“There’s not. I was devoted to her.” Man’s tone is sharp. “When I was with her, I did everything I could to help her along. She wanted to paint, so I bought her canvases, let her use my oils. She wanted to act, so I took her with me to the States when I went home to visit my family and set up meetings for her in New York. She wanted to write—she had this idea that she’d write a memoir, so I read some of her early pages and helped her translate them into English. And I introduced her to a friend of mine, Broca, because he put out a newssheet about Montparnasse and I thought he might be interested in Kiki’s stories. Well, he was more than interested. She started working with him all the time. Writing. And then she moved in with him.”

Lee is confused. “So… she left you?”

Man takes the address book out of Lee’s hands and sets it down on the side table, then walks across the room and stares out the window. “No, I left her. I made it very clear that her behavior was unacceptable. And it was. Broca turned out to be a drinker and a drug addict, always wandering through the street and muttering to himself. Kiki wasn’t with him for long—I think she left him for her accompanist, actually. An accordion player.”

It is clear from Man’s tone that he is still angry about what happened. He has not answered Lee’s question about why Kiki was so jealous of him, but she doesn’t want to push him much further. She goes over to where he stands at the window, wraps her arms around him, and kisses his ear.

She waits a few moments, then says, “I want to meet her. I want to hear her sing.”

“Well. She can be cruel. She knows we are together.”

“Are you worried she’s going to be mean to me?” Lee puts on a pout, bats her lashes.

Man rubs his finger along the side of her face and down her neck.

“You want to know? I’m worried that you two are going to become best friends and Kiki is going to tell you terrible stories about me that make you regret all of this. She could do that. She has done that.”

“And all along I thought you were worried for me.”

“Worried for you? I think you’re quite capable of taking care of yourself.”


When Lee walks through Montparnasse she keeps seeing broadsheets advertising Kiki’s performances, and no matter what she does she can’t get the woman out of her head. Later that week she asks Man if she can see his pictures of Kiki. She can’t help herself. He never misses an opportunity to show off his work, so she’s not surprised when he goes over to the flat files and starts pulling out folders.

At first what she feels is utter relief, tension she didn’t know she had unknotting in her neck. This is the most beautiful woman in Paris? To Lee’s American eye, Kiki looks bloated as over-yeasted bread, her makeup garish, her hairstyle outdated by two decades, her derriere wide and sagging as a half-filled flour sack.

But some of the compositions are uncomfortably familiar. Here are Man’s bedroom curtains, the same as they are today. There Kiki tips back her head—Man has taken a close-up of her neck. It could be Lee’s neck, the shot is so similar. Man doesn’t seem to expect Lee to say anything and keeps up a quick patter about what he was thinking when he shot a certain image, or pauses to inspect one and explain how he would print it differently now.

He shows her at least a hundred pictures. When he is done she is still quiet. Man asks what she thinks. Lee hesitates and then says what she thinks she must: Kiki is very beautiful.

“Of course,” Man says. “But what do you think of the work?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Biarritz,” Man says.

Lee is balancing the ledger; Man is sitting at the table in the far corner of the room. He has appointments booked solid for the rest of the week.

“Biarritz?”

“Let’s go,” he says. “I can get the car out, we can drive there. You’ve never been, have you?”

She makes the phone calls for him. Apologies—Man Ray is very sorry, but there has been a death in the family. Can they rebook? Part of her knows Man should be worrying about money, about angering the clients who pay the bills, but it is simple for her to ignore that thought. If he isn’t worried, she shouldn’t be either.

It takes her an hour to tidy up, go home, and pack her valise, and when she comes downstairs from her apartment he is already idling at the curb in his Voisin, the big long car growling like an animal. Lee has never been in a car this nice. She ties a striped scarf over her hair and props her arm on the leather-covered door, feeling glamorous and louche. She rests her hand on Man’s thigh for most of the ride.

