Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  The music stopped. Ricardo and Paul tapped their flasks with spoons.

  Ricardo said, “And now, my dear friends, it’s time to play Living Statues.”

  The room darkened, and spotlights appeared, each trained on one of the low white pedestals spaced around the loft.

  “Goddesses! Arise!” said Paul.

  I began to shiver. A half-naked couple beside me hunched their shoulders and rubbed their arms. The female guests were excited and frightened by what they’d been asked to do. The men were excited, and also scared that none of the women would do it, and that the women’s refusal would reflect on them. I noticed quite a few guests edging toward the exit, then stopping in the doorway to see what would happen. No one spoke or moved until a woman’s bare arms rose over the heads of the crowd, and everyone stamped and cheered.

  Not any woman. Kiki! She pulled off her toga and stepped naked onto the pedestal and into the cold white light. My eyes ached from staring at all that dazzling flesh. The spotlight raked the room until it found another girl shedding her clothes and climbing onto another column.

  The next person to strip was a puckish blond boy. As he perched on his pedestal, everyone stared at his penis, the women curious, the men entranced, each comparing it with his own. Quivering, it rose slightly and curved to one side, as if retreating from our attention. Once more the mood shifted, and I sensed a tremor of violence. I must have drunk more than I thought, because I became convinced that it was my duty to save the poor boy from being devoured in a frenzied Dionysian rite.

  The rush of blood in my ears said, Do it. It’s just like modeling at the art school. But that was for money. That was work.

  I’d stripped in public once before, on a suffocating Bastille Day. I’d only taken off my shirt, and the café was dark. I danced all night in the arms of the man who’d said, Watch and learn, Suzanne. Whom was he dancing with now? Was he saying that to her?

  It was different to strip in a room full of friends, a place I would return to. As if anyone remembered which girls took off their dresses! I would never have considered it were I not so drunk and so aware that Gabor and the baroness were out there in the dark.

  I raised my arms above my head. Someone whistled. The spotlight found me. Two men carried over a pedestal. I slipped off my dress and handed it to Ricardo, who had materialized beside me.

  He said, “You don’t have to do this.”

  Hands helped me up onto the column, which was wider than it looked. Still I had to keep my knees and feet together. The spotlight was very hot. Sweat trickled between my breasts. My nipples stood up, and I covered them with my hands. The crowd roared again and moved closer. I pretended that I was a plant growing toward the sun. I couldn’t see into the blackness past the circle of light. As my eyes adjusted I spotted Gabor and the baroness. Her arm was draped over his shoulder. But he was staring at me.

  Watch and learn, I thought. Now it was her turn. It was wrong to use my youth as a weapon. It was not a fair fight. I should have been grateful for the meal. But the baroness should have been nicer.

  Once more the crowd applauded. Another girl was stripping. A few of the men kept staring at me, as if to maintain our connection. What if one of my students were here? Tomorrow, I could be conjugating the past subjunctive with a man who’d seen me naked.

  I tottered. Hands reached up to help. I wanted the hands to be Gabor’s. I thought I heard Lionel’s voice. Ricardo gave me my dress. The cool silk splashed down my face like a shock of ice water. Ricardo hugged me, pressing me to his silver chest. His skin was moist and sticky. By the time I looked up, Gabor and the baroness were nowhere to be seen, and I slipped out of the party without telling Lionel that I was leaving.

  From The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars

  BY NATHALIE DUNOIS

  Chapter Three: Sin City

  WHEN LOU TRIED to imagine Paris, she pictured the fresco depicting hell in the church she’d attended as a child: images of the damned boiling in cauldrons, gnawing on their own flesh and the limbs of their fellow sinners. Why would Dr. Loomis and Sister Francis take her to a place that she’d spent every Sunday praying to avoid? Why couldn’t they go on as they were, touring the provinces to compete in races and games, then returning to the convent? Lou was getting stronger, faster, more in control of her body, more adept at deciphering the messages it sent. She even enjoyed Dr. Loomis’s lectures, which she’d heard so often that she could use the time to meditate on her mistakes and how to correct them.

