Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  Special to the Magyar Gazette

  The New Diana Thrills Paris

  THE RAGE OF Paris this season is a seventeen-year-old girl who is giving the fastest Frenchman a run for his money. For the past week, a convent-school student known as Mademoiselle Lou has been thrilling crowds at the Vélodrome d’Hiver with her speed, strength and endurance.

  From a distance, an ignorant stranger might mistake Mademoiselle Lou for a stocky, muscular fellow in a white blazer and flannel trousers. But on closer inspection, one sees the full red lips and dark curls that give this confident young woman’s face the saucy sparkle of feminine beauty.

  The audience cheers as she sprints the course, nimbly jumping the hurdles, heaves a javelin, then hops on a bike and streaks past the crowded bleachers. This record-breaking athlete is already being mentioned as a favorite to compete in some event (as yet unspecified) in the next Olympics. Meanwhile the whole city is buzzing about this creature whose very existence proves that the modern French woman has boldly snapped the chains that still imprison her sisters in the more old-fashioned, less progressive cultures.

  May 15, 1928

  Dear parents,

  I cannot go on like this! My days in journalism are numbered! I must find another way of supplementing your stipend, another job that will let me have my nights free to wander the city, taking pictures. It’s demoralizing enough to be demoted—or promoted, according to my editors—to the sports pages. But when I actually find a subject worth writing an article about, they refuse to print it.

  Last week I attended the event described above. This time I only made a few tiny improvements on the truth. That sparkle of saucy feminine beauty was my invention, as were the hurdles and the bike. And Paris is hardly abuzz about Mademoiselle Lou, though they should be buzzing about this young woman who, in our country, would probably be exhibited as a circus freak.

  I would never have heard of this girl if not for my friend Lionel. With typical directness—excuse the language, his, not mine—my American pal remarked that the sight of a big, healthy, muscular girl in pants, running and chucking a spear, made him feel like a happy bumblebee was buzzing in his trousers.

  It was perfect for the sports page! Even my stingy editors agreed, though they only gave me two hundred words.

  Lionel warned me to get to the Vélodrome late. The girl has a promoter, a pretentious Brit who lectures the crowd in abysmal French. There might have been more of a buzz if this guy weren’t such a bore. This self-styled doctor sells health tonics and an exercise machine he calls the Gymnasticon.

  I arrived late, but not late enough. In a long white coat, “Dr.” Loomis stood behind a podium set up on the track. Let me try to give you the flavor of his French:

  “The body she is cathedral. The arteries and veins is tentacles of female heart and blood he runs back and forth to the girl the woman the mother and then baby, bringing health. The stomach is chair of the soul, of compassion, the happy and pretty. The breathing, the moving house, the green fruits and natural juice will turn a cuttlefish into a giant. I myself was such tiny but thanks for my fitness liquid and the miraculous Gymnasticon I stretched beyond what doctors predicted my mother.”

  Did he really mean cuttlefish? What was he trying to say?

  Two hundred words. No room for anything fancy. The fellow was wasting my time as he listed the requirements for health: sunshine, fresh air, exercise, a balanced vegetarian diet. Baths! Cold in winter, hot in summer, liberating the pores from its jailers, oil and dirt and dust. He pulled down charts of bodies flayed and sliced down the middle. On one a pretty woman smiled, unaware that the other half of her face was a grinning skull. He spoke a bit excessively about the female organs. Fortunately, only a few ladies had come to the performance—among them my friend, the baroness Lily de Rossignol.

  Have I mentioned her, Mama and Papa? She is a former Hollywood star who came home to Paris and married a baron whose family manufactures luxury automobiles. A queen of high society who seems far younger than her age. Perhaps it’s her adventurous spirit. She is one of those daring souls who will try anything once. How Papa would admire this patroness of the arts, this glamorous French eagle who has taken me under her wing!

  Like the rest of the Vélodrome audience, I’d stopped pretending to listen. I looked around for Mademoiselle Lou, who had taken a seat beside a tall nun in a brown robe. I watched the girl rotate her head and ripple her muscular shoulders.

