by Dana Gynther
“He probably never told you a lot of things.” Kiki stubbed out the cigarette, half-smoked, and got to her feet. “I just thought you should know.”
Itching to go, Lee flagged the waiter to bring her the check, then watched the two women disappear down the stairs into the Vavin metro stop. Oh, Man. She resented being held responsible for another person’s happiness, for his well-being.
Ever since Lee could remember, men had wanted something from her—her body, her approval, her devotion—had declared their love and pined for her, desperate for her attention. When she didn’t return their affections, they called her cold, pitiless, unfeeling, la belle dame sans merci. As if she could control how they felt—as if it were her fault! She couldn’t understand why Man refused to let her go. He had always been possessive of her, of her body, her person. Would he rather kill her than give her up?
Gazing at the dark passage into the metro, she suddenly saw a thin young man in a double-breasted suit taking the stairs two by two. Julien had finally arrived.
“Great to see you!” She gave him a kiss on both cheeks. “Now, let’s get the hell out of Montparnasse.”
“Anything wrong?” He took her portfolio and offered her his arm.
“I don’t want to run into Man Ray. I’ve just heard he’s packing a gun.”
“In that case, I certainly don’t want him to see us together.” Julien laughed, but immediately put out his arm for a taxi. “I went by his place yesterday to look at his work. I didn’t see a gun, but he looked half-dead.” He slid into the cab beside her. “Where do you want to go?”
“It’s such a pretty day.” Lee began, trying to shake thoughts of Man and guns out of her head. “Let’s go to the Île de la Cité. To that tiny park at the tip of the island. It should be cool under the trees next to the river.”
“Perfect,” he said, repeating the instructions for the driver. “Then we can have lunch at the Henri IV at the Place Dauphine.”
On the quay, between an old man serious about fishing and an amateur painter crouched on a camp chair before an easel, Julien and Lee sat on the warm stone, letting their legs hang down like children, staring up at the sun with closed eyes. Lee began to relax, away from Montparnasse. A quartier filled with the same old faces, it made the bustling French capital into a village, made Paris intolerably small. Finally, Julien turned to look at Lee.
“Another thing about Man.” He had obviously not stopped thinking about him. “When I was at his place, he showed me a new readymade. It’s a photo of your eye on a metronome. It even comes with instructions. It says to cut the eye from a portrait of a former lover, then, after clipping it to the pendulum, regulate it to the desired tempo.” Julien pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and read out loud. “Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy it with a single blow.” He looked at Lee while stuffing the paper back inside his jacket. “It’s called Object of Destruction. It’s a powerful piece. I’m going to show it in the gallery.”
“If he doesn’t destroy it first, that is.” Lee breathed out, reminded of the scene in Blood of a Poet when Enrique smashed his muse with a mallet. It seemed Man Ray wasn’t above copying ideas from the little magpie.
The hammer, the crushed statue, the gun. In the film, the poet tried to destroy his muse but, in the end, she led him to his fears, to madness, to suicide. She’d watched his demise coldly, her purpose fulfilled. She shivered, thinking of Man’s revolver. As his muse, had she dealt him a deadly hand?
Like the metronome in his Object of Destruction, Lee’s feelings about her former lover swung back and forth, from dread to pity, from revulsion to guilt, from resentment to exhaustion. She wanted done with him. Lee changed the subject, fleeing from Man Ray and his suffering.
“Speaking of the gallery, I’ve brought the photos you asked for.”
She handed him her portfolio and watched as he looked through the thirty-odd prints she’d chosen from her three-year stint in Europe, from wryly observed encounters—labyrinths of architecture, living statuary, surreal glimpses of urban mystery—to original portraits of the famous and the anonymous both.
“They’re wonderful,” he whispered, gazing into her in the eyes, as if astounded.
“Which show do you see them in? The Surrealist show? Or the modern photography one?” Lee didn’t really mind—both would include Man Ray—so long as he took three or four.
“Lee, you’ve got plenty of pieces here, all high-quality prints of interesting subjects. What I’d like to do is give you a one-woman show.”
