♦
C.C. opened the squeaky condo door to find Amelia, sitting in the hall, blue-eyed, statuesque, imperial and hungry.
“Always know when its suppertime, don’t you?” she said to the cat, who arched her back, curling a chocolate tail into a perfect question mark. The condo was quiet with only Amelia in it, not exactly eerie but flat and mournful, empty shadows behind shadows. C.C. switched on a hall light, and another Chinese-inspired lamp in the living room, then went to the kitchen, Amelia hopping before her in a rabbit-like gait. Tuna yesterday, today liver and beef. The phone rang over the electric grind of the can opener, but Amelia got her dinner before receiver left cradle.
“Hello?” said C.C.
Nothing.
“Hello?”
“Quiola?”
“No, I’m sorry, she’s out of town. Can I take a message?”
“Out of town,” repeated a woman’s voice. “Where?”
“Who is this?”
“An old friend.”
C.C. crossed her ankles and leaned against the kitchen sink. “Who is this, please?”
“Who are you?”
“An old friend,” she countered. “I’m taking care of Quiola’s place while she’s away. Now. Who is this and can I take a message?”
“Charlotte Davis? Isn’t it? This is Evelyn. Evelyn Porter.”
C.C. gripped the phone. “Oh. Hello. What do you want?”
“Where is Quiola?”
“In Paris.”
“At the studio?”
“Yes.”
“Are you fucking her again?”
“None of your business,” snapped C.C. and slammed the phone down, muttering, “bitch.” She slid to the floor and clasped her arms around her knees. Amelia, done with the beef and liver, padded over.
“So long ago,” C.C. said to the cat, touching the brown, dry triangle of a nose. “Why do I still care, hmm?”
♦
Summer, 1982. Paris sweltered, and Paul’s old studio felt airless, stifling.
“The chickens are dying,” said Quiola. Lying naked on the unmade double bed, she tried not to move.
“What did you say?” asked C.C. from the tiny bathroom. She’d filled the chipped claw-foot tub halfway with cool water to soak her feet. Sitting on the tub’s rim in a sleeveless t-shirt, she wiggled her toes and draped a soaked towel over her shoulders.
Quiola raised her voice, “I said, chickens are dying – in the paper this morning. They don’t really sweat, and since the temperature stays high, they can’t cool down like normal, so they’re dying of heat stroke.”
“Me, too. Tonight we go some place with air conditioning. I can’t stand it. I need a good night’s sleep. I’m not as young as you are, remember.”
“We could find a restaurant that has air.”
“That, too. Dinner, and a hotel room.”
No response.
“Quiola?”
“How much will it cost?”
“I don’t care. In fact, let’s make it très expensive. We need a treat. A night at the Ritz or something.”
“I don’t have a lot of cash, you know.”
“Doesn’t matter. I do.” C.C. lifted her blistered feet out of the tub and set them down on a dry green towel she’d spread on the gray tile floor. Pentagon-shaped, the cool tiles beaded water. “People at the Ritz know my family. My parents used to stay there whenever they came over, and Ted still makes a yearly trip en famille. I can already feel the air conditioning. Not to mention the sheets.”
“I thought the Ritz was being renovated.”
“Yeah, when Al-Fayed took over. Doesn’t mean the place is closed.”
“Who?”
“Mohammed Al-Fayed. Didn’t you see Chariots of Fire last year?”
“Sure. Why?”
C.C. stepped out of the bathroom. “One of the producers was Mohammed’s son, Dodi al-Fayed. A controversial family; I think they came from Egypt. Anyway, they bought the Ritz and have been renovating it bit by bit. But we can still stay there. Let’s do it now before I melt.”
“I don’t know –”
“What’s the problem?”
“I – it’s just not right.”
“What’s not?”
“You paying for everything.”
C.C. as sat down on the edge of the bed. “I have enough money for both of us.”
“Yes, I know you do.”
“Well?”
“Maybe you should go. Get a good night’s sleep, as you said.”
“Are you nuts? Why would I want to go there by myself? Come on, Quiola, you didn’t mind so much when we were in Italy.”