  When (at last!) Dr. Loomis finished, he announced that Mademoiselle Lou would now attempt to beat the men’s javelin record. The girl removed her blazer and, just as a man would, folded it neatly and placed it on her seat. Underneath her jacket she wore a long-sleeved white shirt and a black tie.

  Do you remember when you took me to see Shakespeare’s The Tempest? For months I was afraid to close my eyes lest a growling Hungarian Caliban murder me in my bed. As Mademoiselle Lou grabbed her knees and inhaled, I again saw that snarling beast emerging from its lair. Though maybe this is just prejudice, the panic of a male in the presence of a female who could flatten him in a fight.

  Rolling her hips like a sailor, the girl strutted down the track. A few crude audience members shouted coarse remarks at the spectacle of a woman doing knee bends and jumping jacks. I thought of the Chameleon Club. The contortionist sailorettes did backbends in my mind.

  Mademoiselle Lou ran for a short distance, then let the javelin fly. Good God, I said in Hungarian, and then, in French, Mon Dieu. How fast, how far, how confidently that young woman hurled the spear.

  The nun who stood up was ten feet tall. Her habit flapped behind her. The measuring tape trailed at her hem. Why didn’t I bring my camera?

  She read the result. The men’s record had been broken!

  The girl’s eyes were dull, her face dark red, she was panting and streaming sweat. When the applause subsided, Dr. Loomis announced that Mademoiselle Lou would answer a few questions.

  The reporter from the right-wing paper asked how long her family had lived in France.

  “Forever,” she replied.

  Another journalist asked if Mademoiselle Lou agreed with Dr. Loomis’s theory that physical exercise would not compromise her future as a wife and mother.

  She said, “My only future plan is to compete in the Olympics.”

  Dr. Loomis frowned. Had he hoped she’d say that his system was preparing her to bake a perfect Tarte Tatin while popping out a litter of French babies? Clearly, he didn’t want us to think that his program encouraged the Amazonian tendencies so common now in Paris.

  That ended the question period. Dr. Loomis announced that he would be selling his elixirs and offering free Gymnasticon demonstrations in the stadium lobby.

  “That poor unhappy girl! Did you see her face?” the baroness asked me. “Please! Go down there and talk to her! Flirt with her! Do something!”

  I climbed down the steps and ventured onto the track. Mademoiselle Lou was alone, momentarily forgotten. She sat in a chair with her head in her hands, her elbows on her knees. I tried to think of a question that might elicit some pungent quote that would move the story off the sports desk to the news section, or at least the culture pages. How do you think your achievements will change the life of the average Frenchwoman?

  Perhaps if I’d asked that probing question my story would have been published, though I can’t imagine how a different ending would have satisfied the small-minded editors who decided that my article made the reader think overly much about female plumbing. Maybe they sensed how their public would receive the suggestion that God had created woman to do something besides rolling out strudel dough. Maybe they would have printed the piece if Mademoiselle Lou were Hungarian instead of a potential threat to Hungarian men in the upcoming games.

  I should have requested a private interview, but the girl looked so desolate that my cool journalistic instincts gave way to my warmer human ones. I fished around in my briefcase until I found what I wanted. Some higher force moved me to
hand Mademoiselle Lou the business card of the Chameleon Club. She slipped it into her pocket just as the giant nun appeared and led her away.

  The reason I have bothered you with the sad drama of my failure as a reporter is because I must ask you to send a little extra this month. There is something I have neglected to tell you, not from any wish to deceive you but to spare you unnecessary worry.

  I don’t know if I mentioned the photos I was taking of a notorious petty criminal named Big Albert and his gang. Until now they’d adopted me as if I were one of their own. I think they were flattered that I thought their faces were interesting, which, believe me, they are. They let me imagine I’d joined their outlaw family. But last night, when I returned from shooting what may be the most extraordinary nocturnal group portrait since Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, I was shocked to discover that my wallet was missing.

  This theft has plunged me into a fiscal crisis. So I must ask for enough money to survive on while I figure out how to end my shameful dependence on the Magyar Gazette and find a job more in keeping with my talents. Every penny is helpful, since—as you may have heard—the price of bread is rising to a level that is turning the average working man into an insomniac like myself!

