The Beautiful American (8 page)

“You don’t need to work,” Jamie said that evening after I told him about my day. “I’ll take care of us. I missed you, working by myself. Come here and give me the kiss that policeman probably expected and didn’t get. Did he? No? Then it is mine.”

Such happiness does not last. The half-life of a good, strong perfume is usually three hours. The half-life of love is measured in years, if you are lucky, not hours. But it is measured just the same.

I was in Café de Flore, drinking coffee and talking with a friend, Madeline from Albany, when the man sitting next to us put down the paper he had been reading, stood so quickly that he was unsteady on his feet, and rushed out the door.

“He’s in a hurry,” Madeline commented. She had a high-pitched
voice that carried quite a distance, and the other diners looked up as well. Our waiter pursed his lips and blew through them, making the familiar sound of Parisian disdain. He took away the half-drunk coffee, the untasted ham and cheese baguette, but before the waiter could take the paper, I reached for it.

It was the
New York Times
, the Tuesday, October 29, edition.

“‘Stock Prices Slump Fourteen Billion Dollars in Nation-Wide Stampede to Unload,’” I read.

“Daddy must be so upset,” Madeline said, looking over my shoulder. “Poor old thing. Bet he’s going to cut my allowance. And I just ordered a dozen new frocks.”

“Just a dip. It’ll right itself,” Jamie said, back in our room on rue Froidevaux, across from the old cemetery. “Dad must be nervous, though,” he admitted, after he had thought about it for a moment. “I can’t go back yet, Nora. We’re okay.” When we made love that afternoon, rolling naked in the warmth of the early autumn weather, Jamie seemed a little preoccupied. “Don’t worry,” he repeated so often that I began to worry.

Soon after, Jamie had a letter from his father explaining that his monthly income would have to be reduced a little, but otherwise all was well. People would always buy bread. A month later there was another letter, saying that the Tastes-So-Good Bakery had almost defaulted on a loan and staff were being laid off.

“Come home,” his father wrote. “It’s time.” Jamie grimaced and tugged at his ear, the way he did when he was upset. “No,” he said back to the letter.

We were sitting on a bench in the Tuileries gardens, feeding to pigeons the crumbs of our leftover lunch. It was two days before Christmas and the gardens were browned and empty of color and scent. Jamie hadn’t received his money from home for the month
and we had enough cash to last one more month, if we were very careful.

The planned exhibit of the Pont Neuf Exiles had already been called off for lack of funds, and the sculptor had taken a boat back to the States. Jamie wasn’t smiling as often as he used to.

“What else does your father say?” I asked.

“Here. Read it for yourself.” Jamie thrust the letter at me, and stood to pace on the graveled path, smoothing back his thick blond hair with the palm of his hand. He had grown it longer, so that it grazed his shirt collar and waved over his ears, like an artist’s.

I read the letter. There was a one-way ticket waiting for him at the steamer office, his father had written. Jamie was to sail immediately.

“Just one ticket,” I said weakly.

“Don’t worry, Nora.” He stopped pacing in front of me and leaned down to give me a quick kiss. “I’m not leaving. I’m not leaving you. I’ll find work.”

“You’ve already tried,” I pointed out. It had been the same story in Paris as in London and New York. The galleries weren’t interested in his photographs, and the newspapers, even when they bought one or two, did not pay enough to live on.

“Maybe he’s right. Let’s go home,” I said. “I’ll find money for my ticket.” For the first time since leaving Poughkeepsie I felt afraid. Something seemed to be coming, something bad, something you couldn’t fight. It was much more than the sense of a party ending; it was the sense of an ending to be followed by something menacing and unknown.

“Let’s get married and go home,” I said, throwing out the last of the crumbs. Pigeons cooed and pushed one another at my feet, black and white and gray birds pecking at crumbs on a gray and white path, as monochromatic as a photograph.

Of course we couldn’t go back without being married, without telling lies and saying we had been married all along, ever since running away to New York. Lee Miller could do something like that, live with a man “in sin,” but not me.

“Soon as I’m twenty-five,” Jamie said.

“Your family will understand if you jump it a couple of years,” I said. “Won’t they?”

Jamie didn’t answer. His father had sent one return ticket, not two. I was still just the gardener’s daughter.

