Whitney Scharer - The Age of Light

Man’s hand is still wrapped around her biceps. “What?”

Before Lee can say the words she’s practiced, Madame Pecci-Blunt sweeps up to them and puts her arms around them both, pushing them as elegantly as she can back into the house. “Darling,” she says to Lee, “let’s move this wholly inappropriate scene off the dance floor, shall we?”

Man and Lee let her steer them into the house and down a long hallway, until they’re standing before some sort of game room, with a billiards table in the center and trophies mounted on the walls. With a delicate shove, Mimi pushes them into the room. “Make nice, and do it quickly before anything happens to my party. A little drama will be good for tomorrow’s papers, but I don’t want anything else to go awry.”

Mimi pulls the doors shut behind her and leaves Lee and Man alone together in the giant room. From this far away they cannot hear the sound of the partygoers; in fact, all sound seems to be swallowed up by the plush carpet and the thick curtains lining the windows.

As soon as the doors are shut, Man whirls to face Lee. “What the hell was that?”

“What was what?” Lee says childishly.

“You. That man. Is he the one who…?” Man makes a sound that is almost a choke and doesn’t finish his sentence. He moves away from her and goes over to the window, lifting one of the curtains and looking out on the grounds below.

Lee moves forward and leans on the pool table, gripping its felted lip so tightly her fingers turn white. In a loud voice, she says, “You—stole—them. My pictures. My bell jar. You put your name on them.”

Man turns to face her. “What are you talking about?”

“What am I talking about? You can’t be serious. You know what I’m talking about. You took my picture—my pictures—and you submitted them to the Philadelphia Camera Society.”

Man looks genuinely confused. He rubs his hand through his hair. “Ah. The bell jar photos. Yes, I did submit those, along with a few others. One of the stipulations of the prize was that the images had to be a triptych. I do so few series, and they’re always coming up with some ridiculous restriction like that, God knows why.”

“Have you—did it cross your mind that what you’ve done is stealing?”

“What? Of course not. We did those together. They’re as much mine as yours.”

Lee’s voice shakes. “We did not do those together.”

“We did all the solarization together—that’s how I saw it. I assumed you felt the same.”

Lee’s hands are like claws clenched around the pool table’s rim. “I discovered it. Not you. Don’t you remember? Do you not remember?” It occurs to her that maybe he doesn’t. Maybe the memory that looms larger in her mind than any other from their time together—those weeks when she felt more in tune with a person than ever before or since—maybe they have left Man’s brain like fog burning off in the morning sun.

Man moves from the window and faces her across the pool table. Above his right shoulder a deer’s mounted head looks down at them. “Lee, it is absurd to be this worked up. What we create in the studio is, ultimately, my work. It’s my studio. You’re”—he pauses, as if suddenly realizing how his words might sound to her, and then says softly—“you’re my assistant.”

“Ah.” It is as she suspected. All the anger goes out of Lee and her legs grow weak beneath her. Man sees the change in her posture and hurries around to her side of the table, where he reaches out to touch her. She flinches.

“Of course I only mean that about the studio work. Just the studio. You know how much you mean to me—how much I love you.”

Lee bows her head and doesn’t say anything, just gazes into the dark shadow of the pool table’s corner pocket.

He tries again. “I should have told you I was submitting those photos. I’m sorry. But it was a busy time, and you were gone a lot, and I suppose I just forgot.”

Still she doesn’t speak. Her eyes fill with tears, and one of them drops and makes a dark spot on the green felt of the table.

“Lee, say something. I’ve forgiven you for cheating on me—I forgave you when I was in Cannes; I can’t stay mad at you—and I can forgive you for whatever this little scene was tonight. I love you, Lee. I love you.”

She lifts her head and stares at him. “What do you see when you look at me?”

Man shakes his head, confused. “What do I see? A beautiful woman. The woman I love.”

A beautiful woman. But what was she expecting him to say? It’s what everyone has always seen. Lee wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. “You don’t see me. You never have.”

“What do you mean? I can’t see anything but you. I’ve told you that.”

