Lee has never seen him like this. He holds the camera like a shield in his hands, but she can see he’s trembling. She’s trembling too. He has confused her, filled her with a need to leave but a conflicting need to soothe him.

“I’m yours,” she whispers, the words like stones in her mouth. Her repeating the words seems to satisfy him. His shoulders relax. He lets go of the camera and lets it hang from its strap. The other times she has seen him angry have been like this: brief flares, quickly extinguished. So different from how she is, the embers burning for days. But right now Lee feels a deep sense of relief that she has calmed him.

“Good. Let’s finish the shoot—I have a few more ideas I want to try out.” With that, Man seems to think it’s over. He reaches out and touches her cheek.

Lee nods. As she follows him back into the studio, she has trouble moving her body; she feels as if she is made of wax. Man has to move her into position, and she lets him. But as he picks up his camera she feels her old wild mind. She stares right at him but doesn’t see him, imagines instead that she is a pilot in the cockpit of a plane, flying above the city and looking down at the ribbon of the Seine. The goggles press into the bones of her face; the air is filled with the smell of acrid smoke and burning fuel. Her heart pounds; she grips the yoke and points the plane straight up, to where the atmosphere is thin above the cloud cover. When Man puts the camera near her eye again she squints, closing him out of her view and filling her eyes with sky.


Afterward, when Man is finally done, Lee gathers up her things and leaves without saying goodbye. As she goes down the stairs she keeps seeing his camera looming toward her and feels the heat of his breath on her face. She makes sure Man doesn’t hear her leave, and as soon as she is on the sidewalk, she inhales and lets it out slowly. She loops her Rollei around her neck and walks north with no destination in mind, her only thought to get far away from where she’s been. She walks up Boulevard Saint-Michel, letting the city move past her in an uninterrupted rush. Across the street a young boy clings to his mother’s hand while sucking on a gigantic lollipop that has smeared his whole face pink. A white-haired man tucks his hands into his pockets and hunches against the wind. A woman in front of a bakery trails her gloved hand along all the baguettes before selecting one. Again and again Lee wants to pick up her camera and snap a picture, but she doesn’t. She lets life stream by without inserting herself into it, uninterrupted, uncaptured. Who is she to make herself a part of it?


Lee continues on across the Seine, through the Île de la Cité and across the Pont au Change. She walks and watches. At Les Halles she takes a quick right, wanting to get onto a quieter street, then turns again onto Rue Saint-Denis, where the bordellos are. Lee has walked here before but without her camera. The street has a furtive, debauched atmosphere that suits her mood. The buildings, painted bright colors years earlier but now fading, have paint peeling off in some places and all their shutters closed at all hours of the day. A few women, their stockings sagging down from their garters and their dresses outdated by several years, lean against the buildings or sit on the steps with their legs spread wide. One of them looks familiar. She has a sharp nose, a small mouth, black hair marcelled in tight waves against her scalp. Her flesh stretches against the seams of her thin black dress.

Lee approaches her. “Kiki?” she asks. With a feeling of elation, Lee starts dialing the settings into her camera. But as the woman looks up, her face dissolute, her makeup blurry, Lee realizes it’s not Kiki. Of course not. Up close this woman looks nothing like her. As the woman puts her hand out to stop Lee from taking her picture, Lee puts the camera to her eye and releases the shutter. When she sees what Lee is doing, the woman starts yelling, a stream of French invectives. After she gets the shot, Lee leaves quickly, looking back only once to make sure the woman isn’t following her. As she turns the corner, Lee feels a rush of clarity and power. The photo—Lee does not need to develop the film to know what she has gotten—will show the woman with her mouth twisted into an angry circle, her hand outstretched like a beggar, the fabric of her dress straining as she leans forward. There will be in it a feeling of surprise, of unexpected juxtaposition, as if in taking the picture at the exact moment when the woman’s anger flared, Lee has shown her honestly, both supplicant and whore.

