The Beautiful American by Jeanne Mackin Page B

mystery, she packed the camera into its case and took me by the arm.
    “Breakfast,” she said. “And a chat. I think we’re going to be good friends.”
    “How come you didn’t take any photographs of Atlas or his brother?”
    “They’re only good for postcards for tourists. If you want one, I’ll make one for you.”
    “No, thanks.”
    We found a little café and sat inside at a table, though it cost more. We were both shivering by then because the morning sun hadn’t brought any significant warmth. Lee ordered for us, coffee with milk, rolls, bread, butter. Slices of ham.
    “Don’t give in to this French way of eating only bread in the morning,” she warned. “You’ll go to fat.”
    Slender as an athletic schoolgirl, she looked as if she knew what she was talking about. I followed her example and slipped some ham into my roll and ignored the pot of jam.
    “So,” she said, when we had finished our coffee and sandwiches. “Tell me.”
    “Tell you what?”
    “About yourself, of course. What brings you to this neck of the woods?”
    The very American phrase made me laugh.
    Lee lit a cigarette and offered one to me. We sat there, two girls from Poughkeepsie, smoking heady Gauloises in a Parisian café on a Parisian morning, and I know what I was thinking. My whole body was a tingling thank-you to whatever gods and destiny had brought me there—though, of course, I had no idea what Lee was thinking.
    There was no easy answer I could give her. Jamie wanted to be an artist and this was where artists came. (Why did I never, in my thoughts, think Jamie was an artist?) I had been bored and unhappy in Poughkeepsie. So who wasn’t? And for that matter, what did I want, other than to be wherever Jamie was?
    We were the same age, but I suddenly felt younger, evenchildish next to the great nuanced worldliness of Lee Miller, who was living with an older, famous man, who had already made a name for herself as a model and now was also working as a photographer.
    “Where else should I be?” was my feeble reply. Rearranging the same perfume bottles over and over in Platt’s department store? Cleaning poodle piss off my aunt’s carpet?
    Lee laughed and lit another cigarette.
    “Exactly,” she said.
    We talked more easily after that, chitchat about where I’d gone to school (public as opposed to her series of private schools), where I had lived in Poughkeepsie (she guessed from my aunt’s address that we were different classes and didn’t falsely argue that there were no classes in Poughkeepsie; of course there were), and what we had left behind back home. For me, a mother, an aunt, a deadly boring job.
    “So, not poor little rich girl. Poor little poor girl. Even more romantic,” she said. “I had a big house and plenty of moola. Friends whose names get in the paper, society column or police blotter of minor offenses, all the same. And brothers. I miss them sometimes, but not P’oke.”
    As we talked, in my mind’s eye I saw my old playmate, that little girl in her white dress, hesitating on the porch, smelling of events and medicines that should have no place in a child’s innocent life.
    The temptation to remind her of our moments of shared childhood flitted in and out of my conversation. It was so long ago, and it had been such a miserable nightmare for her. Maybe she had forgotten that as well, that morning on the porch. But sometimes I thought I saw it in her eyes, in the shadows around them. She just refused to allow the memories into the daylight.
    What I couldn’t guess was whether she remembered me as apart of that event, the little girl asking her to come off the porch, to play. That morning, as we sat drinking coffee and smoking, I made the decision not to remind her. We had the future. What did the past matter?
    “Good,” Lee said, when the second cigarette was finished. What exactly did she mean by that one single comment? “Time to go. Man will be furious if I’m away too long. I didn’t