When she returns from her walks she brings back paper bags full of fruit pastilles, or macarons so light they melt on her tongue, and feeds them to Man. He licks the sugar off her fingers. She comes back as the sun is fading in the west and the light lies like thick striped taffy across the bed, and before it gets too dark Man takes her picture: her neck and torso banded with shadows, her legs tangled in the sheets, the curve of her ribs as she lies on her side. And then he puts aside the camera and spreads out next to her and touches every bit of her, all the parts he’s photographed and all the parts he hasn’t. She closes her eyes and wills her mind to stay in it, the good feeling, and it is better than it has ever been for her. And when her mind drifts, it drifts only to their pictures.
It is spring now, the leaves just pushing their bright green way out of the trees, and one evening when Lee goes back to her apartment, she is stopped at the door by the sight of a woman sitting on the stoop, brown hair bobbed at her jawline, her eyes closed and her face tipped up to catch the warmth of the sun. A valise sits next to her, a small veiled hat on top.
“Tanja?” Lee asks, incredulous, and Tanja hops up and they are embracing, jumping up and down and making small squeals of happiness.
“Oh Li-Li,” Tanja says, “I missed you!”
Lee takes Tanja upstairs and settles her in a chair in the corner of her room. Tanja starts recounting her latest travels, and Lee lets the stories wash over her, a sweet river of words. She has always liked how easy it is to be with Tanja, and it does not take long for Lee to revert to the old version of herself, cracking jokes and talking in shorthand with her friend.
“You should have seen it, Li-Li. We get to Milan later than we would have liked, it’s already dark, and we take a cab to the hotel my friend Ruth had recommended—remember Ruth? Well, it’s called the Casino Hotel and Ruth had told me it’s right in the center of all the action. She was wrong: it was the action. I’ll never forget Mrs. Basingthwaite’s face, standing there in the lobby, surrounded by what I’m fairly certain were ladies of the night. She hustled me out of there so fast it made my head spin.”
Lee laughs. “How long can you stay in Paris?”
Tanja grimaces. “Just the weekend. Mrs. B won’t let me out of her sight longer than that. Please say there’s somewhere desperately seedy you can take me.”
Lee hesitates. She is supposed to go to a party with Man that she has been looking forward to for ages. It would be easy enough to include Tanja, but the idea of sharing Man with someone is unappealing. Yet, another piece of her wants to show him off—to show her life off—so eventually she says, “There’s a party I was planning on going to tonight, at an apartment just a few blocks from here. Do you want to come?”
“Do birds sing?” Tanja says, and dances around the room, trilling, “A party! A party!”
Lee gets dressed and they walk together to Tanja’s hotel. When Tanja used to come down to New York for visits, they joked that their sightseeing was merely a backdrop for their chitchat: they talked about the same things at the Met as they did at a cabaret. And now, Paris is no different. They stroll along and talk and talk. This time, though, Lee has her camera with her, and every once in a while she breaks free from Tanja’s arm and takes a picture. She feels her mind operating on two levels and she loves it: she listens to her friend, but there is another track in her brain and it is focused on what she is seeing, on getting the last of the evening light, images composing and dissolving as she moves her gaze around. Some images she wants to keep, they tug at her, so she frames them, focuses, releases the shutter. She decides to take a picture of Tanja, her hands gesturing as she tells a story, and watches in amusement as Tanja realizes what Lee is doing and gets self-conscious.
“So will Man Ray be there tonight?” Tanja asks her. “Is it still going well with him?”
Lee opens her mouth to tell her friend about what has happened between her and Man and finds she doesn’t know what to say. Both Man and the pictures—her pictures—feel so new. Lee doesn’t want to answer questions; she wants to keep it all to herself, a little pearl locked in a shell.
After a long pause, Lee clears her throat and says, “I haven’t told you yet, but Man and I—we’re…” Her voice trails off.
Tanja’s eyebrows go up. “Really?”
“Yes.” Blushing, disconcerted, Lee turns away and takes a picture of one of the gargoyles on Notre Dame, silhouetted against the iron-gray sky. When she puts down her camera again Tanja is still giving her a look, but doesn’t say another word about it.
At the hotel, Lee can’t help but covet the outfits Tanja has collected as she’s traveled across Europe, day dresses with fuller skirts than Lee is used to seeing, and little bolero jackets with shoulder pads sewn in. The two women are practically the same size, so while Tanja gets dressed Lee tries on her crepe de chine and pearls, and when her friend sees her she tells her she should borrow them. Lee stands in front of the mirror, admiring herself: the flush in her cheeks from the walk and the anticipation of seeing Man, the way her lips always look now, tender and swollen. Tanja comes up behind her and examines her with a critical eye, then turns the necklace backward so that the pearls hang down Lee’s back like a cape, and as they go outside, Lee feels more Parisian than she has the entire time she’s been here.
In a secluded corner of Le Dôme, where Lee has taken her for a drink before the party, Tanja leans down and takes a sip from the full rim of her martini. She looks at Lee while she does it, her kohl-blacked eyes narrowed. “He’s paying for your apartment?” she says. “He’s serious about you. Why haven’t you told me?”
Lee focuses on a group of people over Tanja’s right shoulder. One of the women looks familiar but Lee can’t think where she would have met her. A friend of Man’s? Did she come to the studio? Lee has met so many of Man’s circle now that it’s hard to keep them all straight.
“Li-Li.” Tanja waves her hand in front of Lee to get her attention. “You should have told me. All those letters and you didn’t tell me.”
“I know.” Lee tries to sound contrite. “I just felt—it was so new. It was all happening so fast.” She doesn’t want to make eye contact with Tanja, so she keeps looking around the room, and then realizes they are sitting right beneath the portrait of Man and his friends that has hung on the wall for a decade. Pointing to where Man stands glowering in the center of the group of a dozen men, she says, “That’s him on the wall. With his Dada group. They used to meet here.” Man has told her how different Le Dôme was then, pipes and politics instead of gossip and champagne cocktails. Lee points to the grainy picture. “That’s Tristan Tzara on the right—you’ll meet him tonight, I think. He and Man publish a journal together, 221. Have you seen it? Man said—he told me it might be a good venue for my pictures someday.” Lee cannot keep the pride out of her voice.
Tanja takes another sip of her drink. “I know he’s going to be here any minute, but I…” Tanja fishes out the cocktail onion from her glass and pops it in her mouth, chewing it slowly and looking at Lee with an appraising expression before continuing. “You work for him, the only people you know are the people he knows, and he’s paying for your apartment. Li-Li, just… what happens if it doesn’t work out? You know how you are when you get tired of someone.”
Lee looks down peevishly at her hands, folded in her lap, and is distracted by a smudge of ash on her glove, which she tries to rub out with her finger. The spot gets larger, a gray smear.