Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  No one but her Papa had ever called Lou by her full name, and it worked its magic, even though she would later say that from this point on, she—like my readers, I imagine—sensed what was coming next. Technically, she was an innocent, but Lou was a creature of instinct.

  She eased herself onto the bed. Dr. Loomis set his drawing pad on the nightstand. She turned so she could see it. He’d been sketching a passerby.

  Half a dozen sheets of paper were tacked to the wall by his pillow. On each one, a realistic head was attached to a body rendered in the style of his grisly anatomical charts. Half of each body was covered by skin, the other half flayed down to muscle.

  Reeking of mutton and vinegar, Dr. Loomis kneaded her foot with his fingertips until the pain was nearly unendurable. Then he loosened his trousers and her trousers and lay down on top of her and tried to pry her legs apart.

  His flesh was cold and damp with sweat. Many things became clear. Her uncle hadn’t been drying his hands on Miss Frost’s breasts. The boxers in the hotel weren’t punching the walls.

  When Dr. Loomis lifted his head to breathe, Lou punched him in the nose. He’d seen her fight Vargas. Did he think she would lie there and let him do what he wanted? Blood splattered out of his nostrils and onto her white flannel trousers. He swung and hit her eye. Snowflakes skittered across her visual field. She wriggled out from under him and jumped off the bed. Then, before he could move, she slammed his head into the wall. She could hear him yelling as she hobbled down the hall.

  On the way to her room she passed a mirror. One eye was already swollen. She raised her arm to wipe her face, then decided to leave her tears as evidence. Evidence of what?

  “What happened?” asked Sister Francis. But Lou could tell that she knew.

  “Nothing,” Lou replied. She would no sooner tell on Dr. Loomis than she’d told on Robert. Not telling was a point of pride. Sister Francis bandaged her ankle, praying. Lou felt warm liquid drip on her foot. Sister Francis was crying.

  The nun said, “Pray for forgiveness, dear. God bless you and good night.”

  Lou waited till Sister Francis was snoring. She eased one foot onto the floor. Her ankle felt better already. Where could she go with no money? Reaching into her pocket, she found the card with the sketch of the lizard that she’d gotten from the stranger at the Vélodrome.

  The hotel owner watched her go without mentioning the blood on her clothes. Lou waited in the doorway until her eyes adjusted to the darkness. A man stopped and eyed her up and down. She moved away from the door.

  She liked the sound of her footsteps against the cobblestones. God healed her ankle just as he’d cured Saint Joan’s soldiers. She walked and got lost and asked directions and walked and asked someone else. It was nine in the morning by the time she found the address on the card.

  She knocked. A fat man in dark trousers, a white shirt, and an apron opened the door. The fat man was a woman.

  The woman dressed as a man said, “I thought you were the wine merchant’s boy. You’re not the wine merchant’s boy.”

  Once more there was blood on Lou’s white clothes. Once more she stood in a doorway.

  The fat person told her to wait. She returned with the most beautiful woman Lou had ever seen: blond and tall and dressed like a mermaid, but in red, with a spangled red tail. She held a red lizard pressed against her breast.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the woman said. “Come in.” Her voice was not a French voice, but throatier and less chirpy. The woman led her past a stage decorated like a ship and across a room in which a bearded man in a short black maid’s dress and a frilly apron was flapping white cloths onto little round tables.

  Yvonne

  EVA’S PARENTS HAD a poultry farm near Lake Balaton. She was three when she held her first duckling. After that she tried to be present when the baby ducks were born. She sang to them in a honeyed voice. They thought she was their mother. Each morning a flock of ducklings followed her to school, and she absorbed their habit of instant and fierce attachment.

  She imprinted on the first boy she kissed. She dreamed of him, despite or because of the fact that he dreamed of becoming a sailor. He ran away and was drowned on his first voyage out. The village blamed his bad luck on her. After that no mother would let her son go near her, though almost every boy tried to go around his mother’s back.

  She was apprenticed to a midwife in a distant town. Had they known about her boyfriend’s death, they would never have let her touch a woman in labor or a newborn baby.

