Anio Szado (14 page)

I stretched my aching arms, left my table to extend my legs, and took in the smells of my workplace as I walked: the heavy scent of humid wool, the acerbic edge of chemical dyes, the decades of thick, oily lubricants that permeated the wood and the air.

My table was directly across from the door. Behind my chair was the long bank of windows, almost floor to ceiling, divided with bare metal frames. It was here that the silver moonlight came in. It bent over the radiators below the ledge, curled over the back of my chair, and reflected in the varnish of my tabletop. It arced across the floor and flowed as far as the sofa and the upholstered chairs, leaving Madame’s worktable on the other side of the studio in leaden darkness.

Somewhere in the depths of the building, rhythmic sounds of machinery changed their tune: a low background rumble was joined by a circular rise and fall. If I were a dancer, I would move to such sounds—iron cogs and creaking gears, turning belts, pistons rising and falling, toiling away.

I crossed the moonlight to my table, to my sketch pad. I thought of Antoine lifting off in his envelopes of silver metal, mere air holding the churning, laboring motors in the sky. I thought of Consuelo’s slender hands on my sheath of silk, the sliver-thin chrysalis between my body and the world. I thought of the body, of my own body, and I drew through the hours of the night. The paper was damp under my fingertips. The pencil was slick in my hand.

Waiting, like being kept from one’s calling, can drive a person mad. Here at the airport, it has driven the mother and twins away. Three hours in, I feel like I’ve moved up three spaces in line. There is no line, of course; there is no flight. But if a single plane taxis up to this airport, by God, I’m going to get on it. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to Expo; the whole idea of a world’s fair makes me sad; but now that the heavens and Pan Am try to stop me, I will not allow the chance to be taken from my hands.

Two young sweethearts peel themselves off the floor and off each other. They mosey over (all the time in the world) to take the empty chairs, chatting drowsily in Quebecois accents. Their parents will be worrying. Even my mother still frets.

In New York, I had grown up largely out of her sight, growing unbridled—but not out of control—at the Alliance. In Montreal I outgrew Mother’s capacity to understand me. For the first time, I was something of an expat: lonely, reeling, grieving, and aggrieved. In the mornings, I would sit with my father in the cemetery. In the afternoons, I would join Mother for meager biscuits and tea. I came to live for the evenings at the café in Old Montreal, waiting on tables, pleasing customers, moving, always on, always wanted. All eyes on me.

In the darkness at the end of my shifts, doors locked, tables clear, I would remove my apron in the clattering, spattered kitchen, and the dishwasher—a wounded veteran at thirty—would tell me tales from the battlegrounds. Soon all but the
final threshold of my chastity was being eroded by his chapped hands.

Mother knew I had talent but would not have been disappointed to see my ambitions pushed aside for a normal life with a good man. But now I was not only unmarried but undomesticated. In Montreal I was becoming unfocused, uncontrollable, un-Canadian. Better if I’d stayed in New York, where it wasn’t as frowned upon to see a girl act so free. By the time she brought home
Women’s Wear Daily
, Mother had already asked when I might be ready to leave.

It had been weeks since Antoine told me he’d be going to Montreal for a few days. I sat near a window at the Alliance Française, staring out at the northeast corner of East 52nd and Second Avenue, having a drink. Was this what it had been like for his wife when his plane had been late returning, when his radio had gone silent, when the missions he flew took him halfway to his grave? All the while knowing that—no matter how great her despair, how many her tears, how her heart grieved to imagine her husband lost or dead—if he were to be found, if God guided him home, he would return undeterred to the cockpit again.

No wonder Consuelo was a mess: tormenting Antoine while professing her love, playing at a simpler life with Binty, amusing and soothing herself with fashion and (I took a long swallow of wine) with me.

I had been dropping by the Alliance regularly after work. Sometimes I came with Leo, mostly I arrived alone. I had to be seen by the membership; I needed to be remembered and respected here. But the conversations I had initiated had done nothing to advance my career. The expats couldn’t think of me as a fashion visionary: I was my father’s little angel, a good little teacher, the girl Émile had carried on his shoulders, who had steered him by the ears.

Little girl. They wouldn’t think that if a certain famous author, an older and discerning man, could be seen dining with me,
tête-a-tête
—not to conjugate the English for
avoir
but to collaborate on our own translation of
amour
. Little angel? If they could see what I used to get up to with Antoine!

The room grew warm. I crossed my legs at the knee.

Usually these days I ordered a first drink and jotted notes about my day to look busy while I waited to see if Antoine would show up. Sometimes I ordered a second or third while I watched East 52nd Street. Antoine could steer clear of the Alliance to avoid me, if that was how it was, but eventually I was sure to glimpse him visiting his friend Bernard Lamotte.

I had been to Bernard’s once, a year ago. By then, my meetings with Antoine had become more frequent and less productive, and I had become progressively more impatient for the next. Often we would take our lesson outside, strolling the streets. We would watch pigeons crowd against each other in the squares, Antoine giving each bird a name and personality, speaking their parts in pigeony tones. Once he cajoled me into a game of hide-and-seek with the squirrels in Central Park. I squeezed some English into each of our adventures. After all, I was his tutor; I could hardly pretend our outings were dates—until Antoine asked me to accompany him to an upcoming soirée.

“How can you say no to one of Lamotte’s parties? He is the sweetheart of the artistic community here. Your own uncle has commissioned him to create murals for his restaurant. You must meet him. You will like him; it is impossible to dislike Bernard Lamotte. You will come?”

I hesitated. Should a tutor go to a party with her student?

“I shouldn’t push you,” said Antoine. “Forget I asked. We will keep our regular lesson. Let’s meet at the side entrance.”

On the appointed evening, at the Alliance’s East 52nd entrance, he hooked my arm and led me directly across the
street. We stood in front of a graceful old building with a restaurant on the ground floor.

