“A dream in white. I had some ideas, actually,” Lee says. She begins to describe them and then interrupts herself. “Mimi—do you mind if I call you Mimi?”
“Not at all.”
The woman’s agreement emboldens Lee further, so she continues, her words coming out in a rush as she explains the idea she had when she was talking to Antonio: projected images, words on the floor, on people’s bodies.
“That is good,” Mimi says. “Quite, quite good.” Before long, they have figured out a plan so grand Lee is just as convinced as the woman that it will be the party of the century. The only problem is that Lee doesn’t really know how to do any of it. For that she needs Man, and his equipment. She tells Mimi that he will be back in a few days.
When Madame Pecci-Blunt asks her to clarify the fee, Lee quotes the number she and Man agreed on, a number that feels so high, so outrageous, she half expects the woman to hang up the phone right then. The number is more than the Wheelers offered Man for his next film, more than three months’ rent on the little whitewashed studio on Rue Victor Considérant. But the woman accepts the number without a question, and they agree to meet the next day to go over the details. Lee finds herself wondering if she should have asked for more.
The next afternoon Lee goes to the Pecci-Blunt mansion in the Trocadéro, where the Bal will be held. She brings her notebook, a measuring tape, and a small portfolio of her work, which Mimi doesn’t ask to see. Instead, they walk around the property as if they are old friends. The grounds are astounding; Lee has never seen such wealth up close. In the gardens, everything is laid out tidily and squared off at right angles as if it’s part of a prep school geometry lesson. Each topiary snipped with precision, the winter cabbages and hardy mums arranged in neat formations. Not a petal out of place. Along the paths, pebble mosaics of angular fish leap at forty-five-degree angles out of symmetrical ponds.
It’s all so perfect that as she walks Lee feels the urge to kick out at something, to gash a hole in a box hedge and cover the ground with shredded leaves. Instead, she smiles, accepts Mimi’s offer of tea, which is served in a sitting room whose ceiling is painted sky blue. Delicate porcelain cups, translucently thin at the edges, are filled with cambric liquid made weaker with too much cream. Espresso, the mud and stink of it, is what Lee wants now, but it would be too much for this refined woman’s palate. Lee perches on the edge of a satin-covered settee and lifts her teacup with shaking hands.
After tea, Mimi takes her out a side door to a giant solarium, in which a tiled swimming pool is surrounded by blooming flowers. The air is heavy with the scent of lilies. Lee is enchanted: a winter idyll, here in the center of Paris.
“This is perfect,” says Lee. “We can set up gauze curtains along the perimeter, and project the film on the curtains, and into the water.”
As she says it, Lee can see it, more clearly than she has ever seen anything: couples in white tuxedos and ivory dresses, dancing at the edge of the pool, white-clad waiters weaving their way through the crowd. She sees the way the curtains will billow from the breeze let in through an open window, the images—her images—trembling as if they are alive. And as she and Mimi work out the logistics, Lee fills with such impatience it blots out all her other feelings—her guilt, her anger at Man, her loneliness—and leaves her with one imperative: to get to work. When Mimi smiles with pleasure at Lee’s suggestions, neither of them mentions Man at all.
Over the next few days Lee exists in a sort of fever dream, her only focus to create the films she’ll show at the party. She teaches herself to use Man’s cine camera, which thank God he has not sold, and fills an entire notebook with sketches and ideas. Each afternoon, like a diver emerging from a pool for air, she comes to the surface of the world again, and goes out into the streets for supplies, which she charges to an account Madame Pecci-Blunt has given her. She comes back to the studio with rolls of 16mm film, canvas, materials she can use to experiment as her ideas change and grow.
First she makes a list of a hundred or so words and phrases, both in English and in French, words that will surprise and titillate when they are projected on guests’ bodies. RACONTEUR, COQUILLAGE, FALSEHOOD, DREAMER, CHUCHOTER, PERMISSIVE, LACKADAISICAL—the words come in a flood and she scribbles them all down, paints them on the canvas she has purchased, and then films them. She pictures the words crawling across the wealthy guests’ skin and clothing—GAUCHE, SEREIN, AWESTRUCK, FLÂNEUR, JOURNEYING—and as more words come to her mind she paints and films those too.
One evening Lee starts painting a story on a drop cloth, or maybe it’s a poem, words and phrases that start to have a narrative. As she paints she realizes the words are a love story, they are Man and Antonio, they are a coded apology that only she and Man will understand. The words give her an idea, and she rifles through some pictures Man took of her months ago, and places them next to the phrases. As she works she suddenly wants Man to be there, for him to come to the party and see what she has done, the words she’s written for him, the story she is making, the best way she can think of to tell him she regrets what she has done.
The more Lee works, the more she finds she is sorry. The more she misses Man. The way their eyes met in the darkroom, the looks they gave each other when something turned out well. The dance they executed around each other in their shared small space. Working alone is not the same. On a rainy afternoon she almost phones the Wheelers, but can’t think what she would say.
One evening, after working for countless hours, Lee stops and looks around with bleary eyes. The studio is a disaster. Spent tubes of black paint litter the floor. The air smells of linseed and spilled wine and what might be Lee’s feet. The ends of her fingernails are permanently blackened, the cuticles dry with turpentine. But the films are done. There are four of them: one of disconnected words, one of strangely juxtaposed images that she knows owe much to Man’s Surrealist films, one of the words and images she thinks of as her love poem, and one of her hands in hundreds of poses—she hopes that when these are displayed on people’s bodies it will look as if someone is touching them. Lee opens another bottle of wine and watches all four films, projected on the back wall of the studio, as she drinks straight from the bottle, the wine going down her throat in what feels like one uninterrupted swallow. When the last film slips loose of the reel at the end, Lee sits in the sudden hot bright light of the projector, listening to the tock tock tock tock as the film goes around the reel, and she feels overwhelmingly, drunkenly proud.
The next day, Lee goes back to the apartment for the first time in eight days. She needs clean clothes; she needs a bath. The mail slot is full of correspondence. Bills to be paid, friends to respond to. And as Lee goes through the stack she sees how many letters are addressed to her, all of them in Man’s crabbed hand. There are fifteen of them: he has written her almost two letters a day. She gathers them up and once she has stripped off her dress and lain down on their bed she opens them and reads them as they must have been written, almost in one stream of consciousness.
Away from you I realize even more how much I need you—we are like twins of each other or mirror images—without you I’m less than half of myself—I’ve hardly eaten since I left you, food has no taste, my mouth is dry and water doesn’t help it—and this trip becomes what I should have known it to be: a penance, an exile, a drying out, the only way I can get over the liquor that is you.
In some of the letters he seems angry; in others he is plaintive. He must have spent hours on them. Lee envisions him at some desk at the Wheelers’, looking out at the sea but not seeing it.