Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (5 page)

BOOK: Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
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“Ha-ha,” I said. “That's hilarious.” Maybe a little too loud. Suzanne scowled. I remembered that her papa had died in the trenches.

“I love you,” I whispered in her ear. A lemony perfume rose from her neck.

The French still want to believe in peace. I envy fanatics. But they scare me. So why was I sitting through a film about a heroine who chooses to be burned alive rather than even pretend to give up her goofy religious convictions? When she fainted in the torture chamber, the crowd stamped and shouted like spectators at a bullfight.

No matter. From the very first frame I recognized the hand of a master. Even so, a part of me—the male part—thought, Can't someone make her stop crying? The film would have lasted five minutes if she could have answered a simple question without her eyeballs jiggling in their sockets. When the judges asked Joan how old she was, and she counted nineteen on her fingers, Suzanne lost it. The guy in front of us turned around. She was projectile weeping all over the back of his neck. Clearly, I hadn't thought this through. We should have gone to see Buster Keaton. That Joan of Arc was a soldier in a war in which thousands were killed was something you might not have deduced from this film. There will always be wars, no matter how many treaties are signed.

I understand that you, my reader, should I have a reader, haven't stuck around all this time to hear me pontificate on the inevitability of war. You want to know how the date went, and . . . let's get to the point. Did I fuck her?

Lest anyone imagine that Suzanne's excessive emotionalism was a problem, let him also imagine what it's like to have sex (which we finally did, after a somewhat awkward courtship) with a woman who not only feels twice what a normal woman feels, but also every sensation that you are feeling too. It turned out she would try anything and had a few ideas of her own. I didn't ask where she'd got those ideas, or if she'd just figured them out. We went at it till the sheets were so wet that we wrung them out in the sink, then groped each other and, laughing, lost our balance and fell back on the bare mattress.

In bed, Suzanne was the greedy beast most men can only dream of. Out of bed she was the soul of patience, an angel of reassurance. She read and reread my work, she had total faith in my talent, she knew I'd be famous someday. So many fans would follow me here that we would have to leave Paris.

Reader, if you were beside me, you would hear me groan out loud, stabbed by the pain of remembering the time when Suzanne and I were in love. Belief can be very seductive if what the person believes in is you.

How could all that intensity not be as contagious as a yawn? And how could all that rawness confine itself to useful emotions? I turned into a jealous shithead. Was she sharing Mama's bed tonight? Where was she—really—when she claimed to be teaching? Whose hard luck story had moved her to take off her clothes? When she modeled at the art school, she started with her clothes off.

Until then, there had been plenty of women. Sometimes, after they left, it took me weeks to notice that they were gone. But now I'd come to Paris to become the lovesick, pussy-whipped ninny I'd thought existed only in the estrogen-poisoned brains of Marcel Proust and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

It wasn't entirely my fault. Suzanne's enormous appetite was not just sexual, but gastronomic. She couldn't go two hours without eating. A woman who hated being hungry so much should have thought a million times before taking up with a penniless, legally unemployable writer. But shouldn't a grown woman be able to skip an occasional meal? I'd noticed that when American women are in love they stop eating completely, a financial windfall for American men.

When Suzanne hadn't eaten, everything annoyed her. My talking, my not talking. My accent. My age. My desire for her. The harder she tried not to show it, the more she shrank from my touch. I despised myself for not having the money to buy her the freshest oysters, the crispiest fried potatoes, the silkiest underthings, the softest, most bug-free bed in Paris.

I know she would deny this. She'd say she got fed up with a monster of self-involvement like
moi
. Me, a monster? Self-involved? She was looking for excuses.

After our affair ended—a sad story I will tell in the following chapter—I was depressed for weeks. Then I put it behind me. But did I ever get over her? She came to symbolize everything I wanted and would never have. And so I conclude this chapter more or less where I began, having returned full circle to the subject of self-pity.

M
AY 11, 1928

Special to the
Magyar Gazette

The New Diana Thrills Paris

 

THE RAGE OF
Paris this season is a seventeen-year-old girl who is giving the fastest Frenchman a run for his money. For the past week, a convent-school student known as Mademoiselle Lou has been thrilling crowds at the Vélodrome d'Hiver with her speed, strength and endurance.

