Warpaint (9 page)

 

♦

 

Paris, 1960. C.C. traveled aboard a steamer, to live in the City of Light for a while, with Liz Moore. Paul had willed Lizzie everything, having no one else, which included a Paris studio he hadn't used since before the War, and it was in that one, high-ceilinged room, the kitchen a mere hotplate wedged into a closet with a sink and a glass fronted door, so the ‘kitchen' could be closed off from the ‘dining room' and miniscule bathroom, that she'd found a certain peace about his passing. Not an entirely peaceful peace, lined like a too-thin linen garment with a sheer slip of fear: what would she do now, without him?

Yet more immediately that summer she had another question: what was she going to do with Nancy's daughter? Twenty-four, all grown but as far as Liz could see, Smith College hadn't changed the Davis girl much, though it had given her the veneer of a sophisticate – she smoked, drank martinis, wore the latest, no matter what it was – but then again, most middle-class American girls in 1960 feigned so much world-weary sophistication. C.C. was no different than the rest: she arrived off ship with a Samsonite set, complete with pert little make-up bag, though Liz knew C.C. never made up.

Must be Nancy's doing
, she thought, as she gave the girl a customary Parisian kiss; predictably, C.C. found the unfashionable 11
^th
arrondissement studio appalling. It took her a week to give up her white gloves, and she never quite stopped walking on her toes in the morning, sure the place had mice: it didn't. What it did have was birdsong in the bathroom, some kind of acoustic trick that funneled the lark and pigeon tweets down the roof and into the bathroom, as if the birds had nested in the pipes.

One Sunday morning found Lizzie with
Le Monde
, late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair on the enclosed patio. The cracked cement floor was as dingy as the dead delphinium and sagging clothesline, but she was reasonably happy. She restricted her view to the oranges and the dark sweet coffee or, better still, when she leaned back, to the sky, past the backs of the apartments with the shuttered Sunday windows, their mute façades. She'd taken, lately, to watching birds, an idling sort of interest, born of loneliness.

“What are you doing?” asked C.C. from the solitary window that looked out on the front patio.

“What does it look like? I'm writing a piano concerto.”

“It looks like lazy to me.”

“And just what should I be doing?”

C.C. stepped out onto the patio, barefoot, wearing a man's shirt, her hair braided into a knot at the back of her neck. She looked every inch a well-scrubbed American.

Lizzie regarded her houseguest appraisingly. “Lovely.”

“Do you think so?” C.C. made a quick pirouette.

“Of course. I've always thought you were a pretty child.”

“I'm not a child.”

Liz tipped back her chair. “Aren't you?”

“No. I wish you'd stop treating me like one. I want to go out to the bars and cafés at night. I want to hear jazz, and dance. I want to meet…” she hesitated, her glance on the ground. Then she gave Liz a frowning look. “I want to meet a girl.”

Liz sat very still, tipping the chair back into place. “What sort of girl?”

C.C. said nothing. Slowly, she sat down on the stoop.

“I see,” said Liz. “Have you told your mother?”

“Oh, no. Not Dad, either. I can't. They'd be so – shocked.”

“You'll have to tell them someday.” Liz folded the paper. “Sooner or later. I won't lie to them. I couldn't. Not to Nancy.”

“I know.”

“And are you sure? Sometimes, you know, it passes, that feeling. You're young.”

C.C. laughed. “I'd be lying if I said I wanted a boy. I've tried. I dated a couple Amherst guys, my freshman year, whooo, what a mistake! I couldn't stand them, not at all, the very idea of petting made me queasy. I couldn't get away fast enough. I thought, of course, that there was something wrong with me, but to whom could I spill the beans? Then one night, late, I was talking to this other girl in my dorm – we were in French class together – and I told her, well, I told her how much I couldn't stand boys and the next thing I know, she's kissing me. And I liked it. I liked it a lot. We became roommates. Her name's Susan Perry.”

“And you fell in love with this Susan Perry?”

“Yes.”

“And where is she now?”

C.C. pouted. “I don't know. When she found out I had a ticket to Paris she threw a fit. ‘You're not going without me!' she kept shouting, but how could I bring Suz? I couldn't ask Mom and Dad for another ticket, and I couldn't see myself asking you to put us both up. I haven't heard from her since I left the States. I wrote. Nothing. No offense, Liz, but I'm –”

“Horny,” said Liz.

C.C. blushed, then, to the roots of her pale hair and stared at the concrete floor.

