The Beautiful American (7 page)

I bought a copy to show Jamie and he propped it up on our table, stopping several times a day to admire it.

“See what you can achieve with a little daring?” he said. “A girl from Poughkeepsie on the cover of
Vogue
. Think we’ll maybe run into her?”

“Not unless we’re invited to a party at the Whitney or the opera.”

“Anything is possible,” Jamie insisted.

Jamie earned some money by chasing ambulances and photographing accidents, crime scenes, dance contests, and baby beauty pageants for the glossies. His father, understanding that the Tastes-So-Good Bakery did not really require three sons to oversee it, sent him a little money every month, the allowance he would have had in Poughkeepsie.

I knew that Daddy Sloane was being understanding, playing the boys-will-be-boys card with his youngest son. Daddy Sloane thought I was Jamie’s wild oats.

The Tastes-So-Good Bakery was doing better than ever,
expanding and hiring more employees since Mr. Sloane had bought stocks on margin. I think even my mother bought a few shares in a mining company, that year. Everyone was investing, buying stocks with unsecured loans.

So Mr. Sloane turned a blind eye to his son’s peccadilloes—me—and in the letters he sent I could read the hope father and son shared: fame as Jamie—no, as James Sloane, photographer. Baking was a living, but photography . . . well, that was the future. That was art and maybe fame, and nothing was too good for the baby of the family, the youngest son.

Momma knew within a matter of weeks that I hadn’t gone off alone, of course. So-and-so heard that Jamie Sloane and the Tours girl had been seen kissing in public in the Metropolitan Museum, right in front of the medieval hall, and this was reported to another so-and-so, and in the roundabout way of gossip the story made its way to my mother’s door.

She got my address from Jamie’s father and wrote saying only, “Best you don’t come back to Poughkeepsie, Nora. That bridge is burned, and there’s been too much talk.”

“Don’t worry, Nora,” Jamie said. “I’ll take care of you. I’ll always take care of you.”

I worked in a typing pool, tenth floor in a Midtown building, fifteen minutes for lunch, and in my free afternoon I went to the perfume counter at Macy’s and pretended I was going to purchase a bottle. Billet Doux
had become my new favorite, a scent of carnation with hints of moss, reminding me of afternoons in the garden with Daddy.

I was happy. I was in love, and newly free. Quite honestly, living in sin suited me just fine for the time being. But there was always a sense of horizon in my life with Jamie, a need to be elsewhere.

Jamie received a couple of invitations to art gallery openings by sheer perseverance. He discovered which afternoon of the month the invitations were mailed out and then sauntered into the gallery, charming the girls who worked there, showing enough knowledge of cameras and darkrooms, light and shadow, to be acknowledged as a fledgling artist.

One afternoon he even met the great Alfred Stieglitz, who by then was bald and gray and as fierce looking as an eagle. Stieglitz had opened “the Intimate Room” art gallery downtown, and was putting up regular shows of new American art, works by people like his beautiful wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the photographer Paul Strand. Jamie wanted his photographs to hang at one of those exhibits.

I went with him the day he brought his portfolio to Stieglitz, sat at that great wooden desk and waited, barely breathing, as Stieglitz leafed through Jamie’s photographs, pausing at some, peering closely once in a while, but finally folding the portfolio, placing it on the desk between himself and Jamie, and saying, “Perhaps next year, young man.”

We went back to our little apartment, not speaking, and Jamie rolled into a ball and stayed that way for a day.

Jamie couldn’t get his photographs accepted by one of the uptown or downtown galleries, couldn’t find a patron or collectors interested in his photographs, not even the nudes.

The nudes were of me, since he couldn’t afford a model. Gradually, persistently, he had worn down my shy reluctance. I had developed a technique of pretending my body was there, but I wasn’t. My arms and legs and breasts became alien objects. I could look at the contact sheet and see shadows and light, black and white and gray, not myself. I never wore perfume when I posed for Jamie. I needed to be as colorless and scentless as the photos.

“There are good galleries in London,” Jamie said one afternoon when he was photographing my hands. He had blocked off the top half of me with a black board, so that my hands looked very white and fragile, almost corpselike and disembodied. “New York is nowhere,” he said. “London is the place to be.”

