The Beautiful American (24 page)

And then, just as I studied the last clipping, I heard Dahlia give a little whimper and I went to pick her up, to give her everything of me that others hadn’t wanted, or hadn’t wanted for long.

From the very start, Dahlia was a possessive child, crying when I left a room, wailing inconsolably if anyone else took her from my arms. She seemed to be saying I belonged only to her, and soon I believed her. Dahlia’s huge eyes would follow my every move; she smiled when I smiled, cried if I frowned. I was completely taken over by her.

•   •   •

F
or Christmas that year, Dahlia’s first, Madame Natalia’s son came up from Nice to visit. She had warned me he was coming with several admonitions and shakings of her finger.

“He is a charmer,” she said. “A real ladies’ man. You must resist temptation.”

Only mildly curious, I barely brushed my hair, and didn’t bother putting on lipstick. I was exhausted from being up most nights, walking with the wailing Dahlia in my arms, but I also did not want to cause Madame concern by appearing to be primping for her son. If he was good-looking, it was of no concern to me. I was done with men.

So when I opened the door, wearing a gravy-stained apron and with my hair falling into my eyes, he was as taken aback as I. The charmer was a stout, middle-aged man with thinning hair.

“Ah,” he said, startled. “You are the new companion my mother has written about in her letters.” There was disapproval in his voice.

“Call me Nora,” I said, extending my hand for a shake. He looked at the food stains on my fingers, sighed, and gallantly, bravely took that hand and kissed it.

“You may call me Monsieur Alexandrov,” he said. After an appraising moment, he did something completely unexpected. He brushed my hair out of my eyes and smiled at me. It was a good smile.

From the kitchen, Dahlia, strapped into a cushioned chair, began to wail.

“My child,” I said, turning sideways and getting ready to sprint down the hall.

“Yes. She calls. I will go find Mother.”

“Sitting room,” I said. “At the piano.” A chord sounded, the opening notes of “Pomp and Circumstance” in honor of Nicky’s arrival.

After dinner, sitting by the little Christmas tree, Monsieur Alexandrov, his collar and vest unbuttoned to accommodate the
feast we’d just eaten, entertained us with stories of Nice, of the vacationing moving picture stars and composers, artists, and poets who could be seen in the casinos in the evening and nursing hangovers on the boardwalk in the afternoon. They were especially thick on the ground in February when Carnival began, and Monsieur Alexandrov was already stocking his little hotel with champagne and bags of confetti for the celebrations to come.

Monsieur had a good ear for gossip and a wonderful way of enhancing it in his storytelling. We laughed all evening and I found myself telling him some of my own stories, mostly of parties with Lee and Man, that evening at Zizi’s when I had worn a lobster on my head. I did not mention Jamie.

“You must find Grasse boring,” he said.

Upstairs, Dahlia wailed. “Not exactly,” I said, getting up to go to her.

•   •   •

M
onsieur Alexandrov visited irregularly but always for Christmas and the Fête du Jasmin in early August. “He comes to see the girls,” Madame Natalia told me that August. “You will see what I mean.”

And I did. The jasmine festival began in the afternoon with a parade of floats down the rue du Pays. Topping each float was a duo or trio of pretty young girls dressed as flowers, the stems and petals of which covered only what must absolutely be covered in public. The normally modest young women of Grasse became sirens for the day. They threw baskets and baskets of flowers to the cheering crowd, drenching us in their perfumes. Dahlia shrieked with delight.

Monsieur Alexandrov gave each float a long, appraising glance
and occasionally licked his lips wolfishly. Once, he caught me looking at him and again gave me that large, warm smile. There were fireworks after sunset, and we sat on the little terrace, drinking wine and watching them.

“Not too much,” Madame Natalia warned me. “Not before the child is weaned.” She carefully placed her chair between mine and her son’s.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

D
ahlia had just said her first words
—“Maman, chat, chouchou”
—when I received the letter from my mother saying that Lee Miller had done something very strange. “She’s come back to Poughkeepsie from New York with an Egyptian in tow! She has married him! Can you believe it? I wonder if she’ll end up living in a tent or a harem.”

