Schiap, that year, traveled frequently and to places that would become important for the war effort: London, North Africa, Portugal. Was Schiap scouting locales, asking questions about loyalties, war preparations? If so, for whom? I guessed that Schiap was talking to people who knew people who could get tickets on steamers and planes, all the required travel papers.
Schiap worked and traveled, and Gogo traveled with her. I was alone much of the time. “Stay out of trouble,” Schiap warned before every departure. And then she would wink, and I knew her definition of trouble was a loose one with many allowances. I did stay out of trouble, though, since the only trouble I wanted—Otto—wasn’t free to be with me. I was alone and in a sour mood when I slouched into the Ritz bar one afternoon after being shouted at by Bettina.
Ania was sitting at a table, her head drooping like a wilting flower. The dim interior light played across her white-blond hair, her pale face, making shadows under her eyes and plateaus of silver on her cheekbones.
At first, I shook my head to clear my vision, thinking that too much staring at blurred red and Bettina’s shaky lines of what she thought horses should look like had affected my eyes.
No, Ania was still here, huddled into her pale blue silk coat and the famous Schiap madcap hat, that simple jersey tube that one pulled low over the ears and looked like either a fool or a femme fatale, nothing in between. Ania would never be anything less than a femme fatale.
“Join me,” she said, looking at me over her shoulder. “Another martini, double,” she said to the bartender. “One for my friend, as well.”
We didn’t speak till our martinis were almost finished. There was so much to say and so much that did not need to be said. I decided to go for the obvious.
“Charlie didn’t write to tell me you were coming back to Paris,” I said. “You have left him?”
“I only decided just before the ship left. Maybe he didn’t have time.”
Maybe you broke his heart, I thought.
“How was Charlie, when you left him?”
“I don’t know. He was at the hospital. All the time, he was at the hospital.”
I disliked her at the moment, because she could break my brother’s heart without even looking worse for the wear. I disliked her until I saw the first tear roll down her cheek, smearing a path through mascara and rouge.
“Katya is back, too, then?”
“Katya never left France. Anton changed his mind. I couldn’t stay there, not without her. I must be close to her, to see her. Here I am. Back.”
I held her as she sobbed into my shoulder.
What a mess. Was it ever simple, was it ever about one man, one woman, happily ever after?
We drank together all afternoon, drank until the official cocktail hour began and dinner companions began arriving and the gleaming bar buzzed with activity and conversation, men eyeing Ania, who somehow was even more beautiful with her smeared mascara and crooked hat, and women eyeing me because I was wearing one of Schiap’s famous black-and-white trompe l’oeil sweaters with the bow knitted into it, but it was now stained with Ania’s rouge.
The waitress lit candles on the little tables; the bartender dimmed the light behind the bar and gave us disapproving glances. We were lowering the tone of the establishment.
“Where are you staying?” I asked Ania sometime around ten, when it occurred to me that we might actually want to go home, go to bed.
“I have a room here. They will send the bill to my husband. He will pay, no questions. Almost no questions. And on Sunday, I will go and see him, and Katya. The same arrangement as before.” Ania sat up straighter, the way people do when they want to pretend they haven’t had a little too much to drink.
She had stopped crying by then and was showing interest in the activities in the Ritz bar. Postdinner couples were wandering in; the bar was filling up. It was noisy with the clink of glasses, the murmur of conversations.
“Come with me,” she said. “There’s something I want to show you.” She pulled me off the bar stool and led me out of the bar, exactly the way I’d once seen Josephine Baker lead her pet cheetah. “One of the bellhops told me about it.”
She led me through the main hallway of the hotel, down a flight of stairs into one of those passages that great hotels and houses maintain, full of linen closets and mop closets, creeping shadows and flickering lights, then down a narrower flight of stairs into a passageway so far beneath the street, beneath Paris itself, the only thing I could hear was my own breathing and the sound of steam passing through overhead pipes.
Ania pushed on the heavy steel lever of a doorway.
“Are we supposed to go in here?” I paused in the doorway. It was pitch-black inside that room.
“I go where I want,” Ania said. If your husband allows you, I thought but did not say. She reached up, flicked a switch, and the black hole filled with light.
It was a bomb shelter. I had never seen one before, but those bunk beds, the shelves of canned food and bottles of water, spoke of disaster to come. This was a bomb shelter as only the Ritz Hotel of Paris would devise. The sleeping bags weren’t made of coarse khaki and wool stuffing; they were all silk, from Hermès. The rugs were fur. Paintings and tapestries covered the walls; a chess set was already arranged on a marble game table. A Ritz bomb shelter.
We had been a little tipsy before. Now, standing in the deep basement of the Ritz, seeing their belief in a war to come made manifest, we were sobered again.
“I just don’t see Coco Chanel down here, wearing the same outfit for several days in a row,” Ania finally said, and that lightened our mood a little, but we were silent and thoughtful when we climbed the two flights of stairs and went back into the Ritz bar.
“Ania, you must go back to Boston,” I told her after we ordered another round of cocktails. “You won’t be safe here, if there is war.”
