The Beautiful American (22 page)

“You poor sap,” I said. I sat next to him, feeling numb except for that strange ache in my stomach, that beginning of a new life. Jamie stood up and stepped into his trousers, turning sideways to zip up in that strangely coy manner men seem to reserve for that one single gesture.

“I have a shoot this morning. I’m going to work.”

“And then what? Me or Lee. You can’t have both.”

“It’s not that easy,” he said, buttoning his creased shirt.

“Yes, it is.”

Realizing that he was not going to answer quickly, that he was not going to open his arms and beg forgiveness, swear singular and undying love, was more painful than finding him in bed with Lee had been.

“You have to think about it. That’s an answer in itself.” I slumped onto our bed. My knees were quaking; the floor, the formerly solid, all-too-hard floor, had turned to liquid beneath my feet.

I had planned, this morning, to tell him about my pregnancy. Now I saw I could not. Jamie would do the right thing, I knew. He would marry me. And grow to resent me, perhaps hate me.

“Let’s talk later,” he said. On his way out the door he stopped and patted my shoulder, as if I were a child who had dropped her ice-cream cone.

“Me or Lee,” I called after him.

I got my answer later that day, when I went to Lee’s studio looking for him. The door was locked. I knocked on it until Lee answered. She was wearing Jamie’s shirt, nothing else. There was a look on her face, a hardness, a kind of challenge, that reminded me of the little girl who always climbed to the very top of the tree. Who always won the race. Over her shoulder, I could see Jamie still in her bed. She hadn’t pulled shut the curtain on the alcove.

“Good,” I said, and not even I knew what I meant by that.

Jamie did speak, that time. “Damn,” he said.

Lee put her hand on my arm. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said.

“It may not mean anything to you, but it does to me. And it will to him.”

The room still stank of attar of rose.

•   •   •

N
ext act: abandoned, lovelorn woman wanders down a darkening street. If this were a photograph, it would have been a distance shot, showing the woman dwarfed by the looming buildings of a city not her own. When Lee betrayed me, I lost Paris as well as Jamie.

I went back to the room I had shared with Jamie, threw my clothes into my suitcase, and walked down the three flights of stairs for the last time, with no idea of where I was going or what I would do. I knew only I could not go back to Poughkeepsie, become a regatta girl with a fatherless child, the focus of gossip; the girl who
brought silence and raised eyebrows into every room she entered. Nor could I force Jamie into a shotgun marriage. We both deserved better than long years of a marriage in which resentment eventually filled the days and nights, the wife feeling wasted, the husband trapped. A marriage like the one my mother and father had. I wouldn’t marry Jamie knowing he was now in love with Lee.

That was when I ran into Pablo.

I was crossing the Pont Neuf and he was going in the opposite direction, so we met in the middle. He didn’t kiss my cheek or even greet me, yet he saw the situation for what it was. The suitcase was a giveaway. We stood there together, leaning over the bridge and staring into the rippling gray water of the Seine, not saying anything for a long while. Pablo puffed on a cigarette and I worked to keep my eyes dry.

“You didn’t tell him,” Pablo said. “That you’re pregnant. Don’t look so surprised. That’s what artists do. They see things. That’s why Jamie wasn’t a very good artist. He saw only what he wanted to see.”

“No. I didn’t tell him.”

More silence. Pablo coughed. He nodded at my suitcase, then took out a little scrap of paper and wrote down a name, an address, a phone number.

“I have a friend,” he said. “I knew her husband. She’s old, lives alone. She would be glad for company. Go there, and have your baby. I’ll call her and tell her you’re coming.”

The address was in Grasse. The south. Where they made perfume.

“Okay. Thanks.” I took the scrap of paper.

Pablo patted my shoulder. “Courage,” he said.

He left, and I was alone. Bereft. Heartbroken. You can go back to the room, I told myself. Pretend this hasn’t happened. Wait for
Jamie to wake up, to see what Lee really is, that he is just another toss to her. You can ask Man for the name of an obliging doctor to take care of this.

