Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (12 page)

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 peacock 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.

No one knows what became of Sim. Supposedly the Corsican mob caught up with him, but no one believed that either. I heard he went home to Poughkeepsie and moved back in with his mom.

If one could stand the boredom, one could map this century and a chunk of the last by tracing the craggy highs and lows of currency valuation. Certainly that determined the great population migrations. Why does someone leave country A for country B? And not just your poor huddled masses yearning to be etcetera. As my sainted Pop used to say, The rich eat chicken, it's cheaper. That's how they got rich. A millionaire always turns off the lights when he leaves the room.

Will the future believe that a generation of artists migrated to Paris purely for the privilege of pissing against the same wall Baudelaire pissed on? Or will anyone think to cost-compare the price of a hovel in Montparnasse with the equivalent dump in Newark—and
then
ask why so many American geniuses came for the free rent, free food, free wine, and—ta da!—free love.

None of this is lost on the French, who are not exactly the world's least mercenary individuals. When the first tourists are sighted arriving for April in Paris, the hotel rates triple. And the bona fide artists who'd made it through the winter fight for the coziest spot under the Austerlitz Bridge.

Then came 1929. No sooner had the stock market crashed than letters began arriving: Dear Artistic Genius, we regret to inform you that Mummy and Daddy can no longer send you the regular monthly pittance. As a matter of fact, dear Daddy has just jumped out the window! And on his way down he hit a pedestrian whose wretched widow is suing us for our last million.

So the “artists” went home to put their affairs back in order, to fire the remaining child-laborers and evict the holdout tenement dwellers. The Right Bank jewelry shops felt the pain. Real estate took a hit. There was a fire sale on châteaux whose owners were back in Rhode Island.

Some friends left, and some pretty girls who liked buying everyone drinks. Otherwise I hardly noticed the change except to register the blessed absence of that sinusoidal Yankee twang murdering English and switching over to murder tourist French. I still get teensy, sporadic checks from my ex-wife Beedie, God bless her. Her bootlegger husband has adopted little Walt. The gangster business is thriving.

Unemployment was nothing new. My visa had long since expired. I'd lost my proofreading job. Every once in a century I got a writing assignment. Poverty is a bulwark against being swept in and out by the tide of money coming and going. It's a kind of stability that no sane person would choose.

What's that sound I'm hearing? The slamming shut of books? You readers turning these pages on the increasingly slim chance that the payoff will be food and wine, Paris, sex, café life, and art—just about now you're thinking: I didn't buy this book so some loser could lecture me about economics.

Though what is as sexy, as sweetly taboo as money? So secret, so unspeakable even among dear friends? How much did Daddy leave you? How much did you get for that painting? How did you buy that fancy car with no visible means of employment? I have friends who tell me about every kinky sex act, the lies they tell, the crimes they commit, their intestinal complaints. But they shut up like bad shellfish when you ask what they paid for their house.

I understand. I do. You don't want to hear me talk about cash or the lack thereof. You already know what the smelly old pauper will say. He's going to try to make you feel good about how little you have, or guilty about how much. So to set your mind at ease, I'll return to the subject of sex and slowly work my way back to the topic of dollars and cents.

I'd gotten over my broken heart. I'd forgotten about Suzanne with the help of a dancer named Fatima I'd met at the Chameleon Club.

My friend Gabor and his baroness had been spending a lot of time there. And for some mysterious reason, they liked taking me along. I absorbed or diffused something. I didn't want to know what. I was like packing material, keeping something unbroken.

What made it even stranger was that the baroness didn't like me. From the minute we met, it was clear—for reasons too complicated and tedious to explain—that she and I had no sexual chemistry whatsoever. Which in a way was a relief, though we despised each other for it.

Was she so shallow that her only desire was to stave off boredom? Or shallower still: a spoiled, stylish automaton attuned to the frequency of fashion that only rich women can hear? Or was it all about narcissistic vanity and pride, so that when she looked at Gabor and me, or even at the dancers, all she saw was someone ignoring
her
?

And what was she, exactly? A pretty French girl from nowhere who'd worked as an extra in Hollywood and found herself a wealthy, good-natured, homosexual husband willing to bankroll any life she wanted, as long as she left him alone. Her brother-in-law was a right-wing religious nut with an opium habit he blamed on a bogus war wound.

For a woman I would never sleep with in this lifetime, the baroness Lily de Rossignol has staked out a great deal of territory in my overpopulated brain. But power is always fascinating, power and (to return to my subject) money. Why do some rich and powerful people only like to be around other rich and powerful people, while others, like the baroness, prefer the artistic and eccentric?

Sometimes I watched her at the Chameleon Club. What was she seeing when she stared at the dance floor, predatory and alert, like an animal hunting? Hunting what? Information. One problem is, she's a woman. Really, what
do
they want? Gabor simply wanted to take everyone's pictures. He gazed at the couples like a kid too shy to ask for a date.

For a long time the Chameleon Club had a select, loyal clientele, but suddenly it was the rage. Business picked up when the Americans left. It was always too much for them, frankly. Now it drew crowds of upper-class French kids, artists, film stars, socialites, diplomats, and bankers. From time to time one heard that the old-time butches were threatening to relocate, but they were having too much fun being regulars at a popular club with a famous floor show.

The show was called the Chameleon Review. Girls dressed as boys and vice versa. You needed a forensics expert to tell them apart. You might think it would be a challenge to find two six-foot African bodybuilders of indeterminate gender performing strenuous duets to a score that alternated Tchaikovsky with jungle drums. But Yvonne had done it, with the help of her choreographer, Pavel, who is an artist. Under his direction, cheap cabaret was pure surrealist theater.

