The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  “Nora, what are you doing here? I’ve got hours’ more work to do.”

  “No, you don’t,” I said.

  Jamie put down the glass jar of developing chemicals he had been carrying, placing it carefully on the middle of a table. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Julien Levy is leaving first thing in the morning. He isn’t coming to see your work. Man just told me.”

  Jamie’s mouth opened, then closed. I heard his quick, forceful exhalation and then it seemed he stopped breathing, stopped moving, stood there like a statue, half-turned away from me. His hands had curled into fists.

  “Come home with me,” I said. “It’s late.”

  “Lee didn’t say anything about it,” he muttered. “She didn’t tell me.”

  “I think she just found out today,” I said.

  “No, she would have known even before Man found out. The bitch.”

  “Hey!” I said.

  Jamie smiled and I wished he hadn’t. It was the kind of smile that means trouble, that means something has happened, a crossroads or turning point has arrived, and things will never be the same.

  “You watch yourself, Nora,” he said. “She’s nobody’s friend, that one.”

  His mood changed after he said that. His hands released their fisted tension, and he even tried a smile, a real one. “I’ll clean up here. Then we’ll walk home. I don’t feel like going out to a café tonight.”

  It was almost midnight by the time we reached our apartment, our bed.

  Jamie flung himself onto it, exhausted. I would have screamed and wept with frustration and fury, but Jamie merely put his arm over his eyes, as if the light from the bare bulb overhead hurt them.

  “There will be other opportunities,” I told him.

  “Sure.” He sat up and lit a cigarette, taking a long, harsh drag and slowly blowing out the smoke. “Sure there will.”

  I poured two glasses of whiskey, big ones. I sat next to him, leaning my head on his shoulder. I could hear the couple upstairs arguing about the new dress she had just purchased even though the rent wasn’t paid, their voices crackling like a faulty radio through the flaking plaster walls. Across the hall, the gray-haired nameless sculptor who lived in that single room had put a record on the phonograph to dull the noise of the upstairs quarrel—Josephine Baker singing “J’ai deux amours.” He had played it so often the hissing scratches obscured Josephine’s voice in some phrases.

  “Sure there will,” Jamie repeated.

  Julien may or may not have been called back to the States a day early, but even so, why had Man left Jamie’s name at the very bottom of the must-visit list? Stupidly, I said it aloud.

  “Because no one has ever heard of me,” Jamie explained.

  “But then what’s the point of discovering a new artist if everyone already knows about him?” I complained, raising my voice over the muffled music and the quarreling neighbors, wondering if this was how Mozart had developed his songs for four voices—a combination of anger, frustration, lyricism, and thin walls. “Damn Man. Damn Julien Levy.” I said it because Jamie would not.

  “Right,” Jamie agreed, slugging back more whiskey. His mouth worked in a funny way, the way children’s do when they are trying not to cry. He sucked on his bottom lip to stop the quivering, then jumped up and pulled me into his arms, and we danced to the scratchy music coming from across the hall, that other expatriate American, Josephine, singing that she loved two places, her home and Paris.

  “Ever wonder if we did the right thing, coming here?” Jamie asked, staring at the ceiling. “We were having fun in New York, weren’t we?”

  I didn’t remind him that we had left New York because he hadn’t been able to get a gallery. Or that we left London because he couldn’t get a gallery there either. We had washed up in Paris to look for a gallery. Well, “washed up” wasn’t fair. Paris was its own delightful, gravitating reason; we didn’t need an excuse to want to be there. But the three years since our arrival had been a search for Jamie’s success, a success that seemed as elusive here as it had in good old P’oke.

  I knew no more about photography than Lee and Jamie had taught me, yet even I suspected that Jamie’s photographs were somehow lacking. When he tried to be a surrealist, he merely imitated. If Man photographed Lee wearing a cage on her arm, he asked me to pose with my leg wrapped in chains and my head cropped off. If Man photographed an apple with clock hands on it, Jamie photographed a pineapple wearing a hat.

  The prints were good, technically. Everyone agreed on that. But. With Jamie’s work there was always a but.

