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“No, no, I’m fine.”

They hold the line for a few more seconds, the silence so thick she could reach out and touch it. “Thank you again for the toddy,” she says finally.

“It was no trouble.”

She thinks of how far he must have gone to get it, what he must have said to get a café to let him take its cup. “Well, it was delicious.”

“Take care of yourself, Lee,” Man says, and when she hangs up the phone she realizes he’s never before called her by her first name.

CHAPTER NINE

The next day, Lee wakes up with a clear head, and it feels like a gift to have the energy for everyday tasks. Why doesn’t she appreciate it more when she is healthy? She hums to herself as she gets ready to go to the studio, stepping lightly down the steps from her hotel’s front door, her rolls of film tucked in her purse. As she walks along, she admires how her new suede step-ins look against the cobblestones.

What a beautiful day it is, Paris hers for the taking, the winter air crisp and invigorating. At the corner of Avenue du Maine and Rue des Plantes, she stops at her favorite street vendor and buys a croque monsieur, taking off her gloves before she removes its waxed paper wrapper. As she eats, she is filled with purpose and benevolence. Man is low on his favorite printing paper, and the shop is over a kilometer out of her way, but it will make him happy that she has taken care of this for him, so she heads toward the 15th, pleased with herself for thinking of it. She takes a shortcut through passage Dantzig and pauses to look at La Ruche, with its odd circular structure and oversize awnings that hang over the windows like half-closed eyelids. As always, there are a few people huddled near the gate. Beggars or drunks, most likely, but they could be artists who got home too late to be let into the ateliers inside. Lee crosses the alley and sets the rest of her sandwich next to a man sleeping under a rough brown blanket. That could be her, she thinks. If Man hadn’t hired her, she might be living rent-free in the squalor of La Ruche with all the rest of the starving artists. She reaches into her purse to touch the film canisters and feels profoundly fortunate.

It is late afternoon by the time Man is ready to help Lee develop her film. She stands in the hallway waiting for him, as excited as she used to be on the first day of school. The developing room, near the end of the hall, was originally a broom closet. Inside it, Man has nailed a plank at counter height, and above that a small shelf with bottles and trays stacked neatly on it. Lee steps in, with Man behind her. The space is tight for one person, claustrophobic for two. Dim light comes from a small hurricane lamp sitting on the counter. Man closes the door and pulls a thick black curtain across it, fussing with it until it falls completely evenly. The room is so close that even when Lee leans against the wall she cannot help but brush against him. She rubs her tongue along her teeth, a nervous habit, and tries to give him room to maneuver in the small space.

Man is in professor mode. “Light is our tool,” he is saying. “Film is just a surface for capturing and holding light, but until the film has been developed, extra light becomes the enemy.” As he talks he arranges the supplies, lined up on the table where he has placed black tape to mark their spots.

“Always put everything in the same order. Otherwise you’ll be fumbling around in here and you’ll drop something. Place the tools in the order you’ll use them: film, church key, scissors, metronome, developer, stop, fix, water bath.” He touches her shoulder and moves behind her, an awkward dance in the small room. “Before you blow out the lamp, put your hands on the supplies and close your eyes so you can remember where they are.”

Eyes shut, Lee moves her hands across the supplies. The room is silent except for the hiss of the lamp’s wick.

“Ready?” Man asks, and when she says yes, he reaches around her and blows out the lamp. The flame turns to a sharp red point and dies out. The small room fills with the smell of smoke. Of course she knew it had to be pitch-black, but somehow it is darker than she thought it would be, the darkness thick and alive and warmer than when the room was lit. She feels Man behind her but cannot see him. His hand hovers over hers, heat radiating off his skin.

“I want you to get the feeling of it. This is where most photographers run into trouble. You can take the best pictures in the world but if you can’t develop them properly you may as well not bother taking them in the first place.”

Her hand is on the canister, his hand is just above hers, and she casually changes her grip so that the back of her hand brushes against his palm. As soon as she does, his comes down fully on hers, warm, his skin dry and a little rough, and then his hand is all she is thinking about, the closeness of it. It is that simple: first she is not thinking about him, and then she is. She has to shake her head to retrain her attention on what he is saying.

“Pick up the church key and pry the canister open,” he says.

Lee follows his instructions. She has to try a few times before she lines up the key with the canister’s lip, but soon she manages it, the top peeling back with a screech of metal on metal.

“Good,” he says. “Now take the film out and try not to get fingerprints on it. Feel the skinny end? That’s the starting point. You have to cut that piece off, and then hold the film by each end so you can dip it in the trays.”

Lee fumbles in the dark for the scissors. Man moves a bit away from her, giving her room. “I think I did it,” she says. She can hear his breath, smell the woodsy scent of his aftershave now that the smoke has dissipated, and by necessity he is practically hugging her as he helps her, checking her work. It is so intimate—she didn’t realize how intimate it would be. She could so easily turn around and face him, and part of her is curious about what would happen if she did, what it would feel like to really touch him. But the dark is playing tricks on her. What she wants is her pictures, to get them right.

“Excellent,” he says. “Now, start up the metronome, and then dip the film strip into the developer, back and forth, so that it all gets an even amount of time in the solution. A few minutes should do it—I usually count to two hundred and then move to the stop bath.”

Again she follows his instructions, reaches out in the dark for the metronome and sets it ticking, then finds both ends of the film and tries to move it smoothly through the water. Once the film is wet, though, it gets slippery, and as she tries to change her grip the whole strip slithers out of her grasp and down to the ground.

“Oh, damn it!” She is mortified, and if it weren’t dark he would see that her face is crimson.

“It’s all right,” he says, patiently. “Don’t move your feet. The last thing you want to do is step on it.”

“But now it’s probably all covered with dust, and—”

He has squatted behind her and she can hear him fumbling along the floor, his head level with her thighs. Lee stands as still and quiet as she can, willing herself not to move, achingly conscious of where his head is.

“It’s okay. It’s not the worst thing.”

Lee takes a shallow breath. “What’s the worst thing?”

“When you’re commissioned to take pictures of Pablo Picasso and you get what you think are the best shots of your career and then you manage to mix up the developer and stop bath so that not one—not a single picture—is usable. That is the worst thing.”

As he’s talking he has found the film. He stands back up and takes his free hand and rubs it down her forearm until he finds her hand, and the feeling makes her shiver. When he holds her hand for what seems to be a beat too long she stays perfectly still, waiting, before he gives the film back to her.