That was the problem, really. It was all an imitation.
“Stop moving!” he shouted, aiming the Leica at me. “Look mysterious!”
“Fat chance,” I shouted back, balancing on the public dock at Upton Lake and trying to make my very contrived placement look natural. I was supposed to pose with my right arm across my forehead in a despairing gesture, imitating a Louise Brooks publicity shot, but it was a sultry August day, I was dizzy with heat, and Jamie had made me stand at the very edge of the dock, my heels already hanging in thin air.
I fell off the dock a second after Jamie took the shot.
What did not get photographed: me rising from the water, gasping and streaming like a mermaid. Jamie jumping in after me, laughing and pushing the wet hair out of my face, his fingers tracing a pattern on my cheek. That long gaze shared by two people who know they are about to become lovers.
We crossed that line between childhood and what comes after, the sweetness of flesh against flesh. Jamie took me by the hand and led me to the bakery delivery truck, and we lay down in the back, the truck bed’s cold ridges pressing into our bare flesh, leaving marks on our legs and backs after we had slowly, clumsily undressed each other.
“What’s that?” I asked warily.
“A rubber.” Jamie blushed violently.
“Jesus. Where’d you get it?” We all knew about them, how the soldiers coming home from France after the war had brought condoms back with them. They were hard to come by, though; you had to get your doctor to write you a slip and then convince the pharmacist that you were using them so you wouldn’t catch a disease.
“From my brother. He uses them all the time.”
“Let me see.”
“Want to help?” Jamie wasn’t blushing anymore.
“Absolutely,” I said.
I lost my virginity in the swirling stale scent of vanilla and yeast and sugar. Afterward, when the sun started to slide down toward the horizon, Jamie wrapped his arms around me and said, “Let’s run away together.”
It made sense. We had just reinvented the world, and could now be anywhere, as long as we were with each other.
“Where?” It was just a question to answer him, a way to make him say more so that he would continue whispering in my ear. All I needed in my newness was to hear his voice and smell the mossy sweetness of his skin. I would have followed him to Tahiti or Timbuktu. Jamie was more practical.
“New York. We’ll have an apartment with a studio in it so I can do indoor shots. I’ll get a gallery. P’oke is nowhere, Nora.” I had told him that when I ran into Elizabeth Miller at the bookstore, she had called our town P’oke, and Jamie had been calling it that ever since.
“I can’t stay here, Nora.” He sat up and stuck a piece of grass between his lips, chewed it moodily. “Knowing what I’ll be doing every day for the rest of my life.”
By that time I was pretty much acting as a maid at my aunt’s house, ironing and cleaning and cooking for all three of us when I wasn’t working the perfume counter at Platt’s. Momma and Aunt Betty would spend all day smoking, listening to the radio, talking about their girlhoods, the men they could have married. Aunt Betty’s boyfriend had been killed in the war and there had been no one after that. She had inherited a little money from her father and had never worked, just grew old and dusty and as unused as the silver tea set she kept wrapped in tissue on the formal dining table.
I smelled dust all day long, a peppery, irritating odor of frustration, and some days, some nights, my impatience with life was so unbearable I thought I would burst through my own skin. Something needed to happen. Anything. One night I sat on the stoop of the house and watched people walk by, or bicycle by, or drive by in the occasional car, and my eagerness to join that parade almost made me jump up and run. The direction didn’t seem to matter. All that mattered was the possibility of movement and escape.
Momma didn’t notice my unhappiness any more than she had paid attention to my father’s. She had gone deeper into her own regrets.
“Look at my legs,” she said petulantly one day, pulling up her dress. “They’re still as good as a girl’s.” And they were, slender and strong and shapely. “I could have been a dancer in New York.” She tapped out a couple of steps, then collapsed onto the sofa. “Bring me a glass of cold tea, Nora. And turn on the radio.”
There was money in the world, in those years, and lots of ways to spend it. People were buying Model Ts, radios, clothes, taking weekend trips to Niagara Falls, going out to restaurants where some waiters put two fingers of gin in your glass if you ordered “milk.” Life had become a kind of party, and Momma hadn’t been invited.
