The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  “No need to waste it,” Jamie said, wiping at my dress.

  “We need to talk. Someplace quiet.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “We do. But let’s dance first.” The music on the gramophone had changed. It was an American tune, slow and sweet and wordless, the sentiment climbing up and down on clarinet notes soft as smoke. Jamie nuzzled his head into my shoulder, pressed me close to him, and I thought maybe we didn’t really need to talk, maybe we could just go on and on like that, close, moving together, as sure and silent as animals without language.

  At the end of the song, the electric lights were switched on, and we were bathed in the harsh reflected light ricocheting back and forth from the dozens of mirrors. People squinted as if the sun were in their eyes; they twisted their heads trying to avoid the glare.

  Lee stood on a chair, banging a spoon against a glass. “I have an announcement,” she shouted. “Hey! Attention, s’il vous plaît!”

  Someone took the needle off the record. The dancing came to a standstill, conversations halted. Everyone turned in Lee’s direction. Jamie dropped his arm from my waist and he, too, looked up at Lee. I saw something in his face that took me so by surprise that I fell back a little, as if I had been struck. Oh no, I thought. Not Jamie.

  Lee saluted the crowd. “This is good-bye, folks. I’m going back to New York.”

  Everyone in the room had been politely silent before the announcement; now they were stonily so. You could have proclaimed that Greta Garbo had just flown to the moon or that France had declared an American-style prohibition, and people would not have been more dazed, though I saw satisfaction on the faces of some of the women who had been upstaged by the beautiful Lee Miller. I could think only of the expression I had seen on Jamie’s face when he thought I wasn’t looking.

  Man still sulked in his corner, more than a little drunk by now. The room was no longer silent. It was filling with the murmur of whispers and surprised exclamations as people turned from Lee to look at Man.

  The pistol was in Man’s hand. He raised it. He pointed it at Lee. The gesture, so small in description, seemed to take three days, not three seconds; three days, the amount of time a panther sleeps before it lures its next victim with the sweetness of its breath.

  Someone gasped. Someone pointed. Everyone saw it by then, that gleaming black pistol. Lee had gone white. Even under the red lipstick, chapped in some places, her lips were ashen.

  Man took careful aim, squinting, moving the pistol slightly to the right. He was the only person in the room moving; everyone else had turned to stone. He pulled the trigger.

  I heard the click and it seemed to take years for that bullet to reach its destination. To Lee’s left, far too close to her, a mirror shattered.

  It takes broken glass a hundred years to fall to the ground, and when it does, the noise is like an explosion. Cocteau was there that night, and years later when I saw his movie Beauty and the Beast, with all the breaking, flying mirrors, I wondered if he was thinking of the night when Man fired at Lee.

  When it was over, there was a different sound. Lee was—whooping with laughter.

  “Feel better, Man?” she shouted at him.

  “Much better!” He laughed back.

  Other people around me started to laugh, too, falsely, tentatively. Perhaps this was a prank. The surrealists, they go too far, n’est-ce pas?

  Jamie thought otherwise. He dropped the whiskey bottle and lunged at Man. They grappled and Jamie ended up on top, obviously on his way to a bloody victory, when Pablo and some other man I didn’t know pulled him off and separated the two.

  “You damn coward!” Jamie shouted at Man.

  “You absolute fool,” Man said, calmly. “I missed on purpose.” He used a pristine handkerchief to wipe blood from his split lip, and I knew our days in Paris were over.

  Lee stepped off the chair and went to stand between Man and Jamie. She put a hand on Jamie’s shoulder and whispered something to him. Jamie turned away. When he raised his head, his eyes looked directly into mine though we were separated by the length of the crowded room. In his gaze I saw everything I had most dreaded. His mouth opened as if he would say something, but instead he looked away. My heart broke with the realization.

  The party ended soon after by mutual unspoken understanding. The party was well and truly over. One by one, couples disappeared from Lee’s studio that night, no one bothering to say good night, just disappearing like cast members leaving a failed rehearsal.

