Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  I gave the baroness her photo.

  “In gratitude,” I said. “In gratitude and love.”

  She stared at it for a long time. Then she burst into tears.

  For several minutes, we were both too overcome to speak. Then she thanked me. I thanked her. We kissed.

  I watched from the window as she got in her car and drove away.

  And finally now, to sleep. I promise to write you soon, dear ones.

  Till then and forever, I am your loving son,

  Gabor

  From A Baroness by Night

  BY LILY DE ROSSIGNOL

  IF THERE IS an afterlife, I hope they will throw a party for the angels who on earth were the subjects of famous photos. There will be a carousel for those tragic little girls who sat for Lewis Carroll, nourishing meals for the Dust Bowl families. The lovers Gabor shot in cafés can devour each other forever. We’ll visit with Baudelaire and Bernhardt, courtesy of Nadar, and with that funny Lartigue lady wearing more fur than her dogs. No need to invite Lou Villars and Arlette, who will be in hell.

  We will recognize one another, angels with faces fixed forever in black and white and in two dimensions. There will be many things that we won’t need to say, though I wish that we would. I would like to know how the other angels felt when they saw their pictures, or when (just for a laugh) they read some critic’s ruling on what their image meant. Is immortality a sufficient reward for being tethered eternally to one moment in a whole life?

  Gabor’s photo of me at Brooklands became a symbol of the Machine Age. Many critics had the stunning originality to compare my profile with the hood ornament on my beautiful Juno-Diane coupe, a decorative tribute to me that my husband and brother-in-law designed. Do they really imagine that the resemblance was accidental, or that it took Gabor’s eye to discover the likeness?

  There must be other angels who, even in heaven, can’t look at their portraits without having to fight back tears. I wept the first time I saw mine. How shy and proud Gabor was, almost apologetic.

  “In gratitude,” he said. “In gratitude and love.” He wanted me to know how much it meant to him that I’d stopped by on the evening of the verdict against Lou. I’d known he would be upset about how his work was used in the trial. In fact he was very blue—and very happy to see me. It was almost as if my presence was a sign that he would be absolved for whatever sin he thought he’d committed.

  I had convinced myself that I hadn’t been imagining the new erotic tension that had lately arisen between us. I hadn’t known what to make of it. I’d decided to wait and see.

  Knowing how grateful he would be if I visited that night, I’d dared to imagine a seamless arc, a rainbow of desire and pleasure we had only to follow from the first tentative, awkward touch to a kiss to the heights of passion. I had no idea how we would scale those heights or how rarefied the air would be, if and when we arrived.

  But when Gabor showed me my photo, I focused on the Juno-Diane. Only after that did I think: who is that old woman? The car looked ageless and very beautiful. I looked tired and tightly wound. I understood that my fantasies would never come true in this life.

  He said he wanted me to have it. He said, in gratitude. He said, in gratitude and love. He was the one who used the word love. I heard it the way I wanted.

  Though he and I were the same age, it’s different for women and men, as it is for dogs and humans. His Suzanne wasn’t yet thirty and had the breasts to prove it. What could I have been thinking when I went to his house that night? I suppose I’d hoped to cheer him up. I’d succeeded, if only slightly. It was time for me to leave.

  Gabor and I would never be together. We would never fall in love. Perhaps it could have happened when we were twenty. We were twice that now.

  Then why, you might ask, had he said love? In gratitude and love.

  I was about to thank him and say good night when he took me in his arms. All I will say is that it would have been better for our friendship—and much better for my pride—if I hadn’t gone there that night.

  How can a woman surrender to love, transcend her reserve and hesitations, immolate herself in the heat of her lover’s body, when all she can think of is how to hide the fact that she has never done this before? The only thing that mattered to me was that Gabor not find out that his sophisticated patroness was a middle-aged virgin.

  We were gentle and patient with each other, kind and forgiving as we tried something that didn’t work. Tried something else and failed. I wanted time to go backward and start again, so I could fix what had gone wrong.

