The Eleventh Year (28 page)

“This.” She stood up, went to a small side table on which it was her custom to place the mail, and she brought back an envelope from overseas. Suddenly her eyes were very bright, as at the height of their lovemaking, and her cheeks were red, as when she'd drunk a glass of wine too many. The lovely vibrancy of her.

He took the envelope, removed its contents, looked at them at first with vague boredom, then with sudden excitement. “That's marvelous! What exactly is
The Smart Set?”

“A magazine. A very good magazine for intellectual, intelligent people. And they've paid me three hundred dollars for my short story! Remember, Paul? It was such a nothing of a short story—just a sketch of a giddy young flapper, lost in Paris. Three hundred dollars and my name in print—can you imagine?”

He pulled her down onto his lap, and she threw her arms around his neck. “It wasn't a ‘nothing of a short story,'” he corrected her. “No words you write ever amount to nothing. You're very talented, Jamie. And I know: My own curse is to recognize true talent while possessing none of my own. You've got it. I don't always understand all the nuances of your vernacular, because English isn't my language; but when you write something, it comes to life. It's like a miracle taking place in this miserable little garret: life coming into focus through your brain. A cute little girl from some lost city in middle America, extraordinary through what she creates. There are so many beautiful women, Jamie, so many moneyed, elegant, witty, and worldly women, who will leave nothing behind them when they die. But you? Just think of it!”

She didn't know quite how to react. He had paid her the highest compliment since the beginning of their relationship, yet he'd also called her apartment—their apartment—a “garret” and her a “cute little girl.” What she wanted was for him to finally recognize, to finally tell himself in words, that she was
the
woman of his life, that she was everything to him. But she'd never tell him about those small hurts.

“We should celebrate,” he said. “Get dressed. Put on something vaporous and colorful, a straw hat or something and let's go dancing.”

She started to laugh. “It's almost wintertime,” she chided him. “Straw wouldn't keep the wind away, my darling.”

“Then do the best you can!”

He watched her go into the closet, saw her drop his bathrobe to the floor and fit a brassiere around her round, heavy breasts. She was so natural. He did care for her in his own strange way.

And then he thought of the afternoon, of Elena. Her black eyes upon him. The most beautiful eyes he'd ever seen, the most beautiful woman. All at once, watching Jamie step into a flowing skirt of crimson satin and matching high heels, he was seized with the overwhelming urge to be with Elena, to make love to her. He'd never felt so possessed before, in such actual physical need. He would have given all he had, at that particular moment, to be with her and seize her to him, tumble her upon a bed, undress her, have her. It actually made his testicles hurt to think about it.

“How important is it really for you that we go out tonight?” he asked suddenly. She had moved to the small vanity to apply makeup, and now he saw her turn, and the look of surprise, of quickly hidden hurt, pass over her face. The lovely blue blouse went so well with the crimson skirt, a perfect outfit for dancing. He felt vague remorse, then a renewal of desire for the other woman. One had to follow one's impulses, life was too short. Jamie had him more than any other woman in Paris and therefore had no reason to complain.

“Me? It was your idea, Paul.” She sat down on the bed, and he noticed how vulnerable she looked, her brown hair falling loosely around her hunched shoulders, her feet encased in the satin pumps. He went to her, caressed her neck. “Jamie. I'm sorry.”

“It's all right.” Too bright, the smile, too shiny, the cheeks. She still didn't know how to apply rouge and powder properly. Somehow this fact touched him and made his sense of guilt grow. She was so different from Elena, wise in her own fashion, genuine, tender. Elena was streetwise, wise in the knowledge of self-preservation and self-advancement. A hard diamond, unscratchable. Jamie was a turquoise, a beautiful gem, yet breakable.

“It's just that I must tell Bertrand about today's meeting with the Serts,” he offered lamely. He could not meet her eyes, knowing that she realized he was lying to her. Jamie always knew—she saw through him with that pure clarity into human souls that made her a great writer and not just a good narrator of tales.

And then he was angry: She saw through him, and it wasn't fair. He wasn't married to her, after all, and had never made her any promises. She had no right to bind him, especially not through guilt. “It's got to be, and I can't help it,” he stated curtly.

“It's all right. I need the extra hours to finish my chapter anyway,” she murmured, looking down. She was slipping out of her shoes, neatly depositing them back in the closet. Suddenly he could stand no more, and without a word he turned and left the room. On the threshold of the apartment he stopped, looked back. She had lain down on the bed, and he could see that she was crying, thinking herself alone. Always

proud, never begging. He'd liked that in her, and liked it now. It moved him for a brief instant. Then he remembered Elena and forgot Jamie. He opened the door and was gone.

L
esley sat
at her small secretary and played with the cuticle of her thumb, picking a hangnail until the ragged skin began to bleed. She looked again and again at the hunting scene that she had painted two years before. It really was passé. Lesley was frightened. She sat there, chewing on the inside of her cheek like a little girl.

She was afraid to get started. So she stood up, went to the full-length mirror and thought: I am the flapper personified, the dream girl of the twenties. I have the looks and the money and the social status, the youth, everything! But flappers didn't think—she'd escaped from America because her generation hadn't thought enough. Flappers lived dangerously, and for no other reason than pure shock value. She wasn't a flapper. She only looked like one.

