The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  As foreign as the city was, it was hard to be homesick in Paris. It was filled with Americans, all come for the same reasons as Jamie and me, to be elsewhere, to soak up the wonderful exoticness of a place not home. In Café de Flore, the gossip was in American, full of Southern drawls and clipped New England vowels. When you went to the races at Auteuil—and who did not?—the women wore afternoon costumes purchased at Bergdorf’s and the men wore Texas brimmed hats.

  The gardens, parks, and avenues of the city were lined with young Americans sitting in front of their easels, painting oils and watercolors of Notre-Dame, horse chestnut trees, and French schoolchildren escorted by nuns—all to be sent back home, to Chicago or Memphis or Boston.

  Paris had become the center of gravity. It drew in anyone not nailed to the ground by a different reality, and it had drawn in Lee Miller as well, who had left New York and returned to Paris about the time Jamie and I went there.

  A few times I thought I saw her. I’d glimpse the back of a tall blonde strolling the Champs-Élysées, or a profile of a woman sitting in a café with Lee’s long, elegant nose. I had no idea how to find her . . . or, for that matter, why I would want to. We had gone our separate ways. Childhood felt long ago.

  Jamie and I soon established a routine for ourselves. He took photographs in the morning, haunting the streets during the precious early morning light, and I went with him, holding his camera case, cleaning lenses, scouting ahead for interesting shots, for lovers kissing under bridges, lean dogs sleeping in private courtyards, old men smoking in front of a tobacco shop, women scrubbing the household linen at a municipal washing trough.

  After a café lunch of ham and cheese, wine, coffee, we went back to our room and made love, and then slept wrapped in each other’s arms. I had not known that such happiness existed, being full of Jamie, full of Paris and the light and smells and tastes of that city. I was light-headed with joy. I even loved the smell of the exhaust from the cars, when rainy days trapped the air close to the ground.

  In the later afternoon we strolled down the Champs-Élysées, or explored the Roman catacombs running much of the Left Bank, or took the metro to Odéon to sit on a bench at the Luxembourg Gardens. We stopped for coffee or a little glass of brandy when we grew tired, ate bread and cheese when we were hungry, and then when it was dark, went to a bar or café to drink for hours with friends we quickly made, tripping home in the early morning, singing, making love back in our room.

  A month, three months, six months passed and Jamie’s portfolio thickened with photographs and he needed to purchase a second, then a third portfolio to hold them all. He had met some other young American artists, none of whom had yet a dealer or a gallery, but it was just a question of time, wasn’t it? The world could not hold out against them forever; soon they would have an exhibit, and they would sit drinking in the evening, thinking up names for the exhibit: The Outlaws, The Stoics, The Pont Neuf Exiles.

  “We are going to rent a hall,” Jamie said one summer evening. We were sitting at the little table in our new room in Montparnasse. Even a fleabag hotel had become too expensive and we had moved to a single room. We didn’t have an indoor toilet or hot water, and the walls were so thin we heard the quarrels going on all around us in the other flats, but those things just added to the romance of it all, that’s how young we were.

  It was so hot that night that we sat wrapped in dampened towels, and I had poured water over my head to cool it. Drops of water dripped into my eyes so that when I looked at Jamie, he seemed to be underwater.

  “A hall?”

  “For an exhibit. We’ll put it up ourselves. One painter, one photographer, one sculptor, and a poet who will read his work at selected times.”

  “Sounds swell, Jamie.” I wondered how much it would cost, and if his allowance from home would cover the expense of a hall in addition to our rent and meals. “I was thinking. Maybe I should try to get some work.”

  Jamie laughed. “What could you do?”

  I decided to consider it a challenge. “You’ll see.”

  The next morning, when he rose early to go in search of shots, I did not go with him. Sometime during that sleepless night, I had decided that I would be very good at floral arrangement, and I spent the next morning scouring the florist shops of Montparnasse and Montmartre, offering my services.

