The Beautiful American (21 page)

What would have happened if I had reminded Lee of those days we shared, the tire swing in her yard, chasing the chickens, that day she had stood on the porch in her white dress? Would it have changed anything?

The silence was a charm protecting both of us, Lee from the memory of rape and its aftermath, me from the memory of class stigma, and I did not want to lose the protection.

“It’s raining. That will break the heat.” Lee opened the window and extended her hand, letting the heavy drops splatter into her palm. “Can’t stand reminiscing. I came to ask you to a party. Tonight. My studio, not Man’s. Can you come? You and Jamie? Both of you. It’s important.”

“Of course both of us,” I said. After the party, I thought, I would tell Jamie. He would be twenty-five in a few months. The promise to his family not to marry young ended on this birthday. Just in time.

•   •   •

L
ee’s party was the largest one of the season, all arranged at the last minute and perfect down to the last detail, despite the lack of agonized planning. She had a knack for that sort of thing, knew how to find the perfect caterer, the best wine sold at discount by the crate, flowers out of season from florists no one else had ever heard of. She must have spent a small fortune on orchids and shrimp canapés . . . and mirrors, because that was how she had decorated the studio, with mirrors all over the place, on the walls, freestanding on the floor, propped onto easels.

“You did all this in one day?” I asked when Jamie and I arrived promptly at nine. A girl hired for the evening took my coat. A waiter arrived from nowhere with a tray of champagne flutes.

I turned and saw my reflection, dozens of reflections, back-and-forth and into-infinity reflections, illuminated by flickering, disorienting candlelight.

The studio was already packed. No one ever missed one of Lee’s
parties—or Man’s, for that matter—but that evening Lee seemed to have invited everyone she knew, and they had all come. Lady so-and-so and Maharani this and Lord that . . . all of Lee’s sitters, all her artist friends, all the society people. It was like a who’s who of Lee Miller’s life in Paris: the poet Breton, the surrealist filmmaker Jean Cocteau, the Russian director Dimitri Buchowetski, his star actress Margot Grahame, the failed pianist turned decorator Zizi Svirsky, the publisher Donald Friede . . . all present and accounted for.

Pablo elbowed through the crowd to say hello. He looked unhappy because he did not like parties, and he hadn’t brought either his wife or his mistress. But he gave me a friendly hug in greeting, then stepped back and looked hard at me, running his eyes up and down my figure. His large black eyes grew even larger and I knew he saw what no one else had yet seen.

Man was stewing in a corner, drinking whiskey rather than champagne, and his gaze never left Lee but darted around the room, following her every movement. I wondered what the hell was going on and wished I hadn’t come except how could I have not come? If you saw a car careen out of control and head toward a cliff, would you really be able to look away?

It was so crowded we could barely move, much less dance, yet various couples clung together in one area of the studio, two-stepping to a soft ballad coming from the gramophone, filling the air with a scratchy sweetness. The dancers were reflected in a circle of mirrors, doubling and tripling their numbers, and I realized that evening was Lee’s salute to surrealism, the way the mirrors doubled us, or cut us off at the legs or reflected some torsos as headless, depending on how the mirrors had been hung. It was a fun house for grown-ups, for artists.

Jamie disappeared a few minutes after we arrived, probably looking for the corner where a hash pipe was being passed around. The sweet exotic odor of it, stronger even than the thick smoke of French cigarettes, had greeted us at the door and already clung to my clothes and hair.

“What do you think?” Lee found me in a corner where I had retreated to wait and watch.

“Gorgeous. And a little frightening. Seven years of bad luck if one of these gets broken.”

“No more bad luck for me, kiddo. To hell with that.” Without looking at Man, she raised her glass in his direction. She knew he was watching, glaring, unblinking, from his own corner. “He was good to me, in his way. But that’s not the same as love, is it?” She shouldered a path into the crowd and danced, by herself, eyes closed, face all dreamy and soft. I couldn’t bear to look at Man, to see what he thought of this little performance.

Jamie appeared at my side. “Hey, Nora, why the wallflower? Walls will stand up by themselves, you know.” He was drunk, high, carefree as he rarely was those days in sobriety. “Have a drink.” He offered a bottle.

