CHAPTER FOUR

“Bobby!” Man shouts when the man arrives. He is corpulent; his body fills up the doorway and blocks the light. Once inside, he smiles at Man, a gummy smile in a big bald head, like an oversize baby’s. They laugh and shake hands and Bobby pounds Man on the back.

“It’s been too long,” Man says. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw your note. Big Bobby Steiner, in Paris. Never thought I’d see it.”

“When General Electric sets up the hoop, you jump through it. I’m head of the European division now.”

“I heard. Terrific news. And you were smart to come to me. I’ll take a photo of you that’ll make you look like you deserve it.”

“You better.” Bobby laughs again and glances around. When he notices Lee, he stops short and raises his hands in a gesture of mock surrender. “Hello, looker!” he says. He walks over to her and offers his face for a kiss, one cheek, American-style. “This your new girl, Manny? You got yourself a new girl? I liked that last one you brought to New York.”

Lee expects Man to clear things up, but he just laughs and mutters something to Bobby she doesn’t hear and doesn’t want to. She feels her face grow hot, not with embarrassment but with annoyance. Bobby stands looking at her for a few more moments, letting his eyes drift up and down her body, and then the two men walk into Man’s office and shut the door.

Lee is certainly not Man’s girl, but she’s not his student either. After the woman from the anniversary shoot left that first afternoon, Man asked Lee to stay behind, and explained that he had more work than he could handle and could use her help. Lee is not sure what she did to make him change his mind, but whatever it was, she doesn’t question it. He has had other assistants, he told her. The last one left a few months earlier. The job isn’t glamorous: keeping track of Man’s finances, which he described as a holy disaster; scheduling sessions; setting up the studio equipment; and occasionally helping him print. To his description of all these tasks, Lee nodded her head, bobbing it up and down so insistently she was worried it might come unhinged from her neck. If she was expecting a huge salary, he continued, he couldn’t provide it, but Lee could use the darkroom when he didn’t need it and she could come and go as she pleased. She agreed before he even told her a number. When he did it was shockingly low. But she doesn’t care. It is a beginning, a launching point into what she wants. The idea of working for a famous photographer is so appealing she probably would do it for free.

And now, after a month, she has settled into the rhythm of her new job. Mornings, she arrives at nine or ten o’clock—early by Parisian standards—and lets herself into the studio with the small brass key that Man has given her. She goes to the office and situates herself at his desk. It is her job to balance the ledger, a giant book that usually has to be unearthed from under all Man’s detritus: birds’ eggs, receipts from the tailor, toy soldiers, and, one day, a giant glass jar with a preserved octopus floating in it. He is like a crow bringing shiny treasures back to his nest, and Lee finds she likes the clutter his habits create.

Lee has a head for numbers, but still she does the work in pencil, carefully erasing any mistakes and redoing the figures in her round, even hand. The previous assistant was not as meticulous as she is trying to be, so when Lee has spare time she goes back in the ledger to earlier weeks and tries to untangle the web of errors her predecessor has left behind.

Here is what the numbers tell her: photography pays well. Man’s other creative endeavors, painting and sculpture, do not. He has a lot of money, especially by artists’ standards, but is terrible at managing it. He does not save. Instead, when a big job comes in he treats it like a windfall, an excuse to celebrate or buy something extravagant. There are more entries in the expense column than in the income column, and most of them are for ephemera: oysters at Le Select, two nights at a hotel in Saint-Malo—even, twelve months earlier, a Voisin, which he uses to drive out to the country or when he summers in Biarritz and otherwise has to pay an exorbitant fee to garage nearby.

Lee goes back to the records from 1928, where there were many entries with a single initial attached to them: “K rent,” “Milliner for K,” “Dinner with K,” and sometimes simply a number with the initial next to it, no further explanation. One day she adds up all the K entries and is astounded at how much money Man has spent on this person. It must be the girl Bobby referred to, but who is she? So far Lee cannot ask. The many entries for K’s milliner make Lee picture her as pale, concerned about her skin. Perhaps she is older—at least as old as Man. Lee is not yet sure how old Man is but he is certainly much, much older than she is. But where did K go? Dozens and dozens of entries, and then since January, nothing. A fight? Another man? Lee walks her fingers down the column of numbers and imagines their breakup, Man’s secret torment. K has not been replaced—there are no initials after January. The only woman to be added to the ledger is Lee herself, and since she is now in charge of check writing, she gets the perverse pleasure of paying herself each week for her own hard work.

