Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (16 page)

From the (Unpublished) Memoirs of Suzanne Dunois Tsenyi

To be destroyed on the occasion of its author's death

WE MIGHT HAVE
been more anxious about the economy, the worldwide Depression, the political murders and reprisals, Hitler ranting next door, if day-to-day survival hadn't kept us so busy. The art school modeling had long since dried up, but the language classes were mobbed with immigrants trying to pass as French.

The French had been growing steadily more hostile to foreigners. The musicians' union demonstrated outside the opera because its pit orchestra employed too many immigrants. The doctors tried to purge the wards and clinics of the foreign-born. The French were closing ranks like a fortress under siege, though it is unclear why Polish violinists and Argentinean surgeons should have seemed like dangerous assailants.

The director of the language school tripled the tuition. But still the students came. It was the only job I had. I wasn't doing them harm. Many of my students seemed terrified, and I was frightened for them. For once I could buy enough food for myself and Mama, but thanks to the shortages, there was nothing to buy. There were riots at the market after people had waited for hours on line for some commodity that had run out.

We couldn't afford a telephone, but there was one at the corner café, and they'd send a boy to knock on our door whenever Gabor called. I'd rush across the city to meet him. We'd have a drink and go back to his room, or stay out and walk all night. It calmed and energized me at once, squinting into the darkness, trying to see, before he did, what caught and held the light.

Ricardo and Paul still gave parties, but they weren't as much fun. Gabor and I continued to go, for sentimental reasons and out of loyalty to Ricardo, who was barely hanging on to his job at the clinic. Many friends had left Paris, others were ill and unemployed. I kept hearing that Ricardo had been sent back to Argentina, but the gossip turned out to be false. Paul was making sculptures of fists clenched around pistols and knives. The few collectors left in Paris were buying up the Renoirs.

I remember their last dress-up party: come as the person you fear most. Gabor and I assumed that all the guests would come as Hitler. The silly mustache, the pasted-down hair: a cheap and easy costume. So we weren't surprised, but still we laughed and exclaimed when dozens of male and female Hitlers showed up. Quite a few guests came as Clovis Chanac. That too was a simple masquerade: a pair of curled, pointed red brushes pasted on one's upper lip.

Gabor photographed a painting of a blowsy Bouguereau nude and wore the print around his neck. He hadn't come as Hitler but as Hitler's favorite artist. Out of pure perversity, I came as the baroness, in ropes of cardboard jewelry and moth-eaten furs from a charity shop. No one but Gabor caught the reference. He hardly spoke to me all night. People asked, Was I dressed as the Dutch queen? Why was I scared of
her
?

Of course, the baroness didn't alarm me as much as Hitler or Chanac. She frightened me in a different way. I thought if I pretended to
be
her I might better understand who she was and what sort of threat she posed. I slunk around like a cat all night, but no one got the joke. That is, no one but Gabor, who didn't think it was funny.

He was spending long hours in the studio that the baroness had set up. She often worked alongside him, though I wasn't supposed to know. Afterward he returned to me, in his room at the hotel. I was glad he still used it as a darkroom, a place that was only his. There were still trays of fluids and fixatives, laundry lines hung with prints. The reason he'd been working so hard was that a prestigious publisher, to whom he'd been introduced by the baroness, had agreed to bring out a volume of his art.

One night, for a change,
I
couldn't sleep. And though I respected Gabor's privacy and never looked at his work unless he showed it to me, I got up and switched on the blood-colored bulb. He was sleeping soundly, though in the morning he would insist that he hadn't shut his eyes all night. There was just enough light for me to see the single photo hanging on the line.

He'd made a new print of “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.” He was deciding whether to use it on the cover of his book. I'd seen the photo many times, but something made me look again.

I am, and have always been, a sensible, down-to-earth person. I'd modeled, I gave language lessons, I supported my mother. Later I was an undercover agent in the French Resistance. I married Gabor Tsenyi and since his death have efficiently and conscientiously managed his estate.

I was never superstitious. But looking at the photo, I felt a warning chill. Gabor and his photographer friends were always talking about
the moment
: the fleeting, precious instant of unrecoverable time. But that photo made me think that I was seeing more than one moment. I was being shown the future: a glimpse of what Lou and Arlette saw as they gazed past the camera. A bleak and sinister shadow of what was to come.

Was it a warning about the night, a decade later, when Lou Villars would walk into the interrogation chamber in which I was being held at the Gestapo prison?

Even after I switched off the light, an afterimage of the couple floated in the darkness. I crawled into bed beside Gabor and lay awake for the rest of the night.

February 8, 1934

Dear parents,

It's kind of you to keep saying how much you love my book, that you've shown it to all the neighbors, and even the butcher, dependable Fritz, who gave you a rope of bloodwurst to celebrate my success. And Uncle Ferenc called it the greatest masterpiece since the
Mona Lisa
! Poor Uncle, whom you tell me is nearly blind, cannot be bothered, as I am, by quality of the reproductions. How dark and streaked the prints are, and that portrait of Madame Suzy—I flip past it so as to not see the leprous white blotch on her forehead.

Wasn't it thoughtful of the publishers not to show me the final proof until it was already at the printers? But why am I complaining? I should, as you say, take pleasure in getting what every artist wants: a chance to have my work seen by the public.

I'm glad you like the cover. I can't remember if I wrote you that Lou Villars, the woman in the tuxedo, is the athlete I wrote about, years ago, for the
Magyar Gazette
. I think I told you that I gave her the Chameleon Club's card.

