Lee has not spent much time alone in this apartment. It is unsettling. She misses Man, his charged presence. Without him here, the rooms have a dimness to them. She notices dust clotted in the corners, the repeats in the chinoiserie wallpaper that don’t line up at the edges, the pattern of cherry blossom branches breaking where the paper has peeled away from the wall.
Where is he? She remembers one of the pictures Man showed her of Kiki, her back to the camera and face in profile, imagines the two of them together now, his fingers tracing Kiki’s spine in a delicate curving pattern. Her breasts, pale and swinging, Man’s square workman’s hands kneading them like dough. Without meaning to she imagines Kiki flung facedown on Man’s bed, her hands tied behind her and his body between her legs. The thought makes Lee jittery. She can actually feel the espresso coursing through her. As she moves around the space, three mugs corralled by the handles in one hand, a stack of plates balanced on her forearm, the light from a window hits a framed picture at just such an angle that she can see herself mirrored there—her dress wrinkled, her hair dried to a spoiled snarl—and the sight of her disheveled reflection depresses her, sadness coming in a wave so sudden and strong it almost knocks her over. Lee sets down the dishes and drops into a chair.
What has she done? What if Man is truly angry at her? Without him, what does she have? She has done nothing to create a life apart from him. She wants to crawl into bed, yield to the sadness, wait for Man to comfort her when he gets home. Whenever that will be.
Or she can leave. Lee has always been good at solving problems by leaving, ducking out of parties she no longer wants to be at without saying goodbye, moving across an ocean to get away from a job she no longer enjoys. If she leaves, maybe she can stave off the sadness that threatens to engulf her.
In the bedroom Lee fixes her hair. Pulls on a different dress, puts a dark slash of maroon lipstick on her lips and hangs drop earrings on her ears. She does it all quickly, no wasted motion, and as she leaves the apartment she lets the door shut with a crash. The heels of her oxfords clack against the pavement as she walks away.
The film studio is in chaos when Lee arrives. Jean is behind the camera in the middle of a scene, the main actor shirtless onstage and pounding his chest in apparent agony. Twenty or thirty people rush from place to place and none of them even glance at Lee as she stands at the threshold and takes it all in. Jean shouts “Arrêtez!” and the actor relaxes, cracking his knuckles and rolling his head around in a lazy circle. Jean approaches him and starts talking excitedly.
“You’re the poet,” Jean says, holding on to the actor’s wrists and shaking them. “This is your blood. You must feel it. On the film I see none of this. I see ptthttttht.” He makes a noise like a balloon losing its air and then stares at the actor with a hopeful expression. “We try it again, no?”
“Sure,” the man says. He rolls his head back and forth again, stretching so far that the tendons pop out in his neck. He has dark eyes and sandpapery stubble. He hitches up his trousers and lets them settle back down on his hips while Jean watches him, an intent look on his face.
“Here’s what I want,” Jean says. “You are living in complete solitude. In this moment I want you to be understanding that what you stole from your childhood you cannot get back from destiny. Do you understand?”
They go through the scene three more times. Lee thinks the actor is straining to be authentic, but perhaps she does not fully understand the difference between still photography and this newer medium. She wants to make the actor take a few breaths, to slow down; if Man were shooting, he would tell him to forget there is a camera there at all, to picture himself alone in a calm, green field. Jean does none of this. The more keyed up the actor gets the more tensely Jean responds, the muscles flexing in his arm as he winds the film with the crank.
Finally, after the third time through, Jean seems satisfied. “Good. Fifteen minutes and we begin again,” he calls, and the actor and all the other people who are rushing around move away from the stage. The room quiets. Jean goes to a nearby table and lights a cigarette, inhaling and then letting the smoke out slowly, so that it curls up around his nose like a gray mustache.
Lee stays where she is, leaning against a post at the edge of the room.
“Jean,” she says.
He looks around, notices her. A smile spreads across his face.
“Ah, my Calliope! Your keeper let you out of the cage.”
Annoyance flares in her. “There’s no cage.”
Jean nods. “Good. Have you come to work, to start today? Or just to see what there is to see?”
Lee looks at the stage, the black floor scuffed and dirty. The simple walls, white plaster with a single fake window. In the center stand a small wooden table and two chairs. What will Man think when he finds out she is here?
Two hours later they’ve cobbled together what they need to make Lee’s costume. It is meant to look like the hard shell of a woman’s torso, wider than Lee’s own, with the arms cut off at the elbows to resemble Greek statuary. This they drape with a white cloth like a toga so that she is covered entirely from the neck down. She cannot sit or move her arms, which are strapped to her sides with thick cord. The fabric is covered with a stiffening compound, painted on in several coats with a wide brush and left to harden. Lee itches and sweats inside it. Jean and three other men gather around to discuss her. They take a large sponge and coat her face in white stage makeup, layer after layer, and Jean runs back to look at her through the lens and then returns, muttering that it isn’t good enough, it isn’t statue-like enough, it isn’t right. Soon they decide to try the compound on her face and hair, and instruct her to stay completely still as they apply it.
“It’s burning,” Lee tells them, her jaw immobilized so that she has to force the words out through her teeth.
“It will stop,” Jean tells her. This is not at all what she has been picturing. Where is the gold leaf, the radiance?
By the time the compound is dry, the burning is gone, except for Lee’s tender cheek, which becomes the part of her body that she focuses her attention on so as not to feel all the other parts that are aching. The main actor, Enrique, is called over. He and Jean and the stagehands stand around discussing her as if she is a prop, and she can feel irritation heating her up inside the costume so that she starts to sweat with aggravation as well as discomfort.
“It’s the folds in the fabric. They aren’t right,” Enrique says. “They’re not hanging the way marble hangs.”
The men move around the room looking for something they can use, and an Italian stagehand comes over and starts describing something, gesturing as if he is stirring cake batter in a bowl. Then there is butter and sugar and an actual bowl, and the man stirs it up for them and they spread it with a knife along the folds of Lee’s outfit. It smells good, like shortbread baking in the oven.
Another hour passes. Still the men aren’t done with her. They try her out in various poses on the stage, make her walk so that the bottom half of her body appears to be gliding, but Jean isn’t satisfied. Lee grows more and more uncomfortable and soon she desperately needs to use the lav, but there is nothing she can do until it’s time to take off the costume.
“She’s still a woman,” Jean says, disappointed.
Of course she is. What is it that they want from her? Lee is used to pleasing men when they point cameras at her. She walks again across the stage, not lifting her feet from the floor, but it still isn’t right. Her whole body aches. Tension coils in her neck and shoulders and the heat of her own trapped skin oppresses her. She has an almost irresistible urge to move her arms, to scratch, to crouch down, to crack open the stiffened fabric and get free.