  Thank you again, with all my heart,

  Gabor

  From Make Yourself New

  BY LIONEL MAINE

  NO SOONER HAD we got to the hotel room than we took off all our clothes, no sooner had we twisted ourselves into an acrobatic position orchestrated by Suzanne, no sooner had I stopped wondering which filthy ex-boyfriend had taught her this, no sooner had my delirious cock silenced my chattering brain than we heard someone pounding on the door and shouting, “Police! Open up!”

  I told the desk clerk to go fuck himself, but he kept yelling from the hall that the room was rented to a Hungarian. It was against the rules to loan out rooms on a short-term basis. The French have rules about everything. Nothing is too trivial or intimate to be regulated by the Napoleonic Code.

  “Short-term?” I whispered to Suzanne. “Is he insulting my manhood?” Suzanne was unamused. The clerk would have gladly gone on knocking forever. It was a pleasant break from the reception desk and an outlet for the resentment produced by a lifetime of handing others the keys to ecstasy or despair. He’d been on the telephone when we sneaked past and let ourselves in with Gabor’s key.

  I was reasonably sure that, even in France, our presence was legal. But it didn’t seem like the ideal moment to discuss tenants’ rights. Suzanne rolled away from me and pressed her face into the pillow.

  Knock knock.

  “Just a minute,” I said.

  Suzanne cursed. Why was she blaming me? Obviously, the poor thing was as horny and frustrated as I was. What an enlightened culture! So unlike our own hypocritical country, where ladies are taught to lie back, close their eyes, and think of Calvin Coolidge. How refreshing to live in a place where it is taken for granted that coitus interruptus can leave a woman cranky. Though perhaps I should have thought less about French sexual attitudes and more about Suzanne, who had begun to yell at the clerk. With each new perversion she proposed for him and his mother, I fell more deeply in love.

  Before I came to Paris, I thought I knew something about women. Hilarious, said Paris. You Americans know nothing. The women of Paris are a separate species. They compete to be the wildest. They work on their bad reputations. If Kiki has no pubic hair, she makes sure the whole world knows. There is a girl in Montparnasse, a blond tart who calls herself Arlette and is famous for the strawberry birthmark that covers half her ass.

  Meanwhile I wander among them, a sexual Columbus, marveling at the customs of this exotic breed, these gorgeous moths who fling themselves at the flickering candle, determined to immolate themselves for love, to burst into flame before they end up pinned beneath a washing tub, a mother-in-law, and five squalling brats. They live for freedom, for dancing, good dinners and wine, for music and trips to the Riviera. They refuse to sell their bodies for a diamond ring but will gladly rent them to rich old men and talented young painters. Like geishas, they are artists: their art is how much they can drink, how many drugs and how many lovers of both sexes they can take, how quickly they strip naked at artists’ balls and rip off their shirts on Bastille Day.

  It’s all in fun. Sex is different here. Brothels are licensed and safe! Bald ladies, fatsos, amputees? Sex in a bedroom decorated like an ocean-liner cabin, an igloo, the boudoir of a French king? The customer need only ask. Friends visit a whorehouse as casually as a group of clerks in Hoboken go out after work for a beer.

  Without much hope, I reached for Suzanne. She pushed my hand away.

  “I’m starving,” she told the wallpaper. “And I’m sick of this room.”

  Twice that day, I’d caused a scene at the American Express. Why were they pretending that my check hadn’t come? Hadn’t I written to my ex-wife: Dear Beedie, I am in mortal danger! I’ve joked about starvation before, but this time I’m not kidding.

  Once again, my survival instinct muscled down my panic, and my sex-starved, protein-deficient brain lumbered into action. I remembered that Gabor was dining at the Café des Vosges with the baroness Lily de Rossignol.

