Lee, Tata was a Russian émigré, the daughter of St. Petersburg intellectuals; with the bearing of a war goddess, she was brazen, haughty, and intent on marrying into the nobility. Lee thought she was a riot.
“George is fuming. He says you were taking pictures of a bloody breast. A real one.” Tata’s accent in French was deliberate, filled with Slavic swishes and trills and with occasional grammatical snags; her eyes were laughing. “I’m not surprised it upset him. It’s probably the first one he’s seen since he was baby.”
Lee looked at her in confusion and then nodded knowingly. “Right. He’s not too keen on lady bits,” she said, marveling that she had never realized it before. That outing in Montmartre should have at least given her a clue.
After their modeling session—a madcap couple of hours, where George had them posing with faux pool ladders and pretending to dive off of wooden crates—they were all in a good mood, now able to laugh off their earlier clash.
“You two up for a drink?” George asked as they made their way back to the dressing rooms.
“Not me,” Lee said. “Michel wants to talk to me. I think he’s pretty upset about my anatomical photo session today. I hope I’m not fired.”
“Well, you probably should be,” he said, with a harsh expression that immediately melted into a chuckle. “But I doubt it. You know, before his career at the magazine, he used to be an actor. He’s an incredible mime.” George went into a two-second Tramp impersonation, twitching an invisible mustache while swinging an imaginary cane. “I wouldn’t worry too much, Lee. He’s an open-minded man.”
“Good luck,” said Tata thickly, patting her arm with a serious smile.
She knocked on de Brunhoff’s office door.
“Ah, Lee,” he began, pulling the pipe from his mouth, then using it as a pointer. “Sit down.”
“Michel, listen, I’m sorry about bringing that, uh, organ into the studio today. I was doing a little experiment.” She raised her eyebrows uncertainly. “Maybe I should have asked you first?”
“What I want to say to you is this: If you are capable of taking photos of such things—surgeries at the Sorbonne and so forth—then I’ve been underestimating you here. I believe you’re ready to take on your own assignments. You seem to have an interest in the still life. Show me what you can do with the new line of Chanel fragrances. You’ll start tomorrow.”
Lee jumped out of her chair, excited and relieved both. “Oh, Michel, thank you! I’ll do something original, something new. You won’t be disappointed.”
“Uh, Lee—nothing too original, please.”
“Don’t worry, chief.” She smiled. “I can do this.”
XII
As Lee puttered around Man’s studio, choosing masks and chessboards to set off the perfume bottles, she received a telegram. She used her index finger as a dull letter opener, then scanned the short note. Tanja Ramm was returning to Europe; she was about to board the SS Paris and would be arriving the following week. Lee beamed down at the paper.
“Man!” she called. She popped into the bathroom where he was half-soaped, half-shaven. “Tanja is coming to visit. She’ll be here next Thursday.”
“Tanja?”
“My oldest pal.” She couldn’t stop smiling. “We were together in Florence before I came to Paris. We met at the Art Students League back in ’twenty-six.”
“Of course,” he said with a nod. “It’ll be great to meet her. You know, it always seems funny to me that we both took classes at the same place. Too bad we didn’t meet back then.”
“You cheeky monkey. When you were at the League, I was way too young for you.” She pinched his creamy cheek. “I still hadn’t been kicked out of all the schools in Poughkeepsie.”
“What a bad, bad girl.” He pinched her back.
“Those prudes would expel you for anything. Swearing, smoking, pranks—”
With a dab of shaving cream, he gave her a thin moustache and goatee, like Marcel Duchamp’s Mona Lisa. “And Tanja?” he asked. “Is she a painter now?”
“No. She stayed at it longer than I did, but she makes her living as a model, too.”
“Well, then, maybe she can model for me.” His thin lips curled into a suggestive smile. “The two of you could pose together. Double nudes. Maybe some kissing? How would you feel about that?”
“Actually, Tanja and I have already done a shoot like that. A few years ago, my father took a whole series of us together on the sleeping porch.”
The razor in Man’s hand froze on his outstretched upper lip. His eyes found Lee’s in the mirror.
“What?” said Lee, staring back at him. “My father’s taken pictures of me since I can remember.”
Man’s brow was lined in confusion, poorly disguised aversion. “In the nude?”
Frowning, Lee toweled off the lines of shaving cream from her face. There was no one she loved or trusted as much as her father, and she didn’t like Man’s expression. As if Theodore Miller were capable of anything indecent or inhumane. She’d known a man like that—in fact, he’d had a Brooklyn accent similar to Man Ray’s—but her father, though generous and doting, was a man of dignity, beyond reproach.
“They’re art. He’s done nude studies of my mother as well. He takes them in stereoscope so they can be seen through a viewer. It gives them a three-dimensional effect, you know.” She gave him a defiant look. “Funny that you of all people should be shocked by nudity. It’s art,” she repeated firmly.
