American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  Jane grabbed her oversize purse and began to slide out of the booth. “Where are you going?” said Robert, his mental recording of their conversation fast-forwarding through his head. “Are we breaking up?”

  “Of course you were paying attention. Of course.”

  Unable to respond, Robert watched Jane march out of the restaurant, purposeful as Dukas’s broomstick. Was that it? They may have only been dating for the past four months, but he figured their relationship deserved a more climactic ending. It felt like she had gotten up to use the ladies’ room. Jane hadn’t even seemed sad. Robert was trying to think of a word to describe her when someone in the next booth gave it to him.

  “Got to say, that was cold.”

  The girl from earlier that day turned around to face him. Karl Marx’s beard poked out from her sleeve, and the bangs of Chrissie Hynde hung in front of her eyes. Robert said, “You.” Never had a pronoun made him feel like such an idiot.

  The girl grabbed her plate and stood up from her booth. She sat down across from him and took a bite of her po’boy. “Me Molly Allen,” she said after swallowing. “You Robert Vaughn.”

  “How do you know my—”

  “Leo’s right, you know. You really should cool it on the soap opera shit.” Molly nodded in the direction where Jane had swept her way through the Magnolia. “Though at least now I see why you’re interested in it.”

  “Nobody saw you pressing your ear against his office door?”

  “Didn’t have to, loud as you talk.”

  That got a smile out of him. In response, Robert took a fry from Molly’s plate, trying to initiate a kind of intimacy. The move didn’t faze her. “Want to know the worst part?” he asked, chewing the fry for effect.

  “Sure.”

  “Today’s my birthday.”

  Molly, giving him a sloe-eyed, blank facial expression, pushed her plate toward Robert and said, “Have another fry. You deserve it.”

  Over the next half hour, while Molly played a dollar’s worth of heartbreak songs on the booth’s Seeburg Wall-O-Matic jukebox, each one prompting an impish grin from her, Robert found out she was originally from Kentucky, that her parents had died within a year of each other when she was ten, that she was a senior at Millsaps majoring in English literature, and, “most important,” her best friend as a child had been a sock monkey named Sydney Carton, whom she still slept with every night because he helped her find “a far, far better rest” than she’d ever known.

  Robert’s half of the conversation was a series of statements he did not tell her about himself. He did not tell her he wished he had grown up without parents. He did not tell her that when he was younger he’d wanted to produce what she was now studying, nor did he tell her that in high school he’d written a collection of modern-day updates to the work of Flannery O’Connor, O’Connor Stories and Other Stories, the latter category of which included “The Lucky Star Is Always Open” and “Sipping Suicide after a Double-Header.” He did not tell her that in no way were those stories based on his own life, despite the fact that his father, a frequent patron of a dive called the Lucky Star, used to buy him suicides—all the fountain sodas mixed together—from the concession stand after his Little League games. Robert, who once wrote an unautobiographical short story titled “My Flammable Heart,” especially did not mention that looking at her, Molly, made him feel as though a match had been struck inside his chest.

  “So why were you at Marunga’s office this morning?” he asked as they stood at the counter, each of their checks in hand.

  “I was asking him a few questions had to do with my thesis.”

  From the side of his eye Robert noticed Molly’s lips briefly curl upward. It was the first time since they’d met less than an hour ago, he realized, she had emoted rather than performed emotion, the difference being that she didn’t know he was watching her.

  So you’re his dealer, he decided not to say. Instead he thought of a line he had read somewhere, probably in a novel, though he could not for his life remember which one. “Nothing exists in this world that is more beautiful and destructive than the smile of a woman with a secret.”

  3.7

  Significant Monkey—Les Colporteurs—Ash Wednesday—Sick [sic] Transit—Belle de Jour—Easter Sunday—Photo Finish

  The line is actually from a work of nonfiction. In her controversial book, Significant Monkey, the noted literary theorist Elsa Rankin-Smith frequently references the “beautiful and destructive” smile of her titular subject, Josephine Baker. “She smiled on the world, and the world smiled back.” “At times her face seemed to smile even when it was covered in tears.” “Hers was a smile that knew, thought, and felt with an accord of its own.”