No. I couldn’t. I wasn’t the same. Jamie wasn’t the same. Our very realities had changed and I couldn’t go back to before that moment when I saw the way Jamie looked at Lee.

As for the child I carried, I wanted it. I was filled with curiosity: was it a boy or a girl? I already longed to hold her. A barge motored under the bridge, grays and browns over green water, a country family sitting on the deck, lunching on bread and cheese and wine from a straw-covered bottle. Children scuttled in and out of the barrels and sacks, playing. They waved up at me. I waved
back.

PART TWO

NOTE DE COEUR

The middle notes, the
notes de coeur
, rise after the
départ
has opened the senses to possibility and the top notes have begun the narrative. The nose loves stories, and while the top notes are the “once upon a time” opening, the middle notes begin to suggest destiny. Is the scent telling a story of passion now or remembered passion? Perhaps of love to come? Jasmine, for example, mixes well with almost any other oil, and at the same time has an almost hypnotic effect, and so can suggest past, present, or future. It must have a companion to define its story. In fact, the real story of modern perfumes is the art of blending, just as the different people who are in it are the real substance of any one life.

—Notebooks of N. Tours

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

S
ometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had stayed instead of run. If I had fought and wept and shouted. Would it have made any difference? Would any of us have been spared what was to come if I had forced that situation to a different conclusion? That’s the problem with the finite. You can open only one door at a time, and you’ll never know what was behind the door you didn’t open.

In October, Lee Miller sailed home, back to the States. I had a letter from Pablo telling me. “Jamie asked for your address, but I did not give it to him, as you requested,” Pablo wrote. Jamie could have insisted, I thought. He could have somehow forced Pablo to tell him where I was; he could have come after me. He had not. And that was that.

The rest of Pablo’s brief letter was filled with news of Lee and Man. Lee had left him soon after that catastrophic party. Man had walked in the cold autumn rain to the Dôme, sat down next to a friend, and dropped his pistol on the table, saying he wished he were dead. And then he went back to his studio and made a self-portrait
of himself with a rope around his neck and the pistol pointed at his own head.

It was very melodramatic. He knew how to create an effect. Love was love, but art was art and though he mixed the two a little, he never confused them.

“Man will survive it, I think,” Pablo wrote. “It is mostly his pride that has been injured. Lee is going back to New York. I think Jamie will go with her.”

I folded the letter back up and put it in the bottom of my suitcase, feeling as if I were folding up and putting away my own youth. The scent of rose, Jamie’s favorite, would become for me a scent of loss. Rose had once been my favorite scent. Lee stole that as well. The envelope from Pablo included a note from Jamie and a wad of folded bills, all our money except the amount he would need for the crossing:

“I’m sorry, Nora. I never meant to hurt you. These things just happen, don’t they? Let me know if you need anything. Pablo wouldn’t tell me where you were, he said you didn’t want him to. I think I understand. I hope someday we can be friends.”

And this was the strangest thing of all. Despite the hurt, the anger, the jealousy, the betrayal, if anyone had asked, I would have said, “Yes, Lee is my friend,” and “Yes, I love Jamie.” Perhaps there is memory beyond experience. Perhaps we all sensed that the violence of Lee’s farewell party was a prophecy of things to come, when the bullet would not purposely miss the mark, when survival would be all that mattered, really. Seven years and more of bad luck was on its way. Measured up against simply staying alive despite the odds, everything else was child’s play. We had played rough, that was all.

I lost touch with Lee again, after that autumn of ’32. In Grasse, in the southern hills high above the Riviera, far from the clubs and
cafés and parties of Paris, few people had heard of her, or of Man Ray. And that was fine with me.

•   •   •

M
y life acquired a new focus: my daughter. Just as Jamie had become my focus when I was sixteen, now his daughter became the center of my life. Lee became something from a different lifetime, sensed in strange ways when a certain breeze picked up or when I woke at three in the morning and didn’t know what had awakened me.

•   •   •

“M
en!” said Pablo Picasso’s friend Natalia Hughes, the first morning I was with her, vomiting wearily into a slop bucket. She wiped my forehead and tsk-tsked in sympathy.

