Whitney Scharer - The Age of Light

Instead, she says, “It’s been so long since Tristan’s printed 221.”

Man chews and swallows, his Adam’s apple bouncing in his neck. “I know. Money troubles. Just like the rest of us.”

“Is he ever going to put it out again?”

“I have no idea. It’s a bit of a tense subject. And I’m certainly not in a place to help fund it.” Man puts down his fork and rubs his hands together as if he is washing them.

“So… my pictures?”

He looks at her blankly.

“My pictures. In the magazine.”

Man drops his head. “Lee,” he says. “Now’s not really the time to ask Tristan for a favor.”

Lee waits for him to continue, to apologize. When he doesn’t, when he just keeps sitting there, she says, “I thought you’d already asked him. And I didn’t realize it was a favor.”

Man makes a sound that is half growl, half laugh, and covers his face with his hands. “It’s not a favor. That’s not what I meant. I just—I have a lot on my mind right now. You would have known that if you’d been around lately.”

He is done with his chicken. Even though it wasn’t very good, he has decimated it. The bones are so bare they seem almost boiled, stacked neatly at the edge of his plate. Lee takes slices out of the center of hers and doesn’t care how much she wastes.

“I had an idea,” Man says. “You know how you asked me this afternoon how you could be helpful? I saw George Hoyningen-Huene at Le Boeuf sur le Toit the other evening. He’s working for Vogue and he said he’s bored with all the models he’s been using. He wants someone new, modern. Of course I thought of you.”

Lee sits back in her chair. “I’ve told you I don’t want to model anymore—”

“Oh, I know. But they pay so well. And you did ask how you could help.”

“I meant… What about the Bal Blanc? Should we phone Madame Pecci-Blunt? You said we could charge a fortune.”

Lee wonders if he can hear the frustration in her voice, or if his own worries are drowning out hers. She does not want to model again; he knows that. He must.

“The party’s in six weeks,” Man says. “We won’t get paid until the new year, if we’re lucky. Hoyningen-Huene is looking for someone now. How about this: I’ll call Madame Pecci-Blunt and you’ll drop by Vogue. Just see how it is. He’s supposed to be really good, actually. It might be fun.”

“How about this: I call Madame Pecci-Blunt.”

“Don’t you think the call would be better coming from me?”

Lee puts down her fork and crosses her arms. “Jean recommended me. He also said she wanted to work with a woman on this, so I think I should call her. I’ll explain that you and I work together.”

The “woman” part isn’t true, but Lee figures Man can’t refute it. He drums his fingers on the table. “I think I should call her,” he finally says. “But I’ll use both our names. I’ll present us as a team.”

Lee considers this. “Fine. But I want to be a team. I want to come to all the meetings, and I want to help come up with the concept. And I want my name in the papers next to yours.”

“I can’t control what they put in the papers.”

“Well, you can try. We can call it a Man Ray–Lee Miller production, or something like that.”

Man nods and uses a piece of baguette to sop up the last of his drippings. “All right,” he says.

On the way home Lee insists they stop for a drink in the hope that there is something they can salvage from the evening. They choose a place where they’ve never been before, with a crowd that is mostly men, as if they are all there in the bar to do business deals. Lee downs her first martini and flags the waiter for another before Man has finished his. She lets the gin warm her and looks around the room at all the other patrons, trying to find a way for each of them to remind her of Antonio: the way one man has a silk scarf looped around his neck, the way another’s hair brushes his collar, the way another’s legs spread wide in front of him. She finds herself imagining that they really are Antonio, all of them, that she could simply sit down at another table and be with him instead of Man. Her thoughts embarrass her but she doesn’t stop herself. After a few moments, Lee forces her attention back to Man, to his wide forehead and the two little lines between his eyebrows, to the small patch on his chin where stubble doesn’t grow, to the bright whites of his eyes and the memory of how they made her feel just a few short weeks ago, when she couldn’t think of another man in the world she wanted to look at but him.

It is Lee’s idea to stage the picture. She sits on the wicker chair next to the tub and unlaces her boots, leaving them where they land, then unbuckles her uniform and slips out of it, Dave watching from the door with that smirk on his face. He’s seen it all before and she’s seen him too. It doesn’t matter. What is shocking right then is how white her skin is under her clothes, pale and tender in the hard overhead light. It will be her first bath in three weeks and in the little vanity mirror her neck and face are army issue brown, the dirt almost topographic where it has dried on various layers of sweat.

