Free The Beautiful American by Jeanne Mackin Page A

bar and have a beer. Just one.”
    I hesitated in the doorway. And as I did, a group of six people approached, laughing loudly and shouting back and forth in French and English and German. It was Lee Miller with her friends.
    Lee had the good looks you never confused with a different person, a different face; she had style and daring. That evening, she wore trousers and a coat of white cashmere, and a white cap tight around her head so that she almost looked like a boy, except for her mouth, which was painted bright red, and the smoky kohl circling her blue eyes.
    When she saw me, she paused and there was a second of confusion in her perfect features.
    “I know you,” Lee said.
    “Yes,” I said. “When we were . . .” I was going to remind her that we had once been playmates, but she spoke over me, interrupting.
    “The girl from the bookstore. You gave me your hat. Man,” she said, “come see. Another girl from P’oke. And she gave me a hat once. Isn’t she fabulous?”
    Her escort moved closer to us. He was several inches shorter than Lee, dark haired, stern looking, carefully and expensively dressed in a charcoal pinstripe suit and camel hair coat. I had seen his photos in newspapers and magazines. Man Ray, the artist and photographer.
    Man Ray and I shook hands. Jamie had frozen the way a hunter freezes when a stag crosses his path. He was a businessman’s son. He knew opportunity. Gently, his hand pressed into my back, he pushed me slightly forward, closer to Lee and Man Ray.
    “She looks like Clara Bow, doesn’t she?” Man said. The four others with them circled round me and stared.
    Lee reached up and brushed snow off my bangs. “Were you going in? Come have a drink with us.”
    “Thanks.” Jamie stepped forward, took his cap off, and tipped his head at her, like a delivery boy would, and then at her escort. “Mr. Man Ray, I know your work. I’m a photographer, too.”
    “Of course,” Man said in a bored voice. His five-o’clock shadow made his face look blue in the lamplight. Man was looking at Lee, who was looking at Jamie.
    Jamie still looked like what he had been: a high school football hero, a heartthrob. He had sandy blond hair and seductive brown eyes and the shyness evident in his posture, that frequent downcasting of his eyes and the way his head often tilted to one side during a conversation, all that boyishness made him even more appealing.
    Lee and Jamie had never met before, not even in our small town. She had gone to private schools, partied with a differentcrowd; they were two kids from Poughkeepsie finally meeting in Paris.
    A moment, frozen in my memory like a photograph: a winter night on rue Rabelais outside the Jockey Club, where two girls from Poughkeepsie bumped into each other, each clinging to her beau’s arm; the four of us in the falling snow, music from the club wafting out with the smell of tobacco, perfume, whiskey; each of us looking in a different direction—me at Jamie, Jamie and Lee at each other, Man at Lee. The memory stops there, holds its breath. All is silence and stillness, encroaching shadow. And then we move into the doorway.
    Thresholds seemed to be my meeting place with Lee.
    Man made that palms-up gesture that men of means make, ushering us out of the cold dark into the overheated club, smiling benignly at us and carefully avoiding standing next to Jamie, who was so much taller than he was. Lee guided us through the crowd at the bar to a quieter table in the back and we sat, the eight of us, left to make our own introductions since Lee and Man were furiously whispering together, Lee rolling her eyes, Man once pounding the table with the flat of his hand.
    The two other couples were a German art collector and his wife, Herr and Frau Abetz, and a photographer’s model with her husband. Frau Abetz was already very drunk and when she introduced herself—“Call me Trudie, my dears”—her words slurred. Her lipstick was smeared; her white blond hair,