That spring was the first time Lee mentioned the name of Julien Levy, the New York art dealer.
“He’s looking for photographers to show,” she said, crossing her legs at the knees, so that silver silk, as flowing and shiny as water, rose up her thighs to where her garters showed. It was past midnight and the Paris sky revealed just enough moon to make the sequins on the silk wink as Lee moved.
Through the open window we saw a Harlequin in black and white sprint by, chased by a woman wearing a black leather corset and high heels and nothing else.
“Madame Sandro and her new boy. God help him if she catches him, in the mood she’s in. That dominatrix outfit has gone to her head.” Lee downed her glass of champagne in one toss.
“Speaking of champagne . . .”
Lee and I were having a smoke on the tiny wrought iron balcony, curled up next to the potted red geraniums and ivy. She refilled my glass, dropping her cigarette in her lap as she did so. “Damn. It already burned a hole. Huene will kill me.” She was wearing a hand-embroidered slip borrowed from a Vogue shoot. She had come to the costume ball dressed as a model in a state of undress, wearing the slip and stockings and nothing else, with her hair disheveled, her makeup smeared. Man had finished the costume by encasing her left arm in a wire cage and putting a dog collar, complete with attached lead, around her neck.
They had dressed me in a tablecloth by cutting a hole in the middle and pulling it over my head. On top of my head, Man had strapped a basket with a live lobster that kept hitting its claw against my forehead. The basket was lined with seaweed, and it dripped salty and pungent down my neck.
“How’s the lobster looking?” I asked, lighting another cigarette from the one already in my hand.
“A little tired and listless,” Lee said.
“Right. I’ll go into the kitchen and have the maid boil it up soon and serve it with butter. Let Man get angry, I’m not going to spend the rest of the evening with a dead lobster on my head.”
“You tell ’em,” Lee agreed, slurring her words and clinking her glass against mine.
The party, that evening, was in Zizi Svirsky’s apartment. Zizi was a Russian émigré, a very handsome concert pianist except that he had bad nerves and could never actually play a concert, so instead he decorated homes for a living. He was much in demand and his parties tended to be large and wild. The love of his life, a Tatiana something or other, had run off to marry someone else, so Zizi gave a lot of parties that spring. Payback by champagne, we called it.
He was the only man I ever met who could dress as an apple tart, complete with piecrust hallowing his head, and not lose an ounce of dignity.
“It’s those Russian brains of his,” Lee said. “Genius. Great in bed, too.”
Ah. No wonder Man had seemed tense. The party was given by one of Lee’s lovers. I didn’t know exactly how many she had. I expect she didn’t either. But who was counting?
Not Lee, certainly. The nightmare experience of the child Li Li Miller of Poughkeepsie had created Lee Miller of Paris. Smoldering beneath her beauty, her talent, her fondness for champagne and the unconventional, was that little girl in the white dress, afraid to step off her own porch. How does a child comprehend such a thing as rape? She doesn’t. Instead, she grows up and lets a lover put a dog collar around her throat in revenge because he knows she has many other lovers.
Except Lee was beginning to resist, to take control over what others, men, had previously controlled. That, I knew instinctively, was one reason for the multiple lovers. I belong to me, she was saying. No one else.
Man’s career and reputation had taken a beating that winter, while Lee’s was all shining ascendancy. His recent exhibit in Cannes had not been a success. Very little of it had sold and Man was having money problems because fewer and fewer sitters were coming to the studio. Not many Americans were left in Paris and those who stayed, like Jamie and me, didn’t have the cash for a formal portrait.
Lee, though, had earned more than money by working on the film set in London that winter. Her name had been buzzed about; people were realizing she was more than Man Ray’s girlfriend, more than a lovely model: she was an artist herself.
The great Charlie Chaplin himself had come to her Paris studio to be photographed. Lee had posed him immediately under a large chandelier that seemed, in the photograph, to be growing out of his head. The actress Claire Luce came to be photographed with her Siamese cats, one of which had left a long scratch on Lee’s hand. Lee hadn’t minded because Claire was such fun in the studio, balancing plates on her head and tap-dancing on the table. Claire was another upstate girl, born in Syracuse and full of gossip about a young dancer, Fred Astaire, with whom she was to dance on Broadway.