“If only I hadn’t gotten pregnant,” she would sigh. “I had such potential.”
• • •
“Okeydoke,” I said after Jamie asked me to go away with him a second time. “But shouldn’t we get married first?”
“Artists don’t get married,” Jamie explained somewhat grandly. “We’re going to be bohemians, Nora.”
“That’s a quarterback bootleg,” I said, using the only football term I knew. It meant a fake play. “It’s your family.” I had never been invited over for Sunday lunch, never formally met them. They thought I wasn’t good enough for their boy.
“I promised my dad I wouldn’t get married till I was twenty-five,” Jamie admitted. “If I do, well, he’ll be pretty mad and disappointed. He might cut me out completely. You’ll come away with me anyway? You know you’re the only girl for me.”
I pretended to have to think about it. Let’s see. The choice was to stay in Poughkeepsie, cleaning up poodle piss and listening to my mother and aunt complain about how unfair life was, or run away to New York with the man I loved.
“Give me a couple of weeks,” I said. This was, I knew even then, an irrevocable decision. Once a girl ran off with a boy, or even spent a single night with him, her reputation was ruined forever. I would be as bad as one of the summer regatta girls, doomed to being snubbed on the street, whispered about, no longer thought good enough to be invited into the homes of respectable people. But I didn’t care. If Jamie was going, I was going with him. But how?
Jamie and I were making love one night in the backseat of the delivery van when I remembered Daddy’s tin box buried under the peony bush. I had forgotten about it and left it behind when we moved into my aunt’s house. For when you want to leave, he had said. He had known.
“What’s wrong?” Jamie sat up next to me, alarmed. “Was I hurting you?”
“I know where I can get some money. At least, I hope it’s still there.”
“Later, honey,” he said, nuzzling my neck.
“Now. This won’t wait.”
We straightened our clothing, Jamie muttering all the while, and drove to my old neighborhood. Jamie parked the van across the street from the house and switched off the engine. Crickets chirped and a dog barked down the street in the darkness, and I sat there, fighting tears because I missed my father. The house had been painted a cheap pastel blue over its original gray. Daddy would have hated the color. The new owners had torn out the honeysuckle that had twined on the front porch. What if they had dug up the peony and found the box?
“Come on,” I said, nudging Jamie. “Now or never.”
“I just hope they don’t have a dog,” Jamie said.
We tiptoed like the Katzenjammer Kids up to one of their pranks, arms in front of us, feeling our way through the darkness into the back garden. There were no lights on inside the house, but it was warm enough that the windows were open. I hoped the new owners weren’t light sleepers. “No doghouse,” Jamie whispered.
The roses were in bloom. I had almost forgotten the nose-tingling clove and nutmeg scents of Souvenir de Malmaison, Tuscany, and Parsons’ Pink, all the old roses my father had kept. They were still there in his garden, hundreds of blooms each glowing like a
pink full moon in the dark night.
The peony was still there, too, its delicate green stems bent under the weight of the dead blossoms. I knelt and felt for the stone, and when I lifted it, how light it felt compared with its weight during my childhood when I had been small! The tin box was still there as well. I cradled it to my chest, careful not to rattle the money inside. We tiptoed back out of the garden, and I felt less like a Katzenjammer Kid than Eve leaving Eden.
We counted the money later, in the van’s backseat. Almost a hundred dollars. “Thank you, Daddy,” I said.
• • •
I bought a cardboard suitcase to keep in my locker at the employees’ lounge. Skirt by skirt, blouse by blouse, I moved my clothes out of the closet in the shared bedroom and into that suitcase.
We took the train into New York on a breezy autumn day. Jamie photographed me leaning out the window, holding on to my hat and smiling straight into the camera. The train hissed and steamed, rumbled and clanged, and it wasn’t just a physical movement but one that involved my entire being. Jamie and I were going forward, into our own story. It was 1927, and I was twenty years old.
Five years, I told myself. In five years, I will be Jamie’s wife. So what if the honeymoon came first?
