Wherever There Is Light (30 page)

P
icasso. Julian recognized him immediately from the newspapers and magazines. Short, stocky, a silver horseshoe of hair around his bald pate. The artist was standing under the teal awning of La Palette and looking up to talk to Kendall, his hands massaging the air like a potter working at his wheel. Julian was a block from the café when Kendall started to speak. Picasso canted his head toward her to listen, and Julian recalled his first walk with Kendall on the Lovewood campus—eight, nine years ago—and he felt a surge of joy and pride and a pinch of melancholy at the passing of time. Just like now, Kendall had been wearing a navy-and-white Breton-striped top, and she'd told Julian that she wanted to live in Paris and be a painter or perhaps a photographer. And here she was, in
La Ville-Lumière
, talking to the Babe Ruth of artists.

Picasso disappeared into the dim interior of La Palette as Julian reached the café, and Kendall put an arm around his neck to hug him, holding on for a beat longer than an ordinary hello. Her hair was damp from washing and smelled liked jasmine.

“Interesting friend, Picasso,” Julian said, when they were seated at the outdoor tables under a canvas roof with planter boxes of bushes and hydrangeas forming a green-and-pink wall.

“I don't know him well. He said he saw
Here & There
and some of my shots of the dead prisoners at Ohrdruf reminded him of Goya's prints from
The Disasters of War
. He was right. I carried reproductions of those prints with me.”

A waiter greeted Kendall with a hearty
bonjour,
and after he took their order, Kendall said, “The critics say I was conducting a competition: lynched Negroes versus gassed Jews.”

“My impression was you were saying there's no shortage of places where people are killed for who they are.”

“I was. Except that's not what the critics wanted to hear.” She opened a powder-blue pack of Gauloises and lit up. “I turned down an assignment in Indochina. To see the French tangle with the Communist hordes. I'm sick of photographing the news. Let Maggie White or Lee Miller go back to war.”

“Giving up? Not you.”

Her smile was ringed by weariness. “Léo—my agent—keeps getting calls from
Look
,
Collier's
—plenty of magazines that want pictures of gay Paree and singers and movie stars. Pictures that make you happy. I'll take those.”

The waiter brought them a salad Palette, a basket of bread, and a full carafe of Pouilly-Fuissé. Kendall was more interested in the wine than the food, and she smoked like a soldier in a foxhole—deep drags, squinting in concentration, as though focusing your attention could calm your jitters.

She said, “I was in Lovewood in February.”

“How'd it go?”

“Mama asks if I'm ready to help run the college. I tell her no, and she says that my success hasn't made me any smarter, and if my life's all peaches and cream, where's my husband and her grandbabies? She was rooting for me to marry—”

Kendall caught herself, as if supplying the name would hurt Julian.

“Simon?” he said.

She glanced at the tables around them. People were chattering in French, drinking and laughing. Julian didn't relish her discomfort, but it did temper his jealousy.

“Yes.”

The waiter cleared their dishes and, without being asked, brought Kendall another carafe of Pouilly-Fuissé. Julian refilled their glasses. He wasn't in the mood for more wine, but he didn't want Kendall getting as soused as she'd been at the Deux Magots. Julian had no idea if she even remembered the scene in her suite.

Kendall said, “Simon—that was me trying to fix my past with my present. The shy freshman landing the suave upperclassman. And pleasing her mother. It wasn't about you.”

“I believe you.” That wasn't entirely true: Simon was his polar opposite, and Julian appreciated his appeal to Kendall, though he didn't see an upside in debating it with her.

“Simon needs an audience, not a girlfriend. When we did the Harlem riot book together, he'd bug me to read his every sentence and sulk if I didn't say it was better than Richard Wright and Langston Hughes combined. And he wouldn't quit going on about the great American novel he was going to write. It drove me nuts.”

“He's dating your school friend from Philadelphia?”

“Thayer Claypoole. Her and Simon are made for each other. If either of them farted in a closet, they'd swear they invented perfume.”

“Thayer been in Paris long?”

“She shows up six months ago, enrolls at the Sorbonne—she barely speaks French—and decides she'll host the grandest cultural salon since Gertrude Stein.”

“A
salonnière
, huh?”

