The Age of Light Read online

  Part of the trouble is that she’s kept right on drinking, the extra bottle behind the Weck jars empty now and replaced with one she ferreted away in the back of the pantry. She’s drunk so much that for once she can feel it: her nose gone numb and her fingers slick as sticks of butter. It is just so easy to keep topping up her glass, and there’s no way to know how many times she’s done it. Drinking makes her forget that Audrey is her lifeline to all she used to care about in the world: photography, writing, her old beautiful self. When Lee can fight off the urge to just curl up in bed and fall asleep forever, she wants to be the person she used to be, alive and hungry. But every time she hears Audrey’s voice from the other room, that posh London accent, she keeps picking up her glass for one more swallow.

  At nine thirty the asparagus is on a bed of lettuce with hollandaise drizzled across the platter. Lee picks it up and pushes through the swinging door to the dining room. From the adjacent parlor, the group quiets when they see her. Someone—Seamus, maybe, from the ICA—says, “Brilliant! I’m starving,” and they all come into the dining room. Roland shows them where to sit—this is one of his talents, putting the right people next to one another at a dinner party—and then he comes over to her and takes the platter and sets it on the sideboard. Janie is there, the house girl, whose life Lee makes miserable by rarely letting her in the kitchen, and the girl serves the asparagus and then everyone looks at Lee where she’s still standing by the door.

  “Join us, darling,” Roland says, indicating her place at the end of the table nearer the kitchen.

  “More to do,” she says, backing toward the door and wondering idly if she’s slurring before deciding she doesn’t really care.

  “Sit, Lee,” Audrey says. “You’ve been on your feet all day!”

  Audrey’s right. Lee’s feet are aching. She takes off her apron and finds her seat and someone, not Roland, fills her wineglass, and the conversation begins again in fits and starts as people lift the shining asparagus stalks to their mouths and start exclaiming about how good they taste.

  They eat and drink and it is not too daunting. Audrey is involved in a long exchange with Bettina about a spring fashion show she just saw. The new look was geometric cutouts, cropped jackets, sheath suits. After a while, Bettina turns to Lee and says, “You’ve always had such a good eye. What do you think of the new Yves Saint Laurent?”

  Lee laughs. “Betts, I gave up on all that when I realized how comfortable my army uniform was—you know that. Now it’s just trousers and housecoats for me.”

  Roland looks at her. He, like Audrey, knew her when she was modeling, when she could spot a dress from across the room and tell you the designer and the material and the season. That, too, is behind her, and good riddance. If women knew how comfortable army pants were, they’d all be wearing them. During Lee’s last visit to Vogue, she cornered a few young models in the lift and told them how liberating it was to wear men’s pants and not to stuff one’s feet into the equivalent of Chinese finger traps. One of them recognized her.

  “You’re Lee Miller, aren’t you?” the girl asked. She towered over Lee—it seemed every year the models got taller—and something about the question annoyed her. In it was Audrey’s prompting: “Be kind to Lee. She’s not the same since—Those things she saw—She was in Germany when they opened up the camps. Horrible, really. We never should have sent her.” So when this girl recognized Lee, the devil in her came out.

  “Lee Miller?” Lee said, leaning in so close she could see the girl’s pores, the fuzz of plaque clinging to her straight white teeth. “I heard she died.” The girl looked shocked and then the lift doors opened and Lee got out, the untied laces of her boots slapping along with her as she continued down the hall.

  And here Lee is at dinner in boots too, the shirt she has on, formerly covered by her apron, tucked haphazardly into her trousers, with Audrey and Bettina and Roland staring awkwardly, the fashion conversation at a standstill.

  To break the silence Lee gets the vichyssoise, which she serves in earthenware tots she and Roland picked up in Bath years ago. Janie helps serve, and Lee shows her what to do so that she can bring out the next few courses, which are prepped and ready when they want them. Each trip to the kitchen is an excuse for more whiskey, though, so Lee doesn’t want Janie to do too much.

