The Beautiful American (16 page)

Nimet sniffed her wrist. “Perhaps,” she said.

“Shall I wrap it? The medium or large bottle?” Time for this little transaction to end.

“Large bottle. Please give your friend a message. My husband detests her.”

“Righto,” I agreed, though of course I would deliver no such message. I smiled as I said it, because Monsieur Boulet was still watching us. “Anything else, madame?”

CHAPTER TEN

W
hen I saw Lee that evening, we spoke of many things, but I hadn’t had a chance to mention Nimet and her visit. Charlie Chaplin had visited her studio again, and she had spent all afternoon with him, “horsing around,” as she expressed it. We were sitting outside the Dôme, side by side in the folding chairs of the café, drinking brandies and dining on a bowl of nuts as we huddled inside our coats. Across the street, a performer was leading his trained goats up and down a ladder. A little spotted one bleated with annoyance and had to be tapped on her backside before she scrambled up.

“Wonder why goats don’t like to climb ladders,” Lee mused, finally distracted from the evening’s topic of the Little Tramp, who, in real life, was devastatingly attractive. “I mean, why is this supposed to be entertaining?”

“Maybe the goats know there’s no food at the top, so what’s the point?” I suggested.

“So young, and so cynical.” Lee signaled to the waiter to bring two more brandies. Man came down the street just then, appearing in the quivering light of a streetlamp. He hadn’t seen us yet, so we had
a moment to study him. He looked defeated to me, round-shouldered, long-faced, heavy-footed, all those clichés that suggested a losing boxer stumbling out of the ring. He hadn’t sold anything in weeks and the sittings were more infrequent. It had been a while since I had heard him boast that he paid the bills.

“Thank God for Julien Levy,” Lee mumbled quietly, watching him. “He’s agreed to give Man a solo show in New York next year. Maybe he’ll sell work and build up his bank account.”

There was real tenderness in Lee’s voice that evening. Underneath the tension, the spats, his jealousy, and her need for freedom, underneath even the professional competition, Lee and Man truly cared for each other. For Man, unfortunately, it was love, aching, can’t-live-without-her love. I’m not certain what it was for Lee, except that night there was tenderness in her voice.

Man, still making his way down the street, saw us. He smiled and waved. The smile was forced. When he was up close, I saw shadows around his eyes.

“Brandy, darling. That’s what you need.” As soon as he sat down, Lee put her glass to his lips. He tipped his head back and swallowed greedily.

“Another,” he agreed. “Several others. I spent the entire day with Julien, who insisted on walking rather than taking cabs. We must have covered ten miles.”

“Whose studios did you take him to?” Lee smiled at a passing waiter, who ignored the table he had been heading toward to take her order instead. She had that effect on men.

Man rattled off a list of names, some of which I had heard before, some of which were completely new to me. Lee signaled the waiter again, and when he came with the bottle of brandy, she took it from his hand and thumped it onto the table. “Leave it, please,”
she said, and because she was very beautiful, dressed all in white and with lamplight shining in her blond hair, the waiter smiled and backed away as if she were the queen of France.

“Where’s Jamie?” Man asked after a third brandy.

“In the studio, getting ready for Julien’s visit tomorrow,” I answered. “There are a couple of prints he wants to redo.”

Lee and Man stared intensely in the distance, at nothing.

“What’s up? Spill the beans.” I put down my brandy glass.

“Julien has decided to leave a day early,” Man said, not looking at me. “First thing tomorrow morning. Can’t be helped.”

And I was the one chosen to carry this news to Jamie. The cowards. Lee must have known all along. All that evening as we sat drinking and munching nuts and watching goats climb ladders, she had known Jamie wasn’t going to get his chance. I stood and my knees almost gave way, I was so angry.

“I’ll go get Jamie,” I said. “No point in him spending another night working in the studio.” I turned to leave, but over my shoulder I had a parting remark for Lee.

“That Egyptian’s wife came into Boulet’s today,” I shouted louder than necessary. “She seems to think you are flirting with her husband.”

The other café patrons turned their heads in Lee’s direction. There were smirks, raised eyebrows. Lee sat up straighter than ever.

“Touché,” she shouted back gaily. Man reached for the brandy bottle.