“Really?” Her mouth flew open and her eyes lit up; she flung her arms around him in a warm hug.
He held on too tightly and, as she pulled away, kissed her on her mouth. Confused, she studied his face; a cavalier smile played on his lips. Would she be given the show if she were plain? Was this an elaborate gesture to get her in bed? Did it matter? Lee wasn’t sure. She popped up from the cobblestones and pulled him up by the hand.
“Let’s go celebrate.”
At the wine bar in the Place Dauphine, Lee ordered champagne and escargots.
“I’ve been wondering,” Julien said, “why don’t you take any self-portraits? It would be a great asset to the show.”
“My photo has been taken too much as it is. When I’m behind the camera, I prefer to look at other things.” The waiter served the champagne, and they clinked glasses. “I hope the people that go to the show will be more interested in the photos than the photographer. Who knows? They might imagine Lee Miller is a little old man from Intercourse, Pennsylvania, or a soldier boy off on leave. I’d like that.”
“As much as you may like the idea, I think you’re already too famous for that.”
He locked eyes with her again. She found him good-looking, despite thin lips. Debating the idea of a fling, Lee grabbed a shell with tongs, pulled a snail out of its parsley-butter cocoon, and chewed slowly. While Aziz was in Egypt, their relationship was on hold; Julien was married and would not want a commitment. She licked her buttery lips, then took another sip of champagne. Perhaps they could both get what they wanted.
“Am I?”
“You are.” He smiled broadly. Could he sense that she was considering it, that she was tempted? “In fact, I know a few businessmen who would be more than happy to finance a Lee Miller photography studio if you ever decided to move back to New York.”
“Now, that one’s hard to believe.” She looked him in the eye, trying to decide if this was real information, or more well-timed flattery.
“Claire Luce’s husband, for one. He’s the heir to the Western Union fortune, you know. Loved the portraits you took of her.” He soaked a piece of bread in the snail butter, obviously unsettled by the contents of the shells. “With the gallery show and a financed studio, it’d be a great time for you to come back to New York. I know I’d love to have you around.”
Had she learned everything she could from Paris? From Montparnasse and French Vogue, from the avant-garde art scene, from the city’s most famous photographer? Had she gotten what she came for? She looked up at Julien; he touched the tip of her finger with his.
“Maybe it is time to go,” she said slowly. As they slid out of her mouth, the words surprised her, but she knew it was true.
Only a half-year had passed since Man Ray had suggested the very same move. How preposterous it had seemed then. She wondered how he would react when he heard the news, that she was going, that New York was ripe for her. How bitter would that irony taste? She hoped it wouldn’t be the final blow, the one to make him pull a trigger. Lee, however, was finally making a firm decision about her life, and not Man Ray, Paris, or future winters with Aziz Eloui Bey could make her change her mind.
The next morning, before dawn, her telephone rang. She bolted up in the dark, instantly ousted from sleep. She tiptoed over to answer it, but didn’t hesitate; she knew who it was.
“Oui, âllo?”
“Lee?” Man’s voice was a dried
husk, pleading and desperate, but this time she didn’t cringe or slam the phone back on its cradle. “Don’t hang up! Listen to—”
“No, Man. You listen to me. I’m leaving Paris. In another month or two, you won’t have to see me anymore.”
“Wha?”
“I’m going back to New York. I’m leaving.”
There was a muffled silence on the line—she thought she could hear him deflating.
“Good-bye, Man.”
She quietly hung up and went back to bed.
• • •
That fall, Lee closed her studio and booked passage to New York on the Ile de France, set to cross on October eleventh. The evening before her trip, as she was getting ready to go out, she found a gnarled envelope that had been pushed inside the door. The handwriting—although loose and wild—was still familiar. It was the first message she’d had from Man in months. He must have heard about her imminent departure.
Inside was a page torn from a notebook; he had drawn her eyes and lips—a simple outline, a vacant stare—then covered it, from top to bottom, with her name. Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Lee . . . She imagined his voice calling her—not that of a gangster, but that of a spoiled child—and nearly tossed it in the bin. She stopped herself and tucked it away in her handbag instead. Maybe the next time she saw the drawing, she wouldn’t find it so cloying, so filled with self-pity. Perhaps she’d remember a time when they were equals, a pair.
