Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (31 page)

Lou said, “There won't be another war. You and your husband won't have to worry.”

“I love you.” Inge mouthed the words so that only Lou could see.

From
Paris in My Rearview Mirror

BY
LIONEL MAINE

On Falling in Love with a City

 

SAYING GOOD-BYE TO
a city is harder than breaking up with a lover. The grief and regret are more piercing because they are more complex and unmixed, changing from corner to corner, with each passing vista, each shift of the light. Breaking up with a city is unclouded by the suspicion that after the affair ends, you'll learn something about the beloved you wished you never knew. The city is as it will remain: gorgeous, unattainable, going on without you as if you'd never existed. What pain and longing the lover feels as he bids farewell to a tendril of ivy, a flower stall, the local butcher. The charming café where he meant to have coffee but never did.

Magnify those feelings a thousandfold when the city is Paris. Every bridge is a pirate's plank the lover walks at his own peril, watching the twinkling Seine and giving serious thought to jumping and losing himself in that seductive, sparkly blackness. Every spire pierces the heart. Every alley, every smoky tabac, every fountain was killing me. I was going to Jersey City.

I decided on a departure date. September 1, 1939. Things were getting too crazy with the nonwar about to start and Germany breathing its beery sausage breath down the Frenchies' necks. Each day brought urgent communiqués from the American embassy telling me to go home or they couldn't guarantee my safety. If you've ever gotten such a note, you know: it is not a comforting feeling.

In the meantime I tried to live as I always had. Eating, drinking, picking up girls, making love, seeing friends, talking, writing, having fun. Supporting the final days of my habit by doing little money jobs for the papers back home.

The assignment I was most grateful for was one I almost turned down. The editors in Jersey asked me to cover the last public guillotine execution. No one knew it would be the last. But afterward, everyone did.

The condemned man was a mass murderer. To the folks in the States, his most hideous crime was strangling an American girl he buried in his basement. The paper offered to pay me double my usual fee.

Back home, I'd be off the Paris beat. I'd have to find a new subject. Also, to put it bluntly, a nice messy execution would take my mind off my own problems. I'd be joining the long line of literary lights who had followed the masses to watch the guilty brought to violent justice. Byron, Dickens, now Lionel Maine. As the not-so-immortal Byron once said, I would have saved them if I could.

The news of the crimes had sold millions of papers worldwide. With the economy crashing, this was what people wanted. Forget the political assassinations, the invasions, wars all over Europe! The story that made readers salivate for every juicy detail was about Eugene Weidmann, the depraved German maniac who strangled an American dancer he lured to his house to talk about . . . are you ready? . . .
Wagner
! Afterward the guy went on a murder spree that left six people dead, among them a chauffeur, an unemployed chef, and a real estate agent. This criminal genius left his business card in the real estate agent's office, though in the end that hardly mattered. His accomplices, their parents and girlfriends, all knew about the murders. I sympathized with one thing: the guy could not shut up.

The execution was scheduled for June 17 in Versailles. Everyone wanted a close-up look at the blood spewing out of the guy's neck. When the government got wind of how many people planned to attend, they did some calculations and decided that only a select group of reporters and special guests were invited. The lumpen proletariat would just have to buy the paper. And if the movie-going public wanted to watch it in the newsreels? Too bad! Filming this newsworthy event was
absolument interdit
! The French had been chopping heads off for centuries, but now, on the eve of another world war, they'd gotten squeamish.

Somehow my editor got me a ticket. Two hundred of us chosen ones were permitted to wait in line for an hour. We shuffled past the checkpoint, stopping to make way for VIPs, among them Clovis Chanac, who, in his seamless transition from cop to politician to gangster, had kept his front row seats at sold-out entertainments.

How theatrical—how French—of them to give the dead man a drumroll. The prisoner was marched out. Wearing dark trousers and a white shirt, he was trussed like a duckling with his arms behind his back.

It was lucky they had him tied up in the neatest possible package. Because everything that could go wrong did. To be more blunt than I was in my article for the folks back home: it was a regular goat fuck. Naturally, I thought of myself to take my mind off the horror. I recalled my former fascination with the French Revolution and its ingenious method of decapitating unwanted aristocrats. What a fool I had been to imagine such things were romantic! Then I remembered Picasso's drawing of the guillotine, which I had so desperately coveted and which he'd snatched from my grasp.

When a plank jammed, the executioners panicked. There were hurried consultations. Someone gave an order, someone struggled with the rigging. Finally (it seemed long to us, so imagine how it seemed to him!) it was decided to stuff the prisoner through the opening. They draped his legs up over the board and crammed his head through the space, but it didn't work from that angle either, so they had to shift him around.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask you: was there booing from the crowd? Was there any sign of moral revulsion or even disapproval? The answer is no. There was not. We'd worked hard to get our tickets, we didn't want to get kicked out and spoil everyone's good time. Besides which, what could we have done? I would have saved him if I could.

Finally they got it right, or almost right. What would
almost
mean if it was
your
head on the block? Regardless of our personal views on capital punishment, everyone was praying that the repulsive contraption would function.

Finally God—or something—got the blade to drop. The body fell into a bin. The head rolled onto the cobblestones. A guard picked it up. The crowd was silent. No one prayed or said “God Forgive Us” or
“Vive la France!”
or any such bullshit. We pulled our hats down over our eyes and shuffled off toward the railway station, only to face the part of the story that no one warned us about.

A mob had gathered in Versailles. Thousands of people were only now hearing that the murderer was dead. They'd missed the main event.

