“I’m worried I’m just repeating what I did with Hallie. I found someone who was into me, sexually at least, but then when it came right down to it, I was second fiddle. With Hallie, her husband was number one, and with Thea, it’s her career. I want—”
Renee leaned forward a little, which brought her closer to Gerri, and I noticed their thighs brush together in a casual way that didn’t elicit a reaction from either of them. It just was.
“I want what y’all have. I want to play first fiddle for somebody. I just don’t know how to get that.”
“You might have to leave New York, my friend,” Gerri said, with a wry smile. “This city chews up relationships and spits them out. Renee and I were just talking about that the other day, that maybe we need to jump ship.”
“Seriously?” I didn’t think I could stand it if Gerri moved. And was it fair to blame New York when people everywhere carried emotional baggage?
“It’s just hypothetical for now,” Renee added quickly.
They invited me to stay for dinner, but as much as I wanted to, the tapers were burning down fast, and they had a romantic evening to embark on.
“You don’t mind if I keep this a little longer?” Gerri waited with me at the elevator, and I lifted the flap of my bag to reveal the Montrose biography.
“That? Oh, you can have it,” Gerri said. “I read it twice. Pass it on when you’re done.”
“But it’s signed!”
“Well, it’s not like a signed copy of The Dismantled, is it? If you could ever get me one of those—” she winked, “—I’d be forever in your debt.”
I wished I’d known Gerri didn’t care about the Montrose book before I stormed over to Barb’s and then uptown to Thea’s, but of course, I didn’t say that. In a strange way, realizing the book was missing had spared me from getting in too deep with Thea, in whose biography I’d never have an index entry.
Chapter 24
Thea and I didn’t “break up,” which would have been like a fractured bone. Without ever discussing it, we took the “drifting apart” route— a sprain you could still hobble around with.
Our relationship shifted the very night I got home from delivering the book to her and talking to Renee and Gerri. On the phone table in the hallway, Ramona left two messages, both from Thea. This girl needs to LIGHTEN UP, Ramona had scrawled at the bottom of the second message.
I didn’t call Thea back, but wandered into the living room where Ramona was watching Dallas. Since moving in, I’d discovered that nighttime soaps were her guilty pleasure and that she didn’t want Bea to know about it. Since I’d never watched Dallas or any of her other favorites, Ramona relished filling me in on the characters and the twisted plot.
“Okay, Sue Ellen is unhappily married to J. R. because he’s a serial philanderer. Total prick, right? So she’s having this tawdry affair with Peter, a hottie college student who’s about half her age. You missed the best part— somebody just mistook her for Peter’s mother and she’s flipping out!” The plot line cut a little too close to home; once, a motel clerk had mistaken me for Hallie’s daughter.
Through a wicked grin, Ramona took a sip of her Diet Coke, her beverage of choice; the refrigerator shelves were crammed with the white and red cans. “Seriously, Livvie, you’ve never seen this?”
My sisters and mother all watched Dallas, so I knew who J. R. Ewing was in the way you pick up bits of popular culture without really understanding them. But I didn’t admit that to Ramona because I enjoyed our new camaraderie even if it amounted to bonding over junk TV. At home, Ramona was casual and laid-back, her face clean-scrubbed, her hair pulled back with a rubber band. She had a pink terrycloth bathrobe that enveloped her and slippers that were fuzzy green frogs. (“My baby sister gave them to me, okay?” she explained the first time my eyes traveled to her feet.) Although Ramona dated several times a week, no guy got more than one chance. “Snore,” she’d say about each one. Her heart had been broken, and badly, by a guy she only called “Mr. Creep,” so I understood her reticence about men.
At the commercial break, Ramona asked me about the messages from Thea. “Is she stalking you, or what?”
“We had a fight,” I said, a little uncomfortable. I was out at work, but I never talked about my love life. All the women at the agency were straight, and it almost felt like bad manners to talk about my dating experiences with them. “Hey, you want some popcorn?” I asked, to change the subject. A Presto popper was the only piece of kitchen equipment I owned, a present from my parents on my twenty-first birthday. “For your hope chest!” my mother had said.