“She has lots of parties, I'll say that.” Kendall poured herself more wine. “Tell me about you. You're done with the OSS?”

“Who told you about that?”

“Fiona. We're pen pals.” A sheepish expression crossed Kendall's face. “How else was I going to keep track of you?”

Julian liked that she'd done that. “Truman disbanded the OSS.”

“Won't they start it again, with this Cold War?”

“To spy on all the dangerous commies? Like Picasso?”

“Most of the artists and writers here join the Communist Party like Americans joining the Rotary.”

“I hope you can convince them to come to Club Dans le Vent.”

“Club Dans—”

“That's the name of my nightclub.”

“It's very”—Kendall laughed—“
dans le vent
. I like it.”

“I'm having a bistro in the Latin Quarter renovated.”

“So you weren't kidding? You'll be in Paris?”

“I'm moving into an apartment in the morning.”

Kendall smiled: it was a friendly smile, no promises in it, but Julian would take it—for now. The wine was gone, and Kendall began looking for their waiter. Julian thought that she'd had enough. “I have a busy day tomorrow. Can we go?”

Before she could answer, a man with the tousled good looks of a weekend sailor and a forelock of golden-brown hair curling over his forehead sidled between the tables, saying, “
Bonsoir
, Kendall.”

He bent to kiss her cheek, running his fingers down her arm. It was a proprietary gesture and, because Kendall shifted away from his touch and her face flushed with embarrassment, Julian was certain that this guy—whom he knew—was one of her lovers. He had expected that she would sleep with other men, and he could handle his jealousy, but knowing what her partners looked like was more than his imagination could bear.

Kendall said, “Arnaud Francoeur, this is Julian Rose, a friend from home. Arnaud is an editor at
L'Humanité
and a member of the Central Committee of the Parti Communiste Français.”

Kendall had made the introduction in French, but Arnaud, who was quite chic for a Communist in his white tennis shirt with a green crocodile embroidered on the chest, pulled up a chair and, grinning at Julian, replied in English. “We have met.”

Kendall gave Julian a quizzical look.

“The OSS,” he said.

Arnaud had been a leader of the Maquis, the guerrillas fighting the Nazis, when Julian worked with him in Normandy, a brave fighter with a creative vindictive streak. Near the village of Pont-l'Évêque, they captured two prime specimens of the SS in a farmhouse guzzling Calvados, the famed brandy of the region. The SS men had shot the farmer, his wife, and four kids. They were lying in the barnyard, the parents on top of their children, trying to shield them. Julian wanted to shoot the SS bastards after he interrogated them. Arnaud had an alternate plan for
les Boches
. He had his men build crosses from boards they pried off the barn, then ordered the Germans to strip naked, and crucified them. Arnaud had been carrying nails in his rucksack for just such an occasion.

Arnaud, switching to French, said to Julian, “I hear you are opening a
boîte
.”

“How did you hear?”

“Isabella, your partner, is my cousin. Quite a coincidence, no?”

Arnaud smirked, and Julian had seen that smirk before—when Arnaud's men were getting those Germans up on the crosses. “Small world,” Julian said.

“Isn't it? Kendall has met Isabella. She is a proud woman, my cousin. And confused about what she owes a friend and what she owes her country.”

Julian could see the sorrow on Kendall's face. With an angry flick of a match, Kendall lit a cigarette and said to Arnaud, “We were about to leave.”

He responded to her with a charming bow of the head. “Perhaps another time, then. And Julian, it was good seeing you again.”

On their way out, Julian paid the waiter. Along Rue de Seine, the limestone buildings, warmed all day by the sun, seemed to glow in the evening blue, and women leaned out the windows watching men walking home from work with loaves of bread under their arms and children riding their two-wheeled scooters on the sidewalks. Kendall brooded. Had they been back in Greenwich Village instead of going up Rue de Tournon with the lights of the Palais du Luxembourg in front of them, Julian would've put his arm around her. His impulse to comfort her, to protect her, hadn't diminished. Yet he was wary of the impulse, thinking that Kendall could interpret it as meddling.

