The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  “I’ll find something,” I insisted. “And then maybe you can just accept work from Pablo and stop slaving in Man’s studio.” After last night, I had started to think it might be better if we spent a little less time with Lee and Man.

  “Impossible. I can’t afford to buy all the equipment I need to set up my own studio, so I need to use Man’s when he allows me.”

  “Just don’t spill the chemicals,” I mimicked. That was Man’s mantra in the studio. Jamie had learned immediately what else was not permitted, in addition to not spilling the chemicals: don’t look too hard or too long at Lee. In fact, they didn’t look at each other when Man was around.

  “Besides, Nora, Man is an important connection,” Jamie said. “Eventually, he will pass some of the portrait work on to me. Maybe even some of the advertising work he does. He’s going to introduce me to people. Important people. The dough is only half-risen. Too soon to bake it.”

  His father said that. Jamie was quoting his father. Talk about taking the boy out of Poughkeepsie.

  That afternoon we traced our favorite walk through the city, arm in arm, laughing like schoolchildren, past the luxury hotels near the Champs-Élysées where harried-looking porters and errand boys walked poodles by the dozen, stopping for an aperitif at Fouquet’s, then on to the Luxembourg Gardens.

  Jamie had his viewfinder with him and took photographs of facades and iron grilles over windows, of children playing in the street and an organ-grinder with his monkey. He almost took a photograph of a brown wintering bed of rosebushes in the Luxembourg, then stopped himself. “Too romantic,” he said. “No interesting shadows.”

  We had mail waiting for us at the American Express office—a letter from Jamie’s father with the same news we’d been getting from home for months. Times were getting harder. He’d had to lay off two more employees. Jamie’s brothers were working too hard trying to keep the business afloat. Time for Jamie to come home. There was no check with the letter, but we were already used to that. We were on our own.

  I had a letter from my mother, the second one I’d received since I’d come to France, and she said pretty much the same thing, adding that her arthritis was making her life a misery. I was not to come back to Poughkeepsie until Jamie had “done the right thing.” “Not that I expect him to,” she concluded. “Why should he bother? Have you been to the Folies Bergère?” she wanted to know.

  “Do you love me?” I asked Jamie, standing outside the American Express office. The air smelled of burned chestnuts, charcoal smoke, car fumes, and when I looked at Jamie, the odors became a perfume of Paris, of being young and in love.

  “Of course.”

  I flung my arms around him. “Forever,” I said. “You and me.” I kissed him there on the street, in front of American Express, and an old man in this dusty black beret kissed his fingertips to us.

  “My turn!” he shouted, and Jamie waved him away.

  “Not a chance,” he said. “This one is all mine.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  That spring was the first time Lee mentioned the name of Julien Levy, the New York art dealer.

  “He’s looking for photographers to show,” she said, crossing her legs at the knees, so that silver silk, as flowing and shiny as water, rose up her thighs to where her garters showed. It was past midnight and the Paris sky revealed just enough moon to make the sequins on the silk wink as Lee moved.

  Through the open window we saw a Harlequin in black and white sprint by, chased by a woman wearing a black leather corset and high heels and nothing else.

  “Madame Sandro and her new boy. God help him if she catches him, in the mood she’s in. That dominatrix outfit has gone to her head.” Lee downed her glass of champagne in one toss.

  “Speaking of champagne . . .”

  Lee and I were having a smoke on the tiny wrought iron balcony, curled up next to the potted red geraniums and ivy. She refilled my glass, dropping her cigarette in her lap as she did so. “Damn. It already burned a hole. Huene will kill me.” She was wearing a hand-embroidered slip borrowed from a Vogue shoot. She had come to the costume ball dressed as a model in a state of undress, wearing the slip and stockings and nothing else, with her hair disheveled, her makeup smeared. Man had finished the costume by encasing her left arm in a wire cage and putting a dog collar, complete with attached lead, around her neck.

