SILLAGE
After the départ, after the surprise of the top note, the reassurance of the middle note, the longing of the bottom notes, there is sillage, the wake that is left when a woman wearing perfume leaves the room. Sillage is the closest thing to a molecular memory, the closest thing to permanence in the impermanent life of fragrance, for it is sillage that imprints on the mind to create the final, lasting impression. It is the closing of the perfume’s story.
—Notebooks of N. Tours
August 4, 1977
I am just going out the door for a picnic at Upton Lake with Dahlia and her three children when the postman arrives, carrying a letter from Roland Penrose. I haven’t heard from him in years and I know without opening it what the letter will say. I take the mail and go back inside to the coolness of the kitchen in Dahlia’s summerhouse.
She was seventy, a bit young to die, I think, since, I, too, am now seventy. But considering all the risks she took, all she went through, perhaps it was a good span for her. She could so easily have died a violent death any number of times, but instead she died at home after a long slow illness, with her husband at her side.
Lee, that beautiful, radiant, damaged child. The drop-dead gorgeous model. The brave and talented photographer. The woman who found my lost child. Gone. After that weekend at Farley Farm when she showed me those photographs of the war and war’s aftermath, Lee mostly photographed her family and friends, turning away from the crueler, uglier things that destroy, that kill or at least leave lasting scars.
I refold the letter and close my eyes, seeing that little girl in her white dress on her porch.
“Are you okay, Momma?” Dahlia comes in and sees the look on my face. She is in early middle age, but when I see her, I still see the girl sitting at the potting wheel in Pablo’s studio in Vallauris, her face smeared with clay, her eyes wide with delight mixed with fear, the girl who stood hesitantly and came to me, older, sadder because that is what time does to us.
• • •
My daughter, who had once been lost to me, but was found by Lee. After they took you away, André came to the house. The hesitation lasted only a second. She ran to my opened arms. He broke the window next to the side door and forced himself in. He told me I would never see you again. That you had been shot as a traitor. That it was my fault because I had told. So I ran away. I was afraid of him. I thought you were dead.
We slept in Pablo’s studio that night. Françoise gave us pillows and blankets and supper. Dahlia curled in my arms, a child again. The next day, we went home to Grasse.
• • •
“Lee Miller has died,” I say, putting the letter in my pocket.
“Oh.” Dahlia takes the car keys from the hook by the door and jangles them, an expression of indifference on her lovely face. She met Lee once, in 1955 in New York, where Lee had exhibited in the Family of Man show in the Museum of Modern Art. Dahlia was still a college student then, just beginning her final year. Lee had taken Dahlia’s hand and winked at me. The three of us did not talk about 1949, about the six months of Dahlia’s disappearance or what had happened to her before that.
But I knew that Dahlia still had the occasional nightmare, as did Lee. The past does not die. It just acquires more shadows, blurs a bit like a fading photograph.
Lee Miller’s final photographic essay for Vogue had been published two years before that night in New York: a humorous guide for home entertaining that poked fun at the Soviet system of work camps. She had photographed Roland and a whole regiment of famous artists shelling peas, clipping the grass, watering the garden at Farley Farm. And then Lee had put away her cameras. I think she got tired of shadows, of tones of gray. I think the images she had taken as a war correspondent never faded in her imagination, and whenever she held a camera and looked through the viewfinder, she was seeing unspeakable things.
Lee channeled her famous energy and determination into cooking, of all things. I think that was how she finally found a measure of peace, through the simple act of preparing food and placing it before friends and family. She became quite good at it, a gourmet.
“Well, are you ready? Tad says he wants to drive.” Tad is Dahlia’s oldest son and he looks much like his father, Thaddeaus, tall and blond and a little too serious. Like his father, he wants to be a physician. Dahlia’s second son, William, thinks only about football and Dahlia already worries that he will be aimless, unambitious.
Her daughter, ten-year-old Adele, is a beauty. All anyone asks is that she smile. The sun comes out and all is right with the world when Adele smiles. Adele plans to become a photojournalist. Jamie gives her a new camera almost every Christmas.
Dahlia herself is a professor of French literature at New York University. As soon as she was old enough, as soon as she was able, she returned to the United States and studied here, not in Paris, agreeing to spend her summers with me in Nice as long as I agreed to spend Christmas with her in New York. Omar doesn’t like New York. Too cold. He stays in France when I make my visits, sits over his chessboard and answers the business phone when someone calls to commission a perfume. I have composed perfumes for several movie stars (more of Lee’s contacts), for the wife of a Nobel Prize winner, for several department stores that want a name brand.
Omar and I live in Cannes for most of the year, close enough to my beloved lavender fields and olive groves, but far enough away from Grasse and that sad history there so that we could start fresh with each other.
Shortly after Lee found my daughter for me, Dahlia met her father, and her father’s wife, Clara. We have created a livable peace for all of us, though when I visit, I still catch Mrs. Sloane looking at me as if she would rather I disappeared back to France and never bothered them again. Jamie adores his daughter by me, and Dahlia, an only child for so long, enjoys the company of her half sister and half brother, her nieces and nephews. It is a family filled with tension and sometimes ill will and much too much regret. But we are bound together. Dahlia and I move back and forth, by plane now, not ship, and home is always in front of us or just behind us, except for the home we carry inside that is more than mere place.
Now that Lee is gone, part of my home is also gone. I think of her that day in front of the panther’s cage in Paris, smoking cigarette after cigarette, musing about love and what is given up in its name. Beautiful Lee Miller. The little girl, Lee. The radiant young woman enchanting all of Paris. The exhausted mother, the bickering wife. The model, the photographer, the trailblazing female war correspondent. They were all Lee.
Roland sent an old photograph along with the letter telling of her death. Lee and Man, me and Jamie, sitting outdoors at the Dôme in strangely old-fashioned clothing, looking young and hopeful, and all of us, in one way or another, wildly in love, in Paris. It’s a good photo. I wonder who took it? A stranger? Perhaps Aziz was there, or Julien? Doesn’t really matter anymore. There was a moment when anything was possible and the photograph proves it. Photos are a visual sillage, what remains when all else has left.
“Come on, Momma!” Dahlia yells. “The motor’s running.”