The Beautiful American (25 page)

Nicky’s marriage, he explained that first night over martinis on the terrace, had been built on love and not good sense. The marriage had faltered. He had mourned, of course, when his wife died ten years ago. He had observed the formalities. But death had merely ended her suffering; the marriage had been long over. Nor would he remarry. Life was so pleasant. There was the sun, the beach, the casinos, the pretty women in summer dresses. Why complicate it? Why risk so much known happiness for the unknown?

“And what of you?” he asked. “You do not seem the type of woman to be alone, without a man.”

“I didn’t used to think so either,” I said.

“An infidelity. A betrayal,” Nicky guessed. “That is often how first love ends. Women expect too much.”

“Do we?” I tried to feel angry, but found I couldn’t. Perhaps it was the martinis. Perhaps it was the warmth of his hand on mine, the beauty of the evening with its sound of waves on the beach, the stars overhead, the gay laughter coming from the casino terraces around the corner. Nice is not a good city to be angry in.

“And, of course, there is Dahlia,” he said. “The beautiful if somewhat demanding child. She makes it impossible for you to go back home. What is that strange-sounding city? Poughkeepsie?” The pressure of his hand on mine increased slightly.

“Yes.” I was overcome with guilt, blaming an innocent child and realizing that, at that moment, I did not miss her. I was glad to be away from her screams, her neediness.

“It is all right, these feelings,” he said, reading my mind. “Did Mother ever tell you how she locked me in a closet one day because I would not stop pestering her? She bought me ice cream for supper and I forgave her immediately, but I think she has never forgiven herself. These things are complicated. Pleasure is not.”

Nicky ordered a salad with tuna and olives, iced oysters on the half shell, and a bottle of champagne. No dessert. “It is better not to overindulge, especially not the first night,” he explained.

Since first realizing I was pregnant, I had felt older than the oldest church in Paris, not so much in years but in the mind, the heart. With Nicky I was young again, a learner with training wheels on my bicycle.

To feel carefree, though, is as short-lived as the most volatile of scents. The next morning when I woke up in Nicky’s bed with bold strips of Nice sun warming my legs through the window shutter, the sense of age returned. I missed Dahlia for the first time in my life. It was no longer a starry evening of champagne and oysters but a new morning and it should have been her voice waking me up. I missed her like I hadn’t known a person could be missed. Not even in my strongest moments of love with Jamie had I experienced such a powerful emotion.

Nicky held me as I wept. “There, there,” he said, rocking me. He didn’t need to ask me why I was crying. It was for that beautiful, if demanding, child of mine back in Grasse. “You will be home again tomorrow,” he said, only a slight edge of impatience in his voice.

My business in Nice that afternoon was even more successful than I had hoped. I met with a small group of German businessmen in a tearoom on the Promenade des Anglais, and spread out a little display of perfumes, old and new, explaining the various properties
of the fragrances. Only one of the men spoke fluent French and my German was limited at best to words learned very late at night in Paris cafés . . . hardly appropriate phrases for a business meeting.

The one who spoke French translated for his companions but gave me frequent sideways glances. I worried he was flirting. But when the orders had been placed and the deposit checks written out, he took me aside and said, “Don’t you remember me, mademoiselle?”

I looked harder at him than I had before. Yes. He was older, dressed much more conservatively, but it was the art collector I had met that first night in Paris with Lee, the customer that wily Man had been wooing, the one who bought only Picassos.

“Herr Abetz. How nice to see you again. How is your wife . . . ?” I couldn’t remember her name.

“Trudie. She is well. She stays in Berlin now. Traveling no longer suits her. I am surprised you are in Nice. Did you weary of Paris?”

“Yes,” I said. “I wearied of Paris.”

He eyed me and I thought he was seeing through that little lie. “Your friend. Miss Miller. How is she? A lovely girl. And your young man. His name escapes me.”

“Mr. Sloane,” I said stiffly, uncomfortable with how easily he had put those two names together. Had everyone seen but me, even that very first night? I had been so busy showing off with that silly tango performance, perhaps I had missed the first telling signs.

