“You’re the poet,” Jean says, holding on to the actor’s wrists and shaking them. “This is your blood. You must feel it. On the film I see none of this. I see ptthttttht.” He makes a noise like a balloon losing its air and then stares at the actor with a hopeful expression. “We try it again, no?”

“Sure,” the man says. He rolls his head back and forth again, stretching so far that the tendons pop out in his neck. He has dark eyes and sandpapery stubble. He hitches up his trousers and lets them settle back down on his hips while Jean watches him, an intent look on his face.

“Here’s what I want,” Jean says. “You are living in complete solitude. In this moment I want you to be understanding that what you stole from your childhood you cannot get back from destiny. Do you understand?”

They go through the scene three more times. Lee thinks the actor is straining to be authentic, but perhaps she does not fully understand the difference between still photography and this newer medium. She wants to make the actor take a few breaths, to slow down; if Man were shooting, he would tell him to forget there is a camera there at all, to picture himself alone in a calm, green field. Jean does none of this. The more keyed up the actor gets the more tensely Jean responds, the muscles flexing in his arm as he winds the film with the crank.

Finally, after the third time through, Jean seems satisfied. “Good. Fifteen minutes and we begin again,” he calls, and the actor and all the other people who are rushing around move away from the stage. The room quiets. Jean goes to a nearby table and lights a cigarette, inhaling and then letting the smoke out slowly, so that it curls up around his nose like a gray mustache.

Lee stays where she is, leaning against a post at the edge of the room.

“Jean,” she says.

He looks around, notices her. A smile spreads across his face.

“Ah, my Calliope! Your keeper let you out of the cage.”

Annoyance flares in her. “There’s no cage.”

Jean nods. “Good. Have you come to work, to start today? Or just to see what there is to see?”

Lee looks at the stage, the black floor scuffed and dirty. The simple walls, white plaster with a single fake window. In the center stand a small wooden table and two chairs. What will Man think when he finds out she is here?


Two hours later they’ve cobbled together what they need to make Lee’s costume. It is meant to look like the hard shell of a woman’s torso, wider than Lee’s own, with the arms cut off at the elbows to resemble Greek statuary. This they drape with a white cloth like a toga so that she is covered entirely from the neck down. She cannot sit or move her arms, which are strapped to her sides with thick cord. The fabric is covered with a stiffening compound, painted on in several coats with a wide brush and left to harden. Lee itches and sweats inside it. Jean and three other men gather around to discuss her. They take a large sponge and coat her face in white stage makeup, layer after layer, and Jean runs back to look at her through the lens and then returns, muttering that it isn’t good enough, it isn’t statue-like enough, it isn’t right. Soon they decide to try the compound on her face and hair, and instruct her to stay completely still as they apply it.

“It’s burning,” Lee tells them, her jaw immobilized so that she has to force the words out through her teeth.

“It will stop,” Jean tells her. This is not at all what she has been picturing. Where is the gold leaf, the radiance?

By the time the compound is dry, the burning is gone, except for Lee’s tender cheek, which becomes the part of her body that she focuses her attention on so as not to feel all the other parts that are aching. The main actor, Enrique, is called over. He and Jean and the stagehands stand around discussing her as if she is a prop, and she can feel irritation heating her up inside the costume so that she starts to sweat with aggravation as well as discomfort.

“It’s the folds in the fabric. They aren’t right,” Enrique says. “They’re not hanging the way marble hangs.”

The men move around the room looking for something they can use, and an Italian stagehand comes over and starts describing something, gesturing as if he is stirring cake batter in a bowl. Then there is butter and sugar and an actual bowl, and the man stirs it up for them and they spread it with a knife along the folds of Lee’s outfit. It smells good, like shortbread baking in the oven.

Another hour passes. Still the men aren’t done with her. They try her out in various poses on the stage, make her walk so that the bottom half of her body appears to be gliding, but Jean isn’t satisfied. Lee grows more and more uncomfortable and soon she desperately needs to use the lav, but there is nothing she can do until it’s time to take off the costume.

“She’s still a woman,” Jean says, disappointed.

