The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

  Varian nodded slowly. “That’s good.”

  “Mary Jayne knows what she’s doing. Why not trust her?”

  “It’s that boyfriend of hers I don’t trust. Killer. That little cur, coming and going at all hours.”

  “What’s wrong with coming and going at all hours?” Grant said, and winked. He slid one of his knees between Varian’s. “Don’t look up at the house,” he said. “No one’s watching. Look at me. Throw a party,” he said, exerting a subtle pressure against Varian’s groin with his knee. “Get Chagall here to the house, and whoever else will come. Cast a wide net. You never know what we’ll catch.”

  “All right,” Varian said. “All right. For God’s sake, Grant. I yield.”

  * * *

  ________

  The night of the party, the household sat to dinner at the large walnut table, in the chairs carved with slit-eyed elves. Madame Nouguet circled with a tureen of turnip soup enriched with cream from a contraband cow named Io, who grazed the scrub field below the garden and slept at night in a thatch-roofed shed at the property’s edge. The turnips were the only vegetable in plentiful supply, but Madame Nouguet had scared up some pale radishes and a pile of stunted potatoes that would have been discarded in peacetime. Two feral chickens, caught by the quick-handed Hirschman, had forfeited their lives for the occasion; they lay at the center of the table in a nest of rosemary, their brown skins starred with flakes of Camargue salt. Varian could scarcely remember when he’d last eaten meat. The food supply in Marseille had continued to dwindle; the city lived now on its cellar stores or what it could drag from the sea. That, and what flowed through the black market. He would never tell anyone what he’d paid for the chocolate that flavored the postprandial cake.

  On the table, flanking the two roasted chickens, stood a pair of large apothecary jars into which Breton had decanted nearly a dozen praying mantises. His hope was that the mantises would perform their amorous rituals and that the guests would see the males lose their heads. Earlier, over cocktails in the library, Breton had presented Miriam with a brooch made from a pin-speared bumblebee; he’d found it dead on his windowsill that morning. Bravely she wore it at the neckline of her dinner gown, where it rained a dust of pollen into her décolletage. She sat beside Varian, close enough that he could see gold grains on her cold-pricked skin. On her other side sat Walter Mehring, pale and diminutive in a borrowed dinner jacket and a white silk tie, having managed, for the occasion, to overcome both his fake illness and his justifiable fears. Beyond him, in the hostess’s chair, sat Mary Jayne, patron, toastmistress, distributor of cigarettes and other favors, fanner of the conversational flame, and at her side was a scrubbed-looking Killer in a sharp-edged dinner jacket. Beside him was Hirschman, every sign of chicken-catching effaced from his being. Then there was Theo Bénédite, tranquil as a young countess in her emerald-colored gown, and Danny slim and correct beside her, brushed to a high gloss; the tall and wiry Serges, père et fils; the nervous, broad-shouldered Jean Gemähling, molesting a delicate soup spoon with the ball of his thumb; Lev Zilberman, assessing the assembled guests through the lenses of his tortoiseshell glasses; and a small host of surrealists from the neighborhood: Wifredo Lam with his great inquisitive eyes and mannerist hands; André Masson, massive and direct, sporting a houndstooth cravat; the Spanish painter Oscar Dominguez and his one-eyed friend, Victor Brauner; Jacques Hérold, whose paintings were as precise as they were strange, as if someone had turned a camera on Dante’s hell; and finally, at the head of the table, Breton, outfitted in a blue velvet jacket, smiling to himself as he surveyed the company. He was flanked by Jacqueline on one side and, to Varian’s satisfaction, Marc Chagall on the other—Chagall accompanied not by his wife but by Harry Bingham, who had already begun to whisper in his ear. Next to Bingham, at Varian’s side, was Grant, Elliott Schiffman Grant, in a sky-black dinner suit, the reunited nautilus cufflinks at his wrists.

  And all of this, as Mary Jayne told them over the turnip soup, was only the prelude. The real party would start after the dinner hour, when more guests would arrive for music and dancing. The music was to be provided by Les Conséquences, the famous Paris jazz trio, whose leader, a trumpet player, had been an intimate of Mary Jayne’s in her avenue Foch days.

