Eight Girls Taking Pictures (24 page)

“It’s the breast, isn’t it?”

The count smiled. “They are lovely.”

He came to where she sat, standing behind her and to the side. “If you don’t mind,” he said as he leaned over to show her the pictures from their session the day before.

Being invited to look at herself was an infrequent occurrence. It was different from opening the magazine and seeing herself wearing dresses she couldn’t afford, in locations she also couldn’t afford. Even with her father’s dimensional nudes, she mainly glanced at them as they sat on a table instead of peering through the stereoscopic viewer. And what she saw this day, on this table set with silver and china, coffee and sweets, was a gorgeous girl who knew she was gorgeous. Funny how seldom she revealed just how aware she was of her physical affect.

“It’s modern,” she said.

“It’s modern, yes, this bold girl who dares one to stare at her. But there is something else.” He was patient, polite, and Lenny sensed what he was seeing—what he wanted her to see—what made him slightly uncomfortable.

She picked up the photographs and examined them carefully. She wanted to say, “I look like me,” and toss them back onto the table. When she had studied them without speaking for several minutes, Count Almeida sat in a chair next to her, pulled it away from the table and faced her. He hesitated, then said, “I’m not your lover.”

This made Lenny laugh. “Good that we’ve settled that.” When he said nothing, she again looked at the pictures, more as a way to stall before asking the count what he meant by “I’m not your lover.”

It was then that she saw it: She wasn’t naked, but it was in her eyes, her expression, her posture; it was all over the picture. She was her father’s model, and it was there to see, only no one, even Lenny, had ever seen it, until now.

This girl in the picture was brave, brazen. All the other photographers picked up on her bravado as modern, so au courant, so young and fresh and bold. She was beautiful and a little tough and a touch androgynous, and they liked that. And maybe, just maybe, they liked the way she looked at them through the lens.

Lenny knew that the count knew that she knew. He gently took the pictures from her hands, then said, “We’ll begin again, yes?”

There were always men in Lenny’s life, the number increasing tenfold once she began modeling and attending all those New York parties where she understood that often she and her model friend, Claire, were part of the decor. The best parties were the ones held at Kristof Nash’s penthouse, since he was, as Frank Crowninshield once called him “the man who knows more celebrities than anyone else in New York.” The irony was Nash’s lack of ease when in attendance at his own soirees.

The men in Lenny’s life were publishers, lawyers, trust funders, aviators, physicians, painters, college boys, writers, department store magnates, titans of industry, and a man who made ice cream.

But there was no one she’d rather spend time with than the seventy-year-old, well-mannered Count Almeida.

After that morning when he showed her the photographs, after they retook the shots, he asked if he could take some pictures for himself. The result was Lenny as a girl. Not the fast, fearless girl indulging almost every impulse. There was a softness, a sweetness to these pictures, as if she was again Ellen, with her heart on her sleeve. The boyishness was still there, but infused with an openness that was rarely present in her pictures or her life.

It was like seeing herself for the first time—or like someone finding some essential part of her that she thought never showed.

It was like being known.

This was the start of their New York friendship. He photographed her not for her neoteric image but for her timelessness; not for the boy but for the girl in her. It was the most avant-garde act of all.

The count and Lenny sat together in her apartment, small and spare but wholly hers in decor. A bouquet of tulips, bent over and beautiful in creamy shades of white, pink, yellow, and the palest orange imaginable, sat on the table in front of them. For two years Count Almeida and Lenny had been friends and photographer and model. Though she was never his muse; he didn’t take any more private pictures of her after that first time.

“I will miss you terribly,” she said as she took his hand in hers, there, side by side on the secondhand sofa.

In this moment, she wondered how she would get by without his friendship. Many afternoons and evenings he would visit, and she would get food from a little Italian place down the street, and they would talk about art and Europe and music and photography. On warm summer mornings, when neither had slept well due to the heat, they would walk for miles, impressive for a man of his age.

“I know,” he said.

“I love you,” she said.

“I know.”

It occurred to her that this was the only pure affection she had ever experienced, this old man who knew her more intimately than anyone had ever known her. And the love was innocent, chaste. Love had often felt constricting to her; there was too much want on one side or the other, too much bartering. There was pleasure as well, but everything felt glancing, as if it touched the surface of her skin, electrifying her without ever leaving a mark.

“Will you miss me too?” she asked.

He smiled. “Paris is a marvelous place. I remember my second visit there, when I was about your age, and I remember that it was where I most felt like myself.”

“Why not come with me?” she said. “We could travel together and maybe find a place together. How grand would that be?”

“I must work.”

