“Oh, come on! You know they’re funny,” Jamie insisted.
“You’re funny,” Lee said, and she leaned over the piles of discarded wrapping paper and gave Jamie a kiss on the lips. Not a long one. Not a sexy one, the kind of kiss a girl would give a younger brother.
Man glared anyway.
Lee had a new quality about her, a soft wistfulness that counterbalanced her more acerbic moments and comments. After having partied in some of the fanciest restaurants in the world, with some of the swankiest people, she returned to us seeming less confident, not more. And Man, with that junkyard dog courage of his, became even more bullying, more possessive.
To keep the peace, Lee leaned over and kissed Man as well, on the lips with open mouth. He closed his eyes. Lee kept hers open.
Uh-oh, I thought.
That Christmas, that Hermès Christmas, as we were clearing up the mess from the unwrapping of presents we heard singing in the streets. A crowd marched down the boulevard, carrying placards: France for the French, and Down with Communists.
“They’re wearing black shirts. Like Mussolini’s boys,” Man said, leaning out the window and looking down into the street. The snow had stopped and the air was clear and bright and cold. The boys’ cheeks were red, and their hands, when they raised them in a fist salute, showed chapped knuckles.
They were workers’ hands, thick and callused and now mostly unemployed, and yet these young men and a few women as well were marching for the right to give up their rights, we thought, to do away with the prime minister and his Socialists, what the unemployed workers and nationalists called their bleeding hearts and their tax-and-spend policies. In one of Mussolini’s speeches, reprinted in one of the Far Right newspapers, he had said, “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” That’s what those unemployed workers demonstrated for—the bankers and the factory owners.
We watched in silence, all sense of Christmas celebration washed away.
“Maybe it’s time to go home,” Man said, when the crowd had turned a distant corner and was out of sight. “Back to New York.” He looked at Lee, but she would not meet his gaze.
“Come on, Nora,” she said. “Let’s be useful and make some sandwiches or something. I’m starving.”
• • •
In January, Julien Levy’s art exhibit went up in New York, with works by Man, Dalí, Picasso, Cocteau, Atget, and others I didn’t know. Julien sent Man copies of the reviews in the New York papers, and for the first time, I saw the image Man had in the show that would become so famous, or so infamous, the Boule de neige: a glass paperweight with a cutout image of Lee’s eye floating in it. One of the papers had included a photograph of it and I almost dropped the paper when I saw that photo; it was so disturbing, a single eye floating like a fish in a bowl.
If the whole point of surrealism was to free repressed urges through unrepressed images, I did not want to imagine what had urged Man to make that paperweight, the violence he had imagined, perhaps wished for.
Lee seemed to take it in stride. There was always a touch of cruelty in the worship of beauty, those crippled bound feet, suffocating whalebone corsets, poisonous lead face paints of previous times. Wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world that armless, defenseless Venus de Milo? As a fashion model and photographer’s model Lee perhaps had grown used to seeing her body, at least images of it, dissected in various ways: legs cut off at the knees, torso without the head attached. She herself, when she had done some freelance photography work for the Sorbonne medical school, had walked from the Left Bank to the Vogue offices carrying an actual severed breast on a dinner plate, remnants of a mastectomy. She had photographed it with salt and pepper shakers.
The editors, of course, had been totally scandalized. How dare she be so disrespectful, so brazen, with the female body? But wasn’t that Lee’s point, though perhaps taken a bit too far? Didn’t they, every month in their issues, take women apart and put them back together again, as if women were so much meat?
And there was that other Lee, seven-year-old Li Li Miller, already tainted with the knowledge of the brutality men could do to the female body, the little girl only I knew, since I was certain Lee had never told Man about the rape, nor anyone else.
Honestly, I think that’s why Jamie’s work never really took off. There wasn’t an ounce of cruelty in him. He lived in a world where pretty women were safe from sadists, where men opened doors for them and lit their cigarettes and said “Yes, ma’am” if they were older, and “Sure, sweetheart” if they were young; where men liked or at least accepted them just the way they were, no adjustment needed except a little perfume and lipstick for dress-up occasions.
