The Beautiful American (17 page)

The old men at the table next to us were watching, though, and raised their glass to Jamie.

I wish I had a photograph of that night, that moment, when there was nothing we couldn’t overcome, nothing we couldn’t ultimately laugh at. Life was a bowl of cherries and weren’t we just Yankee Doodly Dum, looking swell on the sunny side of the street.

•   •   •

I
n December, Lee bought new ski pants and a fur hat and went with the fashionable crowd, skiing in St. Moritz. Man didn’t go. Too busy, he lied. Too expensive, I knew. He couldn’t afford it, while Lee was earning money hand over fist, and there was always Daddy’s allowance to see her through any tight spots.

Man and Jamie and I saw Lee off at the train station, waving
forlornly like children not taken on holiday. “I’ll be back soon!” Lee called brightly out the window, her breath steaming in the cold air. She looked very happy. Perhaps, I thought, looking sideways at Man’s darkening face, too happy.

At the resort, Lee met up with Charlie Chaplin and his friends. She sent me some photos taken with her little folding Kodak: Chaplin at a formal restaurant with a napkin on his head, a spoonful of mashed potatoes playfully splattered on his cheek; next to him, Gloria Swanson looking vampish; and on Chaplin’s other side, Gary Cooper brooding handsomely into the camera.

Vogue
also published photographs of the season, since St. Moritz was the most fashionable place to be on the planet, once snow blanketed the ground. I thumbed through the magazine at Boulet’s shop so that I wouldn’t have to buy a copy, and was studying the new fashions for that season, the ever shorter skirts, smaller hats with turned-up brims tilted over one eye, the fur trim on jacket sleeves, wide-legged velvet trousers. Not that I would be wearing any of them. I bought my clothes at a secondhand store and they were always three or four years out-of-date.

There was one dress, though, that turned me green with covetousness. I flipped the page to see if there was a second photograph of it, flipped right to a page spread with the St. Moritz crowd, the Prince of Wales sloshing down the slopes in less-than-princely manner, the bediamonded celebrities taking tea in the pseudo-quaint shops, Lee and Charlie Chaplin dancing friskily in a nightclub, his mouth open in a shriek of Little Tramp delight, his arms positioned over his head like semaphore flags, Lee vamping over her shoulder for the camera. Another photo: Lee and Charlie and Gary and Gloria at dinner in some swank chandeliered dining room, candlelight making the photo a little hazy in some places.

Next to Lee sat Aziz Eloui Bey.

Lee looked . . . it was hard to think of the right word. Peaceful. Serene. There was an uncommon openness to her face. This was what Lee looked like when she was unguarded, I thought. Maybe Man was always photographing her in cages and traps because he sensed the invisible protective cage she wore around herself in Paris.

Aziz looked like the little boy who had caught the brass ring on the merry-go-round. And his wife, Nimet, smoldered next to him, looking as if she were about to catch fire and burn the whole place down.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A
week later, Lee was still in St. Moritz and as usual I went to Man’s studio to meet Jamie so we could go to a café for dinner together. Jamie wasn’t there. Man was.

“There’s a sitting tomorrow, so I sent him out to buy some more glass plates,” Man said, opening the door to me. “Come in. Want a drink?” He brushed snow off my hair and shoulders. He smiled. “Come in,” he said again.

I had walked into that studio a hundred times without hesitation. That night, I hesitated, the way my aunt’s poodle had when it was time for a flea bath, wanting to obey, to not give trouble, yet not wanting to come out from under the sofa because of what lay in wait. Man had smiled more at me in one minute than he had in the past year.

“What’s up?” I said, stepping over the threshold. My boots left damp footprints on the old Oriental carpet.

“Nothing. Just thought we might have a drink together. Get to know each other a bit.” Man helped me out of my coat and guided me to the worn sofa. “Sit on that side,” he said. “It’s closer to the
stove. You look cold. That’s a pretty dress you’re wearing. Very flattering.”

He looked exhausted, but not from physical exertion. Troubles in the soul, my father would have said.

“Missing Lee?” I asked, accepting a glass of whiskey.

“Not at all,” he lied. “She has her life, I have mine.”

