Whitney Scharer - The Age of Light

“No, just a stranger.”

“You set this up and took it without her noticing?”

“Yes—is that not allowed?”

Man laughs. “No, no, of course not. It’s fine. I’m just impressed, that’s all.” He says it lightly, as if he doesn’t realize how much it might mean to her.

“You really like it?”

“Well, I think we can tweak the exposure time a little bit”—he points with his tongs at some dark shadows in the woman’s hair—“and burn in this corner a bit, but for a first print? It’s very good.”

If Lee was feeling strange before, now she feels even stranger. His words make her hot and achy at the same time, flushed with pride, and she looks at her print with new confidence and thinks that if she tries she might actually be able to make herself into a photographer. The confidence emboldens her, and her two desires—to work and to be with Man—come together in that moment. There doesn’t need to be one or the other. The way he said “we”—“we can tweak the exposure.” Perhaps someday her work will be on the same level as his. Perhaps they will work together to create it. A partnership of sorts. So she turns around to face him, and she is not sure what she is going to do until she does it.

“I had a different idea for the saber guard,” she says. “If you still want, I could model for you, if you let me set it up.”

Man raises his eyebrows. “Last time I asked you to pose for me you said no.”

“I know. But if we do it together—I could frame the shots. I have an idea about it.”

“Really? Well—yes. Let me just get things cleaned up in here.”

As Lee is waiting for Man to come into the studio, she stands next to the camera and looks around, at the cloths draped over the couch, the half-drawn curtains, how bright and white and clean everything is. She whips the drapes off the table and the wall and replaces them with some black ones, draping the couch too. Then she goes into the office, picks up the saber guard, and turns it over and over. When she goes back into the studio, Man is waiting for her.

This is the first time Lee has done anything but follow his directions. Despite that, or maybe because of it, she feels she knows what he wants to see, has known it ever since she met him, but didn’t realize it until she saw her own work in the developing tank, saw him appraising it as he did his own.

“You had Amélie near the window,” Lee says, and takes the guard over to the couch, where she balances it on the arm, “but what if you had had her here?” Then she goes over to the camera and says “May I?” before lifting up the hood and going underneath it for the first time. The dark cloth smells of tobacco and cedar, a musty, masculine smell. Lee looks into the viewfinder and swivels the camera slightly so that all she can see is the couch and its black coverings. Through the viewfinder the room appears upside down, the couch hanging from the ceiling. It is disorienting, and Lee almost gasps when Man himself appears in the frame, walking across what looks like the ceiling and then sitting, absurdly, higher up than when he was standing.

“You need something to focus on,” he says, and his voice comes to her through the cloth as if through water, murky and indistinct. She turns the focusing knob back and forth a bit, watching as Man blurs and sharpens, blurs and sharpens. Upside down, he is a stranger. She does not recognize his eyes, his mouth; if she saw him on the street she would not know him. It is disorienting. She comes out from under the camera hood and everything is right side up again, Man sitting on the couch, watching her as she walks toward him.

Lee goes over to the changing area in the corner of the room and stands hidden behind the screen. Slowly she undoes her blouse, first the buttons on the cuffs and then the placket, letting it drop to the floor when she is done. Then she undoes her trousers, unbuttoning three of the five buttons at the fly and pushing the trousers down so they hang on her hip bones and expose the full flat expanse of her stomach. And then she reaches behind her back with both hands, thinking of how the shadow of the pose must look silhouetted on the screen, her arms sticking out like a swan’s wings. She unhooks the back of her brassiere before shrugging it off and letting it drop to the floor on top of her shirt. She keeps thinking about swans as she undresses, the ones she photographed in the park the other day, the muscle and bone of their wings and the power it must take them to beat the air into flight. She walks back and sits where Man has been on the couch and settles the metal guard over her face like a veil.

Up until this moment, Lee has felt calm, her actions at a distance from the emotions that prompted them, almost the way she used to feel when her father took her picture. But once she is sitting down, and able to see Man’s face, the slight raise to his eyebrows the only hint of how he is feeling, she comes back to herself and goes cold all over, her nipples puckering into hard points.

