Eight Girls Taking Pictures (25 page)

She assisted him when he photographed a black-and-white ball where all the guests had words projected on them as they spun around the dance floor.

Together they discovered solarization. He made a profile picture of Lenny so beautiful and breathtaking that she looked like the shocking angel she always believed herself to be. This Surrealist darling, this eighteen-karat muse. Everyone marveled at the small, dark celebrity photographer with a modernist eye, living with his shining girl who stood many inches taller than he, and their almost theatrical manner of dress, including strolling down the boulevard tethered by a thin gold chain, which had the effect of binding him to her rather than her to him.

Tin Type photographed Lenny kissing another woman, then cropped it so that all that remained in the frame was the kiss. He made sketches of the cropped kiss, then scribbled over the pictures,
Ellen, Ellen, Ellen
.

 • • • 

In another picture she was powdered white, naked from the waist up and posed as the Louvre’s
Venus de Milo
. While he was arranging the shot, he confessed that as a teen, he tried, once or twice, to sleep with American girls so young they were barely out of childhood. “But that was
back home,” he said as he tied her hands behind her back to mimic the absence of the goddess’s arms, “when I was someone else.”

Through Lenny Van Pelt, Tin Type learned what it meant to be “hopelessly in love.” Equal emphasis on the lack of hope and the abundance of love.

Paris was full of Surrealist girls, eccentric and inspiring and creative. For example, one showed up at tea dressed in a cardinal’s red robe saying, “I wanted to dress in clothing never meant for a woman, worn by a man who’s never meant to have a woman.” Another peed in someone’s hat on a café terrace in fit of pique. There were balls where everyone was naked from the chest to the knees, clad in costumes of winged sandals, thigh-high leather boots, and feathered headdresses, spikes and chains of silver. Someone fled Paris with someone else’s lover, clad in a fur coat with nothing underneath. Someone else made a cup and saucer of fur. Someone wore a dress of “mother-of-pearl buttons engraved with tiny human footprints.”

For the first time, Tin knew pitch-black jealousy, unable to live with Lenny’s sexual impulses. She tried to explain that love and sex were separate countries in her personal atlas. He countered with possessiveness, fury, threats of violence to her, to himself. He made an assemblage of a photograph of Lenny’s seductive, heavy-lidded eye affixed to a metronome accompanied by a hammer and called it
Object of Destruction.
A self-portrait had him seated with a noose around his neck, a gun to his head, and a bottle of poison on the table before him.

And still their love stumbled on.

“What is it?” Tin said as he gripped the groceries that he’d been carrying. “What’s happened?”

Lenny was on the floor, holding a telegram now tearstained. “My father will be here on Thursday,” she said. “On his way to Zurich. He’ll want me to join him.”

“Well,” said Tin, relaxing his hold on the packages, then setting them down, “you will tell him no. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.” When she didn’t respond, he said, “I’ll talk to him if you like.”

“There’s no need.”

“I don’t mind.”

“What I’m saying is that I mean to go.”

He was mystified by this girl, almost fifteen years his junior. He was as much in love with her face as he was with her intelligence, her laugh, her tireless desire to learn everything about photography, and her happiness in the darkroom (“I grew up spending time in a photographer’s darkroom,” she said).

“I got all your favorites at the shops,” he said, easing away from something he couldn’t quite sort out. “I’ll collage you a lunch,” he said.

Alexander Van Pelt was quite tall and angular, and the gray in his hair, his English-made suit, and rounded spectacles made for an imposing man. Someone who looked like a success and knew it.

“So this is what a real Parisian artist’s studio looks like,” Mr. Van Pelt said, shaking Tin’s hand, smiling in the direction of Lenny. “Hello, darling.”

“Daddy,” she said, smiling.

“Here,” said Tin, taking Alexander’s suitcase, raincoat, briefcase, and camera bag. “Please sit. I’ll get us something to drink.”

Tin had turned his back for a moment to grab the glasses and Pernod, and when he again faced their company, he witnessed Lenny, in her uncharacteristically traditional dress with the little white flowers on a dark blue background, curled up on her father’s lap, the dark color of his suit matching the dark color of her dress. She leaned her head against his chest, her eyes closed. He looked so large, and Lenny, a child on his lap. A kind of Surrealist pietà.

Tin set down the glasses and liquor, picked up his camera, and, as if by agreement, the only movement was Alexander looking into the lens as he folded his hands on Lenny’s hip.

The last thing that Tin thought before he snapped the photo was that she did not look unhappy.

In Tin’s photograph
Larmes,
a woman cries; her face is so closely cropped that all that really remain are her eyes, gazing upward ecstatically; the inky eyelashes are tipped with perfect, tiny orbs of mascara, while the tears that fall down her face are half circles of glass. The meaning of the tears, the emotion in the picture, is ambiguous.

Alexander Van Pelt, amateur photographer, loved Tin’s pictures, and Tin loved that Mr. Van Pelt loved them in the way he wished them to be loved, which is really every artist’s dream when he thinks about an audience. They had a great deal in common, not the least of which was Lenny.

The sole memento of that Swiss trip was a photograph taken from above: Lenny pressing her body, knees bent, into one end of the hotel bathtub. When Tin saw it, he stopped himself from asking if this bathtub was located in Lenny’s room or her father’s room, or if there was any difference between the two.

It wasn’t any one thing that brought the end; no one fell in love with anyone else. They could not even agree on what “being in love” looked like, and this caused Tin’s worst self to emerge, colliding with Lenny’s boredom. Nothing was duller than jealousy.

It was like a dream, Lenny would say of their years together, an extended game of pretend. The solarized pictures, the photographs of mannequins socializing at parties, reclining on divans, climbing fancy staircases. There were eyelids painted like eyes, and models with their features outlined in black paint. Heads appeared captured under bell jars casually placed on tables; white women wore African ivory bangles
up to their elbows; a woman was painted like a violin with sound holes at her back, the picture title reflecting the idea of a woman as a hobby.