American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  “Can I ask you something?” said Ramsey between swallows.

  “Bien sûr.”

  “When did you know, I mean, when did you know you were, uh, interested in, well, um.”

  “Les femmes?”

  “Yes.”

  Josephine rolled over so that she was lying flat on her back. “My first two husbands were named Willie. Willie Wells and Willie Baker.” She hoisted her penciled eyebrow. “Took two divorces for me to realize I don’t need a willie in my life.”

  Ramsey reached across Josephine to get to the plate of petit fours, her forearm glancing against a body molted of its theatrical feathers and fur, her nose filling with the scent of hair unleashed by restless sleep from the slick grip of pomade. “When can I see you again?” Ramsey asked, chewing on a glacé.

  “Tomorrow we go on tour.”

  “How long?”

  “A month.”

  “Where’ll you be touring?”

  In a sudden but unsurprising reversal of demeanor, Josephine sprang from the bed, saying, “Can’t remember. Ne t’inquiète pas. I’ll be in touch.” She wrapped herself in a kimono printed with butterflies. “Jo-Jo will show you out.”

  “Who?”

  Josephine’s bodyguard was named Jo-Jo Chowdhury. “I may have twice her name,” he was fond of saying in regard to his boss, “yet I am but half that woman.” Formerly a security guard at the Galeries Lafayette, Jo-Jo was a stout man roughly five feet in height, with a neck as thick as some men’s thighs. His pulse strained against the top button of his shirt as he stood next to Ramsey in the elevator’s hydraulic cage. She wondered how many times throughout the tenure of his position the button had been rocketed into flight by some fearsome display of strength.

  “If you tell me your address, mademoiselle, I’d be delighted to give you the directions on how to get home,” Jo-Jo said to Ramsey, leading her out of the elevator and opening the front door to the building.

  “I think I can manage. Have a lovely day.”

  Despite Josephine’s about-face earlier, Ramsey was having a lovely day. A smile began to take hold as she looked onto the Avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie and tried to figure out the best route to her apartment. Who cared if she had gotten brushed aside? She was in Paris! At this very moment, with the city spread out before her, anything was possible. She could hop onto the zinc comptoir at the Falstaff and scissor her legs for a crowd of whistling sailors. She could steal the hat right off a police officer’s head and lob it on top of a Metro station’s glass canopy. She could get her hair shingled at one of the most fashionable salons, go skipping down a lime avenue, and let a windswept strand hang over one eye as a stranger lit her cigarette. In the middle of the sidewalk, Ramsey was considering how best to enjoy such a beautiful afternoon when, suddenly, she found herself surrounded by the vibrant, giggling bodies of four children.

  They seemed to be playing a game of tag. Two boys and two girls, all toddlers of varying age, the children ran circles around Ramsey, one chasing the other, as though she were a maypole, slowly being wrapped in ribbons. The girls were twins.

  Ramsey knew without doubt who all of them were, not only because of those eyebrows on one, that mouth on another, but also because of the soot on their foreheads, which she believed had to have been placed there so that, on a Parisian street, she could more easily spot them in the crowd.

  “Les enfants! Venez ici! Onyva!” said a young woman, corralling the children into a cluster. She guided them down the sidewalk. “Dépêchez-vous. Votre mère vous attend.”

  Her joints going loose in her body, Ramsey watched as the four children were taken away. She didn’t know what to do. She had no idea what to say. Finally, after the children and their nanny had rounded a corner and were out of sight, Ramsey took a long breath, flexed her hands, and stumbled toward the curb, where she was sick into a refuse cart.

  * * *

  Two weeks after Ash Wednesday, Ramsey sat in a café on Boulevard St.-Michel, trying to think about her husband, Arthur, but instead thinking only of Josephine.

  They had not spoken since the first time they had been together. Over the past two weeks, Ramsey had relived that night and the subsequent morning in her mind, concentrating on the taste, the aroma, the sound, the touch—sheer physicality combined with a sense of being unmoored from the physical world. If Ramsey’s life had begun as three-dimensional, she considered in the quiet café, and if the events from the last few years had left her as two, even one, then making love with Josephine slung-shot her past three-dimensions and into four, six, ten, a hundred.

