Leonora, April 1938, Paris
Leonora opened the door to Pablo Picasso, who had brought with him a jar of Spanish wine and a friend. “Feliz cumpleaños,” he said, and hugged her, his face nestled, for a long moment, between her breasts. “Por favor, this is Renato Leduc.”
Renato had a smooth, dark face and hair as white as Max’s. “Mucho gusto.” His voice was low and quiet. He took her hand in his long fingers and kissed it.
“He’s the Mexican ambassador to Portugal, here for diplomatic talks,” Picasso explained, tasting the wine himself before handing her the jar. “But all that is dull, and Paris is not, I told him.” She sipped what tasted like someone’s homemade juice and passed it to Renato. “And I brought him to your birthday to prove it.”
“In that case you must have some Pernod,” she said, pouring them each a splash of the licorice liquid. They clinked glasses, and Picasso fixed his dark, glittering eyes on her. She laughed. What else was there to do? He really was incorrigible.
For her twenty-first birthday, Max had filled their flat with the blooming branches of cherry trees he’d snipped at dawn in Luxembourg Gardens. He’d splurged on foie gras and tapenade and champagne, though she had no idea where he’d gotten the money. He’d invited everyone, including Breton. Leonor had refused to come.
It was warm for April, everyone agreed, the dusk drunk on the smell of magnolias. She wore a sheer white dress, and into her hair she’d clipped a real, dead butterfly Leonor had given her, its wings a brilliant orange. Max was in the kitchen, cutting the baguettes, arranging the food onto platters, when there was a quiet knock on the door.
She knew it was Max’s son, Jimmy, before she opened the door. He knocked the same way he acted around Max, with a painful hope for acceptance. A year younger than her, he was tall and slim, with eyes as blue as his father’s, but bigger and sweeter. He was shy and quick to blush, so she was usually reserved around him. But tonight she must have been feeling the Pernod because she threw her arms around his neck and gave his soft cheek a kiss. He turned crimson and grinned. “Happy birthday,” he said, handing her a yellow rose.
They understood each other perfectly, she thought. They both had fathers who, though radically different, loomed large.
“Jimmy’s here! Time for champagne!” Max said, she noticed, with forced enthusiasm. But then he was always awkward around his son, as though he were perpetually getting to know him. Ever since Lou had fled from Cologne to Paris in ’33, Max had seen Jimmy every six months. But Jimmy was already a teenager by then, and Max had left when he was two. Apart from the vacations they’d spent together, Max hadn’t known him as a boy.
Max filled their glasses. “To Leonora, who outshines the moon,” he said. Their glasses rang and Jimmy drank his champagne in a single swallow. He looked happy for the alcohol. She imagined he was even more nervous with Picasso here. He’d seen Guernica seven times, and when she introduced them Jimmy shook his hand too long and had to cough before he could speak. “Ravi de vous rencontrer. Pleased to meet you,” he said, formally, and bowed a little, though she was sure he didn’t realize he was doing it.
Soon Nusch and Paul arrived, as did Breton, who had just returned from Mexico and couldn’t stop talking about the indigenous people’s bizarre and wonderful beliefs, about the lush colors, the warm jungles, and the artist Frida Kahlo, who was a Surrealist without knowing it. The whole country, he declared, was Surrealiste par excellence.
Max had been quiet, not the easy raconteur he so often was, and she sat on the sofa beside him and held his hand. He had blue paint under his nails from the day’s work. He pulled her onto his lap, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her neck. She knew it was Picasso—more rival than friend—that made him sip his wine and say little. When he announced to the room that she must read her story, “The Debutante,” she was surprised to hear his voice. Paul and Breton clapped and hooted.
“You write, too?” said Picasso. “My dear, what don’t you do?”
“Well, I didn’t make much of a debutante.” Leonora read them the story, in which the debutante convinced a hyena to go to the ball in her place. She’d written it in French, and Picasso translated the few slang words she’d used into Spanish for Renato. Renato gasped when the hyena tore the face off the maid to wear it as a mask to the ball, and he looked at Leonora as if she really might be a hyena wearing the face of a girl. “It’s completely autobiographical,” she said. He laughed uncomfortably and lit a cigarette.
Nusch applauded. “I’d like a copy of that.” Curled on the sofa with Woolf, she looked like a cat herself, with her slender body and her mysterious green eyes making the room more beautiful.
“It belongs in the next issue of Minotaure,” said Breton.
The air in the room had grown heavy with smoke, even with the windows open, as if somewhere a wind had died. Jimmy stood, about to give a toast it seemed, but seeing that his glass was empty he sat back down. Max poured himself another drink, whiskey on ice, splashing some into Jimmy’s glass, too. “You should tell them about the show you saw on your way back to Cologne.”
