Eight Girls Taking Pictures (15 page)

“A little.”

“Are you an actor?” asked Clara, though she was thinking that Jack was really too tall to be anything but a character actor, in the same way
that she was too Italian, too darkly beautiful to be anything but someone’s mistress, the one who ruins but seldom wins the leading man.

Jack laughed. “No, no. I’m a photographer.”

“I should’ve guessed,” said Laurent, “since you came here with Marguerite.”

“Really,” Marguerite said, “you think because I take pictures I consort only with other photographers? I like to think my social life is a bit broader than that.”

“And you are?” Clara asked the mustachioed man.

“Morris Elliot,” he said.

“I remember you from the movie studio. I was sitting on the branch of a tree.”

“And I remember you, Madame Cluzet.
The Afternoon of the Leopard,
” said Morris Elliot.

“Yes,
The Afternoon of the Leopard
. So what is it that you do when you aren’t visiting film sets?”

“What made you think I was visiting?” asked Morris.

Clara laughed. “I work there, and
I
feel like
I’m
visiting. It’s that sort of profession, you know, where your job lasts only as long as the movie.”

“I’m a photographer,” said Morris.

Laurent laughed. “Of course you are!”

Marguerite rolled her eyes, smiled. “Morris has a portrait studio in Tropico—a very good one in fact.”

“Well,” said Laurent, threading his arm through Marguerite’s and simultaneously pressing Clara’s inner wrist to his mouth, delivering a light kiss, “why don’t we go and find something very good to drink? And you”—to Marguerite—“can tell me more about all the nonphotographer friends you supposedly have.” He dropped Clara’s hand as he, Marguerite, and Jack Hartmann (“It’s all good to drink, if you ask me”) went to the rolling bar cart near the window.

Once they were left alone, Morris said to Clara, “I take it you don’t like acting in the pictures.”

“No,” she said.

Morris said nothing but kept his eyes on Clara. Though he seemed to
lack a kind of natural warmth, he didn’t come across as unfriendly. Clara recognized the same engaged curiosity that she had noticed on the set; he appeared intelligent. Perhaps it was the way he studied her that undid her. The look, the intelligence; there was no prurience in his questions, no searching for a nugget of gossip or the unintentional confession.

“I don’t think that I’m expected to act.”

“What do you think you’re expected to do?”

“Be beautiful and exotic and dangerous.” Clara took a sip of her drink. “It isn’t interesting.”

Morris took the glass from her hand, sipping before returning it. There was no presumption in the act; in fact, it was so intimate, and natural, so provocative that Clara’s pulse sped up.

“Why not come by my studio sometime? I’ll let you rescue me from the hell of baby photographs and Los Angeles matrons in soft focus.” Now he did smile. It was a lovely smile. “Please say you’ll help a modern man imprisoned in all that romantic dreck. I could be mistaken, but I think you need rescuing too.”

Though he stepped no closer, Clara felt as if he were whispering in her ear when he said, “You are no more a creature of an Edenic past than I am. Men are confounded by your figure and your face, and decide that you aren’t a modern woman but someone more primitive, more elemental. It must make you feel as if you aren’t there at all, waiting for them to see you.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

She thought of Laurent and his endless pursuit of what he called “absolute beauty,” something he demanded from all things in their lives. It didn’t matter if it was Clara’s clothing or the furnishings of their studio in their very beautiful building. His wardrobe, his sketches, his poems, their love. It all must be romantic. It must be Beauty and Art. Her fleeting thought was how long it had been since she was with a man who wanted her, not his idealized version of her. Theirs was an almost sexless love, but she seemed to be the only one who knew it.

“My husband has an ‘intentional disregard for the modern spirit of this age.’ ”

“My wife is impossible.”

She said to Morris, “I’m not sentimental.”

Morris said to her, “Neither am I.”

“Mexico,” said Laurent one night in the aftermath of one of their parties—months following the party where Clara and Morris first spoke. “I plan to leave next month,” Laurent said. “Then, when Clara finishes this last movie, she will join me. Can you imagine an art school where everything is free, for Mexicans and foreigners alike—tuition, board, room, paint, canvas, models, all free—no entrance exam. One must study, that is the only requirement. After ten years of war and unrest, it is wonderful.”

The little group of remaining guests—Morris Elliot, Marguerite Mahler, Pablo Martín, Xavier de Sica, and Erik Norman—reclined in various positions atop the thick Persian area rug in the nearly empty studio. Because of the lack of furniture, Laurent and Clara had splurged on the “good” rug and an assortment of large pillows. Those encrusted with tiny mirrors were really for show, as anyone who ever tried to use one quickly discovered.

“Tell me about your movie, Madame Cluzet,” said Morris, leaning a little too close to Clara, a little too drunk, with Clara not moving away.

“Let me see. Ah, yes, I play a Mexican. A
sultry
Mexican,” she said.

“With a knife behind your back and a rose between your teeth? How original! And it seems . . . almost prescient,” said Morris, clumsily holding his hand to his chest before having to steady himself. He smiled; she smiled.