  None of the business owners I spoke with agreed that they needed an American with bad French to arrange their bouquets. Refusing to acknowledge defeat, I bought a pail of red carnations, the entire thing, and walked past the Eiffel Tower to the Allée des Cygnes, where there was a miniature copy of the Statue of Liberty. I set my bucket down and, with a single red carnation between my teeth, smiled and waved at the passing tourists. I had sold half the bucket, earning about the equivalent of three dollars, when a strolling gendarme stopped and asked to see my license.

  “But I don’t have one!” I said, smiling even more largely.

  “Ah. Then I must give you a ticket,” said the young man.

  I tried to weep for effect, but when you are young, in love, in good health, and it is a sunny day in Paris, tears do not come easily.

  “Maybe just a warning?” I pleaded. I went home with a huge bouquet of the remaining carnations for our own table, and the three dollars still in my pocket, and the warm memory of that gendarme’s smile as he warned the “little American” to read the laws before she tried to set up a business again, even on a street corner.

  “You don’t need to work,” Jamie said that evening after I told him about my day. “I’ll take care of us. I missed you, working by myself. Come here and give me the kiss that policeman probably expected and didn’t get. Did he? No? Then it is mine.”

  Such happiness does not last. The half-life of a good, strong perfume is usually three hours. The half-life of love is measured in years, if you are lucky, not hours. But it is measured just the same.

  I was in Café de Flore, drinking coffee and talking with a friend, Madeline from Albany, when the man sitting next to us put down the paper he had been reading, stood so quickly that he was unsteady on his feet, and rushed out the door.

  “He’s in a hurry,” Madeline commented. She had a high-pitched voice that carried quite a distance, and the other diners looked up as well. Our waiter pursed his lips and blew through them, making the familiar sound of Parisian disdain. He took away the half-drunk coffee, the untasted ham and cheese baguette, but before the waiter could take the paper, I reached for it.

  It was the New York Times, the Tuesday, October 29, edition.

  “‘Stock Prices Slump Fourteen Billion Dollars in Nation-Wide Stampede to Unload,’” I read.

  “Daddy must be so upset,” Madeline said, looking over my shoulder. “Poor old thing. Bet he’s going to cut my allowance. And I just ordered a dozen new frocks.”

  “Just a dip. It’ll right itself,” Jamie said, back in our room on rue Froidevaux, across from the old cemetery. “Dad must be nervous, though,” he admitted, after he had thought about it for a moment. “I can’t go back yet, Nora. We’re okay.” When we made love that afternoon, rolling naked in the warmth of the early autumn weather, Jamie seemed a little preoccupied. “Don’t worry,” he repeated so often that I began to worry.

  Soon after, Jamie had a letter from his father explaining that his monthly income would have to be reduced a little, but otherwise all was well. People would always buy bread. A month later there was another letter, saying that the Tastes-So-Good Bakery had almost defaulted on a loan and staff were being laid off.

  “Come home,” his father wrote. “It’s time.” Jamie grimaced and tugged at his ear, the way he did when he was upset. “No,” he said back to the letter.

  We were sitting on a bench in the Tuileries gardens, feeding to pigeons the crumbs of our leftover lunch. It was two days before Christmas and the gardens were browned and empty of color and scent. Jamie hadn’t r
eceived his money from home for the month and we had enough cash to last one more month, if we were very careful.

  The planned exhibit of the Pont Neuf Exiles had already been called off for lack of funds, and the sculptor had taken a boat back to the States. Jamie wasn’t smiling as often as he used to.

  “What else does your father say?” I asked.

  “Here. Read it for yourself.” Jamie thrust the letter at me, and stood to pace on the graveled path, smoothing back his thick blond hair with the palm of his hand. He had grown it longer, so that it grazed his shirt collar and waved over his ears, like an artist’s.

  I read the letter. There was a one-way ticket waiting for him at the steamer office, his father had written. Jamie was to sail immediately.

  “Just one ticket,” I said weakly.