She slipped her fur coat over her satin evening gown. Michel, George, Tatiana, and the others were all waiting at the Ritz for a farewell dinner. She could hardly believe she was leaving tomorrow, that three years had passed since she’d been in the States. After refusing Man’s entreaties to return, she was the one going back to New York—with contacts, a show, studio backers—and he was staying in his same cluttered old studio near the boulevard Montparnasse.
Lee headed out into the night under her umbrella. Her heels clicked on the wet pavement as she got into the cab. As the driver took off, Lee gazed out at the people, the lights, eager to enjoy Paris one last time. She’d long lost the habit of examining every corner for Man Ray, worrying what he might do. In fact, she’d already forgotten the note in her bag.
EPILOGUE
Hollywood
August 1946
“When exactly was the last time we saw Man?” Lee asked Roland.
He turned from the window to give her his attention. “It was before the war.”
She snorted. “I knew that.” For Lee, the past fifteen years were inescapably divided into pre- and postwar: the before and after of that five-year parenthesis when everything they had once thought normal had abruptly stopped.
From the back of the taxi, she peered out the window and into the glare of California, a clean, modern place, untouched by conflict. The long snouts of shiny automobiles inched along the wide boulevard lined with palm trees and telephone poles; the neon and lights of the cinemas and restaurants were pale in the summer sun. When would Europe look like this again? Had it ever? The last time she’d been to the States was in the “before” category. Not that it mattered—the only thing changed here was the rise in its own prosperity. Lee fidgeted with the clasp on her handbag, remembering when she’d returned to New York in 1932. Even before the war, her life had not been without danger. Though most of it, she admitted, was of her own making.
After Paris, she’d spent two wildly successful years in Manhattan: she had all the uptown socialites coming to the studio, the best accounts—Saks, Macy’s, the fashion rags—her solo show, and The Blood of a Poet running ad nauseam on Fifth Avenue. But it had worn her out. Not the photography—soulless commercial work—but her frenetic social life. The relentless dinner parties, all-night poker games, the weekends on Long Island. The drinking, always drinking, with everyone so blotto that nothing ruffled them: a Rolls-Royce diving into a swimming pool, nearby gunshots, the smell of burning hair, a boathouse split by lightning . . . Nothing.
Lee’s fevered pace—the constant outings and nonstop fun that did nothing to make her happy—had finally caught up with her. She was exhausted, unhealthy, perpetually cranky, on the verge of losing her looks. When Aziz Eloui Bey came to New York on business, they spontaneously eloped. She was ready; it was time. Lee had always needed change, novelty, motion . . . Ecstatic, she returned with him to Cairo; it took only a few months in Egypt to soundly squelch nearly all that enthusiasm.
It wasn’t so much the god-awful heat, the mosquitoes, the typhoid injections, the crazy traffic, or the persistent odor of camel dung, as it was the boredom. On occasion, her intense longing for Europe would surface and overwhelm her like nausea, her idleness would paralyze her until she could scarcely get out of bed. Everything was so colorless in the desert, all ochre, tan, and bone. She became plagued by dark moods—the Plagues of Egypt! But instead of frogs, locusts, and darkness, it was insomnia, depression, and recklessness. At times, Lee tried to combat the blue jitters with danger and excitement. She took lessons from a snake charmer, rode camels and a wild horse, swam with sharks in the Red Sea. And there was more drinking. Often and excessively. After a few years, Aziz, perpetually understanding, encouraged her to go off on holiday by herself, to spend the summer in France with old friends.
That was in 1937, two years before Hitler began invading everything, still during that enchanted time people now called the “Interwar Period.” And suddenly, for the first time in five years, Lee was in Paris.
Her first day in town, Julien Levy—who had evolved from lover to friend after their short-lived affair—whisked her away to a Surrealist ball. Although excited, she was nervous about bumping into Man Ray. Would he be hostile, icy cold, or filled with nostalgic longing? Would he still want to photograph her? Sleep with her? Would he follow her around Paris?
