Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  Florine had called in sick today, so they could rehearse that later. This morning, they would begin with Lou and Arlette’s pas de deux.

  Before he allowed Lou to lift Arlette, Pavel put her through the motions: Stand there. Plant your legs like that. No, like that. Step behind the mermaid. Put one hand under her armpit, the other under her thigh. Stop when you have her at shoulder level. Then raise her over your head. Whatever you do, don’t drop her. Now put her down. Yvonne was right. You’ll be fine.

  Lou might have been more pleased had she been less aware that Arlette was refusing to look at her. Poor Arlette! Lou pitied her for having drawn her as a partner.

  Pavel apologized to the class because, like Florine, his accompanist was out sick. Something must be going around. Lou could tell from the dancers’ faces that this accompanist had been indisposed for quite some time. A pianist’s wages would have strained the choreographer’s budget. The grand piano appeared to have been serving as Pavel’s wardrobe, writing desk, and dining table.

  He switched on an old-fashioned gramophone and turned the volume up high. Static rasped, an accordion moaned, then a woman crooned, “Under the sea, under the sea, embraced by the loving arms of my octopus sweetie and me.”

  Pavel said, “My pretty starfish, my adorable jellyfish, swim around our mermaid so the other sea creatures will see you and want to make love with you and spawn more little fishies.”

  The dancers stared at him until one young man ventured an uncertain salute.

  “All right! I see the confusion! You are no longer sailors. You have slipped a few rungs down the evolutionary ladder. Now you are mollusks and fish. Artists, why should you care what species you play? It is all about movement. But in case the customers like tipping sailors and sailorettes better than oysters and cuttlefish, you can change into your sailor suits before you go out into the crowd.”

  Pavel looked at Lou, through Lou, then told Arlette, “Believe me, my dear, you’ll get lots of tips no matter what you are wearing.”

  The others regarded Arlette with hatred. What were they seeing, exactly? A china doll with a chipped front tooth. How odd that Pavel’s complimenting Arlette should make Lou feel flattered. Arlette ignored and snubbed her, so why should her beauty be a source of pride? Because they worked at the same club? You couldn’t even call them coworkers. Because they’d traveled here together? Arlette was embarrassed to have shown Lou the way.

  “So then, ladies and gentlemen, you are creatures of the sea, navigating the currents around our mermaid and her sailor boy.” Pavel turned up the phonograph. Under the sea, under the sea.

  At the convent, Lou had watched girls skip around the maypole. Now she was that maypole, standing awkwardly beside Arlette as Pavel urged the others on.

  A tall girl Lou had seen at the club, Spanish or maybe Moroccan, waved her hips and arms in a way that combined treading water, a belly dance, and a shimmy. Pavel told the others to watch what Fatima was doing, then to grab each other’s waists and form a line behind her. A few dancers spun out from the swaying row and bent backward till their heads touched their heels, then pulled their arms through the hoops of their legs. They twisted into a tangle, until it was unclear to whom the arms and legs belonged.

  Adding new steps and gestures, they ran through the routine again until they fell to their knees, waving their arms in time to the final notes from the gramophone.

  Pavel told them to rest, then returned to Arlette and Lou.

  “You have seen what your loyal subjects can do. You understand your submarine kingdom.”

  He instructed Arlette to lie crumpled at Lou’s feet, then told Lou, “You have found the mermaid almost dead on the beach. Now lift her in your strong arms and save her from the pounding surf.”

  Lou willed herself to imagine this scene, but she couldn’t see it. She would just have to go through the motions. The fantasy could come later.

  Lou put one hand under Arlette’s back, the other under her thighs. As if someone were tugging up on her belly, Lou felt a warm pressure between her legs. Lou raised Arlette off the ground. If only she could hold her like that, in the air, forever.

  “That’s it! Straight over your head. Now swim!” Arlette began to flail her limbs. Lou held on to her firmly, supporting but not impeding her as she waved and kicked.

  “Now try the backstroke!” Pavel shouted.