Liz stood, and smoothed out the front of her summer dress. “We need bread and cheese for lunch so I'm going to run up to the bakery. Why don't you get dressed? After lunch we can go by that gallery I told you about. Tonight you can go wherever you please. I won't ask too many questions.”

C.C. looked up, almost in tears. “But…I wouldn't know where to go!”

“You don't think I would know, do you?”

“You knew Gertrude Stein.”

Liz laughed. “Knew? I met Stein, once, a long time ago. If you were an American artist in Paris at that time, you ended up at 27. But believe me, she had no use for any girl other than that Alice, whose job it was to shoo all the wives and women into a corner under those goddamn floating doves or love-birds on the wallpaper, while Gertrude held forth to the men. I believe she was of the opinion that women weren't really artists, which made my blood boil. Besides, that was a long time ago and, well, a different world. I wouldn't know how to locate – what you're looking for.”

“Me and Suz found a bar in New York.”

“Of course you did.”

“But here – I don't know. I don't know –”

“You don't know the territory,” said Liz. “Well, honey, neither do I. But I do know how to manage the baker. So go get dressed. Maybe between the two of us we can dope something out and come up with a solution.”

Which turned out to be a round-trip transatlantic ticket for Susan Perry. Liz didn't want C.C. wandering about or sitting in some bar, hoping to meet some girl, when the person she really wanted, after all, was Susan.

On the concrete patio of the Paris studio, under a cloudy sky, Quiola finished a cup of black coffee. At nearly two o'clock in the sticky August warm, the day dragged. She pushed back from the small wire table, hunted up an umbrella and then, locking the studio's grille behind her, walked to the 20
^th
arrondissement.

Cimitière Père Lachaise, the largest garden in Paris, is renowned for its eclectic mixture of famous, infamous and obscure dead, all jammed together in a miniaturized version of the city. Americans often make a pilgrimage to Jim Morrison's grave, but not Quiola. Striding off the broad, living street and through the high gateway in the graveyard, she hurried past tourists. The Avenue Principale, lined with marble coffins and mausoleums, some neglected, some with flowers or new glass, set among headstones and trees, is one of the least narrow. Sunlight dappled cobbles as she approached the Monument Aux Morts, with its sobering and weird sculptural reminder of the direction we are all headed in; then she took a series of cement stairs, winding her way past tombs wedged shoulder to shoulder, over to the Avenue de St. Mary to stroll beside Etienne Godde's elaborate cement coffins for Molière and La Fontaine. But she had a destination: the Gassion-Piaf Famille's granite gravestone.

Standing beside the high-polished marble memorial, sweating in the heat, she wished to hear the singer's voice again. But she hadn't brought any Piaf overseas with her, and buying anything, from a newspaper to supper, was so unnerving she wouldn't dare try for a CD. No matter how many times she visited France, no matter how long she stayed, a command of anything remotely like spoken French eluded her. She could read, she could understand, but she could not make her tongue or lips serve the soufflé of vowels and sibilants with the proper lift. No matter how wonderful the bread, she had never managed the alchemy that made the French word for it, “pain,” translate into anything other than the English word, pain.

After a few moments, she walked out to the shady Avenue Circulaire, to the very minimal concrete slab for Gertrude Stein. The newly mown grass was sweet, and someone had left a fresh rose. She tried to remember Liz Moore's pithy account of Stein, but failed.

“I'll have to ask,” she murmured aloud and walked on.

Lingering in the city of the dead did not bother her as much as did all the shuttered tight, forbidding second and third story windows she passed as she re-entered the Paris of the living. The absolute refusal of those dark evergreen shutters saddened her, as did the rain, which came down all at once, as if in a hurry to drench pedestrians. She had to leap over a massive puddle gathered at a street corner housing a tiny children's park, complete with a carousel of rocketships to ride. Close to the studio, she gave up on a meal out, and went home. Slipping off sodden, grayed-out tennis shoes, rolling off damp cotton socks, she tiptoed across the cold wood floor to the calendar tacked on the wall beside the desk and crossed off the day.

 

♦

 

C.C. opened the squeaky condo door to find Amelia, sitting in the hall, blue-eyed, statuesque, imperial and hungry.

“Always know when its suppertime, don't you?” she said to the cat, who arched her back, curling a chocolate tail into a perfect question mark. The condo was quiet with only Amelia in it, not exactly eerie but flat and mournful, empty shadows behind shadows. C.C. switched on a hall light, and another Chinese-inspired lamp in the living room, then went to the kitchen, Amelia hopping before her in a rabbit-like gait. Tuna yesterday, today liver and beef. The phone rang over the electric grind of the can opener, but Amelia got her dinner before receiver left cradle.