  As the revelers shuffled away in various stages of intoxication, Lee smiled often at Man, but kept a distance from him, and he, still dabbing the now rusty-stained handkerchief at his lip, stayed away from her.

  Not knowing what to do, only that I had to do something, I went to where Lee had stood on her chair to make the announcement, and studied the spot. Glass, sharp-pointed shards, had fallen just a foot or two from her. She could have been injured, even if Man had purposely missed. Glass could have flown into that beautiful, perfect face of hers and ruined it forever. I remembered how she had stood close to the panther’s cage, too close, tempting whatever fates had bestowed such vulnerable beauty on her, and I wished the panther had slashed her.

  Lee and Jamie were standing together, not speaking. If they had been whispering, acting slyly, I think it would have been easier. Instead, they just stood there, intimacy written large on their faces. God, how tired I suddenly felt.

  I dug my coat out from the pile on Lee’s bed. Jamie met me at the door. “I’m going to stay a while. Make sure she’s okay,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said, shivering though it was a hot night. And then, as an afterthought: “What about me?”

  “You only have to walk down the street. You’ll be fine, Nora. Damn, Man just tried to shoot Lee. I don’t want to leave her alone with him.” There was such anguish in his look I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  “He wasn’t really going to shoot her, you know. It was just another act, a spectacle.”

  “I’m not so certain.” He walked me to the door and then closed it on me.

  I walked home alone, rehearsing lines in my head. Jamie, I’m pregnant. Think you’re ready for a family yet, my darling? Think you can be ready in say, eight months’ time? And what are we going to do about Lee?

  By three in the morning, Jamie still hadn’t come home. I knew what the next step was, the next act in this particular drama. I put my coat on and walked back down the street to Lee’s studio. It was dark and silent. She hadn’t locked her door. Crackers and pretzels crunched underfoot, so they heard me coming. When I pulled back the curtain on the small alcove where she kept a bed, Jamie and Lee blinked up at me, their arms wrapped around each other. None of us said anything. What could words express that the look in Jamie’s face did not?

  I stood there for what felt like an eternity. They stared back and our speechlessness thickened our tongues and our wits, reduced us to animals incapable of language. I could have roared or whimpered. That was all. Silence was better. Stupidly, I bent over and picked up a bottle that had fallen off Lee’s table. Perfume. The room stank of attar of rose. I put the bottle back in its place and turned to go.

  I wandered the streets, after that, watching the dawn turn the eastern sky a dingy gray as the early laborers made their way to bakery shops, the stalls of Les Halles, and the few construction areas still being worked on in Depression-quieted Paris.

  When I finally returned, exhausted, to our room, Jamie was stepping out from behind the screen where we kept the towels and soap and washbasin. His sandy hair was tousled, his skin damp and pink from a scrubbing. The morning light sculpted deep shadows under his cheekbones. He had never looked more beautiful and I had never loved him more than I did in that moment just before it was all to end.

  “Say something,” he said. “Don’t just stand there, all silent and wounded.”

  “
I am wounded. But I will say something, since you asked me to. A question or two. How long?”

  He knew exactly what I meant. “A few months.”

  “How many is a few?” I needed a certain specificity, needed the incision to be clean and sharp as he cut out my heart.

  Jamie sat on the bed and rubbed his damp hair with the towel. I used to do that. Dry his hair for him.

  “After Lee came back from St. Moritz. That’s when it started.”

  Christmas. New Year’s. The day at the zoo when Lee had gone on and on about Aziz, in front of the panther’s cage. All that time she had been sleeping with Jamie.

  “Your idea or hers?”

  “Why does that matter?” He threw the wet towel on the floor and stared at it.

  “It does.”

  “One night in the studio when Man was out with Picasso, Lee started to cry. Something had happened that day, she wouldn’t say what, but it made her sad. She was crying, for God’s sake, Nora.”