Man, plainly dispirited, had begun to talk of returning to New York. More, he wanted Lee to “live as his wife.” In other words, no playing around. Fidelity. Obedience. The whole ball of wax.
“God,” Lee said, slumping against the pots of geranium on Zizi’s balcony, “do you really see me frying fish in some miserable flat in Brooklyn?”
“So, tell me more about this Julien Levy,” I said, draining the last bubbles from the champagne bottle directly into my mouth. “What kind of photographers is he looking for?”
“Avant-garde, of course. He’s asked Man to give him some names.”
“He should look at Jamie’s photographs.” I was pretty drunk—how else could I explain the fact that I had allowed a lobster to sit on my head for the past three hours?—but underneath my dizzy silliness, in that corner of my brain that could step back and watch even when the rest of the brain was soused, there was a tingle of excitement. Maybe Julien Levy was going to give Jamie his big break.
“Sure,” Lee agreed. “I’ll speak to Man about it.”
Zizi stuck his head through the window and handed Lee a just opened bottle of Taittinger’s.
“Perfect timing, as always.” Lee blew him a kiss.
“It’s a bribe, my darling. I want you to come dance with me.” Zizi smiled angelically inside his fake piecrust halo.
Zizi had hired a trio of violinists for the evening, portly long-faced fellows in suits that had seen better days. They were playing something sad and slow, and profoundly Russian. They made me want to weep. Or perhaps it was the champagne, or the thought of Jamie. I was more in love than ever, head over heels, over the moon, dizzy with it. Lee stuck her hand through the open window and let Zizi pull her through to the drawing room, where various couples clung together, barely moving.
Zizi had decorated all the rooms in his apartment in different themes. The one inside my window where he and Lee danced was a safari filled with zebra skins on the settees and mounted rhino and lion heads on the walls. The chandelier was made of candles stuck on the ends of twisting horns. “Poor lion,” I wept, looking at the head on the wall opposite my window. The trophy was quite old and the occasional moth flew out of it to commit hara-kiri in the chandelier, but once, it had been a majestic beast. It had roared and purred—did lions purr?—and stalked through a distant jungle.
A woman costumed as an aviatrix, in leather jacket and tight little leather cap, crawled through the window and took Lee’s place next to me and the geranium pots. Amelia Earhart had just announced she planned to repeat Lucky Lindy’s solo flight from Newfoundland to Paris, and stylish Parisian women now wore leather jackets and aviator caps. This particular Amelia handed me her handkerchief, revealing long pointed red nails that I thought the real Earhart would have filed down for the flight.
“I know,” she said, patting my shoulder. “I know.”
“It’s the lion,” I wept. “That wonderful, wonderful beast. Come to this.”
“There, there.” She put her arm around my shoulders. “Chin up. Could be worse. Could be us up there.”
“Very tr-true,” I hiccuped.
“You’re a friend of Lee Miller’s, aren’t you,” the aviatrix said, no question mark in her voice.
“Guilty as charged, Officer.”
“I haven’t met her yet. Could you introduce us?”
“Sure.” I pointed through the window to where Lee and Zizi tried to cling together, her free arm around his neck, her other arm, encased in Man’s wire cage, forcing six inches of space between them. Zizi’s hand was on her backside. “Lee, meet Amelia. Amelia, meet Lee.”
“That’s not quite what I meant.”
“I know.” The lion hadn’t sobered me, but this woman did. This was happening more and more frequently, total strangers approaching me, asking for an introduction to my friend Lee Miller. I was starting to feel over my head in the large and crowded swimming pool that was the artists’ Paris. I crawled through the window and from the other side promised the fake Amelia that I would introduce her to Lee later.
Jamie was in the second parlor, the one decorated like a harem, with embroidered cloths over all the furniture and carved wooden grilles on the walls. The only light came from little brass lamps shaped like genie bottles from an Aladdin illustration, and the air was sweet and heavy. There was a brass hookah in the middle of the room surrounded by a circle of brightly colored cushions. Jamie and four others sat there in the twilight, passing the mouthpiece around.