“Hello?” said C.C.

Nothing.

“Hello?”

“Quiola?”

“No, I'm sorry, she's out of town. Can I take a message?”

“Out of town,” repeated a woman's voice. “Where?”

“Who is this?”

“An old friend.”

C.C. crossed her ankles and leaned against the kitchen sink. “Who is this, please?”

“Who are you?”

“An old friend,” she countered. “I'm taking care of Quiola's place while she's away. Now. Who is this and can I take a message?”

“Charlotte Davis? Isn't it? This is Evelyn. Evelyn Porter.”

C.C. gripped the phone. “Oh. Hello. What do you want?”

“Where is Quiola?”

“In Paris.”

“At the studio?”

“Yes.”

“Are you fucking her again?”

“None of your business,” snapped C.C. and slammed the phone down, muttering, “bitch.” She slid to the floor and clasped her arms around her knees. Amelia, done with the beef and liver, padded over.

“So long ago,” C.C. said to the cat, touching the brown, dry triangle of a nose. “Why do I still care, hmm?”

 

♦

 

Summer, 1982. Paris sweltered, and Paul's old studio felt airless, stifling.

“The chickens are dying,” said Quiola. Lying naked on the unmade double bed, she tried not to move.

“What did you say?” asked C.C. from the tiny bathroom. She'd filled the chipped claw-foot tub halfway with cool water to soak her feet. Sitting on the tub's rim in a sleeveless t-shirt, she wiggled her toes and draped a soaked towel over her shoulders.

Quiola raised her voice, “I said, chickens are dying – in the paper this morning. They don't really sweat, and since the temperature stays high, they can't cool down like normal, so they're dying of heat stroke.”

“Me, too. Tonight we go some place with air conditioning. I can't stand it. I need a good night's sleep. I'm not as young as you are, remember.”

“We could find a restaurant that has air.”

“That, too. Dinner, and a hotel room.”

No response.

“Quiola?”

“How much will it cost?”

“I don't care. In fact, let's make it
très
expensive. We need a treat. A night at the Ritz or something.”

“I don't have a lot of cash, you know.”

“Doesn't matter. I do.” C.C. lifted her blistered feet out of the tub and set them down on a dry green towel she'd spread on the gray tile floor. Pentagon-shaped, the cool tiles beaded water. “People at the Ritz know my family. My parents used to stay there whenever they came over, and Ted still makes a yearly trip
en famille
. I can already feel the air conditioning. Not to mention the sheets.”

“I thought the Ritz was being renovated.”

“Yeah, when Al-Fayed took over. Doesn't mean the place is closed.”

“Who?”

“Mohammed Al-Fayed. Didn't you see
Chariots of Fire
last year?”

“Sure. Why?”

C.C. stepped out of the bathroom. “One of the producers was Mohammed's son, Dodi al-Fayed. A controversial family; I think they came from Egypt. Anyway, they bought the Ritz and have been renovating it bit by bit. But we can still stay there. Let's do it now before I melt.”

“I don't know –”

“What's the problem?”

“I – it's just not right.”

“What's not?”

“You paying for everything.”

C.C. as sat down on the edge of the bed. “I have enough money for both of us.”

“Yes, I know you do.”

“Well?”

“Maybe you should go. Get a good night's sleep, as you said.”

“Are you nuts? Why would I want to go there by myself? Come on, Quiola, you didn't mind so much when we were in Italy.”

“I did mind. I just didn't know how to tell you. I don't like
being kept.”

“Kept! I'm not keeping you, I'm sharing what I have. We've been sharing with each other, haven't we?”

“But it's not an even exchange. I can't treat. I can barely pay for my half.”

“I don't care.”

“But I do.”

“This is ridiculous. This whole argument is ridiculous.” She stood, picked up the phone and rang the hotel.

Three hours later, the two women and one suitcase were dropped off at the front door of the Ritz in the Place Vendôme. Vast, imposing, the old hotel stood like a well-proportioned stallion, regal, quiet, and muscular, as if always awaiting some royal rider. Such grand architectural repose made Quiola panic.

“I can't go in there,” she said, tugging at C.C.'s sleeve.

“Of course you can. Just walk.”

“But look at me! Look at my clothes!”

C.C. stopped at the curb of the cobble-stoned street, and turned. “I am no fashion plate myself, am I? We have a reservation. My American Express card is just itching to be run through. If you really want new clothes, we are certainly in the right part of the city for it. Didn't we just pass Dior?”

“Stop that. Stop teasing.”

