The Beautiful American (11 page)

Lee, grinning, handed me my coat and hat. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He will tip you for the errand. Well. I’ll see to it.”

I ran all the way to the Champs-Élysées, not stopping till I came to the corner of rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where I paused for a second to catch my breath and smooth down my hair. I knocked at number twenty-nine, and a little maid opened the door and showed me into a hallway painted beige and white, no hint of color or pastel.

“Yes?” A young woman, but very beautiful, very stylishly dressed in a jacket and trousers and a string of pearls wound many times around her throat, came into the hall. “Coco is not here. What do you want, please?”

“Monsieur Huene sent me, from
Vogue
. He says the red bag was not sent with the clothes for the shoot.”

“Ah. I will see if I can find it.” She smiled at me and left. I took a few steps forward and looked into the room on my immediate right. It was painted in beige and chocolate, and the sofas and chairs were upholstered in white. The windows at the end of the room looked over a manicured garden that stretched all the way to the next street. Because it was February, the garden was all brown and white, like the apartment. I wished I could see it in the summer, see what roses bloomed there. In the corner of the room stood a dressmaker’s dummy in an incomplete Harlequin costume. Chanel was also, at that time, helping to design ballet costumes for Diaghilev.

“Do you like it?” The pretty young woman in the man’s suit had returned. “Nijinsky himself will wear it.” She handed me a small wrapped parcel.

“It’s swell,” I said. “But he may trip on that bit of lace at the back.”

She laughed loudly, throwing her head back. “You are right and brave to say so. I told her the very same thing. It will be adjusted. Do you like perfume? Wait one more moment. Huene will still be
there when you return.” She left again, and this time came back carrying a small square flacon of Chanel No. 5. “For you. Wear it in joy and health.” She kissed me on both cheeks, and then pushed me back out onto the street.

“Misia,” said Lee knowingly when I was back in the studio. “Chanel’s special friend. Isn’t she gorgeous? And you’ve done well for yourself today.”

I had done very well. A bottle of Chanel perfume and a large tip from Huene, large enough to pay our rent for the week, and Huene had asked me to come to other shoots in case he needed me to run errands.

“You are so young and so helpless looking, perhaps even a little not bright looking, if you don’t mind my saying,” he explained. “They will give you anything you ask for.” I wasn’t flattered by this explanation, but at least I would be earning a bit all those days when Jamie was working so hard for Man.

After Lee was finished, we went out for coffee and a brandy. Her gay mood had passed and she was subdued, tired.

“Modeling got me out of P’oke,” she said finally. “And it still pays the rent,” she said in answer to a question I hadn’t asked. “So, what do you do, my friend, when we are all so earnestly earning a living? Are you dancing the tango in some café, praying at Notre-Dame?” She learned forward and smiled mischievously at me. “Tell me, what is your favorite place in Paris?”

“If you have time, I’ll show you.” I had been startlingly moved by that photo shoot. I had assumed that Lee was taking me there to show off. Just the opposite. She had wanted me to see her powerless, objectified, not Lee the woman but just a woman with no identity of her own. I wanted to give her something back.

“I’m all yours for the rest of the afternoon,” she said. “I’ll just
tell Man the shoot took longer than I had thought.” We finished our brandy and headed to the Left Bank to the Jardin des Plantes, which was both a garden—rather, a series of gardens of all types—and a zoo. During the French Revolution, just about the time my ancestor the perfumer Thouars was packing his bags for the New World, some softhearted revolutionary took pity on all the animals being abandoned by the aristocratic houses, many of whom had private menageries of tigers, elephants, and monkeys. And so the zoo had been created to rescue and house the animals.

“Clever,” Lee said when she saw our destination. “The zoo. Free, and open all year.”

I took her on a roundabout tour of the places I had discovered, the alpine garden filled with small hills and gravel paths where tiny-leaved plants clung close to the wintry ground, waiting for spring, when they burst into brilliant carpets of red and yellow; the neoclassical elephant house; the ornate aviary for pheasants.

When we arrived at the long line of cages holding the big cats, I led Lee right up to the panther’s cage. Our shoes crunched over the frosted gravel and we could hear children shouting from a merry-go-round, yet in front of these cages it seemed still, silent, as if all the wildness of the world had been captured and rendered mute in those cages.