CHAPTER FIVE

A
month later, our funds exhausted, both of us were numbly aware of that single ticket for the steamer back to New York, waiting for Jamie to pick it up.

“We’ve got enough for a dinner and a couple of drinks,” Jamie said. “Let’s go out. Put on your prettiest dress, Nora. That one with the red flowers on it. I’ve got a feeling something good is going to happen.”

I dressed. We went out. Although we knew Paris quite well by then, we might have been experiencing it for the first time, that night. I wondered if that meant we would leave soon, that we had gone back to the beginning only to find it was an ending.

Montparnasse was quiet that evening. It was January, cold. The festivities of Christmas and New Year’s were over and now it was just winter with nothing to look forward to but a spring you didn’t really believe in. People were inside, huddled for warmth. It wasn’t until we reached the larger boulevards that we found that pleasant sense of being in a sympathetic crowd, heard the soft voices of other conversations going on around us.

It began to snow. Large, feathery flakes hovered in the yellow circles of the streetlamps, undecided which way to float, and then disappeared before they landed on the cobbles. We turned off the Champs-Élysées and walked a bit longer until we stood in front of the Jockey Club on rue Rabelais. Light flooded from its windows into the surrounding darkness. We heard laughter, and music.

“We can’t afford this place,” I said, peering in the window at the mass of people inside. I had cut my straight, black hair and hanks of it kept falling into my eyes. “Jamie, look at the pearls that woman is wearing.”

The Jockey was a bar where people like James Joyce and Hemingway drank, the already famous, and even if they weren’t rich, they were surrounded by rich people, and their credit was good. Ours wasn’t.

“You’ve got to think big,” Jamie said. “Straighten your hat, Nora. We can sit at the bar and have a beer. Just one.”

I hesitated in the doorway. And as I did, a group of six people approached, laughing loudly and shouting back and forth in French and English and German. It was Lee Miller with her friends.

Lee had the good looks you never confused with a different person, a different face; she had style and daring. That evening, she wore trousers and a coat of white cashmere, and a white cap tight around her head so that she almost looked like a boy, except for her mouth, which was painted bright red, and the smoky kohl circling her blue eyes.

When she saw me, she paused and there was a second of confusion in her perfect features.

“I know you,” Lee said.

“Yes,” I said. “When we were . . .” I was going to remind her that we had once been playmates, but she spoke over me, interrupting.

“The girl from the bookstore. You gave me your hat. Man,” she said, “come see. Another girl from P’oke. And she gave me a hat once. Isn’t she fabulous?”

Her escort moved closer to us. He was several inches shorter than Lee, dark haired, stern looking, carefully and expensively dressed in a charcoal pinstripe suit and camel hair coat. I had seen his photos in newspapers and magazines. Man Ray, the artist and photographer.

Man Ray and I shook hands. Jamie had frozen the way a hunter freezes when a stag crosses his path. He was a businessman’s son. He knew opportunity. Gently, his hand pressed into my back, he pushed me slightly forward, closer to Lee and Man Ray.

“She looks like Clara Bow, doesn’t she?” Man said. The four others with them circled round me and stared.

Lee reached up and brushed snow off my bangs. “Were you going in? Come have a drink with us.”

“Thanks.” Jamie stepped forward, took his cap off, and tipped his head at her, like a delivery boy would, and then at her escort. “Mr. Man Ray, I know your work. I’m a photographer, too.”

“Of course,” Man said in a bored voice. His five-o’clock shadow made his face look blue in the lamplight. Man was looking at Lee, who was looking at Jamie.

Jamie still looked like what he had been: a high school football hero, a heartthrob. He had sandy blond hair and seductive brown eyes and the shyness evident in his posture, that frequent downcasting of his eyes and the way his head often tilted to one side during a conversation, all that boyishness made him even more appealing.

Lee and Jamie had never met before, not even in our small town. She had gone to private schools, partied with a different
crowd; they were two kids from Poughkeepsie finally meeting in Paris.

A moment, frozen in my memory like a photograph: a winter night on rue Rabelais outside the Jockey Club, where two girls from Poughkeepsie bumped into each other, each clinging to her beau’s arm; the four of us in the falling snow, music from the club wafting out with the smell of tobacco, perfume, whiskey; each of us looking in a different direction—me at Jamie, Jamie and Lee at each other, Man at Lee. The memory stops there, holds its breath. All is silence and stillness, encroaching shadow. And then we move into the doorway.

