The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  “And now, you’re his muse,” Lee said to the girl, pouring more wine and raising her glass. “Pablo says his work has never been more creative, more filled with genius. To you!”

  Marie-Thérèse blushed that intense, allover red that blondes with porcelain skin give off. “I just sit or stand as he tells me to,” she said.

  “Well, then, here’s to obedience and patience. May they never cloud my door.” Lee emptied her glass. “I hate being told how to pose. Man has resorted to photographing me when I’m asleep. He moves my arms and legs and shoots away.”

  That wasn’t completely true. Between photo sessions with Vogue, she still worked as Man’s model. I’d seen the photos he had taken of her the week before. There had been a new vaudeville show in town and he had hired three midgets to pose with Lee, one dressed as a harem dancer standing between Lee’s open legs. It was bizarre, perhaps humorous, but it made me a little queasy, looking at it, seeing Lee reduced to a pair of lovely extra-long legs. A different photo Man called “Prayer” was of Lee on her knees, naked backside submissively facing the camera.

  I remembered how modestly Jamie posed me at Upton Lake. Jamie and Man were two very different kinds of men and I knew which kind I preferred.

  Lee played with the oyster shells and murmured something about Olga, but her eyes were on a table across the room, on another couple, a slender middle-aged man with a thin mustache underneath a prominent nose, a woman with dark hair piled on top of her head and too much makeup on her exquisite face.

  “Odd-looking couple,” said Lee. “But her dress is very expensive. Mainbocher, I’d say.”

  They seemed foreign even in a city filled with foreigners and I strained to hear some of their conversation, to pick up their accent or language.

  “Bey,” Man said quietly, his eyes following Lee’s. “His name is Aziz Eloui Bey. Egyptian. Spends half the year in Cairo, and the other half in Paris. The woman is his wife, Nimet.”

  Aziz Eloui Bey looked up from his plate, where he had been precisely dissecting a duck breast with orange sauce. He smiled at us.

  “What an awful-looking man,” Lee said, not returning his smile.

  “Yes. But very wealthy,” Man said. “I plan to do their portraits.”

  • • •

  “So what did you and Man and Picasso talk about tonight, when I was playing choo-choo with Junior?” It was two in the morning and Jamie and I were in bed in our little room in Montparnasse. I was lying absolutely still, but the room kept circling around me.

  “Pablo said he will find some work for me. Photographing works in progress, children’s first Communions, that kind of thing. Do we have any bromide, Nora? I think I’m going to be sick. Do you think those oysters were off?”

  “Work that doesn’t get exhibited just goes into files and folders,” I said. “There are tablets in the pocket of my jacket. Get one for me, too.”

  “Wet blanket. Work that pays bills and makes connections. We’re on our way, Nora. This time next year I’ll have a solo exhibit. I’m certain of it.”

  He didn’t even have a gallery yet, poor kid, and he was planning his first one-man show.

  “Well, before you buy your tuxedo and top hat, come give me a kiss. Forget the bromide.”

  Jamie came back to bed and hovered over me, his eyes looking amber-colored in the dim light of a single candle.

  “My beautiful boy,” I whispered.

  “Man showed me some obscene photographs at the studio this afternoon,” Jamie said, smiling down at me.

  “You mean girls and donkeys and the other tourist-postcard naughtiness?”

  “No. Real stuff. Photographs they couldn’t use in the October issue of their surrealism magazine, the one dedicated to the Marquis de Sade. Some pretty strange stuff.”

  “I bet. Who were the models?”

  “Not Lee. Girls I didn’t know.”

  “Well, that’s some relief.” I remembered then, Lee had told me about that issue, how Man and his surrealist friends were aligning themselves with the Communist International and Sade. “Can’t see the connection,” Lee had said. “Do you?” “Maybe they think Sade epitomized freedom. For men,” I had said. “He liked his women in chains.”

  “Get off me,” I told Jamie. “You’re leering.”

