The thought makes her squeeze P’tit so tight that he howls even louder. She couldn’t walk away. Not now, not ever.
Pressed against her, belly to belly, P’tit clamps his bowed legs around her, and his head takes refuge on her collarbone.
“‘There’s a good time coming,’” Blanche croons under her breath, “‘a good time coming,’” and she swings him from side to side. Things must get better, simply because they can’t get any worse.
A shuffling dance, the smallness of him so heavy in her worn-out arms. Like a bareback act, its perfectly timed, smooth sway. She sings, P’tit calms; she sways, he breathes. It seems Blanche’s muscles have already said yes. And this boy is made of her, after all, his bones formed from hers. Unbeautiful, but her own.
Much later, the sharp sound of a key in the door wakes her with a jolt, and she realizes that she and P’tit have been in the deepest, most peaceful sleep, face to wet face, sprawled on the sofa.
“Chérie?”
What’s Arthur been drinking that’s made him sound fond of her again? She extricates herself from P’tit’s small limbs, sits up, and dresses her face with a smile, blinking, because Arthur’s turning up the lamps.
“We’ve got company,” he remarks, slurring only a little. He straightens his jade tiepin in the over-mantel mirror.
With pocks still clustered around one of his eyes like milk bubbling in a pan, Arthur’s in the mood for company?
“Ernest’s right on my heels, with a friend.”
“Someone I know?” Automatically, Blanche scoops up the baby and carries him into the dark bedroom, pressing his face against her so the light and bustle won’t wake him. As she lays P’tit in the middle of the bed, irritation ticks behind her eyes. She roots out a clean bodice, not able to tell the color, and not caring, because the last thing she feels like doing is primping to charm some business associate at this time of night. But she does want to be helpful, to match Arthur’s civility with her own. She’ll be—or at least give a decent impersonation of—the old Blanche.
She squeezes her heat-swollen feet into a pair of mules.
Arthur’s opening a bottle of brandy. In the glare of the salon, Blanche sees that her bodice is light blue. She finds a stain on her skirt and picks at it, but it’s too late to change, and the polka dots will obscure the mark. Well, at least she’s made a visible effort. “So who’s this—”
But she doesn’t get to finish her question because the front door’s opening. Ernest leads the way with the grandiose gestures of a butler; he always hams it up when he’s drunk. The American behind him is short and scruffy, but then most men look so beside Ernest. This one must be important somehow, or surely Arthur, barely out of his sickbed, wouldn’t have brought him home?
“Enchantée,” cries Blanche, gliding over.
The man is in the Alaskan ice trade, so they run though all the possible jokes about how much he’s making these days. Mind blank, Blanche brings out Ernest’s line about the nasty residue left by the manufactured stuff, and the American howls with mirth as if it’s a dazzling bon mot.
Nobody alludes to Arthur’s scarified face.
Blanche swallows a yawn and smiles even harder. When are the men going to get on to the meat of their tedious business and let their hostess slip away?
She excuses herself for a moment. In the dim bedroom, she checks to make sure P’tit is still asleep in the middle of the mattress. His small jaw works as if he’s chewing on gristle.
Then she peeks out; if they seem to have forgotten about her, she won’t go back …
But Ernest’s eyes are watching for Blanche, hawkish. He jerks his head, beckoning.
Arthur throws his arm around her waist and kisses her on the neck as if they’ve been parted for years.
Blanche flinches, and tries to hide it. She reminds herself that he’s cured. No reason to shrink away.
“Be nice to him, hein?” Arthur breathes spirituously in her ear. “Give him a dance.”
The euphemism sticks in her craw. “Not now,” she whispers, “not here.” Still smiling in the American’s direction.
“Our room,” murmurs Arthur, with a tiny jerk of his head.
“That’s not what I meant,” she hisses.
“You need a stage?”
“This is where I live.”
“What’s the difference, exactly?”
Blanche doesn’t know how to explain, but there is one.
Ernest refills their glasses, muttering in her ear: “Don’t be a bore.”
The chatter’s died away. The American is grinning at her almost bashfully.