  One night, when the midwife was away, Eva was summoned by a rich Parisian vacationing with his Hungarian wife, who had grown up nearby. Eva reached inside the woman, who had fainted, and delivered a healthy infant just as its mother awoke.

  Like the magic fish in the fairy tale, the father told Eva she could have anything she wanted. She wanted her sailor boy not to be dead.

  She said, I want my own flock of ducks.

  He said, You can do better.

  She said, I want my own poultry farm.

  He said, You can reach higher.

  She said, I want to travel.

  He said, Where?

  Not long before, she’d read a newspaper item about a nightclub singer who had been murdered in Paris. The dead girl had left an empty space that needed to be filled.

  She said, I want to sing in Paris.

  Nothing could be simpler, said the grateful millionaire. He owned property in every neighborhood. He would inform his office. They would find her a place of her own. A nightclub was a small price to pay for a healthy wife and child. Parisians loved new clubs. No one talked about anything but the latest hot spot. Had she sung professionally?

  She nodded. She’d sung to the ducks.

  In Paris she looked up a childhood friend named Gyorgy. It took her weeks to find him, partly because he’d become Georgette. Georgette said that Eva too must change her name.

  In France she was Yvonne.

  Georgette knew artists, fashion designers, musicians, gangsters, people with shadowy pasts and mysterious new fortunes. Very modern, very free, very fond of dressing as the opposite sex. They needed a place where they could relax and have fun.

  Yvonne’s club was an instant hit. Georgette gave Yvonne her first lizard, which not only provided the name for her club but also everything she needed: the transfixed love of a duckling, the sandpaper touch of a man. She enjoyed watching it turn colors. She liked to decorate its little home. She was sad when the first lizard died, but she found a replacement.

  Yvonne’s clientele worshiped her. Her staff called her Yvonne the Terrible, but it was a loving joke. The musicians admired her voice but thought she should pay them more. She wrote songs about the sailor boy whose face she could hardly remember. Word got out that she liked sailors, which narrowed the field of men with the nerve to approach her. Among her lovers were captains, admirals, stokers, even an occasional fisherman who found his way to the city. She’d always liked the taste and smell of salt on a man’s skin.

  But none of these men understood, or wanted to understand, how hard she worked, how early she woke each morning to add up the books and order the wine and charm the delivery men who cheated everyone but her. What man wanted to hear about the constant money worries? No one knew what it took to go onstage and shed years of troubles, gallons of whiskey, and packs of cigarettes, and travel back through age and time to reenter the mind of the girl whose sailor never returned.

  Yvonne was thoughtful and discreet, alert for the scent of the predator. She warned her clients if she thought they were involved with the wrong person, but she respected their privacy and shut her eyes to a lot. Or pretended to shut her eyes. Nothing happened at the club without her knowledge. She protected her customers from voyeurs and unwelcome publicity. She’d turned away the Hungarian who wanted to take pictures, despite how much she’d enjoyed speaking her native language.

  Who had time and energy for a husband and children? For a few hours a week, she could lock
her office door, smoke a little opium, and play with Louis the Lizard. And yet she always found time to adopt and nurture the strays who found their way to the club after hearing that it was a refuge where you would be taken in and not asked any questions.

  Most of the runaways were young. Yvonne put them to work doing odd jobs, taking coats, busing dishes. The cute ones dressed in sailor suits and escorted the dancers onstage. Every kid who knocked on her door imagined that he or she was the first. The first one who’d been born into the wrong body, the first to love the wrong person, the first to have been beaten up, the first to have washed up on the safe shore of Montparnasse. Yvonne liked basking in the warming sun of their admiration.

  One day, Fat Bernard called Yvonne out to meet a chunky girl wearing bloodstained white flannel trousers.

  Yvonne had seen her somewhere before. It took her a moment to recognize the young woman on the posters plastered around the city, announcing a sports exhibition at the Vélodrome d’Hiver. A record-breaking something or other, soon to be a competitor in the upcoming Olympics, the girl had glared out of the ugly sign, threatening passersby with a spear. Now one eye was purple and swollen shut. Some evil bastard somewhere was sleeping like a baby. Yvonne asked Fat Bernard to take her to the backstage shower.