I stood. “So nice to see you again,” I said, offering him my hand.

“Yes. I suspect the next time we meet, I will be in uniform. I will be commissioned.” He stood as well. “Our chancellor grows restless.”

It was 1935 and in Germany Hitler had been elected to replace
President von Hindenburg. Hitler was
Führer und Reichskanzler
—leader and chancellor.

•   •   •

N
icky and I quickly became friends during the day and lovers at night. I understood that when I returned to Grasse, other women would take my place. It didn’t matter. He was as elegantly polite as Aziz had been with Lee, and he kept secrets and withheld much, as I suspect Aziz did. With Jamie, love had been all or nothing. With Nicky, it was merely sensual and fun and fit neatly into a little compartment.

There were nights when I had to have dinner with clients, German and American businessmen looking for luxury items for stores and hotels and expecting to be entertained before placing their soap and perfume orders. I wined and dined them; I flattered and even flirted a little. But at the end of the evening, after their purchase orders had been completed, Nicky would send a car and driver to pick them up and take them to the nightclubs of Nice.

Then I would join him in his very lovely rooms on the top floor of l’Auberge de l’Opéra, where white lace curtains floated in the salty breeze and the morning sun warmed my bare legs sticking out from under the coverlet. He fussed with a coffeemaker in his green-tiled kitchenette, and I thought it was quite pleasant to be a woman of the world instead of a lovesick girl.

All of this, of course, we kept secret from his mother. When he made his visits to Grasse, he was once again Monsieur Alexandrov.

I did well in Grasse as a translator and seller. After a couple of years I was able to have my suits and dresses tailor-made. I bought a secondhand red Peugeot 201 and darted up and down the curving hillside roads, through olive groves and into scrubby pine forests
and out again into the dazzling light of southern France. Dahlia, growing by leaps and bounds, came with me on short trips to the towns and villages around us, Vence and Pertuis and Apt, picnicking in lavender fields or meadows of wild thyme. Every two or three months I ventured south to Nice, to the perfume buyers and to Nicky.

But sometimes it felt as if I were living someone else’s life, and somewhere in the universe there was a different woman with a different life, with a husband with tawny hair and sharp cheekbones who built a swing in the backyard for his daughter.

The day I left Paris, I had split myself in two, like Atlas looking one way while his twin, Gadeirus, looked the other, and neither of them saw the disaster coming. I had been with Lee that day she went to photograph Blondel’s building on the rue du Louvre. I had thought she wanted to photograph the magnificent statues, but instead she photographed shadows on the street.
It’s all about the light,
she had said.
Everything else is superfluous. I think we’re going to be friends,
she said. We had been. And then, she became the disaster I hadn’t seen coming.

Dahlia, meanwhile, became a proper little French girl, with a perfect accent. In midafternoon she ate her
goûter
, her bread with chocolate, and when she sang in the bathtub, she sang French nursery songs.

She had my dark hair, but she looked more and more like Jamie, growing tall and leggy for her age, her lightly freckled cheeks stretched over emerging slanting cheekbones. I would look at her and see Jamie looking back at me, and long for the great unknown of that life with him, the life I would never have.

One day when we were sitting on church steps near a park, Dahlia went to play with a friend. I watched bemused at the way
children turn a leaf into a saucer, a pebble into a teacup. Had I played at tea? No, Lee and I had climbed trees and chased her brothers; we had been tomboys playing rough and ready. Lee. I half hated her, half missed her.

There were only three pretend place settings on the ground, and Dahlia’s little friend, Chantal, looked at her sternly and asked where her setting for her daddy was. “One and one and one and one,” Chantal said. “Four. Not three. My daddy is coming for tea.”

“I don’t have a daddy,” Dahlia said.

I waited, not breathing.

“Why not? Everyone has a daddy,” said her playmate.

Dahlia stood. “I don’t want to play anymore,” she said. She came to me and threw her arms around my knees. I tousled her dark hair and my heart did somersaults in my chest.

•   •   •

I
n 1937, in the spring of the year before I turned thirty, I got a card from my mother, and a note asking me to come home. She was getting married and moving to California and wanted to see me and my daughter. “We’ll tell them you’re married and widowed,” she wrote. “Make up a name.”

