The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  “James Sloane.”

  “Never heard of you.” He turned his attention back to the black-haired girl.

  Lee’s brows met in a little furrow of thoughtfulness.

  Violin music wafted to us from the front of the club, and the smell of old campfires. Gypsies had arrived to play. Most club owners wouldn’t let them in, but the Jockey liked to be daring, liked to be the exception.

  “Do you tango?” the model’s husband asked me. I looked at Jamie. He was talking with Lee. “Yes,” I lied.

  There wasn’t much room to dance, so he—I think his name was Charles—put his arm tight around my waist and swayed me back and forth in time to the music. We did a few quick turns, a few marching steps, then more swaying, more of that movement that suggests lovemaking. I smiled over my shoulder at Jamie, relieved to see he finally was watching. He winked back.

  “Didn’t know you could tango,” he said, when I returned to the table.

  “Neither did I.”

  Man came back from the direction of the kitchen and sat again next to Lee, so Jamie had to pull his chair closer to mine. A trio of black-suited, white-aproned waiters followed Man, carrying pitchers, bottles, trays.

  “Finally! Eat, drink, and be merry!” Lee ordered.

  We drank a lot that night, French champagne mixed with American cocktails, and we ate, dish after dish brought to the table: smoked trout, cucumber salad, potato salad, little sausages served with their own special mustard.

  I hadn’t realized how hungry I was, had been for days, until those sausages arrived, sizzling and smelling of garlic and grease. Jamie put three on his plate at once, with a huge dab of yellow mustard next to them, and leaned back to smile at me again. Aren’t we lucky? his gaze said. He forced himself to eat slowly, taking thoughtful bites, chewing even more thoughtfully, pretending to be listening to the conversations around us when I knew he was occupied, totally occupied, with the exploding flavors in his mouth. As was I.

  Lee and Man and the German collector talked about an exhibit they had visited the day before at a gallery on boulevard Haussmann. Herr Abetz hadn’t liked the work, thought it contrived and a little sentimental. Man was defending the artist, saying his work linked the old impressionists and the new surrealists.

  “Nein,” the collector argued back, thumping his beer mug on the table. “That Spaniard, that Picasso, he is the link. I buy Picasso.”

  “He buys everything,” Lee whispered to me. “Frightfully rich. Related to the Kaiser or some such thing.”

  Sometime close to midnight, Lee, who had been slumped and giggling to herself, sat up a little straighter and gave Man a gentle poke in the ribs. “Since Jamie’s a photographer,” she said, “couldn’t you use him in the studio? You need a new assistant.” Lee had spoken loudly enough for all of us to hear. If Man said no, he would look miserly or ungracious or, worse, jealous.

  “Certainly,” he said, smiling tightly. “Good idea. More champagne, then, to settle the deal.”

  Jamie gently kicked me under the table. We’re in, he mouthed. He looked like a kid at Christmas.

  Couple by couple, group by group, the club began to empty as night turned to a newly arriving day, and still we ate and drank until we were the last ones there and the waiters stood yawning around us, looking at the clock on the wall.

  Lee stood. “Home,” she said, tottering on her high heels. “I need my beauty sleep.”

  Outside, the snow had been falling more heavily and there was a white carpet over the streets, catching the lamplight and sparkling like rhinestones on white satin.

  “I wish I had my camera with me.” Jamie yawned and stretched his arms over his head, then held his hands in front of his eyes, making a frame of them. Man shot him a glance that said much. The shot wouldn’t work. Jamie was too young. Too romantic.

  “Come,” Man said. “Let’s put these fine Germans into a taxi and walk back. The air will do us good.”

  The fine Germans were barely awake, having eaten and drunk too much, so Man told the driver to take them to the Ritz on the place Vendôme, the classy hotel where all collectors stayed when in Paris. If it was the wrong hotel, then they could get a room there for the night and return to the other one in the morning. The model and her husband, locked in a tottering embrace, tangoed to the street corner and waved good night.