On Rue Pierre Lescot, Lee stops and works to calm her breathing. She holds her camera in both hands and it feels as though it is bonded to her skin and completely connected to her. Getting the shot has erased Man from her mind and hinged her to the present. The people, passing by her, appear in flashes, a film reel unspooling as she walks. She heads back toward Les Halles. The street is crowded. Lee watches the lives around her and begins to come back to herself—or to come to herself for the first time. Her eyelids are like a camera’s shutter snapping; she blinks the motion around her into pictures. Every once in a while, one of the pictures she creates in her mind is worth saving, so she picks up her camera and freezes it on film. Every picture she takes feels alive and unexpected. And Lee herself feels more alive than she ever has, just taking them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

By now it is six o’clock and the last rays of the November light angle across the city, everything gray in the growing shadows. Lee doesn’t want to go back to the apartment, but she must. Her feet hurt; she has walked for hours; she is hungry. She thinks of telling Man about her picture: the woman’s mouth rounded into a perfect O, her emotions as visible as her flesh. But it is not Man she wants to tell. She wants to tell herself, so she plays it back in her mind, reliving again and again the feeling of power she got when she released the shutter at the exact right moment.

Lee dillydallies outside their door, hoping Man is out, but when she finally goes inside, she can hear bathwater down the hall and sees the trail of Man’s clothing left on the floor along his path. Lee even hears him singing. It’s that new song “A Bundle of Old Love Letters,” weepy and sentimental. Hearing him, she realizes she can’t stay. Quickly, Lee pulls open the armoire and looks at her dresses. Which one will make her look her best? She chooses her green crepe georgette and puts it on hurriedly, along with a more comfortable pair of shoes, jams her paste diamond clip in her hair, and leaves without letting Man know she was ever there.

Though she’s been walking for hours already, as soon as Lee is back outside she realizes she’s not remotely tired. She wants to move, wants to be outside, and most of all she wants to be doing something that will turn off her brain, calm the thoughts that fill it.

It is an hour’s walk to the Palais Garnier. A nice walk, as good a destination as any. She knows how long it takes because she’s walked there before, a few weeks earlier. The night is clear and mild, and soon Lee unbuttons her coat and lets it swing out behind her. She picks up speed, moving so fast her heart beats hard inside her chest. She walks the hour in forty-five minutes and finds herself at the Garnier at seven o’clock, right when they open the doors to let the crowds in.

She buys herself an orchestra seat, even closer to the stage than she sat with Jean. Pays with a flourish. An extravagance, yes, but it is nice to pay for herself for once. As Lee waits for the dancers to take the stage, she reads the playbill, looking for names she recognizes—the patrons and the dancers and the crew. The set designers and musicians. Sees it printed there. ANTONIO CARUSO, in the same black font as the rest of the names but, to her eyes, burning.

As the first chords sound, the dancers take the stage. Again Lee is transported. It is the purest expression of emotion: feelings made physical and mapped onto the body. Oh, the bodies! Lee would love to photograph them. The hard fact of their bones, the connective tissue visible under their skin, as if she is meant to see how the bodies are made. Lee wants to take pictures of them against Antonio’s sets, the dancers’ sinews and the silk panels in contrast with one another. It fascinates her, the toughness of their bodies, and when they move Lee thinks about the pain of dancing, the ballerinas’ feet crushed and aching as they go up on pointe, the tape and bandages wrapped around the men’s strong calves. Lee’s own body—soft in comparison. The only part of her that is toughened is her hands, the skin dry and flaking from the darkroom. She wishes all of her was thickened up, that her body was a callus, that she got that way through hours of work and training. Lee wants to be someone who exerts effort, tries at things. She does not want to be soft.

At the end of the show the audience members are as ecstatic as they were the other night, leaping out of their seats and pounding their hands together. Lee stands with all of them, claps and claps, waits until she can be the last one to leave.


She does not know what she is doing. Does not know what she wants. No. That is not true. She knows what she is doing and what she wants but does not want to admit it, thinks that maybe if she doesn’t admit it, it won’t be true.

She waits so long at the south door she almost thinks he’s not going to be there. But then she sees him, recognizes him in silhouette, lean, lithe, a scarf thrown over his unbuttoned coat. He sees her too. Stops and stares. Lee stares back with no expression. Her gesture has been made. She wants him to come to her. And he does: he walks over. Stands so close his jacket brushes against her. He is so tall she has to tip back her head to look up at him. The streetlamp casts odd shadows on his face and she can see a starburst of fine wrinkles radiating out from his eyes, the skin tissue thin and delicate.