“Hash,” he said when I sat next to him.
“No thanks.”
His eyes were hugely dilated. When I leaned against him, it felt as if his entire body had turned into a feather pillow; he was that relaxed. “I love you,” I whispered into his ear.
Lee came in, alone, and took a long inhale off the hookah but did not sit down. Jamie smiled dreamily at her.
“Shall we go cook the lobster?” she said. “I think he’s all done in, and I’m famished.”
• • •
The next day, at Man’s studio, we saw the first printing of a brochure Man had been commissioned to do for the Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d’Électricité, to promote the use of electricity.
“Come see,” Lee said, taking my coat and pulling me forward. Man spread open the brochure on the table and Jamie and I stood there, making the appropriate noises of admiration.
My father told me once that Thomas Edison had offered to make Poughkeepsie the first electrified city in the country. But the city fathers had said, “No, thanks. We like Poughkeepsie the way it is, gaslights and all.” And Edison had gone to New Jersey instead. Paris, on the other hand, was paying surrealist artists to brag about its plans for electrification.
The suited men of industry who had hired Man Ray got a little more than they had bargained for, though. He had photographed Lee naked and then cropped off her head and legs, making a sort of modern Venus de Milo. Then, he had drawn white lines across her torso, electric rays. I could imagine good bourgeois husbands and wives looking at this pamphlet and wondering if electricity in the house might cause a little madness.
Man had made several other images of a headless Lee Miller torso, and I wondered if Lee was as uncomfortable with it as I was, this reduction of a woman from an identity to a faceless piece of a body, not even a whole body.
Of course, the best piece in the pamphlet was the photograph of the place de la Concorde at night, all lit up like a Christmas scene.
“Can you guess what’s wrong here?” Lee asked, grinning. “The place de la Concorde is still lit by gas, not electricity. We didn’t find out till after we took the photograph, and decided to use it anyway.”
“Good thing it’s a limited edition,” I said, handing the brochure back. Man gave me a harsh look. He could not stand any criticism, not even as a joke.
Jamie thought the art-brochure was spectacular. He thought most of Man’s work was spectacular.
“So who is this Julien Levy?” I asked Man, helping myself to coffee from the pot Lee had put out.
“Got to run,” Lee said. “The Duchess of Alba is coming to my studio for a sitting.” And she was out the door quick as if a runner’s pistol had begun the race. She hadn’t said anything to Man, despite her promise, and Man didn’t look happy that I even knew the name.
In fact, Man’s face looked bereft as the door shut after Lee, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he most regretted: that Lee spent quite a bit a time away from him these days, or that the duchess had asked Lee rather than him to take her photograph. Or that I had brought up the art dealer, Julien Levy.
Jamie sipped his coffee and looked at me over the rim of the cup. I held his gaze and he saw exactly what I wanted him to see. Opportunity. Pursue it. Take it. Man was busy setting up a tray of glass plates. For the formal portraits he still preferred a huge old camera that used the plates, not the more modern film cameras.
“Let me do that,” Jamie said, putting down his cup.
“Lee said he’s here scouting for photographers for an exhibit. Julien Levy,” I repeated, in case Man had forgotten the question.
Man looked tired and rumpled. He had put on weight and his tailored shirt was too tight, the cloth pulling at the buttonholes. His curling black hair needed a stern brushing. There were circles under his eyes as shiny and dark as purple eggplants. “Don’t you take care of this man of yours?” Lee had asked me months before. Man looked like no one was taking care of him. I wondered if he had seen Lee and Zizi dancing together the night before, Lee swooning at Zizi’s neck, his hand on her backside. The obvious intimacy of it.
“Julien is an old friend,” Man said, going to a sofa and sinking deeply into it. He pretended to look over his shoulder out the window, but he wasn’t really seeing the street, the children playing, the old laundrywoman with her heavy basket. His dark eyes were unfocused, darting back and forth like cats looking for a way to escape a room.
The room was filled with a current of expectation.
Jamie continued to arrange the glass plates in the tray, his strong hands moving swiftly and precisely, revealing the athlete, the high school hero who carries the football over the line, who makes the last winning shot on the court. “So, what’s the exhibit?” he asked.