  When the girl reappeared in a robe and a terry cloth turban, Yvonne led her to the wardrobe.

  “Thank you,” the girl kept saying.

  Yvonne showed her the racks of costumes, suits, and dresses. The girl looked to Yvonne for direction. Yvonne shrugged. Pick what you want.

  The girl reached toward a man’s tuxedo. Her fingertips bounced off it, as if recoiling from a hot stove.

  “Go ahead,” said Yvonne. “Try it on.”

  Paris

  July 15, 1928

  Dear parents,

  Yesterday evening I went to the baroness’s for dinner. She and I have shared pleasant evenings, meals, trips to plays, museums, concerts, nightclubs high and low. Yet never once has she invited me to her home, though I have heard, from others, about her parties.

  I’d assumed I was banned because her husband Didi resents the time she spends with me and the small (by their standards) but generous (by ours) loans with which she has gotten me past some rough spots. Recently, I was pushed to the breaking point when an acquaintance, a terrible painter, described the fabulous meal he’d enjoyed at the baroness’s table.

  Late one night, after the baroness and I had had a few drinks at the Dingo, I asked her why she’d never invited me. Was her husband jealous? If so, I would understand. The baroness laughed. She and her husband didn’t have that sort of marriage, and besides he never inquired what she did with her time—and his money. Then why had she hosted my untalented friend, and not me?

  She sighed. “What is the difference between you and your friend?”

  “I am a good artist, and he is a bad one?”

  “That is not the point. The point is, he is French. The problem is my brother-in-law, Armand, my husband’s business partner—”

  “I know who Armand is,” I said.

  “He’s always at these dinners. And he is something of a maniac about pure French blood or some such distasteful concept.”

  “So the problem is that I am Hungarian?”

  The baroness rolled her eyes.

  So it seemed like a triumph, like proof of the power of our friendship when I received a handwritten invitation to dinner at her home. Maybe her brother-in-law wouldn’t be there. Maybe his views had softened. Who cared what he thought of Hungarians? I was determined to go.

  My desire was not about social climbing but purely about art. If I want to photograph Paris, all of Paris, from its palaces to its hovels, I will have to breach that fortress known as high society.

  On the day of the dinner, I kept hearing Papa’s warning: never be early. To surprise one’s hostess getting dressed is an unforgiveable act of aggression. How well I remember the calculations by which our family arrived at Grandma’s Sunday lunches and the vice principal’s holiday tea precisely twenty minutes late, along with all the other guests who showed up at the same moment.

  I arrived twenty minutes after the appointed hour. On time, by the standards of our town. Rudely late in the sixteenth arrondissement, where the guests were already sipping champagne. Who would have guessed that French aristocrats are as punctual as Germans?

  I should have asked the baroness what to wear. I was crazy to consult Lionel and to listen when he said that socialites love rubbing shoulders with filthy smelly artists. He said it gives the chronically bored a thrill to think that their home has been invaded by a dangerous lunatic. Why did I imagine that the poorest writer in Paris could tell me how to turn myself into the plaything of the rich?

  I asked Lionel, “Are you sure? Her brother-in-law hates Hungarians.”

  Lionel said, “Armand de Rossignol won’t even know you’re there. He is addicted to opium, and those dinner tables are long. Your baroness will seat you as far away from him as possible.”

  I felt a vague unease as I tied a red scarf around my neck and pulled a gangster’s cap down on my forehead. Late or not, I should have gone home and changed when the butler who answered the door asked to see my identification.

  He stood close, prepared to tackle me, while I searched my pockets and in the process knocked over a vase that didn’t break but only—only!—spewed water, lilies, and slime across the marble floor.

  A servant appeared and fixed the problem with a nimble flick of the mop, a sleight of hand that took long enough for him to hiss, “Ming Dynasty, you ignorant fool.”

  I sidled into the conservatory scented with tropical flowers, rumbling with the bassos of men in evening dress, punctuated by the sweet tremolos of women with arms too smooth to keep their spangled dresses from spilling off their shoulders.