  The photographs that moved me, that seemed exceptional, were his unstaged street shots: children playing in piles of leaves in a fenced school yard, maids still in uniform daydreaming in front of a fancy shopwindow in the place de la Concorde, men playing boules in the alley next to a butcher’s shop in Les Halles. He had a feel for those images, more than Man had, or even Lee, because he had a feel for the people, the real people, not the names, the celebrities, the leftover aristocrats—for the people who survived the events, not the people who created them.

  Such images, though, were not fashionable. Atget and Brassaï had already taken those images years before, and now they were merely romantic, good for a local paper back home to show people who had never been abroad what Paris looked like at dawn, how the children played, what young women wore on their hats. But not good enough for a gallery.

  • • •

  That November, the textile factories in France starting going bankrupt. Beggars appeared at the outdoor cafés, caps in hand, only to be chased away by waiters. Some of them were children. Guilt tingled my scalp whenever I sat outside and tried to enjoy a café crème, a brandy, a quick sandwich.

  “Something very bad is coming,” Lee said. “I can feel it.” We were at the Dôme again, but had decided to sit inside. Because of the cold, we agreed, but it wasn’t the only reason. Watching the newly unemployed walk up and down the boulevards, their faces haunted and haunting, was not a pleasant pastime.

  It was November 25, and I had woken up with the phantom memory of a taste of turkey dinner, the closest thing to homesickness I had experienced since I had been away. Lee had suggested we go to the Dôme and see if they had prepared any dinde for the Americans.

  We had made up the quarrel by then, Lee insisting that she hadn’t known Julien Levy was leaving a day early. Man hadn’t bothered to tell her, so how could she tell us? I believed her. I wanted to believe her, though I still felt a clinch of distaste and anger every time I met Man, and that was almost daily.

  Jamie had sent a batch of photos home—postcards, he had called them, sneering at his own work—and his father had sold them to the Poughkeepsie papers. We were back to square one. “Don’t tell Lee,” he had instructed me, his face burning. The P’oke paper offered more for a spread of four photos than Man had paid him in a month of servitude.

  That night, that November 25, Jamie had received the check from the Poughkeepsie paper, so when he joined Lee and Man and me at the Dôme, he was in a good mood. He shook Man’s hand, a real grasp of a shake that pumped Man’s arm all the way up to his shoulder. He gave Lee a kiss on the cheek. “Other one,” she said, turning her face for the second kiss. Jamie hesitated and kissed her on that cheek as well.

  “We are hoping they have turkey,” I told Jamie, making room for him next to me.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Lee said darkly. “I already asked. They didn’t cook any turkey today. Not enough Americans left to bother. I really wanted turkey and gravy and cranberry sauce.”

  “Then go back to Poughkeepsie,” Man said. “Run back to Daddy.” From his voice, you could tell that was exactly the opposite of what he wanted Lee to do. In fact, it was his fear of what she might do . . . leave him.

  “Let’s eat ham and sausages like we usually do. When in Rome,” Jam
ie said. “Brrr. I think it’s warmer outside than in.”

  “Maybe I will go back home,” Lee said.

  The waiter came, the white dish towel tied around his waist stained with mustard and tomato sauce, his black shoes dusty and scuffed. Standards were slipping. He lit the candle on our table, then stood morosely as only jaded Parisian waiters could, and waited.

  “Sausages,” Man ordered. “Four orders. Boiled potatoes with parsley. Green salad. Rosé wine, the Cresci.”

  “No, I want chicken,” Lee said.

  The waiter stood there, looking like Job with a new rash to plague him. He knew that Man placed the orders for all of us, yet Lee had changed the order of things. What to do? Man was obviously the authority, the head of the table, yet Lee was, well . . . no one said no to Lee. The waiter considered, wiped his forehead on the stained cloth, then turned on his worn-down heel without answering.

