Warpaint (10 page)

“They did. Souvenir hunters. But I thought: this is the new world, this world of flight. We won't go back, never go back to rules and earthbound things. I was young. But a part of me can still feel the blood of that moment, the soaring visions of – what?” Liz fiddled with the white pack of cigarettes, making a crinkled corner dance.

“
Pluck
?” asked Susan, naming the Moore C.C. owned.

Liz shrugged. “I wanted to paint the unseen. My whole life changed as the world changed, because after Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, time telescoped. I remember thinking that if I could hitch a ride home, I'd be in the states in three days, rather than three months. Now that, my dears,” she said, smiling and flicking ash into a glass tray, “was something to think about.”

“But he didn't fly back, did he?” asked Susan.

Liz fanned smoke from her face. “No. He was snapped up by the American ambassador and whisked off to see Important People. Me, I hitched a ride back to town, and sort of staggered to the atelier I was sharing with two other painters. Dirty and tired, I just crawled into my gear and slept.”

“How long did you stay in Paris?”

“A couple years. There were a lot of Americans here in twenty-six, twenty-seven, and that summer, after Lindbergh's flight, I fell in with a group, students and would-be writers, many drunk on Hemingway and living like the
The Sun Also Rises
. A lot of girls in the Montparnasse cut their hair short, drank, smoked. When I found a tiny studio I could afford, I turned from a boy back into a girl. Later, after my work was beginning to sell, an older woman I'd met at a gallery took me over to the Rue de L'Odéon. I was too shy to go by myself so Rebecca West took me over, introduced Sylvia Beach, bought Joyce's newest, and left me to wander about by myself. That Beach woman was nice. You know, C.C. you remind me, a little, of her. ”

“I do? How?”

“Your hair, for one, and she was –”

“Did you meet Hemingway?” interrupted Susan.

Liz shook her head. “Not exactly.”

“Not exactly? Like you not exactly but actually met Stein?” asked C.C.

“Did you really meet Stein?”

“Suz, I told you before she met Stein.”

“Excuse me?” said Liz, stubbing out her cigarette. “I'm still here, if you please. Yes, I really met Gertrude Stein. I disliked her. Hemingway – I had no idea that the man with the beard I saw one day was or would soon become the Papa – I never liked his work, either, so I paid no mind. Besides, what I remember most from that summer was painting, Picasso, a parade, a funeral, and riots against the Americans – but by then I was more French than American, so I got away easily enough.”

Both girls looked puzzled, so Liz added, “Sacco and Vanzetti were executed that summer – a shoemaker and a peddler. Most Frenchmen thought they were innocent. Working men attacked Americans in Montparnasse – a few of my friends got hurt, and the gendarmerie had a devil of a time keeping order. To make matters worse, that September the American Legion paraded down the Champs-Élysées. What a day that was – rain steady, Isadora Duncan's funeral in Lachaise, the crazy loud Americans on the street. I admired Duncan, so I was upset. Such an awful accident.”

Susan giggled.

Liz's eyes narrowed. “What's funny?”

“Nothing,” said Susan, blushing violently. “It's just –”

But Liz plowed over the girl. “Remind me, Susan Perry, to laugh at your funeral.”

“Hey!” said C.C., as Susan burst into tears. “Come on, Lizzie!”

“Your
friend
,” said Liz, wrinkling her nose as if a foul odor had crept in upon the pastry shop, “is cruel.”

By now, Susan was sobbing. C.C. had an arm around her girlfriend's shoulders, and an angry bead on Liz. “Enough! We sometimes make jokes about Duncan. You can't be pious all the time. Wearing a ridiculous silk scarf so big and long it gets caught in the wheels of a car is funny. It's also vain. She was kind of odd, wasn't she?”

Liz folded her arms. “She was a genius. And it was a horrible death. Violent, sudden and –” she stopped, gazing at the two girls. Susan had laid her head on C.C.'s shoulder. “ All right, and silly. But she was still a genius. Come, let's pay the piper and go. I've had enough of the past, haven't you?”

