The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  Yes, he said drily. Charged with solicitation and forcibly registered, I might add.

  This is impossible, I said. But you will never catch me again.

  I assure you we will, mademoiselle. How else can we protect you?

  I laughed at this, which annoyed him.

  Then let it be done, I said, suddenly very tired.

  The officer behind me chuckled as the judge looked up at me very intensely.

  My dear, you realize you are still . . . you are still a maiden? You have your virtue intact. You could marry.

  I will never marry, I said. And she is my only friend. If it is a crime, with me unregistered and her not, if I am to be registered the next time we are caught together, then I can see I have no choice, I must register.

  All around me, the other women in the court gasped. Previously muttering on or giggling at my attempt to reason with the judge, they grew still, everyone holding their breath.

  I will ask you to consider one more time.

  I must, I said.

  You must, he said. Very well, then. You are a fool. I look forward to your next visit when you beg to be let off the registry and I will refuse. Let the court record the voluntary registration of one . . . And here he peered into the record. Jou-jou Courrèges. He sat back at this.

  I do not think you understand what it is you do. This is the end to your life as a virtuous woman, he added.

  I shrugged. It was as if he had said I would never be a butterfly or any other impossible thing. And besides, that name was nothing to me. They would be registering a joke.

  Very well, he said. Since it is your wish to be registered, follow this officer, and he will undertake it.

  It was such a hard thing, this virtue, it seemed to me. Keeping it was like having to grip the knife by the blade and defend yourself with the hilt. Ever since I’d been old enough to know about virtue in a woman, it had seemed like a bull’s-eye painted on my head in rouge. I was sure, as I was led away, I would be better off without it. It was better to be done with it and be gone.

  §

  Euphrosyne and I had different cells; we could not see each other but we could hear each other, and sometimes she would sing our song, and I would pick up with it until the other girls yelled for us to be quiet and the guards came to threaten us with beatings, shouting into the hay-strewn cells.

  This place, Saint-Lazare, was my real hell, this woman’s prison. I discovered myself with lice; I had food served to me too foul to eat, with maggots at times, the others laughing the first few times I retched. The other girls were uninterested in me except mostly as a figure of fun. A week went by, an eon, and then I heard my name at the door from the guard.

  Euphrosyne stood there, dressed again as she had been. A brief hope filled me until I saw the caution in her expression.

  La Lune, I guessed, her little boy prince, and said so. She nodded, a hint of a smile. Yes, she said. I had his card; they called for him and, on orders from his father, released me at once.

  She set her hand on the bars and touched mine, gripping it.

  Sweet, kind Jou-jou! Her beautiful eyes, the fierce eyes, they were weeping. You are next, I swear. No one ever gave me so much as you. I wish I could have kept you from this. I should have warned you more, or better. Now I fear you must stay because you have no house and so there is no one to send for you except me, and I have less than nothing here. I have truly corrupted you.

  I will come to visit you and bring you presents, she said. And be sure, be very sure, that nothing happens to your shoes.

  I laughed at this, unexpected and sharp, and leaned in to kiss her quickly. And then she left, and the depth of what I had done was finally clear.

  Four

  THERE WAS NO La Lune to help me. Instead, there was Odile.

  First came a basket from her, sent to the prison, with a fine piece of sausage and bread and, to my surprise, a beautiful new dress, complete with stockings, shoes, gloves, a hat. The gloves were stitched with roses. The hat was a bonnet meant to be worn at a rakish tilt. The other girls made a fuss as it was delivered. The note read, Something to keep you alive until you leave, something for you to wear to come see me when you are free. Your friend, Odile.

  There was her card also, with the address. This surprised me. The only Odile I remembered was the angry concierge in Euphrosyne’s foyer. The one who had said to her, You aren’t allowed guests like that. The one who had threatened Euphrosyne with a fine. Why had her concierge concerned herself with me?