  Finally, after the scallops and the chicken and the pheasant—all of it as perfect as Lee has imagined it would be, if not as timely—the conversation turns to Roland’s work and gossip about the ICA and the latest exhibition troubles. Seamus’s voice rises above them all, pontificating. Why do fat men always love the sound of their own voices? Lee and Audrey are the only people at the table not connected to the museum, so soon they stop listening and Audrey turns sideways in her chair and says, “Lee?”

  Lee is ready—she has been ready—and says, “I have so many ideas, Audrey. Truly. I’m writing again. No more boondoggling.”

  Audrey sits back. Looks surprised. “That’s wonderful!”

  “I was thinking about that fish dinner I made—you remember, I told you about it? The bluefish? Why not write a piece about art and cooking? Or I could do a piece about foraging. People bring me things, things you probably wouldn’t know you could eat—fiddlehead ferns and different types of mushrooms—a whole piece on that, with photos to match.”

  Lee really is slurring now, she can feel it, the words coming from her mouth like puzzle pieces spilling out of a box. Audrey lifts her glass, her wedding band gleaming in the candlelight. In her eyes Lee sees the emotions she expected to see there, pity and embarrassment, her glance sliding away as if she doesn’t really want to be seeing her.

  “Lee,” Audrey says, “there’s something I want to ask you.”

  Lee moves to stand up. “I should—I need to serve the next course.”

  Audrey puts her hand on Lee’s wrist. “It can wait. Roland and I had a nice long chat when he gave me a tour this afternoon, about something that’s been on my mind for months. I want you to write a piece—well, Roland and I want you to write a piece—about your years with Man Ray. A feature. Thirty-five-hundred words. Some of his photos from that time. We think it would do you good to have a big project to focus on. It can go in the February issue. You could interview him if you want, or you could just write it from your perspective, your memories. Our readers will love it. The woman’s touch. They’ve come to love you over the years through all the cooking pieces.”

  Lee looks at Roland, who studiously avoids meeting her eye. His shoulders are hitched up to his earlobes and he has that same penitent beagle look on his face that he gets when Lee is yelling at him.

  They’ve come to love you through all the cooking pieces. All the fluff Lee’s submitted to Audrey over the past few years, the portrait they commissioned of her in her herb garden, dressed in a goddamn gingham apron. And they do love her! They send her letters. Dear Mrs. Penrose, I’m a homemaker in Shropfordshire and I tried your trifle last night. What a success! All my guests are still exclaiming over it.

  Today when Lee was in the kitchen measuring out fenugreek, Roland and Audrey must have been discussing her, cooking up a plan to get her to reengage, come back to herself, do something worth doing.

  “I don’t want to,” Lee says finally, her tone petulant even to her own ears.

  “Why not?” Audrey looks sympathetic.

  Lee reaches for her glass and Audrey’s expression hardens. Without letting her answer, Audrey says, “It will be good for you, Lee. A story with some meat to it. A story only you can tell.”

  “I don’t want to, Audrey.”

  “Lee…I don’t know how to say it…but it’s this, or we’ll have to renegotiate your contract.”

  She knew the words were coming but it doesn’t hurt any less to hear them.

  “I’m writing again, truly, Audrey.”

  “Then write this. This is what we need. We can’t have…We’re moving away from the domestic section, actually.”

  Just then
Janie comes over to Lee and whispers in her ear, “Should I serve the dessert, ma’am?”

  “No, no—I’ll manage it, Janie,” Lee says.

  As the door to the kitchen swings shut behind her, Lee grabs the first clean glass she sees, one of her mother’s teacups with a delicate rose spray pattern, and goes immediately to the Weck jars. The teacup rattles in its saucer as she fills it, so she sets down the saucer and holds the cup in both hands, gulping the whiskey so the fumes rise up and burn her nose.

