The Beautiful American (18 page)

After that time, whenever I saw photos of the
Boule de neige
, of Lee’s eye floating in a paperweight—and it was reproduced surprisingly often—I heard those
Front National
marching shouts in my head. They seemed to me all of a piece, though whether the surrealist movement was prophetic or somehow an early imitation of what was to follow, no one will ever know.

Nineteen thirty-two was a year of encroaching shadow. Everyone felt it, that darkness beginning to fall. Momma wrote a letter, long for her, telling about the Hooverville camp springing up outside Poughkeepsie, where the unemployed and homeless camped. The U.S. Depression, that father of breadlines, had rooted itself deeply in Europe as well.

The French newspapers cheerfully pointed out that six million Germans had already lost their jobs, but I didn’t see that France was doing much better.

In Paris, the street traffic thinned as more and more Americans returned home to try to piece things back together. Four apartments in our building emptied in one month, so that our landlady offered to move us into a larger room without increasing our rent. She was nervous, thinking probably of those times when we had asked for more coal, more hot water, and her reply had been sharp, her prices high. Would we abandon her as well?

I put my arm around her shoulder and assured her we had no intention of leaving and she almost sobbed with relief. Jamie moved us into the larger room, and that soon seemed a mistake. We never felt at home in it, the way we had felt at home in our small familiar room.

Shops began to reduce their hours and then closed altogether, and burn barrels appeared on street corners to warm the newly homeless. The unions, those people still with jobs, began to strike in protest, leaving the city without transportation, sanitation services, mail, and schools, for days on end. “Broke” wasn’t what happened to vases and windows; it was what happened to people, to cities.

But the economy, the newly shuttered shops and cafés, wasn’t the only omen of disaster to come. In March, the baby son of Lucky Lindy, the aviator hero of France, was kidnapped. Even the
Parisians, normally indifferent to American woes (until those woes crossed the ocean), were appalled and saddened. Lucky Lindy had been their hero as well; he had chosen to end his transatlantic flight in Paris, not London or some other European city. It was difficult to find papers on days when there were updates; they sold out immediately.

Personally, I couldn’t think of anything worse than having your child stolen from you.

In Germany, the little man with the ridiculous mustache, Herr Adolf Hitler, ran against von Hindenburg in the presidential elections, and though he came in second, many thought that he would win the next election.

“Impossible,” Man said. “The man’s an idiot.”

“Stupid like a fox about to break into the chicken coop,” Lee said. “He never smiles in his photos. That’s not a face to trust.”

Troubles began to pile up like a train wreck. Spring rain ran in torrents down the cobbles, leaked through roofs, soaked our clothes and shoes. Man was short-tempered and fiercely possessive, stopping Lee with a “Where are you going?” and “When are you coming back?” every time she went out the door. As trees began to leaf out, Jamie grew thin-lipped. My Jamie? Could it be that he was homesick?

I asked him.

“No,” he said. It was Sunday, a long free day of ringing church bells, a day free of Man’s demands and errands, and there Jamie was, sitting by the window nursing a cup of cold coffee.

“Then why aren’t you out taking photographs?” I had already taken a walk, alone, down the Champs-Élysées, and pawed through racks of used books in the stalls along the Seine. And Jamie wasn’t even dressed yet.

“What’s the point? I’ll never show them anywhere. I mean, how
many boxes of prints should I fill up and stack in the corner before I admit I’m a washout?”

It was hard to argue that one. I decided on the simplest, most truthful argument I could come up with. “I believe in you,” I said, sitting in the chair opposite him. “You take great photographs. Not stylish, but that’s the thing with style, isn’t it? It doesn’t last. A new style will come and another and another. What’s important is that you photograph what you see, not what Man or Lee or anyone else sees.”

Jamie wasn’t convinced. He looked at me the way I had seen him look at his father in Poughkeepsie, with love but also a kind of distance, as if we didn’t share a common language.

“I’m starving,” I said. “Let’s go eat.”

“Go without me. I’ve got to think.”

