Lee still can’t believe it’s hers, bought with the Christmas bonus check Man gave her. Man left the envelope propped up on the fireplace mantel in the office with her name written in huge looping letters across the front. She gasped when she opened it: an almost ridiculously lavish gift, and bizarrely close to the price of the camera she’d had her eye on for months. But when she thanked him—grateful, awkward, the check pinched between her fingers as if she expected him to ask for it back—he waved as if it were nothing.
“One windfall deserves another,” he said, referring to a new and unexpected commission he had gotten from his patrons, Arthur and Rose Wheeler.
“It’s too generous,” she protested.
Now, with her new camera in hand, Lee finds herself wondering if the gift will make her beholden to Man, if there is some subtext to it she’s not understanding. And it is not just the bonus check that is making Lee wonder. Ever since Man asked her to pose for him, something has been crackling between them, a static where there used to be calm air. But what Lee cannot figure out is which of them is generating it. Just a few days ago, Man came up behind her at his desk, leaned over her shoulder to read the contract she was typing up for him, his cheek so close to hers she could feel his skin even though he wasn’t touching her. Imperceptibly, she moved her face toward his, just to see what he would do, and when he did not pull back at all she was disconcerted. But it was probably nothing. He is always leaning toward her or needing to show her something, and up until now she has never thought anything of it.
The frustrating thing is that she doesn’t want anything to change between them. This was her first thought when she opened the envelope with the check inside. I hope this doesn’t change things between us. But he was so nonchalant when she thanked him that she decided any change she was feeling had to be in her head. And then, as if to confirm that her worries were unfounded, when she came in to work with the new camera a few days later, Man took one look at it and just said, “Good girl.” His eyes crinkled up from his wide smile, and he took the camera from her and ran his fingers over it with the same covetousness she feels every time she touches it, mumbling to himself about its features like a fanatic reciting baseball statistics, the static between them gone silent. Lee pointed out a few features he hadn’t noticed, and after a while Man handed back the camera and said, “Anytime you want to use the darkroom.”
Lee thanked him and told him she’d let him know.
The Rollei is her friend when she is walking, a better pair of eyes she wears around her neck. On a frigid Sunday a few weeks after Christmas, Lee grabs it and starts wandering, angling up Boulevard Saint-Michel and taking a left into the Luxembourg Gardens, where the wide gravel footpaths divide the lawn into orderly chunks. A dusting of snow has fallen and covers everything in white. At the lake in the park’s center she stops and watches the mallards swim in the part of the water not yet scrimmed with ice. The day is so still they hardly ripple the surface. One dabbles at the edge, and Lee walks over into the soft mud and watches him bob up and down, up and down. She snaps a picture of his tail, sticking out of the water like a tiny iceberg. She cuts across the park and over to Église Saint-Sulpice, where the columns cast stripes of shade onto the building’s facade. She takes a picture. From there it’s to Café de Flore, where she sits at a table near the window and watches the people go by, bundled into thick coats and scarves. She is glad to have a cup of coffee, warm between her hands, glad to have the money to pay for it, glad for her job and her camera and the feeling that she is learning something from her time spent with Man. Nearby, a thin woman sits alone at a table, facing away from Lee. Her hair is in tight pin curls and she wears a white blouse. Every few moments, she reaches up to massage her neck. Her fingernails are filed into sharp points and painted in a reverse French manicure: black tips and white nail beds. Her hair is a rich auburn. She rubs her neck again; Lee snaps a picture.
The day is perfect, cold and clear. By the time Lee has walked to Les Halles she has filled two canisters of film, and she can envision each of the images spooled on the rolls: crisp, original, all her own. Lee has never been able to carry a tune, but as she walks home she sings aloud and doesn’t care who hears her.
LONDON,
1943
It is 1943 and British Vogue has a new editor, Audrey Withers, Oxford-educated, who has knuckled her way to her position from the finance department, more political than pretty, more savvy than chic. With her at the helm, Vogue wakes up, smells the cordite, stops treating the war as if it’s not happening. Instead of making Lee chronicle the season’s latest silhouette—cinched waists, sweeping skirts, sweetheart necklines—Audrey assigns her spreads on short hairstyles for factory workers, on staying fit in wartime, on the different cuts of women’s uniforms. Lee ties her models’ hair back in nets and poses them facing away from the camera, legs spread, feet planted in flat-soled shoes. She photographs beautiful women climbing into air-raid shelters, puts them in fire masks so no one will be able to see their pretty faces.
Lee visits the Women’s Home Defence Corps, the Voluntary Service, the Women’s Royal Naval Service. She takes photos of women carrying rifles longer than their own legs, slung casually over their shoulders like handbags. Takes photos as women pack parachutes, ducking their bodies under yards of hanging nylon, folding and twisting the strings and fabric into bundles. A single tangle could mean a loved one dead. Cord caught, bones shattered. Unthinkable, how it would fill the air with blood and cinder.
At night, Lee drags Roland to the Whitby, where all the press photographers spend their off hours. This is how they meet Dave Scherman, who shoots for Life magazine and charms them both with his lopsided smile and impish humor. Soon enough Dave moves in with them at Hampstead. He’s broke and already half in love with Lee, and for a while she’s with both of them, Dave and Roland, and all of it—the two men, the new assignments—is almost enough to make her happy.
But then one night Dave knocks on her door as she is getting ready for bed. Shows her his war accreditation papers and tells her they’re sending him to cover the action in Italy. Lee tries to smile, to say congratulations, but his words bring back the dark black shadow she has never been able to name. She’s furious when she feels her eyes fill up with tears.
“I wish they didn’t want to send you,” she says.
“Can’t stay in London. There’s nothing going here. What am I going to do, teach soldiers how to finger paint at camo school like Roland? I’d go mad. Wouldn’t you?” And then he says, “You should get accredited too. Get Condé Nast to sponsor you. You’re a Yank. Just as legitimate as the rest of us.”
Lee laughs, a harsh sound in the quiet room. “Me. A soldier. No, I’ll be stuck here, knitting socks or holding scrap drives for the war effort.”
And then the tears really do spill over. Lee pretends to be coughing so she can wipe at her eyes, but Dave has seen them and moves to hold her. He thinks she’s crying over him, and since it doesn’t matter, she lets him.
A few days later, Lee is still thinking about what Dave said. Why couldn’t she? She even floats the idea by Audrey, to see if Vogue would publish her pictures. Audrey is noncommittal, but says that if Lee could write some articles to accompany the photos, maybe they could do it.
Lee makes the call, fills out the forms. Four weeks later she gets her papers: she’ll be a war correspondent just like Dave, traveling with the 83rd Division. A few days after that she is fitted for her uniform: olive-drab pants with a button fly, olive shirt, wool jacket thick as a horse blanket and just as flattering. The second she puts on the uniform she loves it, how shapeless it makes her, how little of her skin she can see beneath all the layers.