She would have stayed longer in front of the bookshop if Arlette hadn’t pulled her away. Arlette had seen something quite different: two women who shouldn’t have been at the same table, let alone in the same photograph, touching. A pretty girl squandering the last of her youth on an overweight butch whose only function was to lift her and twirl her around. A gorilla could have done better, with a minimum of training. Perhaps Arlette had an inkling of how she would live on, as the anonymous female half of the lesbian couple, the nameless girlfriend in the photo of the cross-dresser Lou Villars.
“We look like circus freaks,” said Arlette. “Now we’ll look like freaks forever.”
Lou wished she could afford to buy the book. But she couldn’t because, as Arlette often pointed out, Yvonne underpaid them, considering how much they did for the club.
Just as Lou predicted, the book was good publicity for the Chameleon. Yvonne forgave Gabor for photographing her customers without her permission. Though he never shot at the club, Yvonne said he owed her a set of prints. Gabor agreed on principle but said it might take months. Yvonne cut the pages out of the book he’d given her and had them framed, so Gabor’s portraits of the regulars hung throughout the club. Now Lou could admire the picture of her and Arlette every time she walked down the hall to the toilet.
One night, Arlette told Lou she had a date with Eddie. But Eddie showed up at their apartment an hour after Arlette left. Lou ran to the window whenever she heard a noise. It was dawn before she realized that she had been deceived.
She had never loved Arlette so much as she did then, and, as if to cause herself more pain, she thought back to those first nights when they’d played out their passion onstage, how the mermaid had clung to her sailor, mouth to mouth, belly to belly, so light-headed with desire that it took all Lou’s strength and balance to keep them from falling.
When Arlette got home the next morning, Lou asked where she’d been. Arlette said, With Eddie. Lou said she was lying. Finally Arlette said, Go ahead. Make me tell you. But don’t leave a mark. We’re performing tonight in case you’re too stupid to remember.
Lou slapped Arlette’s cheek. Gently first, then harder.
Finally, Arlette said, “Stop. Enough. I was in bed with Chanac.”
Arlette fell asleep. Lou dressed and went outside. She wore a man’s coat and walked like a man, with her hands in her pockets, head down. The longer she walked, the longer it would put off the day she woke up to find that Arlette was gone forever.
Lou got a telephone call at the club. Baroness Lily de Rossignol would pick Lou up at her apartment, at nine on Tuesday evening, when the Chameleon was closed. Through the static Lou heard two words: driver and job. She assumed: chauffeur. Not exactly the most glamorous work, after starring at the Chameleon. But her days at the club were numbered.
During one of their fights, Arlette had mentioned Chanac’s offer to set her up in a nightclub of her own. And she’d made it obvious that Lou wasn’t coming with her.
Lou began to invent improbable stories about the bright prospects before them. Was Arlette aware that a Hollywood producer—Lou didn’t want to jinx the deal by mentioning his name—had phoned Lou to ask if she and Arlette might be willing to take a screen test, the next time he was in Paris? No, Arlette was not aware of that. Lou should tell her when he called again.
It is not uncommon that, at the end of a passionate love affair, the rejected lover—trying to rekindle the beloved’s interest—fantasizes and may even lie about her own importance. So throughout her romantic career, Lou would begin to tell tall tales just when her soon-to-be ex-lover stopped listening. Ultimately this character flaw or neurotic symptom would have dire consequences. It would, one might even argue, cost Lou Villars her life.
Predictably, Lou’s boasting only alienated Arlette.
At nine-thirty, after a miserable half hour during which she was sure the baroness had changed her mind or forgotten, Lou heard an auto horn beep three times. Arlette was sprawled with her head hanging off the edge of the bed, her eyes shut, her fingertips grazing the floor.
Lou knelt to kiss Arlette’s forehead and said she’d be home soon. Arlette said not to rush. She had a date with Eddie. She claimed she’d gone out with Eddie last night, but Lou had watched from the window as she slipped into a black police sedan.
