Man waves his hand. “He’s sent lots of people my way. I made the mistake early on of being helpful, and now everyone feels like they can come learn from me. I don’t have time to support every person who wants to be the next Man Ray. I’m busy. Portraits to shoot—portraits to shoot for Condé’s magazine, actually. He should know better.”
“How would you shoot me?” Lee pulls down her shoulders and lifts up her chin and looks at him directly.
Man gives her a quick appraising glance. “Probably a close-up of your face, with your hand at your throat. Black background.” His tone is clipped, a bit dismissive. Again the sound of the door knocker echoes through the room.
“That’s boring,” she says, to keep his attention.
Man chuckles and crosses his arms over his chest. “Oh? Then I’d put you near a window, half in light and half in shadow, and shoot you nude with your eyes closed, like you looked at Drosso’s.”
“You just want to see my breasts again.”
He stares at her, surprised, then starts to laugh. “You’re not shy, are you?” He takes a step toward the door and then holds up a finger. “Wait there. Don’t go anywhere.”
She can hear him run down the stairs and open the front door, then voices murmuring, footsteps. Man leads a woman past the parlor and Lee catches a glimpse of her, a column of gold-shot brocade topped with a towering pompadour, as they disappear into what must be Man’s studio. Lee sits for a while, waiting, watching the smooth sweep of the second hand on the grandfather clock, taking in the oils on the wall, the crowded bookshelves, the objects clustered on the mantel. A line of birds’ eggs, arranged by size. A similar arrangement of enamel vases, the smallest no larger than a kidney bean. She walks over to the shelves and reads the titles on the book spines. She picks up a porcelain cow figurine and weighs it in her palm. She wants it, all of it. And then she walks out into the hallway where she can see into the studio, where Man is heaving a reflector light into place.
When he notices her standing there, he says, “Can you come help me with these lights, please?”
The studio smells of burning dust and bromine and it is like every other studio she has ever been in: white walls, light filtering in from wide windows, the camera on its platform with the huge black hood. But this time, she walks over to one of the reflectors, grabs a leg while Man grabs the other, and pulls and wiggles it into place. This time, she picks up a glass plate and hands it to him, watching attentively as he loads it into the camera. The woman in her beautiful dress chats with both of them. She is here to get a portrait done for her husband for their twentieth wedding anniversary. When the camera is set up the woman clenches her face into a small, tense smile. Man keeps up a friendly patter with her, clearly trying to put her at ease, and Lee sees immediately how good he is at connecting with his subject. But Lee knows a few things too, and right before Man goes under the camera hood, she tells the woman, “Relax your eye muscles when you smile,” and after a moment’s hesitation the woman does so, her face suddenly more natural. When Man emerges from the hood, he looks at Lee and gives her a nod of approval. She nods back, feeling the way she has hoped to feel since she left New York, as though she has managed to set something good in motion.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Bobby!” Man shouts when the man arrives. He is corpulent; his body fills up the doorway and blocks the light. Once inside, he smiles at Man, a gummy smile in a big bald head, like an oversize baby’s. They laugh and shake hands and Bobby pounds Man on the back.
“It’s been too long,” Man says. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw your note. Big Bobby Steiner, in Paris. Never thought I’d see it.”
“When General Electric sets up the hoop, you jump through it. I’m head of the European division now.”
“I heard. Terrific news. And you were smart to come to me. I’ll take a photo of you that’ll make you look like you deserve it.”
“You better.” Bobby laughs again and glances around. When he notices Lee, he stops short and raises his hands in a gesture of mock surrender. “Hello, looker!” he says. He walks over to her and offers his face for a kiss, one cheek, American-style. “This your new girl, Manny? You got yourself a new girl? I liked that last one you brought to New York.”
Lee expects Man to clear things up, but he just laughs and mutters something to Bobby she doesn’t hear and doesn’t want to. She feels her face grow hot, not with embarrassment but with annoyance. Bobby stands looking at her for a few more moments, letting his eyes drift up and down her body, and then the two men walk into Man’s office and shut the door.
Lee is certainly not Man’s girl, but she’s not his student either. After the woman from the anniversary shoot left that first afternoon, Man asked Lee to stay behind, and explained that he had more work than he could handle and could use her help. Lee is not sure what she did to make him change his mind, but whatever it was, she doesn’t question it. He has had other assistants, he told her. The last one left a few months earlier. The job isn’t glamorous: keeping track of Man’s finances, which he described as a holy disaster; scheduling sessions; setting up the studio equipment; and occasionally helping him print. To his description of all these tasks, Lee nodded her head, bobbing it up and down so insistently she was worried it might come unhinged from her neck. If she was expecting a huge salary, he continued, he couldn’t provide it, but Lee could use the darkroom when he didn’t need it and she could come and go as she pleased. She agreed before he even told her a number. When he did it was shockingly low. But she doesn’t care. It is a beginning, a launching point into what she wants. The idea of working for a famous photographer is so appealing she probably would do it for free.
And now, after a month, she has settled into the rhythm of her new job. Mornings, she arrives at nine or ten o’clock—early by Parisian standards—and lets herself into the studio with the small brass key that Man has given her. She goes to the office and situates herself at his desk. It is her job to balance the ledger, a giant book that usually has to be unearthed from under all Man’s detritus: birds’ eggs, receipts from the tailor, toy soldiers, and, one day, a giant glass jar with a preserved octopus floating in it. He is like a crow bringing shiny treasures back to his nest, and Lee finds she likes the clutter his habits create.
Lee has a head for numbers, but still she does the work in pencil, carefully erasing any mistakes and redoing the figures in her round, even hand. The previous assistant was not as meticulous as she is trying to be, so when Lee has spare time she goes back in the ledger to earlier weeks and tries to untangle the web of errors her predecessor has left behind.
Here is what the numbers tell her: photography pays well. Man’s other creative endeavors, painting and sculpture, do not. He has a lot of money, especially by artists’ standards, but is terrible at managing it. He does not save. Instead, when a big job comes in he treats it like a windfall, an excuse to celebrate or buy something extravagant. There are more entries in the expense column than in the income column, and most of them are for ephemera: oysters at Le Select, two nights at a hotel in Saint-Malo—even, twelve months earlier, a Voisin, which he uses to drive out to the country or when he summers in Biarritz and otherwise has to pay an exorbitant fee to garage nearby.
Lee goes back to the records from 1928, where there were many entries with a single initial attached to them: “K rent,” “Milliner for K,” “Dinner with K,” and sometimes simply a number with the initial next to it, no further explanation. One day she adds up all the K entries and is astounded at how much money Man has spent on this person. It must be the girl Bobby referred to, but who is she? So far Lee cannot ask. The many entries for K’s milliner make Lee picture her as pale, concerned about her skin. Perhaps she is older—at least as old as Man. Lee is not yet sure how old Man is but he is certainly much, much older than she is. But where did K go? Dozens and dozens of entries, and then since January, nothing. A fight? Another man? Lee walks her fingers down the column of numbers and imagines their breakup, Man’s secret torment. K has not been replaced—there are no initials after January. The only woman to be added to the ledger is Lee herself, and since she is now in charge of check writing, she gets the perverse pleasure of paying herself each week for her own hard work.