American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  A knock at the door pulled Ramsey back into unwanted thought. Through the green translucence shed by the Venetian-glass globe hanging above her head, she walked across the room, her intoxication, though in its descent, slowing each step to a subaquatic pace. Ripples and currents feathered the air as she reached for and opened the door.

  “Bonsoir, mademoiselle,” said Vincent de la Baume.

  At first Ramsey couldn’t place him, so much had happened since her one night at Le Chabanais. The bobbin-lace scarf that only a pimp could pull off triggered her memory. What did he want? Ramsey studied his deckle-edged stubble, those teeth as misshapen and blotchy as freshwater pearls, that lank, greasy hair, and knew this wasn’t a social call. Despite the temperate weather, Vincent wore a black leather overcoat, double-breasted, with a wrap-across front and a belt buckled at the waist. Ramsey didn’t have to go near the coat to know exactly what it smelled like. Her hands shriveled into fists.

  “Hello, Vincent. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  He walked past Ramsey into the apartment, and with his back turned to her, he said, “You are a difficult woman to find. I have been in search of you everywhere. Many weeks sans success. Until now.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Vincent turned to Ramsey. “Why have you not been back to Le Chabanais?”

  After she closed the door and strolled past Vincent, attempting to keep her trepidation hidden, Ramsey picked up her wineglass, drank all that was left, and said, “I’ve been busy.”

  “Busy.”

  “Oui.”

  “Your hands. What is the word? They are quivering.” Vincent picked up the bottle of Malaga from the bar alcove. As he refilled Ramsey’s glass, he whispered, “Say when.”

  “When.”

  But it was too late. A large drop of red wine overflowed onto the wood floor. “Merde,” Ramsey said before siphoning off an inch from the glass to keep it from spilling further. While retrieving a rag from the bathroom, she made the mistake of looking in the mirror, where she saw the collateral damage of the past few weeks. Dark lines crosshatched her skin like a journeyman cartoonist’s approximation of shadows. Her eyeliner did little to distract from the bags under it, and skipped meals had imploded her cheeks.

  “The Romanian admired you very much,” Vincent said, standing near the bar while Ramsey draped a white rag over the puddle of wine. A red moon waxed within the terry cloth sky.

  “I figured he was Hungarian.”

  “Day after day he returns. ‘Où est la femme?’ ‘Où est ma belle?’ He would appreciate very much if you return to Le Chabanais. I would appreciate if you return as well.”

  “No, thank you.”

  Vincent walked toward Ramsey. “‘Thank you,’ she says, but she refuses my special generosity. Quelle fille bête.” He tried to touch Ramsey’s hair, but she drew back. “Do not be afraid, Miss Forster.”

  His use of her name made Ramsey realize that, in this situation, speaking with some repulsive thug in a foreign country, she was no longer protected by the aegis of it. The name of “Forster” was like the Louis Vuitton luggage stacked in her bedroom closet: prestigious to certain people but right now nothing more than Damier-checkered boxes.

  “The Romanian would pay a great deal,” said Vincent. “Tu seras riche.”

  “Do I look like I need money?” Ramsey gestured around her, at the palatial apartment and its lavish decor. The momentary flair of snobbery gave her a momentary sense of power. If this son of a bitch tutoyered her again, Ramsey thought, she’d scream until everyone on the street came rushing up to the apartment. With a careless wave of her hand, the motion of which was regaining normal speed, she asked Vincent to leave.

  “One last thing,” said de la Baume.

  For someone new to the experience, a punch in the face can seem, however briefly, more exhilarating than it is painful, more surprising than it is frightening. The key word, conceded Ramsey afterward, was briefly. After she crashed to the floor, Vincent said, “You seem to have lost your footing, my dear. Is something wrong?”

  Ramsey’s pulse rippled through the spot where the punch had landed. Her ears chimed. Her eyes flooded. Her lips shook. Was this it then? It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t let it be. The world’s glory was not going to pass. Ramsey ordered herself to stand, but her body refused to obey. From the window, she heard car horns, shouted expletives, and somebody telling someone else, in a creole accent, to get the hell out of the way. Across the apartment, she did not see the door slowly open.