  On February 9, 1937, Ramsey Forster, who had recently arrived in Paris to recuperate from her “losses,” the term her therapist used for her miscarriages, among the French landmarks that had populated so many of her childhood fantasies, saw firsthand the famous smile of La Baker.

  Ramsey was at the music hall Folies-Bergère. All around her the crowd bustled, people leaving early, people arriving late, but none distracted her from the show. On the stage, what E. E. Cummings called a “plotless drama” played out: sixteen showgirls, ten chorus boys, and sixteen nudes, in addition to a chorus line of dancers, all of whom were centered, spiritually if not physically, around the show’s vedette. Cummings wrote of the Folies-Bergère and its starlet, “The revue is a use of ideas, smells, colours, Irving Berlin, nudes, tactility, collapsible stairs, three dimensions, and fireworks to intensify Mlle. Josephine Baker.” Ramsey would have agreed. She could not look away from the intense figure onstage.

  “A weird cross between a kangaroo, a bicyclist, and a machine gun,” as the biographer Phyllis Rose would later write, the woman variably known as the Black Pearl, the Creole Goddess, and the Bronze Venus had skin nearly the color of squash and hair that “looked as if it had been plastered down on her head with caviar.” She danced around the stage with a sort of jagged fluidity. In her fox and feathers, each body part appearing to have not just a mind but also a soul of its own, Josephine typified le diable au corps so much that Ramsey, watching from the audience, thought she was to traditional dancing what soda water was to wine. Her frenetic movements seemed to be powered by air trying to escape her bones. Rather than dance to the music she roiled with its rhythm. Ramsey figured that must be what attracted her to the woman, how she was like a physical embodiment of her family’s signature product. At the conclusion of her set—after doing such dance moves as the Mess Around, which reminded Ramsey of her twin brother, and Through the Trenches, which reminded Ramsey of her older brother—Josephine Baker sang what had become a sort of theme song, her syrupy voice matched perfectly to her effervescent body:

  J’ai deux amours,

  Mon pays et Paris.

  Par eux toujours,

  Mon coeur est ravi.

  “Rumzee! Rumzee!” someone yelled into Ramsey’s ear, grabbing her by the elbow, pulling her toward the doors of the music hall. “C’est parti! Vite fait!”

  It was the girl with whom she had come to the revue, a part-time nude model who posed in an atelier beneath Ramsey’s apartment, often wore blue salopettes with nothing else, and, after they crossed paths a few times in the elevator, had invited Ramsey for une nuit de folie.

  “Where are we going,” Ramsey said in broken French, “and why all the rush?”

  “Quoi?”

  The language was still somewhat of a barrier for Ramsey. She attempted to truncate her turn of phrase, searching through memories of the bedtime stories her mother had read to her as a child. Annabelle Forster had considered it an absolute necessity that none of her children be unilingual, as “only guttersnipe make do with their native tongue when they could have any in the world.” To that end, she’d put her children to sleep by reading them Charles Perrault’s Les Contes de Ma Mère l’Oye in the original French. For Ramsey, the tales of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Bluebeard, an
d Little Red Riding Hood had turned her into more of a Francophile than a Francophone, inculcating her with the desire to live a life of sophistication in the city of lights. Her felicity with the language hadn’t lasted as long as that desire. On her way out of the music hall, Ramsey ran through the vocabulary left over from her lessons with Monsieur Perrault and, finally, settled on two vowels.

  “Où?” she asked the girl, whose name she still wasn’t quite sure she knew.

  “Les colporteurs!”