  An article about her time with Man Ray. With photos to match. Lee could tell the story again the way she’s always told it: “I met Man Ray in a bar on his way to Biarritz. I asked him if I could be his student and he told me he didn’t take students. So I told him I was going with him, and before the train pulled into Biarritz we were in love.” Tell it this way and it’s romantic, a fairy tale, and if you tell something enough times it becomes true, just the way a photograph can trick you into thinking it’s a memory. And why couldn’t it be true? Lee was beautiful enough then to get what she wanted exactly when she wanted it, and there are photos of her in Biarritz with Man, her head tipped back to catch the sun, skin creamy as the inside of a seashell. Lee could assemble an entire history from the photos that would tell any version of the story she wants. But back then, that first summer in Paris, she didn’t yet know the power of pictures, how a frame creates reality, how a photograph becomes memory becomes truth.

  Or Lee could tell the real story: the one where she loved a man and he loved her, but in the end they took everything from each other—who can say who was more destroyed? It’s this story that she’s locked up tight inside herself, this story that she was thinking about when she hid all her old prints and negatives in the attic, this story that makes the delicate teacup tremble in her hands.

  Lee takes a final swallow and sets the empty cup atop the pile in the sink. She calls to Janie, and together they carry the bombe Alaska to the table and set it in the middle of the group, and with a theatrical flourish, Lee pours the pitcher of rum over it and takes one of the long taper matches and sets it on fire, and the flames are instantaneous, hot and blue, rising up almost to the chandelier. Everyone gasps and claps loudly, and Lee forgets for a minute how sad Audrey has made her, just stands there and enjoys watching the alcohol burn.

  After the cake is cut and everyone is served, Lee sits back down next to Audrey.

  “When would you need it by?” Lee asks her, and watches as Audrey’s face moves from surprise to pleasure.

  “I’d want to see a first draft by October.”

  Lee nods. “I’ll do it,” she tells her. “But not his photos. Mine.”

  Audrey rolls the stem of her wineglass between her fingers. “I can’t promise that. This is a story about Man Ray.”

  But it’s not, Lee thinks. And that’s been the problem all along.

  Chapter One

  Paris

  1929

  The night Lee meets Man Ray begins in a half-empty bistro a few blocks from Lee’s hotel, where she sits alone, eating steak and scalloped potatoes and drinking half pitchers of dusky red wine. She is twenty-two, and beautiful. The steak tastes even better than she thought it would, swimming in a rich brown roux that pools on the plate and seeps into the layers of sliced potatoes and thick melted slabs of Gruyère.

  Lee has passed the bistro many times since she arrived in Paris three months earlier, but—her finances being what they are—this is the first time she has ventured inside. Dining alone is nothing new: Lee has spent almost all her time alone since she got here, a hard adjustment after her busy life in New York City, where she modeled for Vogue and hit up the jazz clubs almost nightly, always with a different man on her arm. Back then, Lee took it for granted that everyone she met would be entranced by her: her father, Condé Nast, Edward Steichen, all the powerful men she had charmed over the years. Those men. She may have captivated them, but they took things from her—raked her over with their eyes, barked commands at her from under camera hoods, reduced her to pieces of a girl: a neck to hold pearls, a slim waist to show off a belt, a hand to bring to her lips and blow them kisses. Their gaze made her into someone she didn’t want to be. Lee might miss the parties, but she does not miss modeling, and in fact she would rather go hungry than go back to her former line of work.

  Here in Paris, where she has come to start over, to make art instead of being made into it, no one pays much attention to Lee’s beauty. When she walks through Montparnasse, her new neighborhood, no one catches her eye, no one turns around to watch her pass. Instead, Lee seems to be just another pretty detail in a city where almost everything is artfully arranged. A city built on the concept of form over function, where rows of jewel-toned petits fours gleam in a patisserie’s window, too flawless to eat. Where a milliner displays exquisitely elaborate hats, with no clear indication of how one would wear them. Even the Parisian women at the sidewalk cafés are like sculptures, effortlessly elegant, leaning back in their chairs as if their raison d’être is decoration. She tells herself she is glad not to be noticed, to blend in with her surroundings, but still, after three months in this city, Lee secretly thinks she has not seen anyone more beautiful than she is.