This was the first time I had ever seen Jamie in such a black mood, the first time he couldn’t pack up his troubles in his old kit bag and smile, smile, smile. We were turning a corner and I didn’t know what was at the end of this street. Oddly enough, I thought instead of Lucky Lindy, let my heart swell with his sorrow, the hellish pain of losing a child. I thought a lot about children those days, walking out of my way to pass school yards and playgrounds where they played, wondering when Jamie would, as my mother said, do right by me. He would be twenty-five, soon.

There was a café on our corner, a nameless little place with a sandy wooden floor and dented zinc bar and a calendar on the wall from 1928. Normally, I avoided this café. It smelled of cabbage and vinegary wine and the clientele seemed unwashed and uncaring.

One old woman in particular scared the hell out of me. She had a deeply lined face, and she painted her mouth as large and red as a clown’s. Her frizzy hair had been hennaed to the color of a
Christmas stocking and her ancient fur coat had patches of mange. She always sat at the same table, and no one ever sat with her. She seemed, to me, to epitomize the words “old and unloved.”

That afternoon I ate alone at the café, trying on various futures the way Lee tried on different evening dresses. Jamie’s black mood had infected me as well, and for the first time I considered the possibility that . . . I couldn’t finish the sentence, not even to myself. Of course he loves me, I told myself.

The old woman and I eyed each other over our omelets and glasses of sour wine. When I put a fork of egg to my mouth, she did the same. When I lifted my wineglass, so did she. I fled the café without finishing my solitary meal. She cackled with delight.

The next day I worked only half a shift at Boulet’s. My sales technique had improved so much that any woman who ventured near my display counter left that store with a bottle of perfume, whether she had planned to buy it or not. But customers were fewer and fewer and I couldn’t exactly lasso them in off the street corner. Boulet was disappointed, perhaps even a little angry, that the visit from the bejeweled and befurred Nimet Eloui Bey hadn’t put his place on the map. Our clientele were still shopgirls wanting a cheap lipstick and housewives needing sticking plasters.

I spent my free morning at the zoological garden, visiting the panther. When I was near his cage, I felt near to my father. When I had asked Jamie if he was homesick, the question had been for myself as well. I wasn’t. But the sense of loss was there for something I couldn’t name.

The rain had finally stopped and the morning was all warm sun and fresh breezes, keeping the skin alert to possibility, to the joy of touch. Trees showed delicate new green leaves and the air smelled of muddy resurrection, as if the world was being newly shaped. The
park was filled with mothers and children, feeding my new obsession with the various nuances of wails after skinned knees, high-pitched midget shouts of anger and joy, the strange way little boys ran, with their feet and elbows all at different angles.

A group of children had gathered in front of the panther’s cage when I arrived, boys in short pants and girls in frilly pinafores, a swirling mass of screaming tots daring one another to get closer to the cage, and their mothers and nannies, looking monstrously huge next to their tiny wards, flailing and yelling to keep the children at a safe distance.

The panther himself looked bored. He yawned and I wondered, if I got close enough, would that yawn smell of the ancient amber walls of Atlantis? What exactly was the magical sweet fragrance of a panther’s breath that according to legend could so easily lure his victims?

This was the fifth or sixth time I had visited him, and every time it had been this same ritual: his initial boredom. Then he would lock his gaze onto my face, rise, and begin to pace, never breaking our eye contact. It gave me a thrill of both fear and recognition. I knew this animal couldn’t possibly be the same panther that the poet Rilke had visited and written about, yet there was something immortal about the beast, a sense that no matter what happened outside his cage, this panther would be here always.

That’s how wrong we sometimes are. But that day, the panther still had his immortality.

The children ran back and forth in front of the cage and then, in groups of twos and threes, they wandered away with their mothers, as bored as the beast himself, looking for new excitement or perhaps an ice cream. They left a scented trail of candy and shampoo and powder.

“Hi, Nora.”

I hadn’t seen her sitting under the opposite tree, smoking a cigarette, looking like a photograph of a woman sitting under a tree, smoking.

“This is a surprise. Come here often?” I sat next to Lee and accepted one of her cigarettes. It was an Egyptian brand, flavored with clove.

“Not often. Only when I need to be quiet, to think. Never one of my favorite activities.” Lee laughed and there was a hint of wistfulness in her voice.

“So, what did you come here to think about?” I asked her.

“You can guess. Lunch on me if you get it right the first time.”