“Just new photographers. No theme other than that.” Man’s eyes focused now on a photograph tacked to the wall—a portrait of Lee wearing the cage he had designed for her arm. “You know how New York is, as far as art goes. Ten years behind Paris.”
“Yeah. I know.” Jamie smiled and light caught on his sharp cheekbones.
Man knew what he was supposed to say, what he had to say, since he had taken Jamie into the studio and made him an assistant. This was how it was done. Friends naming friends. Great people helping small people up a bit. “I’ll ask him to have a look at some of your photographs before he goes. He’s leaving soon.”
“That would be great.” Jamie had the sense to say it casually, to downplay his thanks. But the electric current that had been building completed itself and there was an invisible arcing of current between Jamie and me. We both knew the importance of that moment.
“I’ll bring him round on Wednesday.”
That gave us three days to prepare.
• • •
There wasn’t time for any new photographs, but Jamie spent the next three evenings, almost entire nights, printing up old shots. He didn’t sleep except for an hour here and there, and he barely ate. I saw little of him. Man was out of the studio a lot, probably taking Julien Levy around to meet with other artist friends, so Jamie had free use of the studio, the equipment, the chemicals. Lee, to make up for breaking her promise, must have helped him a bit because he showed me some of the prints, explaining, “Lee likes the shadows in this one,” or “Here, she likes how the sun seems to be rising out of the man’s head,” and “She thinks this one might be too naturalistic but I should show it anyway.”
My role was to keep out of the way. No problem. Weeks earlier, I had found a job. There was a little chemist’s shop down the street, and I had convinced the owner I was just the ticket to increase his sales of perfume. “The nose knows,” I had explained to him in English, and he had found that very, very funny, though I wondered if he really knew what I had said. His English was as bad as my French, but we had reached an understanding: I worked on commission only. No sales, no pay. He had nothing to lose.
So, every afternoon I dressed in my best white blouse, dark skirt, high heels, and fake pearls and stood in front of his little perfume counter, pretending to try the various fragrances though I never actually put any on my skin, not until the end of the day when it was time to leave and I could take my scented pulse points home for Jamie to enjoy, whenever he returned.
Our schedule was shot all to pieces, with Jamie spending more and more time with Man in the studio, and some days I didn’t see him until he drifted in after midnight, smelling of developing-bath chemicals, too tired for anything but a hug. When we made love, which occurred less and less frequently, it was quick and without tenderness and sometimes even without protection, it began and ended so fast. “Don’t worry,” Jamie said on those occasions. “I withdrew in time.”
“I’m not worried,” I said.
At the pharmacy, women would drift in for plasters for their children and bromide for their husbands’ indigestion and I, dying of jealousy for their small, wonderful, domestic lives, would open a bottle and spritz a little fragrance their way.
The trick was to make a five-second assessment of the woman and decide which fragrance would most appeal to her. Sophisticated Chanel No. 5? Exotic Shalimar? If she was young and had runs in her stockings, I would pick a little flacon of tuberose and spice from smaller, less famous houses than Chanel or Guerlain.
Perfume must never be sniffed directly from the bottle, but sprayed into the air or, better, on the wrist of the buyer. A quality perfume smells slightly different on everybody, takes on some of the personality of the wearer. Brunettes and blondes may buy the same fragrance, but it will smell like two completely different ones on each wearer. And so when the occasional male customer wandered into the store and stood bemused and confounded over the array of perfume bottles, the first question I asked was her hair color (“natural, please, sir, if you know it”) and her weight. The heavier the woman, the lighter the perfume must be.
Had she grown up in the city or the country? Was she quick-tempered? No stimulating scents but rather calming ones with lavender. Passionate or cold? Men would invariably take a step back when I asked that question and look askance. The answer was always whispered.
I had lost some customers with those questions, and other even more personal ones. But I had gained even more customers, almost a kind of following, because the choices I guided the customers to were unerringly right. Nine times out of ten, that was my success rate. And on the very first try. Invariably, the customer would sniff at my choice, express delight in varying degrees, try several others, and then purchase the first one.