  “Les Conséquences!” Miriam said. “Here in Marseille!”

  “Only the best for you,” Mary Jayne said.

  “How is it that you know everyone, Emjay?”

  “I get around. But don’t tell my mother, if you ever meet her! She sent me to Europe to marry honorably. She would have preferred me to marry royalty.”

  “My dear girl,” Breton said, “you could find no more exalted court than the one assembled at this table. Masson! Chagall! Mehring! My brother Dominguez! Victor Brauner! Jacques Hérold! Señor Lam! Degenerates, all!” He rose, bowed to the guests, and ordered Madame Nouguet to refill everyone’s glasses. Then he drew the diners’ attention to one of the apothecary jars of praying mantises, where a slim green male had already mounted a female. “We are graced, as you see, by a demonstration of one of nature’s most inexorable forces. The drive to replicate! To procreate! To germinate, though the results may be disastrous. This gentleman here must have had rumors of the fate that awaits him. Yet he is, as you can see, undeterred.”

  “It’s just a myth, you know, that the females eat the males’ heads,” Mehring said.

  “Quite wrong, my good man, quite wrong!” said Breton. “Who can substantiate my claim? You, Oscar, who grew up in the wilds of Tenerife? You, Jacques, from Moldavia, where such acts are common even among the human population? You, Monsieur Chagall?”

  “I can confirm it,” Grant said, and all eyes turned toward him. “I’ve seen it. At summer camp in the Poconos.”

  Breton tilted his head. “Pardon me? Where?”

  “An American wilderness. Pennsylvanian mountains covered in deep woods.”

  “Ah. And what did you see, Monsieur Grant, in the Poking Nose?”

  “Mantis-eating mantises. Enough to petrify a summer camp’s worth of boys.”

  “Voilà! Monsieur Mehring, what have you to say now?”

  “I’m horrified,” said Mehring, his eyes on Miriam, who, for her part, watched the pair of mantises with evident pleasure, the pinned bee rising and falling at her breast.

  Theo Bénédite, who retained more English primness than she liked to admit, blushed furiously at the sight of mantis copulation. Jacqueline, seated beside her in a hibiscus-colored gown, evidently relished her discomfort.

  “I can confirm what Monsieur Grant says,” she said. “In fact, should this lady mantis not eat her beau’s head, I propose to eat it myself.”

  Theo gasped and turned pale. Miriam clapped her hands in delight. And André Breton gazed admiringly across the table at Jacqueline.

  “I’d better have something more to drink,” Theo said, and Hirschman hurried to fill her glass.

  That was the start of it. The guests toasted each other and drank their wine. They consumed their tiny servings of chicken and potatoes, no one seeming to take note of how little there was. It occurred to Varian that, generally speaking, less food might make for more interesting dinner parties; how many had he attended where the chief activity was to cut one’s meat and sort through mounds of vegetables? The surrealists were fond of participatory theater, and a dinner party was one of their chief stages. It didn’t take Breton long to propose a game for the Air Bel table.

  “Mesdames, messieurs,” he began. “Our esteemed forebears had the stifling habit of avoiding the most interesting topics of conversation at dinner. Not so tonight. We are going to play a favorite game, one we have not played together since Paris. Tonight, in honor of Mademoiselle Davenport, we shall play Non! C’est Tabou.”

  From the assembled artists, a round of murmurs and cheers. Mary Jayne and Miriam exchanged a glance, a shrug; they didn’t
know the game. Nor did Varian, though he might have hazarded a guess.

  “Around the table we will go,” Breton explained. “Everyone shall speak a delicious truth, one that would be generally considered unutterable at a dinner table. The more shocking, the better. Young Mr. Serge shall take notes, and afterward we shall produce and distribute a commemorative book.”

  “Hurrah!” shouted Mary Jayne. “May I begin?”

  Breton raised an eyebrow. “Our hostess is eager to speak the ugly truth.”

  “It’s one of my worst flaws,” Mary Jayne said.

  Varian tried to meet Grant’s eye. They both knew—Varian hoped Grant knew—that between them were many things better left unspoken. He wished he knew how many glasses of wine Grant had drunk. And then Hirschman signaled Varian, clearing his throat to get his attention. He leaned toward Varian and said, sotto voce, “Perhaps we’d better sound a note of political caution.”