  I did need work, however, and resolved to go to see her, thank her, and repay her, and then ask about a job.

  On the last morning of my sentence, I dressed in her gifts. Outside, Odile’s carriage waited for me—a kindness and a luxury. I blinked back tears I hated as I climbed inside and tried to act on the ride as if I took this trip every day.

  §

  Odile was certainly no concierge. She was a procuress, a former danseuse in the Paris Opera Ballet corps, and had taken on dancers, actresses, and singers who sought to make arrangements of this kind but lacked for either rooms or liaisons, using the spare rooms of a deaf aunt of hers, who owned a simple, clean house near the Opera. A share went to the aunt, of course, whose idea it was, worried about the prospects of her beautiful niece. Odile’s first théâtre du désir, then, as she called them, had a view of her aunt Virginie’s kitchen garden.

  She learned quickly that she could charge more if men had a specific fantasy and that they would be loyal if the fantasy could be fulfilled with brio. When one of her admirers told her Baron Haussmann was set to order her aunt’s neighborhood to be condemned for Paris’s renovation, Odile took her aunt in hand, sold the house to the city at a high price, and built the current establishment on roughly the same spot with the help of investors—all clients. A portrait of Virginie presided over the salon, where her girls lingered in talk with their gentlemen; and every so often Odile would solemnly toast or bless her, even leaving a glass of claret for her on the mantel.

  Odile’s new establishment was called l’Hôtel des Majeurs-Plaisirs, a pun on the Menus-Plaisirs, the school of the arts. Each of the rooms was the set to a different fantasy. The room I’d gone into with Euphrosyne on the night of our adventure had not been hers—it was for gentlemen who had a fantasy of seducing a woman while at the opera, something Euphrosyne often provided. The clothes she had taken for us were props for the room. Odile had hired the same craftsmen who’d made the Paris Opera’s boxes to make this one.

  And despite my role in the trouble Euphrosyne had made for her, and for her unhappy client, once Odile learned of my registration, she had sent her basket right away. There were many men who wanted the attentions of a hippodrome rider. She explained all of this to me once I stood in her office in the clothes she’d sent me. Which she then asked me to remove.

  I did so at once. I did not like the dress or the now-visible obligations it represented.

  You have the arms of an acrobat, of course. Very strong, if too slim. We will have you eat more for these, she said, and gestured at my smallish breasts. At least they do not sag. Pastries for you. You are no virgin, yes? And at least age sixteen?

  I nodded twice.

  Virgins fare badly; they know so little. I would have to pay someone to teach you and charge you for it. I may still need to. My doctor will be here shortly to inspect you. She flicked her finger at my arm. So strong, she said. But your face, you look innocent. People think you are good no matter what you do, yes? She walked over to the wall, where an array of cruel instruments hung, whips, crops, paddles. She withdrew a simple crop and handed it to me. I grasped it.

  Perhaps we will make use of this. The strong arm and the innocent face. Please, she said, indicating the empty dress. We will discuss your duties.

  After I’d dressed again, she took me to a door in her office at the back and unlocked it.

  She turned to me, put a finger on her lips to shush me, and led me into a dark passage consisting of a seri
es of viewing stations with peepholes. Today, to begin, you observe, she whispered. She set an hourglass down. When the sand is gone, go to the next one, and the next. Make not a single sound. I will retrieve you when the doctor is here.

  At other houses, they throw you to the men, and you are forced to take what wisdom you can. This way, she said of it later, as she brought me to the doctor, you can see even what my girls would forget to tell you.

  You will have a week to decide, as will we, Odile said, after I had received my tour. I hope you will make us proud.

  At the end of the week I was free to go if, that is, I could repay her. And I could only stay if I pleased her.

  When I only smiled weakly at this, she grew sharp. She sat back and raised one perfectly drawn eyebrow.

  We entertain some of the world’s most important men here. Do not be mistaken, she said. This is a profession; you are performers. These men, they entrust us with their most secret fantasies, and we, we keep that trust—they rule the day, we rule the night.