We had burned bridges at our backs, but the whole world lay in front of us. When you are that young, all movement is forward. And so in 1928, we took a steamer to London, third-class, and danced our way across the Atlantic.

We became part of that great reverse migration, from America across the ocean, west to east, heading back to places our ancestors had left a hundred years before; not for any purpose more serious than to play, to see what there was to see, and to achieve what there was to achieve. Great-grandfather Thouars fled to save his life. I made the return trip for him.

Jamie and I stayed in London for three months, moving regularly to less expensive digs till we were in the cheapest bedsit we could find. London was cold and gray and too expensive. His portfolio, banged and stained and dented by then, did not impress the gallery owners nor did his awards from the Poughkeepsie Photography Club, or his photos of New York car crashes, though there was a good one of a new Model T and an old carriage horse, nose to nose, each demanding right of way. The old and the new, Jamie called it, and we had nicknamed the horse P’oke and the Model T Paris, as if we had known all along where we would finally end up.

We went to Harrods one day to see the famous food court and maybe buy a treat for our supper. We hovered in the doorway in our rumpled clothes, streams of people pushing past us, perfumes from the counter teasing my nose, the jasmine of Jamais de la Vie, the
rose and amber of Amour, the lavender and moss of Adieu Sagesse all mixing together.

A nanny pushed between us, gloved hands firmly gripping a perambulator with its precious burden. I stooped to look at the red-faced infant, who stared back at me with perfectly round, unblinking eyes.

“Adorable,” I said, meaning it, inhaling deeply the talcum and milk smell. The nanny nodded and continued on her way.

Jamie’s hair stuck up strangely in back because I had cut it myself to save money. No matter how often I licked my palm and pressed it down over that lock of hair, it stood up like a flag of surrender. I reached up then and smoothed it down and kissed his cheek. “Let’s have a baby,” I whispered. That’s how much I loved him. That’s how young and unmoored I was.

“In a couple of years. But for now, let’s get out of here,” Jamie said, and I knew he didn’t just mean Harrods.

•   •   •

T
wo days later we were in Paris, unpacked in a fleabag hotel on Île de la Cité, and the fleas were worth it, because outside my attic window was Notre-Dame cathedral.

Maybe it was all those bottles of French perfume, or my father, who after a fourth shot of gin would whisper to me,
We’ll go to Paris one day, just you and me.
A year after I had arrived, a friend told me about reincarnation and how people traveled to get to where they had once been happy in some other life. Whatever the cause, I was immediately happy in Paris, more buoyant and optimistic than I had ever been in my life. It was like stepping out of a closed dark room and into the fresh air.

Paris was cheaper than London, and even if Jamie did not find
a gallery and make money from sales, his allowance would cover us, if we lived frugally. We could go to bars and cafés for meals and drinks, and spend our afternoons walking along the Seine, Jamie always pointing his camera in some direction.

We walked the cobblestone streets of the Latin Quarter, peered through grilled gates at private courtyards with their playing fountains and flower-filled urns. We picnicked in the Luxembourg Gardens, where the writer Hemingway had hunted pigeons for his lunch. We spent a week’s worth of cash at the Folies Bergère to see Josephine Baker dance in her banana skirt . . . Josephine, whose favorite fragrance was jasmine, the flower that gave the name to the new music, jazz. We ate sugar crepes from street stalls, and walked up and down rue de Fleurus, hoping to get a glance of Gertrude Stein.

As foreign as the city was, it was hard to be homesick in Paris. It was filled with Americans, all come for the same reasons as Jamie and me, to be elsewhere, to soak up the wonderful exoticness of a place not home. In Café de Flore, the gossip was in American, full of Southern drawls and clipped New England vowels. When you went to the races at Auteuil—and who did not?—the women wore afternoon costumes purchased at Bergdorf’s and the men wore Texas brimmed hats.

The gardens, parks, and avenues of the city were lined with young Americans sitting in front of their easels, painting oils and watercolors of Notre-Dame, horse chestnut trees, and French schoolchildren escorted by nuns—all to be sent back home, to Chicago or Memphis or Boston.

