The Beautiful American (12 page)

It was like being locked in the panther’s gaze. You couldn’t look away until he did.

“And her young man.” Picasso extended his hand to Jamie.

Lee gave me a sideways glance. Is it everything you expected? her look seemed to ask.

It was not. Pablo wore a tailored suit and his graying hair was combed smartly back. He looked more like a banker than an artist. The furnishings in the room looked even more formal, more expensive than his suit. The sitting room, and I assumed the other rooms of the apartment, were done in Regency style, with delicate curved-leg tables and sofas, pink and yellow cushions, patterned wallpapers, gilt mirrors.

Jamie looked disappointed. We were used to the bohemian, often run-down but interesting studios and apartments of the artists in Montparnasse. This room would have impressed my mother.

When we were formally introduced to Madame Picasso, I understood. The home, the furniture, were chosen by her and they were a statement of intention: respectability, invitations to and from the right people, not the lowlife.

Olga was still very beautiful with her slender dancer’s body and dark eyes and hair. She had been in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes when Picasso met her, and ten years ago she had given up her dancing career for the more ambitious prospect of being Picasso’s wife.

Ten years is a long time in some marriages. Olga, when I met her, was a furious woman. She suspected what everyone else already knew and the suspicion of her husband’s infidelity had frozen her beautiful Russian face into a permanent expression of jealousy and bitterness. Even when she forced a smile, there was a deep line between her eyebrows, an aggressive jutting of the chin. She looked like a woman about to throw something, and when she walked, there was a suggestion of violence in her footsteps. I wondered which roles she had been assigned when she had danced with Diaghilev’s ballet troupe, to match that quiet and intense sense of a building storm.

Their son, Paulo, was there that night as well, though he was sent to boarding school soon after. Nine years old, he had the same blazing eyes of his father, the same barely restrained drama in his movements as his mother. In other words, he wasn’t a child as I imagined children to be, but a smaller, sweeter-faced man-boy who seemed already to suspect he would never measure up to his father.

“Drinks,” Olga said, and I imagined someone could have said “screw you” in the same tone of voice, except with a Russian accent.

A maid appeared, carrying a tray.

Lee looked at me over Man’s shoulder. Her smile was that of a teenage girl who has nailed her brother’s shoe to the floor. What fun, her eyes seemed to say.

Jamie stalked through the room, studying the paintings on the wall, the sculptures on the floor and tables. There were photos of Olga and Paulo set into silver frames and in them I recognized various corners of Man Ray’s studio. Every once in a while Jamie glanced my way, eyebrows still raised after examining a Matisse or a Braque, and I found myself wishing he did not impress so easily. He seemed so young compared with Man and Picasso. He
was
so young. And young things often got hurt.

I sat carefully on a settee, self-conscious about the run in my stocking and wishing Lee had not sprung this event as a surprise. For someone like Olga, now sitting ramrod straight in a Louis Quinze chair, one should at least comb one’s hair, refresh one’s lipstick. I felt like a child at a grown-ups’ party.

In one corner, an electric train had been set up for Paulo and several times I caught Olga giving that messy train set the kind of look a hostess gives a stray dog that wanders into a formal garden. She did not want it there. I decided I would spend the evening playing with Paulo and his train.

Picasso stood smiling in the middle of this battle of wills, perfectly at ease, the sun around which everyone else in the room revolved. (Lee explained later that his real studio, his working studio, was upstairs in a different part of the building, and no one, absolutely no one, not even Olga, was allowed into it. No one except his mistress, Marie-Thérèse, that was.)

Lee sat on a settee opposite Olga, and Man sat next to her, so close their elbows rubbed.

“Lee,” Picasso said, “are you still wasting your time with those fashion photographers?” He looked at her from under graying but still thick lashes. He tugged at his long, straight forelock and smoothed it back, a gesture he repeated frequently that evening. It was a gesture I had seen in other men, usually those proud of their thick hair, an emblem of youth, but in Picasso the gesture was so exaggerated it seemed more a ritual, a superstition, than simple vanity.

“Fashion pays the bills,” Lee said. “Cheers.” She drained her glass and held it out for a refill.

“My portraits pay the bills,” Man said darkly.

“And you, young man, are the new assistant?” Picasso turned to Jamie. “Man doesn’t usually take male assistants, only young girls.”