“We’re having our lesson over dinner?”

He grinned. “We are going above the restaurant, to Le Bocal.”

The Fishbowl?

“It is what I call Bernard Lamotte’s studio. It’s just here.” He pointed out the name beside the door. “The party has started.”

“But I’m dressed for teaching.”

“Then come as my teacher. You would do me a service to translate at my side. So many of Lamotte’s friends are American.” His argument would have been resistible if not for his boyish pout.

The door at street level was not locked. Antoine led the way up the narrow staircase and around a bend. Emerging into the finely conceived main room at the top of the stairwell felt like entering the outdoors: the space was so harmoniously designed as to seem a creation of nature. The ceiling was high, the walls white. At the building’s southern face, three soaring arched windows crosshatched with metal frames caught the oblique lights of Second Avenue in their panes. Everywhere I looked, there was another half-hidden pocket of space: the juliette balconies with wrought iron details revealed through the two open windows; the intimate mezzanines along each of the brick side walls—internal balconies where one might sit to take a long, quenching view of the art that lined the walls. Through the windows I studied the view of the Alliance for a while, then turned to examine the back of the room. To the right of the door through which we had entered, a wide central staircase led to an open second level capped with a large skylight. Spaces layered here, too: an elevated walkway rimmed the floor, leading forward to the mezzanines and back to corner stairs and a shadowed door. As Antoine came up behind me and put a hand on the small of my back, I caught a glimpse of yet another room, on the far side of the grand staircase: its door was being closed on
the sight of a man kissing a woman, her head bent back, her throat arched. It could have been a picture, or real, or a projection of my own absurdly hopeful heart. I took a glass from Antoine. We touched goblets, red to red, and brought them to our lips.

The party was in full swing. Jazz swooned. Men and women mingled and laughed. Some were beacons of beauty my age, in their prime; all seemed magnetic in their charismatic uniqueness. They propped against tables that were crowded with cans of brushes and layered in dabs and blobs of paint, as though unconcerned that their clothes could become ruined. They moved across the room surrounded by paintings on every side, arms draped over each other’s shoulders, bright cigarette pinpoints reflecting in the windows that fronted East 52nd. Dried sausages hung from a painting above a table that was laden with cheeses and breads, olives and antipasto, and carved with initials and autographs. Another painting was festooned with a string of garlic. At a small metal table near the fireplace, a solemn man in an expensive European suit leafed through a stack of illustrations while, not three feet away, a woman in a tuxedo stood against a wall, arms akimbo, as a similarly outfitted man carefully traced her outline onto a large sheet of paper tacked to the wall, layering his androgynous lover’s shape into numerous others that peeked from behind her form.

The host came over, wearing a neckerchief and a Greek sailor’s hat, smiling a charming gap-toothed smile. “So this is Mademoiselle Mignonne,” he said. “I am Bernard—or Lamotte, as you prefer. I know your uncle, your mother, and your father, may he rest in peace. I have heard much about you and your brother. I am astounded that we’ve never met.”

Antoine said, “Mignonne rarely goes out. She is always hard at work. Can you imagine, Lamotte? She hardly knows the meaning of play!”

“Ah, then it is good that she has come on the arm of a child.
You know, my dear, Saint-Ex only looks like a mastodon; he may be older than you and I, but he is really just a boy.”

Antoine beamed as Bernard veered off to greet new guests. It was true, what Bernard had said: in many ways Antoine was more youthful than I was. I spun the wine in my glass and imagined the room swirling, too—with my date and me in the center, gazing into each other’s eyes.

I thought: I will kiss him tonight.

I took his arm and he led me around the room to make introductions. André, Celina, James, Kathleen … The names were numerous. Some were familiar: several were well-known artists, and there was a recognizable actor or two. Someone had brought their child to the party. I was crouched chatting with the little boy, Norman, when a perfectly polished red-haired woman approached Antoine and Bernard. She faced Antoine, staring brazenly up into his face.

“I’ve wanted to meet you for an awfully long time,” she said in English.

“Netta Corelle,” said Bernard. He explained in French, “She is an actress.”

Netta turned to Bernard. “Tell Mr. Saint-Exupéry that I am in love with him.”

Bernard smiled noncommittally.

She put a seductive hand on Antoine’s lapel. “Tell him I am inviting him to take me home.”

“Married to a powerful director,” said Bernard in French. “Don’t be a fool, Saint-Ex.”

“Did you tell him?” the woman asked.

Antoine’s face had flushed. His expression seemed half confused, half intrigued, and just a little too pleased.

I drank down the rest of my wine and stood up.

Netta Corelle shot me a dismissive glance and turned back to the men. “I mean it, Bernard. I’ve read everything he’s written. Tell him I love him.”

“Antoine,” I said, “I hear there’s a terrace. Will you show it to me?”

With an apologetic smile at the actress, Antoine took his leave.

Grasping my hand, he said, “It is a rooftop with a garden. Wait until you see it!” He brought me to a door half hidden by a curtain in a corner. We made our way up steep stairs, my hand small in his, and through a glassed enclosure with a wind chime hung on its door. On the rooftop, I made out the outline of a brick barbecue or broad chimney in a corner. Other shapes were chairs, a table suitable for a café patio, and fat metal structures—rounded and squarish conduits and pipes—that gleamed dully in many angles of moonlight. Bernard was growing things in pots and narrow beds. Plump shrubs ringed the roof’s perimeter. Across the street were the windows and flags of the Alliance Française.

“Come to the edge,” said Antoine.

The air was crisp and clean. Dozens of stars glimmered overhead.

“ ‘A sky as pure as water bathed the stars,’ ” I quoted—the first words of Antoine’s novel
Southern Mail
.