When she realizes he is addressing her, Lee is so surprised she is almost tempted to decline their invitation, but this is the thing she has longed for—a way to be a part of a world just beyond her reach. For a moment she is scared to let it happen. But her waiter has overheard them, and comes over to carry her drink for her, so the choice is made and she moves over to their table.

Once she is settled, the man who invited her leans toward her. “I’m Jimmy,” he says, “and this is Antonio, and this is my sister, Poppy.”

He holds on to the word sister for a beat too long. Lee knows she is to understand that Poppy isn’t his sister, but she has no idea why he would say she is.

Poppy turns her shiny head and looks at Lee. “We were talking about Diaghilev, but I’m bored of that. I want to talk about a scandal. Do you know any scandals?” Poppy purses her lips and a line appears near her mouth like a delicate question mark.

Lee glances around, suddenly hot from all the wine and food. What does she have to say that would interest them? Her mind goes blank as paper, and the only things she can think of are the physical objects around them: the ceiling light swaying on its chain, the scuffed wood floor, the candle on the table with its small waterfall of wax.

“You’re a scandal,” Jimmy says to Poppy, reaching over and putting his hand on her knee. She ignores him, holding Lee’s gaze, the challenge of her question continuing until at last she looks away and it is over. She turns back to Jimmy and he begins talking again, and just like that the tension eases and Lee is folded into their group.

“We were at the Ballets Russes,” Jimmy offers.

“We had to leave,” Poppy says. Lee wonders if they were kicked out because of how they were dressed.

Jimmy balances on the back two legs of his chair. “Poppy here has a very refined sensibility. She can’t bear to see anyone suffer. The director has a reputation—a temper, let’s say—”

Poppy cuts him off. “The dancer looked puffy. She’d been crying, I could tell. And Goncharova’s set was all wrong.”

“I liked it. I better have, all the time I spent helping her paint it.” These are the first words Antonio has spoken. He doesn’t take his cigarette out of his mouth.

Lee turns to him. “Oh, you paint!”

“No.” Antonio takes a huge drag and then crushes his cigarette in the ashtray and lights another in a unified and graceful motion.

“Antonio does automatic drawings,” Jimmy says, and Lee nods as though she knows what he means. Antonio just sits there, so Jimmy continues. “Incredible work. He really gets to the dream state. Time like gears unhinged. Screwy stuff.”

“The opposite of you,” Poppy says, looking at Lee again, and for a moment Lee is shocked, until she realizes that Poppy is pointing to her camera, which she has set on the table and is surprised to find is doing what she hoped it would do: signal her new identity. Lee reaches out and runs her fingers across its case, still cold to the touch in the warm room.

“I’ve been doing illustration work for Vogue,” Lee says, eager to offer up something that might seem intriguing. “They hired me when I moved here to sketch copies of the fashions at the Louvre.”

It is true, or was: for weeks Lee sat on her little folding stool in the Louvre’s east wing, copying the Renaissance objects they had on display. A lace cuff with a rose point pattern, a belt with a giant silver buckle. She sent her sketches to the magazine, care of Condé Nast, but when she did he told her that they couldn’t use them after all. We have a man in Rome now taking pictures, he wrote. Much faster, and such a good way to see all the details. Lee hasn’t been back to the museum since, and she hasn’t found a new job either.

“Fashion at the Louvre,” Jimmy drawls. “How bourgeois.”

Lee flushes, but before she can say anything, Antonio says, “Good light. I work there now and then.”

Lee thinks of the slanting shadows cast down from a bank of the museum’s windows, the silhouettes the statues threw onto the ground. “Yes,” she says, and when she catches Antonio’s eye he gives her a smile, warm and genuine. Jimmy twirls a finger in the air to call for more drinks, and Poppy shifts in her seat so that she’s facing Lee and starts to tell her a long, convoluted story about her childhood in Ohio, and just like that, Lee feels she has lifted a chisel to the wall of Paris and tapped the first crack into its surface.


Later. More wine. Poppy’s hand snakes along Jimmy’s thigh, the white tips of her manicure pale moons against his trousers. A warm flush that started in Lee’s stomach rises up to her neck, as if she is a carafe someone is slowly filling with hot tea. By the time the warm feeling reaches her chin, she is leaning back in her chair, her legs spread in an unladylike posture, laughing so hard at the things Jimmy is saying she forgets to hide her crooked front teeth with her hand. So when Poppy yawns, looks around at the restaurant, now half empty again, and says, “Let’s go somewhere—anywhere,” Lee is ready, doesn’t even care where they take her.