  “Street vendors?” said Ramsey. She felt reasonably certain that was what that word meant. Instead of giving an answer, the part-time nude model grabbed her hand, guiding them both through the nighttime dwellers of Paris—charwomen whose dirty aprons smelled of cabbage soup, young gangsters in flat caps milling near the pissotières, page boys gathered around a dice box, and repairmen carrying acetylene torches down streetcar tracks. Finally Ramsey and the girl reached what the latter had meant by “les colporteurs.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Cole Porter lived at 13 rue Monsieur. Inside the maison de ville, where the girl led Ramsey by her pinkie finger, members of the smart set lingered in rooms with platinum wallpaper, on top of zebra-skin rugs, and in chairs painted mandarin red. Comely servant girls, their pupils dilated by belladonna, wandered the room, carrying trays of champagne dyed various colors, green and red and violet and orange and blue, while guests decked out in tuxedos, smelling of hair oil, cloves, mint, jasmine, sweat, and antiseptics, mingled around the piano, which was momentarily quiet as the host of the party, in a checkered scarf, concluded the irreverent tale of a wealthy, clubfooted widow from Lyon. Anaïs Nin switched which leg she leaned on each time she took a drag of her cigarette. Henry Miller rearranged his crotch by hand whenever he thought nobody would notice.

  “Papillons d’amour,” said an effete man in a green suit that looked to have been crafted from the felt of a billiards table. He was standing by Ramsey’s side, where the part-time model had been, directing his gaze toward the couple, Henry and Anaïs, who didn’t seem to be on speaking terms. “Such a lovely phrase. ‘Butterflies of love.’ Far more pleasant than ‘crabs,’” the man said before his attention was suddenly redirected to another point in the room. “Wallis! I am in love with that bolero jacket!”

  He disappeared the same way he had appeared, mysterious and nameless, prompting Ramsey to think, Now this is what I’ve been looking for, a smile inching across her face for the first time in she couldn’t say how long.

  Throughout the two weeks since her arrival, she had been trying, with little avail, to find “her people,” Americans hoping to suck the marrow out of Paris, proving correct that old Harold Stearns line describing the city as “the greatest testing ground of character in the world.” Ramsey frequented the Coupole, the Dome, the Rotonde, and the Select. She took her meals at Maxim’s, Les Trianons, and Drouant over by l’Opera. All those places, however, were so prosaic. The feast had moved on. So for those first two weeks, Ramsey, walking along the quays at night, applying a heart hook to her bangs, squeezing fruit at the greengrocer, felt more alone than she had back in the States. Not just alone but empty. A failure at Paris’s character test, she could not get rid of the void that remained after her miscarriages, the hollowness, the excavation, a sense that within her body were four cavernous, echoing, amorphous spaces that had once been her children.

  Ramsey sampled every color of champagne served at the party. She was on her fourth one, blue this time, when the person she was speaking with, an aggressively pleasant woman d’un certain age whose robe de soir shimmered in the dim lamplight, said, “Looks as though Josephine made it after all. Have you had a chance to meet her?”

  “In fact, I have not.”

  “My dear, oh my dear, but you simply must!” the woman said, switching to French, as if the force of her sentiment were too great for one language. “She is going to love you!”

  That the woman had used the verb adorer instead of aimer sent an odd thrill through Ramsey. Wasn’t adorer the stronger of the two words for love? During her time in L.A. prior to her losses, Ramsey had been captivated by the world of matinee idols and budding ingénues, and now, after so many months of trying to overcome her depression, it was comforting to allow herself the superficiality of being starstruck. Ramsey imagined becoming best friends with Josephine. She could see it perfectly, the two of them reading Le Figaro on a bench in the Tuileries, the two of them spending une petite fortune at Place Vendôme.

  On being introduced that night, though, Josephine Baker exchanged only mild pleasantries with Ramsey. Every one of Ramsey’s attempts at friendly flirtation with the Creole Goddess was met by strait lace. “This is some party” elicited the response “Isn’t it wonderful?” “I’d love to know where you learned to dance” elicited the response “Watching the kangaroos at the St. Louis Zoo.” “Your body is very intelligent” elicited the response “If only my head were as well.” “I enjoyed the show tonight. You’re such a talent” elicited the response “I have no talent. I have only friends. I like people.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  Although Ramsey immediately regretted saying them, those last words, however impertinent, managed to unleash the famously “beautiful and destructive” smile. Josephine finished her champagne, called for her coat, and said, “Come along, chèrie, you wicked little thing. Some place I want to show you.” The party soon turned into nothing but a low rumble on the other side of a closed door.