  “Sorry.” He rolled over to his side. And then we started laughing, and we made love in our old way, gently and sweetly.

  • • •

  Pablo did find some work for Jamie, so in addition to helping Man in the studio, my beautiful boy was traveling all over Paris, photographing children and gardens and amateur play productions, the kind of event that the people involved want to have recorded, while no one else will ever, ever care enough to want to see the photographs.

  But as Jamie said, it paid the bills and paying the bills was a key ambition in those days. Paying the bills was something many people were no longer able to do. When Man had said he wanted to make portraits of the rich Egyptian couple, he wasn’t being greedy; he was being practical.

  Man was busy earning money with commercial work and didn’t have quite as much time for his art photographs and his models, and I was spending more and more time running errands for Huene. (I knew Paris better than the back of my hand by then, including the rich hotels on the grand boulevards, the alleys of the Marais, the cellars of the Louvre, all the nooks where a photographer might want to shoot, or find interesting objects for a layout.) So, Lee found herself with a little free time on her hands.

  “Even Jamie is too busy,” she complained one afternoon. “He used to take me out for coffee in the afternoon after he finished in the studio. Only for ten minutes,” she added. “He was always in such a hurry to get back to his rooms with you.”

  Lee decided to make use of her free time. The year before, she had acted in Jean Cocteau’s film The Blood of a Poet. Was “act” the correct word? Mostly she wandered around like a statuesque sleepwalker in a Grecian robe, a strange effect made stranger by having eyes painted on her closed eyelids. That winter, 1931, Lee decided to step behind the camera. She accepted a job with Paramount to film an English version of Stamboul. Lee was not to act or even model in it, but to film the set backgrounds and other images, and take publicity photos. It required her to spend a good part of that winter in London, and when she did come back to Paris, all she wanted to talk about was the film, not communism or surrealism or Sade.

  Part of the plan was to get away from Man as well, to have a little freedom across the Channel, as she put it to me one day. We were in Man’s studio, in the small bedroom alcove, waiting for Man to finish a sitting and for Jamie to come back. He had been hired to photograph an anniversary party. Lee was just fresh from a week in London, doing the publicity shots for Margot Grahame, the platinum blonde who played the countess in the movie.

  “She’s actually quite lovely,” Lee said, loudly enough for Man to hear through the closed door. “Even if she does bleach her hair.” Lee’s hair was naturally blond. Almost white when she was a child, it had darkened to a streaked honey. She had wanted to lighten it, and Man had accused her of being bourgeois and vain.

  “Well, I am. Bourgeois and vain,” she said to me, drinking straight from the bottle of whiskey Man kept in the studio. It was a very cold afternoon and the studio wasn’t well heated, so we had thrown all the bedcovers over us and we lay there, still shivering and trying to steal a little warmth from the whiskey.

  “That’s how I’ve made my progress in this world, by being bourgeois and vain,” she said, knocking back another large gulp and then shaking her head the way a dog does when worrying a bone. “Why does he throw it up to me now? Do you think he would have taken up with me if I had been plain and simple and shy? Or even poor? Daddy’s money helps support me, you know. Man can boast all he wants about paying the bills.”

  It was the longest complaint she had ever ma
de about Man. There was a thud from the other room, Man banging something, and the sound of the sitter’s voice, a woman, asking in French, “What is she saying?”

  “Nothing,” Man said. “Rien.”

  Man finished the portrait sitting, Jamie came back from photographing the anniversary party, and we went out to dinner, the four of us, back to the Jockey, where we had met the winter before.

  That evening Lee was full of chatter about London and the film and the people she was meeting, the gowns and the bedroom gossip, the budgets for the shoots, the new designers setting up fitting rooms in Harrods.

  I could see Man getting tenser by the moment. When the waiter came, Lee ordered steak and asparagus. “It costs a fortune,” Man complained. “Can’t you wait till spring—you have to have imported asparagus?”

  “What will you have?” Lee asked me, ignoring Man.