“Drosso’s,” Jimmy says with authority, standing and throwing a sheaf of bills on the table—how many Lee doesn’t know, but it seems to her a vast sum, more than enough to cover the cost of her meal—and then they are outside, and it is raining, so they pile into the back of a taxicab, pressed so close together that Lee can feel the stubble on Poppy’s exposed thigh as it pushes against her own. Antonio is wedged against her other side, staring out the window.

“Careful of your glass,” Jimmy says to Poppy, who has brought her wine into the cab and takes small sips each time they stop.

Poppy turns to Lee as if they are in the middle of a conversation, which maybe they are—Lee cannot recall. “A few weeks ago Caresse and Harry had us drive out to Ermenonville. They own a mill there, and we met in the field behind it. I got into Harry’s car and Caresse got into Jimmy’s car. Lavender leather seats, custom work. At first it was the wildest thing. One switch and you’re leading a gorgeous new life. Harry gave me his gardenia—”

Jimmy reaches over and grabs Poppy’s face roughly, pushing her cheeks together so that her mouth distorts into an unattractive pucker. He lets go after a moment and she takes a sip of her drink as if nothing has happened. She is quiet for the rest of the ride. Antonio pays no attention to them, and when Lee glances at him he is cleaning his fingernails with a penknife. Usually this would disgust her. He has huge hands, long tapered fingers. Artist hands, Lee thinks. The knife blade reflects the light of the streetlamps as they drive, and Lee watches him for a while, then looks out at the city, watery and indistinct through her own reflection in the cab’s fogged windows.


Drosso’s turns out to be an apartment on the third floor of an unremarkable building in Montmartre. The exterior gives no hint of the opulent world they find inside, rooms opening one into the next like brilliantly lit jewels, furnished with silk settees and Persian rugs and piles of embroidered satin cushions. Drosso himself greets them, arms outstretched, dressed in the strangest and most fantastic coat Lee has ever seen, a long burgundy jacket with attached silk butterfly wings that flutter behind him as he approaches. He kisses everyone on both cheeks, awkwardly long kisses.

“Magnifique,” he whispers, and holds Lee at arm’s length and makes her twirl for him, ducking her under his wing and letting it brush over her like a curtain. When she has finished twirling, Drosso smiles and puts one arm around her and the other arm around Poppy and shows them to a dressing room, steps outside, and closes the door. A dozen brightly colored silk robes hang from hooks on the wall. Poppy begins disrobing immediately, piling her clothes haphazardly in the corner. At first Lee tries to watch her without looking as though she is watching her, but it doesn’t matter: Poppy is uninhibited, shimmying her way out of her garter belt and stockings the same way she must when she is alone.

When she sees Lee watching her, she says, “Everyone changes at Drosso’s,” as if that explains things. After debating it for a few more moments, Lee follows her lead. She fusses over the buttons of her dress, folds the garment extra neatly before setting it on the floor, and after she sees Poppy remove her brassiere she does the same, feeling as though she is back in the dressing room at a modeling studio. Once Lee is undressed, she chooses a sky-blue kimono and ties the belt tight at her waist, the silk cool and almost wet against her skin. She cannot bear to leave her camera—what if it gets stolen?—so she picks it up and tries to ignore how absurd she feels carrying it while wearing the robe.

As they emerge from the dressing room, Lee hears muted voices and low music coming from down the hall. Drosso is waiting. He leads them to the back of the apartment, to a library with gilded bookshelves, and then walks over to the shelves and pulls a lever. The bookshelf swivels open to reveal another huge room, this one painted deep eggplant, with several dozen people inside, most dressed in robes, reclining on sofas and the floor. In the center of the room is a low brass table with a hookah and a few opium pipes on it. A dark-skinned man sits cross-legged next to it, dressed in a brocade military jacket and a small close-fitting hat. He leaps to his feet as they come into the room and bows deeply. In a corner, a couple lies entwined, sharing sips from the valve of a hookah tube that snakes toward them from the table. The man’s hand rests in the woman’s hair, unmoving, and her eyes are closed. As Lee watches, the woman’s head starts to droop forward, and his hand clenches shut in her hair and holds her steady. The woman opens her eyes and smiles sleepily at him.