The Eleventh Year (25 page)

He smiled mechanically and above her blond head he saw Jamie, the maid of honor, alone. Shouldn't she have been dancing with Paul, the best man? Wasn't it true that they lived together? Ned liked Jamie enormously and wondered, watching her pretty, earnest face, still and quiet and sad. “I must dance with Jamie soon,” he murmured to his wife.

“Yes, you must. Paul made a dreadful
faux
pas
because this waltz should have been hers—by protocol, if nothing else.” Priscilla's voice rang dry, almost haughty in his ear. He knew she disapproved of Jamie's living arrangements, and sighed. The girl deserved better. At that instant he saw the culprit, laughing, talking to the woman in purple. Lady Priscilla whispered: “That's the Princess Egorova. Her father was a close acquaintance of Lord Buchanan, Papa's friend, when he was Ambassador from the Court of Saint James in St. Petersburg.”

Ned Richardson merely raised his brow, amused. The woman was an artists' model, who had posed in the nude for Matisse, Picasso, Soutine. But Priscilla would ignore the gossip and seize only the points of interest to
her:
Egorova's pedigreed background. She was like a well-trained racehorse who saw nothing on either side of it and who concentrated solely on its own course.

Yet, in America, she had perceived something in Lesley that had concerned her, something that he, blind father, hadn't even spotted. His beautiful daughter, in Alexandre's arms, was like a cloud of softness on the dance floor, all femininity and verve, her red bangs glistening beneath the veil that had been thrown back after the nuptial kiss. “They're very happy,” Priscilla had said. Evidently they were.

J
amie stared
at the pad in front of her. The slinky new styles of the day were definitely not attractive on her. She glanced at her calves, touched the curve of her hip that prevented the skirt from clinging in one straight line that showed off the cleanness of the boyish figure now popular in the tabloids
Femina
and
Excelsior.
Today, 1922, the girl of the day looked like Lesley. Jamie folded her hands in reflection.

She was uncomfortable, thinking of Lesley. They'd drifted apart; not by planned action, not by lack of caring. Simply each had settled into a mode of living that no longer much included the other. Lesley was ensconced in her stone mansion Place d'Iéna, with its high ceilings and beveled glass windows. Jamie and Paul were 23, Boulevard Montparnasse, on the Left Bank, in the heart of the artistic community of Paris. It took determination to make one's way across the Seine to visit; and sometimes Lesley made excuses not to see her. It was as if her life had become so complicated since her marriage that any change in plans was upsetting to her.

Jamie looked around her at the apartment she had painstakingly turned into a home. To reach it, one had to climb eight flights of stairs to the top floor of an old house, decent but unpretentious. The staircase of polished wood curved upward. At each landing a large window gave off light. There was no elevator. From a small hallway one entered, to the right, into an immense studio with an absurdly high ceiling. One entire wall was paned with glass. The bottom was divided into casement windows. The studio encompassed two distinct areas. To the right was the living room. Near the window was a grand piano that Paul had brought. Against the opposite wall a large, low sofa stood, covered by multicolored throw pillows. Between the two armchairs were strewn more chairs and small, short-legged tables with gay linen cloths, supporting vases that overflowed with bright flowers and photographs in interesting lacquered frames. On the walls hung a quantity of paintings of different dimensions and different values. Braque squeezed against Marie Laurencin and Rosa Bonheur, and a small Cézanne beside a watercolor by Lesley. Jamie saw the newspaper lying on the sofa, the opened jar of bonbons from which Paul had picked that morning, and her own manuscript pages next to a volume of poems by the newfangled French Dadaist Tristan Tzara.

To the left was the dining area. A square table surrounded by chairs with high backs of sculpted wood, a sideboard, and a grandfather clock that chimed the half hours seemed set against the background provided by a large wall hanging, really a Persian carpet of simple design, on which she had hung several kitchen utensils: metal spoons and ladles, and a huge copper measure with a handle a foot long. The walls were so cracked and old that it would have been impossible to recondition them and repaint the plaster. On the wall that was paned in glass there was a ledge, on which Jamie had arranged many green plants, which prospered. She had a knack with living things.

