Amélie arrives fifteen minutes late, sniffling. Her nose is red and her eyes watery.
“Are you sick?” Lee asks. As she looks at the girl, Lee is convinced she feels a scratch in her own throat and vows to make a tonic when she gets home.
“No, I’m fine,” Amélie declares, but after a few minutes in the studio it’s clear she’s not. She droops over the couch like a wilted flower, poses for pictures with her mouth hanging open since she doesn’t seem to be able to breathe through her nose.
Man doesn’t seem to notice that she’s sick, or care. He’s humming, cracking jokes, putting Amélie in strange poses and muttering “Brilliant!” under his breath. Lee has come to find his appreciation of his own work endearing.
“Now,” he says, “I thought we could try out this object. Put you in front of the window and play with the shadows a bit?” He pulls out the saber guard he bought at the Vernaison and shows it to Amélie, who stares at him blankly until he brings it over to her and says, “Your arm, here.” The metal mesh is delicate as lacework but sharp along the edges. Amélie places her arm through it and winces as she balances it on the table.
Man steps back. He tilts his head as he always does, looking for the through line the image will need. He kneels and grasps Amélie’s hand, tugging it so that her palm is a bit more open.
“Like this,” he says, tugging again on her arm and moving it at an awkward angle. Satisfied, he disappears under the camera hood. Amélie breathes shallowly and Lee finds herself slowing her own breath to match. Man is out of view for quite a while, calling out now and then for Lee to move the reflectors or adjust the curtains behind them.
Finally he emerges from under the hood. “All done,” he says to Amélie, and then he leaves the room to let her get dressed in peace. She takes her arm out of the saber guard, her face a moue of discomfort.
“So sharp,” she whines to Lee, rubbing a red mark on the pale white underside of her arm.
“Well, models must do what is asked of them.” Lee doesn’t try to hide her annoyance.
Amélie disappears behind the curtain after throwing a mean look at Lee. When she emerges a few moments later, Lee has left the room and stationed herself behind the desk in the office, where she busies herself with some papers.
“Bonsoir,” Lee calls to Amélie as she walks by, artificially cheerful now that the young woman is leaving. After she is gone, Lee goes and looks for Man. He is in the parlor just pouring a cup of tea. He gestures to it—does she want one?—but she shakes her head.
“You shouldn’t use those students anymore,” she says, settling herself on the horsehair couch.
“Ah, she was fine. Needed some meat on her bones, but I was doing a lot of cropped shots and she has nice skin.”
“She wasn’t interested in it.”
“They don’t have to be interested. They just have to stand there and listen to what I tell them.”
He sits down opposite Lee and takes a loud sip. She watches him, still annoyed and not completely sure why. The girl bothered her. Not just her germs, which Lee pictures as little fleas dancing on the couch, on the saber guard, all over the studio. It was more how unimpressed she acted during the shoot. Does Amélie even know who Man is?
“I saw it come through, when I used to model,” she says.
“Saw what?”
“When the model didn’t know why she was there. I’ve done it myself—” She stops.
“You?” Man seems to almost chuckle as he takes another sip of tea. “I bet you look ravishing in every picture anyone has ever taken of you.”
Lee flushes and doesn’t meet his eye. Since the day he hired her, Man hasn’t commented on her appearance. It is what she thought she wanted—a working relationship free from all that—but over the weeks she has often caught herself wondering what he thinks of her. Just the other day she wore one of her nicest dresses to work to see if he would compliment her. He didn’t, which was fine, but now his words send a tingle through her she isn’t expecting to feel.
“It is easy for me,” Lee says, “but not for the reasons you would think. I always felt like…” She pauses, suddenly feeling she is about to reveal too much.
“Tell me.”
She goes over to the kettle. Standing with her back to Man, she says, “I would use this trick—I learned it, I think, when I was little, when I modeled for my father. I can make my expression practically anything—” Here Lee turns around and gives him a confident stare, her eyes narrowed. “But while I’m doing it I can send my mind anywhere. With my father sometimes I would pretend I was a queen, the Queen of England, and that posing was required of me for my royal subjects. Or later, when I was at Vogue, I could put on a gown and pretend that I was at a gala or whatever it was they wanted the photograph to look like. I guess maybe it’s a bit like acting. I had a name for it, when I was little.”
“What was it?”
“I called it my wild mind.” She coughs, to cover up her embarrassment.
“Wild mind. I love it.”
“Yes, well. Amélie doesn’t have it. She was probably thinking about a mustard poultice the whole time she was here. That’s what her face was saying.”
Man sets down his teacup. “Would you pose for me?”
He sounds eager, and it thrills her. She wants to say yes. Part of her always wants to say yes, to please whatever man is asking something of her. And she knows Man’s pictures of her would be beautiful, probably better than anyone else’s have ever been, and that is tempting too, to help him make his art. But posing for him even once will change things between them. She will have given him something of herself, even if he doesn’t see it that way, and he will always think of how his camera made her look when he sees her.
“I’m sorry, I can’t—I have a lot of work left to do this afternoon.” The words hang in the air.
“All right.” Man’s tone tells her he’s not going to push the issue. He refills his teacup from the pot and plops two sugar cubes in it, then says, “I’ve seen some photos of you. I bought an old copy of American Vogue last week so I could see them.”
An image of him stopping at the international newsstand on his way to work rises in her mind. Thumbing through dusty piles of magazines in the back of the shop, pausing at her picture. Seeking her out, assessing her—or, knowing him, critiquing the compositions. Pushing down his hat more firmly on his head as he leaves the shop, the magazine with her picture in it rolled up in a stiff tube and stuck into his overcoat pocket.
“Which issue?”
“Oh, you were wearing black satin and fur, I think. And there was a spread on pearls—you wore a choker. Nicely composed, actually. In any case, you’ve got clear talent. If you change your mind, I’d love to shoot you.”
He slurps the last of his tea and sets down the cup loudly, then slaps his hands on his thighs and says, “Well, back to work,” and disappears into his office. Lee sits there a while longer, touching her neck where those pearls had been, trying to remember what she had been thinking when the photos were taken.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lee’s new Rolleiflex has a beautiful face, two perfectly round lenses for eyes, and a focusing hood that looks like a chic little hat. Lee wears the camera around her neck on a short strap and can’t believe how light it is—not even two pounds with the film loaded. When she puts her eye to the viewfinder she could swear the glass makes things look clearer than her eyes alone can do, and she finds she prefers the world boxed up, contained inside the camera’s frame.