“Dirty auslander,” Dave says in a fake German accent, and they both laugh.

She runs the tap as hot as she can get it, even pours in some Epsom salts from a little container on the nearby counter, and the bathroom fills with steam and a sharp saline smell that reminds her of the ocean and makes her realize how long it has been since she’s seen anything beautiful.

Dave putters with his camera and tests the shot. He leaves the room and comes back with a small portrait of Hitler, which he places on the rim of the tub.

“Too much?” he asks.

“There’s so many goddamn pictures of him in this house I’m shocked he doesn’t have one in here. Leave it.”

She steps in and the water is so hot it gives her goose bumps.

“You’re going to leave a ring around that tub, rub-a-dub,” Dave says, referencing an ad for a cleaning product they made fun of a few years earlier. Dave is drunk. So is she. They’ve been nipping slowly at their stash since leaving upper Bavaria, their stomachs sour from what the Krauts call wine. Here at 16 Prinzregentenplatz they rejoiced when they opened a bar cabinet and found it full of Braastad, a luxury they haven’t seen since before the war. They pour it into snifters etched AH and emblazoned with swastikas and get properly ossified.

Lee sits down in the tub and Dave hands her a washcloth and a bar of soap. There, under the accusing eye of the Führer, his hands on his hips in a pose that Lee is sure is supposed to look commanding but instead looks priggish as a schoolmarm, she scrubs at the dirt of Dachau until her skin stings.

“Wait till Life gets their eyes on these,” Dave says.

“You wouldn’t.”

He laughs. “No. These are just for us. To commemorate—”

“Not commemorate. To bury that fucking monster.”

Dave takes enough shots to fill a roll and Lee sits in the bath until the water gets cold. Then she steps out and puts her uniform back on, the buckles and buttons as familiar to her now as her own body, and she picks up the framed picture and lets it drop facedown on the bathroom tile. In one quick motion, she pivots her foot on top of the frame, the glass screeching on the ceramic, and leaves the room.

They spend three more hours in Hitler’s house before the rest of the regiment arrives. Lee feels as though she knows the Führer a little bit by this point. She’s sat at his desk, read his letters from Eva, looked through his sketchbooks, seen his bedroom and his sock garters and his headache tonics. The more normal he seems, the more she despises him. She is filled to the brim with hatred, choking on it.

Frogue, as everyone calls it, is more than Vogue. To say it is more French is to miss the point. It is more everything. Epicenter, nexus. Here in the ornate cluttered offices, the editors are choosing the fashions that American Vogue copies; they are setting the trends instead of emulating them.

When Man asks her how it is going, Lee talks dismissively of it, but to her surprise she loves being there. Does she wish she were behind the camera? Of course. Does she have to stop herself from shouting directives in the middle of a shoot, bite her tongue when the photographer makes a choice she doesn’t agree with? Mais oui. But at Frogue she and all the other models are treated with a respect never shown to her in New York. From the moment Lee arrives at the main office, foul-tempered, feeling forced into being there by Man, she has been treated as if she is important. In the waiting room, the assistants’ obsequiousness saps the grumpiness right out of her. They usher her directly to a studio to meet the photographer; they do not keep her waiting. They seem, in fact, to be honored to have her, to be reacting to a reputation Lee did not fully recognize she had. And the reputation is not from her connection to Man Ray: it comes from her, from her past work for Condé Nast, from Steichen’s pictures of her, and because everyone at the magazine knows she will make the clothes more beautiful. Here the clothing matters above all. Fashion made totemic. Lee has not forgotten that she is beautiful, of course, but it is nice to have an outside reminder, and from such a place as this.

Her life suddenly has a balance to it. Madame Pecci-Blunt has hired them, but she’s been impossible to pin down on details, so Lee and Man spend a few hours a week making preliminary plans on their own. Then Lee spends a few days at Frogue, and the rest of the week in the studio. She likes the rush of a day spent modeling: fitting in lunch, the way the Frogue employees have their favorite bistros only steps away. And she likes George Hoyningen-Huene, the photographer she works with most closely when she is there.