Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (17 page)

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.

Armand reminded Lou of her father and also of Arlette. She wished she could think of a graceful way to mention that she'd starred in a nightclub act in which a brave French sailor humiliates a Brit, a Chinaman, an American, and needless to say, a Jew. But for all she knew, Armand disapproved of cabaret, and her instincts warned her against disclosing too much. She often spoke of her devotion to Joan of Arc, eliciting from Armand a flicker of the smile that a teacher might give a slow-witted but eager student who, after getting everything wrong, finally guesses right.

From
Paris in My Rearview Mirror

BY
LIONEL MAINE

An Essay on Ambition

 

F
EBRUARY 1934

 

YESTERDAY, ON THE
rue du Bac, a boy ran past me with blood trickling down his face. I grabbed him and asked if I could help. He said a filthy fascist bastard had just thrown a Communist hero into the Seine. Minutes later, I stopped another bloodied warrior who told me he'd just seen a Commie son of a bitch toss a veteran off the bridge.

No one is surprised any more when a riot breaks out.
Demonstration
is a euphemism for some poor slob getting his skull cracked. And no bridge is wide enough for the problems streaming across it. Unemployment, inflation, mass bankruptcy, immigration, a crushing national debt, an increasing tax roll, and a diminishing tax base, political scandal, poverty, a shrinking middle class—and the high jinks, over the border, of our neighbor, Mr. Hitler.

Yesterday's demonstration was unusually violent. By the time the dust cleared and the blood was hosed off the pavement, the leftist government had resigned and the right wing had taken over.

Am I boring my readers yet?

All that anyone talks about is the riot and the handover of power. Is it any wonder that no one took the slightest notice of a book published in Paris that same day: the first volume of Lionel Maine's
Make Yourself New
. Only an egomaniacal American writer would view cataclysmic historical change through the narrow keyhole of his literary career. But couldn't the revolution have waited another week? Couldn't the coup have held off long enough to give a few citizens time to read my first chapter?

When I say “a few citizens” I mean “a few.” The week before my book appeared, one newspaper ran a survey claiming that the average Parisian bookshop sells less than one book a day. My publishers, two Catalan brothers with an inherited income, took me out to lunch to inform me that the first print run would be only five hundred copies. Five hundred readers? I accept! And the lunch was delicious. The Pixho brothers drink the best wines—in the middle of the day!

My hopes were endearingly modest. But the day on which my book was launched was still a red-letter day. I dropped a word from the string of negative adjectives that had trailed behind me like tin cans behind the village idiot.
Unappreciated, unloved, unmarried
. But no longer
unpublished
. I kept my expectations low, and yet when I had heard the pop of rifles being fired at the demonstrators, I confess that my first thought was: A twenty-one-gun salute to
Make Yourself New
!

In any case, my work is out there. It will find its readers. And if not? It's nice to have a riot to blame my failure on. Minor success is better than none. The fact that my book has appeared helps me resign myself to the fact that my friend Gabor's overproduced, outrageously expensive volume—
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
—was a sensation the minute it hit the stores.

Gabor and the baroness will talk your ear off about why people admire his work: his surrealistic vision, his sly wit, his love for the dark side of Paris, his genius for revealing the city's nocturnal beauty, the sacramental nature of his relationship with his subjects. And Suzanne is in love with him, so there's no point asking
her
for an objective opinion.

Were I asked, which I am not, I might humbly suggest that one reason for his book's popularity is that Gabor has arranged the perfect union of serious art with the ever-beloved dirty French postcard. What red-blooded male wouldn't contemplate a quartet of naked whores bellying up to a bar and have his wife admire his taste in the visual image?

I know that it's
un
dignified to compare myself with my friend; it can only harm our friendship and further diminish my self-esteem. It is a far, far better thing to focus on my hopes for my own work. All I want is to say: I am here. I existed! No one else has led my life or seen the world through my eyes!

Just yesterday someone told me that James Joyce admired my book. First I was elated, and then I thought, Great. How will James Joyce's admiration help me repossess the hotel room from which I have again been evicted?

Enough! I hate to repeat myself, and as all of my five hundred readers will know, I have already written the last word on the subject of self-pity.

Yvonne

 

 

ONE AFTERNOON, FAT
Bernard knocked on Yvonne's office door and said that the prefect of police, Monsieur Chanac, was here to see her.

The
former
prefect of police. Did Bernard not know that Chanac had been fired after the recent riots, accused of ordering his men to fire on the Communists and protect their right-wing opponents? Hadn't she heard that he was involved in the financial scandal that nearly destroyed the economy? Had no one told her that he had been implicated in the death of the swindler responsible for the scandal, the billions of francs stolen from small investors, a criminal who died—a suicide, supposedly—while in police custody? For weeks no one in Paris talked about anything else, not even at the Chameleon, where pains were taken to leave politics at the door with the umbrellas and galoshes.

“Monsieur the prefect of police,” repeated Bernard.

Were the tips of Chanac's mustaches always so aggressively waxed? Perhaps he meant the sharpened ice picks curling under his nose to compensate for his recent loss of power and status. He shook Yvonne's hand and gave her his most penetrating interrogator's stare. His eyes were opaque and reptilian. Yvonne thought of her lizards. What a bother they had been, and how much she missed them!