I went to Man’s studio and banged at the door, forcing Jamie to answer it. Our agreement was that I did not interrupt his work for anything other than an emergency, so when he unlocked the door and opened it, he looked angry.

“Nora, what are you doing here? I’ve got hours’ more work to do.”

“No, you don’t,” I said.

Jamie put down the glass jar of developing chemicals he had been carrying, placing it carefully on the middle of a table. “What do you mean?”

“I mean Julien Levy is leaving first thing in the morning. He isn’t coming to see your work. Man just told me.”

Jamie’s mouth opened, then closed. I heard his quick, forceful exhalation and then it seemed he stopped breathing, stopped moving, stood there like a statue, half-turned away from me. His hands had curled into fists.

“Come home with me,” I said. “It’s late.”

“Lee didn’t say anything about it,” he muttered. “She didn’t tell me.”

“I think she just found out today,” I said.

“No, she would have known even before Man found out. The bitch.”

“Hey!” I said.

Jamie smiled and I wished he hadn’t. It was the kind of smile that means trouble, that means something has happened, a crossroads or turning point has arrived, and things will never be the same.

“You watch yourself, Nora,” he said. “She’s nobody’s friend, that one.”

His mood changed after he said that. His hands released their fisted tension, and he even tried a smile, a real one. “I’ll clean up here. Then we’ll walk home. I don’t feel like going out to a café tonight.”

It was almost midnight by the time we reached our apartment, our bed.

Jamie flung himself onto it, exhausted. I would have screamed
and wept with frustration and fury, but Jamie merely put his arm over his eyes, as if the light from the bare bulb overhead hurt them.

“There will be other opportunities,” I told him.

“Sure.” He sat up and lit a cigarette, taking a long, harsh drag and slowly blowing out the smoke. “Sure there will.”

I poured two glasses of whiskey, big ones. I sat next to him, leaning my head on his shoulder. I could hear the couple upstairs arguing about the new dress she had just purchased even though the rent wasn’t paid, their voices crackling like a faulty radio through the flaking plaster walls. Across the hall, the gray-haired nameless sculptor who lived in that single room had put a record on the phonograph to dull the noise of the upstairs quarrel—Josephine Baker singing “J’ai deux amours.” He had played it so often the hissing scratches obscured Josephine’s voice in some phrases.

“Sure there will,” Jamie repeated.

Julien may or may not have been called back to the States a day early, but even so, why had Man left Jamie’s name at the very bottom of the must-visit list? Stupidly, I said it aloud.

“Because no one has ever heard of me,” Jamie explained.

“But then what’s the point of discovering a new artist if everyone already knows about him?” I complained, raising my voice over the muffled music and the quarreling neighbors, wondering if this was how Mozart had developed his songs for four voices—a combination of anger, frustration, lyricism, and thin walls. “Damn Man. Damn Julien Levy.” I said it because Jamie would not.

“Right,” Jamie agreed, slugging back more whiskey. His mouth worked in a funny way, the way children’s do when they are trying not to cry. He sucked on his bottom lip to stop the quivering, then jumped up and pulled me into his arms, and we danced to the scratchy music coming from across the hall, that other expatriate
American, Josephine, singing that she loved two places, her home and Paris.

“Ever wonder if we did the right thing, coming here?” Jamie asked, staring at the ceiling. “We were having fun in New York, weren’t we?”

I didn’t remind him that we had left New York because he hadn’t been able to get a gallery. Or that we left London because he couldn’t get a gallery there either. We had washed up in Paris to look for a gallery. Well, “washed up” wasn’t fair. Paris was its own delightful, gravitating reason; we didn’t need an excuse to want to be there. But the three years since our arrival had been a search for Jamie’s success, a success that seemed as elusive here as it had in good old P’oke.

I knew no more about photography than Lee and Jamie had taught me, yet even I suspected that Jamie’s photographs were somehow lacking. When he tried to be a surrealist, he merely imitated. If Man photographed Lee wearing a cage on her arm, he asked me to pose with my leg wrapped in chains and my head cropped off. If Man photographed an apple with clock hands on it, Jamie photographed a pineapple wearing a hat.

The prints were good, technically. Everyone agreed on that. But. With Jamie’s work there was always a but.

