The Villa Air-Bel gang and the usual gaggle of artists and writers had been playing Truth for hours out on the belvedere in what had become a regular Sunday salon. Jacqueline and T called to Peterkin and Aube, playing their own made-up game around one of the trees hung with art. It was the moment of the day when Edouard most missed Luki, as the children headed for bed. Nanée had somehow obtained an American passport for her, but it had been eight days now since they received the postcard suggesting Berthe was in Dinard, and there’d been no response to the letter they’d sent by the very next post.
He fingered his camera on the table in front of him, the new Leica everyone at the chateau had chipped in to buy and surprised him with the night before, moving him to tears even as Danny slid it across the big dining room table. Again and again today he’d lifted it to frame a shot, but never pressed the shutter release. And now it was too dark. There was enough light on the table to see each other, but nothing to spare.
Nanée, the interrogator in this round of Truth, touched a hand to her neck—bare tonight, that’s what was different, she wasn’t wearing her flying scarf. She said to Varian, her victim, “And if the Emergency Rescue Committee does send someone new from the States to replace you, will you go home?”
“I don’t imagine it will come to that,” Varian objected.
Edouard and Max shared a look. One never imagined a thing would “come to that” until it did. But the Vichy government didn’t want Varian in France, and the US government seemed intent on avoiding any appearance of offending them.
Danny launched into a joke on himself, and Nanée beside him laughed, tipping her head back that way she did when she was truly amused and not just being polite. Edouard hardly knew what he was doing, raising the camera, adjusting the f-stop to minimize the depth of field.
Nanée looked to him, her eyes surprisingly dark in the dark evening. Good lord, he could not do this with her watching him.
And now everyone was watching them watch each other.
How had he thought it would be easier to take a photo at this salon than to stage some bizarre composition of things, like Bellmer and his dolls, with no one there to judge or care?
“You won’t make me horribly ugly, will you?” Nanée said.
He smiled at the preposterousness of the idea, or perhaps at the worry that went with the question, the fear of our own ugliness. “I warned you that beauty doesn’t interest me. Tip your head back again, will you? Lift your chin to the stars?”
“Lift my chin!”
He felt André watching him. God, he hated the way André watched a person. If there was an audience that would make a man stop what he was doing, it was André Breton.
“Your neck is beautiful, Nanée,” André said. “Do let him take the photograph he wants to take.”
She set a hand to her throat again, her expression uneasy, or even ashamed, as if André had just provoked her to confess something about herself she didn’t want known, or perhaps hadn’t known herself. “Even Lee Miller’s beautiful eye looks eerie and ugly when isolated from her face,” she said.
“But Nanée, beauty is convulsive,” André said. “A disorienting and shocking disordering of the senses.”
“I’m not sure I care to have whatever beauty I might have disordered,” Nanée said, “much less shockingly.” Joking, and yet not. Her hand still at her throat.
Veiled-erotic. André’s term. Did André use it to seduce women? Had he seduced Nanée? Was he seducing her now, in front of his own wife?
André still watching.
“Close your eyes,” Edouard said.
“Close my eyes?”
“Imagine you’re that black swan.”
“What black swan?” André asked.
Damn him for crowding in, making the impossible more so.
“Close your eyes and lean your head back. Stretch your neck as long as the swan’s, and don’t think about anything but that beautiful bird.”
She smiled uncomfortably, but she closed her eyes as if to test whether she could trust him. She slowly tipped back her head.
“Your hand,” he said.
She hesitated, then lowered her hand so that the long stretch of her neck was exposed. Vulnerable. Veiled-erotic.
He wanted to reach over and set a fingertip at the dip between her collarbones.
“I do hope you’re not the throat-slitting type,” she said.
Everyone around the table laughed, a welcome break in the tension.
“But of course we know he is,” André said.
“He didn’t slit her neck that night,” Danny said. “He plunged a fountain pen into it.”
“A little more, Nanée,” Edouard said. “A little farther back. Now stretch your chin up toward the stars.”
Her chest arched with the motion, the way Elza’s used to arch when they made love. Go ahead, Edouard. I want you to, Elza had said that first time, on a blanket on the ground in broad daylight. They had gone on a picnic. The lovemaking had surprised them both, and yet it hadn’t really.
Elza had been dead so many years now. Elza had died only yesterday.
“Right there,” he said. “Hold that.”
He pressed the shutter release.
“All right,” he said. “Thank you.”
Nanée sat forward as if brought back from a dream.
“That’s all? Just one?” she asked, puzzled, but also perhaps relieved. She put her hand to her throat again, gently, as if an explanation might be felt in the touch of her neck.
“Yes,” he said.
“Just me, leaning my head back?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No,” he said. “Neither do I.”
He held her gaze, remembering her beautiful neck tilted back against the zinc tub, wet from the bath. He’d wanted to touch it then too. He wondered if she would think the photograph he’d just taken obscene. He wondered if he would show it to her, or to anyone. He couldn’t say why he’d needed to take it, why he imagined taking this very shot might free him.
“It’s a way to see myself,” he said.
He stood then, and took his camera, and he backed away. He knew the whole long table was watching him, but it didn’t matter, the others didn’t matter.
Nanée didn’t say a word, either. She just watched him go. She wasn’t a watcher, but she was watching him.
Monday, November 25, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Madame Nouget was measuring the day’s bread into equal portions and the children were just in from milking the cow, with Dagobert tagging along, when Edouard entered the kitchen. He was headed for the bathroom darkroom, but Peterkin’s face lit up the way it did, and the boy insisted he would share his cup of warm milk with Edouard. T split her son’s milk in two portions, and Peterkin brought the second cup to him, carrying it so carefully.
“It will make your belly warm for the day,” the boy said.
They were all hungry, always. This was a way T cared for her son, feeding him something warm and soothing, loving, as the day started and again before she tucked him into bed. Edouard didn’t want to deprive the boy of a drop, but he imagined Luki handing this cup to him, how much it pleased both of these children to share what they had.
“Thank you,” he said, relieved to see as he accepted the cup that T was surreptitiously topping up Peterkin’s own cup from the milk set aside for the neighbors.