Whitney Scharer - The Age of Light

Jean sniffs. “Enrique does not like to be seen with me.”

“That can’t be true!”

“Lately it feels that way.”

“I’m sorry.”

Jean shrugs. “And you? Man Ray is not taking you out tonight, wooing you?”

“Man doesn’t need to woo me anymore,” Lee says, and laughs.

Jean gives her a look. “Certainly you always need wooing. Someone should tell him that.”

The facade of the Palais Garnier is one of the most beautiful in Paris, studded with statues of the Muses of poetry and harmony. Lee heads toward the front entrance, but Jean moves her around to the south side, where they enter through a small unmarked door.

“We really are sneaking?” she asks.

“Yes—like little mice. You should see backstage.”

They walk down a narrow hallway and emerge into the costume room. From a delicate metal frame bolted to the ceiling, dozens of tutus hang suspended in the air. Against the dark wood of the room, the tutus are ethereal clouds scudding across a nighttime sky. Lee immediately reaches for her camera and takes a few pictures, but the light is fading from the small windows and she knows the shots won’t turn out well.

“Can you bring me back here another time?” she says to Jean, but he is already leading her farther into the building. They ascend a short flight of stairs and emerge backstage. The room takes Lee’s breath away. Dark wood and shrouded set pieces. A vast floor, stained black and scuffed from thousands of ballet shoes, the scent of dance tallow lingering in the air. Lee walks toward the stage and, as her eyes get used to the darkness, notices the sets that must be ready for use that evening: beautiful tapestries with pastoral landscapes, a cloth painted to look like a four-poster bed, a scene of a dining room table laid out for a sumptuous party. Like the tutus, each set panel is suspended from a series of cables, and Lee likes the way the ropes crosshatch the ceiling, lets her eye be drawn up to the top of the room, where the last of the sunset filters through a row of small windows. In the light the dust motes twirl and sparkle.

Lee watches for a while and then notices a person up in the rafters, standing on a wooden platform suspended between two ropes. He extends a leg off the platform and grabs a cable, then crosses over to another ledge, nimbly climbs down a ladder, and moves closer to the ground. She can see him better now. He is dressed all in black: tight black pants, black shirt, black scarf tied around his waist like a belt. When he moves again, pulling a different cable so that he can adjust one of the set pieces, she sees the power in his body, the lithe maleness of him. When she finally tears her eyes away to look at Jean, she realizes he has been watching too, and they exchange a smirk.

“Caruso!” Jean shouts at the man. “We see you!”

The man turns to them, and Lee picks up her camera and frames him in the viewfinder, his shadowy form silhouetted against the ropes. She focuses, releases the shutter, and puts her camera away. The man climbs down and jumps neatly to the ground, the thump of his feet sending up a puff of rosin powder. Jean goes over and embraces him, which the man endures without reciprocating.

“Caruso!” Jean says again. “You are here—why are you here? I need you on my set!”

Caruso doesn’t respond but gives Jean a brief smile. Then he glances over at Lee, and his face shows a flicker of recognition.

As their eyes meet, Lee recognizes him too. Soft dark hair, sharp cheekbones, shirt unbuttoned with a sprouting of straight chest hair visible. Full dry lips. His first name comes to her immediately. Antonio. From Drosso’s.

Antonio reaches into a back pocket and pulls out a flattened pouch of tobacco, then sits on a chair and starts to roll a cigarette.

“Caruso, Caruso,” Jean says. “I need you for my last scene. I need you to paint me a billiards room.”

Antonio licks the edge of the cigarette paper and twists it closed. “You know how much Lifar’s paying me? Good money.”

He lights the cigarette and takes a huge drag, his lips going white with the force of his inhalation. He moves to hand the cigarette to Lee.

“I don’t smoke,” she tells him, but he ignores her and places the cigarette to her mouth. His boldness surprises her, and when his fingers touch her face she thinks at first he must have burned her with the ash, the feeling of his skin on hers sends such heat through her. The effect is absurd, outsize, makes the world seem sharper, as if she has rubbed her eyes and brought everything into better focus. As if she has just come awake. The part of her cheek where he touched her feels separate from the rest of her face, and separately awake. The smoke burns her throat as she exhales, and she is desperate not to cough. Antonio lights two more cigarettes, one for himself and one for Jean, and as he does so Lee tries to look anywhere but at him. But every time she looks, Antonio is staring right back at her, rolling the cigarette without even glancing at it. His eyes are gray, clear like chips of river ice, and he doesn’t seem embarrassed to be looking at her so intently.