  “I’m not that hungry. Just some soup, I think,” I said. Jamie and I never knew when Man would pick up the check or when we would be paying on our own, so we had learned to order very cheaply, just in case. We usually filled up on bread before going out.

  “On me, tonight,” Lee said. “I’ve been paid for the publicity photos. Have a steak, Jamie. You look a little thin. Nora, don’t you take care of this man of yours?” It was going to be a rough evening, with claws unsheathed.

  “She takes great care of me. And I don’t want a steak,” Jamie said, putting his arm around my shoulders.

  “How sweet,” Lee said. “Look at them, Man. Two little lovebirds.”

  Man slammed his glass down on the table, spilling his wine. “Lee, can’t you talk a little less and listen a little more? Be more like Nora.”

  Damn, I thought. Just when Lee and I were actually starting to get close. No budding friendship could survive a comment like that. I inhaled and didn’t exhale, waiting to see what form Lee’s revenge would take.

  She sipped her wine, but her fingers were tapping on the table.

  “Tell me, Nora,” she said after a thoughtful moment, “did you accept Pablo’s invitation?”

  Jamie looked at the white tablecloth and cleared his throat. “What invitation?”

  “Didn’t Nora tell you? Pablo told me he was going to ask our little Nora here to pose for him. To be his model. To see inside his studio . . .”

  “We get it,” Man said. “Shut up, Lee.”

  “He did send a note asking me to pose. A couple of weeks ago. And no, I did not accept his invitation.” I forced a dismissive smile.

  “Do you think that was wise?” Jamie asked. His arm dropped from my shoulders. “Maybe I will have a steak, Lee. Let’s call the waiter back.”

  That, I thought, was a particularly mean revenge and I shot Lee an angry look but she ignored it.

  We drank a lot, spoke little, and ate even less, once the food arrived. Man was angry with Lee, she was angry with Man and me, I was angry with her, and Jamie was angry with me. Not a brilliant evening.

  By the time coffee had arrived, though, Lee had cheered up and was giving Man’s hand affectionate little squeezes on the wine-splattered tablecloth. Jamie’s arm was back around my shoulders, though I felt a little tension in it. There would be a “discussion” once we got back to the privacy of our room.

  Just as we rose to leave, half an hour later, in walked the Egyptian couple, Aziz Eloui Bey and his wife, Nimet. He was dressed in a tuxedo and had probably been to the opera. She was in floor-length red satin with an ermine cape. Nimet wore a heavy, flowery perfume that filled the room when she entered, overpowering even the smell of the cabbage and pork the people at the next table were eating. Aziz and Nimet were the core of a large group of people in formal evening clothes, most of whom seemed to know Man, because there were exclamations and shouts of greeting back and forth. This cheered Man immensely. All artists like public recognition, much as they claim to long for privacy.

  Aziz came over and introduced himself. He had exquisite manners, emphasizing his delight at the chance meeting with a little bow, and when he shook Man’s hand, he held it for a second, putting his other hand over it in a tight clasp.

  Lee gave me a slight poke in the ribs and pressed her lips together, a sign that she was working hard not to laugh.

  “Mr. Ray, would you be so kind as to make my wife’s portrait? We would be eternally honored.” Aziz made another little bow, more a nod of the head, and this homage made Man stand taller.

  “I think I can fit you in,” Man said.

  Aziz stood waiting. He wants you to tell him how beautiful his wife is, I thought. Man, say something. Ingratiate.

  “Well,” Aziz said, “we will ring the studio and make an appointment.”

  “Yes,” Man said.

  “Good evening.” Aziz directed the formality to all of us, his eyes making a quick circuit of our table. But they stopped when they rested on Lee. “Good evening,” he said again, addressing only her this time.

  “What a joker,” Lee said, when we were back in the street. “That mustache. Doesn’t that Austrian wear one like it?”

  “Hitler. His is shorter and thicker,” Man said.

  “God, I hate mustaches,” Lee said. “The only man who looks good with one is James Joyce, and that’s because he has no lips.”