It’s a long drive on lousy roads, so they stop in Poitiers for the night, strolling like tourists through its cobblestoned streets, eating dinner at a small restaurant where they are served brown bread and boeuf bourguignon, the gravy rich with cognac and studded with carrots and potatoes and pearl onions. Lee eats so much the waistband of her dress is tight when they leave the restaurant. At night they make love in their small hotel room, lit only by the full moon that glows like a lamp through the curtainless windows, and in the morning they eat croissants in bed, their fingers slick with butter and smelling of sugar and yeast. When they go outside, shielding their eyes from the bright sunshine, so different from the light in Paris, Lee takes pictures, the towers on the Palais de Justice like men in jester’s caps, and she feels happier than she has ever felt, free and clean and light inside. As they cross over a footbridge, she turns to Man. “Let me take your picture.”

“No one takes my picture.”

“That’s absurd,” she says, and holds her camera to her eye.

Shrugging, smiling, he agrees. She frames him with the wide stone railing running off to a point on the horizon, holding the camera slightly off axis so his body is parallel with a lamppost just behind him. He wears a white scarf, cream-colored linen pants. He is still smiling, just a little, and the wind catches his hair and his scarf and blows them straight out sideways. He looks old, a bit tired, and for some reason that makes her love him all the more.


Biarritz, when they finally arrive after two days of solid driving, is a postcard. The sun is setting as they pull into town, and Man puts the Voisin’s top down and takes them along Esplanade du Port Vieux to Villa Belza, which rises narrowly from the road as if it has been gouged out of the sandstone cliffs. Man parks nearby and together they walk up the path to the villa’s front door.

Man books a room while Lee waits, admiring the lobby’s elegant furnishings and thick velvet drapes. He comes over to her with a giant key, and when she sees it in his hand she feels dizzy. They cannot move fast enough. She walks in front of him up the stairs and brazenly he puts his hand between her legs as they climb, his fingers hot on her skin right up above the lace at the top of her stockings, so high he must be able to feel the wet heat between her legs. As soon as the hotel room door closes behind them they are on the bed together. The window has been left open and as Man makes love to her—hard, fast, the way she likes it—she smells sea and salt and thinks that from now on she might always think of salt when she thinks of him. When they are finished she lies back on a gigantic pillow and looks around for the first time. The hotel room walls are covered in red brocade. Red curtains are suspended from the ceiling and drape over the headboard. Even the vanity and sitting areas are upholstered in red fabric.

“What is this place?” she asks him.

“Isn’t it amazing?” he says, laughing at her expression. “Just wait until you see the cabaret.”

They nap and make love again and emerge from their room for dinner, where they stuff themselves with seafood dishes: moules marinières, amberjack in orange marinade, a crudo made of some fish Lee has never had before. They refill their wineglasses again and again. Lee feels as though she will never stop being hungry. Eating like this—ordering whatever she wants, scraping the last bits of frosting off her dessert plate—makes her feel like a child again, and for a moment she grows antsy. But then Man takes her into the cabaret, which is as lavish and ostentatious as he promised, and she relaxes. They sit at a mirrored table with their knees pressed together. On the stage, women in sequined brassieres and tall feathered headbands dance the Charleston. The music is loud and brassy and when the show ends and the music continues, most of the patrons get up to dance. Man pulls Lee up onto the floor. He is a wild and uninhibited dancer, not particularly graceful, but so full of joy she cannot help but get caught up in moving with him, following his steps and growing wilder and wilder herself. 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.

“I had this idea,” Man says, “a series of self-portraits I want to do. Maybe six or seven of them, all with subtle variations. A close-up of my face and on the desk in front of me a mask, a death mask. The change in the images would be in the other objects on the desk. I’m not sure what they are yet. Maybe in one a noose, in another a feather. Like how it feels to be an artist—”

Lee nods with excitement. “Yes! How one day you can’t think of a single original picture and the next day there’s almost too many of them—and how do you capture that, or how do you hold on to the feeling from the good days—”