Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (9 page)

I lurched and nearly stumbled as I got up from the table. Servants surrounded me, giants expressly hired to load the overindulged into taxis.

I declined the taxi. I was drunk, but not too drunk to know I didn't have the fare. I walked home and fell on my bed.

This morning I was awoken by the receptionist ringing to announce that he was bringing a visitor upstairs. My mystery guest must have paid the lazy slob a fortune to dislodge him from his desk!

How dear and kind the baroness looked as she leaned over my bed, her eyes moist with affection, sympathy, even pity.

She said that she was sorry. It was all her fault. She'd planned to seat her brother-in-law as far from me as she could. But he'd fallen into a chair directly across the table. She couldn't very well move him. Would I ever forgive her? I told her that I was the one who needed to be forgiven.

She kissed me chastely on the forehead, then began to walk around, inspecting everything, heading toward the corner I use as my darkroom. My impulse was to hide the prints on which I was still working. She studied a photo of a clown kissing a trapeze artist at the Medrano circus.

She asked, “Why haven't I seen this one?”

She said we had our work cut out for us. My French could use improvement, as could my wardrobe and table manners. As soon as I was ready, we would discuss my future.

So, it seemed, I'd been pardoned. The baroness was still my friend. The memory of last night returned in all its horror. Was she planning to make me her lapdog, a clown for the entertainment of every right-wing bigot in Paris?

But before I could speak, she said, “First things first. Let my secretary know what photographic equipment you need, how much money you will require to do more work like this. I don't mean work like
this
. I mean new work,
the work you want to make
.”

She blew a kiss in my direction and let the door slam on her way out. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Had I dreamed her visit? Could a dream have spiced my room with her exotic perfume?

Dear parents, do you have any idea what this means for us—for you? No more scrimping to send me the pennies that have sustained me until the last few days of each month. No more humiliating negotiations with the
Magyar Gazette
. Now you can go back to saving for your retirement as I devote myself to my art and prepare to enter the world that may yet appreciate and applaud me.

Even before I got out of bed, before I began to think about what to ask from the baroness, I wanted to send you this invitation to accompany me on the shining road before us. And if you imagine I will write you less often, or love you less, or be any less grateful, then you have forgotten who I am.

Your adoring Gabor

From
Make Yourself New

BY
LIONEL MAINE

An Essay on
l'amour

 

L'amour, l'amour, toujours
l'amour
. Spring has come to the city of romance. Love is blooming on the riverbanks, in the alleys of Montmartre. Park benches exist for lovers exhausted by excessive kissing. The frustrated and the satisfied grow equally misty-eyed as the little sparrows and oily Romeos sing their hearts out in the clubs. Strolling arm in arm, enchanted couples catch their reflection in the Seine, a rippling pas de deux.

If I vomit two hundred words of that onto the page, I can get five dollars from the
Jersey City Herald
! Has my hometown run out of spectacular murders, or do the editors want to distract their readers with a French fantasy strategically placed between the accounts of infants burned in tenement fires and young husbands stabbed in broad-daylight downtown holdups?

If the subject
has
to be love, this is what I should write:

L'amour, l'amour,
welcome to the city founded by lovers strictly for lovers. No one else need apply. No one can squeeze past the couples hogging the sidewalk, no one can rest his weary behind on the seats on which the amorous grope and writhe. The poster-hangers can't do their work because those caught short by passion are humping against every wall. Did Haussmann design the boulevards so men and women could embrace in the road, and the motorists must scatter, honking, around them? A citizen can't turn a corner without being treated to the appetizing sight of someone's tongue snaking down someone else's throat.

You're stuffed, you're force-fed love like a goose, until your liver's ready to burst. And if you don't happen to
be
in love? You'd be better off somewhere else. Don't order
boeuf
bourguignon if you're a vegetarian, don't venture into the tearooms if you don't like ladies with lapdogs. Don't come to Paris if you're planning a solitary hike through a sexual desert. It doesn't help to tell yourself that love is fleeting, that most of these lovers will fall out of love by tomorrow, or that these Parisian couples are unemployed actors paid by the mayor to keep up the city's reputation.

Meanwhile we lie about this paradise to earn enough to afford the privilege of being the only love-starved fool in Paris. Or so the city would like us to believe. In any case, that's the lie we're paid to spread each spring in order to lure the tourists and boost the failing French economy. So let me add this to the list of my crimes. In addition to my other misdeeds, I have whored myself out. I have lied. Two hundred words of bullshit about the romance of Par-ee.

 

When Suzanne said she was leaving me, I refused to believe her. This was a few days after our dinner with the baroness and Gabor, after she stripped at Ricardo's party. Or anyway so I heard. I was outside being sick. That night she didn't come home with me. I couldn't find her. Probably she'd been looking for me and gave up and left.

Days, then weeks went by. When a woman avoids her lover for a month, he (unless he is me) might think she was sending a message.

I ran into her doctor friend Ricardo on the boulevard Raspail. I asked if Suzanne was all right. He said yes, very much so. He'd seen her just last night. I might have been jealous if I hadn't known that Ricardo worshiped at the other church.