Madame Natalia Hughes was the widow of Eugène Hughes, wine merchant of Grasse, and before that the widow of Senia Alexandrov of St. Petersburg, and daughter of Vladimir and Eugenia Rodyanov, also of St. Petersburg. Outcasts of the revolution. That’s what she called her parents, and herself and her first husband. “They drove us from our homes! And when I think of the poor tsar and tsarina and their children . . .” She shook her frizzed, slightly orange curls.

Madame Hughes was seventy when she first opened her door to me, eyed me up and down for several minutes, then said, with her Russian-accented French, “You’d better come in. You don’t look well. Come, come.”

After a very long day of trains and buses through the foreign south of France, I had arrived in Grasse. It was already late and dark and cold in the way that ancient stone towns can be cold, giving off an accumulated damp chilliness as soon as the sun sets.

Natalia Hughes’ house was off the main square, place aux Aires, high up in the center of town, behind a large three-tiered fountain. Her house was ochre, like the other houses, steep and tall with a very austere facade adorned only by peeling pale blue shutters. There was a little terrace off the downstairs sitting room, just large enough for a table and three or four chairs.

I could see for miles from that terrace, down to the other tiny gardens of houses on streets below us, to the lavender fields and olive orchards beyond Grasse, and the slumbering stony hills beyond the fields. When I walked to the other side of town, to the south, I could see all the way down to the ocean, miles and miles away, so steep were the hills. But all of those discoveries were made in the days to come, when I wandered the old city, trying to feel as little as possible, because when emotions did surface, they were anger and fear and more than a touch of simple self-pity. That first evening I was too exhausted for anything but a quick handshake and a sincere thank-you.

“Pablo says you are an intelligent girl,” Madame Hughes said, taking my suitcase and carrying it up a narrow, steep flight of stairs, her hair shining like a torch leading the way. “That is important to me, that you are an intelligent girl. And you read nicely? You will read to me. We will keep each other company. Until your baby comes.”

“Until my baby comes,” I agreed, having no idea what would happen after that.

Perhaps I am making this sound an easy thing for me, this journey to Grasse, to my life as a mother without a husband.

It was not. Some days I did nothing but walk all day, up and down the twisted, narrow streets, feeling like an animal caught in a maze. I missed Paris the way a person is missed, with pain and regret.

I thought often of a plaster death mask I had seen once in Paris, at the Quai du Louvre. This was where
L’Inconnue de la Seine
, the drowned girl fished out of the Seine in the 1880s, had been found.

All the artists of Paris had a copy of her death mask, that lovely sixteen-year-old girl who, fifty years before, had thrown herself into the river. The doctor who had prepared her for burial, after she had been taken back from the river to which she had given herself, had fallen in love with her and made a mask of her face. Her smile was as lovely as that of the Mona Lisa and the surrealists adopted her as a symbol of their own lost loves . . . or perhaps a symbol of the fragility of life and beauty. I thought of
L’Inconnue
often.

But just as my thoughts turned dark during those days of walking the old town, I would turn a corner and see a stone house with potted flowers on the windowsills, bright red geraniums and mossy ferns against gray stone and ochre, and somehow the colors gave me courage . . . the colors of the flowers, and the permeating scents accumulated from the surrounding lavender fields and jasmine farms. Grasse had once been a glove-making city, and because tanning leather is a smelly process at best, it soon also had a few perfumers to scent the gloves. By the nineteenth century, Grasse had become the perfume capital of France.

I had fled to the center of the world my father had told me about, where amber, jasmine, rose, cedarwood, vanilla, geranium, and rosemary and all the lovely scents met in little glass bottles displayed in shopwindows. The perfumes I had sold at Boulet’s had mostly come from Grasse. In a way, I had come home.

Grasse, though, was not an easy city to love. Paris had been light and open and festive. Grasse was closed, dark, somber, especially in the shortening autumn days. Paris played and flirted and tempted. Grasse held her secrets dark and close. There were few
straight lines in the city, few opportunities to view any expanse longer than half a block ahead, unless I climbed to a high hill to see the landscape or the ocean.