Jimmy swallowed the whiskey and coughed, clearing his throat. “Well, I had to go back to Germany for a physical, for the visa to America. Anyway, I got off the train in Hamburg,” he said, softly. “And there was a traveling Degenerate show.”
“The first time he’d seen my work in public,” Max said. “Can you imagine?”
“Best collection I’ve seen in years.” Jimmy nodded at Picasso. The alcohol, it seemed, had done its work.
“My primitive pieces, I’m guessing.”
“It was wonderful,” said Jimmy, animated now, brimming and electric. “And Guernica! My God! It made me see Dürer and Goya in a whole new light.” His excitement charged the air. Nusch stirred from a catnap; Renato polished off the jug of wine. Leonora felt ill. She couldn’t remember the last gathering when talk of impending war hadn’t reared its grotesque head. “Oh, and Da Vinci!” he exclaimed.
Max swirled the gin in his glass. “Nothing more recent?” he asked, pointedly.
“You, your work, of course.” Jimmy blushed. Why had Max made him self-conscious? Did he need to be the center of adoration, even when his son was in the room?
Breton paced. “This is what I’ve been saying.” He stopped. There was something about him. Everyone listened when he spoke. “Art is powerful. Guernica est formidable. You can feel the anguish. And the people are sympathetic, no one can talk of anything else.”
Max sipped his drink, brooding.
Picasso lit a cigar. “The sympathetic ones are not the ones waging this war.”
“This is why the Surrealists must align themselves with Trotsky.” Breton’s index finger pointed skyward in emphasis. “He believes in the power of the artist for change.”
“Enough of Trotsky.” Paul was slumped on the sofa beside Nusch, his words garbled. “Why can’t you just make art? When is the last time you wrote something that wasn’t some sort of manifesto?” It was the first thing he’d said all night.
Breton crossed the room. He stood over Paul. “You shouldn’t talk about things you don’t understand.” His chest was filled with air, but there was sadness in his eyes.
Max slid between them. “Mon dieu. It’s Leonora’s birthday! We don’t need to talk about war.”
Breton hung his head and shuffled backward. He looked so humbled, Leonora felt sorry for him. “Forgive me, Leonora.” With the briefest of bows he left the room in a dull silence.
She stepped onto the balcony. The party had been ruined. Why couldn’t they all go?
Renato leaned on the rail beside her and lit a cigarette. Somewhere down the street two stray cats cried out. A siren and a wail, harmonizing. Was it a fight over love or was it love itself, she wondered, and thinking of a dream she’d had of Marie-Berthe, she shivered. Marie-Berthe had slipped into bed beside her and took her hair in her hands. Gently, so gently. Her whispers like silk rubbing on silk. He belongs to me, he’s my husband, and you are mine now, too, she’d said. Marie-Berthe put her lips over hers, sealing her mouth. They were deep under water. She was trying to swim to the surface but Marie-Berthe held her down. Raising her arm she showed Leonora her gills. She could stay down there as long as she liked. Leonora had woken gasping and pulled Max’s arms around her, wanting to obliterate his past. She’d wanted to crawl inside him and live there, sharing his eyes and fingers, his heart and lungs.
Renato draped his jacket over her shoulders. “It really is pretty here, isn’t it?” he said, but she could only nod.
A month later, she sat with Max and Jimmy at a sunlit table at Café de Flore. Chestnut blossoms sweetened the air. A waiter poured champagne and they clinked their flutes. “To Jimmy,” Max said. “Un voyage merveilleux.” Jimmy had passed his physical and was leaving for America tomorrow.
As if they’d planned it, Man Ray and Paul came strolling up the sidewalk. They pulled up chairs to join them. Max’s first wife, Lou, lived around the corner, so he phoned her and she joined them, kissing Leonora on both cheeks when they met. With her ruddy cheeks and her earthy, easy manner, Lou seemed unshakeable. It had been years since Max fell in love with Gala, and though Lou had initially threatened to not let him see Jimmy again, it seemed that now all was well between them. Leonora had thought she might feel sorry for her, but she found herself, instead, envying her independence.
When Leonora had entered the picture, Lou and Marie-Berthe became fast friends. They had a great deal in common, as the wives—the women Max had married and abandoned. But Lou didn’t seem to mind Leonora’s presence here. She was bigger than that.
She raised her glass. “To my exceptional son. May you travel far and wide and have un bel temps, and then come straight home.”
No one spoke of why he was going, of Germany annexing Austria, of Jews being rounded up and sent to “re-education” camps, how being half-Jewish in Germany was even more dangerous than being all Jewish, since your very being was evidence of what Hitler referred to as “weakened Aryan blood.” No one spoke of the things Jimmy had told them, what he saw from the train that night on his way to Cologne, floodlights in a field, prisoners in striped uniforms, gaunt and digging. It was easier to pretend it was a choice, not an attempt to save his life. “Come with me. Come to America.” Jimmy’s voice wavered as he looked from his mother to his father, and to Leonora, too. “All of you. Before it’s too late.” A breeze through the plane trees made the sunlight dance over their faces, and Max smiled at Jimmy, his boy who somehow still loved him.