Desperate, I rang Suzanne's doorbell. I knew her mother was home. But the old lady didn't answer. Suzanne worked hard. She had two jobs. Maybe she was busy.

I waited for her to come to her senses. Let her take her time. And if she really was leaving me, well, there were other fish in the sea, plenty of pretty French girls.

One night, after several cognacs, I admitted that I was out of my mind with grief. The idea of the future without her made me semisuicidal.

When Gabor told me that his baroness had suggested he get help with his French and work on his accent, I reminded him that Suzanne gave lessons. He could put in a good word for me, tell me how she was doing. The perfect arrangement for everyone: an excellent teacher for Gabor, the baroness's money in Suzanne's pocket. A good meal, some wine, a comfortable bed to make love in. With less worry about how she'd feed Mama, Suzanne could rediscover the creativity—the sexual creativity—she'd had with me at the beginning. Once we wore Venetian masks, once she had me turn her upside down like the guy in the da Vinci drawing. It was agonizing to think about that now.

Blinded by vanity and grief, I couldn't see the obvious: My good “friend” Gabor knew that Suzanne taught French. He'd waited for me to suggest it. To give them permission. A few days later Gabor told me he'd started “studying” with Suzanne.

If he didn't know better, he would have thought Suzanne had grown up speaking Hungarian. She knew exactly what a Hungarian needed. The slippery bastard went on. “What a shame that you and Suzanne are having trouble. You
are
having trouble, aren't you? Not that I heard it from Suzanne. We never mention you. She's your lover. I'm your friend.”

Still, the romantic idiot—me—failed to put two and two together. Until one evening I took my self-pity for a stroll along the Seine and, finding a bench, nearly sat down on a pair of squirming exhibitionists.

It was Gabor and Suzanne! Was it a coincidence? Gentlemen, I think not.

No one wants to hear a pathetic middle-aged expat whining about lost love. Especially not a
poor
middle-aged expat, or worse, an unpublished writer. Here in France they want Hemingway. That's what
American
means. The grizzly bear thumping his chest. Not that I wouldn't thump, if I had a chest worth thumping. Hemingway should have stayed in the Midwest. He ruined things for the rest of us, telling all those lies. The lie about courage, the lie about every red-blooded male needing to kill a bull or climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

What about the red-blooded male who just wants to eat, drink, and fuck—and who has lost the love of his life to a short, homely, Hungarian “artist”
still living off his parents
? If only I could have warned Suzanne: the guy is good-hearted, talented, but self-involved, infantile, weak. Didn't a woman of her intelligence know better than to fall in love with an emotional cripple terminally stunted by his unmanly dependence on Mama and Papa?

What did my friend have going for him? Those crazy eyes? That hair? Did Suzanne imagine he
listened to her,
which she always complained I didn't? I knew how much fun it was to roam the streets with him all night, watching what he photographed, meeting the colorful characters who trusted him to take their portraits. Whom am I jealous of, really? Do I envy Gabor for sleeping with Suzanne? Or do I envy Suzanne for going on Gabor's midnight rambles?

All I can do is hoard my pain to pour into my next book:
The Loser's Guide to Paris
.

Meanwhile, a few words of wisdom for my friends in the States. Here are five things to do in the city of
l'amour
when you have a few centimes in your pocket and the woman of your dreams has left you for your best friend.

One: See the two of them everywhere. Contemplate suicide. Would it seem too tourist-y to jump off the Eiffel Tower? Wouldn't a real Parisian throw himself in the Seine? Forget suicide. Paris is for the living! Save the impulse to end it all until you get back to New Jersey.

Two: Distract yourself. Paris has something for everyone. Let's imagine you are feeling slightly disenchanted with women. Dozens of places will persuade you that a beautiful woman is nothing more than a beautiful man in a dress. At Le Cirque, a six-foot Texan named Barbette hangs from a trapeze by his teeth—in a tutu and a tiara! At the Ton Ton Club, you can watch the enchanting Tiptina Sisters. Or go across the street where the equally enchanting Rocky Twins, two handsome Norwegian boys, dance and sing exactly like the Tiptina Sisters, in the original register and wearing the same gowns. Depressed about the human condition? Head for the Bobino and watch a Ferris wheel powered by cats wearing tiny straw boaters, a man dressed as a gorilla playing classical violin, and a woman who danced with Pavlova removing, feather by feather, fifty pounds of ostrich plumes. Spend twenty minutes in the Louvre, you'll see twenty women more beautiful than the one who left you.

Three: You're in Paris. Go to whores. Visit the brothel where you used to go with your Hungarian friend who pretended he was only there to take pictures. Choose a girl who reminds you of her. It's happened to her before. You can cry on her shoulder. Or pick the one with the softest heart and tell her your heart has been broken. It might get you a little something extra.

Four: Drink an entire bottle of wine, then stand outside the hotel where your beloved has shacked up with your former best friend. Look up at his window. Imagine them in bed until you get hard. Fall to your knees with your hand outstretched and wail, Help me help me, like that crazy Spanish beggar in the rue de Rivoli. Repeat until the hotel manager comes out and threatens to call the cops.