Man and I had never been alone together before. We had never had a reason to be. Now there was no one else to look at, no other face on which to focus, so I studied his face, the wiry black eyebrows, the squarish Edward G. Robinson–style jaw (no coincidence there, Edward G. being another Emanuel, another son, like Man, of Eastern European immigrants). The broad W of Man’s hairline over his sloping forehead looked dangerous. He smelled of acrid photography chemicals and underneath that of bay rum aftershave.

He was an attractive man who dressed well and carried himself with confidence. Lee’s feelings for him had been very genuine and not merely opportunistic, as some had suggested. But nothing lasts, especially not love. Wrong, I told myself, clutching the glass of whiskey Man had given me. Me and Jamie. We’re going to last. I felt that, knew it to be true with every bone in my body.

It was already night and dark. Man had turned off the electric light that hung from the ceiling and we sat in the uneasy dark, illuminated only by the streetlight shining in through the window. The night was very quiet in the way that snowy nights can be, all sounds muffled. Once in a while a taxi honked.

Man started to hum a tune under his breath. That, Lee had told me once, was his cue that he was feeling romantic, and that was how I knew Man had seen the photos, too, of Lee sitting next to Aziz with that strange, unfamiliar glow on her face.

I knew what was coming and why, but I wouldn’t be used that
way, as a tawdry revenge on a straying mistress. Curiosity kept me seated, though, inhaling the dust of the sofa, the bay rum aftershave. When he slid close to me and put his arm around my shoulders, I held my breath.

“You’re a very pretty girl,” Man said, putting his face close to mine. “Jamie is a lucky guy.”

“Very.” I stood. “When Jamie comes back, tell him I’ll meet him at the Dôme.” Then, realizing that I couldn’t be rude to Jamie’s boss, I added, “Want to have dinner with us?”

Man stood as well. “No. I’m meeting with Pablo.”

“Give him my regards. And Olga as well.”

Man gave me a long look and there was something of the panther’s gaze in his eyes, that longing for freedom, knowing all the while that if the cage door were opened, he might not want to cross the threshold after all. It was lonely out there. “I wish Lee were more like you,” he said. “Loyal. Devoted. Easy to be with.”

“You make me sound like a cocker spaniel.”

Man didn’t laugh.

•   •   •

L
ee came back from St. Moritz in time for Christmas and the four of us celebrated together, decorating a potted palm with cutout gilt-paper stars and exchanging gifts on Christmas morning, in Man’s studio. I gave Lee a sample bottle of perfume from Boulet’s. She gave me a Hermès scarf, Jamie got gloves from Hermès, and Man got an umbrella and bowler hat from Hermès.

“I never really liked shopping,” she explained, wrapping the scarf around my neck and tying it in a floppy silk bow. “Easier to shop all in one place.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Merry Christmas, Nora,” she said.

We were sitting on the floor around the potted palm, drinking coffee corrected with large doses of whiskey. Snow fell outside the windows, giving the room a bluish, underwater quality. There were no shadows that day, no strong contrasts, only different shades of water with occasional accents peeking through—Man’s green and gray tie, Lee’s blue eye shadow, Jamie’s bold striped socks, knitted by his mother and sent over for Christmas.

They were hideous, those socks, the kind of garment a toddler would be dressed in to cuten him up, but Jamie had worn them thinking that Man would find them funny, perhaps even surreal.

Bad misjudgment. Man dressed well and never confused his own wardrobe with artwork, unlike his friend Salvador Dalí, who a few years later would arrive in the States with a loaf of bread tied to his head. Puns in attire, Man thought, were for his models, not himself. So when he saw those socks blazing out between Jamie’s cuff and shoe top, he gave a kind of sneer rather than a laugh.

“Oh, come on! You know they’re funny,” Jamie insisted.

“You’re funny,” Lee said, and she leaned over the piles of discarded wrapping paper and gave Jamie a kiss on the lips. Not a long one. Not a sexy one, the kind of kiss a girl would give a younger brother.

Man glared anyway.

Lee had a new quality about her, a soft wistfulness that counterbalanced her more acerbic moments and comments. After having partied in some of the fanciest restaurants in the world, with some of the swankiest people, she returned to us seeming less confident, not more. And Man, with that junkyard dog courage of his, became even more bullying, more possessive.