Now there is talk of her going to work for the baroness's husband. Strange, how certain individuals keep appearing in our lives, though not necessarily the people whom we would have chosen.

I need to tell you a secret. I have been having attacks. Heavy breathing, skipping heartbeats. Paranoid terror seizes me, and I become convinced that Paris is punishing me for revealing her mysteries in my book.

On the night you left Paris after your heartbreakingly brief visit, I took to the streets, as always when I am sad. I walked until dawn and came home with nothing. I felt that Paris was saying, Isn't a book enough? Now look at your book instead of me. I owe you nothing more.

I set up my camera near the Place de l'Opéra, but the scribble of headlights could have been the writing on the back of a tourist postcard. Or (joke) the writing on the wall. As photographic subjects, the inky puddles of rain had all the originality of a depressed adolescent's poetry.

The next night, I tried again. I'd see how a year had affected the clochards under the bridge. My pictures of those unfortunate souls are not only popular favorites but among my best. They inspired the government to offer the men shelter for the night, though that program was soon quashed by the Paris police prefect, Clovis Chanac, who thinks the poor should suffer more than they do. Chanac is a type we saw often in the Empire, before the war: the bureaucrat who sits in his office and, when no one is looking, tosses your papers in the trash, where they will never be found again.

Now those blanket-wrapped larvae roiling under the bridge made me think of my work with horror. How many pretty pictures of these miserable souls are, thanks to me, decorating the fanciest walls in the city?

The icing on the cake, or should I still say on the strudel, was what happened in the rue Quincampoix. The ladies scattered when I approached, though they'd always been glad to see me. Was it because of my book? I should have shown them the prints and asked them if they wanted to be included. No wonder Paris is angry. I'd exploited her hardworking daughters to advance my career.

At the Café Boum, I ran into Petite Marguerite, the one with the corkscrew curl. She'd heard I'd made a fortune off her and her friends.

I said, “Not a fortune. Pennies!”

I promised to give them copies of the book. Tomorrow night. I'd buy the drinks.

I'd given away all my free copies to you, Lionel, Suzanne, and Yvonne. Lou Villars has several times asked for a print of her portrait, but I have none left to spare. And now I've spent my entire advance on copies of my own book, for the girls.

I carted the books to the Café Boum. The champagne began to flow. I didn't know how I'd pay for it. I'd ask the baroness, if I had to.

Anyhow, the girls loved the book. I was flattered by the pleasure they took in how I'd made them look, how I'd captured how brightly our city shines during their working hours.

They insisted I take their picture. They lined up, as if for a class portrait. I didn't like what I saw through the lens, but I felt obliged. I went home and developed the film. My instincts were right. I had taken a photo of the dead, the soon to be dead, women on their last legs and at the end of their tether.

For me to begin to explain would take a complicated disquisition on my aesthetic principles, an unblinking examination of certain aspects of my art that have been secrets even from me. The photo was dishonest, cold, poisoned by everything I never wanted to see in my work. How exhausted the women looked! Could Marguerite be ill? I never aimed to flatter them, but I never wanted to destroy them.

I watched the picture come up in the tray. Can you guess what I did next? Having just seen the visible evidence that the muse had abandoned him forever, your insomniac boy lay down and fell fast asleep. Explain that, Papa, if you can, oh expert on human nature!

Of all the things connected with the publication of my book, my greatest joy is the fact that you two could finally come to Paris. Reunited at the station, we flew into each other's arms and managed to hide our surprise at how much we had changed (in my case, for the worse) during the years apart. All of us were crying, though Papa and I tried not to.

I will never forget the pleasure on Mama's face at that delicious Saturday lunch at the Orangerie, where the baroness made you both feel so welcome. Or Papa's ecstasy when he climbed the steps of the Louvre. Or the way Mama put her soft white hand over Suzanne's when Suzanne said she wanted to see the town where I was born.

If only you could have swallowed your pride and let the baroness put you up at the (admittedly expensive) hotel for more than the few days we could afford. If you'd agreed to camp out at my (admittedly uncomfortable) studio, you could have stayed longer. Yet despite my grief at having to say good-bye so soon, I admire you for this, as I admire everything you do.

Paris will forgive me, or I will go someplace else and find another subject. I forgot to tell you that I have begun to get work, shooting celebrity portraits for an American magazine. This may also take me elsewhere, geographically and artistically, though I will always remain near you, in spirit.

I live for another visit from you. Meanwhile, I kiss you.
Gabor

From
The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars

BY
NATHALIE DUNOIS

Chapter Seven: A New Job

 

WHAT IS ONE
to make of Gabor Tsenyi's repeated refusal to give, or even show, Lou Villars a print of her own portrait? He pleaded absentmindedness. He was busy. Or he forgot. Can we ascribe his behavior to the typical self-involvement of the successful male artist?

So it was by accident that Lou finally saw the photo. It was on the cover of Tsenyi's book, in a bookseller's window. She stopped and grabbed Arlette's arm. She heard herself moan, a sexual moan that briefly froze Arlette's face in a grimace of distaste.

At first Lou saw only her radiant Arlette seducing the camera with her twinkly charm. An impartial viewer might think Arlette looks distracted, drunk, her makeup clownish. But Lou worshiped every wave in her beloved's hair, the polished but bitten fingernails, the tilted half moon where her skinny neck emerged from her collarbone.

It took Lou a while to recognize the woman dressed as a man, lucky beyond all creatures to sit beside a goddess and cradle the heavenly creature's elbow. Looking into her own eyes, Lou saw what she'd seen when the photo was taken: gardens, a swing, wisteria, all her loved ones together.

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 angels, 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.