  They had dressed me in a tablecloth by cutting a hole in the middle and pulling it over my head. On top of my head, Man had strapped a basket with a live lobster that kept hitting its claw against my forehead. The basket was lined with seaweed, and it dripped salty and pungent down my neck.

  “How’s the lobster looking?” I asked, lighting another cigarette from the one already in my hand.

  “A little tired and listless,” Lee said.

  “Right. I’ll go into the kitchen and have the maid boil it up soon and serve it with butter. Let Man get angry, I’m not going to spend the rest of the evening with a dead lobster on my head.”

  “You tell ’em,” Lee agreed, slurring her words and clinking her glass against mine.

  The party, that evening, was in Zizi Svirsky’s apartment. Zizi was a Russian émigré, a very handsome concert pianist except that he had bad nerves and could never actually play a concert, so instead he decorated homes for a living. He was much in demand and his parties tended to be large and wild. The love of his life, a Tatiana something or other, had run off to marry someone else, so Zizi gave a lot of parties that spring. Payback by champagne, we called it.

  He was the only man I ever met who could dress as an apple tart, complete with piecrust hallowing his head, and not lose an ounce of dignity.

  “It’s those Russian brains of his,” Lee said. “Genius. Great in bed, too.”

  Ah. No wonder Man had seemed tense. The party was given by one of Lee’s lovers. I didn’t know exactly how many she had. I expect she didn’t either. But who was counting?

  Not Lee, certainly. The nightmare experience of the child Li Li Miller of Poughkeepsie had created Lee Miller of Paris. Smoldering beneath her beauty, her talent, her fondness for champagne and the unconventional, was that little girl in the white dress, afraid to step off her own porch. How does a child comprehend such a thing as rape? She doesn’t. Instead, she grows up and lets a lover put a dog collar around her throat in revenge because he knows she has many other lovers.

  Except Lee was beginning to resist, to take control over what others, men, had previously controlled. That, I knew instinctively, was one reason for the multiple lovers. I belong to me, she was saying. No one else.

  Man’s career and reputation had taken a beating that winter, while Lee’s was all shining ascendancy. His recent exhibit in Cannes had not been a success. Very little of it had sold and Man was having money problems because fewer and fewer sitters were coming to the studio. Not many Americans were left in Paris and those who stayed, like Jamie and me, didn’t have the cash for a formal portrait.

  Lee, though, had earned more than money by working on the film set in London that winter. Her name had been buzzed about; people were realizing she was more than Man Ray’s girlfriend, more than a lovely model: she was an artist herself.

  The great Charlie Chaplin himself had come to her Paris studio to be photographed. Lee had posed him immediately under a large chandelier that seemed, in the photograph, to be growing out of his head. The actress Claire Luce came to be photographed with her Siamese cats, one of which had left a long scratch on Lee’s hand. Lee hadn’t minded because Claire was such fun in the studio, balancing plates on her head and tap-dancing on the table. Claire was another upstate girl, born in Syracuse and full of gossip about a young dancer, Fred Astaire, with whom she was to dance on Broadway.

  Man, plainly dispirited, had begun to talk of returning to New York. More, he wanted Lee to “live as his wife.” In other words, no playing around. Fidelity. Obedien
ce. The whole ball of wax.

  “God,” Lee said, slumping against the pots of geranium on Zizi’s balcony, “do you really see me frying fish in some miserable flat in Brooklyn?”

  “So, tell me more about this Julien Levy,” I said, draining the last bubbles from the champagne bottle directly into my mouth. “What kind of photographers is he looking for?”

  “Avant-garde, of course. He’s asked Man to give him some names.”

  “He should look at Jamie’s photographs.” I was pretty drunk—how else could I explain the fact that I had allowed a lobster to sit on my head for the past three hours?—but underneath my dizzy silliness, in that corner of my brain that could step back and watch even when the rest of the brain was soused, there was a tingle of excitement. Maybe Julien Levy was going to give Jamie his big break.

  “Sure,” Lee agreed. “I’ll speak to Man about it.”