  When Lee has finished the steak and sopped up the last of the gravy with her bread, she stretches and sits back in her chair. It is early. The restaurant is quiet, the only other diners elderly Parisians, their voices too low for eavesdropping. Empty wine pitchers are lined up neatly next to Lee’s plate, and on the far end of the table is her camera, which she has taken to carrying everywhere despite its heaviness and bulk. Just before she boarded the steamer to Le Havre, her father pushed the camera into her hands, an old Graflex he no longer used, and even though Lee told him she didn’t want it, he insisted. She still barely knows how to operate it—her training is in figure drawing, and when she moved to Paris she planned to become a painter, envisioned herself dabbing meditatively at a canvas en plein air, not mucking about with chemicals in a suffocating darkroom. Still, Lee has learned a bit about taking pictures from him and at Vogue, and there’s something comforting about the camera: both a connection to her past and something a real artist might carry around.

  The waiter stops by and takes her empty plate, then asks if she’d like another pitcher of wine. Lee hesitates, picturing the dwindling francs in her little handbag, then says yes. Even though her savings are getting low, she wants a reason to stay a little longer, to be surrounded by people even if she is not with them, to not go back to her hotel room, where the windows are painted shut and the trapped air always smells oppressively of pot roast. Lately she’s been spending more and more time there, drawing in her sketchbook, writing letters, or taking long afternoon naps that leave her unreplenished—anything to pass the time and make her forget how lonely she feels. Lee has never been very good at being by herself: left to her own devices, she can easily sink into sadness and inactivity. As the weeks have passed, her loneliness has gained heft and power: it has contours now, almost a physical shape, and she imagines it sitting in the corner of her room, waiting for her, a sucking, spongy thing.

  After he has picked up her plate, the waiter lingers. He is young, with a hint of mustache above his lip so faint it could have been penciled there, and Lee can tell he is intrigued by her.

  “Are you a photographer?” he finally asks, the word almost the same in French as in English, photographe, but he mumbles, and Lee’s grasp of the language is still so rusty it takes her a moment to parse his question. When she doesn’t respond, he tips his head at the camera.

  “Oh, no, not really,” Lee says. He looks disappointed, and she almost wishes she said yes. Since she’s been here, Lee has taken a few pictures, but they have been shots any tourist would attempt: baguettes in a bicycle basket, lovers pausing to kiss on the Pont des Arts. Her initial tries did not go well. The first time, when she got the prints back from the little camera shop around the corner, they were entirely black; Lee had somehow exposed the plat
es to light before they were developed. The second set—made with more care, the plates inserted into the camera gingerly, a light sweat dotting her upper lip—came back as murky gray masses, so blurry they could have been clouds or cobblestones, but certainly not close-ups of the sculptures in the park she had been shooting. Her third set of prints, though, was actually in focus, and looking at those small black-and-white images, conjured not only from her mind but from a unique combination of light and time, Lee filled with an excitement she never felt when painting. She had released the shutter, and where nothing had existed, suddenly there was art.

  Lee wants the waiter to ask her more questions—wants, so badly, to have an actual conversation, to make a friend—but just then the bell over the door chimes as a group of older men come in and the waiter goes over to show them to a table.

  Lee sips her drink as slowly as she can to make it last. As the room gets more crowded, it occurs to her that the bistro is stodgy. All the patrons are years older than her. The men have thick gray mustaches like suit brushes above their lips; the women, while chic, have high buttoned collars and sensible shoes. But then a trio comes in: two men and a woman. At first Lee thinks they are actors because their outfits are so strange. The men wear gauchos and sashes tied at their waists, with white shirts and no jackets. They look almost like parodies of artists but they sit perfectly at ease and the waiter hardly glances at them when they order. The woman, too, is dressed strangely, in the Scheherazade style that was popular a few years back. Her hair is closely bobbed and gleams like polished walnut against her small head, and her lips are painted such a dark red they are almost the same shade as her hair.