  She stood and came around her desk, leaning against it to lift my chin with her own hand, and brought her face down before mine.

  Do not be sad, then. Be proud. The night is a wonderful country to rule. Welcome to the Majeurs-Plaisirs.

  §

  Afterward, as I sat in that dark hall, moving from peephole to peephole, turning the hourglass as I did, I felt as if I were a ghost hidden in the walls. The peepholes were either scratched into the silver at the back of a mirror, or looked out through mantels, or were an “eye” set so as to resemble the eye in a painting, or one of a series of glass beads along the base of a lamp.

  In the first, I saw a stout soldier, naked, his face firmly between one woman’s buttocks as another smacked him from behind and he cried out without lifting his face or running away or striking her. In the second, a woman I soon realized as Euphrosyne in performance as a young girl, waiting for the return of her chaperone at the opera and surprised by her visitor. She was enacting a melodrama, during which he called her by another name, that culminated in her being ravished by him—at which point Odile, playing the chaperone, returned to catch and punish him. In the third, a woman held out her delicate bare foot, and a man spread across the floor kissed it, murmuring her name, begging to do more than that.

  She refused until he perfected his kisses to her content.

  Anytime you wonder, Odile said later, as to a lover’s devotion to another, anytime it seems ridiculous, there is only ever one reason.

  What reason? I asked, for I knew it was a prompt. We were seated in one of the theaters as a man waited on us, naked, his eyes downcast in obsequious submission. We were toasting my agreement, signed on the table between us.

  He paid me for the privilege of serving us, she said, as the man finished his pours. I am charging him more for you. What is the reason they are loyal? Why would he pay for such a thing? They have found someone to do the one thing they’ve always longed for, and they are afraid they will never find someone to do it again.

  I laughed, and she said, Don’t laugh. It’s a loyalty greater than love.

  She stroked her champagne glass and looked off into the distance over the rim. She did not meet the eyes of the man trembling now by the wall.

  It may be the only loyalty there is, she said, and held out her glass to be refilled.

  §

  Did you get them? I asked Euphrosyne, once we were alone in the dormitory, the long attic hall of beds I now knew was where she slept. I had written to her, asking her to go to my room at the Cirque Napoléon and take my things before they were sold or thrown away.

  She nodded her head. Yes . . . except your little rose, it was gone.

  Gone?

  She laid out my little kit on the bed we were to share—no girl in the house slept alone. Yes, gone, she said. That and your money. But these remained, and she gestured at the contents now on her bed.

  I had feared the rose lost already when it was not with clothes returned to me at Saint-Lazare. The coat seemed still quite good as did the rabbit-fur bonnet; and the sight of my little route book, my cancan shoes, and the dagger all cheered me. But I had hoped to sell the brooch to Odile to raise what I owed.

  I’m so sorry, my friend, Euphrosyne said. I went as fast as I could.

  She then showed me the dresser where I could keep my things, and the salle de bain, and as I bathed, she told me of her ordeal after jail, how she had returned to discover she owed fantastically huge fines to Odile for our escapade. When I offered to help her pay them, she refused. You already have, she said, somewhat sadly; and then she told me she would receive a generous recruitment fee once it was determined that I would stay.

  My lucky charm was gone, and with it, it seemed, my luck. I survived the first week and was allowed to stay.

  If I had felt, back with my widower farmer, like the victor in a battle, here I came to feel like a fighter, a soldier even. Euphrosyne taught me everything she knew I could not learn through a peephole: that a man could be fooled into thinking he’d entered you; that the finger, well placed, could hasten his release; that if you learned to know when he was to release, you could slip him free and guide his emission onto the floor, sparing both bedding and clothes.

  All of this, then, as well the names for whatever a customer might request, the etiquettes as well. All of the words for cunt, for example, and in several languages. There was only one I liked, minou—to me it sounded like something innocent, though this was not the connotation in French.