Boulet’s sales in perfume tripled. After I’d been there only a week, he gave me window space to make a display, a kind of ancient Greek temple made of painted cardboard with perfume bottles as columns. Jamie had photographed statues and fountains from the Tuileries and collaged the photos onto the back wall of the temple, just past the perfume columns. We had thought it rather clever and Monsieur Boulet kissed his fingertips when he saw it.
Two weeks after I’d begun the job, I’d bought a cup of café crème at the upstairs salon at Printemps, and been satisfied to overhear a woman at the next table say to her companion that she must, she really must, try the perfume counter at Boulet’s. She’d heard there was a charming young woman there who knew perfumes the way some men knew a deck of cards.
Father would have laughed. He’d made me spend hours sniffing garden flowers and herbs with my eyes closed so that I could tell a tea rose from a damask, sage from rue. I had thought it a game, no more. In France, where pleasure and sensuality were esteemed rather than stood in a corner and labeled sin, such training was proving very useful.
The day before Julien Levy was supposed to come to our rooms and look at Jamie’s work, I was again at Boulet’s, earning my commission. The early afternoon passed quickly. Two hours at the perfume counter, then a break during which I bought a little cup of coffee from the café at the corner and drank it, shivering, at an outdoor table. The day was damp and windy. Schoolchildren returning home clapped their hats to their heads, and housewives had their aprons blown up into their faces.
I made that little cup of coffee last the full length of my break, so that I could sit and watch the women and men of Paris, some hurrying, some strolling, some silent and stormy faced, others laughing.
Then, back to the perfume counter for another two-hour shift. This shift was always quieter. Most women were home making dinner, or dressing their hair and getting ready to go out for the evening. Streetlamps were shining when the shop bell rang and a final customer entered.
She wore furs, expensive ones, and shoes with heels so high you knew she had a car and driver waiting for her. No woman could walk cobbled streets in such shoes. Her perfume entered before she did. That was always a mistake. Leave a slight trail like a memory behind you, but never let your perfume arrive before you.
Leper bells, my father used to call this heavy-handed application of perfume, after the lepers of olden France who had to wear bells to warn people of their approach. “Here comes Mrs. Brown,” he would whisper in church on Sunday morning without turning around to see her. “Smells of lilac and mothballs. Here comes Miss Stoltz.” He wouldn’t say what she smelled of, but everyone in the neighborhood knew how she spent her Saturday nights. “Not alone,” Mother said with tight lips.
This obviously wealthy woman in Boulet’s smelled of spice and incense, enough to perfume a dozen churches. The scent was correct: she was a brunette, full-bodied without reaching the point of heaviness. But she simply wore too much.
“I wish a new fragrance,” she announced, slapping her little beaded purse onto the glass counter and sitting on the stool Mr. Boulet had placed there, once he saw how I could convince the customers to linger a while, to sniff and eventually purchase. “Miss . . . ?” She looked closely at the name tag I wore on my blouse. “Miss Tours?” She paused. “Do I know you?”
“We met at the Jockey. I was with Miss Lee Miller and Mr. Man Ray.”
It was Aziz’s wife, Nimet.
“Yes. Now I do remember. Lee is such a funny girl.” It was clear exactly what she meant by that: Lee keeping company with a shopgirl. Nimet narrowed her eyes, and the thick kohl around them made it look as if there were two black holes in her face where the eyes should have been.
“I am learning to swim. We will be going to the Riviera,” she said. “I wish a new perfume. Something suitable for athletics, yes?”
I didn’t think Nimet would be spending much time perfecting her sidestroke. Poolside martinis seemed more her style. But she was the customer and I was there to assist.
“Have you been to the Eiffel Tower?” I asked, trying to make conversation as I studied my artillery of perfume samples.
“So boring,” Nimet said. “If I want to climb something high, I go to the pyramids.” Was she laughing at me? Her face was so heavily made-up it was difficult to read her expression. Sitting there before me, Nimet made me aware that her name had popped up in several conversations with Lee, thrown in with the other trivia I hadn’t paid that much attention to. Paris was filled with names of artists and celebrities and their mistresses and wives; if you paid attention to all of them, you’d probably have surrealist nightmares.