  Dr. Loomis complained about the drafty trains, the overcooked vegetables, the lumpy hotel beds. But for Lou, travel was an adventure. She was happy to go where she was told, to do as she was instructed, to make new friends wherever they went. She treasured her letter from a swimmer asking when Lou would visit Royan again. The previous month had brought a postcard from a runner in Limoges who’d broken the district record by imagining Lou waving her across the finish line.

  Paris was a spider’s web, a ribbon of flypaper over the stove, a bog of quicksand into which you could sink forever. Her parents said Robert was there, but they’d refused to say where. When Lou phoned to ask, they hung up and pretended the connection had gone dead. With Grandma gone and Miss Frost fired, there was no one who would tell her. For all Lou knew, he was sick and scared and desperate. She would find him when she got older and had the money and time.

  She’d heard about Paris from Miss Frost, who’d lived there briefly after the war but was glad to escape the beggars with scorched faces, the amputee veterans who vaulted off the pavement on their stumps and lunged at you as you passed. Dr. Loomis promised that Lou would love the City of Light. But one had to be careful. It was a snake pit of sin, a breeding ground for every maggot and germ, every species of moral contagion.

  On the way they stayed in Amiens. All day, Lou had the sense that the nun and her brother were keeping something from her. For the first time, Lou lost focus and gave the javelin a halfhearted throw. Dr. Loomis seemed not to notice. His lecture was half its usual length, and as a consequence they sold twice as much health tonic. All of which confirmed Lou’s suspicion that their stop in Amiens was about something besides the javelin.

  Dr. Loomis forbade Lou to eat dinner. Shortly after seven, he told Sister Francis to wait at the hotel and set off with Lou on a brisk walk through the seedier parts of town. When Lou asked where they were going, he said it would be a nice surprise and not to be afraid.

  At last they reached an enormous shed that loomed up from the black shadows behind a depot for burned-out trains and trolleys. From a distance Lou heard the voices of men roaring with animal rage. Bright light and cigar smoke poured from the open door.

  How easily one can imagine little Lou’s trepidation! Picturing this disturbing event, I recall the time when a lover brought me to a boxing match, supposing—with characteristic obtuseness—that I might enjoy it. I remember thinking the men had come for the pleasure of losing their humanity in a crowd of wild beasts exhorting the fighters to beat each other senseless.

  Such was the scene that confronted Lou, who’d been brought there to fight a professional twice her age.

  What an eerie experience it was to find, in the dusty archive of Le Journal d’Amiens, a photo of Alfonso Vargas, taken around the time of his fight with Lou Villars. Vargas stares into the camera like a criminal posing for a mug shot; one eye is as white and smooth as an egg. His graying hair is severely parted in a style Lou often wore, though unlike Lou he sports a full mustache and is missing two front teeth. In the accompanying interview—printed alongside a story about the vagrant crisis in Amiens—Vargas talks about having been a champion before his career hit a rough patch and he wound up homeless. Nowhere is it mentioned that he’d come to Amiens to engage in bare-knuckle combat with a seventeen-year-old girl.

  Lou had fought a punching bag, but never a human being. She’d shadowboxed, done push-ups, sit-ups, run mountain roads uphill. Sister Francis had thrown a medicine ball at her midsect
ion, but too gently to have much effect. Whom would Lou have sparred against? Her fellow students couldn’t be trusted not to gossip.

  Nothing had prepared her to find herself surrounded by men crying out for her blood.

  Dr. Loomis said, “Vargas is blind in one eye. He can’t judge distance. There is no way you can lose. Just don’t murder the poor old guy.”

  The closer Lou got to Vargas, the less threatening he seemed. One eye was a milky ball rolling around in its socket.

  The audience bristled and shrank back, clearing a space in the center. There wasn’t a proper ring, ropes, or mat. A thin layer of straw thatched the dirt floor.

  A bell rang, and the crowd shouted, Kill her! Knock the bitch’s lights out! Vargas threw a punch that, when Lou twisted away, struck her shoulder too lightly to hurt but hard enough to enrage her. It was like being a child again, flailing away at Robert. How sweet it felt to hit and be hit, how caressing the contact. Vargas’s fist shot out like a lizard’s tongue and caught the side of Lou’s jaw. Lou could have killed him. She wanted to. But she held back.