  Crouched in front of Ramsey, Vincent pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes, stale tobacco and heeltaps riding his breath. “You shall return to Le Chabanais tomorrow night, and you shall not leave until I say you can leave. If you don’t do as I say, I’ll—”

  Jo-Jo Chowdhury wrapped his thick hands around Vincent’s neck and lifted him into the air. His feet dangled inches above the floor. In the subsequent fray, Vincent de la Baume proved that the nickname he would be given in prison, Vinnie the Bomb, did not concern his explosive fighting skills, but rather his proficiency at failure. Jo-Jo had him in a choke hold against the wall when he said to Ramsey, “You will find her waiting outside, Mademoiselle Forster.” His words were underscored by the patter of a button bouncing past where Ramsey lay on the floor, one that she knew had, in a recent, previous life, held together the collar of Jo-Jo’s shirt.

  Even though she wanted to run, Ramsey forced herself to walk as she left the apartment, passing through the floral-wallpapered hall and stepping into the elevator. The different floors rose in front of her eyes like an emery board sloughing off a callus. Ninth floor, eighth floor, scrape, scrape. Seventh floor, sixth floor, scrape, scrape. Fifth floor, fourth floor, third, second, first. In the lobby, the concierge asked Ramsey if everything was all right. “Never been better,” she said, holding a hand over the red, swelling side of her face.

  Outside, the air smelled of powdered sugar and fried potatoes—circus food. Workmen in red sashes tilted their heads at Ramsey as she peered into the dim evening twilight. Josephine, her cosmetics by Rubinstein and hair by Antoine and jewelry by Van Cleef and apparel by Schiaparelli, sat in the leopard-printed passenger seat of a Ballot, parked on the street in front of the building. She hopped out of the car just in time for Ramsey to stumble on a gap in the pavement and fall theatrically into her outstretched arms. “And they say I’m the one starved for attention,” Josephine said. She then scolded Ramsey for not replying to any of the messages she had sent over the past few days via the pneumatique.

  * * *

  Two years later, Ramsey woke from a dream on the morning of April 9, 1939, after being tapped on the shoulder by Boonwell, a chimpanzee. He held an orange in one hand. “Hello there. What’s for breakfast today?” she asked him as he placed the orange on her pillow. “Thank you, Boonwell. Where’s your mama?”

  The château Les Milandes was a haven for Josephine’s myriad pets. “Originally a run-down house on a hilltop in a beautiful part of France known for its rivers, its foie gras, and its cave paintings,” Phyllis Rose notes in Jazz Cleopatra, the château and its surrounding estate, bought by Josephine in 1936 for a song, would eventually become home to hundreds of cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, and peacocks, their head counts fluctuating by the dozen, as well as “two hotels, three restaurants, a miniature golf course, tennis, volleyball, and basketball courts, a wax museum of scenes from Josephine Baker’s life, stables, a patisserie, a foie gras factory, a gas station, and a post office,” not to mention three monkeys, two white mice, and a Great Dane named Bonzo. Ramsey had been living there ever since the short period she referred to as her “bad times.”

  That morning she got out of bed, took Boonwell’s hand, and walked with him downstairs. In the airy, sunlit kitchen, Josephine was having coffee and, for breakfast, eating a plate of spaghetti, her favorite food, the idea of which always tickled Ramsey. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner: spaghetti, spaghetti, spaghetti. You can take the girl out of America, giv
e her unimaginable fame and fortune, but she’d still be little “Tumpie” from St. Louis, Missouri, wearing shoes made of coal sacking, considering noodles and ketchup a special treat for Sunday dinner. Those were the things Ramsey loved most about her, the tiny threads of her past that constituted the fabric of her present, everything that went into making this woman who always rode in the front seat of taxis, despised the telephone, adored the cinema, and wanted to write a fairy tale about her romance with Ramsey entitled, in reference to the tool commonly used for sipping soda pop, The Straw Princess.

  “Good morning, Tumpie.”

  “Happy Easter.”

  “It’s Easter?”

  “You need to get out more,” Josephine said while Ramsey walked her fingers along her shoulder and kissed her on the cheek. In return, Josephine took Ramsey’s hand and, as was her habit, anointed the inside of her wrist with her lips.

