Afterward, she lies on top of him, skin on skin, and reaches around to help him push off the blindfold. Man pulls her closer to him. Now that they are done, she worries he is going to want to keep talking, so she closes her eyes and pretends to be falling asleep. He strokes her hair for a while. When she doesn’t respond, he gently moves her over and slips out from under her. She hears him getting dressed and then feels him lay a blanket over her. She lies there for hours, until the light fades from the windows and the room goes dark, wishing there was somewhere she could go to be alone.
LEIPZIG,
APRIL 20, 1945
It takes the 83rd forever to reach Leipzig after the Germans surrender the city. Lee is hobbled by her regiment. She knows Margaret Bourke-White has gotten to the city ahead of her, probably others have as well, while Lee sits in the mud in the GI jeep and urges it to go faster. In the end they are only half a day late. Old women in dirty brown dresses greet them in the streets with flowers; they wave and smile and hold up their children. Around the corner the fighting continues, and the sound of gunfire intermittently drowns out the women’s cheering.
Lee hears stories of what the Nazis will do to avoid capture, but she doesn’t know if she should believe them. Poison, gunshot, hanging. A factory director invites a hundred guests for dinner. When the 69th takes the city, he pushes a button, sets off an explosion that kills everyone at the table. Friends point guns at one another, counting to three and pulling the triggers. Someone tells her every Nazi in Leipzig’s Neues Rathaus has committed suicide, and it makes her loathe them even more, the cowards.
When Lee gets there, the Rathaus is quiet, everything coated in thick white dust. She goes from office to office, alone. A bomb explodes somewhere outside and more plaster drifts down from the ceiling. On the second floor, she pauses at the threshold of an opulent room. A window hangs open. Oiled leather furniture is the only thing not completely covered in dust. A mother and daughter lie sideways on the couches. A man sits in the desk chair, his head resting on the blotter before him. Lee feels for a moment as if she has walked in and caught everyone napping, but on the desk an empty bottle of cyanide serves as the paperweight for the family’s documents.
The daughter must be almost twenty. She wears a nurse’s cap, a Red Cross armband on her black jacket. Her hands are folded over her stomach. Lee takes a wide shot and then gets in closer, so that the girl’s face almost fills the frame. Blond hair cut like Lee’s. Cheekbones sharp as bird wings. Her lips are parted, her jaw relaxed. Her teeth are extraordinarily pretty, and after Lee takes the picture, she reaches out and touches them, just so she can feel the bone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The posters start appearing all over Montparnasse, pinned to signposts, stacked near café entrances, taped up in the Métro station. On them is the image of a woman in a gigantic feather boa and a low-cut dress, her mouth open, smiling ecstatically. LE RETOUR DE KIKI is printed beneath her image. Lee cannot escape them. Every time she walks by Le Jockey—which is often; it is only a few blocks from their apartment—she watches the raucous crowd spilling out of the doorway, seemingly having the time of their lives, and she wonders anew what all the fuss is about.
It is embarrassing the amount of time Lee spends thinking about Kiki. Man has insisted he isn’t in love with her anymore, that the only person he loves is Lee, so why does Kiki still fill her imagination?
One day a cold October wind rips a poster off the side of a building and it wraps itself around Lee’s shin, and she peels it off her leg and takes it home. When she walks in the door, she holds it up and says to Man, “I want to go. Tonight.”
He groans. He is already in his dressing gown, sitting on the couch with a large book on his lap. “I thought we were staying in.”
Lee scans the dates on the poster. “Okay, not tonight. Thursday?” With a sigh, he agrees. She puts the poster on the table in front of him, and he glances at the image.
“That photo is about ten years out-of-date,” he says.
“Really?”
“Kiki looks older now. She’s gotten too fat to dance.”
Lee is pleased. “I don’t care how fat she is. We’re going. Besides, I thought you liked a little jiggle in the middle.”
When Thursday arrives, Man keeps his word. He is quiet as they walk to Le Jockey. He wears a new pair of flannel trousers and his beret, which he keeps fussing with while they walk. Lee wears her smartest dress and imagines herself shimmying on a café table—Lee of Montparnasse.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen her?” Lee asks as he takes her arm and threads it through his.
“I saw her just last week, at Éluard’s.”
Lee thinks back to the previous week. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“I see Kiki now and then. She poses for a lot of people. I run into her. We’re still friendly.”
“I thought you said she was jealous.”
Man looks over at her, an amused expression on his face. “She was. I was too. It was a part of it. Actually, it’s how I knew we were in love.”
“Because she was jealous?”
“Because we were both jealous. For a time at the beginning we had an open relationship, but that didn’t work out for us. And even when we agreed not to be with other people, I still imagined her with other men whenever we weren’t together.”
Man says this lightly, but Lee does not love this side of him. She is reminded of how displeased he was when she left him on the beach at Biarritz and went for a walk on her own.
“Let’s never be jealous.” Lee’s voice is firm.
“Sometimes jealousy is a good thing.” There is some trash on the sidewalk, and Man pulls her closer as they sidestep it. “I remember Kiki onstage one night. She was singing some old chanson—I could barely understand the words—and I looked around and every person in the room had stopped what they were doing to stare at her. When she dances she has this one move: she gets really low, her knees pushed together, and somehow she shakes her hips and makes her dress fly up a bit. It’s hilarious, and sexy… You can’t stop watching her. I knew that night that I was in love with her, and I remember thinking that I knew it because I saw how badly all the other men and women wanted to have her and that she was mine. I was jealous of them getting to watch her, but really they should have been jealous of me. And maybe they were.”
Lee pulls away and stops on the sidewalk, facing him. She bends her knees and starts to twist her hips, and her dress climbs up her thighs until her garter clips are showing. “Like this?” Lee asks. “Is this what she used to do?”
“Hmm… sort of. But your version is more… Yankee.” He reaches out and grabs her arms and pulls her toward him. They are standing in the middle of the sidewalk, which is filled with people out for their evening strolls. They become a logjam in the river of the crowd: people behind them have to stop and go around them, bumping up against one another and then adjusting their course.
“Do you think all these people are jealous of us right now?” she asks.
“I think anyone with eyes would be jealous of me with you.”
“And what if I wanted to be with one of them? Like that man, over there.” Lee points across the street to where a fat man is just getting out of a taxi.
“You and that man?”
“Sure. Why not?”
Man laughs, uncomfortably. “I don’t want to think about that.”