CHAPTER TWO
It is not until her camera is gone that Lee begins to understand how much she has grown to love it. For it is truly gone: the next day, she walked the six kilometers back to the apartment in Montmartre, found the door with its elegant bellpull, clenched her hands until her fingernails bit into her palms, and girded herself for Drosso’s moon face, his wet lips. But it was a servant who greeted her, silently took her up and back through the maze of elaborate rooms. Lee knew the secret of the bookshelf and opened it herself, but behind the shelf the hidden room was empty. The whole place was empty, smelling jarringly of lye.
Without her camera, Lee returns to painting. She lugs her folding easel and stool out into the street, sets up along the Seine, bisects her canvas with a decisive horizon line as she was taught to do at art school. Hours pass. Lee wishes she felt inspired, but instead she is just achingly lonely. She watches two young women browse a nearby bouquiniste, their gloved hands trailing across the rows of book spines. They talk and laugh together, and for a moment Lee wants to join them, to abandon the pretense that she is trying to become an artist, and just while away her hours. But something in her is disgusted by their purposelessness, by the excess of the expat culture, all the rich Americans she sees, content to enjoy the favorable exchange rate and live like the hedonists they are.
As Lee wanders the city, she finds herself composing photographs in her mind instead of paintings. One afternoon she goes to the camera shop near her hotel to ogle the window display. The model she wants, a brand-new Rolleiflex Original, sits on a velvet cushion and costs 2,400 francs. Though she barely has money to pay her rent, Lee goes into the shop, ignoring the way the shopkeeper’s eyebrows raise slightly in surprise when she asks to see the Rollei. In her hands it is lighter and more compact than her lost Graflex. She thinks of the pictures she took before and vows—if she can ever afford to buy another camera—to try harder, take more pictures, learn how to make something that is actually art.
When she has touched the Rollei’s every knob and dial and finally handed it back over, the shopkeeper gestures to an ad for a Kodak Brownie on the wall behind him. In the ad the Kodak girl wears a flapper-style striped dress and stands at the top of a small hill, arms outstretched, her Brownie dangling from one finger. “Perhaps you would prefer something smaller, something a little simpler?” he asks her. “These are what all the girls are getting lately.”
Lee shakes her head. Not this girl, she thinks, and bids him good day.
Instead of taking pictures, Lee reads the instruction manual she took from her camera case and stuffed in the back of her one desk drawer. She will use this time productively, and when she has saved up enough, she’ll deserve the professional camera she wants to buy. Printed on one page of the manual are grainy pictures—sailboats, an excavator, a winding country road—followed by columns of numbers under the headings “Bright Sun,” “Cloudy,” “Hazy,” and “Dull.” Within these columns are more choices, based on time of day, and then there’s a small sentence at the bottom of the page: “Exposures with stops larger or smaller than F8 should be respectively decreased or increased one-half with each succeeding smaller or larger stop used. Third group—May—Bright—9 a.m.–3 p.m. = 160—F8.” Sitting on her bed, staring at the diagrams with no camera to reference, Lee finds it all so technical that it makes her want to scream, makes her feel like the living embodiment of the “Dull” column, too stupid to grasp even these basics of the art form.
Was this what her father was doing when he took her picture? Lee remembers him fiddling with the knobs on the camera’s face, how he’d pace off the steps between her and the camera mount, which she realizes now he must have been doing so he’d get the focus right. But she remembers more the way he’d run his finger along her cheek to move her face toward the light, his pleased expression when he knew he had gotten the shot he wanted.
One session in particular stands out. Lee must have been nine or ten. The day would have fallen into the “Bright Sun” column in the manual, the contrast too high for shooting outdoors. Her father set up his camera in the parlor, drew the gauzy curtain liners across the windows, and endured her, with diminishing patience, as she ran through the room, asking him again and again, “Are you ready yet? Are you ready yet?,” whipping the pocket door open and closed each time she came full circle.
When he was finally set up, he called to her and shut both doors, entirely cutting off the room from the rest of the house. With the wide doors shut, it was a small, close space, with such high ceilings the perspective seemed skewed, as if the furniture were clustered together at the bottom of a dumbwaiter shaft. Everything was dark, opulent, a wide band of mahogany wainscoting on the walls and heavy, low-lying mahogany furniture to match. Against the dark wood, her father’s white hair gleamed, his body looked as thin and tough as a piece of jerky.
“Stand by the drapes,” he said, and there are a few pictures of her in the first pose, clad in a knee-length organdy dress with a drooping bow at the waist and a sailor’s collar. She wore black stockings, and all her running around had left them smeared with dust. Her expression in these first shots was insouciant; she stared at the camera with heavy-lidded eyes.
Now, running her finger along the grid of numbers, Lee understands how laborious the process was, why it was after only one or two exposures that he came over to where she stood and studied her with a puzzled, searching expression.
“Li-Li,” he said, “the dress is too bright against the draperies. Let’s try it without, shall we?” He helped her undo the fussy covered buttons that marched down the back of her bodice, unknot the sash cinched at her waist. His hands were warm and rough. As he helped her, his calluses caught on the band at the top of her delicate stockings; his fingernails left light scratches on her dry pale skin.
“That’s going to be much better,” he said, and he was right. Lee remembers the picture so clearly it’s as if she just saw it. In it, her naked body is white and almost glowing, and she looks like a deer emerging from a dark forest, her eyes wide and startled like a deer’s, full of all her love for her loving father.
CHAPTER THREE
As she does every few nights, Lee goes to Bricktop to hear the music. It is September now, two months since she was at Drosso’s. The bar is small and dark, choked with smoke and packed with people. The jazz band sits on a small stage in the corner, the sweat making sparks of light on their dark faces. The music is loud, metallic; the high notes shake her eardrums.
Lee is down to just enough for three more weeks’ rent if she is frugal. She thinks of the expensive clothing she brought with her from New York, already out-of-date, and wishes she were the sort of person who saved. A few days ago, Lee sent a telegram home and asked for a loan. She has wanted to be independent, but she knows her father will help her; he always has, even though he has also always insisted on being in charge of her finances. But the response she received this afternoon was a shock. Kotex ad a scandal, his telegram said. Humiliated. There was no mention of sending the money she requested.
On her way to Bricktop this evening, she stopped at the international newsstand and thumbed through the latest magazines until she found it: her picture in the August issue of McCall’s, clad in a white satin dress, the words “Wear the pad even under the sheerest, most clinging frocks” written in looping script beneath the picture.