All this vivacity, this spirit, this tenderness Nicole brought to Paul with single-minded devotion. And more. Much more. She was no fool about art and no coward about expressing her opinions on it. Every artist worth his salt must have an egomaniac confidence in himself. But underneath this confidence will always be one small lump of uncertainty, of self-doubt, which is waiting to flare up cancerously and destroy him. Why can’t I sell, he wonders. Am I on the wrong track? If I fell in line with the vogue, wouldn’t I do better for myself? And then he is lost, sunk in guilt if he does sell out, full of misery if he doesn’t.
It was Nicole who, by acting as Paul’s conscience, barred the way to retreat from the course he had set himself. Whenever he would throw up his hands in despair for the future, they would have furious quarrels which she always won, because, I think, he wanted her to win, wanted the constant evidence of her faith in him to keep him on his chosen course.
Like a good little bourgeoise, Nicole lived at home with her papa and mama, and, since they took a dim view of threadbare young American artists, she had a hard time of it with them after Paul entered her life. But she stubbornly held her own, until at last there was a wedding service at the Mairie of the XVIII Arrondisement followed by a banquet at which papa and mama, between mouthfuls, loudly discussed their daughter’s cheerless prospects. That same evening, out of money but with the promise of a job in New York, I said goodbye to the newlyweds at Orly airport and went my way homeward to America. As a wedding present – the only one I could afford – I left them my share of the room that Paul and I inhabited on Rue Raspail.
I didn’t see them again for two years, but during that time we corresponded regularly. Nicole did the writing for them, and somehow, despite her schoolbook English, she managed to express all her warmth and wit in those letters. She was still working at Au Printemps and had wonderful stories to tell about tourists. And stories about her family, and about old friends at the University. But no stories about Paul. Only occasional phrases about her happiness with him, her concern with his working so hard, her certainty that he would very soon be recognized as a great artist. Apparently, one does not write stories about God. He is there to be worshipped, and that is all.
Then came the momentous news of Mrs Goldsmith in six crowded pages of dashing script. Nicole had fallen into conversation with this American woman at the store, the subject of Paul had come up – it never took Nicole long to introduce that subject into any conversation – and it seemed that this woman and her husband had recently opened a gallery in New York and were seeking works of art by newcomers. Naturally, she had introduced them to Paul, had shown them his work, and they were much impressed. When they left for New York they would be taking several of his pictures with them. They would also be calling on me as soon as they were home.
So they did, which was how I came to meet Sid and Elinor Goldsmith, and how I finally came into my own. At the time I had few pictures to show them – I was doing art layouts for a Madison Avenue agency at the time – but what they saw they liked.
They were not new at the game. They had worked for a big uptown gallery for years, but now had obtained financial backing sufficient to open their own place. With their wide acquaintance among people who bought art they had a head start over most, but they needed some new and exciting work to put on the market. Paul and I were not their first discoveries, but we were, within a few years, their most important. I sometimes think of what might have become of me if Nicole and Elinor had not met that day in Au Printemps, and it is not a pleasant thought.
As it was, not long after meeting the Goldsmiths I had made my first worthwhile sales and had left the agency to try my hand at painting full-time again. Also, I had got myself married to one of the agency’s loveliest secretaries. Very soon after meeting Janet in the office, I had visions of exchanging wedding rings with her some day in the remote future. When I had told her that, explaining we would have to wait because no wife of mine was going to work to help pay my rent, she smiled a Mona Lisa smile, and, somewhat to my surprise, I found myself married immediately afterward.
So there were the four of us to meet Paul and Nicole when they arrived at Kennedy one rainy night. Their appearance in New York was not unexpected. Nicole had mentioned the possibility to me in one of her letters, trying to sound lightsome about it but not quite succeeding, and Paul had written the Goldsmiths at length, saying that he was fed up with living abroad, and asking if they could not arrange some kind of part-time work for him, teaching art classes, perhaps. It would not be harder, Paul observed, than trying to get along on what Nicole earned at the store and on the few sales he had made.
As it turned out, there was no demand for art instructors, but there was a large demand among various chic Fifth Avenue stores for salesgirls just like Nicole. So at one of the most chic she took up where she had left off at Au Printemps, while Paul continued his eight hours a day at the easel. I found them a cheap flat in the Greenwich Village walk-up where Janet and I lived, and, as in my case, one room was set up as Paul’s studio.
A man will work harder out of the compulsion to create art than for any other reason. That was true of me during that period, and it applied to Paul in double measure. Because of that, because the time became ripe for us, and because the Goldsmiths were more apostles for us than agents, we made it.
There is a great divide between being an artist and being a successful artist. On one side is only hard work. On the other side is still the hard work, but now there are collectors attending your shows, reviews in the press, places on the panels of Sunday television shows. And suddenly there is money, more and more of it, the feel of it in your hand assuring you that all this is real. A great divide. And crossing it can sometimes change a man greatly.
