“This is wonderful,” Lee says, and rolls down her window a little so she can breathe the air, tinged with the smell of a distant controlled burn that smudges the sky with gray.

Lee is aware of how it could appear: she has moved from one man taking her photo to another. This new man is not her father, of course. Still, she cannot bear the idea of having her father see their apartment, where many of the pictures Man has taken of her hang.


In Chantilly, Lee and Man visit the château and spend a while in its gorgeous library. By early afternoon they are famished, so they drive farther onto the château grounds and park the car next to a stream with a view of a pretty little footbridge. The day is still, the water so placid it reflects the trees and clouds above it. Lee sets out the picnic blanket, cuts thick slabs of butter and presses them into rounds of bread, tops them with razor-thin radish slices, and shakes salt on top from paper pouches. Man eats with his eyes closed, blissfully, and they wash down the meal with the Sémillon, not cold anymore but still delicious.

“Sometimes I think about being a chef,” Lee says, popping a slice of Morbier in her mouth and loving the way the ashy rind tastes against the radish and the wine.

Man opens his eyes and looks at her. “I’ve never seen you cook anything.”

“I cook! Well, I would if I had any of the right things. Pans, a larder. I used to cook when I was growing up.”

“What did you make?”

“All sorts of things. I never used a recipe. Soups and stews—I’d just throw things in a pot until it tasted good.”

“And were you successful?”

“My father always thought so.” Lee remembers serving him at his desk, the walk down the hallway with the tureen clutched between two pot holders. She’d set it at his elbow and hover nearby until he put down his newspaper or pencil and took a bite, waiting for the moment when he’d look back at her and smile. Oh, how she used to adore her father.

“Maybe I’ll cook for you sometime,” Lee says to Man.

“Maybe. I like taking you out, though.”

“We’d save money,” she says, and then, after a pause, “He’s coming to visit—my father. That’s what the telegram this morning said.”

Man sits up and grabs the wine, refilling first her glass and then his own. “I didn’t even know you were in contact with him.”

“I’m not.” The last time Lee heard from Theodore was when she received his letter about his photos being published, which she didn’t answer. She mentions him now and then, but each time she does Man never seems interested. He has purposefully cut off contact with his own family, and doesn’t ever seem to regret it. It’s a philosophy he shares with many of the other members of his circle. Like them, he says he wants to be free of the tangled alliances of his past, because being free will help him focus on his art.

“Do you want to see him?”

Lee watches a bird poking around in the mud at the edge of the stream and ponders his question. “I’m honestly not sure. I’ve been angry at him for not contacting me, but I’m to blame for that too.”

“You just have to decide if being in touch with him will make you happy. And if it will, you should see him.”

Lee nods. After a while, she says, “When I was little, my father had this album—actually, lots of albums—and he kept records of everything I did. My first steps, my first visit from the doctor when I got a fever as a baby. All my school papers, and these silly little poems I wrote and gave to him. He was always so proud of me. And he took so many photos. Sometimes I think every memory I have of my childhood comes from looking at those pictures.”

“Did he make the albums for your brothers too?”

“I think so, but I was clearly his favorite. And I needed him more than they did.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because… because of what happened.”

“Of course. God, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to be sorry. It’s just that I… I miss him. He was always there for me. He loved me.”

Man shifts on the hard ground and then winces as he stretches out his legs in front of him. “Well. Of course he loved you. That’s what parents do. But I only meant you don’t have to see him when he visits if you don’t want to. You’re a grown woman. You’re not beholden to him.”

Lee nods again. Part of her agrees with Man: just because Theodore has finally sent her a telegram doesn’t erase all the months that they haven’t been in contact. And he’s not even coming to see her, if she’s reading the message correctly: the trip is business and she’s just tacked on. But “loving father” keeps running through her mind; there was a whole childhood when those words were true.

Man stands up, stretches, and pats his belly. He walks down toward the bank of the stream, picks up a stone from the water’s edge, and sends it bouncing a few times over the surface of the still water. Lee joins him, starts collecting stones and fills her pockets with them.

“Want me to teach you?” Man asks.

Lee pulls a stone from her coat. She palms it for a moment, remembering, then with a neat twist of her wrist launches it smoothly toward the stream, where it skips almost twice as far as Man’s before sinking. “Ha!” she shouts, pleased.