To keep the peace, Lee leaned over and kissed Man as well, on the lips with open mouth. He closed his eyes. Lee kept hers open.

Uh-oh, I thought.

That Christmas, that Hermès Christmas, as we were clearing up the mess from the unwrapping of presents we heard singing in the streets. A crowd marched down the boulevard, carrying placards: France for the French, and Down with Communists.

“They’re wearing black shirts. Like Mussolini’s boys,” Man said, leaning out the window and looking down into the street. The snow had stopped and the air was clear and bright and cold. The boys’ cheeks were red, and their hands, when they raised them in a fist salute, showed chapped knuckles.

They were workers’ hands, thick and callused and now mostly unemployed, and yet these young men and a few women as well were marching for the right to give up their rights, we thought, to do away with the prime minister and his Socialists, what the unemployed workers and nationalists called their bleeding hearts and their tax-and-spend policies. In one of Mussolini’s speeches, reprinted in one of the Far Right newspapers, he had said, “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” That’s what those unemployed workers demonstrated for—the bankers and the factory owners.

We watched in silence, all sense of Christmas celebration washed away.

“Maybe it’s time to go home,” Man said, when the crowd had turned a distant corner and was out of sight. “Back to New York.” He looked at Lee, but she would not meet his gaze.

“Come on, Nora,” she said. “Let’s be useful and make some sandwiches or something. I’m starving.”

•   •   •

I
n January, Julien Levy’s art exhibit went up in New York, with works by Man, Dalí, Picasso, Cocteau, Atget, and others I didn’t know. Julien sent Man copies of the reviews in the New York papers, and for the first time, I saw the image Man had in the show that would become so famous, or so infamous, the
Boule de neige
: a glass paperweight with a cutout image of Lee’s eye floating in it. One of the papers had included a photograph of it and I almost dropped the paper when I saw that photo; it was so disturbing, a single eye floating like a fish in a bowl.

If the whole point of surrealism was to free repressed urges through unrepressed images, I did not want to imagine what had urged Man to make that paperweight, the violence he had imagined, perhaps wished for.

Lee seemed to take it in stride. There was always a touch of cruelty in the worship of beauty, those crippled bound feet, suffocating whalebone corsets, poisonous lead face paints of previous times. Wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world that armless, defenseless Venus de Milo? As a fashion model and photographer’s model Lee perhaps had grown used to seeing her body, at least images of it, dissected in various ways: legs cut off at the knees, torso without the head attached. She herself, when she had done some freelance photography work for the Sorbonne medical school, had walked from the Left Bank to the
Vogue
offices carrying an actual severed breast on a dinner plate, remnants of a mastectomy. She had photographed it with salt and pepper shakers.

The editors, of course, had been totally scandalized. How dare she be so disrespectful, so brazen, with the female body? But wasn’t that Lee’s point, though perhaps taken a bit too far? Didn’t they, every month in their issues, take women apart and put them back together again, as if women were so much meat?

And there was that other Lee, seven-year-old Li Li Miller, already tainted with the knowledge of the brutality men could do to the female body, the little girl only I knew, since I was certain Lee had never told Man about the rape, nor anyone else.

Honestly, I think that’s why Jamie’s work never really took off. There wasn’t an ounce of cruelty in him. He lived in a world where pretty women were safe from sadists, where men opened doors for them and lit their cigarettes and said “Yes, ma’am” if they were older, and “Sure, sweetheart” if they were young; where men liked or at least accepted them just the way they were, no adjustment needed except a little perfume and lipstick for dress-up occasions.

There is imagination, and there is imagination. Jamie’s imagination lingered on lovely and natural things, not angles where a cropping knife might cut.

Man’s imagination went into dark places and took his women there as well. That darkness had appealed to the darkness in Lee when she first met him. But it was a difficult thing to live with, that danger, that darkness, that suggestion that life is frail and to love means to always be vulnerable. Lee had learned too young and too thoroughly how vulnerable the female body could be, and soon Man’s imagination began to close in on her. She hated closed doors where she could be held prisoner, and Man was trying to close them.

No wonder she began to daydream about a place filled with light and open space, and the man who could take her there.