  Arlette rolled around in Lou’s hands and flipped over on her back. How did their bodies know what to do? It was as if they were speaking. Or so it seemed to Lou. For all she knew Arlette was counting the seconds until she could escape Lou’s clutches. Arlette was getting heavy, yet Lou prayed to make it last, for Pavel to let her stay like that, holding Arlette while the dancers gyrated around them. Pavel told her to turn Arlette so she was on her side, half swimming, half waving at the audience. This took some acrobatic shifting, adjusting, and bumping. At one point Arlette’s bony hip struck Lou’s forehead so hard she moaned.

  Dimly she heard Pavel ask if she was tired. She shook her head no, and then he said, “All right. Now lower the mermaid.”

  Climbing down, Arlette twisted around so she was facing Lou. As she slid to the ground, her stomach and breasts pressed against Lou’s. Was it an accident? Arlette ground her hips into Lou’s. It was not accidental.

  Lou was having trouble breathing even as she made sure that Arlette was steady on her feet. Competing in an athletic event was nothing compared to this.

  Pavel said, “Would you like some water? Mademoiselle, you are pale.”

  Lou Villars was praying: save me. Save me or let me drown.

  Paris

  January 1, 1932

  Dear parents,

  Lying awake, I torment myself by thinking of what has happened in the years since I left home. Would we recognize one another on the street? I have sent you my self-portrait, and you have sent me your picture, taken by the pitiful fellow I would have become if I’d set up a studio in our town and married the mayor’s daughter.

  How many childhood nights did I spend dreading the day when Mama and Papa would die? Now you are only a train trip away. And I never see you. I cannot explain—not even to myself—why I cannot come home for a visit, why some unforeseen obstacle always derails my plans to return.

  Because of this, I am perpetually melancholy, though I know you love me too much to want me to be sad. Is misery good for my art? Aren’t you lucky to have a son whose art requires that you suffer?

  I’m sorry for forgetting Papa’s birthday, especially a milestone year. It horrifies me that I needed Mama to remind me!

  By now, seeing my handwriting, you must think: What is our ungrateful brat apologizing for now? If I tell you how pleased I am, now that all your generosity and my hard work is starting to pay off, will you assume I’m happy because I have left home forever?

  You were always the only ones whose selflessness I could rely on: my happiness was your happiness. I know some people say that my work wallows in filth, that I couldn’t pay the rent without the baroness’s help. But there are others who wish me well. Don’t be jealous. Aren’t you glad I have friends? Shouldn’t we thank the baroness for having let Papa again consider retirement, the goal from which he was diverted by my selfish ambition?

  Guess who I spotted the other day, in a café? Remember, years ago, I interviewed a Hungarian diplomat for the Magyar Gazette—the old aristocrat falsely accused of counterfeiting francs to destabilize the French economy?

  When I mentioned him to Lionel, he asked if the old guy could still be persuaded to mint a few bills. What could I say? I sent Lionel to the café where I’d seen him.

  As you know, the economic situation here is grim. The jobs one took for granted no longer exist. The newspapers we used to complain about have fired their foreign correspondents. I might be as desperate as Lionel if not for the baroness—against whom you continue to warn me.

  I’m not surprised that you have trouble believing in the purity of a cultivated woman’s fo
ndness for a talented man. I understand that our relationship would cause a scandal in our town. The baroness is married. Our friendship is purely platonic. She is my muse, the Charlotte to my Goethe, the Héloïse to my Abelard!

  Will it reassure you about the innocence of our involvement if I tell you something that I hadn’t planned on confiding so soon? I have been “seeing” a French girl, a teacher named Suzanne, who also, in her sweet way, inspires me. If you knew her, you would love her like a daughter, though I know you still hope that I will marry a Hungarian girl—preferably someone rich and local.

  Rather than discuss my love life, I want to tell you about the satisfactions I have been finding in my work. I would say I have turned a corner. Corner after corner as I walk the Paris streets. Every night is an education in such critical matters as the timing of an exposure: I smoke a fat little “blue” for a short exposure, a slow-burning Gauloises for a long one. Don’t worry, Mama, I don’t inhale!