Marguerite paled, just slightly. She had been looking a bit drawn lately.

(When Clara had asked Morris if Marguerite were ill, he simply answered, “She’s unhappily in love.”

“Do you know the woman?” Marguerite was a lover of women.

“It’s not a woman this time—hence the unhappiness. Men make her more miserable because she doesn’t really like them in that way.”

Clara wasn’t surprised when someone with a defined preference made the occasional sexual detour.)

“Why not take me with you, Laurent?” said Marguerite in a voice meant to sound flirtatious, but which succeeded only in sounding plaintive.

“Marguerite, you
should
come with Pablo and me. We should all go!” said Laurent. “To Obregón’s paradise.”

“Excuse me if I’m skeptical about anyone’s president,” said Morris.

“Vasconcelos has promised literacy and art to the people. He has thrown the library doors wide open. I’m sorry for your cynicism,” said Pablo.

“Just because the United States doesn’t have a minister of public education, like Vasconcelos, someone who cares about the arts—”

“—and the
people
,” said Morris.

“Yes, and the
people
,” said Pablo.

“I’m just wondering why the people are always being told what to want,” said Morris.

“You don’t know how bad it gets,” said Clara quietly, “when no one cares about you.”

Then, with a lightness, she said, “Having played a Mexican in not one but three movies, I would like to say, Viva la Revolución. And to Señor Martín, and to my wonderful husband, even to my friend Morris, may you never understand what you don’t understand.”

Morris leaned over to Clara, hovering for a moment before kissing her on the mouth, then pulling away slightly, saying, “Back at you, kid,” before struggling a little to his feet. “The wife awaits. Marguerite, shall you take me home?”

Marguerite didn’t move. She had been looking at the floor while everyone was talking, and now a single tear made its way down her pretty face. She nodded as she rose, picked up her cape and one of her original little hats, and walked over to the door, which Morris held open.

The other guests heard Morris say to her in the quiet voice of the drunk (which is to say a voice more audible than the drinker realizes),
“You don’t really care about me, M. It’s only something you’ve talked yourself into,” before closing the door behind them.

For ten years Marguerite Mahler had been the photographer–business partner–object of a slight sexual obsession for Morris Elliot. For those ten years, she had also been his on-again-off-again mistress. He was inspired by her photographs—of fans, flowers, kimonos, shadows, seashells, showers, opera gloves, birds’ wings, and waves of sand—as much as he was by her sunny personality, and her past as a prostitute. It was a spark that ignited in both directions, despite her preference for women. The fact that Morris was an exception for her made the sexual tension deeper and more mysterious.

A photograph taken by Cymbeline Kelley, on the occasion of Morris and Marguerite visiting Cymbeline and Leroy in San Francisco, shows the pair in profile; Marguerite’s back is against Morris’s chest, her head thrown back in a posture of surrender. He holds her as if to support her. It is an elegant portrait by any measure. Their intimacy is unmistakable.

Morris would say that it was Marguerite’s intelligence, artistic brilliance, her original way of seeing and being in the world, that was the polar opposite of the domestic life he lived with his wife and five children; it was her eccentricity, her habit of disappearing for a few days at a time and returning to him like an exhausted, satisfied adventurer that made him see the possibilities of a life he was not living. For Morris, Marguerite was the life he longed for, the life that lived inside himself as he listened to his wife talk about the house and the garden and the children, whom he loved but could not, as hard as he tried, make the center of everything.

It could be said that Marguerite opened the door for him, but Clara was the one who made him decide finally to step through. This was the reason for Marguerite’s tears at Clara and Laurent’s Bryson studio. That evening she knew, as Laurent did not, that Clara and Morris had been lovers for several months.

By the time Morris and Clara moved to Mexico City, in 1923, Clara had been his sometime model and muse for just over two years. It was an off-and-on thing, fueled by the permissiveness of the times, when politics and relationships were in flux, largely due to the calamity that had been the Great War. The sheer scope and barbarism of the four-year war, not to mention the Spanish flu epidemic that took hold as it was winding down, made an entire generation rethink the expectations that had preceded the war.

Artists, writers, and wanderers gravitated toward Paris. Political idealists found their calling in the newly revolutionized Russia. Everyone else who felt unfit for or undesirous of “regular life” went to Mexico City. Some thought of them as a lost generation; others, like Clara, would say that they were found.

The Mexican Revolution had barely ended when the new president, Álvaro Obregón, who dreamt of a literate, artistic epoch for all Mexicans, enlisted José Vasconcelos to implement his programs, including hiring artists wearing workmen’s overalls to paint the most fabulous murals for the same pay scale as the masons they resembled. This, thought Clara, when she had lived in Mexico only a short while, is surely paradise.

Clara and Morris sailed to Mexico, bringing with them Morris’s eldest child, fourteen-year-old Bryce. If Morris’s wife had thought to foist child-rearing duties on the lovers, she had miscalculated: Morris and Clara were very happy to have Bryce along. This may have been because Clara couldn’t have children of her own and missed her large family, or because she was only now recovering from the tragedy of Laurent’s death from smallpox.