Man stands up, stretches, and pats his belly. He walks down toward the bank of the stream, picks up a stone from the water’s edge, and sends it bouncing a few times over the surface of the still water. Lee joins him, starts collecting stones and fills her pockets with them.
“Want me to teach you?” Man asks.
Lee pulls a stone from her coat. She palms it for a moment, remembering, then with a neat twist of her wrist launches it smoothly toward the stream, where it skips almost twice as far as Man’s before sinking. “Ha!” she shouts, pleased.
Man whistles. Lee throws another stone and another, the technique coming back more fully each time she does it. She and her brothers spent whole afternoons down at the pond on their property, skipping stones, catching fish, Lee’s pants rolled up over her calves, the ladylike white bows her mother insisted she wear in her braids drooping and mud-splattered. Man stops throwing his own stones to watch her, and she revels in his attention, a different kind of attention than when he takes her picture.
“You were a wild child, weren’t you?” Man asks.
“I suppose I was.” Lee knows he means wild like free, and she was that way, especially when she was very young. Back then there was no difference between her and her brothers. Whole days were spent outside, exploring; she remembers feeling as though she could hoard the whole world and eat it with a spoon. Before what happened with—she almost hears his name inside her head but stops herself as always. Her childhood is split that way, two neat halves, before and after. It was after when she went truly wild, but not in the way Man means. When her wildness became a thing she felt she had to hide from everyone.
Lee stops skipping stones and stands staring at the water. Maybe Man knows what she is thinking. She’s not sure. All she knows is he is quiet, and she appreciates it.
After a while he says, “Can you show me how you do it, that little flick of your wrist?”
She goes up behind him and puts her small hand on his larger one, their fingers joined around the cool round stone, and she demonstrates a couple of times before Man tries it on his own. His first attempt goes plunking into the water, but it is not long before he has it mastered, the elegant snap that Lee learned all those years ago. When they tire of the diversion, they walk over to the footbridge, where they stand together and look down at the water, its surface smooth as a mirror once the ripples of the stones have disappeared.
Later, as they drive home, Lee takes off her shoes, tucks up her feet on the seat, and lays her head on Man’s shoulder. She feels content, warm, and drowsy. She thinks that it will not be so hard to have her father here. To show him her new life. She is about to say this to Man when he says, “Those albums your father made—did your mother help him?”
Even in Lee’s contentment the mention of her mother fills her with sourness. “I doubt she ever looked back on pictures of me, even when I was little.”
“You never talk about her.”
“I never want to talk about her. I told you how we never got along, not even when I was really young. And then the older I got… I could never make her happy. I kept getting into trouble at school. Everything I did was a disappointment to her. And she was jealous of me.” As always when she talks about her mother, Lee can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice.
“Jealous of you?”
“It’s true. When I was young she was jealous of all the photo shoots my father did with me, and when I was older she was jealous of my modeling career. She was a beauty when she was young, but I was always prettier than her, and she was scared of getting older and losing her looks.”
They are getting closer to the city, and Lee looks out at the modest homes that dot the landscape. Man says, “I don’t wonder that your mother took issue with the photo shoots.”
He keeps his hands steady on the steering wheel. Lee lifts her head to look at him. “Yes. She hated that my father and I were so close.”
Man opens his mouth as if to say something, then closes it. They drive in silence for a while. Then he says, “I would just think, after what had happened to you, that your father would have been a little more protective. It just seems odd, what you’ve told me about those pictures.”
“No no no,” Lee says, and sits up and untucks her legs from beneath her. “You see, he did those shoots with me to make me feel better. To help me regain my confidence.”
“Ah.”
Man doesn’t say anything else, so Lee continues. “I’m sure it’s why I was able to be successful as a model so quickly. And then modeling led me to Paris, and then to you.” She leans over and kisses Man’s arm and rests her head on him again.
They have turned onto a smaller road, and a horse-drawn wagon blocks their way. Man has to focus to keep the car from stalling. The air, now that they have lost the breeze, is thick and heavy, and Lee fans herself ineffectually. Finally they reach a place where the wagon can move into a ditch to let them past, and once it is well behind them, Man accelerates quickly, sending a spray of gravel out from under the tires. They crest a hill and then Paris is spread out before them, even from this distance seeming to teem with life after the calm of the country. At first the buildings are low-slung against the horizon, but as Man drives farther into the city, taller buildings crowd out the sky, the sloped lines of the mansard roofs more beautiful to Lee than a mountain vista. Cars choke the road, people press up against one another on the corners. As Man turns onto Boulevard Raspail, Lee realizes how comforting the city is, how much it feels like home. The smell of their neighborhood, granite and garbage—she lifts her head and breathes it in.
“I think I will see my father while he’s here,” she says.
Man squeezes her knee. “Whatever you want to do.”
“I want him to see—I want to show him what I’ve done since I left New York. That I’m fine here on my own.”
“Better than fine.”
“Yes, so much better.”
Lee watches the buildings vibrate past them and pictures her life through her father’s eyes. How far she’s come. How proud she will have made him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
When Theodore gets to town, Lee goes to meet him at the train station, arriving almost an hour early. The October day is blustery and cold, and the wind cuts between her hat and collar, making her wish she brought a scarf.
Lee has spent the past few weeks envisaging exactly how Theodore’s visit will go. The things she’ll do and say to impress him. Now, as she waits for his train to pull in, she runs through the activities she has planned for them, the carefully curated examples of her artistic life in Paris. A visit to a bistro, where she will introduce him to dishes he’s never tried. A tour of Montparnasse, complete with casual references to streets and buildings where artists and writers she knows he admires work and live. A visit to the studio, so that she can show him the darkroom equipment, maybe even some of her photos if he asks to see them.
The train whistles in right on time and Theodore is one of the first people to disembark. Lee sees him before he finds her in the crowd, and she is shocked at his appearance—it has been only a year, but he looks much older; the skin on his face seems to sag off the bone. Even bundled in his thick coat he looks skinnier than ever, diminished, perhaps, by his long journey. When he sees her, his stern face breaks into a smile. Lee has planned to kiss both his cheeks, a breezy bonjour, but he walks toward her with his arms outstretched and before Lee realizes quite what is happening they are embracing, she is pressed against his coat, enveloped in the smells of cinder and travel. “My Bitsie,” he says. “I’ve missed you.”