  “Where are you staying?” Lee asked me. “We’ll walk you there.”

  “Rue Boissonade, near the convent.” Their bees had flown in and out of windows on those mild days when we raised the sash. The nuns made honey to help support themselves.

  Lee put her arm through mine and laughed. “You’re kidding! Man and I are just two blocks away!”

  Jamie and I lived within shouting distance of Lee Miller . . . and never bumped into her. And then, just as we were about to give up, to go back home, we ran into her outside a club, and like a fairy godmother, she got Jamie work and offered to take us under her wing.

  “Aren’t we lucky?” Jamie beamed.

  • • •

  The next morning, the same morning really, since we hadn’t gotten to bed until around three a.m., I woke to the sound of gravel being thrown against the window.

  I rolled out from under Jamie’s arm and pulled his discarded shirt around me. He was still snoring as gently, sweetly as a sleeping cat.

  Lee was down in the street, grinning up at the window. She put her hands to her mouth as if to shout, then mouthed, “Come down,” and beckoned me with her little finger. “Alone,” she added. How did I read all that from a third-floor window? Or did I just imagine it?

  It was barely dawn, but Lee’s grin was irresistible. She hadn’t been to bed yet, or at least she hadn’t washed the lipstick and mascara from her face, but she had changed her clothes and wore trousers, a man’s wool peacoat, a beret. Her camera hung around her neck and a leather kit of supplies was strapped across her chest.

  “Where to?” I asked five minutes later, having splashed cold water on my face, run my fingers through my hair, and dashed down into the street. We left crunching tracks in the snow as she turned right and pointed me in that direction.

  “Rue du Louvre,” she said.

  “For?”

  “Shadows.”

  Lee was almost a foot taller than I was, and when she put her arm around my shoulder, I felt like someone’s kid sister.

  Fifteen, rue du Louvre, Lee’s destination that morning, was one of Blondel’s apartment buildings, large enough to need two separate entrances, one of metal and one of stone. Blondel had been a polymath, fascinated by numbers, and this building was about the number two. Lee led us to the stone entrance, a double arch flanked by two huge busts of muscled, bearded water gods. It felt quintessentially Parisian to me, with the rich stone carvings of male torsos, garlands, wreaths, the balconies and neoclassical supporting columns. It felt very far from Poughkeepsie, and that felt grand.

  “He looks cranky, doesn’t he?” Lee pointed to the Atlas on the right, and in fact, his arm was raised to his forehead as if he had a pounding hangover. His left arm was pressed against his hip, a gesture of impatience.

  “Wouldn’t you, if you knew your entire kingdom was going to sink beneath the ocean?”

  “Guess that would ruin your day,” Lee admitted. “But how come the sculptor made two busts of the same god? Why not a pretty nymph on the other side of the arches?”

  “Atlas was a twin. The second bust is probably his brother, Gadeirus. Together they ruled all the land the gods gave Poseidon, until it sank forever.” The second bust had one hand raised slightly over his eyes, as if he was looking into the distance. His other hand was poised protectively over his stomach, a defensive gesture.

  Lee gave me a knowing smirk. “Well. Someone did her schoolwork. God, I was a rotten student. And it shows, sometimes. Twins, hey. Wonder what it feels like to have a twin
, a same-sex twin. I never wanted a sister, did you? Much prefer the company of men.”

  “A sister would have been fun,” I said. “I was an only child.”

  “Ah. Poor little rich girl, all alone in a big house with, let me guess, lots and lots of books for company.”

  “Something like that.” Amazing, isn’t it, the conclusions people leap to? That day, I was wearing a blouse I’d bought in a secondhand shop, cream silk with hand stitching. I wore my father’s gold watch. Silk and gold do give off the whiff of money, I suppose, even secondhand.

  “The best thing about Atlantis,” I continued, needing to show off, “is that its palace was built of amber. Plato called it orichalc, but it was white and yellow amber. Imagine how Atlantis must have smelled.” I inhaled, trying to envision walking through a city made entirely of amber, that sweet, resinous fragrance that is the smell of preserved sunlight.

