The Postmistress of Paris(4)

He reached for the bracelet, the brush of Nanée’s fingers warm, the scent of her in his hands now. He touched the fur to Luki’s cheek before he could think how inappropriate that might be.

“Meret says it was Picasso joking at Café de Flore about this bracelet that inspired her fur teacup,” he said to Nanée.

T said, “That cup spoiled my tea-drinking for months. Even now, when I raise perfectly lovely china to my lips, I can’t stop imagining fur in my mouth.”

“And T is dreadfully cranky when she can’t enjoy her Earl Grey,” Nanée teased.

She looked less like Elza in the brighter light and without the hat she’d worn at the gallery—much fairer—but she did have the same arch of brow, charming little nose, slightly impish mouth, the same direct look in her eyes as she watched him watch her, the same obliviousness to her own charm.

“Yet that’s what made Meret famous,” he said. “The fact that you cannot now shake her fur teacup—”

“The point of Surrealism is to provoke,” André interrupted, drawing Nanée’s attention away from Edouard and back to him, as he’d been doing all night. The man was married to a stunning and talented painter, Jacqueline Lamba, his second wife, with a daughter even younger than Luki, but marriage was no barrier for a Surrealist, monogamy not being held in any great esteem by the movement for which André himself set the rules.

Edouard said, “We seek to overthrow the confines of society—”

“—to find the marvelous in the world,” André again cut in. “Only the marvelous is beautiful. And beauty is convulsive. Beauty is a disorienting and shocking disordering of the senses. It will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.”

Nanée smiled, slow and warm and yet challenging. “I might be more sympathetic,” she said to André, “if someone could explain to me why ‘the marvelous’ has its women naked with their heads in cages or their bodies dismembered, while its men are invariably intact and clothed.”

André, leaning closer to her, said, “Ah, I do think we should introduce you to our friend Toyen, who changed her name because in her native Czech the surname identifies a person as male or female, and she wishes simply to be a painter, not a female one.”

“You avoid my question,” Nanée said. “Why are the women naked and dismembered, while the men are full-bodied and fully clothed?”

“But of course the answer,” Edouard answered before André could, “is that we are men.”

Even André laughed, but Nanée only said “Pffft” that way French women did. She was American and not, just as he was German and not.

“You are thinking this is not an answer, that we are men,” Edouard said. “But it is merely not the answer you wish to hear. Much like Freud, we’re interested in exploring, without moral judgment, obsession, anxiety, even fetish.”

She shifted uncomfortably—discomfort being what he’d meant to provoke, being a proper Surrealist himself.

André handed him a piece of drawing paper, suggesting he start them in a round of Exquisite Corpse—an André-invented game in which three players drew separately a head, a body, and legs or a tail, each without seeing what the others had contributed, to create, invariably, a bizarre composite creature. André justified all his Surrealist games as ways to unlock creative minds, but Edouard suspected they were his friend’s excuse to drag out the shame of others for the world to see. Still, he handed Nanée back the fur bracelet and accepted a Waterman pen, moss-green agate with a gold clip and a single gold band on an oft-chewed cap, already looking for something to copy, to play André’s game without exposing himself. He spotted two photos on a Louis XV desk by the windows, one a framed young Nanée at a shooting target with trophy and pistol in hand, her proud father beside her, and the other a snapshot atop an envelope, recent mail, of Nanée in flying gear. He uncapped the pen and set nib to paper, beginning with the long line of neck he imagined under the scarf in the snapshot, drawing poorly, but then he did have the excuse of Luki asleep in his lap.

“I believe you’ve both hit on something,” Nanée said as he drew the bones of her eye orbits, the effect in the unrelenting black ink faintly skeletal. “I think the answer is that you men are unwilling to allow your own inadequacies to be set beside the ideal.”

“The ideal being a woman’s body?” he replied.

“The ideal being a man’s perfect body, which is as ‘marvelous’ as a woman’s,” she said. “Anxiety, as you say.”

Everyone laughed, the entire room attending now to this conversation as he drew her cheekbones, her unremarkable chin. Luki stirred, not from the noise but from the tension in Edouard’s muscles.

He added a filigreed birdcage to his sketch so that Nanée’s skeleton face peeked out through the open cage door—pandering, he supposed, birdcages being all the rage now among the Surrealist crowd, but also imagining stacking negatives to float Nanée’s head alone in a birdcage, free of its mortal body.

“Yet if you examine your own words, Nanée,” he said, “you will see that your argument supports my answer, that we are men.”