Man clears his throat, and his voice, when he speaks, sounds high and thin. “Hold that pose.” He moves over to the camera and goes under the hood.

The saber guard is heavier than it looks, and its sharp scent makes Lee’s mouth go sour. What injury was it meant to protect from? She imagines the curved slice of a fencing sword, the bone-deep bruises from a blunted blade. Lee closes her eyes and holds her head just so.

“Oh, that’s good!” Man shouts, his voice muffled by the cloth. “Hold it just like that.”

Lee doesn’t want to sit still, doesn’t want to do exactly what he asks of her, so she moves instead into different poses, her arms stretched out along the back of the couch and then held tight between her knees, her head tilted so far to the side she feels a hard pull in her neck and the saber guard pressing into her clavicle. She keeps her eyes closed and tries not to breathe in the smell of metal.

“I think you were right,” Man says as he reemerges from under the hood and comes over to her. “Having it over your face like that—it’s good.”

Lee stands up and takes off the guard and sets it down. Standing so close to him, she feels the difference in their heights. His eyes are just level with her jawbone.

“The shots are going to be very good,” he says.

“I know,” Lee says, taking a step closer to him. Her bare nipples graze his linen shirt, sending an ache shooting down to her groin.

Man takes a deep breath. “Lee, I—”

“I know,” she says again, and moves a step closer.

And then their mouths press hard together, their teeth clicking. His arms come all the way around her and pin her own to her sides. They stand that way for what seems like hours, days, just kissing. Man takes her hand and leads her to the parlor. She kicks off her trousers while he does the same with his clothes, hurriedly, and then in the dimness of the falling twilight, Man lays her down on the couch and kneels next to her, running his hands over her bare skin. She arches her back to get closer to him, but it is not close enough, so she pulls him down on top of her and breathes him in. His skin on hers is warm as water, and she is wet with it, and for once her brain shuts off completely, leaving only feeling. The one thought she does manage is that there is no going back from this, and for that she couldn’t be more grateful.

France is metal, the smell and feel and taste of it. Hot steel helmet on Lee’s sweat-soaked hair. The scent her field camera leaves on her hands. The nib of her pen when she licks it, ink bluing her tongue. And the hospital. Bone saws. Disinterred bullets in a bowl. The stink of infection in the air, sweet like licked pennies.

Photos everywhere she looks, compositions formed of horrors. Lee shoots and shoots and swallows down the bile that rises in her throat—even that tasting of metal. Her assignment is to photograph the post-invasion duties of the American nurses, so Lee records plasma bags, penicillin, surgical procedures. She takes pictures of American women working side by side with German nurses, tamps the blast hole of her growing loathing for the Krauts down tight.

She sends the pictures back to Audrey accompanied by essays, knows the censor will scissor away most of what she writes. Even her letters to Roland get censored, blank spaces where her words once were. His notes back to her get censored too, and arrive weeks and weeks after he sends them, but the words they still contain are normal, soothing. They tether her to a world outside the war.

At the end of one day Lee hears a voice calling to her from a hospital bed. She turns to see a man bandaged up like some sort of mummy. “Ma’am,” he says, his voice so weak it’s almost a whistle. “Take my picture, so I can have a laugh about it when I go home.”

His eyes and mouth and nose are black holes, obliterations. His hands are bound up as big as oven mitts. “Say cheese,” he whispers, and Lee grips the dark metal box of her camera and tries to focus.

Three months have passed. Man has moved her to a new apartment a few blocks from his in Montparnasse. Paid the first month’s rent, bought her furniture, given her art to hang on the walls. Together they wander through Printemps like an old married couple. Man helps her pick out sheets, coffee cups, lavender sachets to tuck inside her linens. They paper her bedroom with a geometric print and lay an Art Deco rug on the floor, its thick pile soft beneath her feet. He gives her one of his own blankets and when he isn’t with her she burrows into it for comfort. Lee has never cared too much where she lives but she finds that the apartment becomes an extension of what she feels toward Man. It is not a large space—when he spends the night she stacks their shoes by the door, liking how the heels of hers nestle inside his—but it is sized just right for her, and she feels a sense of calm when she is there that she has never felt anywhere else.