again. What did you say?
We said your place here is pretty kooky, answers Cécilia, gesturing at the Surrealist decorations around the room. Damn kooky, I say. Fou, Madame. Fou.
Foo, foo, fee, foo, sings Victoria, delighted.
Â
Jules, abstemious, was out of place. He had never wanted to come to the party and stood there soberly, judging us all.
I was flirting with Ernst, who wanted a triangle.
I was wilful, cruel. Leonora, Ernst and I danced together.
Do you want to know what I wore? I wore a chiffon dress of lemon and a string of jet beads. I wore lemon stockings and lemon shoes with buckles of fake diamonds, and long gloves in creme with buttons of fake pearls. And my feathers, of course. I wore my feathers.
Ernst removed a glove with his teeth, peering down at me, commanding, blue-eyed and carnivorous; then Leonora smiled all the way to her incisors and removed the second glove. They draped them like scarves around their necks. I saw the shapes of my fingers dangling loosely at their throats; I was intoxicated and expectant, hoping for obscenities. The sound of rain, pure and black, rose above music from the gramophone, and the room revolved around me, with Julesâ face in it, blurred.
I can no longer remember the sequence of events. Jules and Man Ray had been quietly discussing photography, and Salvador Dali had at some point intervened. I heard words spin out in a tone of accusation; then Dali seized â rather cinematically, as though purposeful and rehearsed â a bulbous orange vase and smashed it against Julesâ temple. Water, tulips and shards flew out everywhere, and Jules fell heavily, hitting his head on a sideboard as he went. He was broken and bloodied. Dali was nauseated by the sight of blood and fled from the room with Gala alarmed and in hot pursuit. Man Ray bent above Jules, examining the wound.
Victoria pauses; she seems upset. Here her party-night jump-cuts and falls into edits and distortions.
And then? says Anna. And what happened then?
It was raining, I remember. It rained light Paris rain.
Since it was too late for the Metro we made our way to the Boulevard to find a cab. The streets shone brilliantly with rainwater and the lamps reduplicated. He leant on me, my Jules. Blood streaking from his face soaked my lemon chiffon.
In bed, later on, we lay close together. Our hair was still wet.
Your friend Dali doesnât like to be contradicted, he said in English. Nor does he like Jews, he added in French.
Juif, Jules ⦠jewels, bijoux â¦
I put my hand to his face. I had patched his wound with white gauze and an incompetent bandage so that he looked like a soldier, fresh from battle. The skin at his eyes was already beginning to stretch and darken; in the morning they would be purple ( Two pansies, he said) and his face brutally swollen.
Juif, Jules?
There were things he hadnât told me. Like his brides, knowing nothing.
My stained chiffon dress was there on the floor, quiet and formless. I thought of Baudelaire:
Je tâadore à lâégal de la voûte nocturne
O vase de tristesse, ô grande taciturne.
(I adore you as I adore the vault of the night,
O vase of sadness, you who are so silent â¦)
After his disappearance Jules persisted supernaturally; he was ineradicable. When she was alone Victoria thought often of Jules; over the span of absence his phantom arm still lay warmly across her breast, cupping at her heart. She knew that on her deathbed, in her very last moment, in the tiny wind of life that was her very last feeble gasp, she would still be remembering him. Sometimes she resented this everyday haunting he had bequeathed her. The stories he left behind â an entreating outline â with no body to attach them to.
Â
When he was a child of about nine or ten years old, Jules Levy went with his mother to buy some new shoes. In the shoe shop, the best and newest in the city, was an astounding contraption; it was an
We said your place here is pretty kooky, answers Cécilia, gesturing at the Surrealist decorations around the room. Damn kooky, I say. Fou, Madame. Fou.
Foo, foo, fee, foo, sings Victoria, delighted.
Â
Jules, abstemious, was out of place. He had never wanted to come to the party and stood there soberly, judging us all.
I was flirting with Ernst, who wanted a triangle.
I was wilful, cruel. Leonora, Ernst and I danced together.
Do you want to know what I wore? I wore a chiffon dress of lemon and a string of jet beads. I wore lemon stockings and lemon shoes with buckles of fake diamonds, and long gloves in creme with buttons of fake pearls. And my feathers, of course. I wore my feathers.
Ernst removed a glove with his teeth, peering down at me, commanding, blue-eyed and carnivorous; then Leonora smiled all the way to her incisors and removed the second glove. They draped them like scarves around their necks. I saw the shapes of my fingers dangling loosely at their throats; I was intoxicated and expectant, hoping for obscenities. The sound of rain, pure and black, rose above music from the gramophone, and the room revolved around me, with Julesâ face in it, blurred.
I can no longer remember the sequence of events. Jules and Man Ray had been quietly discussing photography, and Salvador Dali had at some point intervened. I heard words spin out in a tone of accusation; then Dali seized â rather cinematically, as though purposeful and rehearsed â a bulbous orange vase and smashed it against Julesâ temple. Water, tulips and shards flew out everywhere, and Jules fell heavily, hitting his head on a sideboard as he went. He was broken and bloodied. Dali was nauseated by the sight of blood and fled from the room with Gala alarmed and in hot pursuit. Man Ray bent above Jules, examining the wound.
Victoria pauses; she seems upset. Here her party-night jump-cuts and falls into edits and distortions.
And then? says Anna. And what happened then?
It was raining, I remember. It rained light Paris rain.
Since it was too late for the Metro we made our way to the Boulevard to find a cab. The streets shone brilliantly with rainwater and the lamps reduplicated. He leant on me, my Jules. Blood streaking from his face soaked my lemon chiffon.
In bed, later on, we lay close together. Our hair was still wet.
Your friend Dali doesnât like to be contradicted, he said in English. Nor does he like Jews, he added in French.
Juif, Jules ⦠jewels, bijoux â¦
I put my hand to his face. I had patched his wound with white gauze and an incompetent bandage so that he looked like a soldier, fresh from battle. The skin at his eyes was already beginning to stretch and darken; in the morning they would be purple ( Two pansies, he said) and his face brutally swollen.
Juif, Jules?
There were things he hadnât told me. Like his brides, knowing nothing.
My stained chiffon dress was there on the floor, quiet and formless. I thought of Baudelaire:
Je tâadore à lâégal de la voûte nocturne
O vase de tristesse, ô grande taciturne.
(I adore you as I adore the vault of the night,
O vase of sadness, you who are so silent â¦)
After his disappearance Jules persisted supernaturally; he was ineradicable. When she was alone Victoria thought often of Jules; over the span of absence his phantom arm still lay warmly across her breast, cupping at her heart. She knew that on her deathbed, in her very last moment, in the tiny wind of life that was her very last feeble gasp, she would still be remembering him. Sometimes she resented this everyday haunting he had bequeathed her. The stories he left behind â an entreating outline â with no body to attach them to.
Â
When he was a child of about nine or ten years old, Jules Levy went with his mother to buy some new shoes. In the shoe shop, the best and newest in the city, was an astounding contraption; it was an
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