The three of them smoke for a while. Lee wants to reach out and touch Antonio again to see if the same feeling will happen. She can’t even focus on the small talk they are making, so she moves away from them and walks over to look at one of the set pieces. The panel is dupioni silk, painted with sweeping brushstrokes to give the impression of a forest. Here and there intricately painted birds are just visible within the looser lines of the branches and leaves. A draft from somewhere makes the silk vibrate.

“I remember you,” Antonio says, coming up behind her. The night at Drosso’s rushes back.

“You’re friends with Poppy and Jimmy,” she says.

“Those two. Not really.”

Lee is flooded with the memory of her behavior that night, all the drinks she had in an effort to feel comfortable, to belong.

“I saw Poppy once since then,” Lee tells him. “She pretended she didn’t know me. I still can’t figure out why.”

“You’re probably better off. She’s always putting on some new act.”

“What do you mean?”

Antonio shrugs. “She and Jimmy—there’s always some swindle. I didn’t figure that out until later, but they’re no good.”

Lee wonders if they were the ones who stole her camera. It was the only thing she had of any value. When his cigarette is done, Antonio looks at his watch. “Almost time,” he says, and just as he says it the first dancers and stagehands appear backstage. Lee makes to leave but Jean crooks his finger at her and leads her over to the curtain. It is massive, made out of heavy-pile velvet and edged with dense rows of braided fringe. Jean pulls it open and sticks his head through.

“Come—you have to do this,” he says, so Lee goes over and they swap places. She sticks just her face through the fabric, letting it encircle her like a heavy veil, and she looks out over the still-empty opera house, the rows of seats receding into shadow and flanked by the beautiful gilded boxes. Everything is silent, and the room is filled with a sense of expectation. What would it be like to perform on that stage, blinded by the bright lights and unable to see the hundreds of people you know are there? To feel the orchestra reverberating under your feet? Lee drops the curtain and moves to take one step forward but realizes the backstage has gotten crowded. It is time to go.

As she leaves, Lee glances around for Antonio. He stands in the corner talking to another stagehand, but as she looks over at him, he catches her eye, and a devilish, unexpected grin spreads across his face, as if he and Lee are sharing a joke from across the room. Lee smiles back and a string pulls tight between them.

Lee and Jean are among the first to be seated, and they watch as the giant hall fills up around them. They talk of their film, and of ballet; Jean tells her all he knows about that night’s production. Then the lights dim and the music begins. The dancers fill the stage, their legs and arms hard as marble but moving like ribbons when they dance. They are all so beautiful—Lee has never seen such powerful bodies, men and women both, and as she watches them she feels shivers go down her back. Almost as beautiful as the dancers are the sets, which rise and fall with an elegance that is itself almost dancing. Lee pictures Antonio up in the rafters, his body moving the scenes he has created, the rooms and landscapes he conjured now under his control.

Lee watches in what becomes almost a trance. One part of her mind watches the ballet; the other thinks about how it would feel to be touched by Antonio, like a dancer himself, all hard muscle and bone. The air in the opera house is full of perfume, but beneath it Lee smells Antonio’s tobacco, lifts her fingers to her lips to smell it better. She likes the way his belt sits at his hips, how tall he is, the flex of his thighs when he jumped to the floor. Onstage, two dancers promenade, and then the man’s arm circles the woman’s waist and he lifts her up above him as easily as stretching. As she lands she drapes herself across his body. The thoughts leave Lee plucked and twanging like the ropes behind the stage when Antonio leapt down from them.

At the end of the performance, the entire audience stands, clapping furiously and shouting “Bravo! Brava!” again and again as the dancers return to the stage to bow. Lifar has done it; he is a success. Jean applauds for a while and then puts his arm around Lee. She claps until her hands are burning.

When Lee wakes up the next morning, she reaches for Man across the bed, their two bodies warm beneath the blankets. They haven’t made love since she started working on the film, and she misses him, kisses his shoulder and then his neck. Her body hums with longing. Man returns her kiss, and Lee presses against him, but she can tell his mind is elsewhere. Hers is too: the ballet still fills her thoughts. So she tells him about it. Lifar’s first production. What she does not mention is Antonio, the way she can still feel his fingers on her face as he held the cigarette to her lips.