  Fifteen minutes of our very stilted conversation later, he returned with a platter of sausages and stuffed chicken legs that looked like sausage. If only all situations could be so easily solved. By the third bottle of Cresci we were laughing again, chatting loudly and shouting over one another. Lee and Man were holding hands on the wine-stained cloth and Jamie had his arm around my shoulders. When he thought no one was looking, his hand slipped beneath my blouse and he brushed his fingertips over the bare skin, making me shiver like meadow grasses stirred by a breeze.

  The old men at the table next to us were watching, though, and raised their glass to Jamie.

  I wish I had a photograph of that night, that moment, when there was nothing we couldn’t overcome, nothing we couldn’t ultimately laugh at. Life was a bowl of cherries and weren’t we just Yankee Doodly Dum, looking swell on the sunny side of the street.

  • • •

  In December, Lee bought new ski pants and a fur hat and went with the fashionable crowd, skiing in St. Moritz. Man didn’t go. Too busy, he lied. Too expensive, I knew. He couldn’t afford it, while Lee was earning money hand over fist, and there was always Daddy’s allowance to see her through any tight spots.

  Man and Jamie and I saw Lee off at the train station, waving forlornly like children not taken on holiday. “I’ll be back soon!” Lee called brightly out the window, her breath steaming in the cold air. She looked very happy. Perhaps, I thought, looking sideways at Man’s darkening face, too happy.

  At the resort, Lee met up with Charlie Chaplin and his friends. She sent me some photos taken with her little folding Kodak: Chaplin at a formal restaurant with a napkin on his head, a spoonful of mashed potatoes playfully splattered on his cheek; next to him, Gloria Swanson looking vampish; and on Chaplin’s other side, Gary Cooper brooding handsomely into the camera.

  Vogue also published photographs of the season, since St. Moritz was the most fashionable place to be on the planet, once snow blanketed the ground. I thumbed through the magazine at Boulet’s shop so that I wouldn’t have to buy a copy, and was studying the new fashions for that season, the ever shorter skirts, smaller hats with turned-up brims tilted over one eye, the fur trim on jacket sleeves, wide-legged velvet trousers. Not that I would be wearing any of them. I bought my clothes at a secondhand store and they were always three or four years out-of-date.

  There was one dress, though, that turned me green with covetousness. I flipped the page to see if there was a second photograph of it, flipped right to a page spread with the St. Moritz crowd, the Prince of Wales sloshing down the slopes in less-than-princely manner, the bediamonded celebrities taking tea in the pseudo-quaint shops, Lee and Charlie Chaplin dancing friskily in a nightclub, his mouth open in a shriek of Little Tramp delight, his arms positioned over his head like semaphore flags, Lee vamping over her shoulder for the camera. Another photo: Lee and Charlie and Gary and Gloria at dinner in some swank chandeliered dining room, candlelight making the photo a little hazy in some places.

  Next to Lee sat Aziz Eloui Bey.

  Lee looked . . . it was hard to think of the right word. Peaceful. Serene. There was an uncommon openness to her face. This was what Lee looked like when she was unguarded, I thought. Maybe Man was always photographing her in cages and traps because he sensed the invisible protective cage she wore around herself in Paris.

  Aziz looked like the little boy who had caught the brass ring on the merry-go-round. And his wife, Nimet, smoldered next to him, looking as if she were about to catch fire and burn the whole place down.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A week later, Lee was still in St. Moritz and as usual I went to Man’s studio to meet Jamie so we could go to a café for dinner together. Jamie wasn’t there. Man was.

  “There’s a sitting tomorrow, so I sent him out to buy some more glass plates,” Man said, opening the door to me. “Come in. Want a drink?” He brushed snow off my hair and shoulders. He smiled. “Come in,” he said again.

  I had walked into that studio a hundred times without hesitation. That night, I hesitated, the way my aunt’s poodle had when it was time for a flea bath, wanting to obey, to not give trouble, yet not wanting to come out from under the sofa because of what lay in wait. Man had smiled more at me in one minute than he had in the past year.

  “What’s up?” I said, stepping over the threshold. My boots left damp footprints on the old Oriental carpet.

  “Nothing. Just thought we might have a drink together. Get to know each other a bit.” Man helped me out of my coat and guided me to the worn sofa. “Sit on that side,” he said. “It’s closer to the stove. You look cold. That’s a pretty dress you’re wearing. Very flattering.”

