The Woman in the Photograph (12 page)

“
Today we will be performing an appendectomy,” he said, with the projection and timbre of a Shakespearean actor. “The patient is a sixteen-year-old girl.”

From the side of the room, Lee took pictures: nurses handing over steel instruments, the intensity of the masked faces hunched over the girl, the tongs finally capturing the small, ragged organ and brandishing it to the crowd. Lee tried to make out the students' expressions in the relative darkness of the gallery. Had some of them fallen asleep?

Engrossed, she documented the removal of various body parts that week, playing with the lighting and groupings of medical personnel. She liked the quiet intensity of the operations, their urgency and success, but was fascinated by the castaway parts—the hairy, detached limbs or graying organs—left on zinc trays, now useless and unwanted. Despite the blood, odors, and horror, from her place behind the camera, she managed to put herself at a distance and concentrate on picture-taking.

On her last day, as the students were pouring out of the galleries, Lee hesitated at the door. She looked back at the day's remains lying motionless on the metal tray, and had an idea for an interesting photo shoot: a Surrealist meditation on beauty and desire. Putting on a formal expression and a professional tone of voice, she approached the surgeon who had just performed a radical mastectomy.

“Excuse me, sir?”

He looked up at her, almost startled, removed his mask, and gave her a seductive smile. During the operation he'd been too focused to notice the woman taking pictures.

“Yes,
mademoiselle
? How may I be of service?”

“
Are those leavings to be discarded?” she asked, pointing at the orphaned breasts. “Might I take one?”

“Of course,” he said, not bothering to ask why. “Here, let me wrap it up for you.”

He absently picked up his mask and tucked one malignant breast inside. Still smiling, he handed the damp package to her, like a butcher at the market. She thanked him with a pat on the shoulder, then turned and left, the surgeon's mask heavy and squishy in her hand. Keeping her bundle at arm's length, she walked through the twisted streets of the Latin Quarter, heading toward the Right Bank. She had a modeling session at
Vogue
in an hour, but thought she'd have time to take some photos first. The mask soon began to leak, so she stopped at a restaurant to collect the necessary props.

Lee motioned to the first waiter she saw, who was wiping glasses by the side bar. He immediately forgot the wineglass, threw his towel jauntily over his shoulder, and hustled to the door.

“May I borrow a place setting?” Lee asked in an intimate whisper. “I could bring it back to you this afternoon. Just a plate, knife, fork, spoon, napkin. That's right.” She nodded as she watched him collect the things from a table already set for lunch. “Oh, and could I have the salt and pepper shakers, too? Wonderful.”

The waiter's moustache fluttered as his hand grazed hers. “Here you are,
mademoiselle
. Anything else?”

“No, but thank you,” she said, her words exuding warmth, gratitude, and a slight hint of siren song. She slipped the condiments
and cutlery into her bag, put the surgeon's mask on the plate, then covered it with the napkin. “I'll be back later to return these things.”

“I'll be waiting,” the waiter said, waving from the door.

At the river, she hailed a cab and, once inside, held on tight to the dinner plate. As they sped along, she was reminded of the grisly paintings of the saints she'd seen in cathedrals and at the Louvre: Francis of Assisi, stigmata bleeding onto the skull in his hand; Saint Lucy carrying her woeful eyes on silver dish; John the Baptist's head, at rest, on a platter; and the one that had captured her attention most of all, Saint Agatha, whose torturers had cut off her breasts. In paintings, she carried them before her on a plate, looking much more like wobbly custards or cherry-topped cakes than what Lee had here. Looking down at the napkin, she regretted not requesting the pair.

She struggled with the door at
Frogue,
anxious not to spill, then quickly made her way to the photography studio. On a side table, she laid out the napkin, pleased with its home-style checkered pattern. After carefully removing the breast from the bloodstained mask, she arranged it on the plate. She flattened the thick skin, which was already hardening, and tried to highlight the nipple, inverted from the cancer and no longer very recognizable.

Looking down at it—a human slice, a gelatinous mass—she wondered at how, when attached to a woman, this object could make a man red-hot. Man Ray had cropped photos of her to emphasize her breasts, decapitating her, making her a torso. What would he make of this bodiless breast? Would it entice him? She dragged over a light and cast its bright glare on the plate's
center. An operating table without a patient. Placing the cutlery around the plate, she decided on the French fashion, with the dessert spoon laid across the top of the plate. She was staring down at that spoon—an unlikely instrument to tackle this feast—when George walked in.

“What is that?” he asked. Reluctant to come closer, he pointed at the table, looking very suspicious. “Is it food? Something you made?”

She smiled at the idea. Lee was
not
a very good cook and generally preferred restaurants and bistros to the kitchen. In fact, the last time she had tried to roast a chicken for Man, she got distracted and burned it. That skinny black bird looked even scarier than what she had here.

“It's a still life,” she said, “though really, the French term is much more appropriate:
une nature morte
. Come, look at it,” she said as she pulled her camera out of her bag. “See if you can tell what it is.”

“Is that blood?” he asked, his nose wrinkling. “Is it a dead animal?”

“No, George,” she said, her eyes sparkling. “It's a woman's breast.”

“Lee, you are disgusting!” He flew out of the room.

She had taken two shots when Michel de Brunhoff crept up behind her. “What's the matter with George?” he asked, then looked down at the table. “And what the hell is that?”

Lee turned around, blocking the place setting with her body, trying to come up with a plausible story.

“Oh, hello there, Michel. Yes, well, I've been doing a stint at the Sorbonne, taking medical photographs. One of the surgeons
asked me if I could get a good close-up of this severed breast—”

“With a knife and fork?” he cried. “Who do you take me for? Get that thing out of here at once.”