There is imagination, and there is imagination. Jamie’s imagination lingered on lovely and natural things, not angles where a cropping knife might cut.
Man’s imagination went into dark places and took his women there as well. That darkness had appealed to the darkness in Lee when she first met him. But it was a difficult thing to live with, that danger, that darkness, that suggestion that life is frail and to love means to always be vulnerable. Lee had learned too young and too thoroughly how vulnerable the female body could be, and soon Man’s imagination began to close in on her. She hated closed doors where she could be held prisoner, and Man was trying to close them.
No wonder she began to daydream about a place filled with light and open space, and the man who could take her there.
After that time, whenever I saw photos of the Boule de neige, of Lee’s eye floating in a paperweight—and it was reproduced surprisingly often—I heard those Front National marching shouts in my head. They seemed to me all of a piece, though whether the surrealist movement was prophetic or somehow an early imitation of what was to follow, no one will ever know.
Nineteen thirty-two was a year of encroaching shadow. Everyone felt it, that darkness beginning to fall. Momma wrote a letter, long for her, telling about the Hooverville camp springing up outside Poughkeepsie, where the unemployed and homeless camped. The U.S. Depression, that father of breadlines, had rooted itself deeply in Europe as well.
The French newspapers cheerfully pointed out that six million Germans had already lost their jobs, but I didn’t see that France was doing much better.
In Paris, the street traffic thinned as more and more Americans returned home to try to piece things back together. Four apartments in our building emptied in one month, so that our landlady offered to move us into a larger room without increasing our rent. She was nervous, thinking probably of those times when we had asked for more coal, more hot water, and her reply had been sharp, her prices high. Would we abandon her as well?
I put my arm around her shoulder and assured her we had no intention of leaving and she almost sobbed with relief. Jamie moved us into the larger room, and that soon seemed a mistake. We never felt at home in it, the way we had felt at home in our small familiar room.
Shops began to reduce their hours and then closed altogether, and burn barrels appeared on street corners to warm the newly homeless. The unions, those people still with jobs, began to strike in protest, leaving the city without transportation, sanitation services, mail, and schools, for days on end. “Broke” wasn’t what happened to vases and windows; it was what happened to people, to cities.
But the economy, the newly shuttered shops and cafés, wasn’t the only omen of disaster to come. In March, the baby son of Lucky Lindy, the aviator hero of France, was kidnapped. Even the Parisians, normally indifferent to American woes (until those woes crossed the ocean), were appalled and saddened. Lucky Lindy had been their hero as well; he had chosen to end his transatlantic flight in Paris, not London or some other European city. It was difficult to find papers on days when there were updates; they sold out immediately.
Personally, I couldn’t think of anything worse than having your
child stolen from you.
In Germany, the little man with the ridiculous mustache, Herr Adolf Hitler, ran against von Hindenburg in the presidential elections, and though he came in second, many thought that he would win the next election.
“Impossible,” Man said. “The man’s an idiot.”
“Stupid like a fox about to break into the chicken coop,” Lee said. “He never smiles in his photos. That’s not a face to trust.”
Troubles began to pile up like a train wreck. Spring rain ran in torrents down the cobbles, leaked through roofs, soaked our clothes and shoes. Man was short-tempered and fiercely possessive, stopping Lee with a “Where are you going?” and “When are you coming back?” every time she went out the door. As trees began to leaf out, Jamie grew thin-lipped. My Jamie? Could it be that he was homesick?
I asked him.
“No,” he said. It was Sunday, a long free day of ringing church bells, a day free of Man’s demands and errands, and there Jamie was, sitting by the window nursing a cup of cold coffee.
“Then why aren’t you out taking photographs?” I had already taken a walk, alone, down the Champs-Élysées, and pawed through racks of used books in the stalls along the Seine. And Jamie wasn’t even dressed yet.