And then Arthur reaches out and finds her left nipple through her bodice. Presses it hard. It works, of course it works, as always, as if he’s a lamplighter opening the valve and igniting the flame. But just because Blanche is getting wet doesn’t mean she’s not getting angry. She slaps his hand away.
“Let’s not stand on ceremony,” he remarks, no longer bothering to lower his voice. “It seems a late hour to play the prude.”
“Especially,” adds Ernest, “when we’ve gone to some trouble to—”
“Trouble?” Blanche interrupts, looking from one to the other. “You bring home some trash off the street and expect me to put on a show for him?”
The American’s going slightly purple.
“I’m sorry, sir, but you’ve been misinformed,” she tells him, with an imperious gesture that starts him backing toward the door.
Arthur snatches at her elbow. “A quarter of an hour, that’s all I’m asking. Now you’ve thrown off Madame Johanna, we need to bring in the trade. My investments require—”
“We?” she exclaims. “There’s no we. I carry you—the pair of you—like monkeys on my back.”
Now the American’s looking mortified. “I don’t mean to cause a quarrel.” He’d be out the door by now if Ernest weren’t gripping him around the shoulder with all the conviviality of a guard dog.
Arthur’s asymmetrical eyes narrow at Blanche. “I’ll have you know that I bring in sums, sometimes considerable—”
“A fraction of your keep.”
“What are you, some penny-reckoning housewife?”
She lets out a sharp laugh. “I whore myself out to buy you suits and gems, to fund all your speculations—”
“Whore yourself out?” Arthur repeats, puzzled, disfigured head to one side. “But you were born a whore, Blanche. It comes naturally to you.”
She stares. He’s never called her that before.
Ernest spits the words. “You want to make a liar of Arthur, shame him in his own home, after all he’s suffered these past weeks?”
“I’m going to bed,” Blanche snarls.
“Not till you’ve spread yourself for our guest,” says Ernest.
The American blinks, appalled.
She turns to Arthur. Is he really going to let his friend talk to her this way?
“How would you prefer her?” Arthur’s speaking over her head to the American, with incongruous cheer. “Blanche is really not fussy. Bent over the table? Or on all fours like a bitch in heat? She enjoys it any way at all.”
Blanche doesn’t recognize him. The nasty residue of the man she used to love.
She marches toward the bedroom. But Ernest’s put his long limbs between her and the door. “Don’t relish hearing it said out loud?” he asks. “But you love getting banged every which way, up, down, and sideways. Why, when you were pregnant, Arthur complained you were constantly frantic for it, dripping like a melon.”
She shuts her eyes, swallowing the shame.
“You’d fuck a nigger in a haystack,” says Ernest. “You’d fuck a broom handle.”
Is it me he hates, Blanche wonders, or all women?
“So get off your high horse and fuck this Yank.”
Red spots before her eyes.
“Or kneel down and give him a below-job, at least.”
Blanche Beunon of the Cirque d’Hiver. By what circuitous descen
t through stages of humiliation has she come to this?
“Cock, cock, cock,” Ernest tells the American, pronouncing the word with a guttural relish. “The lady lives and breathes it. She’s never met a cigare she doesn’t fancy.”
The visitor is edging backward.
“Stay!” cries Arthur. “I tell you what it is, she’s angling to be forced a little. What say my friend and I hold her down for you?”
“Get away from me.” Blanche’s eyes shift between these crazy men.
“We can all join in,” says Arthur, “make a sporting party of it.”
It hits her with a cold certainty that this isn’t about the macs’ urgent need for money at all. It’s a punishment. Why has it taken her so long to notice what Arthur really thinks of her? Perhaps he’s been this all along: a beast in an urbane and elegant coat. Like bedrock revealed as the ground cracks open.
“I better get going,” whimpers the American.
Blanche sidles up to him as if to whisper in his ear.
He blinks at her, almost hopeful.
Then she dives past, smooth as in the days when she could skip on a horse’s rosined back as easily as on solid ground.