From the studio one proceeded to the small bedroom, taken up by the large four-poster with its draperies of scarlet cotton. Then the tiny kitchen and the bathroom. Jamie had signed the lease, not Paul. One did not trap that sort of man. It was, they both admitted, her apartment. She paid for it from her small inheritance. He brought her food, took her to dinner, and had supplied much of the art work and the elegant piano. But in no way was he keeping her. She had come to Paris to be her own woman. But, day after day, Paul settled more into her life. She loved him with all her heart, but she was afraid to cling. The entire secret to his affection was that she led her own life and demanded nothing of him.

Night after night she slept, entwined against the body of a man who was not her husband. She laughed about it to herself. Marriage was not what counted. It was that Paul trusted her, wanted her. She would think, wistfully, that had he offered, she would have accepted marriage. Marriage would mean a certain respectability that she now lacked. She would have been the Comtesse Paul de Varenne, and not just Jamie Lynne Stewart. But then again—The truth was that much more than marriage, she would have liked to have borne Paul's child.

Lesley, on the other hand, lay encased in respectability. Her house was not the slanted top floor of a building: It was the building itself. All Grecian lines, four stories tall, in the Sixteenth
Arrondissement.
Jamie found it a forbidding residence. Only in Lesley's own boudoir had Jamie felt a sense of freedom. There Lesley had broken loose with vivid colors and delicate textures, and Matisse sketches lay next to Picasso nudes from his Rose and Blue periods. It made absolutely no sense: Lesley, with her short bobbed hair, her gold bangles, her short skirts, in a monument of a house that hung around her tiny presence like a ten-ton frame around a delicate portrait.

Jamie was twenty-four. She still refused to cut her brown hair, because her figure was too full and, also, because Paul liked to unwind the coiled tresses at night. They lived together openly. Friends of his, painters and art dealers, dropped in to see him at her apartment without embarrassment. Among artists there was freedom.

She set down her pencil and the pad on which she had been writing, and went to the Royal Model X she had brought to France with her from college. It was a silent black machine, with a double window on the side through which one could see the miraculous mechanism of its inner workings. When changing from capitals to lowercase letters, one had to move the carriage. Jamie was used to it and would have typed on no other. Her novel was progressing right now by leaps and bounds.

She had returned to see Gertrude Stein, fascinated by the woman's style of composition. She had been most moved by her story of Melanctha, a love story odd because set in the world of the colored people. Melanctha, the black beauty, and her doctor lover had been members of a society that lay outside the bounds of Caucasian, middle-class America. Jamie had loved it, loved Melanctha. She read Stein with interest, trying to understand the flow of rhythm that seemed more important to this writer than plot or common sense. Stein was trying to reinvent the English language, much like the Irish writer James Joyce, whose
Ulysses
had caused such a stir among the puritans that its serialization had been stopped when it had first appeared in the
Little Review
in 1920. Since then Jamie had met Joyce, who at forty was younger and undoubtedly more brilliant than Miss Stein. Still—Jamie was fascinated by the short, middle-aged Jewish-American woman and by the artists and expatriate Americans who gathered around her for her pithy comments and incisive criticisms. Gertrude spoke to her now. First of all, Jamie was not the wife of a talented man; second, she had proven herself as a dedicated writer.

Jamie had at first felt shy about showing her poems and short stories. But she wanted to be recognized, wanted to be read. Paul had said to her: “An unread writer, no matter how brilliant, is like a madman screaming at the top of his lungs from within a padded cell.” One had to be brave enough to risk exposure. Gertrude Stein thought that her own work was ingenious; most of her admirers thought to themselves that she was merely avant-garde and somewhat obscure, and that her particular talent lay in her cognac and coffee conversation. But still, people showed her their creations, and she passed judgment. It was she who had first grunted approval at some of Jamie's freeform verse, and who had introduced her to Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson of the
Little Review.

This was a magazine published at various times in various places: Chicago, New York, Paris, and even Muir City, California. Heap and Anderson did not pay its contributors, but they did publish bold and innovative literary talent. Jane Heap looked like a man, but Margaret Anderson was female in every aspect, the sort of woman who luxuriated in elegant clothes and furs. Jamie had met Jane and been awed. Paul had met Margaret and charmed her. It seemed to amuse Paul to make inroads for Jamie that would then make it possible for her to achieve some success. But how far ahead all this seemed— publication, success…! Jamie tucked a page of paper into the Royal X and began to type.

