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.
“Edouard Moss!” The Edouard Moss photos Nanée knew were from newspapers and magazines: an adorable girl in pigtails enthusiastically saluting Hitler; a man having his nose measured with a metal caliper; a clean-chinned son taking scissors to his Orthodox Jewish father’s beard, the forgiveness in the father’s face heartbreaking and raw. Edouard Moss’s photojournalism as well as his art would have set Hitler against him, forcing him to flee the Reich.
“I thought you would like Edouard,” Danny said.
“‘Edouard’? That’s awfully chummy, isn’t it?” Nanée teased. Danny took such pleasure in befriending the artists he helped, quietly using his position with the Paris police to arrange French residency permits for refugees like Edouard Moss.
T straightened the flap on one of Nanée’s flight jacket pockets. “I thought you would like Edouard,” she said.
Edouard Moss stepped forward then, his tie askew and his dark hair charmingly unkempt. A square face. A mole at the end of his left eyebrow. Thin lines etching his forehead and mouth. He held the hand of a two-or three-year-old girl with carefully braided caramel hair and a much-loved mohair kangaroo. But it was the photographer’s eyes that caught Nanée off guard, willow-green and weary, and yet so intense that they left her sure it was in his nature always to be watching, to be aware, to care.
He frowned as he noticed one of the photographs on the revolving-door display—not the centerpiece merry-go-round horse at a frightening angle, distorted and angry, but a smaller print, perhaps the back of a naked man doing a push-up; Nanée so often couldn’t tell with Surrealist art, except when they wanted you to know that they had, for example, chopped a woman’s body in half. The photograph, improbably tender, left Nanée awash in something that felt like shame, or pity, or remorse. Grief, she might have said if that didn’t seem so ridiculous. The sight of all that skin, the shadow masking his derrière . . . It felt so personal, like the back of a lover lowering himself to join his vulnerable body with hers.
Edouard Moss said something to André Breton, his voice too low to hear but his expression insistent. When Breton tried to respond, Moss cut him off, leaving Breton to nod his lion head for an assistant to remove the push-up man photograph.
As the gallery quieted, Nanée whispered to Danny, “I have champagne if you want to bring your friends to celebrate afterward.” She couldn’t say why she extended the invitation; she’d meant only to put in an appearance and duck out early, to go home to her apartment and fresh pajamas. But she always did have champagne.
She returned her attention to Edouard Moss.
“Mutti!” the little girl with him called out, her face lighting up in surprise and delight.
Nanée looked around, sure the child’s mother must be right beside her.