Arthur lunges at her and grabs her wrist but she wrenches herself out of his grasp, and the American shoves between them, protesting …
In the confusion Blanche is gone. She rattles down the dark stairs, her pulse thumping with exhilaration. Out into the steaming night, but she can breathe, at least, as she races down Sacramento, lanterns glimmering in windows, folks carousing on stoops. A beggar playing on—could that be a stovepipe? Blanche doesn’t know where she’s going. Qu’importe; in any case, she’s out of there.
Halfway along the next block, a gull cuts past her with a yawp, and only then does she remember P’tit.
“Question: Who put you on the town in the first place?”
Eastern light slants in the window, stabbing Blanche in the eye. It’s been a long night since she fled from the apartment. That medicinal cognac she let Jenny buy her when they bumped into each other in a dive off Clay Street, and then some cocktails, and more recently a bottle or two of Durand’s inimitable wine. “Nobody put me on the town.”
“Oh, come,” says Jenny, thumping the long table at the back of the brasserie, “are you telling me you took to it spontaneous-like, for pure fun, when you stepped off the steamer?”
They’re the last customers breakfasting; the others have all gone about their business or crawled off to bed. A lone waiter tosses sawdust on the floor behind the women. Blanche is past needing sleep. She just wants another glass of wine. “It wasn’t like that either.”
“So how was it?”
“I don’t quite remember now,” admits Blanche, the words tripping over one another.
“You sound bored of the game, that’s all I mean,” says Jenny.
“Do you think it was ever interesting?” snaps Blanche, contemplating the stain on her polka-dot skirt. “Seen one swollen cigare, seen them all.”
“Ever think of throwing the whole thing over, then?”
She struggles to focus her eyes on Jenny. “You have some objection to girls on the town?”
“Not to the girls, just to what the town does to them.”
Blanche shrugs. “It’s as good a trade as any.”
“Maybe, for a while. Till it trades them in. All I say is”—Jenny points one brown finger at Blanche’s forehead, right between her eyes—“there’s more to you than cul.”
Blanche can’t decide whether to feel irritated or flattered. “How can you be sure?”
Jenny grins, as if that’s an answer.
“What, should I give it all up and take to the vagabond life, like you?” Blanche scoffs.
A shake of the crop-haired head. “Nah, you don’t have the calling. I can’t see you bedding down under a tree. I picture you as your own boss, or bossing other folks.”
Blanche laughs at the word boss.
“What would you say to setting up your own dancing academy,” proposes Jenny, “and knocking all those so-called Professors into a cocked hat?”
Blanche rolls her eyes at this ludicrous notion. “To steal their customers, I’d have to be the crème de la crème. And where should I set up this academy of mine—on a stretch of gravel in Union Square?”
“You could rent a hall.”
“I can just imagine what Arthur would say to that.”
Jenny sits up straighter at his name. “Question: Which—”
“Enough of your questions!”
“This is my last, then: Would you prefer to have one child on your hands, or three?”
Three? Ah, Blanche sees what she’s getting at.
“Those connards,” Jenny marvels. “A pair of fat skeeters swollen up with your blood.”
Blanche’s mind zigzags with fatigue. “I keep wondering which of them’s changing P’tit’s diapers—Arthur or Ernest.”
Jenny guffaws. “Maybe they’ve tossed a coin.”
“Serve them right, to have to look after him for one night, at least. Puddles on their pants!” But despite her flippancy, Blanche is feeling sick. Will the macs be awake to let the iceman in? If not, P’tit’s milk in the sweating icebox could turn. If he spits it out, will they think to sniff it, or will they jump to the conclusion that he’s just being cranky? “I should be going back,” she says, sobering.
“I’ll come along. I could do with forty winks,” Jenny remarks, yawning.
Beside them at the table, Blanche belatedly notices, is a Durand boy—the one who guarded Jenny’s bicycle that first night, or is this a smaller one?—fiddling with a cap pistol. It’s not real, she realizes, just a novelty. When he shoots it, there’s no crack of gunpowder, just a little metal man popping out and kicking a cowering coolie in the rear end. Her nose wrinkles. Really, the things folks find funny …
The waiter’s slapping at the wood with a wet cloth now. Taking the hint, Blanche looks for her pocketbook, but in her flight from the apartment she didn’t think to grab her bag. She’s got nothing with her except her keys on their little chain.