None of it. At the party he’d smiled and given her a wan kiss on the cheek. She was taken aback by his lack of passion. The maddening jealousy, the tireless arguing, the drunken stalking with a gun in his pocket—in five years, it had all been erased. They stood side by side, polite as strangers. Lee’s relief was tinged with profound disappointment. Man Ray no longer cared.
He had then introduced her to the man next to him. A tall Englishman, barefoot and bare-chested, his hair painted green. It was Roland Penrose, an aristocratic Quaker, a modern art collector, curator, and painter. She looked at him now, sitting by her side. Was it ironic that Man Ray had casually introduced them? Roland was the one who finally propelled her out of Cairo; the one she wanted to be with when war broke out.
“It had to have been before the war. The war just ended last year,” Lee said with a slight hint of derision, but truthfully, she could barely believe it was true. Although the war itself had passed slowly—the Blitz, the blackout, and the food rationing had seemed interminable; her three-year stint as a war correspondent, the work of a lifetime—ever since, she felt as though she’d been trudging through mud. No, mud was the currency of war. Noise, chaos, constant movement had all turned into the silent stillness of peace.
“Well, if you want precision,” he said, his accent refined, “I believe the last time we saw Man was in southern France, August 1939, a week before Hitler invaded Poland. Right before we ran screaming back to London.”
“That’s right.” She frowned, remembering that last visit. It had seemed their common past had never existed. No longer his mistress or muse, she’d been demoted to little more than his friend Roland’s lover. One of the women. Six years later, what would this visit to Man Ray bring? Was it a mistake to come?
At the crosswalk, Lee eyed the long-haired girls in their high-heeled sandals and flowered skirts, smiling at strangers, each one a Hollywood hopeful. She crossed her legs in the roomy backseat, feeling dowdy in loose-fitting slacks.
“I can’t believe Man lives here,” she said, running a hand through her frizzy halo of hair. The cab turned right off Sunset and onto Vine. “It seems the polar opposite to Paris.”
“Didn’t you fancy
coming here as a girl?” Roland teased her. “To get your start in the pictures?”
“Not for long. I was always more attracted to the Atlantic than the Pacific.”
The cab pulled up in front of a narrow redbrick apartment building with an arched gate: Villa Elaine. Two steps inside the quiet courtyard—a tame jungle of palms, hibiscus, and ivy—and the street seemed far away.
“Nice.” Roland nodded his approval. “Perhaps Man’s found a corner of Provence here in Los Angeles.”
When they rang the bell, Man flung the door open. Although in his mid-fifties, he didn’t look remarkably different from when Lee lived with him. His hair, still dark, had stopped receding years before; he was stylish, quick and slim. His big, curious eyes had not lost their glow—they seemed almost darker, more intense—though they were now framed by glasses. Remembering that magnetic pull that had attracted her at twenty-two, she smiled at him shyly. Lee had changed far more than he; almost forty, she was no longer slim, fresh, unlined. Bags hung under her slanted blue eyes, her fluffy blond hair needed re-dyeing. War and lifestyle had taken a toll on her looks.
“You made it.” After giving Lee a warm embrace, the kind reserved for favorite sisters and special friends, he shook Roland’s hand in delight. “It’s wonderful to have you. It’s been too long.”
He ushered them in. The studio, with big windows, high ceilings, and a balcony, had a similar air to his old place in Montparnasse. Paintings and pipes mingled with books and old rayograms; a long piece of driftwood twirled up a standing lamp. In a nook of one wall, Lee noticed a small version of Observatory Time, the enormous painting he’d done, postbreakup, of her red lips dominating a gray sky. This one was a mere memory, a shadow of the original, obsessive piece. She sighed—of course, she no longer merited monumental proportions in his life—then noticed the new harvest of photos, all portraits of an exotic-looking brunette. As Lee turned back to face Man, the model herself walked in from the bedroom. Dark, with sculpted features and a graceful frame, she was at least five years younger than Lee.