  We were still friends. We would always be friends. But we would never be lovers.

  As soon as I saw Gabor’s photo of me, I’d known what was going to happen, and what it would be like. But I tried to put it out of my mind as we went through the motions of love. Or some of the motions. Maybe it was the photo’s fault. Maybe I was distracted by what I’d seen in the image, and Gabor sensed that distraction, and that was the end of that.

  After we stopped trying, we laughed, as if to reassure ourselves that this was just the newest of the little private jokes that formed the bedrock of our friendship.

  The next morning I showed Didi my portrait. I said, “You’ve been asking where is the photo of me? Well, all right, here it is.”

  I turned and gazed out the window. An organ grinder had stationed himself directly across the street. His shriveled monkey in its tiny bellhop’s uniform hopped into the arms of a girl who screamed, and the monkey screeched back.

  “A beautiful photo,” Didi said, “of a beautiful woman. It’s striking, really, how our fabricators were able to make that hood ornament on our Juno-Diane look so much like you.”

  I cried when my husband said that. I pretended that they were tears of laughter at the mayhem the monkey was causing.

  For days, I’d look at the photo and sob. At last I filed it away. I think it got lost in the war. It resurfaced in a collection of Gabor’s racetrack photos, At the Speed of Light, and later in a gallery show near the Spanish Steps in Rome. By then he’d been dead for a decade, having succumbed to a heart attack in the arms of his beloved Suzanne.

  When I saw it on the gallery wall, even all those years later, I broke down and wept. Elegant Romans edged away from me. But I didn’t care. I cried for what happened that night and for what didn’t happen and for everything that happened later. For Gabor, and for what we’d lost, for the years since I’d seen him.

  In the gallery near the Via Condotti, I stared at Gabor’s photo through the blur of tears. How young and pretty that woman was! By that woman I meant me. It had taken all that time for me to understand that the subject of the photograph was not the car but the woman.

  Do the other photographed angels grieve for the irretrievable past? When I look at that photo, I think: too bad that woman doesn’t know that she is still young and beautiful enough to make the photographer love her. What a pity she doesn’t know that he already does.

  From The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars

  BY NATHALIE DUNOIS

  Chapter Ten: After the Trial

  BEFORE HER PROFESSIONAL license to race was revoked as punishment for challenging traditional gender roles, Lou Villars was the favorite to win the 1935 Women’s International race at Montverre. She’d trained to drive the Rossignol 280 for France, against an Alfa Romeo, a Rolls-Royce, and a Mercedes-Benz, each driven by a woman representing her home country. After Lou was disqualified, the competition was won by Inge Wallser, in the Mercedes.

  The Rossignols promised to help Lou get her license restored. They hired lawyers to argue her case in the Third Tribunal. And they continued paying the rent on her cottage near the track.

  Not long after the trial, the Rossignols arrived, unannounced, at her door. Lou had been expecting them. She’d heard they were talking to other drivers: men. They wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. It had been reckless of them to bet that the racing world was ready for a woman in trousers, though they�
��d been right about Lou’s ability to get attention for the brand. Unfortunately for Lou, the Rossignols were selling cars, not newspapers. A win at the track was worth more than a driver people gossiped about, a minor celebrity whom the public had already forgotten.

  Lou opened her door to find the baroness wearing the racing-inspired outfit—goggles, leather, hardware—she’d often worn to the track. She brushed wispy kisses onto Lou’s cheeks and gave her an affectionate hug, which seemed odd, considering she’d come to fire her. Maybe they weren’t firing her. Or maybe it wasn’t odd. Sometimes Lou trusted the Rossignols. Mostly she trusted no one. Armand had said to trust no one, not even the mechanics.

  The baroness’s husband looked Lou up and down and said, “Mademoiselle Lou, allow me to say that you are looking terrific.”