“He did it as a favor to me,” Lee said, finishing her second cocktail. “I thought it would be fun to have a young man around.” She turned white, realizing what she had just said, and that it could not be taken back. Trying to make it mean something else would only underline what she had actually meant. So she went forward. “Besides, he’s taller,” she said, slipping her arm through Man’s. “Finally, I can make you jealous.” And that was the perfect ploy. His ego was flattered. His mistress longed for his jealousy.

It was dark outside, and my stomach was rattling with hunger. Olga’s sardine hors d’oeuvres were small and she, in good frugal housewife fashion, had portioned only one each. I wondered where we would be going for dinner—Jockey, Taverna, or even just the local bistro for beer and plates of sausage.

First, though, must come the shoptalk: what dealer was doing well, who was going out of business, which collector had paid what price, what museums were scheduling group exhibits of which school; which mistress was being unfaithful to her artist lover. Jamie
sat and listened as Man and Picasso quipped back and forth in a coded language of commerce and art.

Lee and Olga gossiped quietly about the wives of various collectors, people I didn’t know. I pushed Paulo’s toy locomotive around the tracks and rearranged the miniature cows grazing alongside it.

After a half hour and another round of cocktails, Paulo was taken away by a nanny for his bedtime, and Pablo rose.

“Don’t wait up,” he instructed Olga. “We may be late.” Exeunt husband and friends, leaving behind angry, suspicious wife.

Outside, I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled.

“Well?” Lee asked.

“Warn me next time,” I said.

“Then this is a warning. There’s more to come.” She slipped her arm through mine. “Having fun?”

Pablo’s mistress was already at Trianon, waiting for us. Pablo had kissed Olga good night on the cheek. He greeted Marie-Thérèse Walter with a long kiss on the lips.

Marie-Thérèse was blond compared with Olga’s darkness, athletic and strong compared with Olga’s slender fragility. Her smile was warm and open, compared with Olga’s closed face.

“So you are the American,” she said, shaking my hand and repeating exactly Pablo’s greeting to me. That was how I knew Jamie and I had been discussed. What had been the point of the discussions?

Marie-Thérèse slid over on the banquette, making room for me next to her. Pablo sat next to me, and Lee, Man, and Jamie sat on the other side, Lee in the middle, looking very pleased with herself. I looked at the trio and thought how lucky I was to have beautiful Jamie as my darling rather than sour, angry Man.

“Poughk
ee
psie?” Marie-Thérèse asked, emphasizing the long
e
’s so that my hometown sounded almost exotic. “Like Lee?”

“But we didn’t really know each other there,” Lee said, not looking up from the menu. “We met in a bookstore, didn’t we, Nora? You were wearing that funny hat. I wonder how the sole is tonight, and if there are oysters.”

Pablo ordered four bottles of a good crisp rosé for the table, but when it arrived, he poured none for himself, just as he had refused cocktails when Olga served them. So Jamie and I drank his share for him. Man and Pablo relaxed finally, and Lee and Marie-Thérèse and I talked about skirt lengths and movies and the cold weather.

Pablo’s mistress was sweet and earnest and very young. I felt sophisticated, even old next to her, though there wasn’t that much age difference, really. Lee gave me the details on Marie-Thérèse later: Pablo had seen her coming out of the Galeries Lafayette three years before, and walked right up to her, offering to do her portrait. The poor kid had no idea who he was, knew nothing about art and less about a man called Picasso, but she liked his face and his manners and agreed to meet him the next day. She was only seventeen, jailbait, so they had to lie about when they had actually met and when the affair began, placing it officially a year later.

“And now, you’re his muse,” Lee said to the girl, pouring more wine and raising her glass. “Pablo says his work has never been more creative, more filled with genius. To you!”

Marie-Thérèse blushed that intense, allover red that blondes with porcelain skin give off. “I just sit or stand as he tells me to,” she said.

“Well, then, here’s to obedience and patience. May they never cloud my door.” Lee emptied her glass. “I hate being told how to pose. Man has resorted to photographing me when I’m asleep. He moves my arms and legs and shoots away.”