“Of course, Lee,” Man said, fanning his hands out in surrender. “It’s all about the art. I’m just surprised he used his own daughter as a model.”
“I started posing for his studies when I was nineteen. My father’s always had a progressive attitude toward nudism.” Lee paused a moment, remembering, and pursed her lips. “Although, I’ll admit it, in the beginning it felt a bit weird.”
Recently home from her first trip to Paris, she’d had a bad case of the blue jitters—that restless, edgy sadness that overtook her at times—made much worse by the flare-up of a childhood illness. One day, after the painful treatment, her father had proposed a photo shoot; Lee supposed he’d wanted to make her feel better by giving her special attention.<
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For their first session, Theodore had taken her to a quiet area in the woods. She undressed awkwardly, her heart beating wildly, a lump in her throat. He spoke to her gently, asking her to sit this way, to lean back, to look at him; she complied, but never quite relaxed. Later, after he’d developed that first batch of photographs, she sat in the wingback chair in his study, looking at them in the stereoscopic viewer. Like the other images she’d seen in the device—the Taj Mahal, Mount Fuji, the Roman Coliseum—the body jumped out at her. In the first one, it covered its face with its hands; in another, it exposed itself, looking away; in yet another, it stretched out, the eyes vacant. Lee’d hardly recognized that pretty young girl; it seemed a different person. With time, however, she got used to posing for her father, to his requests, to his gaze. It was harmless. In fact, he was trying to help her.
“I think he was trying to make me feel comfortable with my body.”
He looked her up and down. “Why in God’s name wouldn’t you?”
“Indeed.” She flashed her tits at him, then, with tarty wink, left him to finish shaving. She was done justifying her father’s art.
On the sofa, she reread Tanja’s telegram and immediately felt better. Lee had so few close female friends that their relationship had always seemed special, unique. She propped the telegram on the dresser next to the photo of the exploding hand. She looked forward to sharing her Parisian life with her old friend.
That evening, Lee decided to make headway on the series that she and Man had taken the day before. When working together, he usually manned the camera; then, in the darkroom, she coaxed out the best possible shot. These were nudes of the singer Suzy Solidor, an attractive blonde who owned a popular nightclub. Lee had a dozen plates nearly developed when a rat scurried across her foot.
“Fuck!” she shouted with a shudder. She kicked her feet and quickly turned on the light. With a jolt at the sudden brightness, she glanced at the negatives and turned it off again in a panic. Had the exposure ruined them? “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” she mumbled, trying to decide what to do.
Always an advocate for denial, she quickly rinsed them, then plunged them back into the developer. Wringing her hands, waiting for images to appear, she finally called Man.
He slipped into the darkroom, “What’s the matter? What’s happened?”
“I turned on the lights by mistake,” she said with a groan.
“Holy hell, Lee, what were you thinking?”
She felt the heat from his angry face in the dark, the tilt of his eyebrows, the flash in his eyes.
“A rat nearly bit me! What a flea hole this is.”
“Christ, don’t start blaming your mistakes on the studio! We can’t redo these. Suzy’s left town.”
“I’ve put them back into the developer—as if nothing happened.”
Still ranting, he plucked out a plate from the holder, his fingers delicately pressed against the sharp edges of the irreplaceable glass. As they stared at the wet, reflective surface, deciphering it, he went quiet; Lee breathed out in relief. An image was there, but it was reversed: some of the black areas were now white. Even more remarkably, a fine silver line had appeared around the singer’s body, as if a talented draftsman had traced her outline.
“God,” Lee whispered finally. “It’s lovely.”
“You’re damn lucky, you know that?” Man pulled her close and kissed her hard.
“You seem pretty lucky yourself.” Exuberant, she unbuckled his belt, sliding a hand into his pants. “That woman you’re with! What spirit, what talent! In fact, I think she’s just made a great new photographic discovery.”
“Yeah, dumb luck,” he mumbled, grasping the sink. He closed his eyes as her lips drifted down his torso, the discovery on hold.
Later that evening, Man went back to Suzy Solidor’s salvaged plates and, for days after, continued experimenting with the process. For better or worse, shadows were lost, images melted, grays predominated. When he had finally learned to control the new technique, he came out of the darkroom and poured them two whiskies.
“Solarization,” he said to Lee, clinking glasses. “That’s what I’m calling it, kid. Solll-arization,” he drawled, then gave her a smug nod. “It’ll be a Man Ray trademark.”
She took a sip, observing his self-satisfaction with amusement. “You know what?” She slowly licked the whisky off her lips, then smiled. “I do believe it’ll be a Lee Miller trademark, too.”
