“You ever been here?” he asks her, his voice low. He was so silent at the restaurant it is a surprise to hear him ask a question.
Lee shakes her head. “I’ve only lived in Paris for a few months.”
“It’s not all just this.” Antonio gestures around them. “Drosso is an art collector. He’s very wealthy.”
“What does he collect?”
“Everything, I guess, though he loves modern work. He funds Littérature. That’s why we’re all here so often, suckling at the teat of our potential patron.” He nods his head toward a few men arranged around a hookah.
“All who?” Lee takes another swallow of the brandy, which is opening up her chest in a strange way, pulling like a hot knife through her breastbone.
“Éluard, Tzara, Duchamp. All the Surrealists. Here to channel the unconscious.” Antonio makes quotation marks in the air and smirks conspiratorially.
She knows these names, has heard them mentioned at New York parties, read them in literary magazines. Hearing Antonio say them is like feeling a key slide into a lock. “Do you know them?”
“Sure I do.”
The drone of the cello stops and Lee looks at Antonio, looks him straight in the face and realizes how attractive he is. His mouth is full, his lips dry, almost papery. His eyes are a beautiful soft gray, ringed with black lashes.
“Can you introduce me to them?” she asks, leaning toward him and wavering unsteadily on her feet. “I know them—I mean, I want to know them. I want to meet them.”
Lee is having trouble making sense, her words as wobbly as her legs, so she reaches out a hand and puts it on Antonio’s arm, hard and warm beneath his robe. She hears everything now that the music has stopped: the burble of the hookah, the click and hiss of smokers’ lighters over their pipes, the tink-tink of ice in her brandy glass. She takes another sip and then another.
“Now’s probably not the time,” Antonio says, his voice kind, and even though she tries to pull him in the other direction, across the room to where he said Duchamp is sitting, he gently leads her to an empty couch against a far wall and tries to take the brandy glass out of her hand. She won’t let him. She needs the cold crystal, the warming bite of the liquor.
“Can you get me another?” Lee asks him, and he looks at her for a while and then shrugs and does as she’s requested, trading her a fresh glass for her empty, and she lifts the new one to her mouth and takes a giant swallow.
“I’ll be right back,” Antonio says, or at least Lee thinks she hears him say it. In any case, he leaves her there, and the couch is deep and overstuffed and upholstered in a slippery fabric that’s just begging for her to slide down on it, so she finishes the new brandy and makes herself more comfortable.
Just before Lee thinks of nothing she thinks of this: That brandy is not just brandy. The voice inside her head is indignant, and then she passes out.
It could be minutes, it could be hours. Lee wakes up, still on the couch, her cheek pressed into a heavily embroidered pillow. She rubs at her eyes, opens them. Drosso stands over her, his butterfly wings hanging at his sides and his big shiny face inches from her own.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Lee mutters, batting her hand at him as if she is brushing away a fly. She lifts her head and looks around the room for Poppy or Antonio but doesn’t see them anywhere.
“I must tell you a passionate secret,” Drosso says in French. Lee is too confused to understand him, so he repeats himself a few times until finally another man comes over and says in English, “He says he has to confess something to you.”
This man is smaller than Drosso, with thick curly hair springing away from his temples.
Drosso speaks to the man in rapid-fire French. He holds a champagne coupe in his hand and points at Lee, talking so quickly that even if she were fully cogent she wouldn’t be able to follow him. The smaller man laughs and looks at her.
“He says…” The man pauses, seeming to debate whether or not to say what comes next. “He says that he’s never seen such beautiful breasts. He says your breast is like a more perfect version of the glass he holds in his hand. He wants to draw it and then have it made so that he can drink champagne from it. He wants to drink champagne from your breast while touching your breast.”
Through the whole statement, Drosso nods in furious agreement. Lee sits up. Looks down. Her belt is loose. Her kimono gapes brazenly from sternum to hip bone so that even in her fog she knows that Drosso must have been able to get a good look at her. She clutches the kimono’s fabric to her chest, crunching the blue silk in her fist as tightly as she can, and then stands up and pulls the absurd robe even tighter around herself.
The small man is smiling at her, and though his expression is friendly and almost apologetic, Lee wants nothing more than to be far away from him.
“Please tell your friend,” she says to him, twanging her American accent as imperiously as she can, “that he will never touch my breasts, not if I was falling from a burning building and my breast was the only thing he could hold on to, to save me from dying.”
He bursts into laughter as Lee walks away from him. She goes toward the bookshelf but realizes she has no idea how to open it. With one hand still clutching her robe, she feels across the shelves with her other hand, desperately searching for a lever or knob or something that will let her out. But she is trapped.
“Wait,” the man says. “Wait.”
Lee looks around, feeling frantic. “How do I get out of here?” she asks a woman who lies nearby, eyes closed. The woman doesn’t respond.
The man has followed her. He reaches for a small gold handle on the bookshelf, and it slides open easily. As she moves toward the opening, he gently circles her wrist with his hand.
“He’s bent,” he says, gesturing at Drosso. “He’d never try anything with you, or with any woman. Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s all just silly. Theatrics.”
Lee shakes her head no.
“Who are you?” he asks.
She shakes her head again. She doesn’t want to tell him her name, doesn’t want him to know another thing about her.
“It’s all right,” he says. “You’re fine. I’m sorry he scared you.”
“I’m not scared. I just want to leave.”
“I understand. If you ever need anything, you can look me up. I’m Man Ray.”
The pomposity of his statement—not “My name is Man Ray,” but “I’m Man Ray,” as if there isn’t a chance in the world she wouldn’t know of him—astounds her. True, she does know of him: his photography appeared in Vogue right next to her modeling spreads. He is as well-known as Edward Steichen or Cecil Beaton in the fashion world—she heard his name mentioned at many parties before she left New York.
Man Ray reaches into his coat pocket—it is only now that she realizes he is not wearing a robe—and hands her a small card with his address printed on it. All Lee wants is to leave, to be alone someplace where she can pretend none of this ever happened, so she says thank you and takes the card and turns away, walking out as quickly as she can without looking as though she’s running.
It isn’t until she has made her way back to the dressing room, found her clothes and put them on with fumbling fingers, taken a cab all the way back to Montparnasse, and is in her own cold bed, the coverlet pulled up to her chin and tucked hospital-tight around her body, that the black humor of the situation hits her. All these months spent hoping to meet other artists, and she meets Man Ray at an opium den, where she is too embarrassed to do anything but run away. Alone, she cringes at the memory, until she has another thought, much more disturbing: her camera, left behind on the couch in her hurry.