Eight Girls Taking Pictures (16 page)

As had been their plan, Laurent had gone ahead to Mexico while she finished her final movie. Then came the telegram of his illness, then his death while she was en route. She never fully forgave herself for letting him die alone, despite the disease having moved faster than the telegraph service and the public transportation of the time.

But Laurent’s death did not deter Clara from moving to Mexico.

When Morris heard the news, he had the splendid idea of the two of
them opening a photography studio. She would run the business while learning photography. “I will be your apprentice,” she said, “for room and board.”

Seldom has the word
apprentice
been so true and so euphemistic.

It didn’t take long for discontentment to enter their household. In the beginning, Morris and Clara were caught up in the energy of the city: fiestas, shops, trams, flowers, music, dancing, cooking, fruit, and toys. The clothes. The cathedral. The zócalo. The holidays. The surreal gardens of Xochimilco, floating islands of flowers and willows.

Their business did well enough, though it didn’t allow them much breathing room; no matter, their new life in the Colonia Juárez was exhilarating. Their new friends were some of the most famous artists, writers, poets, and radicals of the city. There was no one they wished to know whom they didn’t know. Whereas Clara had once given nightly parties in Los Angeles with Laurent, she now gave them in Mexico City with Morris.

And the days Clara spent running the studio, taking photographs (portraits and flowers, including one of white roses, all crushed together, overripe and erotic), printing, and discovering that she not only loved the work of making pictures but had a talent for it. People began requesting her services.

All of this was punctuated by her nude modeling for Morris, usually on their rooftop, where Clara would pose as pleased and as natural and, to Morris’s way of thinking, as unknowable as a cat in the sun.

It was not Clara’s enthusiasm and talents that bred discontent in Morris; it was the insecurity brought on by her beauty. He once grumbled that “next time I’ll get an ugly mistress.” It didn’t help that, when his nudes of Clara were exhibited, they brought her more attention (and notoriety) than they brought him. This was all the more galling since they also eclipsed his gorgeous experiments in modernism, as he had finally come into his own as a photographer.

“I don’t believe in marriage or anything resembling marriage,” said
Clara quietly when he complained of her casual lovers. “You knew how it was in Los Angeles. You were part of how it was in Los Angeles.”

“This isn’t the same thing,” he said.

“It is exactly the same thing.”

“Well, I don’t like it.”

“You said you didn’t care about fidelity. You said if you did, you may as well stay with your wife.”

He said nothing.

She could’ve explained that her sexual freedom wasn’t simply a product of her time and bohemian choices; it was the tradition of her family. The Argentos were no strangers to common-law marriages, or the child of one man, born outside marriage, being raised by another. Her own parents didn’t marry until three weeks before her oldest sister was born. No one gave much thought to whether a relationship was bound by law or love or both. What she said instead was “I didn’t grow up in some midwestern America. I don’t believe in possessions.”

“Really? Then explain your marriage to me, because my hopeless midwestern mind seems confused, Madame Cluzet.”

She was silent. Then, “Laurent and I were ‘married’ because we chose to be married. We lived together, we worked side by side—what else could marriage be?”

“Then what am I to you?”

“I’m with you now. No one else exists for me.” Clara placed her hands on either side of his face and said, her voice kind and loving, “We only live in a single moment anyway.”

Though Morris was uncomforted, he was more than willing when she took his hand and led him upstairs to her room.

For Clara in Mexico the smells of oil, spices, animals, machine exhaust, cooked sugar, pastries, cigarettes, and the sweat of workers took her back to North Beach, and further back to Italy. Mostly Italy. She belonged to Mexico. She said, “I feel Mexican when I’m in Mexico, unlike the United States, where I feel I’m in a foreign country.”

On their one-year anniversary in Mexico, as a lark, Morris and Clara went to a traditional photography studio with corny backdrops, and, as they posed like man and wife, Clara said, “El señor is very religious, perhaps you can put a church in the background; and I should like to hold these lovely flowers. But you will have better ideas than we—your pictures are so artistic!”

They came out into the street laughing, with the promise to pick up the three different wedding portrait prints next week.

“Are you happy now?” she said, trying to catch her breath.

“Very,” he said, pulling her into a happy embrace.

When Clara had her first exhibition, it was a success. Patrons were impressed by the modernism of her composition of glass-paned doors, telegraph wires, rows of concrete stadium seats, convent passageways. Then there were the plants and flowers that, like the architectural details, looked to be pure form.

The portraits were different. Elegant, expressive, compassionate.

And the pictures were well-received, even if they were always overshadowed by Morris’s previous two exhibitions of Clara in the nude.

There was admiration for her intelligence, her generosity, her glamour, her leftist leanings, her peaceful nature, her skill behind the camera, her (eventually) storied, almost mythical love affair with Morris, with its hazy domesticity and creative synergy. Her beauty. Always her beauty. Her image appeared in more than one Diego Rivera mural, including the murals of Chapingo—“the Sistine Chapel of the Americas”—showing her in a languorous pose similar to that in the photographs Morris took on the azotea. For nearly a year she posed; for nearly a year she was Rivera’s lover.

The men who were given her favors could not keep them.

Not to mention a certain man who could not garner her favor when he wanted it—that undid her in the end.

Cymbeline and Leroy went to Mexico to see their old friend Morris Elliot during a break in Leroy’s teaching at his Bay Area college. Cymbeline later said of Clara, “To me she was a performer of real interest. . . . I was never critical of her, never noticed her accent if she had one, just took in her beauty.”

Before Cymbeline and Leroy returned home, they purchased one of Clara’s photographs,
Wineglasses,
which had the same modernist aesthetic as the telegraph wires and endless doors, eventually donating it to the Mallory College art gallery.

There was no photograph of Morris and Clara that even hinted at the swooning closeness shown in Cymbeline’s photograph of Morris and Marguerite; for them the truth would look more like their separate photographs, hung side by side, but always in the same room.

“Clara Argento—profession: men!”

She said jokingly at a party where the guests assembled to play a game where you tell something true about yourself, choosing questions from a hat. Only Morris wasn’t laughing. This was the same party where another guest took a photograph of Clara seated between two men, their backs to the camera, their three faces in synchronized three-quarter profile, as one of the men drew pictures on her exposed shoulder and upper back.

In his refusal to seem “midwestern,” as Clara had said, Morris took to turning a blind eye to her male guests. Fortunately, her room—the couple had never shared a room, partly to keep an element of truth about their master-apprentice relationship, and partly because of Morris’s boy Bryce, who was too old to be fooled and too young to care—was on the rooftop azotea. In this way, Morris could almost, almost avoid knowing of her “little romances.”

Morris tried sleeping with women in their social circle and traveling American girls who saw him as one more way to be daring until they
returned home to respectability. The women in their circle talked too much about art and about politics; he was particularly sensitive to anything involving the Communist Party (Bullshit politics, as he thought of it), since Clara had become more and more entrenched in it.