  “You poor sap,” I said. I sat next to him, feeling numb except for that strange ache in my stomach, that beginning of a new life. Jamie stood up and stepped into his trousers, turning sideways to zip up in that strangely coy manner men seem to reserve for that one single gesture.

  “I have a shoot this morning. I’m going to work.”

  “And then what? Me or Lee. You can’t have both.”

  “It’s not that easy,” he said, buttoning his creased shirt.

  “Yes, it is.”

  Realizing that he was not going to answer quickly, that he was not going to open his arms and beg forgiveness, swear singular and undying love, was more painful than finding him in bed with Lee had been.

  “You have to think about it. That’s an answer in itself.” I slumped onto our bed. My knees were quaking; the floor, the formerly solid, all-too-hard floor, had turned to liquid beneath my feet.

  I had planned, this morning, to tell him about my pregnancy. Now I saw I could not. Jamie would do the right thing, I knew. He would marry me. And grow to resent me, perhaps hate me.

  “Let’s talk later,” he said. On his way out the door he stopped and patted my shoulder, as if I were a child who had dropped her ice-cream cone.

  “Me or Lee,” I called after him.

  I got my answer later that day, when I went to Lee’s studio looking for him. The door was locked. I knocked on it until Lee answered. She was wearing Jamie’s shirt, nothing else. There was a look on her face, a hardness, a kind of challenge, that reminded me of the little girl who always climbed to the very top of the tree. Who always won the race. Over her shoulder, I could see Jamie still in her bed. She hadn’t pulled shut the curtain on the alcove.

  “Good,” I said, and not even I knew what I meant by that.

  Jamie did speak, that time. “Damn,” he said.

  Lee put her hand on my arm. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said.

  “It may not mean anything to you, but it does to me. And it will to him.”

  The room still stank of attar of rose.

  • • •

  Next act: abandoned, lovelorn woman wanders down a darkening street. If this were a photograph, it would have been a distance shot, showing the woman dwarfed by the looming buildings of a city not her own. When Lee betrayed me, I lost Paris as well as Jamie.

  I went back to the room I had shared with Jamie, threw my clothes into my suitcase, and walked down the three flights of stairs for the last time, with no idea of where I was going or what I would do. I knew only I could not go back to Poughkeepsie, become a regatta girl with a fatherless child, the focus of gossip; the girl who brought silence and raised eyebrows into every room she entered. Nor could I force Jamie into a shotgun marriage. We both deserved better than long years of a marriage in which resentment eventually filled the days and nights, the wife feeling wasted, the husband trapped. A marriage like the one my mother and father had. I wouldn’t marry Jamie knowing he was now in love with Lee.

  That was when I ran into Pablo.

  I was crossing the Pont Neuf and he was going in the opposite direction, so we met in the middle. He didn’t kiss my cheek or even greet me, yet he saw the situation for what it was. The suitcase was a giveaway. We stood there together, leaning over the bridge and staring into the rippling gray water of the Seine, not saying anything for a long while. Pablo puffed on a cigarette and I worked to keep my eyes dry.

  “You didn’t tell him,” Pablo said. “That you’re pregnant. Don’t look so surprised. That’s what artists do. They see things. That’s why Jamie wasn’t a very good artist. He saw only what he wanted to see.”

  “No. I didn’t tell him.”

  More silence. Pablo coughed. He nodded at my suitcase, then took out a little scrap of paper and wrote down a name, an address, a phone number.

  “I have a friend,” he said. “I knew her husband. She’s old, lives alone. She would be glad for company. Go there, and have your baby. I’ll call her and tell her you’re coming.”

  The address was in Grasse. The south. Where they made perfume.

  “Okay. Thanks.” I took the scrap of paper.

  Pablo patted my shoulder. “Courage,” he said.

  He left, and I was alone. Bereft. Heartbroken. You can go back to the room, I told myself. Pretend this hasn’t happened. Wait for Jamie to wake up, to see what Lee really is, that he is just another toss to her. You can ask Man for the name of an obliging doctor to take care of this.

