The Beautiful American (19 page)

That day, though, the studio felt different, almost cozy, the way a room gets when two people in love inhabit it. The sofa pillows were scattered on the floor and a blanket had been bunched up as a pillow, with a half-empty bottle of whiskey next to it. A man’s scarf was draped over a chair. It wasn’t one I had ever seen Man wear.

Lee followed my glance. She grabbed up the scarf and folded it lovingly, then stuck it in a drawer.

“Nimet should be lovely,” Lee said. “Aziz says she spends half the day soaking in a Vichy water bath and the other half putting on her makeup. They live in separate apartments, you know.”

“And what does Nimet say?”

“Not much.” And that was all Lee would say of the sitting. I wondered if the wife and mistress had been able to make small talk. Have you tried the lobster bisque at the new restaurant on rue Soufflot? Who does your hair? Love your shoes, where did you get them? Oh, and by the way, I’m in love with your husband. Smile! Don’t move!

CHAPTER TWELVE

L
ee disappeared into a protective silence. After that morning in front of the panther cage, when she had rhapsodized about Aziz, love, and life in a way that would have embarrassed even a schoolgirl, she never said his name again, at least not when I was with her and certainly not when Man was around. She hadn’t decided what to do yet, and silence, secrecy, were needed for the making of plans. One of the first lessons photographers learn in common with comedians is this: timing is everything. Lee was timing her exit.

Looking back on it, I can find motives other than self-protection and deception in her silence. Don’t some doctors lie to their patients and say, “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine,” even as they are planning the amputation? Lee’s silence was meant as a reassurance, an admittance that Man could only handle so much bad news at once.

Because there was more bad news, and Lee had sensed it was coming. In March, Julien Levy had shown the work of both Lee and Man in a New York gallery. When he sent the reviews, we passed them around for a reading, Jamie and me, Lee and Man, all together at the Dôme, sipping coffee and whiskey. Mistake. Lee’s work had
received better reviews than Man’s. Man, deeply upset but unwilling to show it, saved face by claiming he had a portrait sitting and storming off.

“At six o’clock on a Sunday evening? I don’t think so,” Lee said, when he was gone. “He can’t take a little competition from the girlfriend. Sore loser.”

“Lay off, Lee,” Jamie said, for once siding with Man. “Leave the guy a little pride.” They glared at each other, Jamie looking almost as stormy as Man had, Lee with a crooked half smile of triumph.

In fact, her photo, reproduced in the paper, was technically magnificent and emotionally a kind of last word to surrealism. Lee had photographed the back of a woman’s head, one hand resting on top of short, tight blond curls. Her fingernails were painted and filed talon-sharp; the collar of her white blouse was buttoned tightly and high on the neck. There was a suggestion of danger and bondage, but no tricks, no gimmicks. It was life as we saw it, not as we had invented it.

Man realized that he was losing control, and for a man, for an artist, that was a kind of death. He went on a severe diet, a cleansing diet he called it. Food, he could control.

Later that spring, Julien Levy gave Man his first American one-man show, and the reviews again were not good. One magazine called the show an assortment of “nuts and nudes” and described Man as a “kinky-haired photographer.” The reviewer made not-so-sly innuendos about Man’s Jewish background, and salacious comments about the bits and pieces of Lee’s body in the photographs.

Maybe in Paris anything goes, but New Yorkers were not amused by the surrealists’ viewpoint, their irreverent attitude toward the various parts of female anatomy with the underlying suggestions of violence. If surrealism were a perfume, the
départ
would
be surprise, the top note amusement, and the middle note the kind of sigh a sleeper breathes out during a nightmare.

Nor was Lee’s father, back home in Poughkeepsie, amused by the reviewers’ lascivious references to his daughter’s navel; he sued for libel over the damaging comments about Lee. She had a reputation to protect, never mind that for several years Man had been photographing her in various stages of undress or that a few years before, Lee had modeled for the first ad for Kotex, creating a very public scandal with this reference to the great unmentionable: menstruation.

Six months earlier Lee would have laughed at the crude references to her anatomy. But suddenly she was very concerned about her reputation. I saw the influence of Aziz in this.