  Ramsey chose to focus on the pleasure of that night as a means of avoiding, often without success, the memory of what had happened outside Josephine’s apartment building the next day. Those four children weren’t really hers, Ramsey knew, but she couldn’t shake the feeling they were. Was she going crazy? Ever since that day on the sidewalk she’d been seeing other incarnations of them all over the city—her daughters asleep in a double pram while being strolled through the quartier, her sons chasing after a pigeon around the parterres in a municipal garden. The sight of them deboned her like a fish.

  “Excusez-moi,” Ramsey said to the waiter. She then asked him to bring her some stationery, a request whose diligent, unquestioning, routine fulfillment was one of Ramsey’s favorite aspects of Parisian cafés. Seconds later, the waiter placed pen and paper on the table. Ramsey began with “Dear Arthur.”

  Do you ever think about what we would have named them? I do. Perhaps a family name, from yours or mine. In the South we have an odd but fair tradition of giving children their mother’s maiden name. I think “Forster Landau” would have been a wonderful name for a firstborn son. Fitting, too, as it sounds so much like that of a movie star. The star maker’s son with a movie star’s name. For our daughters, the twins, I would have liked to have named one of them Fiona, after my grandmother. She would have liked that.

  At her table in the café, Ramsey stopped writing, unable to see past those names, Forster and Fiona. She set the pen down and took a sip of coffee. The cup rattled as she placed it back in the saucer.

  That drew the attention of the man sitting a few tables away. For him the sound of a coffee cup rattling was similar to a siren going off in the night. It meant the person holding the cup needed his help. The other things that drew the man’s attention were, though he was not aware of them as such, matters of chance’s intrusion in the trajectory of a life. Over the past two weeks, Ramsey had not managed to keep down much food, which had left her cheeks gaunt, and earlier that morning, she’d been too distracted to notice the pull paysan she’d put on had a hole in its sleeve. The man followed the apparently near-starving, near-penniless woman as she walked out of the café.

  “Mademoiselle, is this your necklace?” he asked her after one block. From his fingers dangled a gold necklace with a sapphire gemstone. “I believe it fell off back there at your table.”

  “Do I know you?”

  Vincent de la Baume, besides being a gifted mythomane, was the son of Sephardic Jews and a member of the Camelots du Roi who, after a twelve-year stint in La Santé prison, would become known as Vinnie the Bomb. Presently, he worked as a “wholesaler” or “meat man” for more than half a dozen “hump houses” throughout Paris. It was his job to keep them stocked with girls. On his daily hunts, whenever he came across a desperate character, Vincent would claim to have found her necklace, which, if she said it wasn’t hers, he would insist that she keep, thus ensuring loyalty from the soon-to-be fille de joie with a subconscious advance of wages.

  This woman now was not a typical one. She steadfastly refused the necklace. “D’accord,” Vincent said to Ramsey. He offered her one of his brand, and she heartened him by taking it. Together they walked down the boulevard smoking Gauloises Blues.

  “Please excuse me for the frankness I have, mademoiselle, but you seem to be someone in need of assistance.”

  “Assistance?”

  “There is a phr
ase for which I am now searching my mind. ‘Wit’s end.’ Yes. You seem to be someone who is at her wit’s end.”

  “So, I’m that obvious, huh?”

  “What luck you are now finding yourself in! There exist in this city men who specialize in helping women like yourself. I am such a man.”

  Ramsey had no doubt he was a pimp. It only took one glance at the guy. Nobody but un maquereau would wear a scarf made of Valenciennes bobbin lace.

  Still, he was a welcome distraction, from the children singing in a school playground across the street and from the note in her pocket that would never be sent. Ramsey was almost thankful. The least she could do was listen to what this man had to say.

  * * *

  “Another round?” asked the bartender at Summer Solstice just outside Los Angeles on the night of November 2, 1975. The old woman, his last customer, shook her head. She could barely keep her eyes open. “Want me to call you a cab?” the bartender said. “I think I should call you a cab.”

  “No, thanks.”

  The old woman laid a hundred-dollar bill on the countertop. She staggered outside, got in her car, and cranked the engine. After the wreck there would barely be enough of a body left to test for alcohol.