  “Don’t worry, Nora.” He stopped pacing in front of me and leaned down to give me a quick kiss. “I’m not leaving. I’m not leaving you. I’ll find work.”

  “You’ve already tried,” I pointed out. It had been the same story in Paris as in London and New York. The galleries weren’t interested in his photographs, and the newspapers, even when they bought one or two, did not pay enough to live on.

  “Maybe he’s right. Let’s go home,” I said. “I’ll find money for my ticket.” For the first time since leaving Poughkeepsie I felt afraid. Something seemed to be coming, something bad, something you couldn’t fight. It was much more than the sense of a party ending; it was the sense of an ending to be followed by something menacing and unknown.

  “Let’s get married and go home,” I said, throwing out the last of the crumbs. Pigeons cooed and pushed one another at my feet, black and white and gray birds pecking at crumbs on a gray and white path, as monochromatic as a photograph.

  Of course we couldn’t go back without being married, without telling lies and saying we had been married all along, ever since running away to New York. Lee Miller could do something like that, live with a man “in sin,” but not me.

  “Soon as I’m twenty-five,” Jamie said.

  “Your family will understand if you jump it a couple of years,” I said. “Won’t they?”

  Jamie didn’t answer. His father had sent one return ticket, not two. I was still just the gardener’s daughter.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A month later, our funds exhausted, both of us were numbly aware of that single ticket for the steamer back to New York, waiting for Jamie to pick it up.

  “We’ve got enough for a dinner and a couple of drinks,” Jamie said. “Let’s go out. Put on your prettiest dress, Nora. That one with the red flowers on it. I’ve got a feeling something good is going to happen.”

  I dressed. We went out. Although we knew Paris quite well by then, we might have been experiencing it for the first time, that night. I wondered if that meant we would leave soon, that we had gone back to the beginning only to find it was an ending.

  Montparnasse was quiet that evening. It was January, cold. The festivities of Christmas and New Year’s were over and now it was just winter with nothing to look forward to but a spring you didn’t really believe in. People were inside, huddled for warmth. It wasn’t until we reached the larger boulevards that we found that pleasant sense of being in a sympathetic crowd, heard the soft voices of other conversations going on around us.

  It began to snow. Large, feathery flakes hovered in the yellow circles of the streetlamps, undecided which way to float, and then disappeared before they landed on the cobbles. We turned off the Champs-Élysées and walked a bit longer until we stood in front of the Jockey Club on rue Rabelais. Light flooded from its windows into the surrounding darkness. We heard laughter, and music.

  “We can’t afford this place,” I said, peering in the window at the mass of people inside. I had cut my straight, black hair and hanks of it kept falling into my eyes. “Jamie, look at the pearls that woman is wearing.”

  The Jockey was a bar where people like James Joyce and Hemingway drank, the already famous, and even if they weren’t rich, they were surrounded by rich people, and their credit was good. Ours wasn’t.

  “You’ve got to think big,” Jamie said. “Straighten your hat, Nora. We can sit at the bar and have a beer. Just one.”

  I hesitated in the doorway. And as I did, a group of six people approached, laughing loudly and shouting back and forth in French and English and German. It was Lee Miller with her friends.

  Lee had the good looks you never confused with a different person, a different face; she had style and daring. That evening, she wore trousers and a coat of white cashmere, and a white cap tight around her head so that she almost looked like a boy, except for her mouth, which was painted bright red, and the smoky kohl circling her blue eyes.

  When she saw me, she paused and there was a second of confusion in her perfect features.

  “I know you,” Lee said.

  “Yes,” I said. “When we were . . .” I was going to remind her that we had once been playmates, but she spoke over me, interrupting.

  “The girl from the bookstore. You gave me your hat. Man,” she said, “come see. Another girl from P’oke. And she gave me a hat once. Isn’t she fabulous?”

  Her escort moved closer to us. He was several inches shorter than Lee, dark haired, stern looking, carefully and expensively dressed in a charcoal pinstripe suit and camel hair coat. I had seen his photos in newspapers and magazines. Man Ray, the artist and photographer.

