“I haven’t been there yet. I should go, to hear her.”
“Mm,” Man says, and starts singing again, but more quietly. Lee wonders if she shouldn’t have brought up the other woman—perhaps now Man is thinking of her, remembering all the good times they had together. The hats he bought her to protect her delicate skin, the lavish restaurants he took her to.
Lee makes the contact sheet as Man has shown her, and then, hardly waiting for the fix to drip off the paper, she takes the wet sheet by the corner with her tongs and carries it into the studio, where she lays it down on some newsprint and looks at it with the loupe. Each image makes her throat close a little with excitement. She wants to see them enlarged, so she hurriedly chooses one and makes an X next to it with wax pencil, then goes back into the darkroom, where she places the negative in the enlarger. It is the picture of the woman at the café, shot from behind and close up on the woman’s hair and neck.
Lee flicks on the mercury light, counts to forty slowly. Flicks it off. Carefully, she carries the paper over to the developing basin and slides it in, agitating the liquid as she has learned how to do. Within seconds her image spreads across the paper. First there are just the faint outlines of the woman’s hair, then the outline of her shoulders, and then the bright parts of the image show up: the woman’s hand, her nails, the contrast of the light shining on each of her curls. Sparks, Lee thinks, bright white sparks against her hair. Lee looks up for a moment to see if Man is watching. To her it is incredible: her own picture, appearing before her eyes. But he isn’t paying attention. She returns her glance to the image just in time, before it gets overexposed. Once the image has set in the fix, she stares at it. She feels that it is good without knowing how to articulate why. It is just the nape of a woman’s neck, her fingers scratching at her skin, but the image sends a shiver down Lee’s spine.
Just then Man turns around and sets his own paper in the developer, and she watches as another image of Amélie appears before them. His work sits next to hers and when he doesn’t immediately say something, she starts to panic that hers is banal, amateur. Finally, after what seems like forever, he peers at her photograph in the stop bath and says, “That’s excellent work. Is she a friend of yours?”
“No, just a stranger.”
“You set this up and took it without her noticing?”
“Yes—is that not allowed?”
Man laughs. “No, no, of course not. It’s fine. I’m just impressed, that’s all.” He says it lightly, as if he doesn’t realize how much it might mean to her.
“You really like it?”
“Well, I think we can tweak the exposure time a little bit”—he points with his tongs at some dark shadows in the woman’s hair—“and burn in this corner a bit, but for a first print? It’s very good.”
If Lee was feeling strange before, now she feels even stranger. His words make her hot and achy at the same time, flushed with pride, and she looks at her print with new confidence and thinks that if she tries she might actually be able to make herself into a photographer. The confidence emboldens her, and her two desires—to work and to be with Man—come together in that moment. There doesn’t need to be one or the other. The way he said “we”—“we can tweak the exposure.” Perhaps someday her work will be on the same level as his. Perhaps they will work together to create it. A partnership of sorts. So she turns around to face him, and she is not sure what she is going to do until she does it.
“I had a different idea for the saber guard,” she says. “If you still want, I could model for you, if you let me set it up.”
Man raises his eyebrows. “Last time I asked you to pose for me you said no.”
“I know. But if we do it together—I could frame the shots. I have an idea about it.”
“Really? Well—yes. Let me just get things cleaned up in here.”
As Lee is waiting for Man to come into the studio, she stands next to the camera and looks around, at the cloths draped over the couch, the half-drawn curtains, how bright and white and clean everything is. She whips the drapes off the table and the wall and replaces them with some black ones, draping the couch too. Then she goes into the office, picks up the saber guard, and turns it over and over. When she goes back into the studio, Man is waiting for her.
This is the first time Lee has done anything but follow his directions. Despite that, or maybe because of it, she feels she knows what he wants to see, has known it ever since she met him, but didn’t realize it until she saw her own work in the developing tank, saw him appraising it as he did his own.
“You had Amélie near the window,” Lee says, and takes the guard over to the couch, where she balances it on the arm, “but what if you had had her here?” Then she goes over to the camera and says “May I?” before lifting up the hood and going underneath it for the first time. The dark cloth smells of tobacco and cedar, a musty, masculine smell. Lee looks into the viewfinder and swivels the camera slightly so that all she can see is the couch and its black coverings. Through the viewfinder the room appears upside down, the couch hanging from the ceiling. It is disorienting, and Lee almost gasps when Man himself appears in the frame, walking across what looks like the ceiling and then sitting, absurdly, higher up than when he was standing.
“You need something to focus on,” he says, and his voice comes to her through the cloth as if through water, murky and indistinct. She turns the focusing knob back and forth a bit, watching as Man blurs and sharpens, blurs and sharpens. Upside down, he is a stranger. She does not recognize his eyes, his mouth; if she saw him on the street she would not know him. It is disorienting. She comes out from under the camera hood and everything is right side up again, Man sitting on the couch, watching her as she walks toward him.
Lee goes over to the changing area in the corner of the room and stands hidden behind the screen. Slowly she undoes her blouse, first the buttons on the cuffs and then the placket, letting it drop to the floor when she is done. Then she undoes her trousers, unbuttoning three of the five buttons at the fly and pushing the trousers down so they hang on her hip bones and expose the full flat expanse of her stomach. And then she reaches behind her back with both hands, thinking of how the shadow of the pose must look silhouetted on the screen, her arms sticking out like a swan’s wings. She unhooks the back of her brassiere before shrugging it off and letting it drop to the floor on top of her shirt. She keeps thinking about swans as she undresses, the ones she photographed in the park the other day, the muscle and bone of their wings and the power it must take them to beat the air into flight. She walks back and sits where Man has been on the couch and settles the metal guard over her face like a veil.
Up until this moment, Lee has felt calm, her actions at a distance from the emotions that prompted them, almost the way she used to feel when her father took her picture. But once she is sitting down, and able to see Man’s face, the slight raise to his eyebrows the only hint of how he is feeling, she comes back to herself and goes cold all over, her nipples puckering into hard points.
Man clears his throat, and his voice, when he speaks, sounds high and thin. “Hold that pose.” He moves over to the camera and goes under the hood.
The saber guard is heavier than it looks, and its sharp scent makes Lee’s mouth go sour. What injury was it meant to protect from? She imagines the curved slice of a fencing sword, the bone-deep bruises from a blunted blade. Lee closes her eyes and holds her head just so.
“Oh, that’s good!” Man shouts, his voice muffled by the cloth. “Hold it just like that.”
Lee doesn’t want to sit still, doesn’t want to do exactly what he asks of her, so she moves instead into different poses, her arms stretched out along the back of the couch and then held tight between her knees, her head tilted so far to the side she feels a hard pull in her neck and the saber guard pressing into her clavicle. She keeps her eyes closed and tries not to breathe in the smell of metal.