“That’s all right,” says Jenny. “Put it on my tab,” she tells the man.
They head out. Blanche’s feet are stiff from the long night roaming around Chinatown. She staggers a little, squinting against the morning light. Really, the last thing she feels like doing is going home. But she can’t sleep until she knows someone’s at least given P’tit his bottle.
She and Arthur need to sit down and talk, today, without Ernest’s snaky interference. Other doves have these bust-ups with their macs. You hear of them (and actually hear them, loud in the street) every night of the year. Never Blanche and Arthur, not till now. Last night he acted like a demented boar. But nothing actually happened, Blanche reminds herself, and perhaps nothing would have happened after all that threatening and posturing to impress the micheton. Sticks and stones, that’s all. Arthur’s not himself, and who would be, after coming back from the brink of death? The same goes for Ernest. The young man almost lost the friend he treasures most in the world. Blanche must make allowances.
First I need to sleep, she’ll say, very dignified, when she enters the apartment. Later she and Arthur will share a bottle and civilly discuss how they mean to go on.
Jenny falls in beside her, thrumming a branch along the metal fence the way a small boy might.
Blanche turns her head. “You don’t have to stick by my side.”
“No particular place else to be,” says Jenny. “And you could do with a hand, maybe, if those fellows have still got their dander up.”
Blanche half laughs. “You sniff out any prospect of a scrap, don’t you—like a dog getting wind of a sausage. You’re packing your revolver, I hope?”
She says it mockingly but Jenny pats the outline along her leg with assurance.
“Arthur’s still my man,” Blanche warns her.
“If you say so.”
“Why, what do you say?”
“Why ask me?” counters Jenny.
“Don’t you shrug at me. I need some goddamn advice,” says Blanche.
“Advice? As in, some wise old saw?”
“If there’s one that fits.”
“Here’s one for you, then,” says Jenny. “Life’s too short to drink bad wine.”
Blanche stares at her.
Heading up the second flight of stairs at number 815, Blanche prepares her arguments. She’ll tell Arthur she’s back, but only on fair terms. No more bringing michetons home or speaking to her—or letting Ernest speak to her—as if she’s dirt under their shiny heels …
When she opens the door of the apartment, it’s the silence that hits her. Everyone asleep—could it be?
It’s all just as Blanche left it last night, except there’s nobody here. The empty bedroom still stinks of disinfectant. She rushes to look in the trunk beside the sofa. Empty except for the black doorknob with its tidemarks of spit. “Where the hell have they gone?” she says to Jenny.
Out for a drink, taking the baby with them?
That’s absurd.
Are the men roaming the streets hunting for Blanche so she can change the baby’s shitty diaper?
She flops down on the bed. “I don’t know what kind of game Arthur’s playing.”
“Can I take the sofa?” asks Jenny with an enormous yawn.
Alone in the room, Blanche sinks onto the pillows and tries to ignore the lingering whiff of sulfur from the fumigation. A little sleep will freshen her mind, she tells herself. By the time she wakes up, the macs will have wandered back in with P’tit, surely.
So quiet.
Men are bending her backward across a table; any number of men, she can’t count. Their movements are deliberate. The pleasure brutal. When she cranes her neck around to see who they are, Blanche can’t make sense of the faces, because they’re melting, features dripping like candle wax onto her arms and legs. She cries out, in her dream, but can’t stop, can’t do anything but feel this, take this, the unbearable perfect pressure of—what is it? What is this slippery thing rammed inside her?
A doorknob, she realizes, letting out an appalled sob so loud it wakes her up.
P’tit’s not here, still.
The parched sky has turned black, as if there’s a tornado on its way. Blanche stumbles around the apartment. Everything the same, but horribly darkened, as if the world’s beginning to char, paper held too long to a flame. Jenny like a dead woman on the sofa … Then blinking up at her.
Frog Music Page 20