  “Isn’t there a palace of amber somewhere in Russia?” Lee was fidgeting with her camera, preoccupied.

  “It’s a single room. In the Catherine Palace in Leningrad. Walls and walls of carved amber and gold leaf, made in the eighteenth century.” Just a few short years later that amber room would disappear as completely and mysteriously as Atlantis, not destroyed by earthquake or tsunami but looted by the Nazis.

  “Move over there, Nora,” Lee said, no longer interested in history or the scent of amber. “You’re blocking the light.”

  I felt certain we were there to photograph the busts, but instead, when she was ready, Lee aimed the camera at the paving stones. She waited, barely breathing. Second by second, the morning sun climbed the invisible staircase over the Paris skyline, and as I watched, shadows began to appear, nothing definite, nothing definable, only lines and angles thrown against the uneven cobbles. Lee moved slowly in a circle, camera held to her face, pressing the shutter, cranking the film.

  “It’s about the light,” she said once. “And where it falls. Everything else is superfluous.”

  She took maybe a dozen snapshots, and when the sun had become a firm reality rather than a suggestion and the shadows lost their mystery, she packed the camera into its case and took me by the arm.

  “Breakfast,” she said. “And a chat. I think we’re going to be good friends.”

  “How come you didn’t take any photographs of Atlas or his brother?”

  “They’re only good for postcards for tourists. If you want one, I’ll make one for you.”

  “No, thanks.”

  We found a little café and sat inside at a table, though it cost more. We were both shivering by then because the morning sun hadn’t brought any significant warmth. Lee ordered for us, coffee with milk, rolls, bread, butter. Slices of ham.

  “Don’t give in to this French way of eating only bread in the morning,” she warned. “You’ll go to fat.”

  Slender as an athletic schoolgirl, she looked as if she knew what she was talking about. I followed her example and slipped some ham into my roll and ignored the pot of jam.

  “So,” she said, when we had finished our coffee and sandwiches. “Tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “About yourself, of course. What brings you to this neck of the woods?”

  The very American phrase made me laugh.

  Lee lit a cigarette and offered one to me. We sat there, two girls from Poughkeepsie, smoking heady Gauloises in a Parisian café on a Parisian morning, and I know what I was thinking. My whole body was a tingling thank-you to whatever gods and destiny had brought me there—though, of course, I had no idea what Lee was thinking.

  There was no easy answer I could give her. Jamie wanted to be an artist and this was where artists came. (Why did I never, in my thoughts, think Jamie was an artist?) I had been bored and unhappy in Poughkeepsie. So who wasn’t? And for that matter, what did I want, other than to be wherever Jamie was?

  We were the same age, but I suddenly felt younger, even childish next to the great nuanced worldliness of Lee Miller, who was living with an older, famous man, who had already made a name for herself as a model and now was also working as a photographer.

  “Where else should I be?” was my feeble reply. Rearranging the same perfume bottles over and over in Platt’s department store? Cleaning poodle piss off my aunt’s carpet?

  Lee laughed and lit another cigarette.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  We talked more easily after that, chitchat about where I’d gone to school (public as opposed to her series of private schools), where I had lived in Poughkeepsie (she guessed from my aunt’s address that we were different classes and didn’t falsely argue that there were no classes in Poughkeepsie; of course there were), and what we had left behind back home. For me, a mother, an aunt, a deadly boring job.

  “So, not poor little rich girl. Poor little poor girl. Even more romantic,” she said. “I had a big house and plenty of moola. Friends whose names get in the paper, society column or police blotter of minor offenses, all the same. And brothers. I miss them sometimes, but not P’oke.”

  As we talked, in my mind’s eye I saw my old playmate, that little girl in her white dress, hesitating on the porch, smelling of events and medicines that should have no place in a child’s innocent life.