Man, meanwhile, had lost a good fifteen pounds and was looking fit and lean, but not particularly happy. Around this time, somewhere in the emotional labyrinth of that spring, as Lee hummed and tiptoed through her love-hazed days, Man began to carry a pistol.

•   •   •

“M
an bought a gun,” Jamie said. “He keeps it in a drawer in the studio.” Jamie finished the second half of his drink and signaled the waiter for another. We were sitting at one of the outdoor tables at the Dôme, watching the setting sun turn the sky behind the Hôtel des Invalides different shades of turquoise and magenta. Our conversations had begun to grow a little stilted and they were mostly about Lee and Man, as if “we” was a topic no longer of concern. I thought this was because Jamie and I had grown so close, knew each other so well.

It was June by then, a month of early suffocating heat that left us irritable and lethargic. When we went out in the evenings, where
heavy air simmered over the heated pavements, Jamie drank gin with tonic, not wine. This was new.

All the time we had been in Paris, Jamie had drunk wine or whiskey. Gin, he had said on occasion, was so P’oke. Drinking wine became one of those expatriate gestures that made us feel even farther from home than we were, made Poughkeepsie seem like a colony on the dark side of the moon, while we were on the light side, where the natives spoke French and drank wine and rolled their
r
’s in the backs of their throats.

“And does he say what this gun is for?’ I put my hand on top of Jamie’s and stroked the skin there, enjoying its texture, smooth and tough.

“To shoot his rivals.”

“Jesus. You’re kidding. That would include half of Paris, wouldn’t it?” If I had thought that Lee’s overwhelming infatuation with Aziz would slow her down in the sexual arena, I had been wrong. Aziz and Nimet had, several weeks before, returned to Egypt for the six months that they spent there every year. And Lee now was spending many nights and often days and nights away from Man, holed up in her own studio, not answering the door if anyone knocked. But if you pressed your ear to the door and waited, listening, as I did once out of curiosity, you could hear Lee and a man speaking, laughing, and the sound of glasses clinking.

I saw her once through a café window, sitting opposite a man I didn’t know, leaning back, laughing, inviting him to light her cigarette and then leaning in closer, whispering.

Lee was testing her theory that sex and love were two different things, and she could have both . . . separately. Every time I met her, she seemed to have the remnants of a different aftershave on her.

And now Man was carrying a pistol.

“This is not a joking matter,” said Jamie, irritated. “I don’t think he really plans to shoot anyone. But when Lee comes into his studio now, I don’t dare even look at her. I’ve known some jealous men before, and women.” A knowing glance at me interrupted the thought. “But Man . . . he’s a whole other story.” Jamie held the cold glass of gin and tonic to his forehead.

The café was crowded that night, filled with people eager to be out of their stuffy, hot apartments and sitting in the somewhat cooler air of the boulevards.

“Did you look at Lee much before?” I asked, wondering, if I hadn’t been there, which girl in the café Jamie might find tempting. The redhead wearing the blue hat or the little dark one who was reading a book and never once looked up? He had never openly flirted with anyone, not even during the wildest, hard-drinking evenings. But sometimes he looked wistfully at passing women. And then he always pressed his hand on mine, or put his arm around my shoulders and teased me a little about my jealousy.

I
was
jealous, even though I had no cause. I was more in love with Jamie than ever. Time hadn’t dulled the passion or even the fun, and when he was busy and elsewhere, which was more and more often the case, I thought of him constantly and found myself hoping that the bride or birthday girl he had been sent to photograph wasn’t pretty.

“Look at Lee? Of course not.” He sounded even more annoyed and impatient. “God, Nora, talk about jealous.”

“Just asked. That’s all.”

He finished his drink and sat back in his chair, far enough away that our hands no longer met on the table.

Julien Levy is on your mind, I thought, and did not say. Julien was back in Paris, scouting for more artists for another show. We
knew he had returned because Lee and Man were having dinner with him that night. We hadn’t been asked to come along. Not a good sign. Now Man wasn’t even making empty promises of bringing Julien along to look at Jamie’s photographs.

Perhaps Man had described the work in a way that guaranteed Julien would not be interested. Maybe Jamie
had
looked at Lee a little too often, a little too long. Lee certainly had looked at him. The two of them seemed almost like brother and sister, physically, with their slender height, their high cheekbones, their straight light hair brushed back from wide foreheads. I had looked at the two of them, drinking together in a café or studying a contact sheet in the studio, and thought what pretty babies they could make together, and the thought made me dizzy with jealousy.