  On the other side of the kitchen, Ramsey poured herself a cup of coffee, thinking Jo was right; she did need to get out more, though, point of fact, she was hardly some recluse. Over the two years she’d been at Les Milandes, Ramsey usually made the trip to Paris at least once a month, going to a party or doing some shopping or taking in a show, altogether the type of life that she and Josephine, as they discovered in one of their late-night, wine-charged conversations, had both dreamed of during their respective childhoods in Mississippi and Missouri. To both of them, Paris had represented not only a way out but a way up, a path to worldliness, class, style, and elegance via masterpiece-filled museums and snail-based cuisine.

  With the rest of her time at the château Ramsey had been training herself as a writer, an undertaking for which she had far more ambition than she ever did for the, in her opinion, incredibly boring soft-drink business. She’d even had a minor success last year. Under the pen name Ptolemy Brown, Ramsey had published her first novel, Rebel Yell Down Under, part bodice ripper and part dime western, about a Confederate major who moves to the Australian outback, where, aside from running a cattle station, he defends the natives, woos damsels, beds wenches, and triumphs in many a drunken brawl. The reviews were mixed. Sales were modest. Recently, though, she had finished a children’s book about a dog that lives at a French zoo owned by two elderly friends, Auntie Rue and Gram Magog, whose personalities were not unlike the current residents of Les Milandes. Its subtitle included a made-up term of venery, except in reverse. The animals at the zoo named humans collectively the way humans in the real world usually did animals. Although it wouldn’t be published for another decade—the outbreak of war would soon leave the manuscript forgotten at the bottom of a trunk—The Adventures of Catfish the Dog: A Discombobulation of Philosophers would spawn many additional volumes, including “A Remainder of Novelists,” “An Imbalance of Accountants,” “A Yodel of Swiss,” “A Gossip of Seamstresses,” “A Shuffle of Gamblers,” and “An Independence of Americans.” Just yesterday Ramsey had decided on a dedication for the first adventure of Catfish the dog.

  J’ai deux amours,

  Mon pays et quelqu’un d’autre.

  Par eux toujours,

  Mon coeur est ravi.

  “Tonight our old friend colporteur is throwing a party at the Ritz,” said Josephine, carrying her empty plate to the sink. “Want to make a quick trip to the city?”

  Ramsey thought the same thing Neville Chamberlain might have while negotiating the Munich Agreement half a year earlier: What’s the worst that could happen? “Sounds lovely,” she told Josephine.

  They drove instead of taking the train. Branches reticulated overhead, gossamer clouds visible beyond them like stuffing in threadbare upholstery, the couple passed through the French countryside in Josephine’s new Voisin, which she’d bought in brown to match her own coloring and whose seats she’d had lined in snakeskin, “to match my soul!” Villagers shielded their eyes from the sun as if in salute as the two women zoomed past their farmhouses.

  In the July 22, 1939, issue of The New Yorker, Janet Flanner would describe Paris as having “a fit of prosperity, gaiety, and hospitality” unheard of since the trouble in Munich the previous year. She would add, “It has taken the threat of war to make the French loosen up and have a really swell and civilized good time.” Ramsey could already see that atmosphere burgeoning everywhere. Washerwomen nearly danced a jig in their sabots as they carried bundles of wrapped laundry. Young men who were clearly dans le milieu tried to race the milk train. Even people outside the bureau de contentieux, waiting in line to express their grievances, had smiles on all their jolie laide faces, crooked teeth disguised by dimples, scars disguised by batting eyelashes. After a quick stop at Josephine’s apartment to freshen up, she and Ramsey headed for the Ritz on foot, carrying the invitation that read, near the bottom, ICNW rather than RSVP: “In Case No War.”

  At the party things took a turn for the surreal. Beneath a banner that read pas de histoires, pas des provocations, pas de bruit, or no fuss, no provocations, no noise, a slogan for the French policy toward German military buildup, people of all nationalities and nary a geopolitical creed, British and American and French, stood around drinking cocktails, making jokes, telling stories, and playing with jewel-encrusted, gold-leafed yo-yos from Cartier. Yo-yos were popular that season. “Germany can have Czechoslovakia!” a man with an eye patch said as he “Walked the Dog” and then performed a poor version of an “Around the World.” He almost broke one of the six white globes in the electrolier hanging above his head.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Ramsey asked Josephine as they ordered a drink from Claude, the Ritz’s barman.