  He looked exhausted, but not from physical exertion. Troubles in the soul, my father would have said.

  “Missing Lee?” I asked, accepting a glass of whiskey.

  “Not at all,” he lied. “She has her life, I have mine.”

  Man and I had never been alone together before. We had never had a reason to be. Now there was no one else to look at, no other face on which to focus, so I studied his face, the wiry black eyebrows, the squarish Edward G. Robinson–style jaw (no coincidence there, Edward G. being another Emanuel, another son, like Man, of Eastern European immigrants). The broad W of Man’s hairline over his sloping forehead looked dangerous. He smelled of acrid photography chemicals and underneath that of bay rum aftershave.

  He was an attractive man who dressed well and carried himself with confidence. Lee’s feelings for him had been very genuine and not merely opportunistic, as some had suggested. But nothing lasts, especially not love. Wrong, I told myself, clutching the glass of whiskey Man had given me. Me and Jamie. We’re going to last. I felt that, knew it to be true with every bone in my body.

  It was already night and dark. Man had turned off the electric light that hung from the ceiling and we sat in the uneasy dark, illuminated only by the streetlight shining in through the window. The night was very quiet in the way that snowy nights can be, all sounds muffled. Once in a while a taxi honked.

  Man started to hum a tune under his breath. That, Lee had told me once, was his cue that he was feeling romantic, and that was how I knew Man had seen the photos, too, of Lee sitting next to Aziz with that strange, unfamiliar glow on her face.

  I knew what was coming and why, but I wouldn’t be used that way, as a tawdry revenge on a straying mistress. Curiosity kept me seated, though, inhaling the dust of the sofa, the bay rum aftershave. When he slid close to me and put his arm around my shoulders, I held my breath.

  “You’re a very pretty girl,” Man said, putting his face close to mine. “Jamie is a lucky guy.”

  “Very.” I stood. “When Jamie comes back, tell him I’ll meet him at the Dôme.” Then, realizing that I couldn’t be rude to Jamie’s boss, I added, “Want to have dinner with us?”

  Man stood as well. “No. I’m meeting with Pablo.”

  “Give him my regards. And Olga as well.”

  Man gave me
a long look and there was something of the panther’s gaze in his eyes, that longing for freedom, knowing all the while that if the cage door were opened, he might not want to cross the threshold after all. It was lonely out there. “I wish Lee were more like you,” he said. “Loyal. Devoted. Easy to be with.”

  “You make me sound like a cocker spaniel.”

  Man didn’t laugh.

  • • •

  Lee came back from St. Moritz in time for Christmas and the four of us celebrated together, decorating a potted palm with cutout gilt-paper stars and exchanging gifts on Christmas morning, in Man’s studio. I gave Lee a sample bottle of perfume from Boulet’s. She gave me a Hermès scarf, Jamie got gloves from Hermès, and Man got an umbrella and bowler hat from Hermès.

  “I never really liked shopping,” she explained, wrapping the scarf around my neck and tying it in a floppy silk bow. “Easier to shop all in one place.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Merry Christmas, Nora,” she said.

  We were sitting on the floor around the potted palm, drinking coffee corrected with large doses of whiskey. Snow fell outside the windows, giving the room a bluish, underwater quality. There were no shadows that day, no strong contrasts, only different shades of water with occasional accents peeking through—Man’s green and gray tie, Lee’s blue eye shadow, Jamie’s bold striped socks, knitted by his mother and sent over for Christmas.

  They were hideous, those socks, the kind of garment a toddler would be dressed in to cuten him up, but Jamie had worn them thinking that Man would find them funny, perhaps even surreal.

  Bad misjudgment. Man dressed well and never confused his own wardrobe with artwork, unlike his friend Salvador Dalí, who a few years later would arrive in the States with a loaf of bread tied to his head. Puns in attire, Man thought, were for his models, not himself. So when he saw those socks blazing out between Jamie’s cuff and shoe top, he gave a kind of sneer rather than a laugh.