Elizabeth, now known as Lee Miller, was also in New York, taking dancing lessons, studying stage design (a skill she’d use effectively later in her photographs), and being photographed by Steichen and Genthe and the other greats. I had seen displayed all over Manhattan a Vogue cover with her face on it. I had stood in front of a drugstore magazine rack admiring the sophisticated gown she wore, the upswept hair, trying to see the little girl who had climbed to the top of the tallest tree. She was there, in the eyes.
I bought a copy to show Jamie and he propped it up on our table, stopping several times a day to admire it.
“See what you can achieve with a little daring?” he said. “A girl from Poughkeepsie on the cover of Vogue. Think we’ll maybe run into her?”
“Not unless we’re invited to a party at the Whitney or the opera.”
“Anything is possible,” Jamie insisted.
Jamie earned some money by chasing ambulances and photographing accidents, crime scenes, dance contests, and baby beauty pageants for the glossies. His father, understanding that the Tastes-So-Good Bakery did not really require three sons to oversee it, sent him a little money every month, the allowance he would have had in Poughkeepsie.
I knew that Daddy Sloane was being understanding, playing the boys-will-be-boys card with his youngest son. Daddy Sloane thought I was Jamie’s wild oats.
The Tastes-So-Good Bakery was doing better than ever, expanding and hiring more employees since Mr. Sloane had bought stocks on margin. I think even my mother bought a few shares in a mining company, that year. Everyone was investing, buying stocks with unsecured loans.
So Mr. Sloane turned a blind eye to his son’s peccadilloes—me—and in the letters he sent I could read the hope father and son shared: fame as Jamie—no, as James Sloane, photographer. Baking was a living, but photography . . . well, that was the future. That was art and maybe fame, and nothing was too good for the baby of the family, the youngest son.
Momma knew within a matter of weeks that I hadn’t gone off alone, of course. So-and-so heard that Jamie Sloane and the Tours girl had been seen kissing in public in the Metropolitan Museum, right in front of the medieval hall, and this was reported to another so-and-so, and in the roundabout way of gossip the story made its way to my mother’s door.
She got my address from Jamie’s father and wrote saying only, “Best you don’t come back to Poughkeepsie, Nora. That bridge is burned, and there’s been too much talk.”
“Don’t worry, Nora,” Jamie said. “I’ll take care of you. I’ll always take care of you.”
I worked in a typing pool, tenth floor in a Midtown building, fifteen minutes for lunch, and in my free afternoon I went to the perfume counter at Macy’s and pretended I was going to purchase a bottle. Billet Doux had become my new favorite, a scent of carnation with hints of moss, reminding me of afternoons in the garden with Daddy.
I was happy. I was in love, and newly free. Quite honestly, living in sin suited me just fine for the time being. But there was always a sense of horizon in my life with Jamie, a need to be elsewhere.
Jamie received a couple of invitations to art gallery openings by sheer perseverance. He discovered which afternoon of the month the invitations were mailed out and then sauntered into the gallery, charming the girls who worked there, showing enough knowledge of cameras and darkrooms, light and shadow, to be acknowledged as a fledgling artist.
One afternoon he even met the great Alfred Stieglitz, who by then was bald and gray and as fierce looking as an eagle. Stieglitz had opened “the Intimate Room” art gallery downtown, and was putting up regular shows of new American art, works by people like his beautiful wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the photographer Paul Strand. Jamie wanted his photographs to hang at one of those exhibits.
I went with him the day he brought his portfolio to Stieglitz, sat at that great wooden desk and waited, barely breathing, as Stieglitz leafed through Jamie’s photographs, pausing at some, peering closely once in a while, but finally folding the portfolio, placing it on the desk between himself and Jamie, and saying, “Perhaps next year, young man.”
We went back to our little apartment, not speaking, and Jamie rolled into a ball and stayed that way for a day.
Jamie couldn’t get his photographs accepted by one of the uptown or downtown galleries, couldn’t find a patron or collectors interested in his photographs, not even the nudes.