  Lou had always liked Didi. She admired how he’d found a way to love boys without anyone much objecting. No one objected to anything if you were rich enough. Only now did Lou realize that. It made her like Didi less.

  Didi and the baroness strolled into Lou’s cottage without waiting to be invited. They were paying the rent. They assumed Armand was right behind them, but he stalled in the doorway, swaying slightly, like a building in an earthquake. At the same moment Didi and Lou lunged, caught him, and propped him up. He walked between them, on his toes, with his back stiffly arched. He paused at Lou’s altar to Joan of Arc, where he shuddered, crossed himself, and lurched on.

  Lou and Didi deposited him on the sofa. He slumped and closed his eyes. A soft, rhythmic, nasal whistle was the only sign of his presence. Lou was grateful to Armand. She’d loved him, in a way. She regretted to see the condition in which he’d been brought to witness the end of her association with his family and their cars.

  Lou invited Didi and the baroness to sit, but they chose to stand, as if their vigilant postures might counterbalance Armand’s collapse. The baroness prowled the background while Didi spoke to Lou in the language of business: reassessment, trial, direction, avenue, approach. They had come to fire her. But Didi used every word except that one.

  It was what Lou had anticipated. What good was a racer who couldn’t race? Still, she was caught off guard by the plans they had made for her future.

  “Confidentially,” said the baroness, “our friends are always complaining that it’s impossible to find a good garage mechanic in Paris. There isn’t one you can rely on in the entire city. Lou, you know more about cars than anyone. You’re a celebrity driver and a famous . . .” The baroness’s impish grin expressed the impossibility of attempting to define what Lou was famous for.

  The Rossignols would lease Lou a garage with a reasonable rent. It would be an investment. Their friends would bring her their autos. She could fix cars and sell motoring accessories at a substantial markup. Her clientele would grow. The Rossignols could quit supporting her, and Lou would be set for life.

  They’d trained her to drive fast, to win races, pose for photos, talk to reporters. And now it turned out that her destiny was crawling under some fat lazy banker’s sedan and selling him doeskin driving gloves for his plump boudin blanc fingers.

  If things don’t work out at the track, you can always be a mechanic. How she and Armand had laughed at their little joke. Was it something his family discussed? Had this been their fallback plan from the start? It only made Lou angrier to realize that she should be grateful.

  Armand’s eyes were rolled back in his head. Of course she would agree to their plan. The country was in the midst of history’s most prolonged Depression. There was no money, no work. Lou would be lucky to have a job. Not just a job, but a business. She knew one former driver who was sleeping under a bridge.

  Lou said, “Thank you. What a brilliant idea. When can I start working?”

  The Rossignols found Lou a windowless shack near the Gare du Nord. At first it reeked of dead mice. The stench of gasoline was an improvement. She could live above the garage. Her sheets and pillowcases stank of motor oil.

  The first six months were paid for. After that she was on her own. The owner was a Russian Jew who kept raising the rent. Each incremental increase confirmed Lou’s negative view of his race.

  One evening Lou went to have a drink at the Chameleon Club. Yvonne asked Fat Bernard to let Lou know, gently and diplomatically, that she was no longer welcome. Yvonne was sorry, but the trial had attracted too much attention. The club had lasted as long as it had because everyone was discreet.

  Lou’s exile from the Chameleon was only mildly surprising. She shouldn’t have expected a Hungarian to be loyal.

  Lou saw Armand at political rallies, supported by an entourage of handsome, strapping veterans hired to keep him upright. Sometimes she wasn’t sure if Armand recognized her or not. When he did, he was friendly and polite. How was business? Fine, thank you.

  In fact Lou had plenty of business. She worked fourteen hours a day. The baroness and Didi stopped by to remark on how well she was doing. After their visits, bile rose in her throat.

  Occasionally she closed the garage for a few hours and went to meet married clients. Sometimes these women rented hotel rooms. Sometimes she visited their homes. In accordance with her rule against mixing work with romance, Lou always ended these affairs after one afternoon.