“Aziz.”

“Bingo.” Lee tossed her cigarette and stretched out one long, elegant leg to crush the butt into the gravel. “I think it’s serious, Nora.” Lee said it the way a girl just invited to the prom would say, “He likes me!”

“How serious?”

“Love and marriage and baby-carriage serious.”

“Oh, God.”

Lee laughed again. “My feelings exactly. I mean, I could not have chosen a more complicated situation, could I? If you had sent me on a scavenger hunt to find the most unworkable romance possible, this would be it. Man is beside himself, of course. We haven’t discussed it, but he knows, I’m certain he knows.”

How could he not know? Since she had returned from St. Moritz, Lee had been walking on tiptoe, humming to herself, gazing dreamy-eyed into some horizon we didn’t see.

“Does Nimet know?” I already knew the answer to that question, but I wondered if Lee did.

“Don’t think so.” She pulled another cigarette out of her purse and lit it with a new silver Ronson lighter. It had been engraved, but her thumb was over the inscription.

“So what’s the plan?” I took a cigarette when she offered it, more because I wanted to read that inscription than inhale Egyptian clove, and it was what I thought:
A to L. With love.

“No plan. Day by day.”

“Why tell me? How do I come into this?”

Lee looked into my eyes with the panther’s steady, fearless gaze. “I need to talk about him. Even when I’m not with him, I just need to talk about him, to feel him with me. Nora, have you ever felt like this? Why didn’t someone tell me? Jesus. It’s laughing and crying, feeling young and old, safe and lost at sea, all at the same time. It’s every opposite meeting head-on and thumping into your heart. I’m delighted. I’m terrified. And you’re the only person I can tell this to.”

She took my hand then, held it as if she were going underwater and I could pull her back up.

“Okay,” I said. “Talk. Tell me about his tailor, his education, his hobbies. Is he good on skis?”

That was a very long morning. Is there anything more boring than listening to a girl in love go on and on about her beloved? Lee wasn’t at all bored, of course. She was ecstatic. I’d never seen her like that, soft and vulnerable just from saying a man’s name.

“Thanks,” she said, an hour and far too much detail later. I think I knew more about Aziz than his mother did at that point, about his favorite professors in Liverpool where he had studied engineering; about the glass models of eyes in his doctor father’s study and how he had played marbles with them; his early chaperoned dates with Nimet; his favorite Savile Row tailor and Cairo terrace bar; the songs he sang in the shower. He loved Cole Porter.

“Got to go now,” Lee said, standing, run-down and out of words like a windup doll. “Nimet is coming to my studio for a sitting.”

I stood as well. “You’re doing Nimet’s portrait?”

“Yeah. She asked me to. How could I say no?”

“It’s easy. You say no. This is a bad idea, Lee.”

“No, it’s a great idea. I don’t want Man to know. Not yet. Why act guilty?”

Because you are? And then I heard Jamie’s voice in my head. You can take the girl out of Poughkeepsie . . . No use judging Lee by P’oke standards. And it wasn’t as if Man were holy Mr. Faithful. There was a code of honor of sorts in all this, but I hadn’t figured it out yet.

Several days later, Lee showed me her portrait of Nimet. Aziz’s wife looked straight into the camera, her eyelids slightly lowered over her huge black eyes. Her mouth had a suggestion of a smile but no more than that. Lee had costumed her in a turban and flowing velvet robe, a nod to Nimet’s Circassian ancestors, to emphasize her exotic beauty. It was, when all was said and done, a very generous portrait for a woman to make of her lover’s wife.

“She’s beautiful,” I said, handing the photo back to Lee. We were in Lee’s studio, alone. Lee used the studio for her sittings and to store her personal things and to hide in, once in a while, when Man was in a sulk. And, let’s be honest, she took men there, men who stayed for an hour, who were interesting and passionate and either too much in a hurry to get a hotel room or too broke to afford one.

Man never visited it. He hated it, hated that Lee kept it, because he knew why she did, that it wasn’t just for sittings and shoots. On the surface, her reason for having the studio was for respectability.
Lee and Man were not married and a lady never used the same address as her lover. Appearances had to be kept up, even when the whole world knew the truth of the situation. But Man knew.