I thought of Aziz, in his tailored silk suits, his quietly gracious manners . . . with his wife, Nimet, named one of the most beautiful women of the century. I guessed that marriage was officially over. Guessed Jamie was history as well. I put down Dahlia’s spoon, still filled with pureed squash, and tested my feelings. A surge of satisfaction made me smile, but only briefly. I didn’t want revenge. I had wanted Jamie more than anything in the world, and Lee had discarded him, just as she had discarded so many others. What would Jamie do now?

My child screamed, banging her tiny fists on the table, forcing my attention back to her. I eased the spoon into her mouth, but she angrily spit out the squash and knitted her dark eyebrows at me, threatening a storm.

“That blouse will never be white again,” Madame Natalia said, wiping at me with a towel. Dahlia laughed.

“Little devil,” I said, tickling her squash-covered chin. “Momma’s trying to read a letter.”

“No,” Dahlia said.

“She is precocious,” Madame Natalia said. “That word doesn’t usually show up for another year or so.”

•   •   •

S
everal months later Momma sent a newspaper clipping of Lee on the
Conte di Savoia
, leaning over the railing and waving for the cameras, getting ready to sail off to Alexandria, and the clipping from the
New York Times
: “Lee Miller a Bride.”

Lee looked radiant, healthy, and full of hope. Aziz, standing next to her, looked a little frightened, I thought. There’s an old nursery room puzzle: what do you do when you’ve caught the tiger by the tail?

“Jamie is back in Poughkeepsie,” Momma finished. “Working for his father at the bakery. Still takes those photographs of his. You’d think he’d have given up his little hobby by now.”

That could have been my life. Jamie and me in Poughkeepsie, first child born exactly nine months after the wedding and then a married life so long we occasionally found each other boring. Boring. Jamie? No. Sometimes there was a sensation on my shoulder blade where he used to kiss me, a memory burned into my very flesh.

•   •   •

W
hen Dahlia was two, and Madame Natalia offered to watch over her for several hours each day, I decided it was time to
work again. And in Grasse, the best work for anyone whose family did not own a bakery or café was in the perfume industry.

Pablo’s offer, two and a half years before, of a friend’s home in Grasse as a solution to my “predicament” had been more than coincidental. He had given it thought, and arrived at a perfect solution.

During a spring Sunday afternoon dinner I told Monsieur LaRosa how I had sold perfumes in Paris. We had just finished a plate of goat cheese flavored with rosemary and were looking forward to the citron tart. There was a vase of fresh mimosas on the table and Monsieur LaRosa tapped it thoughtfully, considering.

“Would Fragonard do?” he asked. There were dozens of perfumeries in Grasse and I had expected to work at one of the smaller ones; Fragonard was old and large and very famous. The very next week I had a part-time job in their shop, waiting on the American and English tourists who couldn’t even say in French, “I’ll try that fragrance” or “How much for the larger bottle?” The sales skills I’d practiced in Paris for Monsieur Boulet came in good stead, and I was quickly able to steer women in the direction of a suitable fragrance. Soon I was selling three or four bottles for every single sale the other salesgirls made.

This did not make me popular, but it brought me to the attention of the manager, who began using me in the office as an interpreter, able to handle correspondence in both French and English. I preferred the sales floor to the office, standing amid those glass shelves loaded with gleaming gold and yellow bottles, showing women the proper way to spritz or dab perfume, to test it. When you sell perfume, you sell a hope, a dream. The yearning gleams in the customers’ eyes and the fragrance, those top, middle, and bottom notes, become a map to a hoped-for heaven on earth. But the office paid better and I had Dahlia’s future to consider.

That summer, I was sent to Nice as a company representative, to bring samples to international clients who did not particularly want to take that long road from the Riviera up to the “balconies” in the hills, who preferred to stay close to the Nice casinos and the girls in the revues.

Dahlia screamed and threw her little water mug when she saw me in my traveling suit, looking so unlike her stained, weary mother. I hugged her and kissed her repeatedly, but she only cried harder. I considered canceling the trip, but that would risk my job, and we needed the money. Eventually, I crept out the door like a thief as Madame Natalia tried to distract her with a toy, and ran to the bus stop with only minutes to spare.