  Man Ray and I shook hands. Jamie had frozen the way a hunter freezes when a stag crosses his path. He was a businessman’s son. He knew opportunity. Gently, his hand pressed into my back, he pushed me slightly forward, closer to Lee and Man Ray.

  “She looks like Clara Bow, doesn’t she?” Man said. The four others with them circled round me and stared.

  Lee reached up and brushed snow off my bangs. “Were you going in? Come have a drink with us.”

  “Thanks.” Jamie stepped forward, took his cap off, and tipped his head at her, like a delivery boy would, and then at her escort. “Mr. Man Ray, I know your work. I’m a photographer, too.”

  “Of course,” Man said in a bored voice. His five-o’clock shadow made his face look blue in the lamplight. Man was looking at Lee, who was looking at Jamie.

  Jamie still looked like what he had been: a high school football hero, a heartthrob. He had sandy blond hair and seductive brown eyes and the shyness evident in his posture, that frequent downcasting of his eyes and the way his head often tilted to one side during a conversation, all that boyishness made him even more appealing.

  Lee and Jamie had never met before, not even in our small town. She had gone to private schools, partied with a different crowd; they were two kids from Poughkeepsie finally meeting in Paris.

  A moment, frozen in my memory like a photograph: a winter night on rue Rabelais outside the Jockey Club, where two girls from Poughkeepsie bumped into each other, each clinging to her beau’s arm; the four of us in the falling snow, music from the club wafting out with the smell of tobacco, perfume, whiskey; each of us looking in a different direction—me at Jamie, Jamie and Lee at each other, Man at Lee. The memory stops there, holds its breath. All is silence and stillness, encroaching shadow. And then we move into the doorway.

  Thresholds seemed to be my meeting place with Lee.

  Man made that palms-up gesture that men of means make, ushering us out of the cold dark into the overheated club, smiling benignly at us and carefully avoiding standing next to Jamie, who was so much taller than he was. Lee guided us through the crowd at the bar to a quieter table in the back and we sat, the eight of us, left to make our own introductions since Lee and Man were furiously whispering together, Lee rolling her eyes, Man once pounding the table with the flat of his hand.

  The two other couples were a German art collector and his wife, Herr and Frau Abetz, and a photographer’s model with her husband. Frau
Abetz was already very drunk and when she introduced herself—“Call me Trudie, my dears”—her words slurred. Her lipstick was smeared; her white blond hair, lighter even than Lee’s, had fallen out of its chignon and dangled over her red cheeks. She had the kind of full, voluptuous figure that would turn to fat if she wasn’t careful.

  Her husband was busily, almost industriously, flirting with the model—black-haired, pouty-mouthed, wearing a beaded dress cut low at the neck and high at the knee. His hand pounced on hers and held it prisoner; the bouncing motion of his knee pressing into her thigh pulled at the rumpled tablecloth.

  Lee and Man’s whispered conversation seemed to end in Lee’s favor, for she resumed smiling and he did not.

  Trudie, calmly ignoring how her husband was now nuzzling the model’s long neck, leaned over toward me and whispered, “Six months. Then Miss Miller will leave him. Want to wager? Poor Herr Ray. He’s Jewish, you know.”

  Jamie sat next to me, listening, watching. He was normally full of energy, always in movement except for the moments it took to hold his camera steady, and now he was as still as a cat waiting to pounce.

  Man went to find a waiter and Lee smiled at Jamie. He smiled back.

  “I’m from P’oke, too,” he said.

  “Really?” She leaned toward him in the kind of gesture that is meant to exclude others from what has become a private conversation. “Let’s not talk about P’oke. What do you do now? Why are you in Paris? Most of the others have left like rats leaving a ship. You’d think the world was ending just because the market dipped a bit.”

  “I’m working,” he said. “Trying to work. I’m a photographer.”

  “What’s your name?” the German art collector asked, removing his right hand from whatever it had been doing under the table and pointing at Jamie for emphasis.