  Euphrosyne taught me a great deal in the care and use of it. The method of a douche, for example, very important, as if it was to be sold, it had to be clean and beautiful. And if it was clean and beautiful, business was good. But here there were also salves for making it easier for the man to enter you, to help you heal after he was done. One to make him hard, and one to make him soft, if that was needed. And if you became with child, you were to speak to Odile, and there were her tisanes, and if that did not work, her doctor.

  To keep the child, well, this was expensive. But this, I eventually understood, was how Euphrosyne had come to be here. Her mother was Odile.

  This was why everything here was funny to her; it was her childhood home.

  There was even a method for rouging your cunt, though you never did that if you knew the client wanted to put his face down there, Euphrosyne explained.

  I asked why.

  I did once, and he surprised me and went down there, she said. When he left, he said he didn’t want to wash his face, but his whole face had all the color. It was terrible! And I could not stop laughing! Now I charge for it in advance, and then I know.

  §

  Each night there was like a long, strange dream of many parts, different each night and also the same. You washed once before the evening began and then after each client, usually a splash of cologne between the thighs, which sometimes stung, a wet cloth to the rest of you, a cold glass held to the face to reduce any redness before you fixed your makeup—to do more was to have to redo the face. Between men, I ran the back stairs to clean myself and return, sometimes two stairs at a time. I returned via the front stairs, stately, renewed, descending again to the salon.

  My uniform: fine leather riding boots, stockings held up with leather garters, a man’s riding jacket, and, at times, a top hat. I was a horse act with no horse now, dressing each night as a hippodrome rider, satisfying the fantasies of usually three gentlemen, often with a cropping and beginning first in the actual stables and then soon in a room outfitted as a stable stall, much as the other fantasy rooms were.

  There was a Moorish palace room, a Tuileries bedroom, a peasant’s room, a formal dining room, even a train car.

  A prix d’amour was agreed on beforehand, but men always tried to have more than what they had agreed to, especially if you were new. It was best if you knew how to do sums in your head. Odile watched over us via her trick mirrors and peepholes, though such surveillance was mostly done on new girls li
ke me, to criticize them, and then on troubling clients and, of course, any important visitors.

  Afterward, you returned to the salon, where you were to display yourself at leisure to the men gathered there. But as I had a specialty, I was never much there—the men who sought what I offered soon knew of me, and I was busy at once.

  I discovered this specialty quite by accident—the new boots made my feet sore, and so I took them off in front of a client, who then stared as if I had presented him with feet made of gold.

  And I suppose I had. This is why those carriages stopped, I thought.

  Soon, I knew to do it at once, and it relieved me of my other tasks, much to my delight.

  §

  This long dream ended just before sleep as Odile sat in her chair and ran the numbers in her ledger.

  I was making handsome sums, but my debts were also considerable. As Odile had paid my fines, I owed her for that. Also for the clothes she’d sent to me, and though she did not charge me for that sausage and bread, she did charge for each bar of soap, each meal, even a glass of champagne I might enjoy with a guest, and all came at a cost that soon overwhelmed my earnings. When I complained of it to Euphrosyne, she said only, It is like this for all of us, any house in the city. I checked myself, convinced it could be better elsewhere. At least here the food is not bad, and Odile, she likes her pipe, she does not beat us, only fines us. Her prices are only unreasonable, not absurdly so.

  I was stunned to learn Odile charged even her daughter. She reached out and brushed my hair back behind my ears, smoothing it, and then leaned in and kissed my brow. We should be called filles en compte, not filles en carte.

  The night ended always with us in bed, dressed in slips, our hair long on our pillows like wraiths. We lay together like the sisters we said we were, talking quietly to each other until we slept. Odile kept the dormitory dark with thick velvet drapes that also shut out drafts, a false night to keep us from waking until the afternoon when she opened them to prepare us to begin again.