  A few days ago, I watched a film being shot: a sailor and his girl were kissing good-bye on a corner. It was a bright afternoon, and the lighting men were setting up scrims to block the direct sun. It occurred to me to experiment with something like that at night: I could use the trees and walls to diffuse the glare of the streetlamps. I tried it last night. I applauded when the images came up in the tray!

  And yet there is more going on than I can attribute to skill, logic, or reason. Two nights ago a substitute bartender replaced the stodgy regular at the Hotel Madison. After the bar closed we got to talking, and he let me take pictures from the roof. For a moment the cars appeared to vanish, and the traffic circle became a luminous galaxy spitting out tendrils of light. Is it luck—or technique—that the horse chestnut blossoms lining the boulevards and the tracery of glittering bulbs on the Eiffel Tower seem to have been dabbed onto the prints with a tiny brush dipped in white paint? Is it pure chance that I arrive at the Medrano Circus when the bareback rider is taking a break, and the sadness she exudes suffuses the half-empty arena? Or that I descend into the Métro just as a pretty girl is leaning against a wall, removing her high-heeled shoes, between two posters advertising a salve for aching feet? This last is not one of my favorites. Too obvious, Papa would say.

  I’ve developed a reputation as someone who can’t walk out the door without seeing something magical. There’s nothing occult about it. I’ve trained myself to notice the details, and I do my legwork, pounding the sidewalks to double my chances of being present when a miracle occurs.

  Sometimes I feel that there is a camera eye growing inside me: an alien feeding on the radiant bubbles that will shatter after I catch them on film. Have I been possessed by the outer-space monster that frightened me as a child? Now when I walk into a bar, the girls lick their fingers and snail the spit curls down on their foreheads. They’re preparing for the communion of having their pictures taken, a sacrament in which their souls peer out from behind their eyes and through my lens into my eyes and through my eyes into my soul and through the camera into the soul of the viewer.

  Yesterday, two men came to sit for their double portrait in the studio the baroness has rented for me to work in. Ricardo and Paul are friends of Suzanne’s. But because everyone is so busy, we had to schedule their visit for a time when Suzanne was teaching.

  Both arrived in the overcoats over the costumes they wore when I met them: silver paint and a few peacock feathers. For their portraits they wore masks, because Ricardo comes from a distinguished South American family, is studying to be a doctor, and was sensibly concerned about being immortalized in such an unusual outfit.

  I am sending a print of their portrait. It’s only an offprint, so please don’t frame it or show it to anyone. I will give you a better one when you come to Paris. But I wanted you to see what came out of this session. Look beyond the fact that both fellows are practically naked. Focus on how much character streams from every pore. How little the masks conceal. How much of Ricardo’s decency shines through, though not so much from Paul. The sinewy curve of their arms around each other’s shoulders conveys the easy affection between them.

  A while ago the baroness asked if she could borrow my studio for a few days. Her husband and brother-in-law needed it for a business meeting. I could hardly refuse her the loan of a space she is renting. And it was fine with me to see how it might affect my work if I went back to walking all night (Suzanne sometimes comes with me) and printing in my hotel room.

  Two weeks passed before the baroness left a message that I was free to return to my studio, where she would meet me. I let myself in and walked upstairs to the warehouse with its intoxicating aroma of chemicals used to process sugar and salt.

  My key opened the lock, as always. It was the right place. But how could an entire nightclub have moved into my atelier?

  Not exactly a nightclub. The simulacrum of a nightclub. Of the Chameleon, to be exact. Mirrored banquettes, a dance floor, tables. Was all this some sort of stage set left over from the baron’s business meeting? What sort of meeting could that have been? The baroness had said: a small conference for manufacturers of luxury auto parts pitching their wares to her husband and his brother, who are designing a new Rossignol roadster.