Waiting behind the wheel of a burgundy Rossignol convertible, the baroness wore a picture frame hat with a rhinestone-studded veil swathing a pair of goggles. Was it safe to drive like that? She’d gotten here unhurt.
She said, “I usually take my Delage, which is prettier and faster. If you tell my husband I said that, I will deny it. In any case, I thought it might be smart to arrive in one of our own cars. And for you to be at the wheel. Not that my husband or brother-in-law will be watching us drive up.”
The baroness slid over into the passenger seat. The only car that Lou had ever driven was Eddie’s Citroën. But this was not the moment to tell the baroness that.
What Lou had learned on the Citroën worked on the Rossignol. She eased down on the pedal. They pulled away from the curb. Luckily, few cars or pedestrians ever ventured down Lou’s street. Bicycles were easy to miss, as was the street-sweeper’s cart.
The baroness gave her directions. The first two turns were tricky, but Lou got the hang of it after that. When they reached the Place de l’Opéra, she took a deep breath and dove into the traffic.
“Well done,” the baroness said.
After twenty minutes they drove through a gate, around a circular drive, and stopped in front of a brick mansion covered with vines.
“My brother-in-law’s house,” the baroness said. “Note the giant, vulgar cross above the door.” Lou started to get out of the car, but the baroness restrained her.
“This always happens,” the baroness said. “He pays the servants nothing. He doesn’t believe his household help should be paid at all. He thinks they should pay him for the privilege of washing the socks of the younger brother of a minor great-grandnephew of Louis the Something or Other.”
Finally two uniformed men appeared, opened the car doors, let them out, and drove off. Swaying on her high heels, the baroness took Lou’s arm.
As the baroness had suggested, Lou was wearing a man’s suit, a pale tweed with a high lapel, trousers with shallow cuffs and a sharp crease. A white shirt and a light blue silk tie. The rabbit ears of a white handkerchief peeped from her jacket pocket. A woman’s handkerchief, women’s underwear, it wouldn’t have been her choice, but the law (or so people said) decreed that it was illegal for a woman to wear more than five items of male clothing. Everyone knew someone who had been stopped and stripped by Chanac’s thugs and had every garment counted.
Lou looked stylish and very handsome. Too bad Arlette hadn’t even opened her eyes when Lou left the apartment.
Now, as Lou stood outside Armand de Rossignol’s mansion, it struck her that there were other people in the world besides Arlette, a universe beyond the apartment where Arlette was probably still in bed. Unless she went out with Chanac, she’d still be there when Lou returned, waiting irritably for Lou to bring her to orgasm, which was taking longer and longer. There were more important matters to consider than who, or what, made Arlette come faster, or about whom she was faking it with, which amounted to the same thing.
Before they’d reached the front steps, Arlette had shrunk, in Lou’s imagination, to the size of the tiny mouse that stole cheese from their cupboard. She winced to think of their dear little mouse, whom Arlette had christened Maurice.
“Is something wrong?” the baroness asked.
“Everything’s right,” said Lou.
If she took a job as the family chauffeur, she’d be using the servants’ entrance. Miss Frost had complained bitterly about the humiliation of “going into service.” But telling a little girl horror stories in a lonely country house was not the same as cruising the most elegant boulevards in Paris in the most luxurious cars. If her bosses weren’t an
gels, Lou could live with that. They were part of French history. Lou would be proud to work for them.
A butler opened the door before they knocked, and a half dozen servants bowed as they entered the ornate front hall. Lou tried to project goodwill. She would be one of them soon.
The baroness said, “Don’t worry. It’s just family. Didi and Armand. His wife and children are nowhere around. Probably whipping themselves or praying facedown on the chapel floor. Unless Armand has murdered them. Relax. I’m only joking.
“During the day he’s a fabulous businessman. But in the evening, when he’s high, his creative side comes out. His vision improves. That’s why I wanted him to meet you with a few pipes of opium under his belt.”