  “Ah, yes,” Varian said, and tapped his glass with a knife to signal silence. The talk died away, and there was only the sound of water playing in the fountain outside, beyond the open windows.

  “Thanks, André, for your excellent proposal,” he said. “In a moment we’ll begin. But let me remind our guests that, private and remote as Air Bel seems, Vichy is never far off, and may be interested in the content of our dinner conversation.”

  “Thank you, Monsieur Fry,” Breton said. “You may trust us. And now, mesdames and messieurs, who shall begin? Miss Gold?”

  “I cede my place to a guest,” said Mary Jayne. “Mr. Brauner.”

  The painter’s good eye projected a piercing acuity; the high round dome of his forehead called to Varian’s mind the Paris Pantheon. “I’ll gladly start,” he said. “My glass eye is ugly, and it itches. Yes, it makes me itch inside my head. An itch I cannot scratch without tearing my own face apart, which I long to do.”

  “Bravo!” Breton said. “Dominguez, you’re next.”

  Oscar Dominguez took his long chin into his hand. The V of his brows tightened in concentration. “Well,” he said. “If you want to know the truth, I hate my dear friend Monsieur Brauner. Yes, I hate him, and here is why: At a party one night at Tanguy’s, our friend Esteban Frances claimed I stole an idea of his for a canvas of mine. He called me a hack forger and spat on my shoe. I hit him in the jaw, and he struck me across the face. Then I grabbed a bottle of absinthe and broke it over the mantel, meaning to throw it at him. But just at that moment, Victor stepped into the fray. The broken bottle caught his left eye. I blinded my own friend. And thus I hate him, for making a monster of me.”

  Everyone murmured. Brauner gave a nod to confirm his friend’s story. Vlady Serge bent over his notebook, taking furious notes.

  “Thank you, dear Oscar,” Breton said. “And now you, Jacqueline. Be generous.”

  “I once had a fantasy of making love with my father,” Breton’s wife declared.

  “Phou. What little girl doesn’t? You’ll have to do better, chérie.”

  “All right,” Jacqueline said, a flush rising to her forehead. She resettled herself in her chair and drew herself up to a proud height, adjusting the gold lobster-shaped pin at her shoulder. She seemed to be resolving herself to some great confession. Delicately she cleared her throat, and then she spoke.

  “I like impressionist paintings of cats in gardens,” she said, “and women in billowing dresses, and flowers. Yes, banks and banks of flowers! I love them. I’m sick to death of the conceit that the uglier a painting is, the greater right it has to call itself art. I want to make beautiful, beautiful paintings only.”

  A hush fell over the table at this heresy, but Chagall laughed.

  “C’est vraiment choquante!” he said. “Brava, Madame Breton. You have my respect.”

  “Thank you, Monsieur Chagall. From you, a great honor.”

  “You are a master of the game, as of your art,” Chagall said. “In your hands, the beautiful is neither bourgeois nor insincere.”

  “Thank you, truly.”

  Breton smiled uneasily at his wife, then at Chagall. “And what about you, Marc?”

  “For me there is no taboo,” Chagall said. “I fail utterly at this game.”

  “Well, try anyhow. It’s required.” Breton’s voice held a glinting note of challenge.

  “All right, then. I confess: I relish the scent of asparagus piss.”

  Laughter around the table, scattered applause. Then Breton glanced across the table at Victor Serge.

  “I shall never trim my nose hair, even if it extends to my chin,” Serge said.

  Next, Harry Bingham, with some pride: “I have performed the act of love in the consular office.”

  General applause. And Albert Hirschman, not to be outdone: “I have performed the act of love at the Préfecture de Police, in a storage closet of narrow dimensions.”

  More applause. Then Masson: “I love to fuck a woman while she has her règles. I feel as though I’m murdering her with my cock.”

  “I once stole sixty-three tubes of paint from a fellow artist,” said Lev Zilberman. “A great rival of mine, who shall remain nameless. Some of them I have to this day.”

  “Orthopedic appliances excite me,” said Daniel Bénédite.

  “I prefer Turkish toilets to the Western kind,” Theo Bénédite said.

  “I began experiencing orgasm at the age of nine,” Miriam said.