  * * *

  Ramsey woke to the sight of a parakeet spitting seeds at a bust of Louis XIV. In the spacious, loft-style apartment, piles of clothes dotted the wood floors, the needle of a phonograph blipped over and over at the end of some recording, a coromandel screen blocked the sunlight from a sooty window, and, next to Ramsey in bed, an impossibly long, impossibly smooth leg the color of caramel lay across red silk sheets.

  “Pauvre oiseau,” said Josephine.

  Instead of looking at the parakeet, which continued to assault the Sun King from its cage hanging by the bed, Josephine was looking at Ramsey, circling her ring finger around an exposed nipple. Ramsey pulled the sheets high up her chest, the previous night coming back to her in pieces, each made ragged by too much champagne.

  They had left the Porters’ party around one. After being questioned by cyclos, black-caped police officers on bicycles, about whether they’d seen a sans domicile fixe running down the street with a homburg hat far too luxurious for a bum, Josephine and Ramsey had walked, hand in hand, to Notre Dame. “Mademoiselle Baker!” cried the woman who watched over the cathedral at night. “Vous avez revenu.” She unlocked a heavy door and motioned for them to enter. At the top of a spiral staircase, Ramsey and Josephine reached the roof of the Notre Dame, their view from its balustrade a painter’s dream, heavy fog situated between the Hôtel-Dieu, the Sorbonne, the Eiffel Tower, and Sacré-Cœur, wrapping itself around them like cotton balls in an expensive package. Ramsey, while growing up in the rural South, had so often fantasized she’d one day see Paris, France, in perfect repose, as though it had been waiting patiently, over decades, over centuries, for the boon of her presence. She took in the nearly mystical view of a nearly mythic city without realizing her mouth was hanging open. It was pushed shut by Josephine, who, using the crook of her index finger, pulled Ramsey toward her by the chin. With the city of Paris spread out before them, they kissed, lightly at first and then urgently, just as they found themselves doing the next day in Josephine’s apartment, moments after waking up.

  “The bourgeois way is to save and accumulate. Sexual potential is a woman’s capital,” Phyllis Rose writes in her book Jazz Cleopatra. “[Josephine’s] promiscuity was very likely a mask for a deep-seated distrust of intimacy.”

  In the expatriate heiress Ramsey Forster she had met her match. Ramsey had distrusted intimacy since the night she’d been invited into the coatroom of an apartment in Greenwich Village. Ramsey had trusted intimacy even less since the series of nights she’d woken her hus
band by whispering, uneasy and confused and fearful, “Something’s wrong.”

  But this, here and now, felt right. Although she had never been with another woman, Ramsey had always believed in the elasticity of love, as cognizant of other types of sexuality as she was of the fact that in various parts of the world people ate with two sticks instead of cutlery, wore wigs in open court, had dozens of words for snow, and rode through jungles on the backs of elephants. Until now she had not thought to try the other types the same way she had not thought to dance the hula. Ramsey’s experience with Josephine that morning made her regret her previous self’s lack of enterprise. On top of silk sheets, a type so often described as being like a second skin, the two of them felt each other’s own, Ramsey drawing her palm down a midriff often rubbed with lemon in an attempt to lighten its complexion, Josephine walking her fingers up a thigh still striped where a bathing suit had encountered the California sun. They coincided halfway.

  “Josephine was always, always, always dominant in bed,” writes Elsa Rankin-Smith, whose flagrant claims about the inaccuracy of Phyllis Rose’s biography were themselves found to be inaccurate in the Columbia Journalism Review’s investigative report, “Follies of Truth: Josephine Baker and Two Biographers.”

  The consummate performer, onstage as well as in life, Josephine proved, while lying next to Ramsey in the cool morning air, that Rankin-Smith was right about one thing at least. She was in control. All those years abroad had given her the advantage as she reached down through the sheets. Shocked at first by the new sensation, Ramsey gradually settled into it, allowing herself to be handled, clutched, hefted, until the moment Josephine grew even bolder, at which point Ramsey thought, with a gasp, Sweet Jesus, she’s double-jointed.

  “I should be getting to the theater soon,” Josephine said an hour later, the afternoon sun breaking through a western window. She was methodically placing petit fours on Ramsey’s tongue like some kind of Eucharist.