  Man was silent and thoughtful.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Okay,” Jamie said when we had climbed the four flights of stairs and were in our room. “Tell me.”

  I didn’t bother to light a candle. There was a full moon and plenty enough light for undressing by. Besides, quarrels always seem easier in the dark, don’t they? Gentler somehow, for not being able to clearly see the other person’s face.

  “Two days after we went to Pablo’s house and met him and Olga and Paulo, he sent me a note. He asked me to model for him.” I rolled down my stockings, slowly. Jamie usually loved to watch me do this, but not that night.

  “That much I could figure out from what Lee said.” Jamie pulled at his shirt so hard he popped a button. I picked it up and put it on the table so I could sew it back on in the morning.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d love to know why she said it, though. Man was the one picking on her, not me.” I unbuttoned my dress and let it fall to the floor. We stood face-to-face, Jamie bare-chested and me in just my slip, but he didn’t move to put his arms around me. I felt alone, adrift. He was never angry, never cold and distant. That evening, he was. Preoccupied, as well. I thought that if he didn’t touch me soon, I would turn to stone.

  “Were you planning to keep it secret?” he said, sounding a little too much like Man.

  “It was a note to me, not to us,” I said, sounding perhaps a bit like Lee.

  “And you said no. Why? He pays his models.”

  “Yes. And sleeps with them as well.”

  There was a clatter from the alley, cats jumping on garbage bins or perhaps a homeless man—there were more and more of them lately—trying to find a warm sleeping spot for the night.

  “Damn cats,” Jamie said, drawing the curtain.

  “I thought you liked cats.”

  “He could have helped us.”

  “You mean helped you.”

  “Prude. You can take the girl out of Poughkeepsie, but you can’t take Poughkeepsie out of the girl.”

  “Clever,” I said. “Did you think of that one all by yourself?”

  “If only you were a little more like Lee.”

  Ah.

  It was like a blow, and my knees gave out. I sat on the bed so heavily the springs creaked. Jamie hesitated, then sat next to me.

  “Listen to us,” I said. “Like an old married couple. Maybe we should.”

  “Should what?”

  “Get married.”

  Jamie stood up again and ran his fingers through his hair. It reached well past his ears, and curled like a child’s
before its first haircut.

  “Your timing is incredible. Can’t you see how busy I am, Nora? Working ten, twelve hours a day to pay the bills”—more of Man’s influence here, I couldn’t help but think—“and trying to find time to make my own art, to take a few good photographs, and you want a wedding.”

  “Not necessarily a wedding. Just a husband. A city hall kind of thing.”

  “Lee doesn’t demand marriage from Man. Or even want it.”

  “I’m not Lee.”

  “Did you believe that Egyptian guy? What a creep. Looks like a real wet blanket. I’m tired. I’m going to sleep now.” And sleep he did, so far on his side of his bed he almost fell out, till I reached over and pulled him close and we slept in our usual manner, his arm around me, my head on his shoulder.

  The next morning, Jamie slept later than usual and I had to tickle him awake.

  “You’ll be late,” I whispered in his ear, throwing my leg over him.

  “No work today. Man’s going out of town and the studio is closed.” He shifted his weight so that I was fully on top of him. “Time to play.”

  “You’re not angry anymore?”

  “Well, let’s just see.” He moved my hand down his belly. “Nope. Not angry anymore.”

  For the first time in weeks we had a leisurely morning together, lovemaking and coffee and bread, and a talk, a real talk.

  “You are working too hard,” I said. “I’m going to get work as well, more work than Huene is giving me. But not as a model. I mean, did you really want me to come home smelling like one of Pablo’s cigarettes?” Do you want me coming home to you from Pablo’s bed? was what I meant, but decided not to say.

  “No. I don’t want you to come home . . . like that. But what work can you do?” Jamie looked skeptical, but good skeptical, like when we were in high school together and I had boasted that I was going to get an A on my Latin final. Proud skeptical. Show-me-because-I-love-you skeptical.