  “I delight in the trimming of my own toenails,” Mehring said.

  “I have a passion for fake jewels,” said Mary Jayne, getting into the spirit of it. “And no one suspects me of wearing them!” Then she turned to Grant, at her left. “Now you, dear Elliott.”

  “I’m a Negro,” Grant said without hesitation, not meeting Varian’s eye. “My father was black. I’ve lied about it most of my life.”

  A silence settled over the table. “Is that true?” Mary Jayne said. “You’re a Negro?”

  “It’s true. Are you shocked, Mary Jayne?”

  “My dear, it would take a great deal more than that to shock me!”

  “Bravo, Monsieur Grant,” Breton said, and everyone applauded. “A secret history.”

  The game continued. The praying mantises copulated; at last one female mantis ate her husband’s head, to everyone’s horror and delight. Wine flowed into the cups, and from the cups into the guests. Varian held the edge of the table for support as a tide of burgundy washed through him. Grant had revealed his own history, no more and no less. To speak those words aloud was no small feat. In certain contexts, it would have been a matter of life and death. Why, then, did Varian feel this shameful disappointment at his core? What had he expected Grant to say? What had he wanted him to say? Had he wanted him to profess his feelings for Varian, to strip them both naked before all assembled? The wine lifted his diaphragm, compressed his lungs, rose through his throat, filled the lacunae in his brain. He himself hadn’t spoken yet; had anyone noticed? Perhaps in another moment all eyes would turn to him. What would he say or do? Break a glass and put out his lover’s eye? His own? His life—what he had once called his life—was a wrecked thing already, a ruin, its original use scarcely discernible from what remained. He must stay in control, on his guard; after all, he was supposed to be the protector of these human beings, this freight of culture assembled around the walnut dining table.

  And just when it seemed to Varian that he was safe, that the conversational pendulum would swing away from Non! C’est Tabou, the guest of honor turned to him and said, “Now, Varian, it’s your turn.”

  They were seated too close for their eyes to meet comfortably. He looked instead at the gold grains of pollen rising and falling on her chest, a mesmerizing undulation. Grant seemed to follow the direction of Varian’s gaze. A silence expanded over the table.

  “Well?” said Mary Jayne. “Will our reticent leader speak?”
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br />   A fork clinked. Someone swallowed wine.

  “The cake you are about to eat,” Varian said, “cost five hundred and forty francs.”

  “Non! C’est tabou!” Breton shouted in delight. Madame Nouguet, as if on cue, brought out the dessert, which was dissected and passed. Everyone ate and smoked. And then the doorbell rang, to Varian’s relief, signaling the beginning of the party proper. In came the jazz trio, in came the pre-Pétain minister of culture, in came refugees from Poland, from Czechoslovakia, from Germany, Russia, Yugoslavia. They came with wine, with flowers stolen from the neighbors’ gardens; they came with their work in hand, with renewed pleas for help, with stories of their escape; they came with ardent wishes of good luck for Miriam, who held Mary Jayne’s elbow and glanced around in desperate dismay, as if at a dream from which she’d soon be forced to wake. The jazz trio launched into “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and the guests pushed furniture aside and rolled up the rug, while Madame Nouguet watched the proceedings with horror. Hirschman took Miriam into his arms and led her in a smooth and energetic step. Zilberman, generally reserved, went cheek to cheek with Jacqueline Lamba. Theo Bénédite fell into the arms of Wifredo Lam. Grant and Varian leaned against a sideboard to watch, their shoulders nearly touching.

  “It’s not like you to show your hand,” Varian said, carefully keeping his gaze on the dancers. When Grant drank, he lost the ability to recognize and maintain the appropriate public distance between himself and Varian; to meet his eye at times like these was to court disaster.

  “Did I show it, though?” Grant said, and half-smiled. His voice was blurred, his posture loose. He fixed his eyes on the dance floor, at Miriam and Mehring quick-stepping in synchrony. Miriam’s dress—borrowed from Mary Jayne—had a slashed side that revealed a tanned leg. As she passed, Varian couldn’t help but watch the taut expansion and contraction along its shadowy inside surface.

  “You’re free to sleep with anyone you like, you know,” Grant said.