The Postmistress of Paris(2)

“All right,” she said to Dagobert, still crouched on the floorboard, as rattled as her own nerves.

She descended toward the lake again, this time to a less daring five hundred feet, to run along the length of the water, past the waterfall and to the left of the island and the Emperor’s Kiosk, its little blue dome so hopeful.

And there he was, at the north tip of the lake—the black swan, settled safely on the ice.

She ought not to have been flying so low, but that was what she loved: the high, open sky, yes, but also the rush of earth.

That daughter of yours would rather be wild than broken. Don’t you worry she’ll end up alone?

“But I’m not alone, am I, Daggs?” She patted the bucket seat beside her, shaking off her father’s words. “I have you.”

Dagobert reluctantly scrambled back up, then hunkered down on the seat, head on paws. She tugged on one of his velvety ears, and he shook his head that way he did whenever she messed with them.

“I didn’t mean to scare you, but I couldn’t bear to hurt him,” she said as she banked eastward, toward the landing strip at Le Bourget. “And this is his world. He belongs up here.”

SHE BROUGHT THE plane to a stop on the tarmac and climbed from the cockpit onto the wing, already pulling off her goggles and leather helmet and shaking out her hair. She lifted Dagobert from the plane, the poor dog still trembling a little, and kissed him on his cold black nose. She set him on the wing, then pulled out her skis and her slim traveling case. Only then did she dare glance to the clock on the domed airport tower. She was impossibly late.

She slid down to the tarmac, leaned her skis against the wing, and set her case on it, beside Dagobert. He watched attentively as she popped it open to its mirror-lined top, swapped her flight jacket for a purple wool with gilded beads and buttons, and added her fur-cuff bracelet. Damn, it was cold, but at least there was nobody to see her. She looked in the mirror, then shrugged off the jacket and bracelet and tossed them on the wing. She dug out a reliable old black Chanel dress and pulled it over her head, slipped her blouse off underneath, and let the silk fall into place over her leather flight pants. Better. Not warmer, but better. She added her flight jacket again, for warmth. Could she just wear the leather pants and boots with the dress? It was a Surrealist exhibit, after all.

Dagobert settled in, resting his head on his paws as she swapped her wool stockings for silk ones. She pulled on heels. Added pearls. More pearls. Even more. She clipped the strands together with an oversize safety-pin brooch, silver with a red Bakelite accent, then unfolded a fabric crumple into an elegant hat. She touched perfume to throat and wrist and wrapped her flying scarf back around her neck. Not better, but warmer. She added the fur bracelet again, its brass underside cold. She applied lipstick, then took Dagobert’s face in her hands.

“I don’t want to go either, but it’s for Danny.” Danny Bénédite, her French brother; she’d lived with his family when she first came to study at the Sorbonne years ago. Danny did so much good for so many.

She kissed Dagobert twice in the French way, leaving red lipstick on his face. “All right,” she conceded. “I’ll drop you by the apartment.”

Dagobert licked the fur of her bracelet.

“That’s Schiaparelli, Daggs.”

Dagobert’s look: she could wrap him around her wrist any time she wanted, and at a fraction of the cost.

She lifted him from the wing and set him on the tarmac. “You are terrifically soft and beautiful,” she said, “but you would never sit still on my wrist.”

IN THE GALERIE des Beaux-Arts courtyard, Nanée eyed Salvador Dalí’s Rainy Taxi, a vine-covered 1933 Rolls-Royce with a male mannequin-chauffeur wearing a shark’s head and goggles in the driver’s seat and, in the back, a gowned, sopping-wet female one covered in live snails. A gallery attendant handed her a flashlight and opened the grated door to a “Surrealist street” lined with more female mannequins dressed—largely undressed—according to the fetishes of prominent artists, with a velvet ribbon gagging a mouth, a birdcage over a head. Unsettling laughter haunted the main hall, a dim, dusty grotto of a room with hundreds of coal sacks hung from the ceiling, a double bed in each corner, and a floor that was somehow all pond and leaves and moss without actually being wet. The source of the laughter was, she found, a gramophone devouring mannequin legs, titled Jamais. Never. Nanée was inclined to agree.

A crowd was gathered around a display of photographs hung on freestanding revolving doors at the dim room’s center. And there was Danny, all neatly-slicked-back hair and round black glasses, long nose, tidy mustache over a narrow, dimpled chin, with T beside him even smaller than her husband, her boy-cut dark hair and huge hazel eyes more handsome than beautiful.

Nanée threw her arms around Danny, then exchanged bee kisses with T. La bise.

“Don’t you look posh?” T said.

Nanée, who’d forgotten to take off the flight jacket and scarf, said, “Do you like it? I’m calling this look ‘Aero-Chanel.’” She smiled wryly. “Sorry I’m late. The winds were fierce.”

“When are the winds in your life not fierce?” Danny teased.

The French writer André Breton stood in front of the revolving-door photographs, clasping and unclasping his hands as he finished an introduction and asked everyone to join him in welcoming Edouard Moss.