“Daddy,” Lee says. “Let me show you the darkroom equipment.”
Theodore turns and seems surprised to see her standing there. “Oh, of course, Bitsie,” he says, and then, with an almost apologetic glance at Man, follows her into the other room.
Lee knows Theodore has never seen equipment as professional as Man’s. He seems particularly interested in Man’s photoflood prototype on the stand in the corner, with its rheostat controller, and he inspects it from all angles. He’s also intrigued by the xenon unit, saying, “I should get one of those. Or a klieg light. Does Mr. Ray have one of those?”
“I don’t think so.”
“They’re so bright it’s like having the sun there when you shoot indoors. I read about it.”
“Aren’t they mainly for movies?”
“So far, but their advantages for studio work are obvious. Remember all the times I made you shoot outside when you didn’t want to?”
Of course she remembers. A whole childhood of it. Indoors, outdoors, hundreds of photos. Her fourteenth birthday, when he had a vision of Lee as a modern dryad, stolen from the pages of Ovid, her head crowned with branches as she stood next to the small creek just south of their house. She’d been so sad that whole year—nothing could shake her dark mood—and he told her the shoot would be fun, like acting. “It will cheer you up,” she remembers him saying, but it didn’t. He meant well, but that day she felt uncomfortable in front of the camera. She couldn’t find the words to tell him. In the photos she is hunched and shivering, her arms crossed over her naked torso, her eyes round and dull as the river stones that cut into her feet while she was posing.
Lee doesn’t want to spend any more time thinking about the past. “Let me show you something,” she says, and takes her father over to the flat files and pulls out some of her recent pictures, including one from the bell jar series and an abstract shot she took recently of a sailboat in a child’s regatta. She lays them out on the table and gives her father time to look them over. He picks up a few photos and inspects them more closely, holding them carefully by their edges. Lee stands expectantly on the other side of the table. They’re good, she thinks. She waits for him to say it. Theodore picks up the sailboat print and stares at it for a long time. Lee bends down to another drawer and pulls out more of her work, street scenes and studio shots, her whole portfolio. Taken in total, the collection is impressive, but the longer they stand there, and the longer Theodore spends picking up a print, setting it down, picking up another, the more off-kilter Lee feels.
“Elizabeth,” he finally says, “all of these are yours?”
Lee nods and starts to respond, but just then Man comes into the room, a scarf looped around his neck. He glances at the table and then at Lee. “I thought I’d step out for a quick coffee. Would you two like to join me?”
Embarrassed to have Man see her showing off her work, but relieved again that he is being friendly, Lee begins to hurriedly push the prints into stacks and shove them back into their folders. “I’d love one. Daddy?”
“Certainly. I wouldn’t miss a chance to get more advice from Mr. Ray here.”
As they walk outside, Lee pulls Theodore aside and whispers, “Just call him Man. Or Man Ray. No one calls him Mr. Ray.”
They go to Café de Flore and sit crowded around a small outdoor table. Man orders a double espresso and a pastis, then turns to Lee. “Same for you?” It is what they always drink when they come here together.
“Alcohol during the day is terrible for digestion,” Theodore says to both of them, then turns to the waiter and, in his broken French, says, “I’ll have a hot water with lemon, and my daughter will have black tea.”
“Actually,” Lee says, “café crème, please.”
The waiter nods and moves away, and into the silence that follows, Man says, “Pastis is a digestif. For digestion. It always calms my stomach—isn’t that the point?”
Lee sighs. Man has given Theodore a perfect opening to explain his eating habits, and as he launches into a lecture, the mood at the table grows tense. Lee can tell Man is annoyed; he thinks all theories on diet are from charlatans, which he actually says out loud.
“Taking care of yourself is not hoo-ha,” Theodore says with dignity.
Man coughs, then busies himself pouring water from the jug into his glass and stirring the clouded liquid with a long-handled spoon. “But only eating certain things together? It all ends up in the same place in your stomach the moment you swallow. It seems, if you will forgive me, absurd.”
Lee has thought the same thing, many times, but still she wants to smooth things over. “I think people should do what feels right for them.”
Man gives her a sharp look. “You do?”
“Yes,” Lee says, then raises her eyebrows at Man before she turns to her father and, pointedly changing the subject, says, “How was the opera last night, Daddy?”
Theodore smiles. “Wonderful. Just wonderful. I’ve always wanted to see Guillaume Tell. And the Garnier is so much more ornate than the Collingwood. Have you been yet, Bitsie?”
“No, not yet.”
“That surprises me. You used to love the opera.” To Man he says, “You’ve never seen a little girl so focused. Her brothers got bored after twenty minutes, but Elizabeth was in love with all of it. She said she wanted to be Sarah Bernhardt when she grew up. Or a film star.”
“Oh, remember when we saw her?” Lee must have been ten when Bernhardt’s farewell tour came to Poughkeepsie. She still remembers everything about it: the immense arrangement of lilies in the lobby, filling the air with their syrupy scent; the people of Poughkeepsie crowding the tiers and theater boxes, almost unrecognizable in their finest clothes; the domed ceiling that rose above them with its beautiful Italianate frescoes. Lee sat rapt through the entire performance: the silent film they showed as a curtain-raiser, the tableaux vivants, and then finally the divine Sarah herself, resplendent in thickly draped maroon velvet, making her way around the stage with the help of an ivory cane before reenacting the death of Cleopatra by swooning onto a chaise longue the exact color of her dress.
Theodore chuckles. “Remember how afterward you had to act out the locomotive scene from the film they showed?”
“Did I? I don’t remember that.”
Theodore turns to Man. “Elizabeth’s brother built a child-sized locomotive in the barn behind our house, including a wooden track that went down the hill into a field. Quite impressive. He’s an aeronautical engineer now. After Elizabeth saw that silent, she insisted on riding on the engine, backward, holding her Brownie like the camera stuntman in the movie.”
“That’s right!” Lee says. “I had forgotten all about that old locomotive. I wanted you to pay me danger money, just like a real cameraman.”
“And I did. I gave you three dollars after we developed your pictures.”
Lee laughs with the pleasure of the memory. Man watches the two of them but doesn’t say anything.
“One could say I was your first paying client.” Theodore reaches out and pats Lee’s leg, then leaves his hand resting on her thigh, a self-satisfied look on his face. Lee drains her coffee and grows silent. Man’s gaze keeps moving from Theodore’s face to where his hand is lying in Lee’s lap.
When they’ve finished their drinks, Man gets up to pay, but Theodore waves him off. “Allow me,” he says, and makes a big show of signaling the waiter. Man puts his billfold back in his pocket and doesn’t say a word.