It occurs to Lee that she can walk away, so she does, stamping out Claude’s cigarette in a heaping ashtray and helping herself to a glass of wine from a passing tray.
It is a relief to be near Man again, and Lee leans into the familiarity of his rumpled jacket, his solid arm that comes around her waist and holds her tight. Tanja gives Lee the dazzling smile she always has when she is drunk, all gums and teeth. The Wheelers have left, and Man and Tanja are talking with an older woman who has ten or twelve strings of pearls looped around her neck, her drink held high above her head like a torch.
“And I said to Rémy,” the woman shouts, “I said that what is going to ruin art isn’t the young people, the young people are fine, no matter what anyone says about their heads being completely empty. What’s going to ruin art is commerce.” The last word is said imperiously, with the hoisted drink waggled for emphasis, liquid sloshing.
Tanja leans toward Lee and in a whispered imitation of the old woman says, “Commerce.”
But Lee is interested, and waits for the woman to continue.
“If you think that Americans are going to be sitting for portraits now,” the woman says, pointing a long maroon fingernail at Man, “you are very mistaken.”
Man clears his throat. “Is it that bad? We haven’t felt the effects here yet. In fact, I was just talking to Arthur Wheeler about this very subject—”
The woman cuts him off. “I’m from Pittsburgh,” she says, shaking her head. “I went to get money out for this trip, and can you imagine, but they told me they didn’t have it. My bank! Didn’t have my money.”
Man nods, frowning, and questions the woman again, his voice pitched lower so Lee can’t hear him. Tanja turns toward Lee and says, “Who was the bizarre person you were talking to before?”
“Claude Cahun. She’s a photographer. She’s going to have her own show at a gallery near here.” Lee hands Tanja the card. She looks at it for a brief moment and then hands it back. Tanja has never cared much about art.
“Lord, I hope she does something about her hair before then,” Tanja says, and they both laugh.
“She’s actually very talented,” Lee says. “It’s not everyone who gets to show their work in this city.”
Tanja raises a shoulder in an elegant half shrug. “Soon enough it will be you.”
“I hope so,” Lee says, but only part of her believes it could really happen. She remembers a snippet from her father’s last letter. “My father’s photographs are being published,” she says.
Tanja looks at her, surprised. “His photos of you?”
“Some sort of architectural shots he took.”
“Ah.”
Tanja has known Lee’s father since their girlhood, and has never liked him, though she sat for art portraits with him just as Lee did. They even did portraits together, which Lee is still a bit embarrassed by, her father’s staging making them look more like women in love than friends. Lee still has not responded to his letter; she has just stuffed it in the bottom of a drawer and tried not to think about it.
“I like Man,” Tanja whispers now, changing the subject, her voice smelling of wine as she leans in close to Lee.
“You do?”
“Yes. He seems to really love you.”
Lee reaches out and touches Tanja’s forearm. “What did he say?”
“He spent almost our entire conversation—before that woman joined us—telling me how talented you are. Some picture you took of a broken umbrella? He went on and on about it.”
Lee flushes with pride and takes a sip of her drink to cover it up. She didn’t know that Man liked that photo, though she herself was quite happy with it. Man is still talking to the woman, so Lee asks Tanja if she needs another drink, and they set off together for the bar, where they stand for a while, nibbling on pickled eggs and downing their drinks so that they can grab fresh ones. When they get back to Man, Tristan Tzara has joined him, and the conversation seems much the same as it was when they left, though a larger crowd of people has gathered around them. Every time Lee sees Tristan, he is politicking, and she can tell by his deeply earnest expression that tonight will be more of the same. He is a man who should travel with his own soapbox.
“How do we justify making art when class is still such an issue, when people are struggling?” Tristan shouts.
“Art is always justified!” someone shouts, and a few people rap their knuckles on the tables in agreement.
Lee moves over to Man and kisses his cheek. Tristan nods at her, then continues talking, switching to French and speaking quickly and loudly: they must liberate people from bourgeois concerns; under the rod of the capitalist system people are exploited; exploitation is death. Lee tugs on Man’s sleeve, wanting to ask him about the journal and whether or not they can ask Tristan to include some of her photographs, but before she can speak, Man says to her, “We’re going to make the entire next issue of 221 about this. A new manifesto about the role art and photography play in freeing the mind from complacency.”
More manifestos. Talk, talk, talk. Perhaps all their talking makes a difference, but so far Lee hasn’t seen it. She likes the conversations she has with Man about art when they are alone much better than these public shouting sessions, when confrontation and conflict seem to be the point. At the studio, they talk about desire, how much it is like hunger, how love is as important to art as revolution. Lee has found this much more interesting, but even those ideas struck her as slightly false. Or perhaps it isn’t that the ideas themselves are false, but that she doesn’t quite believe that art always needs an underlying message. Her favorite pieces of Man’s are the ones that don’t require an explanation or larger context, the ones that simply make her feel when she looks at them.
Still, there is something energizing about what Tristan is saying, the passion that guides his thinking. Lee looks back at where Tanja stands behind her, obviously bored, and realizes that over these past few months some of what he and Man are saying has begun to affect her own work. That having a reason and purpose behind the photographs she creates is important, even if she doesn’t quite know yet what that purpose is.
But tonight she is here with her friend, and as Lee looks at her she feels the lifetime of their affection for each other. She steps slightly out of the circle of people surrounding Tristan, throws her arm around her old friend’s shoulder, and clinks her glass against Tanja’s with a smile.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Lee lies with Man on the couch in the studio. She has smudges of paint on her stomach and thighs where his hands have been. He rests his head on her, tells her the past months are the most creative he has known. The photographs, the paintings, the sculptures—they are the best work he’s ever done.
“It’s you,” he says. “All you.”
“What about with Kiki?” she asks him. In the four months they’ve been together, Man hasn’t mentioned her, so until now neither has Lee, but she has wondered about her again and again. Lee has never cared about any man’s former lovers, but with Man she finds herself dwelling on his past more than she’d like to admit.
“It was different.”
“Different how?” Lee sits up and starts buttoning her shirt.
“She was young—”
“I’m young.”
He looks at her, starts again. “She was young. I was young. I met her at a café. There was a misunderstanding—you don’t care about this.”