“Thank God Aziz has gone back to Cairo,” I said. I didn’t know how much Man knew about Lee’s meetings with other men, but he did know about Aziz, and Aziz was the real threat, not the onetime Charlies. Lee believed she was in love with Aziz, whatever that meant.

Lee herself had told Man about Aziz and little by little she was removing her personal things—an old cardigan she wore in the morning, slippers, her spare toothbrush—from Man’s place and moving them to hers. Piece by piece, she was leaving Man.

“Good timing for both of them,” Jamie agreed. “Clever of Man to get a pistol only after Aziz has already left. Great stage directions, there.” Jamie, not usually cruel, laughed and began to hum the tune we had heard Bricktop sing only last week—“Miss Otis Regrets,” about a woman who shoots her straying lover and then is herself lynched by an angry mob. Lee, who knew about such things, said Cole Porter had written that song especially for Bricktop, the flaming-red-haired American singer who owned a popular club on place Pigalle.

“I don’t think Man would like a lynch mob.” Jamie signaled to the waiter for another gin and tonic.

“I’d better tell Lee about the gun.” I finished my wine and gave the empty glass to our waiter, indicating I wanted a refill.

“She already knows,” Jamie said. “He showed it to her. Took it out of the drawer and pointed it at her.”

“Damn. What did Lee do?”

“The worst thing possible. She laughed at him. Wonder where they took Julien Levy for dinner tonight. Probably the Jockey.” Jamie started humming “Miss Otis Regrets” again, and smiled one of the saddest smiles I’d ever seen.

That summer, our last summer, after Aziz had left, Lee spent quite a bit of time with Julien Levy, and I think Julien was one of the men who occasionally holed up in her apartment with her behind the locked door. Lee and Julien and Man made a rough threesome, and Jamie and I laughed about it, since Man would never shoot his own art dealer. Jealousy and love counted for only so much among artists. A woman could be replaced, but a good art dealer was hard to find.

Lee even managed to get Julien over to our rooms to look at Jamie’s photographs before Julien sailed back to America, and so I finally met him, this dealer Man had for weeks kept as unavailable and busy as a princeling not allowed to mix with the hoi polloi. That was me and Jamie. The hoi polloi, the workers, the outsiders.

Julien looked a lot like Man. They both had thick dark hair, intense and opaque brown eyes, a tendency to haggardness in the face if they were not well fed and well rested. Julien also dressed impeccably, suit and tie and hat, even to visit the hoi polloi. He came to our rooms on a Monday night and I could tell by his steps
on the stairs, heavy and a little slow, and by the way he kept looking at Lee over his shoulder, that he had come to see Jamie’s work as a favor to her.

We did everything wrong, of course. Jamie tried to look artistic, with his long hair and old shirt unbuttoned at collar and cuff, his bare feet in cheap sandals bought at a street market. Instead of artistic he looked down-and-out. Unpromising. I served a tray of fancy hors d’oeuvres bought very expensively at a shop I normally wouldn’t even go into because of their prices. They were fussy little things, toothpicks overladen with pineapple and bacon, soggy pastry boats filled with overcooked creamed vegetables. And sherry. My God. Did I think I was setting up a tea at an English girls’ sorority?

Julien accepted one or two canapés out of politeness and praised our apartment—“Such a splendid view of the old cemetery.” He admired the way I had strung lights with paper lanterns from the ceiling, approved my dress, and, in fact, commented on everything except Jamie’s photographs.

When the soggy hors d’oeuvres and too-sweet sherry had been set aside, Jamie spread open his portfolio on the bare table. Lee and I took the two chairs and sat in a corner, like children trying to behave as the grown-ups talked. Lee held my hand and tried too hard to make interesting conversation. I didn’t hear a word she was saying, all of my attention focused on Julien.

Julien looked at Jamie’s photographs, one by one, his expression never changing, his rhythm never varying. Right thumb and forefinger to right corner of photo. Pause. Run eyes up and down, left and right. Turn photo facedown on left side of portfolio. Right thumb and forefinger to right corner of next photo. Over and over, without a single spark of interest in those opaque brown eyes.