  The baroness stepped out of the shadows. Have I mentioned that she is tall? She wore a black suit with a calf-length skirt and a fitted jacket topped with a collar that many small white animals had given their lives to create. Her platinum hair was tucked under a sort of beaded swimmer’s cap. She looked like an animated version of the hood ornament that adorns the Juno-Diane, which the baroness’s husband and brother-in-law produce in their signature line.

  Do you think I have fallen in love? I haven’t. One can appreciate beauty without having to possess it. Though why I am telling this to Papa, who (I feel sure) has remained faithful through decades of marriage despite the temptations offered by his students’ more attractive mothers!

  My relations with the baroness are more serious than romance. If I were in love with her, I would be crushed by the impatience that sometimes creeps into her voice and reminds me of Yvonne. Is there something about me that makes women sound like that?

  “What exactly are you not understanding?” asked the baroness.

  I mumbled something about her husband’s business meeting.

  “Oh, please,” she said. “That was a trick to get you out of the studio while I had it redecorated so you can photograph customers from the Chameleon without upsetting your friend Yvonne. Invite them over, ply them with drinks. No one who’s afraid of blackmail is going to volunteer. Yvonne won’t have to worry about her customers’ precious privacy.”

  Mama and Papa, my head spun. Images whirled through my brain: the dancers from the club transplanted to a place where I can have peace and quiet, where I can control the lighting and camera angle. A place where I can take my time and get what I need in three takes! My happiness runs too deep for words. I can only do my work and let the images speak for me.

  Meanwhile, I kiss you.

  Gabor

  January 30, 1932

  Dear Mama and Papa,

  I should have known better than to think you would understand. What was I expecting when I poured my heart out, trying to describe this new phase of my work?

  Did you even read that part? And if you did, how could you have fixated on the most trivial detail? You point out that I never actually interviewed the Hungarian counterfeiter. You refer to an old letter in which I confessed that I fabricated our conversation. Did it slip my mind that his regret about missing the birth of his family’s pet bear was my own invention?

  Pardon me if a few facts are jumbled in my brain, rearranged by the cornucopia of images and experiences I’ve absorbed during my years in Paris. Perhaps your more accurate memory has something to do with how little happens in our town.

  And, Mama, could you really not stop yourself from making Papa ask, Was I no longer Hungarian? That photo of the men in peacock feathers! Did I really not recall that bringing p
eacock feathers indoors is begging for bad luck? Was I raised by wolves? Whose bad luck would it be? Bad luck for the two young men? For me? Or for everyone else?

  Could you not see the image as a work of art? Could you not refrain from telling your tender-hearted son something that, though he knows better, keeps him awake at night?

  Forgive me for being unkind! But I need you to know that I was wounded and confused by your response. Did I invent that conversation? Am I certain that those peacock feathers won’t bring some dire fate down on us all?

  Despite how I struggle to tell you what makes my heart beat, you fixed on one tiny smudge along the line between truth and fiction. Have you also saved the letters in which I described staging scenes to look more convincing than “reality”? Do you fear that this Sodom and Gomorrah on the Seine has turned your honest boy into a liar?

  Before you consign my letter to that perfumed silk-lined box in which Mama has saved every word, please read it one more time.

  Meanwhile I remain your honest and loving son,

  Gabor

  From Make Yourself New

  BY LIONEL MAINE

  Marxism in one word or less

  THE FIRST AMERICAN I met in Paris, a guy named Sim the Griff, claimed he’d won and lost a million bucks at blackjack. He said he’d worked on the Oakland docks and as a private eye. He claimed to be a Marxist, the only one of his claims I believed. He had that Marxist passion for oysters and good Sancerre, and that Marxist paralysis when the waiter brought the check.

  Already it’s obvious how much the Communists got wrong, overbetting on human high-mindedness, lowballing human desire. But Karl Marx wasn’t an idiot. He hit some nails on the head. For example, history. The professor had history’s number. Preceded by a dollar sign. All history is the fabulous, filthy fairy tale of greed and money.