Pretend I was widowed? As if no one would see through that ploy, I thought. For one month, the planned length of my stay, I could manage the farce. But Jamie would be sure to hear about it. Gossip would flow down the streets of Poughkeepsie like rainwater.

Five years had already passed since I had seen him. Where had the time gone? In diaper washings and bedtime stories, I thought. Evenings in Nice with Nicky. I hadn’t heard from Jamie, or tried to contact him. Maybe it was time? And what would I say?

Stop it, I told myself. Do you expect him to run to you, fall on his knees, beg you to marry him? I had seen a silent movie once at the moving picture house in Poughkeepsie, lovers separated by the Great War, the soldier coming home to the girl, to the girl’s daughter, born while he had been in the trenches. He had done that. Fallen on his knees, begged. It was only a movie, Nora, I told myself. More likely, you won’t see Jamie at all. And if you do . . .

If I did, I wanted the movie version, the happy ending. I would end the silence and tell him everything. We were older, wiser. The betrayal was a long time ago. We could pick up where we left off. Or maybe not. Maybe that chapter was over. But how could it be? As soon as I thought of going back to Poughkeepsie, I thought of Jamie.

Nicky sensed my indecision. “Go back,” he said. “You can afford to take a month off. A trip may be just what you need.”

“Do I need something, Nicky?” I asked, sitting up on my elbows. He was in the bathroom just off the bedroom, his face covered with shaving cream that made his black eyes even darker, a towel wrapped around his waist. “Is that what you think?”

He put down the razor and looked at me. “I think if you don’t go to your mother, you will regret it later. And who wants to live with regrets?”

“And what will you do, all that time?” I already knew.

“Work hard and then find ways to amuse myself, darling. And miss you every minute.”

•   •   •

D
ahlia and I sailed past the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July. The statue hadn’t been there when my great-grandfather had fled France and the revolution. I wondered what that great
harbor had looked like to him, that bit of rocky real estate jutting into the Atlantic, before it had its skyscrapers and monuments, when New York was still a mud-path village and France, until the guillotine, had been the center of civilization. Roles had reversed. Now I was coming from a quiet hillside village in France to the greater city of Manhattan.

We spent the night in the city, not at the Plaza but at a hotel just one price grade down, and used cabs, not the subway. I had the strange sensation that my older self, the woman wearing the tailored suit and the professionally clipped hair, holding her daughter’s hand, might bump into her young self, that poorly dressed, lovesick girl who would follow her guy anywhere.

My child was terrified of the fireworks and the parades and the commotion. She was not normally a fearful little girl, but we led such a quiet, calm life in Grasse. I realized how little English she knew, how for all purposes she was, in fact, a French girl. I looked at her the way I anticipated my mother would and wondered, what am I doing? Shouldn’t I bring my daughter home for good, before it is too late?

The question was an awakening. I still thought of Poughkeepsie, or at least the United States, as home. And there was a deadline to my situation. At some point, Dahlia might become irrevocably French. Not a bad thing in itself, but it meant that if I wanted to stay with her, I, too, would have to stay in France.

Momma met us at the Poughkeepsie train station, looking as I had never before seen her look, or at least didn’t remember her looking. She seemed younger, not the old woman I had anticipated, and her hair was bleached blond. She was slender and made-up with red lipstick and powder to hide her freckles. When she came toward me, tottering a bit on her heels, forced to take small steps by the
tightness of her skirt, Dahlia hid behind my skirt and looked up at me, her eyes large with fear.

“Nora!” Momma shouted, waving. The train was pulling out already and the noise made it impossible to hear each other. I waited till the train had chugged down the tracks, the grinding of metal on metal and the hiss of the steam dying away.

“Hi, Momma,” I said.

We looked at each other. We did not hug or kiss, just looked.

“You’re older,” she said.

“You’re younger.”

“And who is this?” She crouched down carefully in her tight skirt, her knees twisted to the side, and extended a lace-gloved hand to Dahlia.