She said, “Arnaud told me that Isabella was close to a Jewish couple who were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz. They hid their twelve-year-old son Manny with Isabella. A Nazi officer heard about Manny from an informer, and Isabella made a bargain with the officer. She'd sleep with him if he protected Manny from the roundups. The day the Germans left Paris, a mob cut Isabella's hair. Manny tried to stop them. They beat him to death.”

Julian sensed that whatever was eating away at Kendall was contained in that story, and hidden by it, like the angulated imagery in Picasso's
Guernica
, the agony obscured by abstractions. Julian chose not to press her, though. Less is more—his new philosophy.

At her hotel, Kendall said, “I spoke to Otis. I'm under orders to help you frenchify your wardrobe.”

“How's tomorrow afternoon? I'll meet you here at one?”

“The day after. I have a shoot tomorrow.”

They stood facing each other. Julian didn't think Kendall was waiting for him to kiss her. He was right. She said, “I'm drinking too much.”

“I noticed.”

“And I haven't made the best decisions about my—my social life.”

“I noticed that too.”

“I know you did. I'm going to try and do something about it. And the drinking.”

“I'm glad.”

“Me too,” she said, and went into the hotel.

F
or ten days in a row, as Kendall rediscovered Paris with Julian, she felt as euphoric as a coed with a new beau. It would have been perfect except for her recurring nightmare of Manny lying on Rue Blainville as the mob beat him with only his eyes visible beneath the pile—burning eyes that pleaded with Kendall to save him. Whenever Manny woke her, Kendall reached for her cigarettes and a bottle of wine, understanding why a faceless boy she'd never met disturbed her sleep yet refusing to think about it and cursing her memory, that merciless thief who wouldn't let her rest.

Julian knew nothing of her nightmare because they didn't sleep together, which was partially responsible for Kendall's euphoria. The men parading through her hotel suite had once made her feel rebellious and free, as if she were living out the assertion that Beauvoir repeated to her with the same devotion as Fiona reciting the Rosary: “One is not born a woman, but becomes one through her actions.” Yet, after a year in Paris, the parade had a dispiriting sameness, and some mornings, as Kendall brushed her hair before the mirror, she found herself counting her partners and feeling slightly appalled, reluctantly admitting that neither Parisian insouciance about matters of the flesh nor existentialism could revise her history—that she was the daughter of a puritanical mother and the Negro upper crust who had been taught that a young lady crosses her ankles when she sits and keeps them crossed until a man of substance marries her.

Returning to the innocence of dating freed Kendall from the oppressive demands of rebellion and adhering to someone else's philosophy, and she hadn't felt so lighthearted since her freshman year at Lovewood with its merry-go-round of chaperoned mixers and dances. That first afternoon Kendall helped Julian update his style by taking him to her favorite hat shop in the Marais and buying him a black Basque beret and a white linen scarf with tiny black triangles. After they drank lemon
pressés
on the sunny terrace of Café Les Philosophes, Kendall stood behind Julian's chair to show him how to tie a French knot. She folded the scarf in half, draped it around his neck, and when she leaned over him to tug the ends through the loop, his head brushed against her breasts. She liked the feel of him against her, but it frightened her, and as Julian glanced over his shoulder and saw her fear, she felt herself blush.

She was almost as flustered the evening they went to the Cinéma du Panthéon and saw the Yves Montand movie. Julian had brought a bag of gumdrops, and they were eating them when he whispered, “Can I have some more?” and Kendall realized that her hand was in the bag and holding on to his fingers. She had been distracted by the bittersweet song “Les Feuilles Mortes,” which compared the sorrows of separated lovers to piles of dead leaves, and she was still humming it two evenings later when they went with Otis to listen to jazz at Tabou, the most popular
cave
in Saint-Germain.

Mostly, though, they walked, and Kendall noticed that Julian was quiet and studied every sight: the statue of the archangel Michael on the Boul'Mich; the sidewalk stalls of purple carnations, white and lavender roses, pink and yellow tulips, and red peonies; the bicyclists circling the Luxor Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde; the boxes of fruits and vegetables and iced fish on Rue Mouffetard; the fountains and statues in the Luxembourg Gardens and the Tuileries; the paintings in the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. In New York, Kendall had taken Julian to the Museum of Modern Art to see
Guernica
, and he'd been blasé about the masterpiece, but now Julian peppered her with questions and listened carefully to her answers.