He was there, long and sleek and black as a midnight shadow, lying on his belly, paws stretched out, amber eyes staring out of that perfectly black, shining face. His eyes caught mine and I felt the pull of his majesty.

The panther, my father had told me, was the only animal that was said to have a sweet scent of its own. It killed and ate, and then slept for three days, like Christ in the tomb, and when it wakened, it yawned and its breath gave off such a sweet odor that any fawn or
antelope nearby followed that scented trail to its source. Then the panther killed and ate, and the cycle began all over again.

“Rilke’s poem about the panther was one of my father’s favorites,” I told Lee. “About an animal caged so long it moves in circles and doesn’t remember the world before it was seen through bars.”

“I know how it feels,” Lee said.

The panther slowly, with mesmerizing grace, stood and began to pace, back and forth, back and forth, its eyes now on Lee.

She had stepped nearer to the cage, so near she could press her face to the bars if she leaned forward another inch or two. The panther stopped pacing directly in front of Lee, and they stared at each other, both panting, waiting.

“You’re standing too close,” I warned her.

“Look at the flesh on my arms,” Lee whispered. Between her gloves and coat I could see the gooseflesh rising. “So thrilling,” she breathed. “How do you know you’re alive if there is absolutely no danger?”

I had a quick, terrifying image of the panther’s claw slashing through the bars and into Lee’s beautiful face. Just as I thought it, the panther crouched and showed its teeth in a snarl.

“I promised my father that if I came to Paris, I would come and see the panther. Step back a little, Lee. You’re standing too close to the cage.”

“It is like childhood,” Lee said. “Cages and bars. God, some of those days . . .” But instead of stepping back, she moved even closer. She must have been able to feel the panther’s breath on her skin—she was that close.

She was on the verge of speaking of it, that day on the porch, the early days of a childhood friendship when she wore a white dress and smelled not a panther’s breath but her own acrid smell of
medicines, the lingering sourness of a hospital ward, the day I stretched my hand to hers and called her away from whatever she was remembering, whatever still frightened her.

The panther snarled a second time.

I pulled harder on Lee’s hand. I was feeling really sorry that I had brought her here, but this time Lee stepped back, out of reach of that great black claw. She laughed.

“What a coat she’d make! I wonder,” Lee said, “if the zoo would let us do a photographic shoot here. Huene would love it.”

She lit a cigarette and turned in a circle, trying to decide which direction she wanted to take, if she wanted to head to where the children had gone to find a carousel, or back toward the monkey or reptile house. “Lots of great places for photographs,” she said. “So, how are you and Jamie doing?”

The question took me by surprise. “Great. Jamie loves Paris. He never wants to leave.”

“And what do you want?’ Lee puffed out a circle of smoke and pulled a piece of tobacco off her lip.

“What Jamie wants, because I want Jamie. For always.”

“Never tempted, Nora? Never feel an impulse to stray, to discover how some other man makes love to you?”

“Never. I have the one I want.”

“I wish I could be that simple. For me, love and sex are two different things. Love is, well, you want to protect that person, help him, share with him. But sex. That’s just an urge, an itch. Scratch it, and it’s gone, and good riddance. On to the next itch.”

Her philosophy seemed cold to me and, ultimately, defeatist, in the order of “all cats are gray at night.” There are ginger cats and tabbies, friendly and feral. House cats and caged panthers in a zoo, and lions roaming free on an African savanna. There are cats, and
cats. There is sex, and then there is what Jamie and I had, in our little creaking bed in Montparnasse, that making the world new and exciting every time we touched flesh to flesh.

“You mean that, Lee?”

“I do. It’s what my daddy taught me, and I think he was right.”

That comment haunted my idle moments. How could a father tell his daughter such a thing? And then I realized. This had been part of Lee’s treatment after the rape, the philosophy that had helped her survive. The body and the heart were separate and sex was just an activity, perhaps not so different from a strenuous game of tennis. This was the survival skill her father had given her, to disassociate sex from love, as surely as the surrealists, in their paintings and photographs, cut off limbs or put eyes on shoulders rather than faces.

In that way, Lee was much more authentic than the surrealist artists. They made objects of their philosophies. She lived it.

