Whitney Scharer - The Age of Light

“So sharp,” she whines to Lee, rubbing a red mark on the pale white underside of her arm.

“Well, models must do what is asked of them.” Lee doesn’t try to hide her annoyance.

Amélie disappears behind the curtain after throwing a mean look at Lee. When she emerges a few moments later, Lee has left the room and stationed herself behind the desk in the office, where she busies herself with some papers.

“Bonsoir,” Lee calls to Amélie as she walks by, artificially cheerful now that the young woman is leaving. After she is gone, Lee goes and looks for Man. He is in the parlor just pouring a cup of tea. He gestures to it—does she want one?—but she shakes her head.

“You shouldn’t use those students anymore,” she says, settling herself on the horsehair couch.

“Ah, she was fine. Needed some meat on her bones, but I was doing a lot of cropped shots and she has nice skin.”

“She wasn’t interested in it.”

“They don’t have to be interested. They just have to stand there and listen to what I tell them.”

He sits down opposite Lee and takes a loud sip. She watches him, still annoyed and not completely sure why. The girl bothered her. Not just her germs, which Lee pictures as little fleas dancing on the couch, on the saber guard, all over the studio. It was more how unimpressed she acted during the shoot. Does Amélie even know who Man is?

“I saw it come through, when I used to model,” she says.

“Saw what?”

“When the model didn’t know why she was there. I’ve done it myself—” She stops.

“You?” Man seems to almost chuckle as he takes another sip of tea. “I bet you look ravishing in every picture anyone has ever taken of you.”

Lee flushes and doesn’t meet his eye. Since the day he hired her, Man hasn’t commented on her appearance. It is what she thought she wanted—a working relationship free from all that—but over the weeks she has often caught herself wondering what he thinks of her. Just the other day she wore one of her nicest dresses to work to see if he would compliment her. He didn’t, which was fine, but now his words send a tingle through her she isn’t expecting to feel.

“It is easy for me,” Lee says, “but not for the reasons you would think. I always felt like…” She pauses, suddenly feeling she is about to reveal too much.

“Tell me.”

She goes over to the kettle. Standing with her back to Man, she says, “I would use this trick—I learned it, I think, when I was little, when I modeled for my father. I can make my expression practically anything—” Here Lee turns around and gives him a confident stare, her eyes narrowed. “But while I’m doing it I can send my mind anywhere. With my father sometimes I would pretend I was a queen, the Queen of England, and that posing was required of me for my royal subjects. Or later, when I was at Vogue, I could put on a gown and pretend that I was at a gala or whatever it was they wanted the photograph to look like. I guess maybe it’s a bit like acting. I had a name for it, when I was little.”

“What was it?”

“I called it my wild mind.” She coughs, to cover up her embarrassment.

“Wild mind. I love it.”

“Yes, well. Amélie doesn’t have it. She was probably thinking about a mustard poultice the whole time she was here. That’s what her face was saying.”

Man sets down his teacup. “Would you pose for me?”

He sounds eager, and it thrills her. She wants to say yes. Part of her always wants to say yes, to please whatever man is asking something of her. And she knows Man’s pictures of her would be beautiful, probably better than anyone else’s have ever been, and that is tempting too, to help him make his art. But posing for him even once will change things between them. She will have given him something of herself, even if he doesn’t see it that way, and he will always think of how his camera made her look when he sees her.

“I’m sorry, I can’t—I have a lot of work left to do this afternoon.” The words hang in the air.

“All right.” Man’s tone tells her he’s not going to push the issue. He refills his teacup from the pot and plops two sugar cubes in it, then says, “I’ve seen some photos of you. I bought an old copy of American Vogue last week so I could see them.”

An image of him stopping at the international newsstand on his way to work rises in her mind. Thumbing through dusty piles of magazines in the back of the shop, pausing at her picture. Seeking her out, assessing her—or, knowing him, critiquing the compositions. Pushing down his hat more firmly on his head as he leaves the shop, the magazine with her picture in it rolled up in a stiff tube and stuck into his overcoat pocket.

“Which issue?”

“Oh, you were wearing black satin and fur, I think. And there was a spread on pearls—you wore a choker. Nicely composed, actually. In any case, you’ve got clear talent. If you change your mind, I’d love to shoot you.”

