Read Online The Beautiful American by Jeanne Mackin - Free Book Online

digs till we were in the cheapest bedsit we could find. London was cold and gray and too expensive. His portfolio, banged and stained and dented by then, did not impress the gallery owners nor did his awards from the Poughkeepsie Photography Club, or his photos of New York car crashes, though there was a good one of a new Model T and an old carriage horse, nose to nose, each demanding right of way. The old and the new, Jamie called it, and we had nicknamed the horse P’oke and the Model T Paris, as if we had known all along where we would finally end up.
    We went to Harrods one day to see the famous food court and maybe buy a treat for our supper. We hovered in the doorway in our rumpled clothes, streams of people pushing past us, perfumes from the counter teasing my nose, the jasmine of Jamais de la Vie, therose and amber of Amour, the lavender and moss of Adieu Sagesse all mixing together.
    A nanny pushed between us, gloved hands firmly gripping a perambulator with its precious burden. I stooped to look at the red-faced infant, who stared back at me with perfectly round, unblinking eyes.
    “Adorable,” I said, meaning it, inhaling deeply the talcum and milk smell. The nanny nodded and continued on her way.
    Jamie’s hair stuck up strangely in back because I had cut it myself to save money. No matter how often I licked my palm and pressed it down over that lock of hair, it stood up like a flag of surrender. I reached up then and smoothed it down and kissed his cheek. “Let’s have a baby,” I whispered. That’s how much I loved him. That’s how young and unmoored I was.
    “In a couple of years. But for now, let’s get out of here,” Jamie said, and I knew he didn’t just mean Harrods.
    •   •   •
    T wo days later we were in Paris, unpacked in a fleabag hotel on Île de la Cité, and the fleas were worth it, because outside my attic window was Notre-Dame cathedral.
    Maybe it was all those bottles of French perfume, or my father, who after a fourth shot of gin would whisper to me, We’ll go to Paris one day, just you and me. A year after I had arrived, a friend told me about reincarnation and how people traveled to get to where they had once been happy in some other life. Whatever the cause, I was immediately happy in Paris, more buoyant and optimistic than I had ever been in my life. It was like stepping out of a closed dark room and into the fresh air.
    Paris was cheaper than London, and even if Jamie did not finda gallery and make money from sales, his allowance would cover us, if we lived frugally. We could go to bars and cafés for meals and drinks, and spend our afternoons walking along the Seine, Jamie always pointing his camera in some direction.
    We walked the cobblestone streets of the Latin Quarter, peered through grilled gates at private courtyards with their playing fountains and flower-filled urns. We picnicked in the Luxembourg Gardens, where the writer Hemingway had hunted pigeons for his lunch. We spent a week’s worth of cash at the Folies Bergère to see Josephine Baker dance in her banana skirt . . . Josephine, whose favorite fragrance was jasmine, the flower that gave the name to the new music, jazz. We ate sugar crepes from street stalls, and walked up and down rue de Fleurus, hoping to get a glance of Gertrude Stein.
    As foreign as the city was, it was hard to be homesick in Paris. It was filled with Americans, all come for the same reasons as Jamie and me, to be elsewhere, to soak up the wonderful exoticness of a place not home. In Café de Flore, the gossip was in American, full of Southern drawls and clipped New England vowels. When you went to the races at Auteuil—and who did not?—the women wore afternoon costumes purchased at Bergdorf’s and the men wore Texas brimmed hats.
    The gardens, parks, and avenues of the city were lined with young Americans sitting in front of their easels, painting oils and watercolors of Notre-Dame, horse chestnut trees, and French