Therefore, there was no excuse. She could feel the faint swelling at her right temple, the warning signs of an oncoming migraine. Lately she'd felt the signs more and more often. At first, a kind of aura, then a pulsation, then the dreadful, overpowering nausea. No, of course I can't sit down and paint. I'm going to be sick! But that was absurd.

I am going to be sick, but I'm going to set up my easel nevertheless. Lesley went to the closet, took out the stand, unfolded it, dug out the box of paints, set them out neatly on the large worktable, the only large piece of furniture in her boudoir, and last of all brought out a medium-sized white canvas. Clean, white; so white that suddenly the entire room began to swim in white, the color that always made her ill when a migraine was beginning.

She'd never been afraid, literally terrified, by the easel before. She'd blamed her avoidance of painting on adjusting to married life, making sacrifices for Alex, wanting to do right by him, spending her time on elaborate preparations for their receptions. Alex was inherently such a reserved person—he needed her to make that extra effort so that other people, the people essential to his political career, would be drawn to him and overlook his initial reserve. But that didn't explain her fear of painting. She'd met and married Alex too soon to have established herself in Paris in her own right. Paul, in an absurd, inverted sense of logic, had actually done Jamie a favor by not marrying her. He'd allowed people to come to know her as herself.

Lesley returned to the worktable, all polished hardwood, and sat down. The room was reeling now, the mauve drapes blending with the lilacs in the carpet, and she held onto the edge of the wood, steadying herself. The pots of paint didn't seem inviting at all now. There was, she thought suddenly, a ball in two days: a benefit for the war orphans, or something like that. Marie-Laure had asked her to help. Marie-Laure de Noailles, regal yet ugly, was another daughter of an extremely rich American—a Jewish banker—who had married into an austere French clan of august nobility. Her eccentricity displayed itself in gathering to her table all the Left-wing thinkers of the day. She enjoyed shocking her contemporaries. And Winnie Singer was the renowned Princesse Edmond de Polignac, he a homosexual, she a Lesbian, each placing no demands on the other but tenderly accepting each other's preferences. These women patronized the arts and held their salons, but they had no pretensions to being great artists in their own right. Why then wasn't this enough for her? Was it that they were secure in their individuality?

She opened one of the bottles of paint, a turquoise blue, and stared at it, fascinated. She could imagine Elena's apartment all decked out in such an unusual, vivid color. Elena
dared.
She, Lesley, hadn't dared in so long—in over three years!—that she'd almost forgotten how. And Alex, on the other hand, had grown more confident with time. She had breathed her own life into his soul.

She painted a circle, liked it. Turquoise blue on white. She laid down the brush and picked up another, and opened all her pots. She dipped the second brush in green and drew an oblong shape near the turquoise circle. Odd. No idea of what she was doing, just a child acting out her frustrations. She went from pot to pot, using every brush she had, until the canvas had no white remaining and was a mess of splotches of blending, furious colors. And then she felt an immense sense of relief. She was literally shaking. But she felt good.

“My God,” Alex was saying from the threshold, and his face reflected the shock he was experiencing. “What are you
doing?”
“I'm having the time of my life,” she replied, smiling, her pupils strangely dilated. He saw the smile and it made him cringe. There was something demented about it. “I like it— don't you?”

“It's frightening,” he whispered.
‘Why?”
“Because this is how I feel! This is my world.” She saw that his eyes were concerned. He came to her and placed a hand on her shoulder, another on her other forearm. “Oh, darling,” he murmured. “What
is
it?” And then she collapsed against his chest and burst into sobs.

Gently, rhythmically, his fingers massaged the heaving back, the delicate bones and muscles under the thin material of her silk dress. And as she wept in his arms, he wondered desperately how he might help her and to whom he might turn. “I
do
love you” he whispered, but even as he said it he knew that he was helpless. He wished that he could be back in the Palais-Bourbon, back in the world of reason. Still he rubbed her back.

I
mpulsively
, Jamie threw a short skirt on and a cotton blouse with three-quarter sleeves—something simple, summery, and blue. Paul seemed to like her in that color, and she was afraid of the daring tones sported by some of her contemporaries. She knew who she was, and she was not a flapper. “Too serious, my little Jamie,” Paul would tease her. But it was true. She felt uncomfortable in most social situations where she did not know people and where the surroundings jarred her. Jazz bars were all right, and Paul loved them. But she much preferred out-of-the-way bistros and the small, intimate corner tables where men and women pored over the poetry they had written or exchanged ideas about the world. It was fascinating, it was Paris.

She hesitated, then left a note for Paul: “I'll be home soon— not to worry.
Je t'adore,
J.” But she didn't feel like writing any more today. It was such a magnificent summer day, scented with lilacs—an early-summer afternoon, before the wealthy went off to their Riviera hideaways and abandoned the capital. Lesley would still be in Paris.

Jamie walked along the Seine, watched an old man with his fishing gear, wanted to speak to him, then didn't, respecting the rapturous attention he was giving to the slow gray waters and his bait. Lesley should have been painting people like this, immortalizing them. Paris was so unique: With his beret planted firmly on his bald old head, this man belonged here, and could never have existed on the banks of the Hudson or the Ohio river. She felt a wave of tenderness flowing through her: for him, for all of them, the Parisians in their taverns and small shops, in their neighborhoods and in the heart of Paris. It felt good to be alive.