“I think you were right,” Man says as he reemerges from under the hood and comes over to her. “Having it over your face like that—it’s good.”
Lee stands up and takes off the guard and sets it down. Standing so close to him, she feels the difference in their heights. His eyes are just level with her jawbone.
“The shots are going to be very good,” he says.
“I know,” Lee says, taking a step closer to him. Her bare nipples graze his linen shirt, sending an ache shooting down to her groin.
Man takes a deep breath. “Lee, I—”
“I know,” she says again, and moves a step closer.
And then their mouths press hard together, their teeth clicking. His arms come all the way around her and pin her own to her sides. They stand that way for what seems like hours, days, just kissing. Man takes her hand and leads her to the parlor. She kicks off her trousers while he does the same with his clothes, hurriedly, and then in the dimness of the falling twilight, Man lays her down on the couch and kneels next to her, running his hands over her bare skin. She arches her back to get closer to him, but it is not close enough, so she pulls him down on top of her and breathes him in. His skin on hers is warm as water, and she is wet with it, and for once her brain shuts off completely, leaving only feeling. The one thought she does manage is that there is no going back from this, and for that she couldn’t be more grateful.
NORMANDY,
JULY 1944
France is metal, the smell and feel and taste of it. Hot steel helmet on Lee’s sweat-soaked hair. The scent her field camera leaves on her hands. The nib of her pen when she licks it, ink bluing her tongue. And the hospital. Bone saws. Disinterred bullets in a bowl. The stink of infection in the air, sweet like licked pennies.
Photos everywhere she looks, compositions formed of horrors. Lee shoots and shoots and swallows down the bile that rises in her throat—even that tasting of metal. Her assignment is to photograph the post-invasion duties of the American nurses, so Lee records plasma bags, penicillin, surgical procedures. She takes pictures of American women working side by side with German nurses, tamps the blast hole of her growing loathing for the Krauts down tight.
She sends the pictures back to Audrey accompanied by essays, knows the censor will scissor away most of what she writes. Even her letters to Roland get censored, blank spaces where her words once were. His notes back to her get censored too, and arrive weeks and weeks after he sends them, but the words they still contain are normal, soothing. They tether her to a world outside the war.
At the end of one day Lee hears a voice calling to her from a hospital bed. She turns to see a man bandaged up like some sort of mummy. “Ma’am,” he says, his voice so weak it’s almost a whistle. “Take my picture, so I can have a laugh about it when I go home.”
His eyes and mouth and nose are black holes, obliterations. His hands are bound up as big as oven mitts. “Say cheese,” he whispers, and Lee grips the dark metal box of her camera and tries to focus.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Three months have passed. Man has moved her to a new apartment a few blocks from his in Montparnasse. Paid the first month’s rent, bought her furniture, given her art to hang on the walls. Together they wander through Printemps like an old married couple. Man helps her pick out sheets, coffee cups, lavender sachets to tuck inside her linens. They paper her bedroom with a geometric print and lay an Art Deco rug on the floor, its thick pile soft beneath her feet. He gives her one of his own blankets and when he isn’t with her she burrows into it for comfort. Lee has never cared too much where she lives but she finds that the apartment becomes an extension of what she feels toward Man. It is not a large space—when he spends the night she stacks their shoes by the door, liking how the heels of hers nestle inside his—but it is sized just right for her, and she feels a sense of calm when she is there that she has never felt anywhere else.
At night they lie on her bed, the mattress sagging in the middle so that they continually roll toward each other, their bodies warm and their skin sticking together in the unseasonable April heat. He kisses her toes, her wrists, the cleft of her buttocks. In the mornings she finds that his stubble has chafed her skin and left it stinging.
Always, always, he is photographing her. His camera is a third person in the bedroom, and she flirts for it and for him as he takes her picture. They print the images together, standing hip to hip in the developing room, her body blooming on the paper while they watch. This way they get to have the moments twice, the images calling up the feelings from the day before until sometimes they stop what they are doing and make love again, quickly, her hands gripping the edge of the sink, the pictures forgotten and gone black in the developing tray.
For days at a time Man takes no clients. They lock the studio door behind them. She does not answer the phone when it rings. Instead, they print pictures of Lee, or Man paints or sculpts—he is filled with an almost manic energy that he says comes from her, from being near her. He begs her to stay close when he is painting and often Lee does so, sitting curled in an armchair near his easel, breathing in the smell of camphor and turpentine and watching his expression while he works. Sometimes he paints abstracts; other times he uses her seated figure or one of their photographs as inspiration—the line of her neck becoming a guide for a tightrope walker, her breast becoming a grain silo becoming a mountain. Where he is meticulous in the darkroom, here he has an almost frenzied focus. He wants her close but sometimes forgets that she is there, until Lee grows frustrated and takes the brushes out of his hand to call him back to her, kissing him insistently until he is hers again.
Sometimes Lee looks at him as they are eating dinner, or just sitting next to each other, and wonders how she ever thought this might not happen. It feels inevitable. He looks like a different person than he did when she first met him. He has become dear to her. The fringe of his lashes, the whorl of his ear, all of him now more familiar than she is to herself. His smell—almost piney. Even after she bathes she can smell him on her. She nestles her nose into her own shoulder and breathes him in.
At parties or cafés, she is aware of where he is in the room without looking; they catch each other’s gaze and hold it longer than they should. Their connection feels so obvious, as if everyone around them can see, just from looking at them, what they have been doing in the bedroom. Their need for each other. All the other people in the room must hear her heart thumping, the naked tum tum tum tum tum tum of it.
When Lee is not with Man, she does her own work. She finds herself as eager as he is to create things. As the weeks pass she wants to walk more than she wants to shoot in the studio, so on the days when Man is taking clients, she puts her Rollei around her neck and takes long afternoon strolls through the city, cutting across the wide boulevards and crossing over the Seine, losing her way in the Marais, where the Jews look at her curiously, the tall girl with the camera and the bright blond hair. Maybe she should be fearful wandering the city alone, but the camera not only gives her purpose but feels like protection. She likes the serendipity of shooting street scenes, juxtaposing people and objects in weird positions, playing with perspective. Each time she prints one of her photos and Man likes it, she grows more confident, feels more like who she has always wanted to be.