We went to a café for brandy and cigarettes before beginning the walk home. It was late afternoon and the sun had disappeared, leaving Paris in a gray twilight. When we passed a corner newsstand, Lee stopped and rifled through the magazines, looking at the covers, flipping through pages to see the photo layouts, until the old man who ran the stand grabbed one from her hands and said to buy or leave, no free reading.

“I’ll buy it for her,” a man standing behind us said. I hadn’t heard him approach. He was American, well dressed, big diamond pinkie ring on his right hand. When he offered Lee a cigarette, he produced a silver case, all engraved. Money didn’t impress Lee. She was more liable to make fun of wealth too obviously displayed. But this man had looks and an impressive refined elegance.

“You’re Lee Miller, aren’t you?” He made a little mock bow. “I
saw you at de Brunhoff’s table at the Jockey last week. The brute refused to introduce me.”

Michel de Brunhoff was the editor of Paris
Vogue
, the man who had hired Lee to model Patou and Chanel gowns.

“And you are?” Lee extended her hand.

“Let me tell you over dinner. Are you hungry?”

“Famished,” Lee said, winking at me over her shoulder.

I walked back to Montparnasse alone. Lee and her admirer went off in the opposite direction.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“W
hat is that perfume you are wearing?” Jamie came home late the day that Lee and I visited the zoo. He was out of sorts, frowning and in no mood for the kiss I longed to give him. Instead, he gave me a quick peck on the cheek, threw his damp coat on our bed, and slumped into his chair by the window.

“Well, hello to you, my love,” I said, determined to be cheerful. “It’s Chanel No. 5.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“It is. Very.”

“I thought we had agreed . . .”

I put my finger to his lips to stop him. “It was a gift.”

“A gift?” Both his eyebrows went up. “Who gave you an expensive gift? Why did you accept it?”

“Jamie, you are starting to sound like my mother.” I told him the story of my day with Lee, the photo shoot, the errand of the red bag, the zoo, the promise of more work from Huene. I left out the panther and the man with the silver cigarette case.

“The zoo!” He laughed. “That’s why Lee didn’t show up. At the
studio,” he added. “Man was furious. Shouted at me all afternoon. Come here. Let me smell that perfume again.” He burrowed his nose into my neck, tickling me.

“First there is the scent of ylang-ylang, from the Comoros Islands,” I breathed, remembering what my father had said about No. 5 in 1922, the Christmas he bought a very small bottle for Momma. “Next comes the scent of jasmine from Grasse. That’s in the south of France.” I could barely finish the sentence. Jamie’s mouth was moving south and had reached my breasts. His hands were moving north, up from my knees. “Then, there is the scent of sandalwood from India. Yes,” I breathed. “Yes. If you can’t go to Mysore, the bed will do nicely.”

•   •   •

T
wo weeks later I was picking Jamie up from the studio at the usual time, seven at night, when Lee opened the door. She had her own photography studio across the street, but still spent most of her time at Man’s. “I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said, tilting her head.

Man looked up from the table where he had been examining contact sheets with a magnifying glass. Jamie was crouched next to Man and, as usual, looked worried. Man was demanding and Jamie’s confidence seemed to be shrinking rather than growing.

“Not sure it’s a good idea,” Man said, not bothering to say hello to me. “You know how he feels about privacy.”

“It’s a grand idea,” Lee said. “And high time. Come on, Nora, you’re going to meet Pablo.”

“Pablo?” Jamie asked, his eyebrows moving toward his hairline.

“Yes. That one. Put on your coat.”

Evidently it had all been arranged beforehand, because when we arrived at Picasso’s rather grand house on rue la Boétie, a Champs-Élysées neighborhood with ritzy clothing stores and art and antiquities dealers, we were expected. A maid opened the door and led us to a sitting room where the great artist Picasso and his wife, Olga, rose to greet us.

“Man. Lee. And the American,” Pablo said to me.

“The other American,” I corrected.

When Picasso looked at me, I felt, well, truly looked at. Some glances are cool and superficial; some are mere nods of the head with the eyes never engaged at all. But Picasso . . . his eyes locked onto yours and peered through to your innermost being. It was like being naked in a crowd, his gaze was so intense. And then his gaze would move slowly over your face, your body, not in a sexual way—well, at least not always in a sexual way—and you would feel as if he had taken you down to your slightest measurement, as if he could tell the length of each eyelash and which foot, in tight high heels, was hurting most.