“I did mind. I just didn’t know how to tell you. I don’t like
being kept.”
“Kept! I’m not keeping you, I’m sharing what I have. We’ve been sharing with each other, haven’t we?”
“But it’s not an even exchange. I can’t treat. I can barely pay for my half.”
“I don’t care.”
“But I do.”
“This is ridiculous. This whole argument is ridiculous.” She stood, picked up the phone and rang the hotel.
Three hours later, the two women and one suitcase were dropped off at the front door of the Ritz in the Place Vendôme. Vast, imposing, the old hotel stood like a well-proportioned stallion, regal, quiet, and muscular, as if always awaiting some royal rider. Such grand architectural repose made Quiola panic.
“I can’t go in there,” she said, tugging at C.C.’s sleeve.
“Of course you can. Just walk.”
“But look at me! Look at my clothes!”
C.C. stopped at the curb of the cobble-stoned street, and turned. “I am no fashion plate myself, am I? We have a reservation. My American Express card is just itching to be run through. If you really want new clothes, we are certainly in the right part of the city for it. Didn’t we just pass Dior?”
“Stop that. Stop teasing.”
“Then you stop being a baby and follow me inside where there is air conditioning before we are so drenched in our own sweat we’ll look even more down on our luck, and smell worse.” And with that, she marched up the street and through the revolving doors.
♦
Smack in the middle of a Minnesota snowstorm, Liz Moore borrowed – as in stole – a threadbare flannel shirt, faded cord trousers, a floppy hat and a thick old torn sweater, one from each of her brothers, then snuck out of the family farmhouse in the dead of freezing white night.
It was 1924. She was sixteen, furious, and lucky she didn’t die.
It started this way: there was a local buzz about some soldier-boy from her neck of the woods, who had been publishing these racy stories in the Saturday Evening Post. Stories about young people, people from Liz’s dream world: fast, audacious, beautiful girls who did what they wanted, with whom they wanted. A friend from school stopped by the farm that afternoon to loan Liz Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first two novels.
The Moore place wasn’t big, but big enough to have three separate barns: far-barn, near-barn and the tiny Father’s barn. She stuffed the first book under a coat, told her mother she needed to curry the new mare and headed across the pasture.
“I thought,” she said to C.C. and her girlfriend Susan Perry, as they sat over coffee in a pastry shop one afternoon in the fall of 1960, after Liz had paid for Susan’s passage to Paris from the States, “that no one would be in there. But I was wrong. I saw Father before he saw me, so I ducked into an empty stall and peered through the bars. He was on one knee, reaching under a rickety wooden shelf. It was dark, and at first I couldn’t see what he was doing. Our Sally, the barn cat, was squalling and then I figured it out – he was shoving her litter into a burlap sack. I screamed at his shoulders. He just stood up with the creepy crawling sack, looked and me and turned his back. For some reason, that was the last straw. I ran. Bobbed my hair for money, bummed my way to Minneapolis, then New York, London, finally, here, Paris.”
“Wh
at happened to the kittens?” asked Susan. A tall, stoop-shouldered girl, she’d folded herself into the corner seat of the table.
Liz blinked. “Why, I’m sure he drowned them.”
“I don’t want to think about that,” said C.C. She’d pulled her wire-back chair as close to Susan’s as possible, which made Liz feel a little like she was holding court.
“A working farm is a cruel place,” she said. “He’d drowned a litter of Sal’s before. Anyhow, I never went back. I made it here, to Paris, with nothing more to sell except myself. But I wasn’t going back.”
Susan’s eyes went round. “Did you?”
“Sell myself? No. I dressed like a boy. If I had sold myself, some john would’ve been very angry.” She shrugged, smiled and added, “or maybe not.”
Both girls giggled nervously.
“Besides,” said Liz, “I was bare bones. I’m not proud of some of the things I did, but I survived.”
“And?” prodded C.C. “What did you do?”
Liz reached into her jacket pocket for a pack of Lucky Strikes and lit a cigarette, blowing smoke out fast. “Things. But one night, I didn’t care about anything at all except this one particular man.”