  When I entered, the conversation stopped. Everyone stared, or so it seemed.

  I saw the men patting their pockets and their wives clutching their evening bags. It is how we Hungarians act when a Gypsy boards the tram.

  The baroness swanned out of the crowd, swooping down to save me. How happy she was to see me and how lovely she looked. Her silk dress fit her like a coating of lilac liquid gleaming with silver bugles. If I’d brought my camera, I might have broken our unspoken agreement and insisted on taking her picture. She handed me a glass of champagne, brushed cigarette ash off my jacket, and hooked her arm through mine.

  Shouldn’t this have signaled that I wasn’t threatening or contagious? Yet when the baroness introduced me, her guests’ smiles flickered and died. My name meant nothing to them, but their names were the names of wines, perfumes, and banks. Mr. Brandy, Miss Cologne, Mrs. Laundry Soap, and quite a number of Mr. and Mrs. Luxury Automobiles.

  A servant hit a silver triangle, turning the guests into obedient zombies. They shuffled beside the servants who showed them to their places at the candlelit table set with crystal, china, heavy silver, sprays of peonies and camellias.

  The baroness patted my arm and left. I had no choice but to annoy everyone, leaning in to read the cards until I found my seat between two women closer to your age than mine. You will understand what kind of dinner it was when I tell you that the lady on my right was a cousin of Prince Yusupov, the murderer of Rasputin, while on my left was the duchess on whom Proust modeled a character whose name Papa would recognize, if I could recall it.

  The Russian looked like a close relation of the mad monk’s assassin. Proust’s ancient muse seemed marginally less disturbing. I introduced myself to her as a friend of the baroness’s, a photographer and a writer. She seemed to think we’d met before, and said something I didn’t catch. Apparently she believed I’d recommended a doctor for her cats. The veterinarian had worked miracles. I told her she was welcome. What did I like to photograph? I said I’d just been shooting in an opium den.

  My dinner partner shrank away, rigid with discomfort. Too late, I remembered that our hostess’s brother-in-law is rum
ored to be an addict. The woman was practically apoplectic to think that someone might overhear me. I would be to blame if she was never invited again.

  I gulped my wine, then turned back to the Russian. This time I planned to say, Like your cousin, the prince, I am acquainted with darkness. I would tell her about the nights I spend walking the streets, befriending thieves and pickpockets, police, prostitutes, and pimps. . . . Maybe I would leave out the prostitutes and pimps.

  The Russian turned her back on me before I could begin. I looked around. The baroness caught my eye and smiled. Why didn’t she seat me near her if she liked me so much?

  At the other end of the table was her husband Didi, as relaxed as if forty dinner guests were a few friends at his club. Even though he was sitting down, I could tell that he was tall. Everything about him was exquisitely neat and crisp: his suit, his hair, his glowing pink skin, his perfectly clipped eyebrows. Every cell of his being seemed forceful and decisive, except for his eyes, which were a watery and uncertain blue. His nose and mouth looked as if they had been pinched like rubber and allowed to snap back, then pinched and shaped again.

  Darlings, you know how I admire the French, as do you, Papa. Even so, it struck me that such a nose exists nowhere except in the middle of a French face: a nose that makes you imagine God compressing two nostrils into the tightest space that will let its owner breathe. Nostrils that thin were bred to convey a message: superiority, privilege, culture, money. Though you may wonder how a pair of nostrils could communicate all that. Despising the French for their nostrils—I am as bigoted as they are!

  But where was the infamous brother-in-law? Another man with similarly pinched nostrils sat across the table from me, half dozing. It could only have been Armand. The Hungarian-hater.

  A squad of servers delivered a dish to each guest at the precise same instant. On my plate were three small fish surrounded by a ring of green grapes. I hunched over my plate like a buzzard. I had to drain my whole glass of wine to get the nerve to look up again. Once more, I glanced at the baroness; once more, she noticed and turned away from the man with whom she was chatting. She twinkled encouragement at me. Observe how the sunbathing aristocrat waves at the drowning immigrant!