“Yes, I do.”
Lee drags the story out of him. He had just arrived in Paris. He went to La Closerie des Lilas and saw a woman sitting in the corner with a friend. He knew, even fresh off the boat from Brooklyn as he was, that she didn’t belong there. She wore no hat, had her hair unpinned and cheeks rouged to a consumptive brightness, and was speaking too loudly in a fast stream of words with a guttural rasp to them. Back home in New York, Man had been doing nude studies, and Kiki’s loose hairstyle reminded him of the prostitutes who often posed for him, easy in their bodies and grateful for a job for which all they had to do was stand still. From the moment Man first saw her he wanted to protect her. He watched as a waiter approached Kiki and told her that she must leave the restaurant if she did not cover her hair. Kiki screamed that she would not leave. The waiter insisted, and she rose from her seat and stepped up onto and over the table. In two quick steps she was down and walking toward the door. As she was passing, Man reached out and grabbed her arm, offering her a place at his table so that the waiter would not bother her anymore. He spoke hardly any French and Kiki no English, but somehow they enchanted each other. He took her to dinner and then a show and then his studio and then his bed, and they were together for ten years before he left her.
“Why did you leave her?” Lee wants to know because she wants to confirm she is better than Kiki, wants to know all the ways in which the other woman failed.
“She was jealous.”
“Jealous of what? What did you do?”
Man looks at her with an injured expression. “Nothing! She was volatile—such a performer. She spent every night singing songs about betrayal and pretty soon she saw it everywhere.” He stands up and crosses over to the office. “Here, let me show you something.” He returns with a small black address book. Inside are dozens of names, all written in Man’s neat hand, but as Lee looks closer she sees that some of the names and telephone numbers have been altered, run over again and again in thick black pen until the letters look like misshapen animals.
“I came home one day and found it like this.” He flips through the pages, chooses one, and hands her the book. “My cousin Flora, who lives in Philadelphia. My grandmother. Every woman’s name that was in there.”
“Had you been with someone else?”
“No, no, nothing like that.”
Lee thumbs through the book. The markings are pressed into the pages so hard they are visible on the other side, and there are gouges where the pen’s tip caught against the fibers. On one page, Kiki has written merde merde merde in the margins. Lee imagines Kiki in Man’s bedroom, white-knuckled, furious. But as she keeps flipping through, something about the other woman’s anger tugs at Lee, and she is surprised to find herself feeling empathy, or even kinship. “There must have been some reason she did this—”
“There’s not. I was devoted to her.” Man’s tone is sharp. “When I was with her, I did everything I could to help her along. She wanted to paint, so I bought her canvases, let her use my oils. She wanted to act, so I took her with me to the States when I went home to visit my family and set up meetings for her in New York. She wanted to write—she had this idea that she’d write a memoir, so I read some of her early pages and helped her translate them into English. And I introduced her to a friend of mine, Broca, because he put out a newssheet about Montparnasse and I thought he might be interested in Kiki’s stories. Well, he was more than interested. She started working with him all the time. Writing. And then she moved in with him.”
Lee is confused. “So… she left you?”
Man takes the address book out of Lee’s hands and sets it down on the side table, then walks across the room and stares out the window. “No, I left her. I made it very clear that her behavior was unacceptable. And it was. Broca turned out to be a drinker and a drug addict, always wandering through the street and muttering to himself. Kiki wasn’t with him for long—I think she left him for her accompanist, actually. An accordion player.”
It is clear from Man’s tone that he is still angry about what happened. He has not answered Lee’s question about why Kiki was so jealous of him, but she doesn’t want to push him much further. She goes over to where he stands at the window, wraps her arms around him, and kisses his ear.
She waits a few moments, then says, “I want to meet her. I want to hear her sing.”
“Well. She can be cruel. She knows we are together.”
“Are you worried she’s going to be mean to me?” Lee puts on a pout, bats her lashes.
Man rubs his finger along the side of her face and down her neck.
“You want to know? I’m worried that you two are going to become best friends and Kiki is going to tell you terrible stories about me that make you regret all of this. She could do that. She has done that.”
“And all along I thought you were worried for me.”
“Worried for you? I think you’re quite capable of taking care of yourself.”
When Lee walks through Montparnasse she keeps seeing broadsheets advertising Kiki’s performances, and no matter what she does she can’t get the woman out of her head. Later that week she asks Man if she can see his pictures of Kiki. She can’t help herself. He never misses an opportunity to show off his work, so she’s not surprised when he goes over to the flat files and starts pulling out folders.
At first what she feels is utter relief, tension she didn’t know she had unknotting in her neck. This is the most beautiful woman in Paris? To Lee’s American eye, Kiki looks bloated as over-yeasted bread, her makeup garish, her hairstyle outdated by two decades, her derriere wide and sagging as a half-filled flour sack.
But some of the compositions are uncomfortably familiar. Here are Man’s bedroom curtains, the same as they are today. There Kiki tips back her head—Man has taken a close-up of her neck. It could be Lee’s neck, the shot is so similar. Man doesn’t seem to expect Lee to say anything and keeps up a quick patter about what he was thinking when he shot a certain image, or pauses to inspect one and explain how he would print it differently now.
He shows her at least a hundred pictures. When he is done she is still quiet. Man asks what she thinks. Lee hesitates and then says what she thinks she must: Kiki is very beautiful.
“Of course,” Man says. “But what do you think of the work?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Biarritz,” Man says.
Lee is balancing the ledger; Man is sitting at the table in the far corner of the room. He has appointments booked solid for the rest of the week.
“Biarritz?”
“Let’s go,” he says. “I can get the car out, we can drive there. You’ve never been, have you?”
She makes the phone calls for him. Apologies—Man Ray is very sorry, but there has been a death in the family. Can they rebook? Part of her knows Man should be worrying about money, about angering the clients who pay the bills, but it is simple for her to ignore that thought. If he isn’t worried, she shouldn’t be either.
It takes her an hour to tidy up, go home, and pack her valise, and when she comes downstairs from her apartment he is already idling at the curb in his Voisin, the big long car growling like an animal. Lee has never been in a car this nice. She ties a striped scarf over her hair and props her arm on the leather-covered door, feeling glamorous and louche. She rests her hand on Man’s thigh for most of the ride.
It’s a long drive on lousy roads, so they stop in Poitiers for the night, strolling like tourists through its cobblestoned streets, eating dinner at a small restaurant where they are served brown bread and boeuf bourguignon, the gravy rich with cognac and studded with carrots and potatoes and pearl onions. Lee eats so much the waistband of her dress is tight when they leave the restaurant. At night they make love in their small hotel room, lit only by the full moon that glows like a lamp through the curtainless windows, and in the morning they eat croissants in bed, their fingers slick with butter and smelling of sugar and yeast. When they go outside, shielding their eyes from the bright sunshine, so different from the light in Paris, Lee takes pictures, the towers on the Palais de Justice like men in jester’s caps, and she feels happier than she has ever felt, free and clean and light inside. As they cross over a footbridge, she turns to Man. “Let me take your picture.”