“A man? What man? Not Paul.”
“Want a cig?” asked Susan.
“Sure. Light one for me, would you?” C.C. narrowed her eyes.
“Who did you fall for, Liz? What man?”
“All of Paris fell, all the world, really. We all fell in love that night. We knew he was coming, but so many had failed, everyone held their breath. France was mourning their own, lost somewhere off Nova Scotia. This young American – a Minnesota boy! – was flying solo. I heard people call him a fool, a kid with a watery grave. But there we were, and so far as anyone could tell, he was going to land, as he said he would, on the field at Le Bourget.”
Susan blinked through the thickening cigarette smoke, and handed C.C. one she’d lit. “Who?”
“Lindbergh,” said C.C. “Of course.”
“Lindbergh? But that was a million years ago.”
Liz laughed. “Not quite. I’m not that ancient, even if Lindbergh was the hero of my youth. I hitched a ride, walked when I had to, and got to Le Bourget as a crowd was gathering in for the night. After a while, it got very quiet and my heart went dead: was the adventure over? Had he gone full fathom five? And then we heard it, that buzzing hum, the sound of war, the sound of a mail drop – a plane. He’d made it. In an instant the field broke into a sea of whooping Parisians. I caught a glimpse of him as he climbed up out of the cockpit, squinting into the headlights, utterly shocked. In an interview I read later, he said he’d expected to land in the dark with a few mechanics about, so was puzzled, then downright alarmed, by the crowd of cars, all beaming the joy of their headlights into his face. He called us the Reception Committee of Fifty-Thousand, and said we were probably the most dangerous part of the whole flight.”
“Nearly ripped Lindy, and his plane, to bits,” said C.C. She’d heard the story a thousand times.
“They did. Souvenir hunters. But I thought: this is the new world, this world of flight. We won’t go back, never go back to rules and earthbound things. I was young. But a part of me can still feel the blood of that moment, the soaring visions of – what?” Liz fiddled with the white pack of cigarettes, making a crinkled corner dance.
“Pluck?” asked Susan, naming the Moore C.C. owned.
Liz shrugged. “I wanted to paint the unseen. My whole life changed as the world changed, because after Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, time telescoped. I remember thinking that if I could hitch a ride home, I’d be in the states in three days, rather than three months. Now that, my dears,” she said, smiling and flicking ash into a glass tray, “was something to think about.”
“But he didn’t fly back, did he?” asked Susan.
Liz fanned smoke from her face. “No. He was snapped up by the American ambassador and whisked off to see Important People. Me, I hitched a ride back to town, and sort of staggered to the atelier I was sharing with two other painters. Dirty and tired, I just crawled into my gear and slept.”
“How long did you stay in Paris?”
“A couple years. There were a lot of Americans here in twenty-six, twenty-seven, and that summer, after Lindbergh’s flight, I fell in with a group, students and would-be writers, many drunk on Hemingway and living like the The Sun Also Rises. A lot of girls in the Montparnasse cut their hair short, drank, smoked. When I found a tiny studio I could afford, I turned from a boy back into a girl. Later, after my work was beginning to sell, an older woman I’d met at a gallery took me over to the Rue de L’Odéon. I was too shy to go by myself so Rebecca West took me over, introduced Sylvia Beach, bought Joyce’s newest, and left me to wander about by myself. That Beach woman was nice. You know, C.C. you remind me, a little, of her. ”
“I do? How?”
“Your hair, for one, and she was –”
“Did you meet Hemingway?” interrupted Susan.
Liz shook her head. “Not exactly.”
“Not exactly? Like you not exactly but actually met Stein?” asked C.C.
“Did you really meet Stein?”
“Suz, I told you before she met Stein.”
“Excuse me?” said Liz, stubbing out her cigarette. “I’m still here, if you please. Yes, I really met Gertrude Stein. I disliked her. Hemingway – I had no idea that the man with the beard I saw one day was or would soon become the Papa – I never liked his work, either, so I paid no mind. Besides, what I remember most from that summer was painting, Picasso, a parade, a funeral, and riots against the Americans – but by then I was more French than American, so I got away easily enough.”