“Then you stop being a baby and follow me inside where there is air conditioning before we are so drenched in our own sweat we'll look even more down on our luck, and smell worse.” And with that, she marched up the street and through the revolving doors.

 

♦

 

Smack in the middle of a Minnesota snowstorm, Liz Moore borrowed – as in stole – a threadbare flannel shirt, faded cord trousers, a floppy hat and a thick old torn sweater, one from each of her brothers, then snuck out of the family farmhouse in the dead of freezing white night.

It was 1924. She was sixteen, furious, and lucky she didn't die.

It started this way: there was a local buzz about some soldier-boy from her neck of the woods, who had been publishing these racy stories in the
Saturday Evening Post
. Stories about young people, people from Liz's dream world: fast, audacious, beautiful girls who did what they wanted, with whom they wanted. A friend from school stopped by the farm that afternoon to loan Liz Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald's first two novels.

The Moore place wasn't big, but big enough to have three separate barns: far-barn, near-barn and the tiny Father's barn. She stuffed the first book under a coat, told her mother she needed to curry the new mare and headed across the pasture.

“I thought,” she said to C.C. and her girlfriend Susan Perry, as they sat over coffee in a pastry shop one afternoon in the fall of 1960, after Liz had paid for Susan's passage to Paris from the States, “that no one would be in there. But I was wrong. I saw Father before he saw me, so I ducked into an empty stall and peered through the bars. He was on one knee, reaching under a rickety wooden shelf. It was dark, and at first I couldn't see what he was doing. Our Sally, the barn cat, was squalling and then I figured it out – he was shoving her litter into a burlap sack. I screamed at his shoulders. He just stood up with the creepy crawling sack, looked and me and turned his back. For some reason, that was the last straw. I ran. Bobbed my hair for money, bummed my way to Minneapolis, then New York, London, finally, here, Paris.”

“What happened to the kittens?” asked Susan. A tall, stoop-shouldered girl, she'd folded herself into the corner seat of the table.

Liz blinked. “Why, I'm sure he drowned them.”

“I don't want to think about that,” said C.C. She'd pulled her wire-back chair as close to Susan's as possible, which made Liz feel a little like she was holding court.

“A working farm is a cruel place,” she said. “He'd drowned a litter of Sal's before. Anyhow, I never went back. I made it here, to Paris, with nothing more to sell except myself. But I wasn't going back.”

Susan's eyes went round. “Did you?”

“Sell myself? No. I dressed like a boy. If I had sold myself, some john would've been very angry.” She shrugged, smiled and added, “or maybe not.”

Both girls giggled nervously.

“Besides,” said Liz, “I was bare bones. I'm not proud of some of the things I did, but I survived.”

“And?” prodded C.C. “What
did
you do?”

Liz reached into her jacket pocket for a pack of Lucky Strikes and lit a cigarette, blowing smoke out fast. “Things. But one night, I didn't care about anything at all except this one particular man.”

“A man? What man? Not Paul.”

“Want a cig?” asked Susan.

“Sure. Light one for me, would you?” C.C. narrowed her eyes.

“Who did you fall for, Liz? What man?”

“All of Paris fell, all the world, really. We all fell in love that night. We knew he was coming, but so many had failed, everyone held their breath. France was mourning their own, lost somewhere off Nova Scotia. This young American – a Minnesota boy! – was flying solo. I heard people call him a fool, a kid with a watery grave. But there we were, and so far as anyone could tell, he was going to land, as he said he would, on the field at Le Bourget.”

Susan blinked through the thickening cigarette smoke, and handed C.C. one she'd lit. “Who?”

“Lindbergh,” said C.C. “Of course.”

“Lindbergh? But that was a million years ago.”

Liz laughed. “Not quite. I'm not that ancient, even if Lindbergh was the hero of my youth. I hitched a ride, walked when I had to, and got to Le Bourget as a crowd was gathering in for the night. After a while, it got very quiet and my heart went dead: was the adventure over? Had he gone full fathom five? And then we heard it, that buzzing hum, the sound of war, the sound of a mail drop – a plane. He'd made it. In an instant the field broke into a sea of whooping Parisians. I caught a glimpse of him as he climbed up out of the cockpit, squinting into the headlights, utterly shocked. In an interview I read later, he said he'd expected to land in the dark with a few mechanics about, so was puzzled, then downright alarmed, by the crowd of cars, all beaming the joy of their headlights into his face. He called us the Reception Committee of Fifty-Thousand, and said we were probably the most dangerous part of the whole flight.”

“Nearly ripped Lindy, and his plane, to bits,” said C.C. She'd heard the story a thousand times.