  Zizi stuck his head through the window and handed Lee a just opened bottle of Taittinger’s.

  “Perfect timing, as always.” Lee blew him a kiss.

  “It’s a bribe, my darling. I want you to come dance with me.” Zizi smiled angelically inside his fake piecrust halo.

  “To that?” Lee protested.

  Zizi had hired a trio of violinists for the evening, portly long-faced fellows in suits that had seen better days. They were playing something sad and slow, and profoundly Russian. They made me want to weep. Or perhaps it was the champagne, or the thought of Jamie. I was more in love than ever, head over heels, over the moon, dizzy with it. Lee stuck her hand through the open window and let Zizi pull her through to the drawing room, where various couples clung together, barely moving.

  Zizi had decorated all the rooms in his apartment in different themes. The one inside my window where he and Lee danced was a safari filled with zebra skins on the settees and mounted rhino and lion heads on the walls. The chandelier was made of candles stuck on the ends of twisting horns. “Poor lion,” I wept, looking at the head on the wall opposite my window. The trophy was quite old and the occasional moth flew out of it to commit hara-kiri in the chandelier, but once, it had been a majestic beast. It had roared and purred—did lions purr?—and stalked through a distant jungle.

  A woman costumed as an aviatrix, in leather jacket and tight little leather cap, crawled through the window and took Lee’s place next to me and the geranium pots. Amelia Earhart had just announced she planned to repeat Lucky Lindy’s solo flight from Newfoundland to Paris, and stylish Parisian women now wore leather jackets and aviator caps. This particular Amelia handed me her handkerchief, revealing long pointed red nails that I thought the real Earhart would have filed down for the flight.

  “I know,” she said, patting my shoulder. “I know.”

  “It’s the lion,” I wept. “That wonderful, wonderful beast. Come to this.”

  “There, there.” She put her arm around my shoulders. “Chin up. Could be worse. Could be us up there.”

  “Very tr-true,” I hiccuped.

  “You’re a friend of Lee Miller’s, aren’t you,” the aviatrix said, no question mark in her voice.

  “Guilty as charged, Officer.”

  “I haven’t met her yet. Could you introduce us?”

  “Sure.” I pointed through the window to where Lee and Zizi tried to cling together, her free arm around his neck, her other arm, encased in Man’s wire cage, forcing six inches of space between them. Zizi’s hand was on her backside. “Lee, meet Amelia. Amelia, meet Lee.”

  “That’s not quite what I meant.”

  “I know.” The lion hadn’t sobered me, but this woman did. This was happening more and more frequently, total strangers approaching me, asking for an introduction to my friend Lee Miller. I was starting to feel over my head in the large and crowded swimming pool that was the artists’ Paris. I crawled through the window and from the other side promised the fake Amelia that I would introduce her to Lee later.

  Jamie was in the second parlor, the one decorated like a harem, with embroidered cloths over all the furniture and carved wooden grilles on the walls. The only light came from little brass lamps shaped like genie bottles from an Aladdin illustration, and the air was sweet and heavy. There was a brass hookah in the middle of the room surrounded by a circle of brightly colored cushions. Jamie and four others sat there in the twilight, passing the mouthpiece around.

  “Hash,” he said when I sat next to him.

  “No thanks.”

  His eyes were hugely dilated. When I leaned against him, it felt as if his entire body had turned into a feather pillow; he was that relaxed. “I love you,” I whispered into his ear.

  Lee came in, alone, and took a long inhale off the hookah but did not sit down. Jamie smiled dreamily at her.

  “Shall we go cook the lobster?” she said. “I think he’s all done in, and I’m famished.”

  • • •

  The next day, at Man’s studio, we saw the first printing of a brochure Man had been commissioned to do for the Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d’Électricité, to promote the use of electricity.

  “Come see,” Lee said, taking my coat and pulling me forward. Man spread open the brochure on the table and Jamie and I stood there, making the appropriate noises of admiration.