The photographs that moved me, that seemed exceptional, were his unstaged street shots: children playing in piles of leaves in a fenced school yard, maids still in uniform daydreaming in front of a fancy shopwindow in the place de la Concorde, men playing
boules
in the alley next to a butcher’s shop in Les Halles. He had a feel for those images, more than Man had, or even Lee, because he had a feel for the people, the real people, not the names, the celebrities, the leftover aristocrats—for the people who survived the events, not the people who created them.

Such images, though, were not fashionable. Atget and Brassaï had already taken those images years before, and now they were merely romantic, good for a local paper back home to show people who had never been abroad what Paris looked like at dawn, how the children played, what young women wore on their hats. But not good enough for a gallery.

•   •   •

T
hat November, the textile factories in France starting going bankrupt. Beggars appeared at the outdoor cafés, caps in hand, only to be chased away by waiters. Some of them were children. Guilt tingled my scalp whenever I sat outside and tried to enjoy a
café crème
, a brandy, a quick sandwich.

“Something very bad is coming,” Lee said. “I can feel it.” We were at the Dôme again, but had decided to sit inside. Because of the cold, we agreed, but it wasn’t the only reason. Watching the newly unemployed walk up and down the boulevards, their faces haunted and haunting, was not a pleasant pastime.

It was November 25, and I had woken up with the phantom memory of a taste of turkey dinner, the closest thing to homesickness I had experienced since I had been away. Lee had suggested we go to the Dôme and see if they had prepared any
dinde
for the Americans.

We had made up the quarrel by then, Lee insisting that she hadn’t known Julien Levy was leaving a day early. Man hadn’t bothered to tell her, so how could she tell us? I believed her. I wanted to believe her, though I still felt a clinch of distaste and anger every time I met Man, and that was almost daily.

Jamie had sent a batch of photos home—postcards, he had called them, sneering at his own work—and his father had sold
them to the Poughkeepsie papers. We were back to square one. “Don’t tell Lee,” he had instructed me, his face burning. The P’oke paper offered more for a spread of four photos than Man had paid him in a month of servitude.

That night, that November 25, Jamie had received the check from the Poughkeepsie paper, so when he joined Lee and Man and me at the Dôme, he was in a good mood. He shook Man’s hand, a real grasp of a shake that pumped Man’s arm all the way up to his shoulder. He gave Lee a kiss on the cheek. “Other one,” she said, turning her face for the second kiss. Jamie hesitated and kissed her on that cheek as well.

“We are hoping they have turkey,” I told Jamie, making room for him next to me.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Lee said darkly. “I already asked. They didn’t cook any turkey today. Not enough Americans left to bother. I really wanted turkey and gravy and cranberry sauce.”

“Then go back to Poughkeepsie,” Man said. “Run back to Daddy.” From his voice, you could tell that was exactly the opposite of what he wanted Lee to do. In fact, it was his fear of what she might do . . . leave him.

“Let’s eat ham and sausages like we usually do. When in Rome,” Jamie said. “Brrr. I think it’s warmer outside than in.”

“Maybe I will go back home,” Lee said.

The waiter came, the white dish towel tied around his waist stained with mustard and tomato sauce, his black shoes dusty and scuffed. Standards were slipping. He lit the candle on our table, then stood morosely as only jaded Parisian waiters could, and waited.

“Sausages,” Man ordered. “Four orders. Boiled potatoes with parsley. Green salad. Rosé wine, the Cresci.”

“No, I want chicken,” Lee said.

The waiter stood there, looking like Job with a new rash to plague him. He knew that Man placed the orders for all of us, yet Lee had changed the order of things. What to do? Man was obviously the authority, the head of the table, yet Lee was, well . . . no one said no to Lee. The waiter considered, wiped his forehead on the stained cloth, then turned on his worn-down heel without answering.

Fifteen minutes of our very stilted conversation later, he returned with a platter of sausages and stuffed chicken legs that looked like sausage. If only all situations could be so easily solved. By the third bottle of Cresci we were laughing again, chatting loudly and shouting over one another. Lee and Man were holding hands on the wine-stained cloth and Jamie had his arm around my shoulders. When he thought no one was looking, his hand slipped beneath my blouse and he brushed his fingertips over the bare skin, making me shiver like meadow grasses stirred by a breeze.