Antonio sips, coughs, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out his tobacco. In one fluid motion he rolls a cigarette and lights it, taking a deep drag off it so that the ember hisses and crackles. He hands it to Lee, who almost refuses but then thinks, Why not? As she inhales, the smoke sharpens the absinthe in a way that makes her feel as though she’s burning from the inside. As though she is flaying herself and starting over. She takes another long sip of the drink, another drag off the cigarette, and soon they are refilling their glasses and starting the process over. The force of their attraction to each other hangs in the air like a suit of clothes they could step into.

“So,” Antonio finally says, his expression curious.

Lee takes another sip and puts her hand on the table, and he rests his hand on top of it. Her world narrows to a point and he is at its center.

The crowd ebbs and flows. The music gets louder, the beat more insistent. Several couples stand and push aside tables so they can dance in the middle of the room. The dancing women hold up the bottoms of their robes and expose lean unstockinged legs. Lee and Antonio sit close together. Around them swirls the world. It feels like that to Lee, as if this strange room contains everything anyone would ever need. The dancing couples—as she watches them, time slows, and she sits back and just lets details wash over her: a bruise on someone’s knee, the way an earring casts a sliver of prismatic light on a woman’s neck, the expressions the dancers make as they move, both self-conscious and uninhibited, their eyes closed while smiles and grimaces of concentration flash across their faces. Lee catches snippets of conversation from other tables: “I was growing gardenias, of all things.” “We made it down the mountain before it started to really snow, but I had lost a ski.” “Patrice is a real hussy when she’s around him.”

Lee leans close to Antonio so her lips almost touch his ear. “You know what I want? I want to take pictures of this place.”

He pours more absinthe in her glass. “You’re good, aren’t you? Your work. You really care about it.”

Lee doesn’t know how he’s gotten this impression, but it’s true. His knowing it makes it truer, somehow, than when Man or even Jean has said the same thing to her.

“I do care about it. I feel…” She looks around at the dancers as they jump and hop, at the other couples at the tables nearby. “I feel like I finally understand what I’m trying to do.”

Each time they talk they have to lean in so they can speak at a normal volume, which feels incredibly intimate in the loud room.

“I think the world…,” she continues, “the world just goes on doing what it does whether I take a picture or not. My art—it’s about choosing when I release the shutter. It’s not about setting up a scene and making a picture of it. It’s about being somewhere at the exact right moment and deciding it’s a moment when no one else might think it’s anything.”

He nods. “I like that.”

She feels flushed. She is not sure if he has understood her—Lee has never voiced this thought to anyone. She is still just figuring it out herself. With a trembling hand she picks up her absinthe and takes a long searing swallow, then refills the glass herself. The water hits the absinthe and swirls like smoke in the glass.

What she longs for more than anything is that moment of decisiveness, of clarity. She wants to create moments and capture them on film. Capture lived experience, the feeling of being alive.

From across the room she sees the bartender extend a wineglass to a man as if she is holding out a rose. She sees a man lower his head and rub his neck. The room smells of liquor and perfume and it is humid with all the bodies—exactly, she thinks, as Antonio must have imagined when he wanted it to be a mouth. Lee picks up the bottle and fills his glass again, and then she leans across the table and kisses him.


Hours later, drunk, their bodies thrumming, they stumble down a darkened hallway in a part of Drosso’s apartment that Lee doesn’t think she’s seen yet. Antonio’s hand is clenched around hers; her thumb rubs the round knob of bone in his wrist.

Someone walks toward them in the semidarkness.

“We need a room,” Antonio mumbles.

The person doesn’t answer, staggers away.

They try doorknob after doorknob. Giggling now, simultaneously drowsy and alert. So many doors! They open one on a bathroom, catch each other’s eye. Almost consider it. Antonio puts his arm around her, his big hand wrapped tight around her rib cage. He is so warm she feels as if he is melting her.

Finally, at the end of the hall, double doors with large matching pull handles.

“Are those…?”

They are: two giant erect penises, cast in bronze, curving up from their bases to make the handles.