  My father told me once that Thomas Edison had offered to make Poughkeepsie the first electrified city in the country. But the city fathers had said, “No, thanks. We like Poughkeepsie the way it is, gaslights and all.” And Edison had gone to New Jersey instead. Paris, on the other hand, was paying surrealist artists to brag about its plans for electrification.

  The suited men of industry who had hired Man Ray got a little more than they had bargained for, though. He had photographed Lee naked and then cropped off her head and legs, making a sort of modern Venus de Milo. Then, he had drawn white lines across her torso, electric rays. I could imagine good bourgeois husbands and wives looking at this pamphlet and wondering if electricity in the house might cause a little madness.

  Man had made several other images of a headless Lee Miller torso, and I wondered if Lee was as uncomfortable with it as I was, this reduction of a woman from an identity to a faceless piece of a body, not even a whole body.

  Of course, the best piece in the pamphlet was the photograph of the place de la Concorde at night, all lit up like a Christmas scene.

  “Can you guess what’s wrong here?” Lee asked, grinning. “The place de la Concorde is still lit by gas, not electricity. We didn’t find out till after we took the photograph, and decided to use it anyway.”

  “Good thing it’s a limited edition,” I said, handing the brochure back. Man gave me a harsh look. He could not stand any criticism, not even as a joke.

  Jamie thought the art-brochure was spectacular. He thought most of Man’s work was spectacular.

  “So who is this Julien Levy?” I asked Man, helping myself to coffee from the pot Lee had put out.

  “Got to run,” Lee said. “The Duchess of Alba is coming to my studio for a sitting.” And she was out the door quick as if a runner’s pistol had begun the race. She hadn’t said anything to Man, despite her promise, and Man didn’t look happy that I even knew the name.

  In fact, Man’s face looked bereft as the door shut after Lee, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he most regretted: that Lee spent quite a bit a time away from him these days, or that the duchess had asked Lee rather than him to take her photograph. Or that I had brought up the art dealer, Julien Levy.

  Jamie sipped his coffee and looked at me over the rim of the cup. I held his gaze and he saw exactly what I wanted him to see. Opportunity. Pursue it. Take it. Man was busy setting up a tray of glass plates. For the formal portraits he still preferred a huge old camera that used the plates, not the more modern film cameras.

  “Let me do that,” Jamie said, putting down his cup.

  “Lee sai
d he’s here scouting for photographers for an exhibit. Julien Levy,” I repeated, in case Man had forgotten the question.

  Man looked tired and rumpled. He had put on weight and his tailored shirt was too tight, the cloth pulling at the buttonholes. His curling black hair needed a stern brushing. There were circles under his eyes as shiny and dark as purple eggplants. “Don’t you take care of this man of yours?” Lee had asked me months before. Man looked like no one was taking care of him. I wondered if he had seen Lee and Zizi dancing together the night before, Lee swooning at Zizi’s neck, his hand on her backside. The obvious intimacy of it.

  “Julien is an old friend,” Man said, going to a sofa and sinking deeply into it. He pretended to look over his shoulder out the window, but he wasn’t really seeing the street, the children playing, the old laundrywoman with her heavy basket. His dark eyes were unfocused, darting back and forth like cats looking for a way to escape a room.

  The room was filled with a current of expectation.

  Jamie continued to arrange the glass plates in the tray, his strong hands moving swiftly and precisely, revealing the athlete, the high school hero who carries the football over the line, who makes the last winning shot on the court. “So, what’s the exhibit?” he asked.

  “Just new photographers. No theme other than that.” Man’s eyes focused now on a photograph tacked to the wall—a portrait of Lee wearing the cage he had designed for her arm. “You know how New York is, as far as art goes. Ten years behind Paris.”

  “Yeah. I know.” Jamie smiled and light caught on his sharp cheekbones.

  Man knew what he was supposed to say, what he had to say, since he had taken Jamie into the studio and made him an assistant. This was how it was done. Friends naming friends. Great people helping small people up a bit. “I’ll ask him to have a look at some of your photographs before he goes. He’s leaving soon.”