Vogue has stopped sending Lee on assignment, but she is still working. She travels throughout Europe and photographs what freedom looks like. In Denmark it is an outpouring of repressed gaiety despite the lack of power, people creating elaborate cardboard facades to hide the damage done to their city. In France it is big hats, a flagrant use of fabric now that rationing is through. In Luxembourg—a country whose war strategy could be summed up as “Whistle and hope they don’t notice us”—it is polite small-scale parades, harvest celebrations.

Lee is the only photographer still there. After Munich, after Dachau, after Hitler’s suicide in his Berlin bunker, the press corps leaves, called away to other countries, other projects. Even Dave leaves, when Life sends him on assignment in the States. He urges Lee to come with him, but she cannot imagine languishing in a country the war barely touched. Instead, she continues on to Eastern Europe, hoarding petrol and brandy, driving alone across the cratered landscape in a jeep she’s liberated from the 45th. She misses Dave’s company so much that as she drives she starts talking to herself in an imitation of his deep voice, but she resents him too: for abandoning her and going home to take comfortable photographs of socialites and public works projects.

Somewhere in Romania the money runs out, and the telegram Lee sends to Audrey is answered tersely. Her accreditation has been revoked. There’s nowhere to go but home.

When she gets back to London, Lee reunites with Roland Penrose. After all the years of letters, at first his corporeality disturbs her: the warmth of his body next to hers, how clean and well-dressed he always is. But lots of things disturb her, and she finds he is the only person she can bear to be around for more than a few hours. He doesn’t ask anything of her—unlike Man, who asked for everything, and unlike the war, which took it all. Together she and Roland travel to Sussex, near where he was born, and rent a small farmhouse, walk along the gravel drive. They talk about moving there permanently someday. He takes her hand in his, and squeezes.

The farm is green and pastoral and so quiet Lee’s ears won’t stop ringing. Once they’ve unpacked, she collapses on their bed and sleeps for days, waking only to drink brandy from the bottles she keeps by her side. Roland brings her sandwiches, the crusts curling up and drying out when she doesn’t eat them. One night she wakes up screaming, and Roland rubs her back until she pretends to fall asleep again. She waits until he starts to snore before she reaches for the bottle.

Lee can’t shut off the pictures, the endless film loop of her brain, but brandy helps, and cognac. It also helps to sleep, to let nightmares replace her memories for a while.

“It’ll get easier,” Roland tells her, patting her hand, rubbing her arm. He spent the war in Norfolk, running the army’s Eastern Command School of Camouflage. He touches her too often—sometimes she has to grind her teeth to stop herself from flinching—but it is easier to tolerate it than to tell him to stop.

A few years later, they get married. It is a mistake, but at the time Lee doesn’t care; she just wants someone who accepts her as she is. Roland wants to be in the country, so soon they buy Farley Farm. She arranges to have her things sent down from London, and the crates arrive while Roland is away on business. Boxes and boxes of negatives and old discolored prints. Lee doesn’t even bother opening most of them before she heaves them up to the attic.

She puts the boxes in a far corner behind an old bed frame, where no one will ever find them. Roland won’t ask questions, and with him she can move on, become a different person, let the years erase the past until all that’s left is clean and empty. Once she’s locked the attic door behind her she feels a sense of release, a crack of light in the darkness. What is the name for what she’s feeling?

She wishes it were liberation.

EPILOGUE

London 1974

You wouldn’t know from looking at her that Lee is dying. She looks beautiful as she walks unescorted through the front doors of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, where Roland has recently been promoted to director. It is the first time she’s been in the ICA’s new building here on the mall, and if anyone were to ask her she’d say it is atrociously ugly, a squat structure covered with an excess of fat Grecian pillars, like a child’s rendering of high culture. Lee vastly preferred the old space—drafty and cantankerous as it was—but no one has asked her. Certainly not Roland, who never asks her opinion on anything anymore.

