Lee’s mouth feels numb, and she hears the words as if they are coming from someone else. The room is very dim and she is glad she cannot see Man’s expression.
“This is entirely different,” Man says.
“I know.”
“I am so sorry that happened to you. So, so sorry.” He moves his arm around her waist and she rolls over so that he is holding her. The feeling of his body is pure animal comfort. Lee feels herself relax a bit, feels her heartbeat slow.
“I love you so much,” he tells her.
“I love you too.”
“Has this been hard for you?” Man asks. “Us together? The things I’ve wanted you to do?”
“I don’t think so,” Lee says. She is confused. “But—the blindfold. It scared me.”
“I’m so sorry. We don’t have to do that. Of course we don’t have to.”
“I think part of what scared me is I want you to.”
He wraps his legs and arms around her even tighter and she lets the warmth of his skin sink into her. Very gently, he runs his hand through her hair and kisses her cheek and neck. They lie like that for a long time, and finally she says, “I think I want you to do it.”
“Are you sure?” He sounds as nervous as she is.
“Yes, I think so.”
He gets up to grab the scarf, and then stops. “No,” he says. “Maybe someday, if you really want me to, but not now.”
Lee watches him. He pulls her against him again, and they stay that way for a while, and then Lee finds his lips with hers. She feels hollowed out and hungry, as if she has made room inside herself by telling him. He is gentle with her still, his kisses tentative, but suddenly she wants him closer to her, and she pushes her mouth harder against his and presses the full length of her body to him. When Man moves on top of her, she closes her eyes and puts her arm over them, imagining what the darkness of the blindfold would feel like. With her eyes gone black, all that is left is touch: Man’s thumbs against her nipples, his thigh between her legs. Behind her eyelids beautiful bright flashes explode. And then as Man starts to move inside her, he is all she thinks about—she could not make her mind think of anything else if she tried. She is alone with him in the darkness she has made and when he calls her name she feels herself dissolving, into sparks, into film grains, and by the time they are done she does not know where she ends and he begins.
It becomes even more than it was before. He cannot get enough of her. In the mornings, he takes her picture as she stretches like a cat getting out of bed. At the studio, he puts her next to the window, he bends her down against the wall. Instead of using the studio camera, he puts a small one around his neck and gets close to her. He runs his hand through her short hair and pulls her head back, takes close-up, blurry pictures of her neck. In the images her skin doesn’t even look like skin but like a river, the muscles turned to water rushing over stones. He runs his fingers over her breasts and takes pictures of the goose bumps he raises on her skin. He cannot get close enough, takes dozens of pictures of just her lips, just her ear, just her eye.
In the darkroom they perfect the technique that she discovered, figuring out the right amount of time required to re-create the haunting, double-exposed effect. And when they try it out on pictures of her, when she sees what they have made together—her torso glowing like a ghost, manipulated into someone she almost doesn’t recognize—what Lee feels is heat and pride and love, all at the same time.
Solarization, they decide to call it. It feels like that to her, dazzling, as if they have untethered her body and brought it closer to the sun.
After a few weeks of experiments, they make one print they both agree is perfect. It’s simple, just a shot of her face in profile. She is set against a gray background, and the solarization gives her face a nimbus of black. She looks like an etching, set out of time. She looks more beautiful than she has ever looked before. Man takes a pen and writes along the print’s white border “Man Ray/Lee Miller 1930,” then puts his signature below and hands her the pen. Lee scrawls her own signature with shaking hands. There is nothing better than seeing their names together on the page.
A few weeks later Lee finishes her bell jar series, a triptych the way she has imagined. The first image shows the model with her eyes open, staring out and past the viewer. In the second her eyes are closed and her head is tipped slightly to the side, appearing to rest against the glass. The third image is solarized and has a submerged, underwater quality to it. The pictures feel very personal. As if they are telling a story or revealing something she hasn’t been able to say.
Shyly, Lee shows them to Man. In her heart she knows they are good but while he looks at them she is stricken with panic. She has no eye; she is a fraud. He spends a long time looking, and she tries to remember that this is what he always does.
Finally Lee can’t take it anymore. “I’m not sure about the print quality—maybe the first one should be darker to balance out the last? Or maybe I should only use two images instead of three? The first and the last, maybe? Or the second and the last…?”
Finally Man says, “These are incredible. The three of them together—they’re what we should print in 221. I’ll talk to Tristan.”
That night, elated, Lee goes to Bricktop to hear the music. She goes alone and chooses a table in the back. Josephine Baker is singing. Her voice is gravelly, the song slow and sentimental. “Blue days, all of them gone / Nothin’ but blue skies from now on.”
Lee closes her eyes and rests her head on the wall. The song feels exactly right.
Part Two
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
At the end of August, on a suffocatingly hot day, Lee stands at the threshold of her apartment for the last time. She has already sent her boxes to Man’s, has sold what little furniture did not come with her rooms. She looks around the space, emptied of her possessions, and hopes she is making the right decision.
There are a thousand reasons to move in with Man. Money has become a worry in the past few months—things are still relatively inexpensive in Paris, but more stories roll in about the crash from family and friends back home, and some of their acquaintances who have been living in France for years are heading back to the States. Man has fewer portrait bookings, and the magazines are cutting back as well, printing issues with smaller spreads. Man seems unconcerned, but he agrees it will be nice to pay less rent instead of skimping on other things. They are both terrible at skimping; Lee has gotten used to helping Man spend his money, and when he wants to spend it on her, she has a hard time saying no.
They haven’t spent a night apart in months, and before they even talked about living together, more and more of Lee’s possessions had migrated to his apartment. But now, gazing around her bare rooms, she feels a little worried. As Tanja so rightly pointed out when she visited, Lee and Man work together, they socialize together, and now she won’t even have a space to call her own. Their worlds are completely joined. What will happen when she needs to be alone? What will happen when she is irritable or sad and has no choice but to be those things in front of Man? Lee pictures herself doing what she did when she first got to Paris—whiling away the hours at empty cafés—but now she will be going out to find some space for herself, and not because she’s hungry for human interaction.
For Man, living together is a simple proposition. One of their beds sits empty every night—it is a waste. And he loves her. He loves being with her and hates when they are apart. What good does it do to keep two apartments?