  No. I couldn’t. I wasn’t the same. Jamie wasn’t the same. Our very realities had changed and I couldn’t go back to before that moment when I saw the way Jamie looked at Lee.

  As for the child I carried, I wanted it. I was filled with curiosity: was it a boy or a girl? I already longed to hold her. A barge motored under the bridge, grays and browns over green water, a country family sitting on the deck, lunching on bread and cheese and wine from a straw-covered bottle. Children scuttled in and out of the barrels and sacks, playing. They waved up at me. I waved back.

  PART TWO

  NOTE DE COEUR

  The middle notes, the notes de coeur, rise after the départ has opened the senses to possibility and the top notes have begun the narrative. The nose loves stories, and while the top notes are the “once upon a time” opening, the middle notes begin to suggest destiny. Is the scent telling a story of passion now or remembered passion? Perhaps of love to come? Jasmine, for example, mixes well with almost any other oil, and at the same time has an almost hypnotic effect, and so can suggest past, present, or future. It must have a companion to define its story. In fact, the real story of modern perfumes is the art of blending, just as the different people who are in it are the real substance of any one life.

  —Notebooks of N. Tours

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had stayed instead of run. If I had fought and wept and shouted. Would it have made any difference? Would any of us have been spared what was to come if I had forced that situation to a different conclusion? That’s the problem with the finite. You can open only one door at a time, and you’ll never know what was behind the door you didn’t open.

  In October, Lee Miller sailed home, back to the States. I had a letter from Pablo telling me. “Jamie asked for your address, but I did not give it to him, as you requested,” Pablo wrote. Jamie could have insisted, I thought. He could have somehow forced Pablo to tell him where I was; he could have come after me. He had not. And that was that.

  The rest of Pablo’s brief letter was filled with news of Lee and Man. Lee had left him soon after that catastrophic party. Man had walked in the cold autumn rain to the Dôme, sat down next to a friend, and dropped his pistol on the table, saying he wished he were dead. And then he went back to his studio and made a self-portrait of himself with a rope around his neck and the pistol pointed at his own head.

&
nbsp; It was very melodramatic. He knew how to create an effect. Love was love, but art was art and though he mixed the two a little, he never confused them.

  “Man will survive it, I think,” Pablo wrote. “It is mostly his pride that has been injured. Lee is going back to New York. I think Jamie will go with her.”

  I folded the letter back up and put it in the bottom of my suitcase, feeling as if I were folding up and putting away my own youth. The scent of rose, Jamie’s favorite, would become for me a scent of loss. Rose had once been my favorite scent. Lee stole that as well. The envelope from Pablo included a note from Jamie and a wad of folded bills, all our money except the amount he would need for the crossing:

  “I’m sorry, Nora. I never meant to hurt you. These things just happen, don’t they? Let me know if you need anything. Pablo wouldn’t tell me where you were, he said you didn’t want him to. I think I understand. I hope someday we can be friends.”

  And this was the strangest thing of all. Despite the hurt, the anger, the jealousy, the betrayal, if anyone had asked, I would have said, “Yes, Lee is my friend,” and “Yes, I love Jamie.” Perhaps there is memory beyond experience. Perhaps we all sensed that the violence of Lee’s farewell party was a prophecy of things to come, when the bullet would not purposely miss the mark, when survival would be all that mattered, really. Seven years and more of bad luck was on its way. Measured up against simply staying alive despite the odds, everything else was child’s play. We had played rough, that was all.

  I lost touch with Lee again, after that autumn of ’32. In Grasse, in the southern hills high above the Riviera, far from the clubs and cafés and parties of Paris, few people had heard of her, or of Man Ray. And that was fine with me.

  • • •

  My life acquired a new focus: my daughter. Just as Jamie had become my focus when I was sixteen, now his daughter became the center of my life. Lee became something from a different lifetime, sensed in strange ways when a certain breeze picked up or when I woke at three in the morning and didn’t know what had awakened me.