Lou shrugged. She’d gone to an opium den with Arlette. Lou smoked a pipe, then another, but all it did was constipate her for days. Whiskey was her drug. For Arlette, opium was an aphrodisiac. On those evenings Eddie was instructed not to visit. When Eddie slept over, Lou heard them in bed, Arlette practically sobbing. Arlette swore she faked it with Eddie. Lou believed her real sounds were the sounds she made with her.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” the baroness said. “There is nothing to fear. Didi and Armand will see what I see in you. And they will do what I tell them.”
In the parlor a man sat by the fireplace, half sunk in a leather chair.
“Darling!” said the baroness, from across the room. “Lou, this is my husband, Didi de Rossignol. What are you reading so intently you didn’t hear us come in? Don’t get up.”
“Suetonius.” Didi stood. He was tall, and his skin glowed, a freshly scrubbed pink. His straightforward handshake was neutral. He wasn’t trying to find out how male or female Lou was.
The baroness said, “This is Mademoiselle Louisianne Villars. She should be driving for us. The Rossignol 280. She could take it to Montverre and all the way to Le Mans.”
Those were the names of racetracks. This interview was for a different position than Lou had imagined. Her acceptable fantasies—waiting at the florist’s while the baroness bought peonies, cleaning up the ants that crawled from the peonies into the car, calling for the baron at his gentleman’s club—were replaced by diesel fumes and sheer vertiginous joy.
The baron looked Lou up and down.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Why bother? All the great drivers are men.”
The baroness said, “Trust me. This is why you have me and Armand.”
“Look, my dear,” the baron told his wife. “You’re making the poor thing nervous.”
“I’m not nervous,” Lou lied.
“Of course you’re not,” the baroness said. “There’s no reason to be nervous.”
“Please sit.” The baron pointed at a chair across from his.
“Later,” the baroness said. “Maybe. First we’ll look in on Armand.”
The baron said, “I like hiring designers, engineers, technical experts. I can tell when someone loves speed. The person is always tapping. You aren’t tapping, Mademoiselle.”
Lou looked down at her shoes, two twin black dogs asleep on the Persian carpet.
The baroness said, “Mademoiselle Villars was an Olympic hopeful. She’s on the cover of Gabor Tsenyi’s book.”
“I realize that,” said Didi.
“Suetonius,” the baroness murmured. “I’ve always meant to read him.”
She led Lou down a corridor to a large room, darker than the hall. A candle with a beaded shade gave off just enough light to see the figured carpets on the floor and walls covered with brocade. In one corner was a lacquered, canopied bed surrounded by Chinese carvings. The room smelled like a candy store or a pâtisserie.
A man sat up in the Chinese bed. In the flickering light, his eyes shone dully, like onyx pebbles. He said, “Well, hello. Look at you.”
“My brother-in-law,” said the baroness. “Armand, this is Lou Villars.”
“I see what you mean,” he said.
In a life like that of Lou Villars, so thickly populated with strange individuals, it signifies something to say that Armand de Rossignol was one of the strangest.
When he appeared at the 1933 convention organized by the Order of the Legion of Joan of Arc, before a crowd that overflowed the stands at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, he chose to appear on crutches, though he didn’t need them. He was a decorated war hero. Also an aristocrat and the sort of Catholic who would have felt at home in the court of a Spanish king at the height of the Inquisition. He was one of the earliest converts to Opus Dei, which had been founded by Josemaría Escrivá a few years before Armand joined.
It was a miracle that his opium addiction had left his nervous system and his reflexes so intact that he could serve as the trainer and coach who taught Lou Villars the skills she needed to race at the most challenging tracks in Europe. He was, it would be fair to say, another mentor from hell, though ironically, hell was what his sect taught its members how to avoid, with unceasing prayer, constant penitence, and the vigorous and merciless mortification of the flesh.
Lou approached the Chinese bed.
“Come closer,” Armand said. “Stop. That’s more than close enough.”
After a moment he said, “Lily is always right when it comes to the newest style. The trend about to happen. Myself, I have older values, among them the love of Christ. But faith, pure faith, is a luxury a businessman can’t afford. Lily is correct when she says that people will talk if you are our public face, a driver and a fast one. A winner. A record breaker. Is my sister-in-law decadent? Does she dwell in Sodom and Gomorrah? Can one live in two cities at once?”