From a distance, an ignorant stranger might mistake Mademoiselle Lou for a stocky, muscular fellow in a white blazer and flannel trousers. But on closer inspection, one sees the full red lips and dark curls that give this confident young woman's face the saucy sparkle of feminine beauty.

The audience cheers as she sprints the course, nimbly jumping the hurdles, heaves a javelin, then hops on a bike and streaks past the crowded bleachers. This record-breaking athlete is already being mentioned as a favorite to compete in some event (as yet unspecified) in the next Olympics. Meanwhile the whole city is buzzing about this creature whose very existence proves that the modern French woman has boldly snapped the chains that still imprison her sisters in the more old-fashioned, less progressive cultures.

May 15, 1928

 

Dear parents,

I cannot go on like this! My days in journalism are numbered! I must find another way of supplementing your stipend, another job that will let me have my nights free to wander the city, taking pictures. It's demoralizing enough to be demoted—or
pro
moted, according to my editors—to the sports pages. But when I actually find a subject worth writing an article about, they refuse to print it.

Last week I attended the event described above. This time I only made a few tiny improvements on the truth. That sparkle of saucy feminine beauty was my invention, as were the hurdles and the bike. And Paris is hardly abuzz about Mademoiselle Lou, though they
should
be buzzing about this young woman who, in our country, would probably be exhibited as a circus freak.

I would never have heard of this girl if not for my friend Lionel. With typical directness—excuse the language, his, not mine—my American pal remarked that the sight of a big, healthy, muscular girl in pants, running and chucking a spear, made him feel like a happy bumblebee was buzzing in his trousers.

It was perfect for the sports page! Even my stingy editors agreed, though they only gave me two hundred words.

Lionel warned me to get to the Vélodrome late. The girl has a promoter, a pretentious Brit who lectures the crowd in abysmal French. There might have been more of a buzz if this guy weren't such a bore. This self-styled doctor sells health tonics and an exercise machine he calls the Gymnasticon.

I arrived late, but not late enough. In a long white coat, “Dr.” Loomis stood behind a podium set up on the track. Let me try to give you the flavor of his French:

“The body she is cathedral. The arteries and veins is tentacles of female heart and blood he runs back and forth to the girl the woman the mother and then baby, bringing health. The stomach is chair of the soul, of compassion, the happy and pretty. The breathing, the moving house, the green fruits and natural juice will turn a cuttlefish into a giant. I myself was such tiny but thanks for my fitness liquid and the miraculous Gymnasticon I stretched beyond what doctors predicted my mother.”

Did he really mean
cuttlefish
? What was he trying to say?

Two hundred words. No room for anything fancy. The fellow was wasting my time as he listed the requirements for health: sunshine, fresh air, exercise, a balanced vegetarian diet. Baths! Cold in winter, hot in summer, liberating the pores from its jailers, oil and dirt and dust. He pulled down charts of bodies flayed and sliced down the middle. On one a pretty woman smiled, unaware that the other half of her face was a grinning skull. He spoke a bit excessively about the female organs. Fortunately, only a few ladies had come to the performance—among them my friend, the baroness Lily de Rossignol.

Have I mentioned her, Mama and Papa? She is a former Hollywood star who came home to Paris and married a baron whose family manufactures luxury automobiles. A queen of high society who seems far younger than her age. Perhaps it's her adventurous spirit. She is one of those daring souls who will try anything once. How Papa would admire this patroness of the arts, this glamorous French eagle who has taken me under her wing!

Like the rest of the Vélodrome audience, I'd stopped pretending to listen. I looked around for Mademoiselle Lou, who had taken a seat beside a tall nun in a brown robe. I watched the girl rotate her head and ripple her muscular shoulders.

When (at last!) Dr. Loomis finished, he announced that Mademoiselle Lou would now attempt to beat the men's javelin record. The girl removed her blazer and, just as a man would, folded it neatly and placed it on her seat. Underneath her jacket she wore a long-sleeved white shirt and a black tie.

