“Not that many. Not once since I’ve been with you.”
Lee is not surprised at Man’s answer. She doesn’t know why. It is as if she knew the minute the man touched him at the party. If it were women she would be furious, but there is something about the image of these men together that arouses her: one brother or both, Man tied, submissive. The power in it.
She cinches his other wrist.
“Did you like being with them?”
His voice is so low she can barely hear it. “Yes, but—”
Lee cuts him off. “I don’t care what you did with them. Just don’t do it now that you’re with me.”
Man still has the covers over him. Lee stands and pulls them off, leaving him exposed. His body and face are in shadow, the whites of his eyes bright spots in the moonlit room. Lee stands looking down at him, waiting for her breath to come more slowly. Then she kneels and takes the length of his penis, already erect, in her mouth, following the motion with her hand. She does it only a few times, then stops and stands up again so she can look down at him. Teasing him, making him wait. His eyes don’t leave her. She puts her hand between her legs and touches herself, loves having him watch her while she does it.
“Lee, please…” Man says after a while, his voice small.
She waits to bend down to him again until she cannot make herself wait any longer.
Later, afterward, what surprises her most of all is how much she likes it. How good it feels to be in control.
PARIS,
DECEMBER 1944
The bennies make Lee’s teeth ache but they also help her get the writing done. Dave has nicked some more for her from the other soldiers and now she’s got a cache of them that will see her through her article. She takes one as soon as she gets out of bed. Cracks open the inhaler and eases the paper strip from inside, rolls it into a pill, and downs it with hot water because no one has any coffee left. Then she sits at her makeshift desk, puts her fingers on the typewriter keys, strokes their curved edges. Soon her veins will start singing and the words will come, the words she sees behind her eyelids when she lies in bed at night, too agitated to sleep but too drunk to get up and start working. Outside her hotel window is her stash of jerry cans, some filled with framboise, others with gin, all within arm’s reach and very tempting. She has to get the draft done first.
Her most recent photos sit on her desk. On top is the shot of surgeons gathered around an amputee, holding him like some sort of gruesome Pietà. When Lee took that picture she wasn’t able to hide her revulsion, and she was glad the soldier was unconscious so he couldn’t see her face. Looking at it again wakes her up even hotter than the bennies and she types a few lines as quickly as she can. But then she reads them over, black marks on the page that are nothing like what she sees in her mind. The words are not right. Nothing is right. Her photos are shit and the article is going to be shit and she’s a disappointment to Audrey and everyone who has ever put their faith in her. Was she really naive enough to think she could become a writer? The anxiety starts in the pit of her stomach and rises into her throat like a trapped bird, fluttering and frantic. Lee slams the lid of her typewriter case shut and pounds on the wall for Davie. He is there in an instant and she knows he can tell just by looking at her that she’s too wound up, but he doesn’t say anything, just comes over to her and rubs her neck and shoulders until her heart stops racing.
When he has calmed her down, he picks up the stack of photos from her desk and flops on the bed.
“This one,” he says, holding up a shot she took in Paris right after the surrender, a picture of a woman modeling a Bruyère coat in the Place Vendôme, framed through the shards of a shattered shop window. “Jesus, that’s a good one. The way you foregrounded the bullet holes.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so.”
His praise brings the words back into focus. Lee turns around and pounds out a paragraph, only stopping once to worry that it doesn’t sound right. When she is done, she pulls the paper off the platen and hands it to him. He reads it slowly, but this time Lee doesn’t need him to tell her it is good. She already knows. While he’s reading, she eases the window open and grabs a jerry can, fills up two glasses to their brims. It’s not even noon, but lately she’s turned everything into an opportunity for celebration.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
One hot July night a month or so after the Patou party, when Man is out again, Lee stays late in the studio. She has been working on her bell jar images. There is a small series of them now, and she is very pleased with them. Their framing makes the model’s head appear to float inside the jar, trapped like a specimen under the glass even though she was kneeling behind it. In a few shots the woman has a dreamy expression; in others she has her eyes closed and her head tilted to one side. In all of them, there is a sense of claustrophobia that feels both provocative and familiar. Lee has started to understand her work in this way: she is consciously evoking a feeling rather than just lucking into a successful image.
Lee decides that if she can get the series done tonight, she is going to show it to Man. It is her best work so far, and she has been waiting until she has all the images printed. Perhaps four of them could be mounted in a frame, or there could be a triptych of them in 221. They work best in a grouping, as if they themselves are a collection of specimens. Maybe, if she ever has a show, the pictures can be pinned to the wall rather than framed, or they can be displayed inside bell jars. That might be the most provocative of all.
Lee moves through the darkroom easily now. It is almost a second home.
When Lee is done printing, she goes back into the developing room. There is one roll of film left from the bell jar sessions, and she is curious to see what it contains. She lines up her tools as she’s been taught and turns off the light. It is still a shock to be plunged into darkness. She has her hands on the film and the church key. She peels open the canister and is getting ready to start dipping the film in the developer when she feels a skitter-scratching run across her shoe and dart up her leg. Lee lets out a shriek, drops the film, shakes her leg frantically, and, in her panic, reaches up and pulls the cord to turn on the ceiling light.
The first thing Lee notices in the sudden brightness is the tail of the mouse as it runs under the table. The next thing she notices is her film, curled in a heap on the table and almost certainly ruined. Quickly she turns off the light. What to do? The chances of the film being salvageable are minimal. But she loves the photos so much—they are the final roll of her bell jar session, the one she thought might be the best of all.
Out of indecision more than anything else, she goes through the motions of developing the film. When the images are finally in the fix, she sees that they aren’t entirely black, as she would have imagined them to be; they are murky, low contrast, fuzzy compared with the others from the session. She feels a crushing sense of disappointment that she knows is related as much to Man and her growing need to impress him as it is to the loss of her work. Hanging from the clothesline to dry, the negatives are like a sad little ribbon of failure, and she goes home immediately, not even wanting to print the other work she has planned to complete. When Man returns, she pretends to be asleep.
The next morning when Lee comes into the studio, she takes down the negatives to inspect them under the loupe. They’re altered, certainly, but when she sees them magnified, she notices that they seem almost reversed, as if the light and dark crystals on the film have switched places. Intrigued, she chooses one and prints it. As the image appears in the developing tray, she draws in a sharp breath. She was correct—there has been some sort of reversal, and all around the image, where the light and dark areas of the composition meet, there is a fine black line, as if someone has traced it with a soft pencil. The image itself is extremely low contrast, which is unfortunate, but paired with the ghostly effect of the black outline, it is like nothing she has ever seen.