Something about feeding Ramona gave me enormous pleasure. I felt sisterly toward her, even though the women in my family were hearty eaters not the least bit shy about first or second helpings. In contrast, Ramona never thought to eat until I suggested it.
She agreed to the popcorn and we shared a big bowl of it, dressed with Parmesan cheese. (“What is on this? It’s the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten!” High praise for someone who’d been to every chichi restaurant south of Houston Street, although I wasn’t convinced she ever ate on any of her dates.) While we gobbled it down in lieu of dinner, the phone rang again, and I could just make out Thea’s voice leaving another plaintive message. By that time, J. R. was suggesting that he and Sue Ellen have another baby, and the drama was just too good to interrupt.
Later, I pulled the phone into my room— Ramona had outfitted it with an extra-long cord that reached from one end of the apartment to the other.
“I’m sorry,” Thea said immediately. “I should have told you about Barb.”
“It would have explained a lot.”
“I acted like a bitch tonight.”
“Maybe we’ve been taking this too fast,” I said. “You know, us.”
She sighed heavily. “You’re breaking up with me.”
“Maybe we should slow things down. I mean, you’re busy with your job search and all.”
“Oh, is that what this is really about?”
“What?”
“You’re mad at me for looking for a job somewhere else. Even though I explained to you—” Her tone was stern, professor-ish, and I cut her off.
“Of course, I’m not mad about that. You think I’m an infant?” A pause in which she didn’t reply. “When do you find out about Hamilton?”
“Soon.” Another long pause. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you, I got two more on-campus interviews.”
I nodded, even though I knew she couldn’t see me.
“Livvie?”
“Yeah, I heard you. That’s great, Thea. I’m really happy for you. We’ll have to celebrate. Soon.”
“Soon?”
“How about Saturday?”
We’d been seeing each other four or five nights out of the week, and now I was proposing we skip four nights in a row. The change wasn’t lost on Thea.
“I leave Sunday afternoon for Boston, so I’ll probably be packing and shit on Saturday,” she said. “Plus, I need some new shoes.”
“Okay, why don’t you call me when you get back?”
“Sure.” She stretched the syllable into three or four.
“Well, break a leg, or whatever it is they say.”
“That’s theater talk,” she said.
The call made me queasy, and I regretted making it. I couldn’t sleep, but didn’t want to bother Ramona with the TV or music, so I stayed up most of the night reading Clio’s biography.
• • •
Reading a book about someone you know and see regularly is deeply intimate, like having a hidden camera that films them while you’re apart. Surprises abounded, like the fact that in 1921, when she first met Flora, Clio was living (in sin, presumably) with a male artist named Laurence Tolliver. Their meeting ended both Flora’s marriage and Clio’s live-in relationship with Tolliver. She and Tolliver remained on friendly terms, though, and he cropped up on several pages of her life story, even helping her get her apartment in Milligan Pl
ace.
The biographical parts of Montrose’s book were overshadowed by what I found to be dry literary criticism, and I skimmed it as I plowed through the pages. According to the author’s introduction, Clio had refused to be interviewed for the book, so Montrose was forced to rely on files and manuscripts Clio released to the New York Public Library in the 1970s. Montrose filled in the details of her subject’s private life by interviewing Tolliver, Louise Durand, and the Paris lesbians who were still alive, such as Janet Flanner and Berenice Abbott.
I knew Clio hated biographies, which she called “voyeurism,” and memoirs, which she deemed “nothing but narcissism.”
“My work was meant to stand on its own,” she maintained.
But the Paris expatriates she had lived among had written memoirs. “Natalie, Janet, all of them!” she complained. “I begged my friends not to include anything about me, but Janet said, ‘My dear, how could I write about those years and not include you?’”
