Rushing, Lee prints another few images from the series. In each the effect is subtly different—perhaps, she thinks, because of where that particular frame was positioned when the light came on—but they all have the black outline and the same ethereal quality. By the time Man arrives, she has printed several more and cannot wait to show him.
He comes over and kisses her, but she has no time for kisses.
“Look.” Lee shows him the prints and explains what happened in the developing room. He takes one of them, still dripping wet, out into the light so he can see it better.
“Very curious,” he says. His finger hovers just above the surface of the print and traces the outline along the bell jar. “So you mean to tell me that you turned on the light—the overhead light—in the developing room, and this is what you got? That really doesn’t seem possible.”
“I know. I thought I had completely ruined them, but for some reason I developed them anyway, and here we are.”
“Lucky mistake,” he murmurs, and Lee clenches her teeth in annoyance. He looks at all the other prints, holding up one image and saying, “You know, we could experiment with this. See what would happen if we exposed it to light for longer or shorter times. How long do you think the light was on?”
“Maybe ten seconds?”
“We could try five, twenty—and we could lay the film out on the table purposefully so that the exposure is uniform.” He is moving from print to print as he talks.
“I was thinking that if we underexposed the film to begin with maybe it wouldn’t be so murky.”
“Ah, yes—we should try that!” His face fills with excitement. “All we need are some terrible pictures we can experiment with.” She follows him as he leaves the darkroom. He grabs both of their cameras from the office and throws his coat back on, and then fills his camera bag with extra film.
Outside, Lee poses on bridges, makes funny faces, takes pictures of Man doing the same. Since the goal is to use up the film, they take pictures of pedestrians, shadows, signposts, trash cans, antique store windows. Soon it devolves into a game to see who can do the oddest pose in a shot with a stranger, so Lee goes and sits behind someone at a café, puts a napkin on her head like a babushka, and stares at the camera with a look of surprise. Man leans on the back of a car that someone has just parked; Lee takes a picture of him sticking out his tongue while the driver, not noticing him, opens the car door. For each roll, they experiment with under-and overexposing, making careful notes about which roll is treated which way. After less than an hour they’ve used all the film, and they head back to develop it.
In the studio, they are methodical. There are twelve rolls of film; they make a chart and hang it on the wall, marking out how long they will expose each roll to light and if it was underexposed to begin with. Only one roll of film can be in the developing bath at a time, so they work as a team: Man does the exposures and dips them in the developer; Lee agitates them in the stop and fix and hangs them up to dry. When they speak, they speak only about the work.
“This one is twelve seconds.”
“I think we should mark them with tape once they dry so we don’t get confused, and then we can match that to the chart.”
When she and Man make eye contact, she can tell he feels it too: a sense that they are doing something momentous. To be able to manipulate the negative itself, its chemical properties, the very nature of it, rather than to alter it manually by scratching or cutting—it feels as if they are creating a new medium altogether. She hopes so much that it works, that it wasn’t some weird fluke when she did it the first time.
Without acknowledgment, it seems that they have both decided to wait to look at the images until they develop all the film. Lee hangs them up and marks them with tape without even holding them up to the safelight. Finally, after several hours, all twelve strips hang together on the drying line, and Man rubs her back as they stand there looking at the film.
The three little words come unbidden out of the ache she feels in her stomach. “I love you,” she says.
Man puts his arm around her shoulders and pulls her tight. “I love you too,” he whispers.
It is the first time they’ve said the words to each other, and it should be huge, but it just feels of a piece with the work they are doing together. Lee hugs him back quickly and then moves away, grabbing one of the still-damp negative strips and taking it out into the main room. Immediately, it is obvious that they’ve re-created the effect that Lee produced accidentally. Lampposts glow white, outlined against white streets. Man’s hair against the parked car is traced with a black edge. Lee’s eyes are shockingly dark against her ghostly skin. She feels as if she is looking at pictures from another planet. Together, she and Man choose twelve images, one from each roll, and print them, moving around each other in the darkroom as smoothly as dancers.
When the prints are laid out side by side, it’s clear that there’s a pattern—that their experiments with underexposure have created subtle variations in the effect. They talk about the images for a long time, appraising them. Which effect works best with which image, what they would tweak if they did it again. They both scrawl copious notes, and after a while, Lee puts down her pencil and stretches, rubbing at her neck where tension sends threads of pain into her shoulders.
“Are you hungry?” Man asks her, moving her hands aside and placing his own on her neck to dig into her muscles.
She rolls her head back and closes her eyes. “Mm. Starving. But I don’t really want to stop.”
“It will be here later,” he says, and they grab their coats and walk to Le Dôme, where Man orders a dozen oysters and champagne. Lee is almost too worked up to eat, but the first oyster hits the back of her throat like a gulp of the sea and suddenly she is famished. Brine and lemon, the delicate fizz of the champagne when she swallows, Man’s hand on her leg, the hum and clatter of the restaurant around them, everything amplified, larger and better than it was before.
“Can you work after we drink this?” she asks, gesturing to the bottle.
“No—but let’s be done for the day. It will be there tomorrow.”
So they drink the bottle and order another. Around them the crowd ebbs and flows, new faces replacing old. They see people they know and ignore them. The longer they sit there, the less Lee hears the noises and clatter, as if a thin shell separates them from everyone else. They see no one and no one sees them.
When they get home, electrified, tingling from liquor, they hurry to bed. Man starts at her feet and begins kissing her, delicate kisses all along her body. When he gets to her mouth, he lingers, and then he stops and reaches for the nightstand and gets out one of the scarves they have been using. Lee lifts her arm to let him tie it. But he shakes his head no and folds the fabric on itself to make a blindfold, then moves to put it on her.
She pushes her hand against his chest to stop him. All of a sudden her heart is racing, she is sweating, she cannot breathe.
Man freezes. “What’s wrong?”
Lee cannot speak. The blindfold has terrified her. She swings her legs over the side of the bed and sits with her arms crossed over her stomach. Man runs a gentle hand across her back. Her heartbeat thumps in her neck, and she tries to take a deep breath to calm herself down, but she can only manage little sips of air. Man gets up and brings her a glass of water. She drinks it down. He waits for her to speak.