• • •
Tanja arrived with three enormous steamer trunks, prepared for a long stay. Man gallantly gave up his side of Lee’s bed and returned to his studio, but came round every day to visit. Lee took a week off work to show Tanja around town. Although she’d done the Grand Tour on her last trip—Italy, Switzerland, and Germany—she’d missed out on Paris. Lee smiled as her friend gawked at everything: an artful street mime performing with poodles; window displays of dazzling pastries; a chic lady with a jade cigarette holder—her dress unbuttoned to expose the legal limit of cleavage—being sketched by an unwashed artist squatting atop his chair; drunken men laughing riotously inside a pissoir; hawkers selling everything from sprigs of lavender to a good time.
“I love it! It makes Florence seem like something out of the Middle Ages.”
“You mean the Renaissance,” Lee corrected.
“And it’s a far cry from all those double dates we used to go on in New York,” Tanja continued happily. “The polo matches, sailing in the Hamptons, your brother’s flyboy friends taking us up in their two-seaters—or even the Vogue parties at Condé Nast’s place. This is it! The real thing.”
It was fun to see it all through Tanja’s eyes, to feel like Paris was new.
They went out, arm in arm, and flirted with students and businessmen, danced and drank with pianists and sculptors, and were swept off to parties by international aristocrats. From time to time, Lee would disappear with a man for an hour or so, but at the end of the night, she would return to her studio, a five-minute walk from Man Ray’s.
“Where did you go off to?” Tanja asked Lee one night. Still awake, she was reading in bed. “I couldn’t find you, so I left.”
“I went back to Vincent’s place.” Lee, tipsy and tottering, kicked off her high heels and dumped her coat on the floor. “I was just testing that theory. You know, that men with big noses have big . . . appendages.”
“My God, Lee, you’re joking. I thought you were serious about Man—whose nose, by the way, should be big enough to verify any theories.” Tanja, trying to be severe, bit back a smile. “You’ve never been with one man for so long. I thought you two would get married.”
“Marry him?” Lee dissolved into giggles. “As in a big white wedding followed by lots of babies? Come on, now.”
“But aren’t you happy together?”
“I enjoy his company. He’s interesting, sharp, very well connected—he knows absolutely everybody—and I love working with him. But we’re very different. And sometimes he drives me crazy.” Lee sat down on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. “Really, though, I’m faithful to him in my fashion.”
“Does he know you see other men?”
“We don’t discuss it, but I assume so.”
“Doesn’t he say anything?”
“In theory, none of the Surrealists believe in fidelity or monogamy. Those ideas are antiquated and bourgeois.” With a scholarly finger raised, Lee emphasized the words like a Harvard lecturer, then quickly slouched down and looked over at Tanja. “You know, Man and his friends want freedom from commitment, but I’m not sure they want it for their women. Man’s awfully jealous.”
“Does he sleep with other people, too?”
“I doubt it, but I wish he would. Then he might stop obsessing so much over me—where I go, who I’m with, what I do, how I look.” She blew a smoke ring, then watched it disappear. “Some of his cronies have several lovers. Others let the men they admire sleep with their wives, offering them up as some kind of tribute.”
Tanja’s hand flew up to her mouth. “Man doesn’t pass you around, too, does he, Lee?”
“Now you’re the one who’s joking. Man wouldn’t share me with anyone. He’ll barely let another photographer take my picture.”
XIII
“Do you think this miserable little drizzle will stop before the opening?”
Tanja and Lee, still in their bathrobes, looked out on the slick, wet tombs in the cemetery below. There’d been erratic showers every day since March began, and they were fed up with it.
“I hope so,” Lee said, with an annoyed sigh. “I’d like to wear my open-toed shoes.”
“That reminds me, what exactly does one wear to a Surrealist art exhibition in Paris?” Tanja lit a cigarette and started rifling through a trunk. “Any ideas?”
“I usually wear something simple. I like to leave extravagance to the plain girls. With their jellyfish hats and necklaces made of fingers, they’re sure to get plenty of attention. Face it, sweetie, we don’t need props.”
They decided to wear contrasting colors, fair Lee in black, dark Tanja in white. Man came round to pick them up at eight.
“You two look lovely,” he said. He took off his red scarf and wrapped it around Tanja’s head, letting it drift over one shoulder, then plopped his fedora on Lee. “Now even better.”
“Won’t your head be cold?” she asked, admiring the angle of the hat in the mirror.
“Nah, it’s stopped raining.”
Man hailed a taxi on the boulevard Raspail and the trio slid in. “On va à la Galerie Goëmans dans la rue de Seine,” he said to the cabbie, then nestled between them. “This should be a great first show for you, Tanja. My pal Louis Aragon helped organize it. It’s all collage—it’s the first show of its kind, I think—with Dadaists, Surrealists, and Cubists. Really, everyone’s in this show. Picasso, Duchamp, Dalí, Picabia, Magritte—”
“Man’s showing two pieces,” Lee said proudly. She gave him a kiss, leaving the mark of her lips on his cheek. She loved going to art events with him, both to watch people fawn over him and to talk with him about the pictures. They reminded her of the things she loved most about him—his cleverness, his creativity, his importance in the art world—and allowed her to completely forget her intermittent urges to be on her own.