“But of course the answer,” Edouard answered before André could, “is that we are men.”
Even André laughed, but Nanée only said “Pffft” that way French women did. She was American and not, just as he was German and not.
“You are thinking this is not an answer, that we are men,” Edouard said. “But it is merely not the answer you wish to hear. Much like Freud, we’re interested in exploring, without moral judgment, obsession, anxiety, even fetish.”
She shifted uncomfortably—discomfort being what he’d meant to provoke, being a proper Surrealist himself.
André handed him a piece of drawing paper, suggesting he start them in a round of Exquisite Corpse—an André-invented game in which three players drew separately a head, a body, and legs or a tail, each without seeing what the others had contributed, to create, invariably, a bizarre composite creature. André justified all his Surrealist games as ways to unlock creative minds, but Edouard suspected they were his friend’s excuse to drag out the shame of others for the world to see. Still, he handed Nanée back the fur bracelet and accepted a Waterman pen, moss-green agate with a gold clip and a single gold band on an oft-chewed cap, already looking for something to copy, to play André’s game without exposing himself. He spotted two photos on a Louis XV desk by the windows, one a framed young Nanée at a shooting target with trophy and pistol in hand, her proud father beside her, and the other a snapshot atop an envelope, recent mail, of Nanée in flying gear. He uncapped the pen and set nib to paper, beginning with the long line of neck he imagined under the scarf in the snapshot, drawing poorly, but then he did have the excuse of Luki asleep in his lap.
“I believe you’ve both hit on something,” Nanée said as he drew the bones of her eye orbits, the effect in the unrelenting black ink faintly skeletal. “I think the answer is that you men are unwilling to allow your own inadequacies to be set beside the ideal.”
“The ideal being a woman’s body?” he replied.
“The ideal being a man’s perfect body, which is as ‘marvelous’ as a woman’s,” she said. “Anxiety, as you say.”
Everyone laughed, the entire room attending now to this conversation as he drew her cheekbones, her unremarkable chin. Luki stirred, not from the noise but from the tension in Edouard’s muscles.
He added a filigreed birdcage to his sketch so that Nanée’s skeleton face peeked out through the open cage door—pandering, he supposed, birdcages being all the rage now among the Surrealist crowd, but also imagining stacking negatives to float Nanée’s head alone in a birdcage, free of its mortal body.
“Yet if you examine your own words, Nanée,” he said, “you will see that your argument supports my answer, that we are men.”
“You are a Surrealist then? I didn’t see any isolated female sex organs in your photos.”
Edouard reassessed her—a woman who could say “sex organs” without embarrassment?—as he draped the neck of his caged paper skeleton in a scarf like the one she wore, letting it fly out as if caught in a mighty wind. The kinds of photos she spoke of simply weren’t what interested him. What compelled him, or used to when he was still taking photos, was never the sin, original or otherwise. It wasn’t even the central power, the tragedy, the disaster or violence. It was the watchers, those standing to the side, never imagining they were involved.
He refolded the paper along the crease and flipped it over—stunned to see not Nanée’s skeleton eyes observing him from the page but Elza’s. Elza’s jawline. Elza’s nose. Elza’s cheekbones. Elza, his wife everyone described as “lost,” as if she might be found somewhere other than enclosed in a tomb. She peered up at him the way she did in his dreams, demanding to know why he’d let their child die. Not charging him with her own death or even her sister’s, but grieving for her unborn baby, the sibling Luki would now never have.
He picked up the pen and scratched a quick set of flight goggles over the eyes, refolded the paper, and passed it to André, who began blindly adding a body.
“Come to think of it,” Nanée said, “I didn’t see a single naked body in your photos, Edouard.”
“Nude, Bending,” André said without looking up.
Edouard again bristled at this title for Salvation, but correcting André would only draw more attention to the photo he hadn’t meant for anyone to see.