Paris had become the center of gravity. It drew in anyone not nailed to the ground by a different reality, and it had drawn in Lee Miller as well, who had left New York and returned to Paris about the time Jamie and I went there.

A few times I thought I saw her. I’d glimpse the back of a tall blonde strolling the Champs-Élysées, or a profile of a woman sitting in a café with Lee’s long, elegant nose. I had no idea how to find her . . . or, for that matter, why I would want to. We had gone our separate ways. Childhood felt long ago.

Jamie and I soon established a routine for ourselves. He took photographs in the morning, haunting the streets during the precious early morning light, and I went with him, holding his camera case, cleaning lenses, scouting ahead for interesting shots, for lovers kissing under bridges, lean dogs sleeping in private courtyards, old men smoking in front of a tobacco shop, women scrubbing the household linen at a municipal washing trough.

After a café lunch of ham and cheese, wine, coffee, we went back to our room and made love, and then slept wrapped in each other’s arms. I had not known that such happiness existed, being full of Jamie, full of Paris and the light and smells and tastes of that city. I was light-headed with joy. I even loved the smell of the exhaust from the cars, when rainy days trapped the air close to the ground.

In the later afternoon we strolled down the Champs-Élysées, or explored the Roman catacombs running much of the Left Bank, or took the metro to Odéon to sit on a bench at the Luxembourg Gardens. We stopped for coffee or a little glass of brandy when we grew tired, ate bread and cheese when we were hungry, and then when it was dark, went to a bar or café to drink for hours with friends we quickly made, tripping home in the early morning, singing, making love back in our room.

A month, three months, six months passed and Jamie’s portfolio thickened with photographs and he needed to purchase a second, then a third portfolio to hold them all. He had met some other young American artists, none of whom had yet a dealer or a gallery,
but it was just a question of time, wasn’t it? The world could not hold out against them forever; soon they would have an exhibit, and they would sit drinking in the evening, thinking up names for the exhibit: The Outlaws, The Stoics, The Pont Neuf Exiles.

“We are going to rent a hall,” Jamie said one summer evening. We were sitting at the little table in our new room in Montparnasse. Even a fleabag hotel had become too expensive and we had moved to a single room. We didn’t have an indoor toilet or hot water, and the walls were so thin we heard the quarrels going on all around us in the other flats, but those things just added to the romance of it all, that’s how young we were.

It was so hot that night that we sat wrapped in dampened towels, and I had poured water over my head to cool it. Drops of water dripped into my eyes so that when I looked at Jamie, he seemed to be underwater.

“A hall?”

“For an exhibit. We’ll put it up ourselves. One painter, one photographer, one sculptor, and a poet who will read his work at selected times.”

“Sounds swell, Jamie.” I wondered how much it would cost, and if his allowance from home would cover the expense of a hall in addition to our rent and meals. “I was thinking. Maybe I should try to get some work.”

Jamie laughed. “What could you do?”

I decided to consider it a challenge. “You’ll see.”

The next morning, when he rose early to go in search of shots, I did not go with him. Sometime during that sleepless night, I had decided that I would be very good at floral arrangement, and I spent the next morning scouring the florist shops of Montparnasse and Montmartre, offering my services.

None of the business owners I spoke with agreed that they needed an American with bad French to arrange their bouquets. Refusing to acknowledge defeat, I bought a pail of red carnations, the entire thing, and walked past the Eiffel Tower to the Allée des Cygnes, where there was a miniature copy of the Statue of Liberty. I set my bucket down and, with a single red carnation between my teeth, smiled and waved at the passing tourists. I had sold half the bucket, earning about the equivalent of three dollars, when a strolling gendarme stopped and asked to see my license.

“But I don’t have one!” I said, smiling even more largely.

“Ah. Then I must give you a ticket,” said the young man.

I tried to weep for effect, but when you are young, in love, in good health, and it is a sunny day in Paris, tears do not come easily.

“Maybe just a warning?” I pleaded. I went home with a huge bouquet of the remaining carnations for our own table, and the three dollars still in my pocket, and the warm memory of that gendarme’s smile as he warned the “little American” to read the laws before she tried to set up a business again, even on a street corner.