The shows used to change fairly frequently, but the current program—“By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea”—had been running for a while. Water sloshes on the stage, and as the dancers and acrobats flop around, their fish costumes get wet and so transparent they might as well be naked. But the appeal was not about nakedness. Paris was full of nudie reviews.

The show gave you a giddy, bubbly sensation deep in your chest, like a swallow of pricey champagne. It wasn't great art, you knew that. But you couldn't stop watching. You could feel your brain expanding with each tiny shock to your unexamined ideas of what it means to be male or female, an octopus or a human.

One bright star was bound to emerge. And that stellar creature was Arlette—a slip of a thing with the body of a wood nymph and the voice of the hag who lives in the tree trunk. She played the little mermaid and sang a song she'd written, in which dirty double entendres were mixed with obnoxious references to the brave, handsome, superior French and the cowardly, ugly, inferior everyone else.

The “plot” had something to do with the mermaid nearly drowning. Sailors from various nations and ethnic groups try to save her, or fuck her, or both. They all fail miserably—she bats them away like water bugs and goes back to drowning—until the French sailor gets the job done. Sex and patriotism are an unbeatable combination, even for people who imagine they are rebels because they like to dress up. Could a mermaid almost drown? No one bothered explaining. It's hard to describe the experience of hearing a pretty girl with a voice like a cat yowling in the alley sing a terrible song—and being equally and simultaneously nauseated and aroused.

When Arlette's song ended, she hugged and soul-kissed chunky Lou, who played the French sailor who saves her. Lou half squatted, half sat on the air, and the mermaid rubbed her groin between the sailor's open legs. It was dirtier than any sex show, hotter than any French postcard, though the models on those cards wear a lot less than the two girls onstage. The hard-ons their embraces inspired were intensified by gossip about their offstage affair.

The first time Arlette sang her song, Fatima was so offended by its poisonous
Frenchness
that she went straight to Yvonne and quit. But since Fatima's solo was also a popular number, Yvonne brokered an accord. She reminded Fatima that, in Arlette's song, no Moroccan sailors got the chance to save the mermaid. If they had, Yvonne said, they would have succeeded.

Fatima wasn't stupid, but she stayed on at the club. Feeling isolated and aggrieved made her more receptive than she otherwise might have been to the attentions of a poor, aging American writer who (alone in that adoring crowd) came right out and said that Arlette was a filthy little pig and that Fatima's belly dance was the best thing in the show.

At first I was worried that Fatima might be a man. It wouldn't have been the sneakiest trick played at the Chameleon. But lucky Gabor had photographed her naked and assured me that under her spangled bra and filmy skirts was a bona fide female.

By our second night together, I couldn't remember what life had been like with Suzanne. How could I have imagined that I would love her forever?

And so it happened that Fatima and I entered that zone of tranced-out bliss until . . . Do I sound self-pitying when I say that bad luck kicked in? Not Fatima's bad luck. Mine. But why should I blame myself? It was all Arlette's fault, and to a lesser extent Yvonne's, turning the club into a pigpen where French
cochons
went to feel
French
.

One evening two cops in cheap blue suits asked to see Fatima's papers. The next day her deportation order was delivered by a messenger with a mashed-in boxer's face. On the following night, Clovis Chanac, the proto-fascist police chief who would later rise through politics to a career in professional crime, came to the Chameleon, just after the show ended.

He drank on the house, smoked a cigar, and joined Fatima and me without being invited. In a tone that mixed the harsh vinegar of the interrogator with the oil of a flirt, Chanac asked Fatima if she'd ever read
Les Misérables
.

“The novel,” he said helpfully. “The French classic.”

I squeezed her hand: say yes. I would never have pegged Chanac for being much of a reader. Which he wasn't. He was a bully who knew the name of one book, and decided to mention it, because I was a writer.

Chanac said that if you read
Les Misérables
the right way, it was a story about Fatima's chances of staying in France. But Victor Hugo had gotten one thing wrong, and that was the cash amount for which poor Jean Valjean could have bought off Inspector Javert and gone free.

“How much would that have been?” I asked.

Chanac gave us a number. I could have bought a car for that!

“How long would Jean Valjean have had?” I asked. “To come up with the money.”

“Two weeks,” said Chanac.

As soon as he left the club, I took Fatima over to the table where Gabor sat with the baroness. I told them the whole story. Fatima's tears would have melted a heart of stone, but not the baroness's. She was staring at the dance floor. The band was playing a song called “My Little Pink Horse,” and several dancers were giving their partners piggyback rides.

After a silence so long I thought she hadn't heard, the baroness said she would love to enable Fatima to bribe Chanac. But then she would have no money left to help Gabor with his art. In other words, to put it bluntly, she was a useless bitch.

Gabor stared into his ashtray. I didn't know what
I
would have done, faced with the choice between my art and my friend's girlfriend. Art, we'd agreed, was eternal. Girlfriends came and went. None of us should have to choose. The baroness wasn't making Gabor choose. She had already decided.

That night, after Gabor and I had seen the baroness to her car and we'd set out walking, he said he had an idea. He knew an old Hungarian who had gone to jail for counterfeiting. He told me some bullshit story about the guy's family keeping pet bears for generations, and the guy missing a baby bear's birth because he was in jail.

He said there was a café where the old geezer hung out. We should find him and ask if he could mint enough cash to bribe Chanac.

I said, That is
so
Hungarian. It didn't sound terribly smart to me, passing counterfeit bills to a cop, a more serious offense than staying in France on an expired visa. But Gabor said the cop wouldn't tell anyone, because it might lead to an investigation into how he got the fake money.