Up to the time Paul and I made the crossing, he had been submerged in his work with fanatical dedication. And he had leaned heavily on Nicole, sustained by her encouragement, grateful for the paycheck she brought home each week, for the housekeeping she did, for the role of wife, mother, and mistress she played so devotedly. She had also been a convenient model for him, and it used to enrage Janet that Nicole, after a hard day at the store, would pose for Paul until all hours of the night, holding some bone-racking position until she must have been ready to collapse.
From Nicole, however, there were few complaints, and those few always delivered with wry self-mockery. Having art as a rival for your husband’s affections was not so bad, she would point out. There were more dangerous rivals. The unscrupulous two-legged kind with an eye for a handsome man.
Did she have a foreboding of the future when she said that? Or was it only the expression of the fear in every wife as her youth fades, especially a wife whose husband has removed her so far from homeland and family and who is that much more dependent on him? Whichever it was, when Paul’s success brought about the great change, it was clear that she had spoken prophetically.
At first, the change was superficial. Nicole left her job, as Janet had already done, to become the complete housewife. Paul leased the duplex off Sheridan Square. There was a glossy new car parked in front of it. Then there were parties every weekend, and very good and plentiful liquor to ignite the social spirit.
And there were women. There were always women at those parties, and where they came from and where they went to when the party was over was often a mystery to me. I do not mean the usual wives and mistresses. I mean those unescorted young charmers who appeared from nowhere to sit at your feet, a drink in their hands, and look up at you meltingly. There were so many of them, all strangely resembling each other in their vacuous prettiness, all apparently available to any man who cared to stake a claim. Certainly they were available to Paul. The fact that his wife was on the premises eyeing them with loathing only seemed to amuse them.
More than once I saw Paul make a fool of himself with them. On his behalf I can only say that it would have been hard for him not to. For all his years in Paris and New York, he was still the cou
ntry boy, and this alluring breed of female drawn his way by the smell of money and success was new to him. And its rapt, odalisque adoration of him, so unlike Nicole’s strong-minded partnership, was unsettling. Why not? Give any healthy man a few drinks and face him with a lovely young creature who, eyes limpid with emotion and lips parted, strains toward him, offering him the luscious fullness of her decolletage, and he is likely to make the same kind of fool of himself. Face him with Elizabeth Ann Moore, and he is in real danger.
In the kaleidoscope of those weekend gatherings, Elizabeth Ann remained a constant. Others came and went, finally disappearing for good, but she remained. I believe that from the time she first met Paul she had decided that he was to be hers, and slowly, inexorably, like an amoeba flowing around its prey and ingesting it, she devoured him.
She had the means for it. As an artist I can say that she was almost too flawlessly beautiful to make a good model, but, of course, she was not offering herself to Paul as a model. And she conveyed an air of childlike innocence, of wide-eyed, breathless rapture with life. That was the role she must have set herself long before; by now she played it to perfection. She was not one for furs and jewels either. A shrewd child, she dressed, as Janet once remarked, like a sweet little milkmaid who had $200 to spend on a dress.
In matters of the intellect she was totally ignorant. And here there was no pretence about her. She evidently lived on a diet of sickly romantic novels, lush movies, and popular music played in a slow, dreamy tempo, and when she was charged with that she would say, smiling at her own naivete, ‘Well, I guess I’m sort of old-fashioned, aren’t I?’
But she said that – she uttered all her banalities – in a soft little voice, a honeyed, insinuating whisper, which suggested that you weren’t really annoyed with her, were you? How could you be, when you were such a great big strong man, and she was such a helpless little girl?
She was as helpless as Catherine de Medici. And she had a skin thick enough to withstand any blow. That, of course, is essential equipment for the woman invading another woman’s territory. Not only Nicole, but Janet and Elinor detested her and let her know it. For all the effect their remarks had on her, Elizabeth Ann might have been getting compliments on her new hairdo. To the intent of the remarks she was deaf, dumb, and blind, sweetly smiling, more childlike than ever.
Then one night we were shocked witnesses to a scene in which Nicole could no longer restrain herself. Paul and Elizabeth Ann had left the room together, and had been gone so long that their absence became embarrassing. When they returned, absorbed in each other, slightly disheveled, Nicole burst out and told them in the idiom of Rue Pigalle what they were. Then she fled to her room while Paul stood there, ashamed and angry, hesitating about following her, finally taking the first step after her.
That was the deciding moment for Elizabeth Ann. Another woman told off in public this way would have left. She might have done it with bravado, but she would have left. Elizabeth Ann remained. And wept. It was not the ugly, helpless weeping that Nicole had given way to as she fled the scene; it was a pathetic teariness, a whispered sobbing. Face buried in her hands in the approved melodramatic style, she whimpered like a stricken child. And when Paul stopped in his tracks, when he turned to take her in his arms and soothe her anguish, we knew it was all over for Nicole.
It was Janet who went with her to Juarez a month later to arrange the divorce. The night before they left for Mexico, Nicole stayed with us at our new apartment uptown, and we were up till dawn while she talked in a nerveless, exhausted way of what was happening to her. She seemed past the point of tears now, suddenly much older and stouter, her face bloated, her eyes sunk in her head. Only when she described the great confrontation scene that Elizabeth Ann had finally contrived, the performance Elizabeth Ann had given in it, did a spark of the old animation show.