Nice was nowhere as large or varied as Paris, but it was exciting nonetheless, after the quiet life of Grasse. As in Paris, Nice’s old cobbled streets of the
Vieille Ville
and the newer paved boulevards lining the ocean or headed uphill to the modern apartments were crowded with foreigners—tourists who still had the money to travel and stay at the large, luxurious hotels lining the Promenade des Anglais along the oceanfront.

Monsieur Alexandrov’s little hotel, l’Auberge de l’Opéra, was not one of those expensive, glitzy places. It was situated at the southern end of boulevard Jean Jaurès, around the corner from the promenade and Opera Beach. Only three stories high and painted a bright yellow with turquoise shutters, it was the kind of hotel that elderly gentlewomen from England or financially embarrassed barons from Austria preferred. Quiet. Respectable. No gambling on the premises, no floor show, although those were available just around the corner.

What l’Auberge offered was reasonable rates, quiet, clean, spacious rooms, aging waiters and maids who had worked there for
years and remembered you by name, and the owner-manager, Monsieur Alexandrov, who had perfect manners and discretion.

Monsieur did not see me when I first entered his hotel. He was standing to the side, half behind a screen, greeting a customer with old-fashioned side whiskers and a battered suitcase. He bowed frequently, little obsequious gestures that somehow diminished him . . . until he stood straight again, all five feet six inches of him, and I saw the look in his eye. He was nobody’s fool and nobody’s servant, but he knew how to greet a member of the minor aristocracy. He knew how to keep his customers returning, year after year.

The receptionist, a mousy woman named Solange with faded blond hair and chapped lips, asked if she could be of assistance. Her voice was filled with unasked questions. Judging from the ladies taking tea on the little patio, I was the youngest person there by several decades.

“I would like to speak with Monsieur Alexandrov,” I said, putting my suitcase on the floor.

“He is busy at the moment. Will you wait?” Mademoiselle Solange made the required offer with a note of suspicion in her voice.

Just then, Monsieur Alexandrov, finished with the side-whiskered gentleman, saw me.

“Nora,” he said, crossing the lobby swiftly and taking my hand. Again, that little kiss just over the knuckles, that old-world gesture that always caught me off guard.

“Nora, what can I do for you? How interesting to find you in Nice.” He seemed different from the middle-aged, slightly bored man who visited his mother in Grasse, better-looking, interesting in a man-of-the-world way. Or perhaps I was different. That was our first meeting, really, that afternoon in Nice.

“Business,” I said. “Your mother said you would give me a
room. Free,” I added in a whisper, handing him the note Madame Natalia had sent with me.

He frowned as he read it. “It says I am to provide you with a good room, and to make no charge. I am also to provide breakfast and dinner in the dining room. Again no charge. This is presumptuous.” He bowed slightly so that he could speak very quietly, close to my ear. His breath tickled my neck and his voice at that moment had a slight trace of his mother’s Russian accent, a hint of Fabergé jewels and caviar in his vowels and consonants.

“I agree,” I whispered back, suppressing the urge to reach up and touch my neck where his breath had warmed it. “But your mother insisted. The factory is not paying my travel expenses.”

A long, appraising stare. A smile. “Well. How about this? The room will be without charge if there is an available one. Otherwise, it will be half-price to cover the hotel’s expenses. And breakfast will be provided. But not dinner. Not unless you dine with me.”

I hesitated, as expected, but not for long. Nicky, admittedly not the most handsome of men, nevertheless gave off charm the way flowers give off their scent . . . naturally and agreeably. And once he was away from his mother’s watching eye, it was evident that he could be a ladies’ man. With his confidence, his dark eyes, the brilliance of his smile when he flashed it, there was something of Pablo about him. A flirt, a heartbreaker.

I was no longer naive, or trusting. I saw Nicky for what he was, and it was okay by me. I wanted nothing that could be confused with love.

“Agreed.”

How easily we came to an understanding. There was none of the foot-shuffling, yes-or-no despair of a teenage romance, none of the soul-searching right or wrong before the jump into the deep end.
Nicky was as different from Jamie as day was from night, and that seemed right. My heart belonged to Dahlia and, if I was honest, still to Jamie, but what I did with my body was my business. “I wish you could be more like Lee,” Jamie had said once. Well, I thought, I’ll give it a go.