  “She was really impressed by some car in the parking lot,” the bartender told a police officer the next day. “Last thing she said, while she was walking out the door, was ‘sick transit.’ I remember exactly. Sick transit. It must have been the Chevy Camaro one of our regulars drives.”

  Nearly four decades prior to that incident, during her Paris sabbatical, Ramsey Forster whispered the first two words of the Latin phrase that meant “thus passes the glory of the world” as she walked into the parlor of Le Chabanais. All around her stood young women in varying degrees of undress. Tapestries hung along the walls next to oil paintings that wouldn’t have been out of place in The Sweetest Thing. Chandeliers twinkled overhead like those in the lobby of the Memphis Peabody. Built on the site of the Hôtel Chabanais Saint-Ponges, the brothel known as Le Chabanais was considered the epitome of Parisian grandeur and elegance. Vincent de la Baume thought it would be just the right sort of venue for a woman like Ramsey Forster.

  A particularly strong dose of Veronal helped her acclimate that night. The drug reminded Ramsey of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a book that had played almost as large a role as Perrault’s fairy tales in her childhood desire to escape the confines of her home state, her family name, her entire country. Rather than make her larger or smaller, though, the drug gave her a sense of being at once present and absent, quantum and infinite, similar to how she’d felt during her too-brief time with Josephine. The drug made Ramsey extradimensional. Only in that condition could she consider accepting the universe’s refusal to apologize.

  What does anything matter? she thought, gazing around the parlor. Nothing mattered. That was the key. For the person Ramsey was right then, it did not matter that she had lost four children in two years, nor did it matter that Josephine hadn’t sent her so much as a petit-bleu in over a month. Was she still on tour? Was she already back? Had she used Ramsey as a body, a goddamned receptacle in which to expend a moment’s pleasure as oblivious morons discussed Anything Goes in the background and the stench of filthy, sweaty coats engulfed the room? The answers to those questions didn’t matter to the woman draping herself across a chaise longue while getting browsed by a group of tuxedoed men.

  “Would you please join me for the evening?” one of them asked her.

  “Non,” Ramsey said, causing a girl across the room to chirp in shock. Ramsey stood from the chaise longue and walked through the customers, those sentient tuxedos, all of whom grew, as she’d hoped, obediently still and quiet. She’d be damned if she’d let them have all the fun. Insouciant yet deliberate, as if she were choosing jewelry to wear for an evening out, Ramsey studied the men, dragging her fingers across their shoulders, tugging at their cuffs, rubbing their lapels, pondering the relative pertness of their butts. “You’ll do,” she said to one with hair in the style of a Roman emperor.

  The man said, “Merci,” and as he led Ramsey from the parlor, he glanced back at those who were not chosen and beamed at their dejection.

  Le Chabanais was famous for its theme rooms. Replete with furniture of the Ancien Régime, the Louis XVI boudoir was decorated in homage to Marie Antoinette and the Louis XV boudoir in homage to Madame de Pompadour. There was a Moorish room. There was a Pompeian room. The Torture Chamber included all manner of whips, gags, flails, handcuffs, crops, clamps, and leather blindfolds. The Chinese Pagoda featured a variety of Oriental rugs, bamboo screens, lamps, fans, stools, and a platform bed. At the 1900 World Fair, the Japanese Room won a prize for its exemplary “French refinement and taste.”

  On Ramsey’s evening at Le Chabanais, the tuxedoed man led her to the Hindu Room, which had once been the favorite of the future King Edward VII. “Does this room meet your satisfaction?” the man asked Ramsey.

  “I suppose.”

  She pushed her arms into his jacket, helping him slide out of it, and began to loosen his bow tie. Ramsey thought of herself as an actress playing a role. No longer was she the girl from Mississippi who had married up, or the woman who could not do the one thing only women could, or the girl at a party in New York following a man into the coatroom. She was a lady of the evening, someone whose daily expenses were clothes, hair set, manicure, and drinks, someone for whom the bidet was the most vital bathroom fixture, the corset drawer the most necessary in the bureau.

