The Beautiful American by Jeanne Mackin Read Free Book Online Page B

“Don’t smile. Try and look mysterious.”
    Jamie had purchased a camera, a little black Leica, and when we went for our Sunday walks, he photographed me sitting under a tree looking into the distance, propped against a doorway trying to look sophisticated, leaning closely into the camera, weeping. The tears were fake, squirted onto my cheeks from an eyedropper of tap water. He carried a copy of Photoplay magazine in his back pocket and referred to it when posing me in various ways.
    That was the problem, really. It was all an imitation.
    “Stop moving!” he shouted, aiming the Leica at me. “Look mysterious!”
    “Fat chance,” I shouted back, balancing on the public dock at Upton Lake and trying to make my very contrived placement look natural. I was supposed to pose with my right arm across my forehead in a despairing gesture, imitating a Louise Brooks publicity shot, but it was a sultry August day, I was dizzy with heat, and Jamie had made me stand at the very edge of the dock, my heels already hanging in thin air.
    I fell off the dock a second after Jamie took the shot.
    What did not get photographed: me rising from the water, gasping and streaming like a mermaid. Jamie jumping in after me, laughing and pushing the wet hair out of my face, his fingers tracing a pattern on my cheek. That long gaze shared by two people who know they are about to become lovers.
    We crossed that line between childhood and what comes after, the sweetness of flesh against flesh. Jamie took me by the hand and led me to the bakery delivery truck, and we lay down in the back, the truck bed’s cold ridges pressing into our bare flesh, leaving marks on our legs and backs after we had slowly, clumsily undressed each other.
    “What’s that?” I asked warily.
    “A rubber.” Jamie blushed violently.
    “Jesus. Where’d you get it?” We all knew about them, how the soldiers coming home from France after the war had brought condoms back with them. They were hard to come by, though; you had to get your doctor to write you a slip and then convince the pharmacist that you were using them so you wouldn’t catch a disease.
    “From my brother. He uses them all the time.”
    “Let me see.”
    “Want to help?” Jamie wasn’t blushing anymore.
    “Absolutely,” I said.
    I lost my virginity in the swirling stale scent of vanilla and yeast and sugar. Afterward, when the sun started to slide down toward the horizon, Jamie wrapped his arms around me and said, “Let’s run away together.”
    It made sense. We had just reinvented the world, and could now be anywhere, as long as we were with each other.
    “Where?” It was just a question to answer him, a way to makehim say more so that he would continue whispering in my ear. All I needed in my newness was to hear his voice and smell the mossy sweetness of his skin. I would have followed him to Tahiti or Timbuktu. Jamie was more practical.
    “New York. We’ll have an apartment with a studio in it so I can do indoor shots. I’ll get a gallery. P’oke is nowhere, Nora.” I had told him that when I ran into Elizabeth Miller at the bookstore, she had called our town P’oke, and Jamie had been calling it that ever since.
    “I can’t stay here, Nora.” He sat up and stuck a piece of grass between his lips, chewed it moodily. “Knowing what I’ll be doing every day for the rest of my life.”
    By that time I was pretty much acting as a maid at my aunt’s house, ironing and cleaning and cooking for all three of us when I wasn’t working the perfume counter at Platt’s. Momma and Aunt Betty would spend all day smoking, listening to the radio, talking about their girlhoods, the men they could have married. Aunt Betty’s boyfriend had been killed in the war and there had been no one after that. She had inherited a little money from her father and had never worked, just grew old and dusty and as unused as the silver tea set she kept wrapped in tissue on the formal dining table.
    I smelled