The picture that emerged of Clio’s life was a patchwork of facts. Flora left first for Paris, and Clio followed a few months later. They rented a two-room flat on the Left Bank, and drank a lot of wine and smoked a lot of cigarettes in famous places like Café Flore with famous people like Flanner and her “companion” (as Montrose called her), Solita Solano. But their lives weren’t just about drinking and frolicking with friends— they wrote, too, including the stories I’d tracked down in American magazines. Flanner described Clio as “writing every day, feverishly almost, filling up notebooks with her delicately woven stories. She put so many other writers to shame.”
On the streets of Paris, Clio cut a dashing figure in velvet capes of different, striking colors— wine, jade, plum. Her wit was biting, and everyone wanted her at their dinner parties and salons. “To be taken down a notch by Clio Hartt was considered a badge of honor,” Louise Durand said. Louise met Clio and Flora at Gertrude Stein’s, and gifted each of them with a generous monthly stipend.
Although other expats, like Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney, stayed on in France during World War II, Clio and Flora set sail for New York after Kristallnacht— the wave of pogroms that swept across Nazi Germany. Flora’s mother had been Jewish, and it seemed safest to flee Europe while they could.
The details of Clio’s life back in New York became sketchier. She and Flora lived together on West 10th Street, but by 1941 Clio was ensconced in Milligan Place. She enjoyed a modest but comfortable existence and for a few years even had another “companion,” a painter named Moira McGough.
But then Louise abruptly announced that she could no longer support both Clio and Flora, and chose Flora. The break caused a rift between Clio and Flora, too, and they didn’t speak for almost fifteen years.
“Flora was a remarkable talent who needed me more,” Louise told Montrose, as justification for her decision to cut Clio off. “She was a true genius.”
Yet history hadn’t borne out Flora’s exceptionalism. In fact, Montrose concluded that Flora was better remembered for the celebrities she’d had affairs or relationships with, not for her own creative endeavors. And there were many entanglements— not just with Clio (and presumably Louise), but women and men alike, from Berenice Abbott to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Ezra Pound and Man Ray.
A few years after the split with Louise, Clio’s writing output dried up, Moira was out of the picture, and she became a near-recluse. After Bea Winston signed on as her agent in the 1960s, Clio no longer had any reason to leave her apartment.
She did have a phone call with Flora not long before she died. Clio had referenced it with me in the Asheville hospital, when Flora called to tell her she was coughing up blood and submitting to tests.
Before that, though, Flora had written to Clio from Connecticut, where she was living part-time with Louise, and Clio sent the letter back to her unopened. Louise apparently let Montrose read the letter and use the two photographs Flora had tucked into the envelope.
“Darling,” the letter read, “I can’t bear to have these with me anymore. It’s as if they mock me. I’m in a bad way, Birdie— nothing to do with drink or powder, haven’t done anything like that in 8 years, you must believe me. I want you to take care of this sweet memory for me. That weekend in Deauville! My hair’s gone grey, has yours too? You will always look like this to me— so delicious & true! Please call me, just once, & I can tell you something I must not keep from you. Yours, Florrie.”
Darling . . . Birdie . . . Yours, Florrie.
I read the words several times and stared at the two photos, which Montrose included side by side in her book. One was of Flora in a revealing bathing costume— more like underwear than a bathing suit— posed on an empty beach, her pert nipples poking against a sleeveless tank. With her lascivious grin and sexy bob ruffled by the ocean breeze, she looked like someone New York lesbians might trample each other to enjoy even one night with.
The other photo was of Clio, barefoot on what seemed to be the same beach, in rolled-up pants and a gauzy shirt and smiling so radiantly I had to check the caption to make sure it was really her. All the photos I’d seen of her as a young writer showed her as more regal— beautiful, for sure, but rigidly posed. Here she was unfettered and simply stunning: “Clio Hartt, Deauville Beach, June 1929.”
“I can’t say I ever understood their connection,” Montrose quoted Louise as saying. “They were a tortured pair.” You could almost hear a heavy sigh lifting off the page.