“You don’t. You don’t.” Lee is crying harder now, her face crumpling, and instead of hiding behind her hands as she normally would, she stands with her arms at her sides and lets the tears fall. “I can never forgive you.”

Man takes a step back. His face registers his realization that she is serious, that this is more important to her than he first understood. “Lee, be reasonable. It doesn’t matter—I’ll write to the society. Take the photos back. Whatever you need me to do.”

“Will you write to them and tell them they’re mine?”

Man’s eyebrows scrunch together. “I’d rather just withdraw them. I don’t want the society to get the wrong idea…”

It is the worst thing he could say. Lee wipes her eyes once more and then steps away from him. “I’m finished,” she says.

“Finished?”

“Finished. With this. With us.” She waves her hand around the room.

Man looks stunned. “Are you saying that your photos matter more to you than what we have together?”

“Yes, I guess I am.”

At first Man blusters, defending himself, and then he switches to contrition. The words don’t matter to her. When Lee said she was finished, she meant it: by the time he begs her to forgive him it is far too late.

Before she can leave the room, Man sinks to his knees and wraps his arms around her bare legs. She watches him do it and feels no connection to him, bends down and peels his arms away from her, steps awkwardly out of his grasp. Purposefully, she retraces her steps down the maze of hallways and back to the party, where everything is still spinning on just as it was before. Lee goes over to one of the stalled projectors and numbly switches out the reel, then watches as her own hands begin to move over the surface of people’s bodies, her fingers running up a man’s suit jacket and across his cheek before disappearing into shadow. The party lasts for hours, and Lee stays until the end, finally gathering her coat and heading out into the frozen winter air. Who knows where Man is by then? Maybe he is still kneeling, waiting for her to join him on the floor.

Weeks later, when Lee has gathered all her things from Man’s apartment and moved into a hotel, after she has answered the SPACE TO LET sign on the little studio’s window, written to her father for a loan, bought her own studio camera and a gurney to put it on, after she has written up an advertisement—LEE MILLER STUDIO: PORTRAITS IN THE STYLE OF MAN RAY—after she has had her first client, an older woman who saw the ad in the Sunday paper, a package arrives at Lee’s new studio’s door. It is wrapped in brown paper, tied with twine, and it’s clear that it hasn’t come by post.

She knows immediately who it is from, even though they have not seen or spoken to each other since the Bal; Lee made sure to pick up her things from the apartment when she knew Man would not be there.

Lee takes the package inside and unwraps it slowly. Inside the brown paper is a wooden box. Inside the box is Man’s metronome, with something taped to the pendulum. Lee picks up the metronome and sees that what’s taped on is a piece of paper, and on it is a photo of an eye, her eye, staring vacantly out at her. At the bottom of the box is a hammer with a note tied to its handle. Destroy me, it says, in Man’s familiar hand.

Lee sets the metronome on the table in front of her and considers it. The emotion that fueled its creation is tangible in the jagged scissor marks where the eye has been cut from her face. The image is underexposed, as if the print was pulled from the developing bath too quickly. Her eye is vacant, depthless, the iris thin as water. Lee stares at the image and it stares back. What picture did Man cut it from? Which version of her face jigsawed into the trash from the scissors’s slicing? With a finger Lee sets the metronome in motion, sits down and watches as her eye rocks back and forth.

And then Lee looks around the space—her space, all her own, her sparse white room, as clean and bright as she imagined it would be when she first saw it—and at the photos she’s been working on lately, some of them still hanging on the line to dry. She’s begun a new series, semiabstract street scenes that are carefully composed but have the energy of snapshots. They are some of the best pictures she’s ever taken. Lee gets up and goes into her darkroom to get back to work, leaving the metronome on the table to tick out the last of its spring-wound power.

“Liberated”: the word was bound to degenerate. Lee wrote those words and sent them off to Audrey with all the rest. She wrote them with Dave Scherman, right after they liberated a case of Gewürztraminer from another Nazi storeroom. The word became hilarious. “I’m going to liberate your pants,” Davie said, and they laughed so hard they knocked over their wine bottle, but it didn’t matter because they just liberated another.