“No,” she said. “I can’t.”
“Steal her. Steal your daughter, and leave.”
“Yes. Just put her in my suitcase while Anton and the nurse and the chauffeur are looking the other way. No, Anton wants me to stay, and he is using my daughter to keep me here.”
“Does he love you that much?”
Ania laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh. “Love has nothing to do with it. You still haven’t learned. It is because I have made connections, I am useful. He wants me to come back to him.”
She was wrong, I thought. It wasn’t just because she knew people. Some women, as beautiful as they are, as kind as they might be, bring out a fiercer kind of love from men, a love that requires control and ownership, just as a beautiful painting can be owned, possessed, displayed. Anton wanted that kind of control over Ania. Perhaps von Dincklage as well.
Neither of us drank the new round of martinis we had ordered. That bomb shelter in the basement of the hotel had sobered us completely.
“I’m tired,” Ania said. “Let’s go.”
Just as we were leaving the bar, Coco and von Dincklage came in, arm in arm, laughing. They stopped when they saw us. Ania, thankfully, was wearing Chanel under the blue coat, a simple black jersey dress with a costume necklace of green and red glass, and earlier in the evening she had taken off the Schiaparelli madcap. Coco eyed her with approval.
Von Dincklage barely looked at her, gave both of us the briefest, coldest of smiles. Otto stood behind him, the formal, on-duty Otto who looked right through me, then at the ceiling.
Ania gave Coco a kiss on both cheeks. Von Dincklage, blond hair pomaded back so stiffly it looked sculpted, bowed over her hand without actually touching it. His face was a mask.
Coco gave me a hug and whispered something surprising in my ear: “Your friend is in trouble. She needs to make up to him, any way she can.” I blinked and nodded.
No one is all bad. No one is all good. Coco had won the rivalry over the baron and co
uld afford to stop short of total destruction of the woman who had been her enemy. Not all women would have been as generous.
My umbrella in a storm, Ania had called the baron. She had lost him and Coco was telling me that Ania very much needed that umbrella.
I saw her up to her room. “I still love Charlie,” she said, crumpling on the bed, one high heel slipping off her foot, the other already on the floor. “That’s the saddest part.” When I left, she was sleeping like that, in her Chanel dress, curled on her side, ladders in her stockings making her legs look mottled in the dim light.
Otto was waiting for me in the small, private lobby downstairs.
“Lily.” Just the one word, my name, but I read the look in his eyes. We couldn’t speak freely. The desk clerk was watching, Coco and von Dincklage were just down the hall in the bar, people were coming and going.
“I couldn’t . . .” he whispered, bending close to my ear.
“I know.”
“I wanted . . .”
“I know that, too.” The night at La Pausa had been instinctive, casual, impossible to resist. This time, though, required a decision. An important one. Did I want this man? Yes. I did. “How much time do we have?” I asked him.
“An hour, I think. Maybe less.”
“Follow me.”
I took his hand and he resisted, pulled me back as I tried to pull him forward, indecision making him frown.
“Otto,” I said.
“Yes. You’re right,” he said. I led him down the hall, down the stairs, down the second set of stairs, down the hall with the pipes overhead, the sound of the hotel plumbing gurgling overhead, from faraway kitchen sounds of banging pots and pans, people quarreling.
We made love in the Ritz bomb shelter, on top of a Hermès sleeping bag, both of us almost fully dressed, struggling through our clothes to feel skin against skin, the comfort of his heart beating over mine, and I knew we were bound together, but what remained to be seen was how deeply and for how long.
“This should be all there is,” Otto said. “Nothing else. Except maybe music. And your art.”
* * *
• • •
Charlie’s letter arrived the next week. Tell Ania if she comes back, I’ll try harder. We’ll get a lawyer, we’ll find a way to get Katya. You come back with her. I’m worried about both of you.
I had talked to Schiap about Ania without actually naming Ania, asking her for information about French divorce and custody laws. “If the wife commits adultery and abandons her husband and child, she will not get custody,” Schiap said. “I am sorry for Ania, but that is how it is. Of course I knew you were asking about Ania. Who else would you ask for? Do you have the new sketches ready?”
I’m not coming home yet, I wrote back to Charlie. Getting ready for an exhibit. I hope. I’ll keep an eye on Ania. What I didn’t tell Charlie: I was in love.
I questioned it, sometimes. What I felt for Otto had nothing to do with the love I had felt with Allen. Allen and I had had a future, till I had destroyed it. What future could Otto and I have? I couldn’t even talk about him with anyone, especially not Schiap, knowing the censure I would receive. I knew our meetings would be rare and brief at best. It was a love based on isolated moments, an emotion as difficult to define as true red, red without pink fading the edges or blue making it electric, or brown dulling it.
Wait seemed to be the word of the season. Wait and see what Hitler does next. Wait and see what will happen to France, if anything. I waited and painted, painted and waited and tried not to think about Otto, whom I loved.
