Over the next few days Lee exists in a sort of fever dream, her only focus to create the films she’ll show at the party. She teaches herself to use Man’s cine camera, which thank God he has not sold, and fills an entire notebook with sketches and ideas. Each afternoon, like a diver emerging from a pool for air, she comes to the surface of the world again, and goes out into the streets for supplies, which she charges to an account Madame Pecci-Blunt has given her. She comes back to the studio with rolls of 16mm film, canvas, materials she can use to experiment as her ideas change and grow.

First she makes a list of a hundred or so words and phrases, both in English and in French, words that will surprise and titillate when they are projected on guests’ bodies. RACONTEUR, COQUILLAGE, FALSEHOOD, DREAMER, CHUCHOTER, PERMISSIVE, LACKADAISICAL—the words come in a flood and she scribbles them all down, paints them on the canvas she has purchased, and then films them. She pictures the words crawling across the wealthy guests’ skin and clothing—GAUCHE, SEREIN, AWESTRUCK, FLÂNEUR, JOURNEYING—and as more words come to her mind she paints and films those too.

One evening Lee starts painting a story on a drop cloth, or maybe it’s a poem, words and phrases that start to have a narrative. As she paints she realizes the words are a love story, they are Man and Antonio, they are a coded apology that only she and Man will understand. The words give her an idea, and she rifles through some pictures Man took of her months ago, and places them next to the phrases. As she works she suddenly wants Man to be there, for him to come to the party and see what she has done, the words she’s written for him, the story she is making, the best way she can think of to tell him she regrets what she has done.

The more Lee works, the more she finds she is sorry. The more she misses Man. The way their eyes met in the darkroom, the looks they gave each other when something turned out well. The dance they executed around each other in their shared small space. Working alone is not the same. On a rainy afternoon she almost phones the Wheelers, but can’t think what she would say.


One evening, after working for countless hours, Lee stops and looks around with bleary eyes. The studio is a disaster. Spent tubes of black paint litter the floor. The air smells of linseed and spilled wine and what might be Lee’s feet. The ends of her fingernails are permanently blackened, the cuticles dry with turpentine. But the films are done. There are four of them: one of disconnected words, one of strangely juxtaposed images that she knows owe much to Man’s Surrealist films, one of the words and images she thinks of as her love poem, and one of her hands in hundreds of poses—she hopes that when these are displayed on people’s bodies it will look as if someone is touching them. Lee opens another bottle of wine and watches all four films, projected on the back wall of the studio, as she drinks straight from the bottle, the wine going down her throat in what feels like one uninterrupted swallow. When the last film slips loose of the reel at the end, Lee sits in the sudden hot bright light of the projector, listening to the tock tock tock tock as the film goes around the reel, and she feels overwhelmingly, drunkenly proud.


The next day, Lee goes back to the apartment for the first time in eight days. She needs clean clothes; she needs a bath. The mail slot is full of correspondence. Bills to be paid, friends to respond to. And as Lee goes through the stack she sees how many letters are addressed to her, all of them in Man’s crabbed hand. There are fifteen of them: he has written her almost two letters a day. She gathers them up and once she has stripped off her dress and lain down on their bed she opens them and reads them as they must have been written, almost in one stream of consciousness.

Away from you I realize even more how much I need you—we are like twins of each other or mirror images—without you I’m less than half of myself—I’ve hardly eaten since I left you, food has no taste, my mouth is dry and water doesn’t help it—and this trip becomes what I should have known it to be: a penance, an exile, a drying out, the only way I can get over the liquor that is you.

In some of the letters he seems angry; in others he is plaintive. He must have spent hours on them. Lee envisions him at some desk at the Wheelers’, looking out at the sea but not seeing it.

I feel old. I probably shouldn’t admit this to you, as one of the things I worry about most is that you will tire of being with me. But I do. My bones ache. My knees creak when I stand up from the floor. My head aches. I feel your beautiful fingers at my temples, rubbing the pain away. But then I think: no wonder she does not love me as I love her, if what I imagine is myself sick and needing to be taken care of. And you—you are so free. You only half realize it, I think, how much potential you have inside you, all the things you have left to do.

