At night they lie on her bed, the mattress sagging in the middle so that they continually roll toward each other, their bodies warm and their skin sticking together in the unseasonable April heat. He kisses her toes, her wrists, the cleft of her buttocks. In the mornings she finds that his stubble has chafed her skin and left it stinging.

Always, always, he is photographing her. His camera is a third person in the bedroom, and she flirts for it and for him as he takes her picture. They print the images together, standing hip to hip in the developing room, her body blooming on the paper while they watch. This way they get to have the moments twice, the images calling up the feelings from the day before until sometimes they stop what they are doing and make love again, quickly, her hands gripping the edge of the sink, the pictures forgotten and gone black in the developing tray.

For days at a time Man takes no clients. They lock the studio door behind them. She does not answer the phone when it rings. Instead, they print pictures of Lee, or Man paints or sculpts—he is filled with an almost manic energy that he says comes from her, from being near her. He begs her to stay close when he is painting and often Lee does so, sitting curled in an armchair near his easel, breathing in the smell of camphor and turpentine and watching his expression while he works. Sometimes he paints abstracts; other times he uses her seated figure or one of their photographs as inspiration—the line of her neck becoming a guide for a tightrope walker, her breast becoming a grain silo becoming a mountain. Where he is meticulous in the darkroom, here he has an almost frenzied focus. He wants her close but sometimes forgets that she is there, until Lee grows frustrated and takes the brushes out of his hand to call him back to her, kissing him insistently until he is hers again.


Sometimes Lee looks at him as they are eating dinner, or just sitting next to each other, and wonders how she ever thought this might not happen. It feels inevitable. He looks like a different person than he did when she first met him. He has become dear to her. The fringe of his lashes, the whorl of his ear, all of him now more familiar than she is to herself. His smell—almost piney. Even after she bathes she can smell him on her. She nestles her nose into her own shoulder and breathes him in.

At parties or cafés, she is aware of where he is in the room without looking; they catch each other’s gaze and hold it longer than they should. Their connection feels so obvious, as if everyone around them can see, just from looking at them, what they have been doing in the bedroom. Their need for each other. All the other people in the room must hear her heart thumping, the naked tum tum tum tum tum tum of it.


When Lee is not with Man, she does her own work. She finds herself as eager as he is to create things. As the weeks pass she wants to walk more than she wants to shoot in the studio, so on the days when Man is taking clients, she puts her Rollei around her neck and takes long afternoon strolls through the city, cutting across the wide boulevards and crossing over the Seine, losing her way in the Marais, where the Jews look at her curiously, the tall girl with the camera and the bright blond hair. Maybe she should be fearful wandering the city alone, but the camera not only gives her purpose but feels like protection. She likes the serendipity of shooting street scenes, juxtaposing people and objects in weird positions, playing with perspective. Each time she prints one of her photos and Man likes it, she grows more confident, feels more like who she has always wanted to be.

When she returns from her walks she brings back paper bags full of fruit pastilles, or macarons so light they melt on her tongue, and feeds them to Man. He licks the sugar off her fingers. She comes back as the sun is fading in the west and the light lies like thick striped taffy across the bed, and before it gets too dark Man takes her picture: her neck and torso banded with shadows, her legs tangled in the sheets, the curve of her ribs as she lies on her side. And then he puts aside the camera and spreads out next to her and touches every bit of her, all the parts he’s photographed and all the parts he hasn’t. She closes her eyes and wills her mind to stay in it, the good feeling, and it is better than it has ever been for her. And when her mind drifts, it drifts only to their pictures.


It is spring now, the leaves just pushing their bright green way out of the trees, and one evening when Lee goes back to her apartment, she is stopped at the door by the sight of a woman sitting on the stoop, brown hair bobbed at her jawline, her eyes closed and her face tipped up to catch the warmth of the sun. A valise sits next to her, a small veiled hat on top.

“Tanja?” Lee asks, incredulous, and Tanja hops up and they are embracing, jumping up and down and making small squeals of happiness.

“Oh Li-Li,” Tanja says, “I missed you!”