“No.” The very thought of whiskey, or even champagne, made me want to gag. Soon, very soon, I would have to tell Jamie what I had suspected for several weeks.

“Spoilsport.” Ah. One of Lee’s terms. Over the course of the year, he had picked up quite a few of Lee’s turns of phrase.

“Do you ever get tired of this?” I asked Jamie, putting my arm around his waist.

“Tired of what? Champagne I can’t afford? The pickpockets at the Eiffel Tower? Snotty waiters? Man’s treating me like a lackey? How could I get tired of all that? Here, have a drink.”

“No!” I pushed the bottle so hard its contents sloshed over both of us.

“No need to waste it,” Jamie said, wiping at my dress.

“We need to talk. Someplace quiet.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “We do. But let’s dance first.” The music on the gramophone had changed. It was an American tune, slow and sweet and wordless, the sentiment climbing up and down on clarinet notes soft as smoke. Jamie nuzzled his head into my shoulder, pressed me close to him, and I thought maybe we didn’t really need to talk, maybe we could just go on and on like that, close, moving together, as sure and silent as animals without language.

At the end of the song, the electric lights were switched on, and we were bathed in the harsh reflected light ricocheting back and forth from the dozens of mirrors. People squinted as if the sun were in their eyes; they twisted their heads trying to avoid the glare.

Lee stood on a chair, banging a spoon against a glass. “I have an announcement,” she shouted. “Hey!
Attention, s’il vous plaît!
”

Someone took the needle off the record. The dancing came to a standstill, conversations halted. Everyone turned in Lee’s direction. Jamie dropped his arm from my waist and he, too, looked up at Lee. I saw something in his face that took me so by surprise that I fell back a little, as if I had been struck. Oh no, I thought. Not Jamie.

Lee saluted the crowd. “This is good-bye, folks. I’m going back to New York.”

Everyone in the room had been politely silent before the announcement; now they were stonily so. You could have proclaimed that Greta Garbo had just flown to the moon or that France had declared an American-style prohibition, and people would not have been more dazed, though I saw satisfaction on the faces of some of
the women who had been upstaged by the beautiful Lee Miller. I could think only of the expression I had seen on Jamie’s face when he thought I wasn’t looking.

Man still sulked in his corner, more than a little drunk by now. The room was no longer silent. It was filling with the murmur of whispers and surprised exclamations as people turned from Lee to look at Man.

The pistol was in Man’s hand. He raised it. He pointed it at Lee. The gesture, so small in description, seemed to take three days, not three seconds; three days, the amount of time a panther sleeps before it lures its next victim with the sweetness of its breath.

Someone gasped. Someone pointed. Everyone saw it by then, that gleaming black pistol. Lee had gone white. Even under the red lipstick, chapped in some places, her lips were ashen.

Man took careful aim, squinting, moving the pistol slightly to the right. He was the only person in the room moving; everyone else had turned to stone. He pulled the trigger.

I heard the click and it seemed to take years for that bullet to reach its destination. To Lee’s left, far too close to her, a mirror shattered.

It takes broken glass a hundred years to fall to the ground, and when it does, the noise is like an explosion. Cocteau was there that night, and years later when I saw his movie
Beauty and the Beast
, with all the breaking, flying mirrors, I wondered if he was thinking of the night when Man fired at Lee.

When it was over, there was a different sound. Lee was—whooping with laughter.

“Feel better, Man?” she shouted at him.

“Much better!” He laughed back.

Other people around me started to laugh, too, falsely,
tentatively. Perhaps this was a prank. The surrealists, they go too far,
n’est-ce pas
?

Jamie thought otherwise. He dropped the whiskey bottle and lunged at Man. They grappled and Jamie ended up on top, obviously on his way to a bloody victory, when Pablo and some other man I didn’t know pulled him off and separated the two.

“You damn coward!” Jamie shouted at Man.

“You absolute fool,” Man said, calmly. “I missed on purpose.” He used a pristine handkerchief to wipe blood from his split lip, and I knew our days in Paris were over.

Lee stepped off the chair and went to stand between Man and Jamie. She put a hand on Jamie’s shoulder and whispered something to him. Jamie turned away. When he raised his head, his eyes looked directly into mine though we were separated by the length of the crowded room. In his gaze I saw everything I had most dreaded. His mouth opened as if he would say something, but instead he looked away. My heart broke with the realization.