  “But of course, chèrie. Why?”

  “You were quiet the whole ride up.”

  Josephine swatted the air. “Pfftt! Think nothing of it.” It was all Ramsey could think about as she followed Josephine into the crowd.

  The first people they ran into were what Jo’s friends liked to call the Lavender Element. Noël Coward, currently in town for some “security detail” he loved being coy about, was playing straight man to Cole Porter, who, at the moment, was telling the story of how he’d won a Croix de Guerre in the Great War. “My fellow soldiers lifted me to their shoulders and cheered, I tell you, cheered as they carried me out of those beastly trenches.”

  “I’m sure you enjoyed some beastly behavior in those trenches, Porter.”

  “Oh, shut it, Noël. I was at war, which, you know, does things to a man.”

  Everyone laughed obligingly except Josephine. What had her so upset? Ramsey spent the next few hours trying to pry an answer loose, but all she received was the usual meaningless exclamation. “Isn’t it wonderful?” These funks of Jo’s were common. The main difference with this one was that she seemed to be trying to hide it. Around four in the morning, Ramsey finally got an idea of its cause when, on a makeshift runway atop the bar, models from Lelong, a couturier, began an impromptu fashion show.

  On their bodies the models wore dresses, exquisitely tailored and obviously expensive, but on their heads they wore gas masks, military-grade, operational, and painted in gold. They looked like giant humanoid insects strutting on the bar top. “You have to leave,” Josephine whispered in Ramsey’s ear as the crowd applauded.

  “What?”

  “You must go home.”

  “Shouldn’t we sleep it off before driving back to Les Milandes?”

  “Not that home.”

  Josephine took her by the sleeve and guided them both out of the party. As they walked through the city, passing apartment buildings in front of which sandbags would soon be piled to protect against fire from incendiary bombs, stepping on bits of newspapers in which crossword puzzles would soon be discontinued for fear they contained code, passing cafés in which waiters would soon require customers to pay up front in case an air-raid siren emptied all their tables, Josephine told Ramsey she had to go back to America.

  “It’s no longer safe for you here. Any day now that pudgy little man with the mustache will come stomping into the city,�
�� she said. “I know his kind. They don’t give up. And when he’s here, do you think he’ll simply open the gates for you? ‘Run along home, child’?”

  “But what about you? America’s home for you, too.”

  Josephine smiled halfheartedly. She raised the inside of Ramsey’s wrist to her lips, as though telling it a secret. “Mon pays c’est Paris.”

  It was almost seven o’clock. The sun was creeping into the sky behind their backs, shedding a honeyed glow on the Arc de Triomphe a short ways up the avenue, while shopkeepers drowsily began to open their doors. Only a few tourists were milling along the Champs-Élysées. “If it’s yours, it’s mine, you damn fool,” Ramsey said, tears halfway down her cheeks and a seam running jagged through her voice, as she wiped her thumbs across the bags Jo always had under her eyes. She would stand by those words until the day after September 1, 1939.

  Five months before that day, however, the two of them pulled their hips close, not bothering to ensure they were unwatched. “The famous photograph of Josephine Baker and Ramsey Forster kissing in front of the Arc de Triomphe was undoubtedly staged,” Elsa Rankin-Smith writes in Significant Monkey, one of many libelous comments that would lead her publisher to have all unsold copies of the book pulped. In truth neither woman knew their picture was being taken by a man sitting on a bench across the street.

  “A colored,” said the photographer, Franklin Scarlatti of Vantage Pictures, lowering his camera from his expressionless face.

  3.8

  True Delta—A Phonetic Reminder of an Old Friend—Struck Pond—Caste and Class in a Southern Town—Three-Card Monty

  “This here’s cotton country,” Montgomery’s driver, Push Lloyd, was saying as they entered the Mississippi Delta. “Miles around everything you can lay eyes on used to be swamp. Pestiferous swamp. Full of panthers and bears and ’squitoes big as fists. Then you white folks took care of all that. By likes of which I mean you had us take care of it.”