Of course she is. What is it that they want from her? Lee is used to pleasing men when they point cameras at her. She walks again across the stage, not lifting her feet from the floor, but it still isn’t right. Her whole body aches. Tension coils in her neck and shoulders and the heat of her own trapped skin oppresses her. She has an almost irresistible urge to move her arms, to scratch, to crouch down, to crack open the stiffened fabric and get free.

Then Lee remembers a scene from one of Man’s movies that she saw recently, made before he gave up on film entirely. In it he has Kiki lying down, staring up at the camera, and then, when she closes her eyes, painted eyes appear on her lids. She moves to the center of the stage and closes her eyes, knowing that this is what they need—her blindness—and then she moves tentatively across the floor, unseeing and ghostly.

Jean loves it, and when he comes to adjust her costume one final time she tells him through clenched teeth about Man’s idea to paint the eyes on Kiki’s closed lids. A slow, competitive smile spreads across his face. He gets out an eyebrow pencil and she can feel its pressure through her closed lids. Lee opens and closes her eyes once to show him the effect and leaves them closed for the rest of the day’s filming.

With her eyes closed, the power shifts. Lee suddenly feels as if she has gained control. The men in the room cease to matter. She is separate from them. She walks when they tell her to walk, shifting her body to face things she cannot see, but they are nothing more than sounds to her. After a while she loses her ability to distinguish where the sounds are coming from, everything in the room distorted and murky as if they are all trapped in a giant fishbowl.

And then the tension eases and she floats out of her aching body, as she has done so many times when her picture was taken. But this time she doesn’t use her wild mind; she stays in the moment. Eyes closed, she watches herself glide across the room, while also still seeing the play of light and shadow across her eyelids from the shifting of the stage lights and the dark spots of the other actors moving past her. And then Lee can’t feel her body at all, but she can see it there, under the plaster, can see how powerful she will be when she brings the stone to life on-screen.


When the bright lamps are turned off for the day, Jean comes up to Lee and moves her to a chair, where he and a stagehand begin getting her out of the costume. They remove the armor and the cord that holds down her arms. When they are done, she stretches her arms over her head and almost gasps at the pure pleasure of full movement. And then Jean places his hands on the sides of her face and pushes gently until the makeup cracks and he can begin peeling the layers of compound and batter off her like an eggshell. He does this slowly, almost tenderly, and when he is done he gets a big cloth and wipes away as much of what remains as he can.

As they all leave for the day, she tells Jean she is going to stop by Man’s studio, and he and Enrique offer to walk her there. The men are subdued, but as they walk, Lee feels more and more alive. The day has changed her. Everything about it—the crush and bustle of activity on the set, the frenetic energy—was so different from a photo shoot, so much more alive.

At first Lee walks a bit ahead of them, but then Enrique moves next to her. “Have you acted before?” he asks. “I’ve never seen you.”

She shakes her head no.

“You did great. It’s batty the things Jean makes people do.”

Lee laughs, but already the agony of the costume feels like a distant dream, and what remains is a strange feeling she can barely articulate, as if her emotions have experienced the equivalent of a slap that has brought them, like blood, to the surface.

The air is still, and in it hangs the odor of decaying leaves on the wet earth, rubbish bin fires, the yeasty scent of bread and the sweet rot of old vegetables from the restaurants and bakeries they pass. Lee realizes she is ravenous: she cannot stop thinking about food, a thick veal stew, perhaps, and a jammy red wine to wash it down. She has cake batter in her hair and her dress is smeared with plaster dust and stage makeup, but she doesn’t care. As she walks she swings her arms back and forth. Jean glances at her occasionally and smiles.

“We are lucky to have her, no?” he says to Enrique as they wait to cross the street, watching her as she twists her body to wring the last stiffness out of it.

Enrique nods and gives a terse smile. He is just as intense as he was during the filming, and he seems almost angry at Jean in a way that doesn’t make sense to Lee.

They reach Man’s studio, and the familiar sight of his door with its simple brass knocker sets her stomach fluttering—whether from anticipation or trepidation she isn’t sure.