“What’s the point? I’ll never show them anywhere. I mean, how many boxes of prints should I fill up and stack in the corner before I admit I’m a washout?”
It was hard to argue that one. I decided on the simplest, most truthful argument I could come up with. “I believe in you,” I said, sitting in the chair opposite him. “You take great photographs. Not stylish, but that’s the thing with style, isn’t it? It doesn’t last. A new style will come and another and another. What’s important is that you photograph what you see, not what Man or Lee or anyone else sees.”
Jamie wasn’t convinced. He looked at me the way I had seen him look at his father in Poughkeepsie, with love but also a kind of distance, as if we didn’t share a common language.
“I’m starving,” I said. “Let’s go eat.”
“Go without me. I’ve got to think.”
This was the first time I had ever seen Jamie in such a black mood, the first time he couldn’t pack up his troubles in his old kit bag and smile, smile, smile. We were turning a corner and I didn’t know what was at the end of this street. Oddly enough, I thought instead of Lucky Lindy, let my heart swell with his sorrow, the hellish pain of losing a child. I thought a lot about children those days, walking out of my way to pass school yards and playgrounds where they played, wondering when Jamie would, as my mother said, do right by me. He would be twenty-five, soon.
There was a café on our corner, a nameless little place with a sandy wooden floor and dented zinc bar and a calendar on the wall from 1928. Normally, I avoided this café. It smelled of cabbage and vinegary wine and the clientele seemed unwashed and uncaring.
One old woman in particular scared the hell out of me. She had a deeply lined face, and she painted her mouth as large and red as a clown’s. Her frizzy hair had been hennaed to the color of a Christmas stocking and her ancient fur coat had patches of mange. She always sat at the same table, and no one ever sat with her. She seemed, to me, to epitomize the words “old and unloved.”
That afternoon I ate alone at the café, trying on various futures the way Lee tried on different evening dresses. Jamie’s black mood had infected me as well, and for the first time I considered the possibility that . . . I couldn’t finish the sentence, not even to myself. Of course he loves me, I told myself.
The old woman and I eyed each other over our omelets and glasses of sour wine. When I put a fork of egg to my mouth, she did the same. When I lifted my wineglass, so did she. I fled the café without finishing my solitary meal. She cackled with delight.
The next day I worked only half a shift at Boulet’s. My sales technique had improved so much that any woman who ventured near my display counter left that store with a bottle of perfume, whether she had planned to buy it or not. But customers were fewer and fewer and I couldn’t exactly lasso them in off the street corner. Boulet was disappointed, perhaps even a little angry, that the visit from the bejeweled and befurred Nimet Eloui Bey hadn’t put his place on the map. Our clientele were still shopgirls wanting a cheap lipstick and housewives needing sticking plasters.
I spent my free morning at the zoological garden, visiting the panther. When I was near his cage, I felt near to my father. When I had asked Jamie if he was homesick, the question had been for myself as well. I wasn’t. But the sense of loss was there for something I couldn’t name.
The rain had finally stopped and the morning was all warm sun and fresh breezes, keeping the skin alert to possibility, to the joy of touch. Trees showed delicate new green leaves and the air smelled of muddy resurrection, as if the world was being newly shaped. The park was filled with mothers and children, feeding my new obsession with the various nuances of wails after skinned knees, high-pitched midget shouts of anger and joy, the strange way little boys ran, with their feet and elbows all at different angles.
A group of children had gathered in front of the panther’s cage when I arrived, boys in short pants and girls in frilly pinafores, a swirling mass of screaming tots daring one another to get closer to the cage, and their mothers and nannies, looking monstrously huge next to their tiny wards, flailing and yelling to keep the children at a safe distance.
The panther himself looked bored. He yawned and I wondered, if I got close enough, would that yawn smell of the ancient amber walls of Atlantis? What exactly was the magical sweet fragrance of a panther’s breath that according to legend could so easily lure his victims?