It is not until she reaches the tenth letter that he mentions the night she left and what she’s done, and the letter trembles as she reads it.

I know you were with another man the night before I left Paris. I’m not sure how I know, but I do. I could feel it, while you were gone. Could feel what you were doing. I saw the man’s hands touching you, I saw him making love to you as only I am supposed to do. It made me sadder than I have ever felt in my life.

And then in the last letter, he gets angry, the slant of his penmanship more pronounced, his pen gouging into the paper.

You have never let me in. You know this, don’t you? For all our time together I have been knocking against the door of your skull and you have only opened it one crack. I have had to view you through a peephole. I know why—I understand how hard it is for you, that what happened to you when you were young is still with you—but I thought I could break through that old, old pain, clean it up like a spill. But you! You don’t even know that I am knocking. Don’t even know that we could have been more than we were if only you had opened up to me. You didn’t let me be all the things I wanted to be for you.

By the time she gets through all the letters, Lee is hollowed out. Exhausted. In the margins of the last letter Man has written Elizabeth Lee Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Lee Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth. Her name a hundred times over. While she thinks, she traces her finger along the letters.

It is true, what Man has written. That she hasn’t known how to let him in. Or perhaps she didn’t want to. All along she has thought maybe he hasn’t noticed. Lee doesn’t have other love affairs to compare to this one, not real ones, so there was always the chance that what they had together was enough. But it wasn’t. She has tried to move past the memories, to erase them, but instead they have become indelible, a scribbled darkness over what used to be light. She is so ashamed at her weakness, at how events from two decades ago have left such a permanent mark on her. If only she could have done as the analyst requested, as her father requested, and forgotten. And now, here, another erasure, another thing lost—or maybe it’s something she never had in the first place.

Lee fills with such powerful self-loathing she has to lie back on the bed and close her eyes. Everything suddenly seems absurd—her own aspirations as an artist, her relationship with Man. Her love poem film: the thought of it is embarrassing. As if a few words projected on a screen could be a true representation of love. All of it is nothing. She puts an arm over her eyes and feels hot tears slip out from under it.

Lee gets under the covers and huddles in a little ball, Man’s letters spread around her, until finally sleep comes and saves her for a while.


When the sun comes up it wakes Lee from a fitful night. She is still surrounded by Man’s letters and all the other mail. She lies there, staring up at the ceiling, watching the shadows the curtains cast on the wall. She picks up one of Man’s pages and reads a few lines. She already knows what it says; the words are burned on her brain like a photograph. As she sets down the letter, she notices a big envelope at the bottom of the pile, with the Art Deco monogram on it that the Philadelphia Camera Society uses on all its correspondence. It’s addressed to Man, of course, and is thick and heavy. Good news is always thick and heavy. She knows she shouldn’t open it, but then it occurs to her that if he has been accepted for the exhibition—or even better, if he has won one of the big prizes, the grand prix, even—it would be a good reason for her to call him at the Wheelers.

So she opens it, slipping her finger under the thick glued flap and peeling it open as carefully as she can. Inside, there is a letter and a big exhibit booklet. It has to be good news.

December 20, 1930


Dear Mr. Ray,


We are pleased to inform you that the Jury of Selection has awarded your triptych, “The Bell Jar Series,” the Patterson-Shrein Award for Portraiture. The triptych will appear in the exhibition on March 1, 1931. The jury members were deeply impressed by the compositions, and especially by the new technique one of the photos employs, described in your accompanying artist statement as solarization. Furthermore, your photos have been chosen by Mr. Joseph Merrill Patterson and Mrs. Richard T. L. Shrein to receive a five-hundred-dollar ($500) prize and a place in the Philadelphia Camera Society’s distinguished permanent collection.