 

♦

 

Nancy Jones Davis stood in the lobby of the Paris Ritz, waiting for her new husband. He was asking the concierge, in halting French, what might be the easiest way to get to a bookstore his wife wanted to visit. Barely twenty years old, married a week, she'd already begun to take the measure of her husband, only to find his sleeves, as it were, a bit short, and his trousers a bit too long. Her infatuation with the young doctor had begun to mellow out into affection. She stood, nervous and a bit impatient. Her French, learned first in boarding school and then at Smith College, was better than his. And besides, she knew exactly where the Rue de L'Odéon was, she didn't need directions. But he had to ask.

She tugged at a glove, touched her hat, and settled her clutch a little more firmly under her arm. Tom headed across the rich red carpet to her. With his needle nose and already thinning hair, he wasn't a beauty, but he was funny, and such a dedicated doctor, her heart made a little surge of
he's mine
.

“Darling,” he said, slipping a hand to her elbow. “Are you sure you want to go to this bookstore? I think it must be a tad disreputable.”

She laughed. “Of course it is. Every artist I know talks about it.”

“Rue de l'Odéon. Is it in a poor neighborhood?”

“Come on, Tom. Paul would be mortified if we didn't go.”

“Do you want a cab?”

“No, let's walk.”

“I thought it sounded far,” he said, glancing behind him.

“Oh, Tom,” said Nancy merrily. “Nothing is ever that far in Paris.”

He smiled in a way his bride would come to understand as both apologetic and annoyed, and followed her lead.

Cold and clear, the flat, unruffled cerulean sky arched over the Seine as they crossed it, two young Americans between the wars, burnished by the armor of a yet untarnished love. They said little. The light was too perfect, the city too various, all of it new to Tom, all of it beloved by Nancy. While he took note of streets Parisian, she drank in the comfort of sunflowers or daisies sold in dull silver pots, ivy and architecture, the winter's sharp metal air. She wore a cloche she'd bought yesterday, one with a small brim, and a fur trimmed coat from Revillion & Cie, 89 Rue de Petite Champs, bought with her mother's money and at her mother's insistence, though the extravagance made Tom wince. When Nancy caught a glimpse of herself in the bookshop's plate window, she felt, well, quite modern.

“Is this it?” asked Tom, squinting through the glass.

“There's the Bard,” she said, pointing to a portrait of Shakespeare hanging above their heads from an iron rod. “Yes, this is it.”

“What did Paul tell you about this place?”

“If you are an American artist, you must visit.”

“But we're not artists.”

“Oh bother. You read, don't you? This is a bookstore, isn't it?” and she stepped up into the shop. Tom doffed his hat and followed. Once inside, he relaxed. He was, after all, a reader, and the shop was crammed floor to ceiling with books. Several walls hosted black and white framed portraits of men and women, only two of whom Tom knew, but if you were living in or near New York, as Tom and Nancy were, it would have been hard not to know the Fitzgeralds. The papers followed the couple as they tore around town.

Two women were standing beside the marble fireplace, underneath about a dozen or so of the framed portraits. One wore a neat tweed jacket and skirt set, with a round white collar and a soft, striped silk bowtie, her thickly curled brownish hair bobbed to the earlobe. The other, younger woman, also in a short, dark bob, wore a green drop-waist dress and leaned against the top of the hearth, writing something on a small white card. Both women had strong features, the kind dubbed handsome rather than pretty.

“There –” said the younger woman. “Now I'm one of the Company, too.”

“I'm glad,” her companion said, taking the card. “Is there anything you'd like to take today?”

The woman shook her head, just as a man stepped in from the street, or rather blew in at a clip that was almost a dash. Nancy worried about the possibility of books flying off shelves as he whisked by the laden tables to claim the younger woman by slipping an arm around her green drop-waist. The older woman said something low, which made the big man laugh and in another moment, the couple left.

A rough
, Nancy decided, and went back to her browsing. When she heard the woman in the bowtie sigh, and say, “Poor Bumby,” she felt confirmed in her opinion of the one-man windstorm.

“Who was that?” asked Tom, suddenly at Nancy's side.

“How should I know?”

“He looked familiar.”

“All Americans look familiar.”

“Oh? And how do you know the man was an American?”

“He looked American.”