  Most mornings, the only way that Lou could get out of bed was by telling herself that she was fortunate to have a bed to get out of. The only rays of light that brightened her dark night of the soul were the trips she still made, once or twice a month, to speak to provincial sports clubs. The Rossignols had sold her a sedan destined for the junk heap that she restored and got on the road. She loved the long solitary drives, the cheap traveling salesmen’s hotels, the attentive crowds of women unconsciously stroking their biceps as she spoke.

  One evening, in Nantes, the audience was so large that the venue had to be moved from a church hall to a barn. The ladies of the Nantes Gymnastics League showed off their fitness by rushing across the cowshed with stacks of folding chairs.

  A few minutes into her lecture, Lou felt a new spirit move through her. In a brave and confident voice, she told the crowd that she knew they’d heard her sad story. But she hadn’t come all this way just to rehash a legal scandal. Nor did she plan to compromise their dignity and her own by explaining, yet again, why she chose to dress like a man and why she had every right to do so.

  That was exactly why they had come. But before they had time to be disappointed, Lou promised them a chance to rise above all that. She would tell them how their government, corrupted by foreign influence, had stolen her God-given right to make an honest living. The very same government that, by raising taxes, permitting uncontrolled immigration, weakening the military, failing to control the national debt, and fostering skyrocketing unemployment, was making it impossible for them to feed their families and provide better lives for their children.

  She’d come to tell them that their problems could be solved if they were willing to sacrifice, to transcend their personal interests and become part of something larger. Their needs would be met, their nation restored to its former glory—a process that could start with sports and physical fitness. Who didn’t want their destinies to be more heroic, to surrender to something higher than the question of who cheated which sibling out of an inheritance and who was sleeping with whose husband?

  In a spiffy suit, with a cigarette idling between her lips, Lou Villars was promising that something different could happen. But what? She ended before she had to explain what this new world would look like. Armand had never elaborated, so why should she?

  After her speech, she was mobbed by more fans than she’d had when she raced or when she and Arlette had played the Chameleon. It made perfect sense that the women of France would respond so openheartedly to a woman in a suit. After all, she wasn’t the first. Joan of Arc had paved the way. The vision to look beyond what a person wore was deeply rooted in the French, paradoxically the most fashion-conscious nation on the planet.

  Lou mad
e friends wherever she went. Soon there were so many she had to organize them in her mind, alphabetically and by region. There was Abelia from the Ardennes, who told her husband that the money she made teaching tennis came from selling aubergines in the market. Berthe from Bordeaux, whose lecherous choirmaster had shown her drawings of a Greek discus thrower. Clara from Caen, who told no one but Lou how often she swam too far out in the ocean, Danielle from Drancy, who ran to escape her dread that a catastrophe was about to befall her town. They took up collections to bring her back and boldly ignored the censure of the French Women’s National Athletic Association.

  When Lou spoke to these sisters in sport, when she shared their nutritious regional delicacies, smoked their cigarettes, drank their wine, and spent the night in their beds, she was content, or almost content. But on Monday morning a grumpy Cinderella was back in coveralls at the garage.

  Lou tried not to imagine a future in which she’d be fixing cars after the local clubs tired of her and wanted to hear a new voice. For example, the voice of an athlete who’d competed in next summer’s Olympics. She tried not to think about the games from which she’d been excluded. Regret was for cowards and weaklings.

  On good days, she convinced herself: there was honor in hard work. Then a client would mention a sporting event, or she’d see a flyer for the Garden of Eden, the club Chanac had opened for Arlette, and which, she’d heard, was popular with right-wing journalists and city officials.

  One morning a Delage pulled into the garage: a midnight blue ocean liner piloted by a uniformed cop with another cop beside him. In the backseat was Clovis Chanac.

  Lou knew he must have approved her license to operate the garage, a mystifyingly generous act. Now the spiteful pleasure visible on his face told Lou he’d been waiting, calmly planning the fun he was going to have today.