“Oh, Jimmy,” Lou said. “Don’t worry. It’ll all be over soon. You know this sort of thing can’t stand. Dictators always fall.” Leonora marveled at her resilience, her unflagging hope. She had fled Cologne after the Reichstag fire and the suspension of civil liberties, when three SS officers had shown up at her and Jimmy’s door and ransacked their flat, leaving with her passport. Being a journalist, she might have easily been taken, too. Lou finished her champagne. “And besides, this is France,” she said. “Not Germany.”
They ate piles of steamed mussels, soaking up the broth with good bread. “How’s your English?” Leonora asked Jimmy.
He turned red and cleared his throat. “Pleased to meet you, miss. Can you tell me, please, where is station for train?”
She laughed. “Well, it’s a start. Repeat after me.”
“No, no,” Man said. “You’ll have him speaking like an Englishman, saying ‘bloody hell’ and ‘rubbish’ and ‘poppycock’ and ‘time for tea.’ For God’s sake, they’ll put him right back on the boat and ship him off to England!” And he took over, giving him a lesson in American slang. You were all wet or dizzy in love, a policeman was a copper, a regular guy a joe, you could get the low down or the kiss-off, but now that Prohibition was over, at least you wouldn’t have to drink any of that rot gut.
As the English lesson continued, Paul ordered more champagne. “André kicked me out,” she heard him tell Max. “My poem in Commune was apparently the last straw. He called me a traitor. I said I chose the journal for its left-leaning readers, not because it was Stalinist, which was more or less true. Tanguy told me he announced to the group that anyone who doesn’t do all they can to discredit me and my poetry is a traitor, too. I guess it was Tanguy’s way of explaining why he’s going to ignore me next time he runs into me at Les Deux Magots.”
Max held his hand up to stop the news. “I don’t want to know the details. If you are out, so am I. The Surrealist meetings are as bad as morning mass. I’m not going to make the sign of the cross or go to confession, and I’m not going to allow Breton to confer some sort of benediction on me, or else to deny it. He might have been a true friend once, but I’m too old for that.”
It was as if, at the mention of morning mass, he had summoned Marie-Berthe out of the bright air. She stood before them. White as the tablecloth, her fists clenched. “Oh Lord,” Max muttered. “Not again.”
Leonora’s stomach turned. Too many mussels and now this. It seemed so clear. Max loved Leonora and she loved him. But his wife refused to see it, refused now to even look at her. If Marie-Berthe attacked, Leonora wasn’t sure she’d be able to restrain herself. She might claw her even worse this time.
“Jimmy’s leaving for America,” Max said. “Don’t ruin his farewell.”
“Jimmy?” she said, taken aback. Silently, the boy got up and went to her. Lou was up, too. They both had their arms around her as she sobbed.
“That’s right,” Lou said. “He’s terrible. We know he’s terrible, but this just isn’t the place. You’re better than this. Stronger.”
Marie-Berthe nodded, holding tight to the silver cross that hung over her chest. “I’m going to join the sisters of St. Anne,” she said to Max. “Is that what you want?”
Max’s face hardened. “That sounds perfect.” Leonora had never seen him this cold and it frightened her. Shaking Lou and Jimmy off her, Marie-Berthe teetered down the sidewalk. They ran to her and walked her around a corner. Man poured more champagne, but the very air had been spoiled, tasting now like sour milk.
When they returned, Lou looked at Max with a sad and sympathetic understanding, and it filled Leonora with a tight, hot feeling she recognized, grudgingly, as jealousy. Lou had known Max since before Leonora was born, knew him in ways she never would.
And then she realized—everyone at the table was staring, not at Lou or Jimmy, but at her. It appeared that she was clutching a knife, her knuckles white. She laughed and set it down. Seeing Max’s pained expression, she looked away. She realized it then and there. If she became as needy as Marie-Berthe, he’d decide he was done with her. He’d fix her with that icy stare, and she’d crumble to a handful of dust.
That night Leonora dreamed of her again. In a crowded room Marie-Berthe fired her gun at her and no one tried to stop her. They only stared. She woke in a sweat.
“I can’t stay here. I can’t stay in this city,” she said.
His eyes were closed and she thought he was sleeping, but then he stroked her forehead. “The light in Paris doesn’t suit my new work. There’s a town I’ve been to in Provence. The blue of the sky against the cliffs is like nowhere else.”
“Really?” she said, wiping the tears from her face. “We can go?”
He kissed her eyes and nose and cheeks. “There’s nothing I’d like more.”