There were so many interesting people to encounter in Paris, who never would have found her in Cincinnati and might not have noticed her in New York. More and more Americans were becoming disenchanted with their own country. They congregated around the Steins' house on rue de Fleurus and at the libraries of Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, both on rue de l'Odéon. Sylvia Beach was an American, who ran a lending library for English and American writers. It was she who had found a French printer for Joyce's huge manuscript,
Ulysses.
Heap and Anderson had been prosecuted, by the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice two years before, for printing the eleventh part of Bloom's saga, and hope of being considered by an American publisher had vanished for James Joyce. But one printer in Dijon had listened to the impassioned plea of Miss Beach and gone to work. Adrienne Monnier, her French friend, owned a shop across the street, and the Dadaist poets Tzara, Eluard, and Aragon converged there, feeling comfortable.

Jamie drank some strong coffee. Perhaps the biggest difference between her life and Lesley's lay in the fact that Lesley was trying, it appeared to Jamie, to become totally French. Jamie felt fine as an American. She would not have felt so fine back in the United States, but here it was forgotten that the Eighteenth Amendment had been passed, that Prohibition had turned the country into a divided camp. On the one hand were the bootleggers, the speakeasies, the illegal drinking; on the other, the Carrie Nations, the Margaret Stewarts who considered all drinking a form of evil. In France life, like wine, flowed smoothly. But here, she could enjoy being American. The French thought that American women were so much more modern, so much more liberated. They could vote and spoke out with such passion when their minds provoked them into action! Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach—they were admirable, unstoppable.

Had I been French, Paul would never have granted me a moment of his time, she thought with a start. He knew so little about her country that she still seemed mysterious. She set down her steaming cup and thought: If ever he leaves me, it shall be after I've made my mark. Because I'm going to make it, come what may.

Ernest Hemingway, Paris correspondent for the
Toronto Daily Star,
was two years younger than she. Yet Sherwood Anderson,
the
novelist of note today, had taken him under his wing, introduced him to the expatriate Americans by sending him to rue de Fleurus. She, Jamie, had thought right away that this young man, so often trying to pick arguments with everyone, so heartily disliked by Alice Toklas, would become the strongest novelist of the epoch. She'd read Fitzgerald and been charmed by
This Side of Paradise.
But Hemingway was less poetic and more vivid. Jamie would have to fit between them. Her novel was going to contain harsh reality—but with feeling, with passion, with dreams and visions.

We write what we are, she thought. To each of us our own life is unique. Had Paul loved her and erased that last iota of insecurity, she would have been the most gloriously happy woman in Paris.

L
esley felt very hot
, and her forehead felt humid under the bangs. From her ears dangled emerald teardrops, and at her throat was an antique choker of matching gems. Her evening gown of gray silk hung almost entirely straight, and since her bust was small and her hips practically nonexistent, it presented her as a slender tubular form crowned by her red, permanented hair. It curled around her face like Cupid's ringlets, and underneath her green eyes, in their gravity, belied the naughty cuteness of the hairstyle. She was clinging to Alexandre's arm, unaware that her fingers had closed tightly around his sleeve.

“Notre cher Deputé,”
their hostess, Marquise Casati, was saying, laying long painted nails on his other sleeve. Her face was striking, white with an overlay of powder, black eyes ringed with kohl. She had dyed red hair that made Lesley's look almost blond by comparison. Her black gown was highlighted only with sprinkles of diamonds.

Alexandre smiled, bent over her hand. In three years he had become more supple. His body moved with less stiffness; he was more relaxed. Lesley noted this as he replied: “Dear friend, what a pleasure to be with you again. You are the most dramatic woman in Paris.”

“Hardly, you clever boy. There is always the Princess Egorova. She has one distinct advantage: She is younger.”

He laughed, yet Lesley could see that for a moment his eyes had frozen. Then the Marquise kissed her cheek, whispered something, and disappeared among her guests. Lesley looked up, suddenly anxious, but his look had already faded and Alex was appraising the salon with interest, peering at the jade flowers in the vases, at the elaborate furniture. “Do you like it?” she murmured.

He made a sweeping gesture with his free hand. “This? Not really, darling. You know my type: the secure conservative. I like to feel at ease, in control of my decor. This is pure rococo, don't you think?” He smiled at her, then touched her curls: “Like this.”