“Right now? You’ll write to her now?”
“As soon as we get this cleaned up. But you do know the post doesn’t come at nine in the evening?”
Edouard looked at the card again, the miracle of those words, Berthe aller à 3 boulevard de la Mer, Dinard.
“What does your friend mean, that she needs money for rent?” Edouard asked, focusing on the checkmark beside that line.
“That someone is renting Berthe’s flat?” Then, more certainly, “That the information is probably pretty good, as that is the address to which the person who now lives in Berthe’s apartment sends the rent check.”
“How do you get that from two words?” Edouard asked.
Nanée shrugged. “My friend needs money for absolutely nothing, so it must mean something. What else could it mean?”
Edouard nodded. “So we could resend the returned letter to Berthe at this Dinard address.”
Nanée finished wiping the vomit from the marble tiles and stood. Edouard too stood, and he took a strand of her hair to wipe off a bit of vomit sticking it to her cheek.
“Thank you,” he said.
She kept his gaze.
He nearly kissed her, she with one vomit-drenched rag in hand and he with the other and the vomit-splattered postcard too.
“Thank you,” he repeated. “I can’t thank you enough for what you’re doing for Luki and me.”
Sunday, November 24, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
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.