The party ended soon after by mutual unspoken understanding. The party was well and truly over. One by one, couples disappeared from Lee’s studio that night, no one bothering to say good night, just disappearing like cast members leaving a failed rehearsal.

As the revelers shuffled away in various stages of intoxication, Lee smiled often at Man, but kept a distance from him, and he, still dabbing the now rusty-stained handkerchief at his lip, stayed away from her.

Not knowing what to do, only that I had to do something, I went to where Lee had stood on her chair to make the announcement, and studied the spot. Glass, sharp-pointed shards, had fallen just a foot or two from her. She could have been injured, even if Man had purposely missed. Glass could have flown into that
beautiful, perfect face of hers and ruined it forever. I remembered how she had stood close to the panther’s cage, too close, tempting whatever fates had bestowed such vulnerable beauty on her, and I wished the panther had slashed her.

Lee and Jamie were standing together, not speaking. If they had been whispering, acting slyly, I think it would have been easier. Instead, they just stood there, intimacy written large on their faces. God, how tired I suddenly felt.

I dug my coat out from the pile on Lee’s bed. Jamie met me at the door. “I’m going to stay a while. Make sure she’s okay,” he said.

“Sure,” I said, shivering though it was a hot night. And then, as an afterthought: “What about me?”

“You only have to walk down the street. You’ll be fine, Nora. Damn, Man just tried to shoot Lee. I don’t want to leave her alone with him.” There was such anguish in his look I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

“He wasn’t really going to shoot her, you know. It was just another act, a spectacle.”

“I’m not so certain.” He walked me to the door and then closed it on me.

I walked home alone, rehearsing lines in my head. Jamie, I’m pregnant. Think you’re ready for a family yet, my darling? Think you can be ready in say, eight months’ time? And what are we going to do about Lee?

By three in the morning, Jamie still hadn’t come home. I knew what the next step was, the next act in this particular drama. I put my coat on and walked back down the street to Lee’s studio. It was dark and silent. She hadn’t locked her door. Crackers and pretzels crunched underfoot, so they heard me coming. When I pulled back the curtain on the small alcove where she kept a bed, Jamie and Lee
blinked up at me, their arms wrapped around each other. None of us said anything. What could words express that the look in Jamie’s face did not?

I stood there for what felt like an eternity. They stared back and our speechlessness thickened our tongues and our wits, reduced us to animals incapable of language. I could have roared or whimpered. That was all. Silence was better. Stupidly, I bent over and picked up a bottle that had fallen off Lee’s table. Perfume. The room stank of attar of rose. I put the bottle back in its place and turned to go.

I wandered the streets, after that, watching the dawn turn the eastern sky a dingy gray as the early laborers made their way to bakery shops, the stalls of Les Halles, and the few construction areas still being worked on in Depression-quieted Paris.

When I finally returned, exhausted, to our room, Jamie was stepping out from behind the screen where we kept the towels and soap and washbasin. His sandy hair was tousled, his skin damp and pink from a scrubbing. The morning light sculpted deep shadows under his cheekbones. He had never looked more beautiful and I had never loved him more than I did in that moment just before it was all to end.

“Say something,” he said. “Don’t just stand there, all silent and wounded.”

“I am wounded. But I will say something, since you asked me to. A question or two. How long?”

He knew exactly what I meant. “A few months.”

“How many is a few?” I needed a certain specificity, needed the incision to be clean and sharp as he cut out my heart.

Jamie sat on the bed and rubbed his damp hair with the towel. I used to do that. Dry his hair for him.

“After Lee came back from St. Moritz. That’s when it started.”

Christmas. New Year’s. The day at the zoo when Lee had gone on and on about Aziz, in front of the panther’s cage. All that time she had been sleeping with Jamie.

“Your idea or hers?”

“Why does that matter?” He threw the wet towel on the floor and stared at it.

“It does.”

“One night in the studio when Man was out with Picasso, Lee started to cry. Something had happened that day, she wouldn’t say what, but it made her sad. She was crying, for God’s sake, Nora.”