Thresholds seemed to be my meeting place with Lee.

Man made that palms-up gesture that men of means make, ushering us out of the cold dark into the overheated club, smiling benignly at us and carefully avoiding standing next to Jamie, who was so much taller than he was. Lee guided us through the crowd at the bar to a quieter table in the back and we sat, the eight of us, left to make our own introductions since Lee and Man were furiously whispering together, Lee rolling her eyes, Man once pounding the table with the flat of his hand.

The two other couples were a German art collector and his wife, Herr and Frau Abetz, and a photographer’s model with her husband. Frau Abetz was already very drunk and when she introduced herself—“Call me Trudie, my dears”—her words slurred. Her lipstick was smeared; her white blond hair, lighter even than Lee’s, had fallen out of its chignon and dangled over her red cheeks. She had the kind of full, voluptuous figure that would turn to fat if she wasn’t careful.

Her husband was busily, almost industriously, flirting with the model—black-haired, pouty-mouthed, wearing a beaded dress cut
low at the neck and high at the knee. His hand pounced on hers and held it prisoner; the bouncing motion of his knee pressing into her thigh pulled at the rumpled tablecloth.

Lee and Man’s whispered conversation seemed to end in Lee’s favor, for she resumed smiling and he did not.

Trudie, calmly ignoring how her husband was now nuzzling the model’s long neck, leaned over toward me and whispered, “Six months. Then Miss Miller will leave him. Want to wager? Poor Herr Ray. He’s Jewish, you know.”

Jamie sat next to me, listening, watching. He was normally full of energy, always in movement except for the moments it took to hold his camera steady, and now he was as still as a cat waiting to pounce.

Man went to find a waiter and Lee smiled at Jamie. He smiled back.

“I’m from P’oke, too,” he said.

“Really?” She leaned toward him in the kind of gesture that is meant to exclude others from what has become a private conversation. “Let’s not talk about P’oke. What do you do now? Why are you in Paris? Most of the others have left like rats leaving a ship. You’d think the world was ending just because the market dipped a bit.”

“I’m working,” he said. “Trying to work. I’m a photographer.”

“What’s your name?” the German art collector asked, removing his right hand from whatever it had been doing under the table and pointing at Jamie for emphasis.

“James Sloane.”

“Never heard of you.” He turned his attention back to the black-haired girl.

Lee’s brows met in a little furrow of thoughtfulness.

Violin music wafted to us from the front of the club, and the
smell of old campfires. Gypsies had arrived to play. Most club owners wouldn’t let them in, but the Jockey liked to be daring, liked to be the exception.

“Do you tango?” the model’s husband asked me. I looked at Jamie. He was talking with Lee. “Yes,” I lied.

There wasn’t much room to dance, so he—I think his name was Charles—put his arm tight around my waist and swayed me back and forth in time to the music. We did a few quick turns, a few marching steps, then more swaying, more of that movement that suggests lovemaking. I smiled over my shoulder at Jamie, relieved to see he finally was watching. He winked back.

“Didn’t know you could tango,” he said, when I returned to the table.

“Neither did I.”

Man came back from the direction of the kitchen and sat again next to Lee, so Jamie had to pull his chair closer to mine. A trio of black-suited, white-aproned waiters followed Man, carrying pitchers, bottles, trays.

“Finally! Eat, drink, and be merry!” Lee ordered.

We drank a lot that night, French champagne mixed with American cocktails, and we ate, dish after dish brought to the table: smoked trout, cucumber salad, potato salad, little sausages served with their own special mustard.

I hadn’t realized how hungry I was, had been for days, until those sausages arrived, sizzling and smelling of garlic and grease. Jamie put three on his plate at once, with a huge dab of yellow mustard next to them, and leaned back to smile at me again. Aren’t we lucky? his gaze said. He forced himself to eat slowly, taking thoughtful bites, chewing even more thoughtfully, pretending to be listening to the conversations around us when I knew he was
occupied, totally occupied, with the exploding flavors in his mouth. As was I.