Do you remember when you took me to see Shakespeare's
The Tempest
? For months I was afraid to close my eyes lest a growling Hungarian Caliban murder me in my bed. As Mademoiselle Lou grabbed her knees and inhaled, I again saw that snarling beast emerging from its lair. Though maybe this is just prejudice, the panic of a male in the presence of a female who could flatten him in a fight.

Rolling her hips like a sailor, the girl strutted down the track. A few crude audience members shouted coarse remarks at the spectacle of a woman doing knee bends and jumping jacks. I thought of the Chameleon Club. The contortionist sailorettes did backbends in my mind.

Mademoiselle Lou ran for a short distance, then let the javelin fly. Good God, I said in Hungarian, and then, in French,
Mon Dieu
. How fast, how far, how confidently that young woman hurled the spear.

The nun who stood up was ten feet tall. Her habit flapped behind her. The measuring tape trailed at her hem. Why didn't I bring my camera?

She read the result. The men's record had been broken!

The girl's eyes were dull, her face dark red, she was panting and streaming sweat. When the applause subsided, Dr. Loomis announced that Mademoiselle Lou would answer a few questions.

The reporter from the right-wing paper asked how long her family had lived in France.

“Forever,” she replied.

Another journalist asked if Mademoiselle Lou agreed with Dr. Loomis's theory that physical exercise would not compromise her future as a wife and mother.

She said, “My only future plan is to compete in the Olympics.”

Dr. Loomis frowned. Had he hoped she'd say that his system was preparing her to bake a perfect Tarte Tatin while popping out a litter of French babies? Clearly, he didn't want us to think that his program encouraged the Amazonian tendencies so common now in Paris.

That ended the question period. Dr. Loomis announced that he would be selling his elixirs and offering free Gymnasticon demonstrations in the stadium lobby.

“That poor unhappy girl! Did you see her face?” the baroness asked me. “Please! Go down there and talk to her! Flirt with her! Do something!”

I climbed down the steps and ventured onto the track. Mademoiselle Lou was alone, momentarily forgotten. She sat in a chair with her head in her hands, her elbows on her knees. I tried to think of a question that might elicit some pungent quote that would move the story off the sports desk to the news section, or at least the culture pages. How do you think your achievements will change the life of the average Frenchwoman?

Perhaps if I'd asked that probing question my story would have been published, though I can't imagine how a different ending would have satisfied the small-minded editors who decided that my article made the reader think overly much about female plumbing. Maybe they sensed how their public would receive the suggestion that God had created woman to do something besides rolling out strudel dough. Maybe they would have printed the piece if Mademoiselle Lou were Hungarian instead of a potential threat to Hungarian
men
in the upcoming games.

I should have requested a private interview, but the girl looked so desolate that my cool journalistic instincts gave way to my warmer human ones. I fished around in my briefcase until I found what I wanted. Some higher force moved me to hand Mademoiselle Lou the business card of the Chameleon Club. She slipped it into her pocket just as the giant nun appeared and led her away.

The reason I have bothered you with the sad drama of my failure as a reporter is because I must ask you to send a little extra this month. There is something I have neglected to tell you, not from any wish to deceive you but to spare you unnecessary worry.

I don't know if I mentioned the photos I was taking of a notorious petty criminal named Big Albert and his gang. Until now they'd adopted me as if I were one of their own. I think they were flattered that I thought their faces were interesting, which, believe me, they are. They let me imagine I'd joined their outlaw family. But last night, when I returned from shooting what may be the most extraordinary nocturnal group portrait since Rembrandt's
The Night Watch,
I was shocked to discover that my wallet was missing.

This theft has plunged me into a fiscal crisis. So I must ask for enough money to survive on while I figure out how to end my shameful dependence on the
Magyar Gazette
and find a job more in keeping with my talents. Every penny is helpful, since—as you may have heard—the price of bread is rising to a level that is turning the average working man into an insomniac like myself!

Thank you again, with all my heart,
Gabor

BOOK: Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
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