‘They were together,’ Nicole said, ‘but he did not speak a word. What a coward he is. How contemptible to let her be the one to tell me. And she? I swear she was like a diva in an opera performance. She was like Tosca preparing to die for her lover. She stood like this—’ Nicole pressed a fist between her breasts and raised her head with jaw proudly outthrust ‘—and told me about their love, their undying passion for each other, as if someone had written the lines for her. And he never spoke a word. Not one. I don’t understand, I cannot understand what she has done to him.’
What Elizabeth Ann had done to Paul might be bewildering. What she did to Nicole was very simple. After the divorce Nicole settled down in a hotel room near us. She had intended to return to Paris, she said, but the thought of facing her family after what had happened was too much. So she lived in her hotel room, visiting us sometimes at Janet’s insistence, growing a little stouter, a little blowsier, a little more apathetic at each visit. And then one night she put an end to her misery with an overdose of sleeping pills.
The scene at the cemetery was one I will never forget. It was bad enough that Paul should appear at the services, although meanly rewarding to see from his drawn and haggard look how hard he had been hit. Much worse was the sight of Elizabeth Ann at his side. There may be more obscene demonstrations of bad taste on record, but her presence in genteel mourning, a handkerchief pressed to her lips, a pitiful moaning forcing Paul’s attention her way while Nicole’s body was being lowered into the grave, will stand me well enough the rest of my life.
It was the last I was to see of Paul and Elizabeth Ann for a long time. But since they were topics of conversation when Janet and I were with the Goldsmiths, we were kept very much in touch with their affairs.
As Elinor put it, it seemed that Elizabeth Ann had a job cut out for her. Paul was obviously morbid about Nicole’s death, so Elizabeth Ann now lived with the ghost of the first wife always beside her. To exorcise it, she was, said Elinor, giving her cute little all to Paul’s career. Of his work she knew nothing and cared less, but in the art of career making she had set herself up as an expert. There were no more unattached and alluring females at the parties; not for Elizabeth Ann the mistake her predecessor had made. Now in attendance were only those who could add luster to an artist’s reputation. Museum curators and rich collectors, critics and celebrities – these were the grist for Elizabeth Ann’s mill.
When I asked how Paul took to this, Sid said, ‘With bile. His manner, if you know what I mean. He drinks too much for one thing, and then there’s this ugly way he has of baiting Elizabeth Ann into talking about things she’s completely blank on. After which he apologizes for her with elaborate sarcasm while she blushes and looks prettily confused.’
‘Darling little bitch,’ said Elinor ‘She has what to blush for. My guess is that she and Paul hate each other like poison now, and nothing is going to be done about it. He wouldn’t know how to get rid of her, and she won’t get rid of him because he’s a winning horse. So there they are.’
How much a winning horse became painfully clear to me not long after that, because, as it happened, I was the other horse in a race he and I were to run.
It was Sid who broke the news to me. As part of its cultural exchange program, the State Department was going to pick an artist to represent America in a one-man show in Russia. The artist would be in attendance for interviews, and, Sid pointed out, his eyes alight, he would be accompanied not only by State Department bigwigs, but by reporters from every important newspaper and by a photographer and writer from Life. Back in America the show would be taken across the country for a year, starting at San Francisco and winding up at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
He didn’t have to explain what this prize could mean to the one who drew it. But when he confided that I was a leading contender for it – the leading contender, in fact – I was actually left weak-kneed and sick with a sense of anticipation
It was Paul Zachary who won the race. I am not decrying his talent when I say that with a jockey like Elizabeth Ann handling him he could not lose. Among those she entertained and charmed were State Departmen
t people very much concerned with making the final choice. They must have been keenly interested when she repeated to them some scathing remarks about our national leaders and their handling of international affairs I had incautiously made before her in the dim past. She gave me due credit as the author of the remarks, of course. More than enough to settle matters for me then and there.
When the Goldsmiths reported this, I could have killed Elizabeth Ann on the spot, while Janet, I think, would have preferred to slowly torture her to death, which was the only difference between our reactions. As for Sid and Elinor, they could hardly be expected to take it too hard since Paul was as much their client as I was, and they were winners either way. Which was why they could be insensitive enough to invite us to the celebration party the Zacharys would be giving.
‘You’re out of your mind,’ Janet said. ‘Do you really think we’d go after all this?’
Sid shrugged. ‘I know. But everybody who is anybody will be there. If you don’t go, you’ll look like the worst kind of bad losers.’
‘And under the circumstances,’ Elinor said shrewdly, ‘aren’t you the least bit anxious to look Elizabeth Ann right in the eye and tell her what you think of her?’
So we went. Angrily and vengefully, which is hardly the right approach to a celebration – but we went. And throughout the evening, while Janet and I drank to get up courage for the showdown with Elizabeth Ann, Sid and Elinor drank for conviviality. And Paul drank for his own dark reasons.
Only Elizabeth Ann remained sober. She never drank much, because, I am sure, she never, not even for a moment, wanted to risk losing control of herself in any situation. And she knew that there was a situation brewing here. It was obvious from our manner that something unpleasant was going to happen before the party ended.
The Specialty of the House Page 43