Whitney Scharer - The Age of Light

George is talking about their swimwear shoot that afternoon. He took Horst and Lee up to the roof, where he posed them against the sky and told them to pretend it was the sea.

“It’s hard to get Vogue to pay for location shots anymore,” he says, turning companionably to Man, who is pushed back from the table, his ankle crossed over his knee, the picture of relaxation. “So I’ve been doing more of this sort of thing, shooting close and letting the background suggest a mood rather than dominate the image.” George picks up his glass and swirls around the inch of wine in it. “But they want a big shoot for the summer issue, and Horst had this idea of Biarritz or Saint-Tropez, on the beach. Wouldn’t they be stunning? Those two blond heads in that light?” He tips his glass at Lee and Horst in turn. “You know the magazine better than I do. How can I convince them to let me do it?”

George is looking at Man, eager. Man says, “You have to have a better reason than the light to get them to let you go on location. In fact, I’m sure whatever you’re thinking of shooting there you could easily do here. You’re right when you say the setting doesn’t matter as much in fashion right now.”

Horst leans in toward the center of the table, makes his voice low. “But we want to go to the beach. Let them pay us for lying in real sand, with real sun on us.” He laughs and gives Lee a wink.

He and Lee had this conversation this afternoon, as they sat back-to-back, shivering in the strong rooftop wind, on the wooden plank George fashioned to look like a diving board. “If my balls were any colder they’d crack right off my body,” Horst whispered to her, and to forget the frigid air they spent the rest of the shoot describing to each other the sun-splashed paradise they’d be in if they were shooting in the Côte d’Azur. It felt funny then, a lark, but now, with Man staring at them as if they are naughty children, Lee just wants to change the subject.

“I can never tell if it’s a good thing or a bad thing to fantasize about warm weather in the winter,” Lee says. “I grew up in the coldest wasteland in America, so I have a lot of practice.”

But Horst won’t let it go. He reaches out across the table and touches Lee’s cheek. “A face like this deserves the perfect setting. As does this one.” He puts his hands to his own face and frames it, giving them a joking smile. “I want to get out of this city. Have an adventure.”

“Well, try to get Vogue to pay for it if you can. They never did much for me,” Man says, his voice clipped. He raises the end of the napkin he has tucked into his shirt collar and wipes his lips with it before looking over at Lee. “Obviously, if it works out, you wouldn’t be going. You’re needed here, in my studio.”

Lee sees Horst and George exchange a glance, and she lifts her wine goblet and takes a deep swallow so that she can look into the bottom of the glass instead of at their expressions. The moment is a small one—right afterward the conversation shifts to Dalí’s latest film, set to premiere in just a few days—but it is the end of the good feeling of the evening for Lee, and she cannot help but feel as she did so many times when she was young, as if she has been chastised for doing something she didn’t even know was wrong.

Over the next few weeks, as Lee continues to switch off between modeling and Man’s studio, she keeps thinking back to the dinner with Horst and George, keeps seeing Horst frame his face in his hands and insist he wants an adventure. And then she pictures herself on the beach, her skin warmed by the sun. And every time she thinks of it, she thinks of Man’s reaction, and the dinner becomes the moment when distance opens up between them. Nothing huge, just a crack in the sidewalk, with her on one side and him on the other. Just the sense that he is suddenly unfamiliar to her. And that she herself might be unknowable to him.

She works more, stays out later, goes out for drinks with Horst and some of the other people she’s met at Frogue. In addition to her modeling, Lee starts to take on small writing assignments, fluff pieces, mostly, but she finds she enjoys pounding out the stories on her typewriter, likes even more seeing her name as the byline. Lee becomes friendly with one of the women in the finance department, a British expat named Audrey Withers who is desperate to get back to London, the first woman Lee has become true friends with since Tanja. And she starts staying out so late each night that Man is asleep when she arrives home, and then it’s Thursday and she realizes she needs to be at the studio and she hasn’t had a real conversation with him since Sunday, and she hasn’t even noticed, not really, hasn’t even missed him all that much.