  The point was not to hurt but to dance. What she really wanted was to pound the old man until someone made her stop. Now everyone was advising them on how best to murder each other. Some of the yelling was in Spanish. Lou didn’t want to know what it meant. She knew it was about her. She focused on not letting Vargas get close. It was easy to keep out of range if she stayed on his blind side.

  Then someone threw something at Vargas. An orange bounced off the back of his head and rolled across the ground. Maddened, he flung himself at Lou, a windmill powered by a lifetime of failure. She drew back her fist and socked him hard, in his good eye. She was so fascinated by the sight of blood welling up in his eyebrow, which filled and spilled over and filled with blood and spilled over again, that for a moment she forgot herself and just stood there, watching. Vargas dropped to the ground, where he rolled like a man on fire trying to put out the flames.

  The crowd cheered itself hoarse, and a referee—where had he been until now?—raised Lou’s hand above her head. Dr. Loomis appeared beside her, bending down to whisper in her ear.

  “My champion,” he said.

  Back at the hotel, Sister Francis pressed an ice pack to Lou’s chin. Lou always hated how the nun prayed over her cuts and bruises. Dear Jesus, let your loving kindness heal our little sister. It reminded her of how disgustingly the nun breathed when she concentrated on cutting Lou’s hair. Despite her repulsion, Lou was grateful that Sister Francis cut it short, like a man’s, without having to be asked.

  All night Lou dreamed of Joan of Arc, rescued from the fire, burned but intact, her bobbed hair charred, her corpse sliced open from neck to groin, her innards spilling out, writhing like Saint Teresa welcoming the angel. Lou dreamed that she and her parents and Robert were driving through the countryside, and three men with rifles jumped out from behind a hay wagon and massacred them all. Lou woke and dozed off and dreamed of cobwebs shedding droplets of ice.

  The next day, on the train, Dr. Loomis was in such a chipper mood that he entertained his sister, Lou, and himself with a monologue about the crimes of Paris. His breath smelled like mutton stew. The odor of lamb fat coated the story of how the twin Corsican maids chopped up their employers and made the children into sausage; of the wet nurse who sold plump Christian babies to a Turkish sultan; of the devil Jew Dreyfus who had plotted to bring down France.

  At school the Parisian girls boasted that, at home, night was as bright as the day. But as the taxi took them from the train station past the houses where the grisly murders had occurred, Lou was alarmed by how dark it was: darker than the country, where at least there were stars. The walls were stained and furred with mold. Greasy puddles of cold rain shimmered over the drains. Shadows flickered in the doorways, and every window concealed a crime behind the lying facade of the lamps.

  The Hotel Monaco was wallpapered with autographed photos of bare-chested prizefighters scowling at the camera over boxing gloves cocked like the paws of giant dogs. The foreign man who ran the hotel gave Lou a suspicious look, then smirked so only she could see when Dr. Loomis explained that they were staying here to breathe the air of Sport. The owner assumed he was lying, but the presence of the Nazarene nun made the truth hard to decipher.

  In the hotel basement was a poorly lit, malodorous gym beneath which Lou could hear running water. On the train Dr. Loomis had told her about the Mad Butcher of the Sewers, who chained and tortured his victims under the city streets.

  All the other guests were boxers. At night Lou heard them in their rooms rhythmically punching the walls. Lou’s insomnia returned, but she enjoyed it less than she had when she’d listened to Grandma’s stories and sneaked around the convent.

  Lou had never minded sharing a double bed with Sister Francis. But now the nun’s metronomic snoring kept her awake, and she lay rigid, trembling, longing to pinch Sister Francis’s nostrils shut and stop the drone, the wheeze, the gulp, sounds punctuated by the boxers hitting the walls. Waves of homesickness washed over her. But how could she be homesick when she no longer had a home?