Both girls looked puzzled, so Liz added, “Sacco and Vanzetti were executed that summer – a shoemaker and a peddler. Most Frenchmen thought they were innocent. Working men attacked Americans in Montparnasse – a few of my friends got hurt, and the gendarmerie had a devil of a time keeping order. To make matters worse, that September the American Legion paraded down the Champs-Élysées. What a day that was – rain steady, Isadora Duncan’s funeral in Lachaise, the crazy loud Americans on the street. I admired Duncan, so I was upset. Such an awful accident.”
Susan giggled.
Liz’s eyes narrowed. “What’s funny?”
“Nothing,” said Susan, blushing violently. “It’s just –”
But Liz plowed over the girl. “Remind me, Susan Perry, to laugh at your funeral.”
“Hey!” said C.C., as Susan burst into tears. “Come on, Lizzie!”
“Your friend,” said Liz, wrinkling her nose as if a foul odor had crept in upon the pastry shop, “is cruel.”
By now, Susan was sobbing. C.C. had an arm around her girlfriend’s shoulders, and an angry bead on Liz. “Enough! We sometimes make jokes about Duncan. You can’t be pious all the time. Wearing a ridiculous silk scarf so big and long it gets caught in the wheels of a car is funny. It’s also vain. She was kind of odd, wasn’t she?”
Liz folded her arms. “She was a genius. And it was a horrible death. Violent, sudden and –” she stopped, gazing at the two girls. Susan had laid her head on C.C.’s shoulder. “ All right, and silly. But she was still a genius. Come, let’s pay the piper and go. I’ve had enough of the past, haven’t you?”
♦
Nancy Jones Davis stood in the lobby of the Paris Ritz, waiting for her new husband. He was asking the concierge, in halting French, what might be the easiest way to get to a bookstore his wife wanted to visit. Barely twenty years old, married a week, she’d already begun to take the measure of her husband, only to find his sleeves, as it were, a bit short, and his trousers a bit too long. Her infatuation with the young doctor had begun to mellow out into affection. She stood, nervous and a bit impatient. Her French, learned first in boarding school and then at Smith College, was better than his. And besides, she knew exactly where the Rue de L’Odéon was, she didn’t need directions. But he had to ask.
&
nbsp; She tugged at a glove, touched her hat, and settled her clutch a little more firmly under her arm. Tom headed across the rich red carpet to her. With his needle nose and already thinning hair, he wasn’t a beauty, but he was funny, and such a dedicated doctor, her heart made a little surge of he’s mine.
“Darling,” he said, slipping a hand to her elbow. “Are you sure you want to go to this bookstore? I think it must be a tad disreputable.”
She laughed. “Of course it is. Every artist I know talks about it.”
“Rue de l’Odéon. Is it in a poor neighborhood?”
“Come on, Tom. Paul would be mortified if we didn’t go.”
“Do you want a cab?”
“No, let’s walk.”
“I thought it sounded far,” he said, glancing behind him.
“Oh, Tom,” said Nancy merrily. “Nothing is ever that far in Paris.”
He smiled in a way his bride would come to understand as both apologetic and annoyed, and followed her lead.
Cold and clear, the flat, unruffled cerulean sky arched over the Seine as they crossed it, two young Americans between the wars, burnished by the armor of a yet untarnished love. They said little. The light was too perfect, the city too various, all of it new to Tom, all of it beloved by Nancy. While he took note of streets Parisian, she drank in the comfort of sunflowers or daisies sold in dull silver pots, ivy and architecture, the winter’s sharp metal air. She wore a cloche she’d bought yesterday, one with a small brim, and a fur trimmed coat from Revillion & Cie, 89 Rue de Petite Champs, bought with her mother’s money and at her mother’s insistence, though the extravagance made Tom wince. When Nancy caught a glimpse of herself in the bookshop’s plate window, she felt, well, quite modern.
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