“Do you think”—Lee begins speaking, then hiccups—“those are Drosso’s?” She starts to laugh again and worries she’s not going to be able to stop.

“Probably.”

“Well, they’re very… impressive.”

But Antonio just gives them a yank and leads her into a large bedroom that must be Drosso’s. Antonio, who all the time Lee has known him has been a man of few words, is whispering things to her, his voice a low rasp in her ear. The things he wants to do to her. All the ways he’ll fuck her.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes.” Lee wants to say more but her mouth isn’t moving right and she doesn’t want to miss what he is saying. They find the bed; he lifts her onto it. Their robes are off, crumpled on the ground, there is just skin on skin on skin. Lee is on her back; Antonio kneels between her legs and grabs her around the waist, lifting her up and onto him so that their positions are reversed. With no effort he slides into her. She presses her thighs against him and feels the sharp blades of his hip bones as she moves above him, setting the tempo. Each time she lifts herself up he raises his hips to meet her. As he pushes into her she feels the same as she felt with the absinthe, as if she is scraping herself out from the inside and starting over. She leans forward and runs her hands all over him, feels every inch of his body, puts a hand between her legs and circles the base of his cock so she can feel how hard he is. Soon enough she stops thinking of anything. It is all just smoke and heat and licorice, the feel of their bodies as they move against each other. Her orgasm, when it comes, is a wild and terrible wave. She holds it off for as long as she can but it rolls in anyway, an obliteration, and she is lost to it, senseless, the wave is the blackness crashing over her and she lets it come.

Afterward Lee lies next to him, her head resting on his shoulder. The room is dim, and she stares at the wallpaper, letting her vision blur so that the pattern of vines and flowers seems to undulate on the wall. Or perhaps the flowers are undulating; in the gloom she watches, fascinated. Then she shifts her gaze and stares at Antonio’s profile. He is looking up at the ceiling, unblinking. Lee rubs her hand along his arm until he looks over at her.

“What are you thinking?” she asks.

He props himself up on an elbow so he can look right at her. “You know? I’m thinking I don’t really even know who you are.”

In her drunken, sated state, Lee considers this. She could tell him that she doesn’t know who she is, that she never has, that sometimes she just feels like an empty vessel to be filled by whoever she is with or whatever she is doing. She has the sense he might understand.

But instead she says, “Does it really matter?”

He rolls toward her. “I think it does. Because I want to see you again. Can I see you again?”

Lee feels herself sobering up. In an unwelcome rush, she pictures the list of excuses and alibis she will have to create to keep this from Man. It is exhausting just to think about. And yet she cannot imagine herself not doing this again now that she has done it.

She looks at the way the shadows play over Antonio’s chest, the dark line of hair that runs down his stomach. “Of course you can,” she says.

“You’re not with Man Ray? I thought I’d heard…?”

“What if I were?”

Antonio raises his hands above his head in a conciliatory gesture. “You don’t have to explain to me. I remembered you from that other time we met, and then once I thought I saw you with him at the Dôme. You looked… I thought you looked happy.”

Lee pictures what Antonio might have seen. The camera lens zooms back and she is in the middle of the shot, smiling, Man’s arm around her protectively, possessively. Man sees someone he knows, smiles and waves, goes over to say hello. If Lee were to snap a picture of that scene, in it she would be watching Man without wanting anyone to know she was watching him, sidelong and hungry. But what might Antonio have seen? Under the surface, love? There is no way for her to know. The moment is gone; the moment never existed in the first place.

“We were happy,” Lee says, and swings her legs over the side of the bed and searches for her robe until she finds it tangled with Antonio’s by the door. She picks them both up and tosses his to him. He roots around in its pocket and finds his tobacco, then scoots up to the headboard and starts rolling a cigarette on his thigh.

Lee walks over to him and gives him a long kiss, neither of them wanting to break it off first. He tastes like smoke and sugar cubes. The nerve endings in her tongue pull taut a knot in her stomach, and it is all she can do not to lie down beside him again. But instead she moves away.