Beet red was the median facial hue of the assembled citizens, who proceeded to get drunk and destroy “downtown” Versailles. Needless to say, they left the palace untouched. They were French. As I made my way toward the station, sirens started to wail. Shards of glass were flying. A café table just missed me. The faces I saw were frightening. I had never seen, never want to see, expressions like that again.

I looked at the people around me and thought, Enough
. Adieu. Au revoir.
It's been fun. But now it's time for this Jersey boy to go home. Maybe I'd try the West Coast. Hollywood, here I come!

From
A Baroness by Night

BY
LILY DE ROSSIGNOL

EVEN THEN, WITH
the sky falling in, there were still warm spring mornings when the greatest pleasure was to sneak out early and do errands, like a normal person in normal times. The lilacs were never as fragrant as they were that year. I'd buy an armful of snapdragons, put the flowers in my bag, along with cheese and a loaf of bread. There was rationing throughout the city, but less so in my neighborhood. All the merchants knew me, and if the authorities checked, I had a letter from Didi's doctors saying that we were ailing and needed a bit more butter than our neighbors.

It was outside the baker's, on one such morning, that I saw Lionel Maine for the last time. By which I mean the last time until years later, after the war, when I gathered my old friends for a reunion at my château in Ménerbes, before the American tourists ruined it.

Lionel had plastered himself flat—arms out, like Jesus—against the baker's wall. Spread-eagled over the hot air duct, through which the ovens piped delicious smells onto the street. Lionel was breathing rapidly and deeply.

I tapped him on the shoulder. He wheeled around, red-eyed and still bleary from the night before.

He said, “My dear Lily, do you know how, when you've run out of cigarettes, sometimes, when you wake up, you can cough hard and get some of that good smoke taste in your mouth?”

“Lionel, you smoke too much. That's disgusting,” I said, even though I smoked that much too, and I knew what he meant.

He said, “I'm inhaling Paris. I'm leaving tonight for Cherbourg. Somewhere over the ocean I can go on deck and cough, and the breath of a Paris bakery will still be in my lungs. I'll give it an ocean burial.”

“How romantic,” I said.

I've said that I never liked Lionel, but it wasn't that simple. It was partly the sexual element, or the lack of a sexual element. The insult of knowing he'd tried to seduce every woman in Paris but me. He was Gabor's friend. I'd spent time with him. And everything that had happened—my sad misunderstanding with Gabor, the death of my brother-in-law—had so toughened me that I no longer cared whether an aging American poseur happened to find me attractive. Except that a woman is never immune to insecurities of that sort.

Lionel said, “I'm leaving Paris.”

“You mentioned that,” I said.

Then he told me he'd attended the public guillotine execution in Versailles. I remember his exact words. He said it was a goat fuck.

I said, “You went to see a man's head chopped off. What did you expect?”

He'd written about the execution to earn a little money. But he was glad that he did. What he'd seen in Versailles had finally enabled him to leave Paris.

I said that sounded like something he would put in a book. Surely he had other reasons for leaving.

I had always expressed a certain contempt for Lionel's writing, though to be honest I'd never read it. I assumed it would be the literary gushing of your typically self-involved, hard-living, tough-talking “man's man,” madly in love with his penis and with no understanding of women. They are all repressed homosexuals, as one still sometimes hears, mostly from feminist academics on literary TV talk shows.

When I finally read his work, not so very long ago, I discovered that I'd been right. Though by then the formerly shocking stuff seemed as mild as milk. And by then I was doing my own “literary gushing,” writing, or trying to write, the memoir you hold in your hands. Curious to see what Lionel said about me, I skimmed his books for my name. I was especially interested in how he described our nights at the Chameleon Club. That I'd studied the dancers for information about sex was one of the few things about me that Lionel got right.

That last morning, outside the bakery, I felt I owed Lionel something. I suppose I still felt guilty for not defending him when he spoke up, as Gabor and I should have, against Arlette's disgusting song. Also he'd written a useful piece for an American newspaper about Lou's trial; the story was widely reprinted. He'd always complained that he'd gotten cheated on the fees. Thanks to his essay, several rich Americans custom-ordered Rossignols, but the war interceded before they could be delivered.

Standing with Lionel in the delightful cloud of yeasty vapors, I felt warmer toward him than I ever had, and not just because we were surrounded by balmy gusts of fragrant air. It certainly wasn't because he kept repeating that he was leaving Paris, in that aggressively tragic tone, as if his departure was my fault. The thought of him leaving made me sad; that is all I can say.

I told him, “We'll see each other again. I know.”

He said, “Maybe if you're paying, baroness, we can all get back together.” He really could be a bastard.

I said, “By then, Lionel, you'll be able to pay for us all.”

Lionel gave me a vigorous hug, the way he might hug a man. He kissed me on both cheeks.

“Good-bye,” he said.

“
Au revoir,
” I told him.

“So they say,” he called over his shoulder.

Lionel's shirtsleeves were rolled above his elbows. I noticed that, as he left. At what age do men start walking with their shoulders turned out, so their elbows are facing backward? A man walking like that has crossed the line from a young man to an old one.

It depressed me to watch him, bent over, walking away from the bakery, from me, from Gabor. From Paris. I too left, very soon after. For the rest of my life I would remember the sight of Lionel walking away, his elbows receding into the distance. And happily, he was still walking that way, healthy and vigorous, at our reunion, after the war.

P
ART
T
HREE