  The temptation to remind her of our moments of shared childhood flitted in and out of my conversation. It was so long ago, and it had been such a miserable nightmare for her. Maybe she had forgotten that as well, that morning on the porch. But sometimes I thought I saw it in her eyes, in the shadows around them. She just refused to allow the memories into the daylight.

  What I couldn’t guess was whether she remembered me as a part of that event, the little girl asking her to come off the porch, to play. That morning, as we sat drinking coffee and smoking, I made the decision not to remind her. We had the future. What did the past matter?

  “Good,” Lee said, when the second cigarette was finished. What exactly did she mean by that one single comment? “Time to go. Man will be furious if I’m away too long. I didn’t leave a note and he does worry.” She wrinkled her nose. “Is Jamie possessive?”

  The question was delivered lightly and took me by surprise. I didn’t have an answer because I didn’t know. Since becoming lovers, we’d had little opportunity to test his capacity for jealousy. Nor did I want to. Never had I questioned my own potential for jealousy because that would mean thinking about Jamie as a possible betrayer, and he wasn’t. He was as true and faithful as the North Star.

  When I got back to our room, Jamie was gone. He had left a note: “At Man Ray’s studio. Meet me for lunch.”

  He had underlined “studio” three times. I read between the lines: I’m in!

  • • •

  Man Ray, raised Emmanuel Radnitzky in Brooklyn, New York, was almost twenty years older than Lee, and had a face, a posture, that looked even older. More than once, in our time together in Paris, I would see a waiter or barmaid mistake him for mademoiselle’s père, see the grimace on Man’s face, the teasing satisfaction on Lee’s. Sometimes, seeing them walking side by side, I got the impression that a short, stocky, aging mortal had somehow captured a goddess and held her captive with some invisible golden rope.

  Man Ray encouraged that image. One day, he and Lee walked down the Champs-Élysées together, Lee wearing a leather collar and leash he had put on her. A girlfriend told me that story a few years later, I can’t remember who, and she laughed because Man, so proud of his conquest, had looked like a puppy being walked by his mistress owner, not vice versa.

  By the time Jamie and I met up with them, Lee and Man had been living together for more than a year, and the story of their meeting was already the stuff of legend among the Parisian artistic set. Lee had decided he would be her mentor. When Lee made a decision like that, it happened. She made it happen. So, fresh off the boat from New York for the second time (no chaperon
e in tow), she had gone to the studio of the famous Man Ray to introduce herself and announce their relationship, as she envisioned it. But the concierge blocked her path and said Man wasn’t there; he had left for the summer.

  Lee went to the café across the street and ordered a Pernod to think over. Or did she already know the next step?

  Man, who was there, who had been watching from an upstairs window, followed the tall, slender blonde and asked her what she wanted. Lee was completely irresistible. He didn’t really have a choice.

  Man was on the verge of leaving town for the season; he didn’t want to be disturbed, he didn’t want a student, he didn’t want a woman in his life, at least not that kind of woman, the kind that requires attention and care and moments of actual hard work. Moments of suffering. His previous mistress, Kiki de Montparnasse, had left him the year before and he was still licking his wounds and letting the many lovely prostitutes of the quarter meet his needs for ten francs a toss.

  But here was this beautiful American, coolly, with absolute presence of mind, sipping Pernod in his neighborhood café, patiently explaining to him that she was going with him, and she was his new student, his protégée. It was too hot to argue.

  They drove down to Biarritz in his Voisin sports car, Man stopping frequently to photograph his beautiful new traveling companion, already smitten with her boyish haircut, her swanlike neck, and her long slender legs, those beautiful, perfect lips. He wore a black beret and black linen jacket; she wore a white beret and sweater. They were already a complementary image, a couple.

  They spent the summer together, and when they returned to Paris, Lee took a studio just a few minutes away from his, more for appearance’s sake than any other reason, though later the room, and the rare moments of privacy it provided, would become important in another way.

  The rest was history, as they say.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I went to Man Ray’s studio at one, thinking Jamie and I would go to the corner café and have a cheese sandwich and black coffee, but Lee had other plans.