  This afternoon, as Suzanne and I were grappling on his gritty sheets, Gabor was (on my suggestion) escorting the baroness to see a charming Sapphic creature hurling deadly weapons in the Vélodrome d’Hiver. I knew they would enjoy it, partly because my Hungarian friend was always on the lookout for sports-related stories and partly because the baroness sounded like someone who would appreciate a performance that involved an Amazon, a giant nun, and a snake-oil salesman. I knew from my own experience that one could work up quite an appetite watching the exertions and the intriguingly broad behind of the sexually ambiguous, vaguely alarming female athlete.

  Another brilliant idea of mine was telling Gabor where he and his lovely patron should dine. If Suzanne and I just happened to stroll into the Café des Vosges, and if we just happened to run into them, Gabor might just mention that I was the one who told him about the athletic demonstration. And the grateful baroness might just invite us to join them.

  What a schoolboy Gabor is! Sometimes I wonder which of us is the naive American and which is the savvy European. He still seems astonished when the baroness picks up a check. How can he not understand that she will pay for the food he eats, the wine he drinks, the oxygen he breathes? She will promote his art, support him, and sleep with him, but only on her terms. Either he is truly innocent or else pretending because of some atavistic male vanity he’d be better off without. Perhaps such women don’t exist in his Hungarian backwater: older, rich, not caring what it costs to stave off boredom. But for me to tell Gabor would test the limits of our friendship. Two women could easily discuss all that and more—another reason why a man must be careful around women.

  My plan had obvious risks. What if the baroness changed her mind about where she wanted to eat? What if I convinced the snooty maître d’ that our friends were inside, and led Suzanne past all those glittering diamonds, past all those sparkly perfect teeth lightly marinated in champagne—and found Gabor and the baroness installed at a cozy table for two?

  But the gods of Paris were smiling on us, or in any case consoling us for our ruined amour. I spotted Gabor from across the restaurant. A less loyal friend might have taken a sudden interest in the potted ferns. But Gabor grinned and beckoned us over.

  In her sleek platinum bob and ermine coat, the baroness turned to watch us approach with the sleepy languor of a jungle cat. It was a relief to discover that she wasn’t my type: too bossy, too spoiled, too arrogant, too close to my own age. But most men would have fucked her in a heartbeat, as Gabor could have, if he’d wanted. Only God, or another Hungarian, could fathom why he has been so excessively respectful toward his attractive patron.

  Gabor hugged me and kissed Suzanne. Blushing, he introduced us. The baroness knew who I was and made a point of not caring who Suzanne was.


  She said, “So you are the American writer we can thank for sending us to see that pitiful girl, her tedious British Svengali, and that utterly delectable, colossal cross-dressing nun?”

  I said, “The nun was a female, I think.”

  “Oh, really?” said the baroness. “How long have you been in Paris?”

  I said, “I want to thank you for getting us out of jail.”

  She looked at Gabor. “Jail? Why is this not ringing a bell? I really must quit drinking.”

  Gabor said, “When I took that photo of the three crooks breaking into the house . . . ? Lionel was one of the thieves . . . the one in the checkered cap . . . ?”

  “Right,” she said. “A faint bell. I own a print of that, don’t I?”

  “In fact you do,” said Gabor.

  The baroness ran one pearly fingernail down the length of his cheek. “Now I remember. And you”—she inspected me—“the old thief, am I right?”

  After an awkward silence, Suzanne asked Gabor, “How are you?”

  “Never better,” the baroness told me, as if I were the one who’d asked her. She refocused the brute force of her attention on Gabor, who was looking apologetically at Suzanne, as if to say, Don’t blame me. Suzanne smiled sweetly at him, as if to say, I don’t.

  Whom exactly did I have to fuck to make someone look at me? Should I lecture the baroness about good manners? Or whisper a warning against offending Suzanne, whose sense of justice was as fierce as her compassion, and who might be planning to make the baroness pay for her rudeness? Would our lives have been different if I’d grabbed Suzanne’s hand and dragged her out of that den of the blood-sucking rich and found a deserted corner and had semirough sex with her against a wall?

  Why did I do none of that? Because when Suzanne finally turned toward me, I saw the face of someone witnessing a miracle, and when I looked over my shoulder to see what the miracle was, I saw a waiter heading toward us with a giant platter of oysters.