  Just before dawn she drifted off, only to be woken by the grating birdsong of Sister Francis’s good morning. They found Dr. Loomis in the hotel’s steamy, airless breakfast room, where the proprietor’s daughter lurched among the tables, slamming down trays of stale bread and coffee—or in Lou’s case, a bitter tea brewed from raspberry leaves that Dr. Loomis provided. The doctor loudly held forth about how, in the waitress’s native land, girls carried water jars on their heads, which encouraged regal posture, sufficient oxygenation, and excellent liver, lung, and kidney function.

  Fortunately, no one was listening. Not the furious waitress, not the younger boxers drinking coffee and smoking, not the elderly fighters still reeling from the punch they never saw coming. No one heard Dr. Loomis’s speech about his trip to Germany, where he’d watched peasant women chop wood, while their statuesque blond daughters attended naturist camps offering nude calisthenics. Had the guests been paying attention, someone might have taken offense at Dr. Loomis’s claim that the physically fit German youth were far superior to the French, which might be a serious problem in the event of another war.

  Lou feared she’d been brought to Paris for another boxing match. But as they walked to the taxi stand, she was so surprised to see her face on a poster advertising a series of athletic demonstrations at the Vélodrome d’Hiver that it took her a while to recognize the furious girl in a shirt and tie, and a man’s short haircut.

  She dozed off in the taxi. When she awoke, she thought she was still asleep, dreaming of a sultan’s palace, spun with silver fretwork and crowned with minarets—an enchanted castle from The Arabian Nights. It was the first time that Lou Villars had been moved by beauty. How tragic, and how fitting, that the thing of beauty should have been the Vélodrome d’Hiver, now mainly known for its diabolic role in the German Occupation.

  Instinctively, Lou crossed herself. She hoped that no one was looking. Dr. Loomis smiled and said that she was right to be moved to prayer. They were closer to God here than they would be in Notre Dame. When Sister Francis frowned, he laughed and repeated it louder.

  Inside the vast arena, Lou looked up and for a moment was afraid the sky might come crashing through the thin membrane of glass. It was dizzying to contemplate the bleachers that rose in tiers, sickening to imagine them packed with people come to see her.

  Lou didn’t fill the stands. But the crowds were decent, and they grew steadily during her three-week engagement. The track owners made a small profit at a time when no bicycle races were scheduled and they would otherwise have lost money.

  Each time Lou entered the stadium, she felt sick with nerves. It bothered her that Sister Francis always pretended that her javelin toss had broken the men’s record. Didn’t these “sophisticated” Parisians understand that no new record could be set in an amateur demonstration? They might as well have come to watch a woman sawed in hal
f.

  Lou was right. Looking back through the decades during which we have learned so much about the male gaze, we can state with assurance that not one male in Paris cared about setting records or about Dr. Loomis’s lectures.

  One afternoon Lou actually did break the men’s javelin record. But success came at a price: she twisted her ankle in the run-up. Afterward, she sat on a bench by the track, trying to ignore the pain.

  A stranger with curly dark hair and the pinwheel eyes of a madman came over and spoke to Lou in an incomprehensible foreign accent. He gave her a business card, which she put in her pocket. She thanked him. She would have said anything to make him go away.

  By evening, the pain had intensified, but Lou hid it from Sister Francis and Dr. Loomis, whose energetic massages always made her injuries worse. She accepted the fact that pain would be part of her life. But after their celebratory dinner at a bistro near the hotel—salad, mutton, and a bottle of red wine for Dr. Loomis, parsley potatoes and chicken for Sister Francis, and for Lou a bowl of boiled kale and a sliced unripe pear—she stood up and heard herself yelp like a puppy whose tail has been stepped on.

  Dr. Loomis made her sit down again and, right there in the restaurant, prodded her swollen ankle. He told her to come to his room at seven for therapeutic massage, then unceremoniously dropped her foot as he turned to ask his sister what ointments and medicines she’d brought.

  At five to seven, Lou hobbled up four flights to the doctor’s room, larger and nicer than the one she shared with Sister Francis. It even had a balcony overlooking the street. Dr. Loomis sat on the terrace, drawing in a sketchbook.

  “Lie down on the bed, Louisianne. Let’s take a look at that ankle. My little champion is in pain.” His French, never good at the best of times, was halting, thick and furry.