Why me? Lou wondered to herself.
“Why you?” Armand said. “Because female athletes are rare birds. It will be a coup if we catch one and keep it in our cage. Everyone will notice. As Dr. Johnson said about the dancing dog, just the fact that it can be done. And there is the example of Joan of Arc, whom, I hear, is also important in—”
He stopped in midsentence and slumped against the cushions. A clocked ticked off the seconds, irregularly, it seemed to Lou.
After a while he said, “How could the competition have gotten it so wrong? Bolshevik Jews thinking with their dicks. Hiring gorgeous photogenic girls who know their way around a track. The beauty who will sleep with you if you buy their automobile. Women can’t win, is the problem. Women come in seventh, thirteenth. Pretty women get photographed. But it’s men who buy the cars, and the richest men want the fastest. Women drive, but not as well or as daringly as men. It’s a biological fact. Women set records for endurance. Who cares about endurance? Who wants to watch a marathon? No one has the patience.
“Speed is what matters now, and what will matter in the future. We want a winner. Someone fast. The one who takes home the trophy and whose face is in all the papers. What we want is that rarest of birds: a woman who can win.”
“Like me.” How idiotic Lou sounded! At least it was too dark for him to see her blush.
“Obviously.” Armand sighed. “Like you. Most women are fragile flowers. My wife, for example, is mentally and physically incapable of having sexual relations without a crucifix clutched in her hand. We have three children. The cross is worn smooth.”
Lou didn’t know what to say.
“You’re hired,” he said. “Starting tomorrow. Au revoir.”
He pulled the blanket over his head.
The baroness was nowhere around when Lou left Armand’s room. A maid showed her out. A taxi was waiting to take her back.
She arrived at her apartment to find it ransacked and nearly empty. Not only was Arlette gone but so was the suitcase she’d never unpacked, together with the few household objects—a corkscrew, two wineglasses, a shot glass, an ashtray—that comprised the domestic inventory of their happy home.
Later, Lou would say that this proved the existence of some basic decency in Arlette. She’d waited to finally leave her for Clovis Chanac until the night when Lou started a new life, when the safety net had been put
in place to break Lou’s fall.
Rossignol Motors had been founded by Didi and Armand’s grandfather, a passionate anti-Dreyfusard who’d punched the French president—supposedly by mistake. For several years Rossignol Motors was banned from professional competition, a handicap from which the brand had yet to recover when they hired Lou Villars.
The Rossignol 240 had been the favorite to win the Paris-Madrid race of 1903, the first of the historic automotive disasters. Drivers and pedestrians were killed, cars twisted around trees, charred wrecks smoldered in ditches from Madrid to Monte Carlo. Not only did the Rossignol driver die when he ran into a herd of sheep that some boys in the Pyrenees herded onto the road, not only did he spray a half-mile course with wool and sheep guts, but after he was ejected from the car, his vehicle, minus its driver, struck one of the boys who had set loose the sheep.
So began the succession of mishaps that had kept the Rossignol from joining the first rank of its rivals: Mercedes-Benz, Bugatti, Rolls-Royce. For a fervent French patriot like Armand, the Rossignol’s record was a source of shame. By the time they hired Lou, Didi and Armand knew that their business couldn’t survive much longer without a steady transfusion of funds from the investments of their despised dead father. Didi hid this from his wife, whom he encouraged to live as if their resources had no limits.
From the day Lou showed up for practice at the track outside Paris, Armand de Rossignol combined her professional education with an indoctrination in his extreme political and religious views. He reminded her that she was working not only for her own glory, or for that of Rossignol Motors, but for the love of God and France. For decades, Armand said, auto racing had been controlled by special interest groups who wanted France overrun by the same foreign profiteers who were sucking the country dry and destroying her from within. The village where the Rossignol ran into the sheep had a Communist mayor who instructed the boys to sabotage the French driver for the good of the international proletariat and the profit of Bolshevik Jews.
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 Page 18