That wasn’t completely true. Between photo sessions with
Vogue
, she still worked as Man’s model. I’d seen the photos he had taken of her the week before. There had been a new vaudeville show in town and he had hired three midgets to pose with Lee, one dressed as a harem dancer standing between Lee’s open legs. It was bizarre, perhaps humorous, but it made me a little queasy, looking at it, seeing Lee reduced to a pair of lovely extra-long legs. A different photo Man called “Prayer” was of Lee on her knees, naked backside submissively facing the camera.

I remembered how modestly Jamie posed me at Upton Lake. Jamie and Man were two very different kinds of men and I knew which kind I preferred.

Lee played with the oyster shells and murmured something about Olga, but her eyes were on a table across the room, on another couple, a slender middle-aged man with a thin mustache underneath a prominent nose, a woman with dark hair piled on top of her head and too much makeup on her exquisite face.

“Odd-looking couple,” said Lee. “But her dress is very expensive. Mainbocher, I’d say.”

They seemed foreign even in a city filled with foreigners and I strained to hear some of their conversation, to pick up their accent or language.

“Bey,” Man said quietly, his eyes following Lee’s. “His name is Aziz Eloui Bey. Egyptian. Spends half the year in Cairo, and the other half in Paris. The woman is his wife, Nimet.”

Aziz Eloui Bey looked up from his plate, where he had been precisely dissecting a duck breast with orange sauce. He smiled at us.

“What an awful-looking man,” Lee said, not returning his smile.

“Yes. But very wealthy,” Man said. “I plan to do their portraits.”

•   •   •

“S
o what did you and Man and Picasso talk about tonight, when I was playing choo-choo with Junior?” It was two in the morning and Jamie and I were in bed in our little room in Montparnasse. I was lying absolutely still, but the room kept circling around me.

“Pablo said he will find some work for me. Photographing works in progress, children’s first Communions, that kind of thing. Do we have any bromide, Nora? I think I’m going to be sick. Do you think those oysters were off?”

“Work that doesn’t get exhibited just goes into files and folders,” I said. “There are tablets in the pocket of my jacket. Get one for me, too.”

“Wet blanket. Work that pays bills and makes connections. We’re on our way, Nora. This time next year I’ll have a solo exhibit. I’m certain of it.”

He didn’t even have a gallery yet, poor kid, and he was planning his first one-man show.

“Well, before you buy your tuxedo and top hat, come give me a kiss. Forget the bromide.”

Jamie came back to bed and hovered over me, his eyes looking amber-colored in the dim light of a single candle.

“My beautiful boy,” I whispered.

“Man showed me some obscene photographs at the studio this afternoon,” Jamie said, smiling down at me.

“You mean girls and donkeys and the other tourist-postcard naughtiness?”

“No. Real stuff. Photographs they couldn’t use in the October issue of their surrealism magazine, the one dedicated to the Marquis de Sade. Some pretty strange stuff.”

“I bet. Who were the models?”

“Not Lee. Girls I didn’t know.”

“Well, that’s some relief.” I remembered then, Lee had told me about that issue, how Man and his surrealist friends were aligning themselves with the Communist International and Sade. “Can’t see the connection,” Lee had said. “Do you?” “Maybe they think Sade epitomized freedom. For men,” I had said. “He liked his women in chains.”

“Get off me,” I told Jamie. “You’re leering.”

“Sorry.” He rolled over to his side. And then we started laughing, and we made love in our old way, gently and sweetly.

•   •   •

P
ablo did find some work for Jamie, so in addition to helping Man in the studio, my beautiful boy was traveling all over Paris, photographing children and gardens and amateur play productions, the kind of event that the people involved want to have recorded, while no one else will ever, ever care enough to want to see the photographs.

But as Jamie said, it paid the bills and paying the bills was a key ambition in those days. Paying the bills was something many people were no longer able to do. When Man had said he wanted to make portraits of the rich Egyptian couple, he wasn’t being greedy; he was being practical.

Man was busy earning money with commercial work and didn’t have quite as much time for his art photographs and his models, and I was spending more and more time running errands for Huene. (I knew Paris better than the back of my hand by then, including the rich hotels on the grand boulevards, the alleys of the Marais, the cellars of the Louvre, all the nooks where a photographer might
want to shoot, or find interesting objects for a layout.) So, Lee found herself with a little free time on her hands.