Lee smiles and pulls him on top of her, and he continues to kiss her, soft kisses on her lips and trailing down her neck. She tips her head back and is distracted by the view out the window, where white clouds scud across the dark sky. His kisses are so gentle she can barely feel them. She puts one hand on top of his head and pushes it down and wills him to bite her nipple. He doesn’t do it. She arches her back and presses her chest against his face, but he moves away, so she reaches down and grabs him by the hips and pulls him up until he is inside her. For a few moments the hot slick slide of him is the only thing she’s thinking of. But then he falters, pausing above her with his eyes squeezed shut, and murmurs some sort of apology, and they wait like that, his body unmoving. She kisses him again and pulls his bottom lip into her mouth and bites down before she releases it. He lets out a small moan and begins again, slowly, too slowly, and she wraps her legs around him to be able to feel it deeper. And then he moves faster, but moving to the time of what he wants. Lee feels her mind detach, as it often does when she has sex, and she is floating somewhere above the bed and looking down at herself. She watches from above as he comes and falls over on the mattress next to her. She watches as she takes his hand and pushes it between her legs, watches as he touches her until she comes too. But she doesn’t feel it. She watches these two strangers as they lie next to each other on the bed, and feels nothing. And all the time, while she is watching, what she is thinking about is Man.
CHAPTER TEN
Lee does not mean to spend the night with George, but the champagne sends her into a deep sleep and she wakes to find him rubbing her bare arm and smiling at her. In the daylight filtering in through the organdy draperies, he looks mawkish and needy. He suggests breakfast on the hotel terrace but her head is pounding and she doesn’t want to be outside with him, so they call for a service cart and eat omelets with snipped tarragon in bed while they try to make conversation. The way she feels is familiar: caged, choked, but above all deeply, deeply bored. She knows George’s mind is pinwheeling through thoughts of more lovemaking, followed by a day spent wandering Paris together, but before he has a chance to suggest anything specific or reach for her again across the mattress, she finishes her eggs and gets up, sliding so quickly back into her clothes that she barely gives him time to register that she is leaving. Her apologies are false but firm. Yes, she does have to go to work; no, she cannot be late; yes, she will try to meet him at Le Bateau Ivre again that night and won’t be able to stop thinking of him until she sees him there. And then, like a prisoner emerging from a secret escape route, Lee walks out into the frigid city and lets out her breath in one big exhale.
The day is bright and her head feels full of last night’s champagne bubbles, which seem to ping against her skull as furiously as the thoughts of Man’s hands, the feeling of him behind her in the dark. She walks quickly back to her room, where she will lock herself in the shared lav and submerge herself in the hottest bath she can manage. She feels as if she hasn’t had a good bath since she left New York—there is always another tenant pounding at the door and rushing her. Not that she blames them, since she herself does the same whenever she is late getting ready.
Lee splashes water on her face and stares at her reflection in the cracked mirror. Puffy bags beneath her eyes. The beginnings of an angry red pimple in the middle of her chin. She pinches her cheeks to give herself some color and sticks out her tongue at her reflection, then slides the latch on the door and fills up the tub to the brim.
She is unnerved at the thought of going back to the studio. She could call up Man and say she’s not coming in today. But she thinks of her negatives, hanging on the drying line, and knows she can’t not print them. She almost itches to get back to them and see if they are any good. She’ll print the one of the duck first; that one, perhaps, has some potential.
When Lee gets to the studio an hour or so later, it is quiet, and for a moment she thinks maybe Man is not there. She goes up the staircase and into the office, which is empty too. But then she hears him in the darkroom, humming loudly, the way one does when one thinks he is alone.
What will she say to him? She tries things out in her head. I can’t stop thinking about you. I keep remembering your hands on mine. I looked for you last night at your favorite bar. Every option seems absurd, trite. Her previous encounters haven’t made her feel this way, and she has no idea how to go about telling someone like Man that she is interested in him. She’s a little in awe of him, perhaps, or maybe it’s just that she doesn’t know how he would react if she told him. For all she knows, he is still in love with Kiki, or with someone new.
But then Lee remembers Man hasn’t seen her negatives yet. They can talk about this, a subject much less fraught than whatever she’s feeling for him. Maybe he is looking at them right now. She wants so much to hear his opinion of them, lets her imagination spool out a different scene in which she walks into the darkroom and he is standing there with her work in his hands, a look of surprise on his face. “These are what we developed?” he will ask. “They’re wonderful. I never knew you were so talented.” And she will offer a few halfheartedly modest refutations, and then she will print the photographs, and soon enough some art collector will come to the studio and see them and offer to hang them in his gallery, and all of them will sell within the first month, and everyone she has ever known, including Man himself, will be jealous of her success.
She does their special triple tap on the darkroom door, and Man opens it, wearing rubber gloves with his shirtsleeves rolled up. She has been thinking about him so much for the past few hours that when she sees him, there is a vague sense of disappointment. The solid realness of him doesn’t match up with what’s been in her mind, though she doesn’t know what she expected, if the disappointment lies in her inability to have remembered him accurately or in the reality of the person standing before her, his face unshaven and his eyes closer together than she remembered them being. But seeing him eases some pressure in her that has been growing since she left the studio yesterday. He is just a man. There are many men in the world.
“You’re very late,” he says, his eyebrows crunching together in a frown. Behind him she can see her negatives on the drying line exactly where she left them.
“I know, I’m sorry—”
“This is a job.”
Lee knows she should feel bad—she has no real excuse for being late and should have called him, but she feels anger snap beneath the fug of her exhaustion. “I know. I’m sorry—I forgot to tell you I’d be late today.”
He sighs. “I’ve been waiting all morning for you to help me with the prints from the session with Amélie.”
“Have you started on them?”
“Yes,” he says, his tone softening a bit. Lee goes over to the sink, and floating there is the picture of Amélie with the saber guard. The shot is cropped close, showing only her chin and shoulders, the mesh of the metal crosshatching her skin with geometric shadows. Man picks up the paper at the white border with his tongs, and the water runs off the photo’s edge and plinks into the tray.