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When they are sweating and winded, Man nicks a wine bottle and two glasses off their table and they go upstairs and climb into the giant red bed and talk until three o’clock in the morning. Art, inspiration, the difference between painting and photography. The conversation is its own dance, looping and circling back on itself until she is practically breathless.
“We’re in a strange town. I didn’t know where you were. And you alone—it worries me. I don’t like to think about other men seeing you.” “Other men seeing me?” He can’t be serious. “So the entire time you were napping, I was just supposed to sit here waiting for you to wake up?” Man opens his eyes and looks at her. “I guess when you put it that way, it sounds a bit ridiculous. I just…I need you, Lee.” And then, more softly, he says, “Don’t ever leave me.” He pulls her down so that she is lying on his chest again, and strokes her hair. The words are not what she wanted him to say. Still, there
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After the war she’ll find out this was the Americans’ first use of napalm—explaining not only why they censored her photos but also the way the fire seemed to stick like syrup to the soldiers’ skin.
Lee doesn’t know when she became this person, fueled by rage, but she loves how it feels not to hold back, to let her emotions judder out of her uncontrolled.
so content they don’t even feel the need to speak.
So now on most of the nights when Man goes out with his crowd, she stays in, or goes back to the studio to get in a few more hours of work. That is part of the beauty of the darkroom for her. Completely sealed off from the rest of the world, time loses meaning there, measured only by the metronome as she guides her prints from developer to stop bath to fix.
“Hmm,” says Lee, putting down her pencil. “What are you actually trying to say?” He groans, stands up, and crushes the paper into a ball. “I’m trying to say that when I look at a picture of you, I want to feel exactly as good as I felt when I was taking the picture. Photography can capture reality, but how does it capture emotion? Isn’t the emotion what makes reality real?” “So why don’t you say that?” “I am saying that! Or at least I’m trying to.” “Sometimes a direct approach works better,” Lee says, and goes back to her correspondence.
“Yes. It’s done. I called it ‘The Light of Our Time.’” “‘The Age of Light,’” she says. “That would be better.”
Until she composes it through a camera’s eye, though, she can’t be sure it will work, so she tries it out in the studio without a model. It is then that she begins to understand the allure of an Amélie, an interchangeable person she can bring in to pose for her. For some reason, she doesn’t want to tell Man about her project, wants it to belong just to her. So she puts up a note at the art school where he has advertised before and a few days later gets a response. Lee makes the model come to the studio at seven in the morning, long before Man arrives. The light is good, the model compliant and
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We get together once a month or so and discuss art.” “You discuss art.” “Yes,” Man says, but as he says it he tugs again at his collar. The room is hot. He is sweating. She cannot understand what he could possibly be lying about, or why.
As he pulls the stiff silk over her head, Lee realizes just how drunk she is, champagne sloppy, and before she goes to brush her teeth she sits on the floor for a few minutes, hiccuping at her reflection in the mirror and listening to Man stumble around in the other room.
Why wouldn’t you tell me…whatever it was you wouldn’t tell me?”
She waits for him to finish. “Sometimes I like…to be tied up.”
she finds she wants to make him wait.
Later, afterward, what surprises her most of all is how much she likes it. How good it feels to be in control.
But then she reads them over, black marks on the page that are nothing like what she sees in her mind. The words are not right. Nothing is right. Her photos are shit and the article is going to be shit and she’s a disappointment to Audrey and everyone who has ever put their faith in her. Was she really naive enough to think she could become a writer?
His praise brings the words back into focus. Lee turns around and pounds out a paragraph, only stopping once to worry that it doesn’t sound right. When she is done, she pulls the paper off the platen and hands it to him. He reads it slowly, but this time Lee doesn’t need him to tell her it is good. She already knows. While he’s reading, she eases the window open and grabs a jerry can, fills up two glasses to their brims. It’s not even noon, but lately she’s turned everything into an opportunity for celebration.
Lee has started to understand her work in this way: she is consciously evoking a feeling rather than just lucking into a successful image.
The image itself is extremely low contrast, which is unfortunate, but paired with the ghostly effect of the black outline, it is like nothing she has ever seen.
He comes over and kisses her, but she has no time for kisses.
When she and Man make eye contact, she can tell he feels it too: a sense that they are doing something momentous. To be able to manipulate the negative itself, its chemical properties, the very nature of it, rather than to alter it manually by scratching or cutting—it feels as if they are creating a new medium altogether. She hopes so much that it works, that it wasn’t some weird fluke when she did it the first time.
The three little words come unbidden out of the ache she feels in her stomach. “I love you,” she says. Man puts his arm around her shoulders and pulls her tight. “I love you too,” he whispers. It is the first time they’ve said the words to each other, and it should be huge, but it just feels of a piece with the work they are doing together.
The blindfold has terrified her.
Uncle—Lee never allows herself to think his name,
gonorrhea inoculations.