  Judging by the man’s English, not just the way but also the fact he spoke it, Ramsey guessed he was Hungarian. He seemed more nervous than she was. Most likely in his late thirties, the man did not appear to Ramsey, as she guided his hands up her body, the type who would have never visited a maison close, not too young and not too old. She found a possible answer in the wedding ring on his finger.

  “Please excuse me for that,” he said, wrenching the ring off and placing it in his pocket. “I should have remembered.”

  In an attempt at playfulness, Ramsey said, “And what will the missus think of your being in a place such as this?” looking up at him through her eyelashes.

  “Nothing.”

  “Pourqui?”

  “She died three months ago.”

  He blinked away the tears that had briefly welled. What a strange thing. Ramsey had no idea how to respond to such naked emotion from a person whose name she did not even know. Until that moment he had simply been the Hungarian.

  That he would reveal a matter so personal unhinged something inside her. Near the foot of the rococo four-poster bed, kissing the man on his mouth and then turning her back to him and wrapping his arms around her and then swiveling her neck and kissing the man on his mouth again, Ramsey misremembered one of the lessons her mother had taught her when she was growing up. “Sometimes the world can get so biting you have to start biting back” became in her memory “When the world gets too biting, just hold out your hand.”

  Ramsey loosened the grasp of the Hungarian. She leaned over the bed, pressed her cheek into it, and spread her arms wide.

  * * *

  Ramsey’s evening at Le Chabanais concluded with an “accidental” spillage of wine on her dress and mumbled comments from the staff that she and her fancy manners should go slum somewhere else. She couldn’t say she blamed them. Women who worked there out of necessity had a right to hate those who only pretended to. Still, Ramsey was disappointed, because of how much she had enjoyed her encounter with the Hungarian. It had made her feel whole again. The ounce of pleasure had outweighed the pound of pain. She’d regained control by relinquishing it. If she couldn’t replenish that sense of control, satisfaction, and wholeness at Le Chabanais, Ramsey decided, then who the hell cared? She’d find it somewhere else.

  At the boîtes de nuit patronized by the café-terrace set, Ramsey convinced everyone she was a Russian aristocrat waiting for her Nansen passport, stateless and destitute, and she did no
t refuse when they offered to pick up her check. She got blind drunk with rag pickers, vidangeurs, navvies, and Zouaves on leave from their regiment. She invited clochards to join her for Vouvray and escargots at the city’s most upscale restaurants. In the restroom of a Coq d’Or dance hall, she snorted the white powder a waitress had said would “bring the universe into submission,” and at a street fair in the Place d’Italie, while the trainers were distracted, she opened the cages for the exotic birds and filled the Parisian sky with streaks of emerald-green, ocean-blue, fire-red, and lemon-yellow. One night, driving through the city in a stolen Renault with a dancer named Artemis the Heathen, she hit a slick spot in the road caused by a leaking Richer pump, and after bringing the spinning-out car to a curbside stop, she winked at her startled passenger and said, “Always turn into the skid.”

  Seldom during those few weeks did Ramsey spend the night at her own apartment, a result, though she would never admit it, of her eternal struggle to rout convention and her utter distaste for sleeping alone. On the evening of March 22, 1937, after “puffing bamboo” with a hurdy-gurdy who had a crush on her, she returned to the apartment for, as far as she cared or could recall, the first time that month. Ramsey wandered down the sidewalk and through the entrance to her building, whistling some erratic melody, unaware she was being watched by two men across the street, one in a parked car and one by a lamppost, neither of whom was yet aware of the other.

  “Mademoiselle! So good you return!” yelled the concierge from his loge. He reached under his desk and held up a stack of envelopes. “Votre courier. Please, I give to you, yes? Tellement de courier!”

  Ramsey mumbled, “Later, okay?” before getting on the elevator.

  In her apartment, ignoring the pervasive scent of withered flowers, she poured herself a glass of Malaga, turned on the radio, and sank into the crushed-velvet cushions of a settee. She disappeared into an absence of thought, the voice from the radio merely a backdrop of sound. “. . . an encyclical of Pope Pious XI against the German Reich . . . Mit brennender Sorge . . . document condemns the exaltation of any one race over another . . . idolatry of State is still idolatry . . . Herr Hitler . . . but national pride does not absolve hatred or the . . .”