Man whistles. Lee throws another stone and another, the technique coming back more fully each time she does it. She and her brothers spent whole afternoons down at the pond on their property, skipping stones, catching fish, Lee’s pants rolled up over her calves, the ladylike white bows her mother insisted she wear in her braids drooping and mud-splattered. Man stops throwing his own stones to watch her, and she revels in his attention, a different kind of attention than when he takes her picture.

“You were a wild child, weren’t you?” Man asks.

“I suppose I was.” Lee knows he means wild like free, and she was that way, especially when she was very young. Back then there was no difference between her and her brothers. Whole days were spent outside, exploring; she remembers feeling as though she could hoard the whole world and eat it with a spoon. Before what happened with—she almost hears his name inside her head but stops herself as always. Her childhood is split that way, two neat halves, before and after. It was after when she went truly wild, but not in the way Man means. When her wildness became a thing she felt she had to hide from everyone.

Lee stops skipping stones and stands staring at the water. Maybe Man knows what she is thinking. She’s not sure. All she knows is he is quiet, and she appreciates it.

After a while he says, “Can you show me how you do it, that little flick of your wrist?”

She goes up behind him and puts her small hand on his larger one, their fingers joined around the cool round stone, and she demonstrates a couple of times before Man tries it on his own. His first attempt goes plunking into the water, but it is not long before he has it mastered, the elegant snap that Lee learned all those years ago. When they tire of the diversion, they walk over to the footbridge, where they stand together and look down at the water, its surface smooth as a mirror once the ripples of the stones have disappeared.


Later, as they drive home, Lee takes off her shoes, tucks up her feet on the seat, and lays her head on Man’s shoulder. She feels content, warm, and drowsy. She thinks that it will not be so hard to have her father here. To show him her new life. She is about to say this to Man when he says, “Those albums your father made—did your mother help him?”

Even in Lee’s contentment the mention of her mother fills her with sourness. “I doubt she ever looked back on pictures of me, even when I was little.”

“You never talk about her.”

“I never want to talk about her. I told you how we never got along, not even when I was really young. And then the older I got… I could never make her happy. I kept getting into trouble at school. Everything I did was a disappointment to her. And she was jealous of me.” As always when she talks about her mother, Lee can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice.

“Jealous of you?”

“It’s true. When I was young she was jealous of all the photo shoots my father did with me, and when I was older she was jealous of my modeling career. She was a beauty when she was young, but I was always prettier than her, and she was scared of getting older and losing her looks.”

They are getting closer to the city, and Lee looks out at the modest homes that dot the landscape. Man says, “I don’t wonder that your mother took issue with the photo shoots.”

He keeps his hands steady on the steering wheel. Lee lifts her head to look at him. “Yes. She hated that my father and I were so close.”

Man opens his mouth as if to say something, then closes it. They drive in silence for a while. Then he says, “I would just think, after what had happened to you, that your father would have been a little more protective. It just seems odd, what you’ve told me about those pictures.”

“No no no,” Lee says, and sits up and untucks her legs from beneath her. “You see, he did those shoots with me to make me feel better. To help me regain my confidence.”

“Ah.”

Man doesn’t say anything else, so Lee continues. “I’m sure it’s why I was able to be successful as a model so quickly. And then modeling led me to Paris, and then to you.” She leans over and kisses Man’s arm and rests her head on him again.

They have turned onto a smaller road, and a horse-drawn wagon blocks their way. Man has to focus to keep the car from stalling. The air, now that they have lost the breeze, is thick and heavy, and Lee fans herself ineffectually. Finally they reach a place where the wagon can move into a ditch to let them past, and once it is well behind them, Man accelerates quickly, sending a spray of gravel out from under the tires. They crest a hill and then Paris is spread out before them, even from this distance seeming to teem with life after the calm of the country. At first the buildings are low-slung against the horizon, but as Man drives farther into the city, taller buildings crowd out the sky, the sloped lines of the mansard roofs more beautiful to Lee than a mountain vista. Cars choke the road, people press up against one another on the corners. As Man turns onto Boulevard Raspail, Lee realizes how comforting the city is, how much it feels like home. The smell of their neighborhood, granite and garbage—she lifts her head and breathes it in.