Lee takes Tanja upstairs and settles her in a chair in the corner of her room. Tanja starts recounting her latest travels, and Lee lets the stories wash over her, a sweet river of words. She has always liked how easy it is to be with Tanja, and it does not take long for Lee to revert to the old version of herself, cracking jokes and talking in shorthand with her friend.

“You should have seen it, Li-Li. We get to Milan later than we would have liked, it’s already dark, and we take a cab to the hotel my friend Ruth had recommended—remember Ruth? Well, it’s called the Casino Hotel and Ruth had told me it’s right in the center of all the action. She was wrong: it was the action. I’ll never forget Mrs. Basingthwaite’s face, standing there in the lobby, surrounded by what I’m fairly certain were ladies of the night. She hustled me out of there so fast it made my head spin.”

Lee laughs. “How long can you stay in Paris?”

Tanja grimaces. “Just the weekend. Mrs. B won’t let me out of her sight longer than that. Please say there’s somewhere desperately seedy you can take me.”

Lee hesitates. She is supposed to go to a party with Man that she has been looking forward to for ages. It would be easy enough to include Tanja, but the idea of sharing Man with someone is unappealing. Yet, another piece of her wants to show him off—to show her life off—so eventually she says, “There’s a party I was planning on going to tonight, at an apartment just a few blocks from here. Do you want to come?”

“Do birds sing?” Tanja says, and dances around the room, trilling, “A party! A party!”

Lee gets dressed and they walk together to Tanja’s hotel. When Tanja used to come down to New York for visits, they joked that their sightseeing was merely a backdrop for their chitchat: they talked about the same things at the Met as they did at a cabaret. And now, Paris is no different. They stroll along and talk and talk. This time, though, Lee has her camera with her, and every once in a while she breaks free from Tanja’s arm and takes a picture. She feels her mind operating on two levels and she loves it: she listens to her friend, but there is another track in her brain and it is focused on what she is seeing, on getting the last of the evening light, images composing and dissolving as she moves her gaze around. Some images she wants to keep, they tug at her, so she frames them, focuses, releases the shutter. She decides to take a picture of Tanja, her hands gesturing as she tells a story, and watches in amusement as Tanja realizes what Lee is doing and gets self-conscious.

“So will Man Ray be there tonight?” Tanja asks her. “Is it still going well with him?”

Lee opens her mouth to tell her friend about what has happened between her and Man and finds she doesn’t know what to say. Both Man and the pictures—her pictures—feel so new. Lee doesn’t want to answer questions; she wants to keep it all to herself, a little pearl locked in a shell.

After a long pause, Lee clears her throat and says, “I haven’t told you yet, but Man and I—we’re…” Her voice trails off.

Tanja’s eyebrows go up. “Really?”

“Yes.” Blushing, disconcerted, Lee turns away and takes a picture of one of the gargoyles on Notre Dame, silhouetted against the iron-gray sky. When she puts down her camera again Tanja is still giving her a look, but doesn’t say another word about it.

At the hotel, Lee can’t help but covet the outfits Tanja has collected as she’s traveled across Europe, day dresses with fuller skirts than Lee is used to seeing, and little bolero jackets with shoulder pads sewn in. The two women are practically the same size, so while Tanja gets dressed Lee tries on her crepe de chine and pearls, and when her friend sees her she tells her she should borrow them. Lee stands in front of the mirror, admiring herself: the flush in her cheeks from the walk and the anticipation of seeing Man, the way her lips always look now, tender and swollen. Tanja comes up behind her and examines her with a critical eye, then turns the necklace backward so that the pearls hang down Lee’s back like a cape, and as they go outside, Lee feels more Parisian than she has the entire time she’s been here.


In a secluded corner of Le Dôme, where Lee has taken her for a drink before the party, Tanja leans down and takes a sip from the full rim of her martini. She looks at Lee while she does it, her kohl-blacked eyes narrowed. “He’s paying for your apartment?” she says. “He’s serious about you. Why haven’t you told me?”

Lee focuses on a group of people over Tanja’s right shoulder. One of the women looks familiar but Lee can’t think where she would have met her. A friend of Man’s? Did she come to the studio? Lee has met so many of Man’s circle now that it’s hard to keep them all straight.