Lee wears a dress, the first she has put on in months. Dying has, ironically, brought back her love of fashion, as well as her hips and cheekbones, and before she pushes through the museum’s glass front doors she catches a glimpse of her reflection in their surface and for once likes what she sees. Face flushed from the unseasonably cold air and the coughing fit she had a few blocks earlier. Bouclé wool sheath with a smart matching jacket in a blue that brings out the color of her eyes. The suit may be démodé but it’s Chanel, and it fits the way it fit when Lee bought it years ago—a victory of sorts.

Roland promised Lee a private viewing of the new exhibit before the opening party scheduled for that evening. Lee deserves it—deserves, in fact, far more than she’s gotten from him, especially since she is part of the reason the exhibit is even happening. The Vogue article she wrote about her time with Man Ray—she counts back and can’t believe it’s been seven years since it was published—sparked the interest of the ICA’s former director, and Roland weaseled his way into being part of the team that put it all together. This exhibit is probably why they promoted Roland when the other director retired. He has Lee to thank for his new role, though of course he’d never say so.

She needs this time alone before she is forced to hobnob with all the museum people. And before she sees Man. At first Roland told her Man wasn’t going to be able to come, that he was too frail to make the trip from Los Angeles, but then a few weeks ago he idly mentioned that he would be there after all. Forty years since they last saw each other. Try as Lee might to imagine what it will be like when he is standing in front of her, she can’t make the image of him come together. Her memory has reduced him to impressions: the line of his jaw against his jacket, the slouching way he liked to stand. She’s not even sure if those remembered fragments are real, or if they all come from a photo, that one she took of him on the bridge in Poitiers, the only one of him she saved.

Lee pushes through the groups of schoolchildren and tourists thronging the lobby, and takes the stairs to the second floor and past a temporary barrier. She almost laughs when she sees the exhibit’s entrance. Hanging above the closed doors is a giant silk-screened sign, with Man’s signature printed on top of a picture of Lee’s naked torso. It’s one of the many shots Man took of her against their old bedroom window, her body striated with evening light. Lee shakes her head and wonders if the museum’s marketing people knows it is the director’s wife they’ve printed on their banner.

She opens the doors and enters. No one is there. The room is completely quiet, dimmer than she would have expected. Small monolights illuminate framed prints, and some of Man’s sculptures stand on pedestals in the center of the room.

The exhibit is set up chronologically, and the first few rooms are easy: artifacts from the life of the young Emmanuel Radnitzky, sketches and doodles, a mezuzah from his childhood home, early nude studies, even a copy of a term paper he wrote at school. And then a room of 1920s Paris: Kiki with the violin markings on her back, another of her sleeping. In an alcove Emak Bakia loops, already playing in preparation for the party later on.

It is not until Lee gets to the next room that she starts to have trouble. Painted on the wall by the door is 1929–1932, EROTIC PARIS. Photos are clustered in large groupings, and as Lee knew they would be, almost all the pictures are of her body. But knowing this in advance does not make it any easier. She walks slowly along one wall, taking it all in: her thighs and arms and breasts, boxed up in thick black frames, the harsh lights flaring off the glass as she moves past them.

Here they are, all those parts of herself she let Man photograph. All the parts he touched and painted and loved. She looks and looks, waiting for it to coalesce into a whole, but of course this does not happen. Why would she expect it to? In her attic there are dozens of self-portraits—Lee Miller par Lee Miller—and even those have never satisfied her. She knows why. It is because there is no whole to be found. No center. Or maybe that’s not true. Maybe Lee has just never known how to find it.

Man’s photos look old—they are old, Lee realizes, with a stab of sadness—and the girl in them has been lost to her for so many years. Here is her beautiful eye, her beautiful sternum. Lee wants them back, all the pieces of herself that have been taken. Her lips. Her wrists. Her rib cage. As she looks at the disembodied sections of herself she thinks of the X-rays the young pimply-faced doctor splashed up on the screen: the illuminated moth’s wings of her lungs inside her chest, shot through with cancer. In the negative, there was a reverse effect, and the tumors appeared as bright white spots, but Lee knows what color they really are. In the examination room she had a small feeling of vindication: finally, proof of the blackness she always knew she carried inside.