By late summer I had enough canvases to show Monsieur Rosenberg. The thought of him standing before my works, assessing, judging, gave me nights of insomnia. No one had seen them except Schiap’s upstairs maid, who swept up once a week. But if I wanted to be a painter, I had to sell my work, and to sell it I had to have a dealer, and to have a dealer, Monsieur Rosenberg would have to judge. Shoulders back, I heard Charlie whispering in my head. Jump, Allen would have said. Take the leap.
On a clear afternoon when the returned summer heat had driven most of the population of Paris out of the city, I went back to his gallery at 21 rue La Boétie, two small paintings wrapped in brown paper tucked under my arm.
The gallery was quiet that day. Monsieur Rosenberg was in, and two assistants, and one buyer, or at least I thought at first he was a buyer. Dark-haired, young, dressed in tweeds and a bow tie, he prowled through the gallery, glaring, arms behind his back, leaning close into the paintings to see better, standing back, chin in hand, to consider, I supposed, how distance changed the colors, the lines of the painting. He grimaced as if he had just bitten into a lemon when he stood in front of a Matisse; almost growled in front of the row of Picassos.
He left without making a purchase, without discussing even the possibility of a purchase.
“Lucien Rebatet,” Monsieur Rosenberg said, after the door jangled shut.
“He doesn’t seem to think much of contemporary art.” I wondered how anyone in his right mind could find fault with a Matisse.
“He doesn’t. He’s scouting art for Hitler. The Nazis prefer the old masters, but they aren’t above buying a few Picassos just for their market value. He’ll be back in a few days to offer me half the purchase price of something here.” Monsieur Rosenberg saw the brown parcel under my arm and led me into his office.
“Rebatet writes for the fascist press,” he said, closing the door behind us for privacy. “He says the Jews want to start a war in France to overthrow the Third Reich in Germany. That the Jews want to get rid of Hitler. If only we could.” He stood in front of a window overlooking the street and for a moment forgot about me.
“Should I come back?” I asked.
“No. No. Stay.” His brisk, businesslike manner returned, and with a wave of his hand he gestured for me to untie the package. “You were here before. I remember you. A Schiaparelli outfit. Uncommon, on unknown painters, you know. She is expensive.”
“She’s a friend.”
“I see. She has good politics. A bit too much of a communist for my taste, but at least she hates the fascists as much as I do. Let’s see these paintings.”
The first painting was a study in blue with circles and triangles of ultramarine overpainted with cobalt, and thin spirals of vermilion in the upper right-hand corner. Rosenberg put the painting on an easel, stood close to the work, and stared hard at it, covering it inch by inch with his eyes; he walked away from it, chin in hand, and studied it from a distance of five feet, of ten feet. He did the same with the second painting, another study in blue but with squares of intense Prussian blue over a solid pale azure canvas.
The two paintings together, for me, were the best of what I remembered of childhood, before my parents died, the blue skies and deeper blue nights, the flashes of the red of skaters’ scarves in a winter park. Rather than a pictorial image or an imitation of a remembered vision, they were pure emotion, the unstructured story where there is no beginning or ending. Zeno’s paradox. All possibility.
I stood, barely breathing as Rosenberg spent a full fifteen minutes inspecting the two paintings, going back and forth between them.
“Good,” he said finally. “Like Nicolette Grey but with bolder colors. Who are your influences?”
“Botticelli and Fra Angelico,” I said. “Without the saints and angels. And da Vinci, of course. Sfumato. How to make modeling work when there is no subject.”
He looked at the paintings again and frowned. “I might be able to find a buyer. Abstraction is not as hard to move as it was a few years ago. I’ll hang two in a group exhibition later. Yes? You will be here?”
“I will be here,” I agreed.
When I returned to Schiap’s house, the maid had a letter for me, hand-delivered and sealed with old-fashioned red wax.
“Did the appointment go well?” the mai
d asked. She had been following my progress in the studio upstairs. “Monsieur Rosenberg was agreeable?”
“Very. He will show some of my work. But what is this, Anne-Marie?” She shrugged and went back to her dusting. I broke open the wax seal and read the note.
Come to your old studio. I’ll be there this afternoon. O.
My heart raced. Otto. Joy. And then fear. He had something important to tell me, or he would not have risked getting in touch like this, but he had never been to my studio in Montmartre. How did he know where it was? And why was he sending for me? I instinctively thought it was bad news, as bad as any news a telegram might bring. My hands shook when I refolded the note and put it in my pocket.
“I have to go back out,” I called to Anne-Marie.
Rue Ravignan in Montmartre felt steeper than it had before. I climbed and climbed, my legs burning with the strain, my blouse growing damp on my back, under my arms, in the late-afternoon stillness. Would he still be there? Had he waited and then left?
“Upstairs,” said my old landlady. No other greeting, but her glare was malevolent. People were beginning to leave Paris, and she hadn’t been able to rent it out after I left.
He was standing in front of the window, his back to the door, and even when he heard my steps behind him he didn’t turn around.
“How did you know about this place, Otto? Did you follow me?” I waited in the doorway.
The Last Collection Page 23