That soon, in another day or two, she’ll be able to have sex with Man again as if nothing is different. It would be so easy to push the thoughts back down from where they came. To close herself off as she is so good at doing. She wonders if he will let her. But another piece of her knows that if she does not tell him—if she keeps him at the same distance she’s always kept everyone—their relationship will never deepen past where it is now. They will never truly know each other.
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.
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.
Man works constantly on the painting. Lee now understands how single-minded he can be. His behavior reminds her of the first few weeks when they were together: he cancels appointments, skips meals, gazes past the world with bloodshot eyes. But for her it is not the same. Now that she has her own work, she finds she doesn’t want to just watch him, gets jumpy if she sits next to him for too long. He insists that he needs her there. So even though she often doesn’t want to, for hours Lee lies on the bed as he works above her, her head cocked toward him just so. By the end of the day the drop
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the joy of abandoned responsibility.
Lee wishes she hadn’t agreed to see her father while he was here. Having him see her new life has diminished it somehow. Diminished her.
“The poet is looking for a muse. The statue comes to life. You have the look.” He leans back and seems to compose himself. “I’m Jean Cocteau,” he says, grabbing her hand and kissing it lightly. “Have you heard of me?”
“The two of you are in love?” Jean asks. Lee nods but doesn’t say anything at first. Of course she loves Man, but after the scene in the café, she doesn’t want to discuss her feelings with a stranger. What do the words mean, anyway? She and Man have barely said them to each other: just the time when they were doing the solarization, and later in bed. She dislikes the formality of the phrase, the weight of the history of all the other couples who have said it before them. Or maybe she doesn’t like how vulnerable the words make her feel: how they show her to be a person who feels deeply and
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She lies there for a while, luxuriating in the cool hand of the lemon-scented sheets.
Their space. In the bright morning light, after being in Jean’s apartment, Lee finds this place small and unkempt. The table where she sits to drink her espresso is cluttered with unsuccessful prints, empty glasses, a plate crusted with brown gravy. Lee is no housekeeper. Until this moment she has not noticed what a mess she has made—she and Man, for he is not exactly tidy—and all the piles of dishes and clutter remind her of the time they spent together, how easy it’s been, over
the past months, to ignore the simple chores of everyday life. Now she is disgusted by the mess they have created. She begins gathering things up, arranging them in tidier piles and filling the sink with dishes.
Or she can leave. Lee has always been good at solving problems by leaving,
It's all supposed to be easy. (That's the sign that it's right.) Then one day you find out it isn't. Then what happens?
With her eyes closed, the power shifts. Lee suddenly feels as if she has gained control. The men in the room cease to matter. She is separate from them. She walks when they tell her to walk, shifting her body to face things she cannot see, but they are nothing more than sounds to her. After a while she loses her ability to
distinguish where the sounds are coming from, everything in the room distorted and murky as if they are all trapped in a giant fishbowl. And then the tension eases and she floats out of her aching body, as she has done so many times when her picture was taken. But this time she doesn’t use her wild mind; she stays in the moment. Eyes closed, she watches herself glide across the room, while also still seeing the play of light and shadow across her eyelids from the shifting of the stage lights and the dark spots of the other actors moving past her. And then Lee can’t feel her body at all, but
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Lee wants to push Man and see how far she can make him go. “But that’s exactly the problem: you don’t like him. It’s your art. But I’m not you.”
Commit—to say yes, to agree. And if it will gain her a permanent place here at his side, in this studio, then isn’t that what she wants? So she nods, and she says it. “All right, yes. You know I love you.” He squeezes her hands harder and she feels her bones pressing against one another. “I want you to love me forever.” “Forever,” she says, nodding, and then because she doesn’t want to say anything more, she pulls her hands free and wraps her arms around him and lets him hold her and rock her back and forth. They stay like that for a while. Finally she pulls away. Man squares his shoulders and
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The vulnerability she sees in herself. Lee wonders if this is what Man means by asking for a commitment. If what he wants from her is total surrender.
Later they go home together. Man seems satisfied by their conversation. He holds her hand while they walk to the apartment, gently moves her out of the way of a pothole in the road. When they get inside, he runs a bath for her, and when she has dried off and gotten into her dressing gown, she finds him in their small kitchen, where he has scrambled her an egg. It sits steaming on a plate on the counter, and Man spreads
butter on a slice of toast and adds it to the plate. Lee is famished, eats the egg and then another. She feels warm from the food in her stomach and warm from the bath and from the robe she has knotted at her waist. She and Man barely speak, but there is comfort in their silence. If this is not love, then what is?
Lee finds she loves acting.
The part of her cheek where he touched her feels separate from the rest of her face, and separately awake.
When she was there, she was thinking about Man. Now she is with Man and she’s thinking about the film set.
Kiki, now Ilse—these women are crueler than the men. At least Lee knows how to manage men, how to flirt with them and get them to do what she wants. But these women are entirely different. Judging her before they even know her.
The anger is dissipating and she does not like the new feeling that has sprung up in its place: a gulf between them.
But then she realizes she could re-create that feeling right here in Paris, that their happiness is not some irretrievable thing; she can create more of it if she wants to.