He stood sternly by as she picked it up with her thumb and forefinger, tucked it back into the dirty mask, and went to chuck it into the bin.

“Out!” de Brunhoff shouted, pointing dramatically to the door.

In the street, she hesitated; it seemed outrageously disrespectful to just toss out a human body part. This breast, which had hung so close to a heart, could have lured lovers or fed a child. She considered burying it next to a tree, below the reach of dogs, but she hadn't any tools. She looked down at her manicured nails, then back at the studio door where Michel was waiting. With no ceremony, she let it drop from her hand; it fell into the gutter among leaves and wisps of paper. She slumped back to the studio.

“George and Tatiana are waiting for you. It's swimwear today. But afterward, I want to see you in my office. We need to talk,” Michel said, then swept out.

Lee walked into the dressing room and found Tatiana Iacovleva looking at bathing costumes. Tall and blond like Lee, Tata was a Russian émigré, the daughter of St. Petersburg intellectuals; with the bearing of a war goddess, she was brazen, haughty, and intent on marrying into the nobility. Lee thought she was a riot.

“George is fuming. He says you were taking pictures of a bloody breast. A real one.” Tata's accent in French was deliberate,
filled with Slavic swishes and trills and with occasional grammatical snags; her eyes were laughing. “I'm not surprised it upset him. It's probably the first one he's seen since he was baby.”

Lee looked at her in confusion and then nodded knowingly. “Right. He's not too keen on lady bits,” she said, marveling that she had never realized it before. That outing in Montmartre should have at least given her a clue.

After their modeling session—a madcap couple of hours, where George had them posing with faux pool ladders and pretending to dive off of wooden crates—they were all in a good mood, now able to laugh off their earlier clash.

“You two up for a drink?” George asked as they made their way back to the dressing rooms.

“Not me,” Lee said. “Michel wants to talk to me. I think he's pretty upset about my anatomical photo session today. I hope I'm not fired.”

“Well, you probably should be,” he said, with a harsh expression that immediately melted into a chuckle. “But I doubt it. You know, before his career at the magazine, he used to be an actor. He's an incredible mime.” George went into a two-second Tramp impersonation, twitching an invisible mustache while swinging an imaginary cane. “I wouldn't worry too much, Lee. He's an open-minded man.”

“Good luck,” said Tata thickly, patting her arm with a serious smile.

She knocked on de Brunhoff's office door.

“Ah, Lee,” he began, pulling the pipe from his mouth, then using it as a pointer. “Sit down.”

“Michel, listen, I'm sorry about bringing that, uh, organ
into the studio today. I was doing a little experiment.” She raised her eyebrows uncertainly. “Maybe I should have asked you first?”

“What I want to say to you is this: If you are capable of taking photos of such things—surgeries at the Sorbonne and so forth—then I've been underestimating you here. I believe you're ready to take on your own assignments. You seem to have an interest in the still life. Show me what you can do with the new line of Chanel fragrances. You'll start tomorrow.”

Lee jumped out of her chair, excited and relieved both. “Oh, Michel, thank you! I'll do something original, something new. You won't be disappointed.”

“Uh, Lee—nothing
too
original, please.”

“Don't worry, chief.” She smiled. “I can do this.”

As Lee puttered around Man's studio, choosing masks and chessboards to set off the perfume bottles, she received a telegram. She used her index finger as a dull letter opener, then scanned the short note. Tanja Ramm was returning to Europe; she was about to board the SS
Paris
and would be arriving the following week. Lee beamed down at the paper.

“Man!” she called. She popped into the bathroom where he was half-soaped, half-shaven. “Tanja is coming to visit. She'll be here next Thursday.”

“Tanja?”

“My oldest pal.” She couldn't stop smiling. “We were together in Florence before I came to Paris. We met at the Art Students League back in 'twenty-six.”

“Of course,” he said with a nod. “It'll be great to meet her. You know, it always seems funny to me that we both took classes at the same place. Too bad we didn't meet back then.”

“You cheeky monkey. When you were at the League, I was way too young for you.” She pinched his creamy cheek. “I still hadn't been kicked out of all the schools in Poughkeepsie.”

“What a bad, bad girl.” He pinched her back.

“
Those prudes would expel you for anything. Swearing, smoking, pranks—”

With a dab of shaving cream, he gave her a thin moustache and goatee, like Marcel Duchamp's Mona Lisa. “And Tanja?” he asked. “Is she a painter now?”

“No. She stayed at it longer than I did, but she makes her living as a model, too.”

“Well, then, maybe she can model for me.” His thin lips curled into a suggestive smile. “The two of you could pose together. Double nudes. Maybe some kissing? How would you feel about that?”

“Actually, Tanja and I have already done a shoot like that. A few years ago, my father took a whole series of us together on the sleeping porch.”

The razor in Man's hand froze on his outstretched upper lip. His eyes found Lee's in the mirror.

“What?” said Lee, staring back at him. “My father's taken pictures of me since I can remember.”

Man's brow was lined in confusion, poorly disguised aversion. “In the nude?”

Frowning, Lee toweled off the lines of shaving cream from her face. There was no one she loved or trusted as much as her father, and she didn't like Man's expression. As if Theodore Miller were capable of anything indecent or inhumane. She'd known a man like that—in fact, he'd had a Brooklyn accent similar to Man Ray's—but her father, though generous and doting, was a man of dignity, beyond reproach.

“They're art. He's done nude studies of my mother as well. He takes them in stereoscope so they can be seen through a
viewer. It gives them a three-dimensional effect, you know.” She gave him a defiant look. “Funny that you of all people should be shocked by nudity. It's art,” she repeated firmly.