Man usually doesn’t come in until eleven, so each morning Lee has a few hours by herself. She loves this time spent putting his house in order, loves having a list of things to tell him each day when he arrives. He usually shows up in one of three moods: distracted, his fingers covered in charcoal or smeared with oils from a morning spent painting; harried, when he knows an important client is coming in the afternoon and is anticipating a day spent doing work he does not enjoy; or gloomy, when there has been a lull in the stream of sittings or he has had to pay a bill he’s forgotten about. Lee navigates all the moods with the same blend of professionalism and detachment, and Man matches her professionalism with his own, treating her with a courtesy she never knew when she was modeling.

In the afternoons, she assists him in the studio or in the darkroom, and these are by far her favorite hours of the day. Man insists he is a terrible teacher and that she’ll learn nothing from him, but on the contrary, Lee finds him informative and patient. He’s warm, surprisingly open with all the tricks he’s learned. He tells her that photography is more like science than like art, that they are chemists doing experiments in a lab, and it does seem that way to her, as much about the technical work in the darkroom as it is about the original artistic vision.

Man doesn’t print every day, or even every week, but when he does, Lee sets up the darkroom for him, donning rubber gloves and a rubber apron to mix the developer, stop, and fix baths. She places wooden tongs in the trays, uses a turkey baster to blow air off the enlarger, makes sure the safelight is working. She takes older prints off the clothesline and brings them into the studio, placing them carefully in one of the large flat file drawers with onionskin layers between them. As bad as Man appears to be at managing money, he is equally good at printing, and there are hardly ever any prints that have to be thrown away. Rarely, a first effort is too dark, or the contrast too low, but these prints he saves and uses in other projects, cut into ribbons and glued to a wood backing, or simply turned over so the reverse sides can be repurposed for sketching.

Sometimes the pictures are so beautiful Lee pauses in her work just to stare at them. Like the portrait of the dancer Helen Tamiris, whom Man shot dressed in a loose kimono, lying on the ground with her hair teased into a giant black cloud around her milk-white face. It is good, good work, and it is an honor just to be holding it, to know that she will one day develop prints in the same darkroom where it was made.

Lee has not yet broached the topic of her own photography with Man, even though Man mentioned it when he hired her. Above all she wants to keep things professional. But in her travels through the ledger book—and, though she doesn’t want to admit she’s this sort of person, in her early morning snooping through his desk drawers—she knows that Berenice Abbott, one of the former assistants, developed her own prints in Man’s studio, with Man’s blessing, and is now making a name for herself back in New York. Lee figures that there is time, that she is learning by observation, just as a scientist would do. Plus, there is not much to develop. Lee has three rolls of undeveloped film in her stocking drawer, but the last thing she wants is to use Man’s supplies on pictures that any tourist might have taken.

Now, Lee stands in the studio and listens to the rise and fall of Man’s and Bobby’s voices in the office, their bursts of laughter. Her work is in the office too, so Lee doesn’t know where to go or what to do. The situation and the visiting man remind her of the dinner parties her parents used to throw, the way she was shunted into a corner until it was time for her to help mix drinks. When she was young she looked precious, Lee supposes, all dolled up in Chantilly lace, with starched white bows stuck on her head like giant moths. But as she got older, it became discomfiting, the way the men leered at her when she brought them their cocktails, damp cigars clenched in their tight smiles.

Lee is still standing in the studio when the door from the office opens. The two men are in midconversation. “Sam’s working for Lisowski now—did you hear? He made a pile off that property in Flushing,” Bobby says.

“Yes, he wrote to me about it. Said the job doesn’t give him much time for his writing.”