Within the next few paragraphs, Louise’s words intimated that Flora had committed suicide rather than suffer through the cancer that had taken over her body. “She decided not to go on,” she said. “I was powerless to stop her. No one could have.” Any more exact explanation of her death was missing. Louise scattered her ashes off Long Island Sound.
• • •
That morning, before work, I dashed to D’Agostino to buy baking supplies. When I checked on Clio later that day, I wanted to offer her something special. I had been impressed with Clio’s hearty appetite for my mother’s cooking and had copied Mama’s recipe for buttermilk biscuits before leaving for the airport.
What stood out most for me in the Montrose biography was how Flora had addressed Clio as “Birdie.” I always assumed Clio had rejected all vestiges of her past self when she moved to New York and then Paris. “I named myself Clio,” she told me on our trip south, “because I read that it meant ‘to celebrate.’ And I was celebrating my liberation.” She abandoned the name Threatt, because people mistook it for “threat,” which sounded too ominous. She said she preferred the openness of Hartt and had almost spelled it “Harte,” like the short story writer. But at the last minute, when she was sending off a story to a publisher using her new moniker, she added the extra T as a hat tip to her birth name.
Still, even at the height of her luminous career, even though she’d been photographed by Man Ray in all her self-confident beauty, even though she was one of only a few people allowed to call James Joyce “Jim,” Clio had been plain old Birdie to Flora, the woman she never got out of her mind.
I left the flour and baking powder in a bag in the kitchen with a note for Ramona saying, “Please don’t move this!” and stuffed the butter and buttermilk behind a stack of Diet Cokes in the refrigerator. Ramona rarely went into the kitchen except for a can of pop, so I doubted she’d even notice it.
After work, I got to baking. On her way out to an author signing, Ramona wondered what I was doing with flour all over my face and hands. “It’s in your hair, too,” she said. “Looks like you’re prematurely white.” When I told her what I was up to, she asked, “If you have any extra, save one for me?”
The biscuits were still warm when Clio buzzed me in. At her apartment door, I brushed a spot of flour off the leg of my jeans.
“Miss Bliss, whatever is it?” Instead of being dressed in her usual sweater and skirt, she wore a men’s flannel bathrobe so old the cotton seemed almost see-through and so large it swept the floorboards. A thick wool sca
rf obscured her neck, and a gold stocking cap covered crown to ears. Her hair hung loose on her shoulders, with a charming natural wave to it. The ensemble gave her the appearance of a Dickens character.
“I am so sorry to bother you, Miss Hartt!” I said. “I just thought I’d check on you.”
“At this time of night?”
I showed her my wristwatch. “It’s just after six.”
“My. Well, it does get dark early this time of year. Come in.”
The room was colder than usual and darker, with the only light coming from the lamp next to her armchair. Remington had tucked himself onto a pillow next to the lamp. I recognized it as the one Clio placed behind her back when she sat at her desk, and I made a mental note to get the cat a proper bed.
Clio switched on the overhead light, then blinked several times from the brightness.
“Oh, don’t turn it on for me,” I said. “I won’t stay long. I wanted to bring you these.” I held out the bag of biscuits with pride.
A smile turned up Clio’s lips as she glanced inside. “Did you make them yourself, Miss Bliss?”
“From my mama’s recipe.” They looked fluffy, but I realized with a spurt of panic that I hadn’t bothered to test them. “I hope they’re okay.”
“I am sure they will be delicious. But I’m afraid we have nothing to put on them.”
“I thought of that, too,” I said, drawing a jar of apricot jam out of my bag. It wasn’t homemade but it was French, which seemed like the next best thing— the mingling of home with memories of Paris.
I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch, so I made a biscuit for each of us, slathered in jam. Even Remington looked up like he might be interested, but I gave him a tuna-flavored treat instead.
“What is the occasion, Miss Bliss?” Clio asked after her first appreciative bite. “Are you still trying to make up for invading my privacy?” We hadn’t spoken of my offense in weeks, but her tone was light. I’d been coming around less, as she requested, and I wondered if she might possibly have missed my company.
Clio Rising Page 24