The nudes were of me, since he couldn’t afford a model. Gradually, persistently, he had worn down my shy reluctance. I had developed a technique of pretending my body was there, but I wasn’t. My arms and legs and breasts became alien objects. I could look at the contact sheet and see shadows and light, black and white and gray, not myself. I never wore perfume when I posed for Jamie. I needed to be as colorless and scentless as the photos.
“There are good galleries in London,” Jamie said one afternoon when he was photographing my hands. He had blocked off the top half of me with a black board, so that my hands looked very white and fragile, almost corpselike and disembodied. “New York is nowhere,” he said. “London is the place to be.”
We had burned bridges at our backs, but the whole world lay in front of us. When you are that young, all movement is forward. And so in 1928, we took a steamer to London, third-class, and danced our way across the Atlantic.
We became part of that great reverse migration, from America across the ocean, west to east, heading back to places our ancestors had left a hundred years before; not for any purpose more serious than to play, to see what there was to see, and to achieve what there was to achieve. Great-grandfather Thouars fled to save his life. I made the return trip for him.
Jamie and I stayed in London for three months, moving regularly to less expensive digs till we were in the cheapest bedsit we could find. London was cold and gray and too expensive. His portfolio, banged and stained and dented by then, did not impress the gallery owners nor did his awards from the Poughkeepsie Photography Club, or his photos of New York car crashes, though there was a good one of a new Model T and an old carriage horse, nose to nose, each demanding right of way. The old and the new, Jamie called it, and we had nicknamed the horse P’oke and the Model T Paris, as if we had known all along where we would finally end up.
We went to Harrods one day to see the famous food court and maybe buy a treat for our supper. We hovered in the doorway in our rumpled clothes, streams of people pushing past us, perfumes from the counter teasing my nose, the jasmine of Jamais de la Vie, the rose and amber of Amour, the lavender and moss of Adieu Sagesse all mixing together.
A nanny pushed between us, gloved hands firmly gripping a perambulator with its pre
cious burden. I stooped to look at the red-faced infant, who stared back at me with perfectly round, unblinking eyes.
“Adorable,” I said, meaning it, inhaling deeply the talcum and milk smell. The nanny nodded and continued on her way.
Jamie’s hair stuck up strangely in back because I had cut it myself to save money. No matter how often I licked my palm and pressed it down over that lock of hair, it stood up like a flag of surrender. I reached up then and smoothed it down and kissed his cheek. “Let’s have a baby,” I whispered. That’s how much I loved him. That’s how young and unmoored I was.
“In a couple of years. But for now, let’s get out of here,” Jamie said, and I knew he didn’t just mean Harrods.
• • •
Two days later we were in Paris, unpacked in a fleabag hotel on Île de la Cité, and the fleas were worth it, because outside my attic window was Notre-Dame cathedral.
Maybe it was all those bottles of French perfume, or my father, who after a fourth shot of gin would whisper to me, We’ll go to Paris one day, just you and me. A year after I had arrived, a friend told me about reincarnation and how people traveled to get to where they had once been happy in some other life. Whatever the cause, I was immediately happy in Paris, more buoyant and optimistic than I had ever been in my life. It was like stepping out of a closed dark room and into the fresh air.
Paris was cheaper than London, and even if Jamie did not find a gallery and make money from sales, his allowance would cover us, if we lived frugally. We could go to bars and cafés for meals and drinks, and spend our afternoons walking along the Seine, Jamie always pointing his camera in some direction.
We walked the cobblestone streets of the Latin Quarter, peered through grilled gates at private courtyards with their playing fountains and flower-filled urns. We picnicked in the Luxembourg Gardens, where the writer Hemingway had hunted pigeons for his lunch. We spent a week’s worth of cash at the Folies Bergère to see Josephine Baker dance in her banana skirt . . . Josephine, whose favorite fragrance was jasmine, the flower that gave the name to the new music, jazz. We ate sugar crepes from street stalls, and walked up and down rue de Fleurus, hoping to get a glance of Gertrude Stein.
The Beautiful American Page 5