One day when she shows up at the studio, at first she doesn’t pay much attention to his mood. He is hunched over his desk, scribbling furiously in a large notebook, with an extra pen stuck behind one ear and lots of crumpled sheets of paper dotting the floor around him.

“Tea?” she asks.

He looks up briefly. He is unshaven, with pouches under his eyes. “Yes, thanks.”

She puts the kettle on. From the other room she hears him rip another sheet of paper out of the notebook, then silence, then the loud scratching of his pen. When the water boils she gets out their two teacups, fills the teapot, drops sugar cubes in the empty cups, and places everything on a tray, which she carries into the office with the grace of someone performing an action perfected over time. She sets the tray at the edge of his desk and slides the cup near him, stands for a few minutes waiting for the tea to steep, and pours it in the cup, twirls a spoon around. Through all this Man doesn’t speak, just scratches at the notebook without stopping.

“Is that your artist statement, for the Philadelphia prize?” she asks when he pauses.

“Yes—it’s finally coming. I figured out what I wanted to say late last night.”

“That’s wonderful,” Lee says, and means it. After fixing her own cup of tea and standing over him for a few more moments, she continues. “I’m going to start printing the Artaud shoot. We said we’d deliver it Friday.”

Man looks up at her with an unreadable expression. “Actually, do we have anything this afternoon? I’d love to shoot you. I have an idea for a project.”

Lee is surprised. Flattered. It has been a while since he’s taken any pictures of her, and it hits her that this is what must be missing between the two of them right now, the collaboration that used to fuel everything.

Lee works all morning and when she comes into the studio in the afternoon he has two of his Graflex cameras looped around his neck. She feels almost shy. He stands at the window and stares down at the street below. He says, “The light is good right now.” Lee starts unbuttoning her shirt, but he shakes his head no. She poses by the window where he places her, resting her palms on the windowsill. Man gets very close to her, the camera lens only inches from her face, its eye peering at her eye. He focuses and releases the shutter quickly, a few times in a row.

“What are the pictures for?”

“I can’t quite explain it yet,” he says. He switches to the other camera, again getting as close to her as he can. He takes pictures of her ear, her eye, her mouth, her nose. Lee holds perfectly still, hardly breathing. The camera obscures Man’s face, and she can actually feel the chill emanating from the metal of the camera case. In the curved surface of the lens, she sees her features, shrunken and distorted, and feels a rising sense of panic at the idea of his camera touching her. It doesn’t help that Man is completely silent, engrossed in the work.

“Your eye,” Man says, pausing to reload one of the cameras with a new roll of film. “When I get this close to you, I can reduce it to pure geometry, to the golden rule. I see it that way when I’m shooting it.”

Lee’s heart is beating fast; she can feel it in her throat. “It’s just my eye.”

“Your eye is what I make it into.” He moves her shoulder gently so the light will hit her face. “Now there is a beautiful shadow across your iris that’s going to run the length of the frame. I might crop it even more when I print it. Total abstraction. Geometry. That’s it.”

Lee wishes he would move away, give her space. She closes her eyes but he keeps shooting. Her eyelids flutter wildly. After a few moments, she can’t take it anymore and steps away from him.

“I don’t… Just stop.” Lee steps back again, into the shadow of the curtains, and he finally puts down the camera. They stare at each other for a moment.

“I’m done with this,” she says.

“But I’m not.”

Lee walks out of the studio. She is shaking. Man follows her. He is angry; she can feel it rolling off him.

“Your eye is my eye,” he says. There is a tremor in his voice, and he has his mouth clenched so that two curved grooves are cut into his cheeks. “You’re mine in every way. You know that, don’t you? You’re my model. My assistant. My lover.”

She backs away from him.

“Tell me you’re mine. Say it.”

Lee’s throat has closed to the size of a straw and her words when she says them sound strangled and reedy. “I’m yours.”

Even though she has said what he asked her to say, he doesn’t seem satisfied. Lee wonders what it is he does want, if there are any words she could say that would placate him. They don’t break eye contact.

“You’re no one else’s model. Not Hoyningen-Huene’s, not Cocteau’s, not anyone’s. And if you want to go somewhere, back to Biarritz or anywhere else, I will take you.”