Lee had laughed at both Nimet and her husband, Aziz: she with her overblown beauty and strong Egyptian accent, he with the promise of a potbelly to come and the hand gestures of a spoiled prince. He snapped his fingers all the time, at waiters, barbers, chauffeurs, Lee had said. He tapped the side of his nose when he wanted to appear cunning. He templed his hands in front of his face when he wanted to look thoughtful. So transparent.
How was I remembering all this now, with Nimet there in front of me? Lee must have talked about him much more than I had noticed.
“What perfume do you wear now?” I asked Nimet, though I already knew, had known from the very first night at the Jockey when she had walked into the restaurant in her private mist of fragrance. Nubian Amber. A pleasant enough fragrance if appropriately worn, though too heavily weighted with musk, in my opinion. It had a kind of leftover “party from the night before” aura to it, no freshness.
“I don’t remember,” she lied, testing me. “I have heard the little countergirl at Boulet’s knows her fragrances. Choose one for me.”
“Madame is wearing Nubian Amber,” I answered mildly. “You like spice and incense. May I suggest Enigma from Lubin?” I took a bottle from the shelf. “Your wrist, please. Let it dry completely before you smell it.”
Enigma was one of the older perfumes and still very popular. It seemed designed for Nimet, the way you sometimes found a book written before you were born and yet that book was about you. Even the advertising used for Enigma shouted “Nimet!” with its sphinx and winged green Egyptian scarab surrounded by art nouveau flowers.
After I applied a single drop, Nimet vigorously waved her hand in the air to dry it. As soon as it began to dry, I smelled heat and sand and the cooling water of the Nile.
“So you know Miss Lee Miller,” she said casually, still vigorously waving her hand as if flies plagued her. Her heavy gold bangles clanged together. The emerald and diamond ring she wore caught the light and sent it back against the dark walls of the shop, prisms of shiny wealth alighting on jars of cheap face cream, boxes of stale candy and shaving soaps.
“I have the honor. Does Madame like the perfume?”
She sniffed tentatively, bringing that lovely nose with its flaring nostrils to her bangle-weighted wrist. “No. It is too mannish. Try another. Something womanly. Flowers. Spices.”
Enigma was one of the strongest florals, so I knew Nimet was stalling; she was there for something other than perfume.
Monsieur Boulet, meanwhile, was watching us from his mezzanine office window. He had observed Madame’s furs, the emerald ring and gold bracelets, and his eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his head. He had smoothed his curly hair down with a palm of spit and straightened an otherwise always crooked tie. We didn’t normally have clientele like Nimet Eloui Bey. Housewives and shopgirls were more our crowd. Was this the beginning of a trend? Was his little shop to become fashionable? Stranger things had happened, stranger fortunes made. Chanel, after all, had started out stitching straight seams in another woman’s workshop.
I smiled at him, hoping his heart was strong enough for this, and returned my attention to my extensive display of samples. I chose Bouquet Manon Lescaut out of meanness. It was dated, too overwhelming even for women who liked to overwhelm with their scent, and it was named for a very unhappy love affair and the woman who died because of her infidelity. Even just sitting on the shelf, the flacon seemed dangerous to me. I had often considered throwing it away. Perhaps I had saved it just for this moment. I did not like being pumped for information about the famous Lee Miller.
“Try this,” I said sweetly. “Other wrist. Mustn’t blend scents.” The départ of Bouquet Manon Lescaut spoke of tragedy, with its funereal scent of carnation and incense. Sadness washed over me as soon as I opened the bottle. When I applied a single drop to Madame’s wrist, she again flapped her hand for a few moments with a great clanging of bangles, then sniffed. The top notes deepened the tragedy, with a hint of smoke and burning cedar, as if a million funeral wreaths had been set afire. (These were just my impressions. Some women, happy women, were pleased with the scent. They were of stronger constitution than myself.)
Nimet sniffed her wrist. “Perhaps,” she said.
“Shall I wrap it? The medium or large bottle?” Time for this little transaction to end.
“Large bottle. Please give your friend a message. My husband detests her.”
“Righto,” I agreed, though of course I would deliver no such message. I smiled as I said it, because Monsieur Boulet was still watching us. “Anything else, madame?”