“You can work there. I’ll work with you.”

“No. I think this is my New York time of life. But you’ll write to me, and we can compare our respective Parises.”

“I hate this,” she said, starting to cry.

“Some people say the only thing worse than not getting what one wants is getting what one wants. How long have we talked about Europe?”

“Will you see me off at the ship tomorrow?”

“Can’t. I have a job tomorrow: ‘Every Woman Can Be the Artist of Her Own Beauty.’ Cosmetics advert.”

She wanted to plead—Postpone it, get out of it, oh, please, please don’t let me go—but she knew that his having an assignment on the day she was to sail to France was no accident.

He took her hands in his, turning them over, at first saying nothing, then reciting:

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

At the pier were four of Lenny’s lovers, who had all argued over who was to escort her onto the ocean liner. As they went back and forth, Lenny’s attention was taken by a biplane flying low overhead. She followed the path of the plane, leaving behind her lovers, so immersed in attaining the prize of saying farewell to Lenny that none of them noticed her quietly walking up the gangplank.

As the ship pulled away, away from the well-wishers on the pier, away from her lovers, who now all felt cheated and would agree to get a drink together in commiseration, Lenny wandered to the uppermost deck, gazing out at the open sea, still watching the little biplane as it appeared to follow the ship.

Just as the liner was a distance from the dock but still not too much into the open sea, the plane seemed to catch sight of her, standing alone on the deck, and it dipped, then dropped a shower of red roses at her feet.
The voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.

She plucked a rose from among those that landed on the deck and said good-bye.

The Girl in Paris, 1929

“Ideally you would apprentice with a famous photographer whose name begins with
St,
” said Eder with a smile. “You know, Steichen, Stieglitz, Steiner, Strand. But failing that, here’s someone interesting and, I believe, right up your alley, as they say.”

The studio of the Paris-famous Surrealist photographer Tin Type was located on the rue Campagne-Première, next to the Hôtel Istria, where she had taken a room. The room was barely bigger than a closet, though the child-size bathroom still had a bidet and a toilet and a shower. The view was nothing much, just a mirror-image hotel (multistoried, narrow mansard roof) across the street, but Lenny was happier than she had been in years. She felt it in every relaxed breath.

She had barely settled in when she slicked her hair and lined her eyes with kohl and bruised blue shadow, increasing their usual heavy-lidded drama. Her lips were painted deep red. Her makeup was almost exaggeratedly feminine, because she wore a fitted man’s cotton shirt and
men’s cut trousers, enjoying the play of the eyeliner and lipstick with her masculine attire. Then she went next door.

Armed with her letter of introduction from Eder, Lenny stood at Tin Type’s studio door, reading the sign,
I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions,
before ringing the bell.

She waited. She listened. Then rang again. This time she thought she heard someone inside.

 • • • 

If someone was there, he certainly didn’t care to answer the door. As reluctant as she was to walk away, that is what she did, wandering until she came to the tall gates of the Luxembourg Garden. The day wasn’t terribly warm, but it was sunny, and mild enough to wear a sweater. Lenny strolled the broad gravel paths, lined by pristine lawns of new grass. Later she left the paths to thread through the area of widely spaced trees, the grass replaced by dirt; Lenny had never seen anything like this strange grove in any American park.

As the sun heated up the day, Lenny noticed a grouping of little tables and slated chairs, with a refreshment stand nearby. As she went to buy a drink and consider her next step, she noticed two men, playing chess. One of the players, a rather compact man with thick dark hair, said something in French to his opponent, as he shook his hand, then leaned to kiss his cheek. The other man kissed him in kind, as they parted, the dark-haired man pausing to stretch.

In the midst of reaching his arms straight above his head, he caught Lenny watching him. He had the most intense, intelligent eyes as he watched her get up and walk toward him. She told him her name, as she handed him Eder’s letter.

“I don’t take students,” said Tin Type. “And I’m leaving on holiday.”

Lenny smiled. “I’m already packed.”

The first picture was of Lenny naked, except for a velvet ribbon choker. She stood behind a printing press, the palms of her hands and the undersides of her forearms smudged with ink.

In another, she was half-naked, a corset folded down on her hips, her head cropped out of the frame.

In another, she was again naked, with shadows slashing the light that striped her as it came through the window blinds.

He painted a picture of her lips the length of the sky, above an empty landscape, the trees dwarfed below. He called it
Observatory Time—The Lovers.

For three years, she was his muse, his mistress, his assistant, his apprentice.

He taught her how to carefully photograph silver objects, “because you think a silver object is very bright when it actually isn’t, it’s just reflecting what’s in the room.”