Tom laughed and Nancy smiled. “Well, he did,” she said, putting the book she'd been looking over back on the shelf. “Big galoot like that.”

“Want to bet on it?”

“Why? We both thought he was an American.”

“Hmm,” said Tom, rubbing his earlobe. “True. I'm going to ask, though. I want to know.” And he stepped over to the woman in the bowtie, who was filing library cards. “Excuse me, Ma'am?”

The woman looked up. “Yes, may I help you find something?”

“No, thank you. I do have a question, though – if I may ask, was that man who just left an American?”

Which made Sylvia Beach laugh outright. “Why yes,” she said. “Oh, yes. I don't think there's anyone so American as Hem. Would you like to see some of his work? These short stories are his –” and she reached for a small pile of books on a table, a small pile of
In Our Time
, by Ernest Hemingway.

“Never heard of him,” said Tom, looking over the slim volume.

“You will,” said Sylvia Beach. “Trust me, you will.”

 

♦

 

“I read somewhere,” said Quiola, sitting on the blue and gold floral brocade spread of the king-sized Ritz bed, “that after WWII, Ernest Hemingway was greeted by the doorman at this hotel and asked if he'd come to pick up his trunk. They'd kept it safe for him, during the War. That's why he wrote
A Moveable Feast
, finding all his old stuff in that trunk.”

“Yeah? Have you read it?” One by one, C.C. hung their few shirts, two pairs of blue jeans and a light zippered jacket in the closet, unpacking their shared suitcase. The Ritz had given them a two-room suite, with a sitting area, a desk and a bathroom.

“No. Should I?”

“It's mean. He savages the ex-pats, especially Fitzgerald. Who, by the way, drank himself silly downstairs at the bar. With Hemingway.”

“The place is too much,” said Quiola glancing over to the gilded hearth. “It's all so, I don't know, gold.” She shivered at the stately, ornate, impersonal pomp of the room.

“Ritzy?” C.C. put the empty Samsonite on the floor of the closet, next to two pairs of loafers and a pair of once-white tennis shoes.

“Our clothes look sad and lonely in there.”

C.C. turned around and put her hands on her hips. “Would you just stop?”

“Sorry.”

“Aren't you pleased we're not melting anymore?”

“I guess.”

C.C. rolled her eyes, stomped one foot like an enraged elf, and marched off to the bathroom. “I'm taking a shower,” she called over her shoulder. “A
cold
shower.”

“Okay.” Quiola got up from the bed and went over to the unusable gilt hearth, upon whose marble mantle sat a fat gold clock and two twisted gold-plate candelabras. Behind the clock and candelabras was a long plate mirror, which reflected her and the room, the brocade bed with its assortment of tasseled throw pillows, and the heavy, matching brocade curtains. Quiola examined her face briefly, for blemishes. Finding none, she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and wandered over to the window, which had a view of Place Vendôme, the vast square of grey cobblestone surrounded by a certain architectural uniformity, dotted with iron streetlamp trees, each one sprouting three lanterns, dead quiet in the daytime, all sight lines leading to a central spiraled monument, the Colonne de Vendôme, atop of which stood Napoleon. Quiola thought it probably the ugliest thing she'd seen in Paris, and when she read in her guidebook that the artist Gustave Corbet had helped tear it down during the Commune in 1871, her heart went out to him. Unfortunately for Quiola's sense of beauty, the column had been restored by 1874.

“What are you moping about now?” C.C., finished with her shower, was mummified in white terrycloth, head to toe.

Quiola turned away from the window. “Grandeur.”

“Parisians are good at it.” She unwrapped her hair, shook it out and toweled the curls. “Hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Well, I am. Let's go down for a drink, and see what's on the menu.”

“You want to eat here?”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. I thought we'd go out.”

C.C. sat down in one of the brocade armchairs and crossed her ankles. “We can do that, if you like. Where?”

“Oh, come on C.C., I don't know Paris the way you do. What about that café where we had the chicken and pepper thing? Or that Vietnamese place near the studio?”

“We've been to that place three nights out of five.”

“So? It's good.”

“It's also cheap. Don't make me fight you every single step. Let's just relax. Go downstairs. I'm sure there's something tasty at the Club.”