This was the fifth or sixth time I had visited him, and every time it had been this same ritual: his initial boredom. Then he would lock his gaze onto my face, rise, and begin to pace, never breaking our eye contact. It gave me a thrill of both fear and recognition. I knew this animal couldn’t possibly be the same panther that the poet Rilke had visited and written about, yet there was something immortal about the beast, a sense that no matter what happened outside his cage, this panther would be here always.
That’s how wrong we sometimes are. But that day, the panther still had his immortality.
The children ran back and forth in front of the cage and then, in groups of twos and threes, they wandered away with their mothers, as bored as the beast himself, looking for new excitement or perhaps an ice cream. They left a scented trail of candy and shampoo and powder.
“Hi, Nora.”
I hadn’t seen her sitting under the opposite tree, smoking a cigarette, looking like a photograph of a woman sitting under a tree, smoking.
“This is a surprise. Come here often?” I sat next to Lee and accepted one of her cigarettes. It was an Egyptian brand, flavored with clove.
“Not often. Only when I need to be quiet, to think. Never one of my favorite activities.” Lee laughed and there was a hint of wistfulness in her voice.
“So, what did you come here to think about?” I asked her.
“You can guess. Lunch on me if you get it right the first time.”
“Aziz.”
“Bingo.” Lee tossed her cigarette and stretched out one long, elegant leg to crush the butt into the gravel. “I think it’s serious, Nora.” Lee said it the way a girl just invited to the prom would say, “He likes me!”
“How serious?”
“Love and marriage and baby-carriage serious.”
“Oh, God.”
Lee laughed again. “My feelings exactly. I mean, I could not have chosen a more complicated situation, could I? If you had sent me on a scavenger hunt to find the most unworkable romance possible, this would be it. Man is beside himself, of course. We haven’t discussed it, but he knows, I’m certain he knows.”
How could he not know? Since she had returned from St. Moritz, Lee had been walking on tiptoe, hummi
ng to herself, gazing dreamy-eyed into some horizon we didn’t see.
“Does Nimet know?” I already knew the answer to that question, but I wondered if Lee did.
“Don’t think so.” She pulled another cigarette out of her purse and lit it with a new silver Ronson lighter. It had been engraved, but her thumb was over the inscription.
“So what’s the plan?” I took a cigarette when she offered it, more because I wanted to read that inscription than inhale Egyptian clove, and it was what I thought: A to L. With love.
“No plan. Day by day.”
“Why tell me? How do I come into this?”
Lee looked into my eyes with the panther’s steady, fearless gaze. “I need to talk about him. Even when I’m not with him, I just need to talk about him, to feel him with me. Nora, have you ever felt like this? Why didn’t someone tell me? Jesus. It’s laughing and crying, feeling young and old, safe and lost at sea, all at the same time. It’s every opposite meeting head-on and thumping into your heart. I’m delighted. I’m terrified. And you’re the only person I can tell this to.”
She took my hand then, held it as if she were going underwater and I could pull her back up.
“Okay,” I said. “Talk. Tell me about his tailor, his education, his hobbies. Is he good on skis?”
That was a very long morning. Is there anything more boring than listening to a girl in love go on and on about her beloved? Lee wasn’t at all bored, of course. She was ecstatic. I’d never seen her like that, soft and vulnerable just from saying a man’s name.
“Thanks,” she said, an hour and far too much detail later. I think I knew more about Aziz than his mother did at that point, about his favorite professors in Liverpool where he had studied engineering; about the glass models of eyes in his doctor father’s study and how he had played marbles with them; his early chaperoned dates with Nimet; his favorite Savile Row tailor and Cairo terrace bar; the songs he sang in the shower. He loved Cole Porter.
“Got to go now,” Lee said, standing, run-down and out of words like a windup doll. “Nimet is coming to my studio for a sitting.”
The Beautiful American Page 14