He slurps the last of his tea and sets down the cup loudly, then slaps his hands on his thighs and says, “Well, back to work,” and disappears into his office. Lee sits there a while longer, touching her neck where those pearls had been, trying to remember what she had been thinking when the photos were taken.

Lee’s new Rolleiflex has a beautiful face, two perfectly round lenses for eyes, and a focusing hood that looks like a chic little hat. Lee wears the camera around her neck on a short strap and can’t believe how light it is—not even two pounds with the film loaded. When she puts her eye to the viewfinder she could swear the glass makes things look clearer than her eyes alone can do, and she finds she prefers the world boxed up, contained inside the camera’s frame.

Lee still can’t believe it’s hers, bought with the Christmas bonus check Man gave her. Man left the envelope propped up on the fireplace mantel in the office with her name written in huge looping letters across the front. She gasped when she opened it: an almost ridiculously lavish gift, and bizarrely close to the price of the camera she’d had her eye on for months. But when she thanked him—grateful, awkward, the check pinched between her fingers as if she expected him to ask for it back—he waved as if it were nothing.

“One windfall deserves another,” he said, referring to a new and unexpected commission he had gotten from his patrons, Arthur and Rose Wheeler.

“It’s too generous,” she protested.

Now, with her new camera in hand, Lee finds herself wondering if the gift will make her beholden to Man, if there is some subtext to it she’s not understanding. And it is not just the bonus check that is making Lee wonder. Ever since Man asked her to pose for him, something has been crackling between them, a static where there used to be calm air. But what Lee cannot figure out is which of them is generating it. Just a few days ago, Man came up behind her at his desk, leaned over her shoulder to read the contract she was typing up for him, his cheek so close to hers she could feel his skin even though he wasn’t touching her. Imperceptibly, she moved her face toward his, just to see what he would do, and when he did not pull back at all she was disconcerted. But it was probably nothing. He is always leaning toward her or needing to show her something, and up until now she has never thought anything of it.

The frustrating thing is that she doesn’t want anything to change between them. This was her first thought when she opened the envelope with the check inside. I hope this doesn’t change things between us. But he was so nonchalant when she thanked him that she decided any change she was feeling had to be in her head. And then, as if to confirm that her worries were unfounded, when she came in to work with the new camera a few days later, Man took one look at it and just said, “Good girl.” His eyes crinkled up from his wide smile, and he took the camera from her and ran his fingers over it with the same covetousness she feels every time she touches it, mumbling to himself about its features like a fanatic reciting baseball statistics, the static between them gone silent. Lee pointed out a few features he hadn’t noticed, and after a while Man handed back the camera and said, “Anytime you want to use the darkroom.”

Lee thanked him and told him she’d let him know.

The Rollei is her friend when she is walking, a better pair of eyes she wears around her neck. On a frigid Sunday a few weeks after Christmas, Lee grabs it and starts wandering, angling up Boulevard Saint-Michel and taking a left into the Luxembourg Gardens, where the wide gravel footpaths divide the lawn into orderly chunks. A dusting of snow has fallen and covers everything in white. At the lake in the park’s center she stops and watches the mallards swim in the part of the water not yet scrimmed with ice. The day is so still they hardly ripple the surface. One dabbles at the edge, and Lee walks over into the soft mud and watches him bob up and down, up and down. She snaps a picture of his tail, sticking out of the water like a tiny iceberg. She cuts across the park and over to Église Saint-Sulpice, where the columns cast stripes of shade onto the building’s facade. She takes a picture. From there it’s to Café de Flore, where she sits at a table near the window and watches the people go by, bundled into thick coats and scarves. She is glad to have a cup of coffee, warm between her hands, glad to have the money to pay for it, glad for her job and her camera and the feeling that she is learning something from her time spent with Man. Nearby, a thin woman sits alone at a table, facing away from Lee. Her hair is in tight pin curls and she wears a white blouse. Every few moments, she reaches up to massage her neck. Her fingernails are filed into sharp points and painted in a reverse French manicure: black tips and white nail beds. Her hair is a rich auburn. She rubs her neck again; Lee snaps a picture.