“Ah, but of course it will be titled Nanée’s Beautiful Neck.”
He hesitated, then reached out to her. Touched her neck. Her skin.
He kissed her there, at the base of her throat. Up her neck. Underneath her chin. On her jaw. Her sensuous lips.
She groaned almost inaudibly.
Someone again knocked on the door. Good god, what timing.
Nanée called out, her voice deep now, “We’re developing something in here. Could you use one of the upstairs loos?”
Rose grumbled on the other side of the closed door that there was no pleasing anyone in this house.
And already Nanée was untucking his shirt, her hands warm on his skin.
“Wait,” he said, realizing there was no proper place to make love and not wanting this first time to be up against the damn toilet.
He lifted the trays one at a time, carefully, so that no chemicals spilled, and stacked them in the sink.
“The photograph,” she objected.
But the photograph he could print again.
“Are you sure?” he whispered. “I don’t . . .”
She hesitated, then whispered something back, her breath warm. “I’d rather be wild than broken,” it sounded like.
He skinned off his shoes, dropped his pants, knelt to remove her shoes, her slacks, her panties that were the smooth white of her flying scarf. She pulled his shirt off. He pulled the soft cashmere over her head, unhooked her brassiere, and lifted her so that her legs straddled his waist. He carried her into the zinc tub and sat with his back against the cold metal, her warm body on his in the red light and chemical smell, with the single photograph, not yet fixed or rinsed, growing darker and darker, to become nothing at all. And that was fine. That was somehow as it should be. A thing that could be redone again, anytime.
Monday, November 25, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Nanée had her clothes back on before she emerged from the darkroom bathroom with Edouard, but still she felt stripped bare. Edouard must have seen it in her face, because he touched her arm, he started to ask if she was okay. She turned away, not wanting him to see, just as she had turned away so briefly as he lifted her into the tub, as she felt the extent of the damage his body had suffered: his bony shoulders, bony hips, knees as bony as she had imagined them in that Exquisite Corpse drawing she’d done the night they met.
There was a new interzonal postcard waiting there on the kitchen counter where Rose must have left it, addressed to her but meant for him, from his friend Berthe. From Dinard, in Brittany. La Famille X va bien.
“Luki is in Amboise,” Edouard said, the words coming like the release of a long-held breath. He stood beside her, holding the card so she too could read the second line, Mon autre fille va entrer à l’ecole d’église Saint-Denis en Amboise. Berthe’s “other daughter” would enter school at the Saint-Denis church in Amboise.
“Amboise,” Nanée repeated, more exhale than word. For two days after Pétain had begged for peace, some of the last and bravest of the French had fought the Germans from the entrance to the Chateau d’Amboise, a castle that had welcomed the likes of Leonardo da Vinci in centuries past. For two nights the Germans had shelled the town, tons of explosives leveling large parts of it. If Luki had been long in Amboise, she might not have survived.
The damned Germans. The damned Vichy. The damned commandant.
“We could send a letter,” she said. “To Amboise. To the school.”
But they didn’t know anything about the people at the school. They didn’t know if anyone there knew Luki was Jewish, or even that Luki was Luki. And a third letter would add delay, with every day Edouard spent in France a danger.
If she could get Luki and bring her to Marseille, Edouard could leave. Edouard would have to leave.
Nanée could leave with him, though. She was American. She could always go back to Evanston, to hell with their ideas about who a girl ought to love.
She was moving too fast; she knew that. The moment in the tub was a moment captured, like one of his photographs. What went before and what came after were unfixed, ungrounded, unreal. To have expectations was to open your heart to breaking.
But Amboise. It was in the occupied zone, yes, but just the other side of the demarcation line. Not more than ten miles, she didn’t think.
“I could go get her,” she said. “We have an American passport for her. I have an American passport. No one would suspect an American woman my age traveling with a child.”
Wednesday, November 27, 1940