Bernard brought Chanac a large whiskey, and a dancer skipped in with a brandy for Yvonne.

“Monsieur Chanac,” Yvonne said. “To what do I owe your visit?” She assumed it had to do with Arlette, with whom Chanac was living, across town from his wife and children. Now that he'd lost his job, Arlette was probably planning to leave him for someone richer and more influential. Had he come to ask Yvonne's advice? The country was falling apart, and she and an ex-cop were meeting to discuss the tender feelings of a tone-deaf gold digger.

Pushing some clothes aside so he could sit, he held a camisole to his lips and gazed over it at Yvonne. Was he flirting? She'd lost her intuition, along with her voice and her interest in romance. She no longer cared if she seemed like a fascinating woman, a pool of secrets that a man might want to plunge into. The red dresses had begun to make her skin look yellow. Now she more often wore black. Red was for the very young and the very old.

Chanac dropped the camisole and swatted it off his lap. “It's come to my attention that you have, displayed in your club, a tasteless so-called
work of art,
a heavily doctored photograph that purports to show a female friend of mine in the company of a degenerate.”

“I know the photo,” said Yvonne. “But
degenerate
is not a word we use here at the Chameleon.” Now
she
had to flirt a little. She had to pretend she was joking.

Gabor's pictures had been good for business. Tourists—the few who still visited Paris—came to see the place where the photos were supposedly shot. It would have been pointless to explain that they had been taken elsewhere. Yvonne had been silly to protect the privacy of the customers who'd flocked to the studio where Gabor and the baroness had re-created the club. She'd failed to understand how times had changed. Everyone wanted to be famous, no matter how they dressed.

“It is my impression,” said Chanac, “that shooting this picture involved coercion, deception, and ultimately, trick photography. I would like this offense to public decency taken down at once.”

Lou will miss it, Yvonne thought.

Yvonne had worried that Lou would be devastated by Arlette's desertion. But Lou had been too busy with her new job, racing cars for the Rossignols. Still, every few weeks, Lou came to the club and got drunk and stood there, weaving, staring at the double portrait. Yvonne liked to think that the club had helped Lou, that it wasn't just a place where people went to drink and dress up, but a ship of storm-tossed souls that Yvonne offered safe harbor. Now Lou had found work she was suited for, a career Yvonne had helped launch.

The prefect wished to obliterate Arlette's entire past. The
former
prefect. He no longer had the authority to tell Yvonne what to do.

Yvonne said, “To be truthful, Monsieur Chanac, it's not even a proper print. Just a page I tore from a book.” She'd never admitted this to anyone. Not that anyone, including Chanac, cared about the provenance of her decor.

“Mademoiselle,” Chanac said. “I am first and foremost a police officer. And as a policeman it's my professional duty to know what you are thinking. Correct me if I am wrong, but you are thinking that I no longer have the power to tell you what you can and cannot hang on your walls. But let me be the first to inform you that
you
are the one who is wrong.”

Chanac smiled each time he said the word
wrong,
as if it were a joke, but Yvonne understood that he would rather kill than be wrong. He would rather murder someone in cold blood than have someone think he was wrong when he wasn't wrong, or even when he was.

“Surely you realize that the crimes committed against me will be exposed, that these perversions of justice will be reversed, and I will be restored to power. I've had some bookkeeping problems, I'll admit. But my replacement—my
temporary
replacement—is a murderer and a fool. When the demonstrations resume, he will shoot into the crowd. The rioting will escalate. Our pathetic excuse for a government will collapse. The people of Paris will beg me to return and restore order.

“Perhaps I should also warn you that the laws are about to change. Degeneracy won't be as freely tolerated as it is now. It would be in your interests to protect yourself against the crackdown that, I promise, will occur.”

Was Clovis Chanac bluffing? Yvonne didn't think so. It was humiliating to take orders from a bullying petty crook. But she had to safeguard her business. She owed it to her clientele.

“Could I trouble you for another taste of that delicious whiskey?” Chanac asked. Yvonne was reluctant to leave him alone in her office. She went to the door and yelled for Bernard, and Bernard, her fat angel, appeared.

Turning, Chanac scooped more room for himself out of the mess on the couch, and settled back against the cushions, with his drink. He was silent for a while. Then he said, “People say I am Corsican, but that was only my father. He died when I was seven. We returned to France when my mother inherited a tiny plot of land. She asked an uncle for enough money to buy one male and three female rabbits. By the time I was fifteen, I was killing seven hundred rabbits a week.”

Yvonne gave flirtation one last try. “Poor man! We both grew up too young.”

“It's not that I don't trust you,” Chanac said. “But I would like to take the photograph with me. As a memento—a souvenir—of our pleasant conversation.”

Yvonne called Bernard, who returned with the photo. Chanac examined the picture, then gingerly turned it over, as if something even more disgusting might be stuck to the other side.

Yvonne pictured Lou at the wheel of a race car. Drive faster, Yvonne thought.