CHAPTER FOURTEEN
By now it is June again, and Lee realizes she’s been in Paris for an entire year. The city is still fresh to her, but she has settled in, found her haunts, and begun to feel as if she belongs. On balmy days, she wanders through the Cimetière du Montparnasse, just a few blocks from her apartment, or spends an afternoon at the Bois de Vincennes, watching the rowboats and the swans float across the placid lake. She always brings her camera, and loves taking pictures of the carousel with its carved pigs, the fierce expressions on the children’s faces as they wait to spear the iron rings. In the early evenings, she and Man take a sidewalk table at Le Select or La Coupole and nurse aperitifs, often so content they don’t even feel the need to speak. One particular toy vendor Lee likes often stations himself in front of Le Select, and whenever he comes to their table Man buys her one of the toy dogs he is selling. Lee has a whole collection now that she keeps on top of her dresser.
She barely ever gets hit with the dark moods that were so frequent when she first arrived in Paris. When she thinks back to those early days in the city, the memories are tinged with loneliness: wandering the city with her arms crossed tight across her chest, sitting cross-legged on her bed with her sketchbook on her knees, catching the reflection of her wistful face in a store window. Moving here was harder than she thought it would be. But now, the memories feel as though they are from much more than a year ago, and the girl she was then is distant and unfamiliar.
Some evenings—more now that there are so many stories about money and its lack, so much more anxiety—Man has been going out with his circle. To Drosso’s, where they try to ingratiate themselves to their host in the hope that Drosso will buy their work. To Tristan’s opulent apartment, paid for with a family fortune that is never mentioned. Sometimes to Le Dôme, where Man mutters darkly about the prices and the atmosphere.
Lee tried to go to Tristan’s with him once, but it was a disaster. She was the only woman in the room, and her presence set the men off-kilter. Even Man was different—brash and boastful. The talk revolved around sex: fellatio techniques, homoerotic desire, the depiction of penetration in Surrealist art. Everyone kept looking to Lee as if for her opinion, referring to her as Madame Man Ray, but she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to act. At first, she went along with the conversation, laughing gamely. She has always been adept at double entendres and loves the visual ones Man creates in his work—his photo of an eggbeater that looks like genitalia, or the close-up he shot of the peach—but when she tried a bawdy joke with the group, Man cast a disapproving look at her that made her unsure what he wanted from her. She wondered if she was supposed to act shocked, if having a woman there as a foil to the conversation freed up the men to not act shocked themselves. By midnight, with everyone tittering like schoolgirls and sloppily drunk, Lee decided she was ready to go home.
So now on most of the nights when Man goes out with his crowd, she stays in, or goes back to the studio to get in a few more hours of work. That is part of the beauty of the darkroom for her. Completely sealed off from the rest of the world, time loses meaning there, measured only by the metronome as she guides her prints from developer to stop bath to fix. The transition from the amber-lit darkroom out into the city at night is an easy one, and often she goes home and straight to bed, diving deep into a dreamless sleep from which even Man, returning late, cannot rouse her. Other times she is antsy, filled with energy, and on those nights she pulls her hat down low and walks the blocks around her apartment until she wears herself out. The sun doesn’t set now until almost ten o’clock, and after it does the sky retains its echo, bluing the clouds and obscuring the stars for hours. On the nights it rains, steam rises from the pavement and curls around Lee’s ankles as she walks.
Man has put off writing his essay for 221, but now the deadline is looming, and with every passing day, his anxiety grows. It turns out that as a writer Man is insufferable. In his office he sweeps aside papers and pounds on his big Remington in noisy bursts. Sometimes he poises his fingers over the keys for five or ten minutes, and then types furiously for a while, only to later rip the paper off the platen and toss it on the floor. Lee’s work is relegated to a small side table, where her concentration is interrupted by his sighs and constant questions.
“How about this?” he says, and reads out loud. “‘The mode of the artist is one of perception. In perceiving, in replicating, reality, the artist comes to create automata of his experiences, that are simultaneously new modes of reality as seen through the eyes of the artist, and also ultimately inferior simulacra of lived experience.’”
“Hmm,” says Lee, putting down her pencil. “What are you actually trying to say?”
He groans, stands up, and crushes the paper into a ball. “I’m trying to say that when I look at a picture of you, I want to feel exactly as good as I felt when I was taking the picture. Photography can capture reality, but how does it capture emotion? Isn’t the emotion what makes reality real?”
“So why don’t you say that?”
“I am saying that! Or at least I’m trying to.”
“Sometimes a direct approach works better,” Lee says, and goes back to her correspondence.
One night when Man is out with friends, Lee goes alone to the little gallery on Boulevard Raspail to see Claude’s pictures. The show is called Masks and every photographer has interpreted the word differently. Claude has three photos in the show, and in each she is dressed in a different costume: the weight lifter outfit from the show’s postcard, a swimmer with spit-curled hair, a matron in a Parliamentary wig and burlap dress. The work is good. Arresting, even. Lee walks up and down the narrow cramped hallway a few times—Claude was right: the gallery is less a room and more a passageway between two buildings—and takes it all in, her body aching with envy as she looks at all the pictures.
When Lee leaves she decides she is hungry, that she will plug the ache she feels with food. A small bistro down the street has a seat at its marble-topped bar; Lee orders a thick slab of pâté studded with pistachios that comes with a little pot of mustard, and washes it down with white wine. The meal is delicious but leaves her feeling bloated and tired. Instead of going home she goes back to the darkroom, where she prints from the same negative a dozen times, each attempt marred by something different: one is underexposed, the next has a hair on the surface, another a dark patch in the corner. Each time it comes out wrong, Lee growls with frustration and sets up the negative to print again.
It takes Man right up to and past the deadline to finish his essay. That night he stays at the studio until 3 a.m., and though Lee has gone home she imagines him in the office, drinking and running his hands through his hair until it stands up like a feather duster.
As he is quietly slipping off his clothes so as not to wake her, she murmurs sleepily, “Did you finish?”
“Yes. It’s done. I called it ‘The Light of Our Time.’”
“‘The Age of Light,’” she says. “That would be better.”
“That’s good,” he says admiringly. “You’re good at this.”
“I’m good at lots of things.”
“You certainly are,” Man says, and lies down next to her. Lee snuggles up against him until she has fit her body completely against his.
The idea comes to Lee one afternoon while she is walking. A woman, not Lee herself, kneeling behind a desk. On the desk’s surface a bell jar, with the woman’s head lined up so that it appears to be floating inside the glass. Lee likes the idea so much she makes sketches of it, and soon she has filled an entire notebook with ideas. Until she composes it through a camera’s eye, though, she can’t be sure it will work, so she tries it out in the studio without a model. It is then that she begins to understand the allure of an Amélie, an interchangeable person she can bring in to pose for her. For some reason, she doesn’t want to tell Man about her project, wants it to belong just to her. So she puts up a note at the art school where he has advertised before and a few days later gets a response.