She found shirts in the armoire to wrap around the photography gear. She considered the pants, too, but they were for a bigger man, one whose hips hadn’t been whittled by a year of starvation rations in an internment camp.
The desk here was empty but for a single sheet of stationery and a framed 8-by-10 photograph propped against the wall the way On Being an Angel was on her dresser back at Villa Air-Bel. She blew the dust off the note first and read, Dear Nanée.
A letter to her?
What followed was the start of a thank-you note, unfinished, for the gathering she’d hosted after the Surrealist exposition nearly three years before. How impossibly odd.
She used a sleeve to wipe a layer of dust from the glass over the photo, to see the push-up man. Such an eerie photo. She remembered the look that had passed between Edouard and André when she’d mentioned it at that party, the embarrassment she’d felt under André’s questioning. Sometimes the viewer does not see all that is in the art.
Was this photograph of Edouard himself? She considered taking it from its frame to save the weight of it and packing it, but it seemed wrong somehow to take the man from his pressed-silver home. A dark shadow hid the man’s derrière at the bottom of the print. Derrière. The French word so much softer and more evocative than the English buttocks or behind. She peered more closely at the photo. It was a naked torso, wasn’t it? Surely that was a waist, with the shoulders hunched forward awkwardly. Those bumps, was that the angle? Why was the photograph so unnerving? The man was naked, yes. Was that it? The reminder of the naked shoulders above her in bed, men who’d made love to her. No, not love. Men she’d gone the limit with, only imagining herself in love.
She looked at the back of the frame, to see if there was anything tucked into it. There was not.
She entered the cottage’s windowless bathroom, where Edouard said she would find his developing gear. She used a kitchen cloth to wipe the cobwebs and dust from the big black bulby thing that was an enlarger for printing photos, and from its wooden baseboard and the metal-and-wood easel. She wrapped the bulb end in one of Edouard’s shirts and repositioned the gear in the bag to accommodate its bulk.
A half dozen photos hung backside to her from wooden clothespins on a clothesline over a tub that held empty trays and bottles of developing chemicals he’d said to leave behind. She unclipped one, curious to see what Edouard had been working on before he was taken to the camp.
It was the same nude that was on his desk in the bedroom, but much darker. Push-up man.
She unclipped another of the photos: the same photograph, darker still. Another: again, the same photo. One after another, each darker or lighter, with more contrast or less, more light in one area of the print or another.
She examined one of the prints more closely. The slightly odd curve of the shoulders. The arms angled toward each other. The legs apart?
She peered more closely. Did she have it all wrong? Was it . . . ? Yes, the photograph was of a woman’s torso, not a man’s. A naked woman bent forward at the waist. The curves at the top that she’d thought were a man’s curled shoulders were a woman’s derrière. What Nanée had thought were the edges of a man’s arms behind his shoulders were a hint of thigh, and at the bottom of the photograph a woman’s spine disappeared into a shadow cast on her shoulders. The shadow of the photographer, of Edouard.
This photograph she’d seen as presenting a man’s strength instead captured the opposite, a woman collapsing forward in grief or shame or loss, supplication. And yet there was her long, straight spine too. There was the sense that she would unbend and rise up again.
Nude, Bending—that’s what Edouard had called that photograph back at her apartment in Paris. Or had that been André?
Ghost Wife. The vulnerability of the pose. The intimacy. Surely this was one lover photographing another? She looked over her shoulder, shivering at the impression she was being watched.
No one was there.
Still, she went out into the main room and looked around. She locked the front door. She retrieved the hat from the closet and fingered the inside leather band, softened by years of hair and skin oils but the tag still clean, the hat well cared for, the initials—ELM—only slightly faded. She took the hat back with her into the bathroom to put it in the bag after all, but already there was no room for it. She set it on her own head. Too big, but easy enough to carry that way. It smelled of Edouard, comforting.
Should she take one of the prints? Nude Bending. Ghost Wife. She peered at the photograph again. So intimate. It had been hanging in the exhibition, but Edouard had made André take it down. And he had been so clear about not needing any of his prints.