Five: Invite your friend for a beer. Promise you're not going to punch him. Even if it's not true, say everything is forgiven. Spend your last pennies on alcohol until your forgiveness is real.

I've agreed to limit myself to five, but let me add one more.

See her, quite by accident, after a long separation. She is lying on the sidewalk, modeling for a series of photographs he is taking. Talk to her. Say the wrong things. Tell her that you are angry at him when you mean you are missing her. You want to say, He doesn't care about you, he only cares about his photos.

Restrain yourself from saying that. She loves him. She's not going to listen to you. And still you want to tell her that she was wrong when she said you didn't understand her and only thought about your writing. That was unfair and untrue. You know who she is, and you love her.

That's when your friend appears and explains why she's been lying on the sidewalk. It has something to do with ectoplasm, with the residue of the dead. He's been trying to catch it on film. In other words, some Hungarian bullshit that's the most interesting thing you've heard in ages. You think, Fuck it. The guy's a genius. He deserves her.

What is a woman, after all? You are alive and in Paris.

From the (Unpublished) Memoirs of Suzanne Dunois Tsenyi

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

HE WAITED TILL
we were in bed, after sex.

He said, “Suzanne, I need a favor.”

I thought, There is nothing I wouldn't do.

I said, “Like what? It depends.”

He wanted me to play dead on the sidewalk across from his hotel. Some friends of his would pretend to be strangers gathered around me. They'd play it so straight that real strangers would collect around my corpse. He'd arranged for a hearse to take me away, while he photographed the scene in stages, looking down from his window.

Any sane, self-respecting woman would have said “Are you out of your mind?” But love, it seemed, had obliterated my sanity and self-respect.

Morning and night I thought about him. All day I waited for evening so I could see him again. When I got home from the language school or the life-drawing class, Gabor was waiting for me at his hotel. We made love as soon as I walked in and only afterward thought about dinner. His kitchen was a hot plate on which my repertoire was limited to a decent onion soup. There were only a few restaurants that we could afford. One café let us split an order of roast lamb and flageolet beans, the perfect meal for indigent lovers.

There were problems, small ones, but problems nonetheless. When he asked me to pose as the dead girl, I asked, “Who's paying for the hearse?”

“A friend,” he said. I knew which friend. Let her lie in the street in her ermine coat! He pulled my head against his chest and gently stroked my hair.

“When?” I said.

“Tomorrow noon.”

I said, “I'm giving lessons all day.”

He said, “Come on your lunch break. The light will be perfect. It's supposed to be cloudy.”

I said, “It's all the way across town.”

He said, “Take a taxi. I'll pay.”

I almost said, “She'll pay.”

First he kissed me, then he said, “Let's go for a walk. Then back to bed. All right?”

“Yes,” I said. Yes to it all. I had become a puppy that stands on its hind legs and barks when its master fetches its leash.

I had grown up in Paris. But now I saw my city with the clarity of the newly arrived. I followed him, stopped when he stopped and started again when he did. I'd always been the kind of girl who walked ahead of her boyfriend. Lionel used to complain that he'd had to skip, to keep up. What had made that quick, independent girl lag so meekly behind?

But why was I so hard on myself for changing in his presence, when each night, a city transformed itself into whatever he desired? I watched the darkness ask questions to which he always found new answers. I watched him finding the marvelous in the everyday. He used to say he wanted to raise himself to the level of the object, to the glory of the trolley track, the smokestack, and the tunnel.

He photographed a gutter: a cobblestone cobra winding between two trees. The shadow of a buttress underneath a bridge became the silhouette of a fat man in a crooked top hat. He caught the fireworks showering the welders fixing a tram. The workers greeted him by name and offered us coffee with brandy.

As we walked alongside the prison wall, he let go of my hand. How could there have been such interesting shadows on that same wall last night—and such dull ones now? I told myself it wasn't my fault if the shadows were less exciting. His gloom lifted at the entrance to a narrow street of hotels whose neon signs hung like the banners in a Shanghai bazaar. The hotel of the universe, the hotel of the world, the hotel of the princess, the hotel of the king.

Pausing on the bridge, he meant to say, Look at the Seine. But what he said was, “Regard the breasts.” I was no longer a useful teacher for him. I'd stopped correcting his French.

We'd only had two lessons. He'd insisted I must be part Hungarian. How else could I know exactly what a Hungarian needed? That lesson ended abruptly. We were too shy to go on. At the end of the second class, he was just about to leave when he turned around and we clung to each other. Until then our loyalty to Lionel had kept us from acting on what, we later agreed, was decided that night I stripped—for him—at Paul and Ricardo's party.

As we gazed at the river, I wanted him to embrace me. But he wasn't there for love. Or anyway, not love for me. I'd never wanted to be the flattering mirror in which a man admires his talent.

But how could I stop loving a man to whom a city is saying, Tell me what you want. For him, two gendarmes shared a smoke by a streetlamp and traveled back through time to take a break from pursuing the serial killer Landru. For him, the magicians with their long wands lit the last gas lamps in our electric city. For him, an elderly prostitute in moth-eaten furs extended her spotted hand, and the ghost of her lost beauty flirted with the camera. A taxi paused long enough for him to catch the wink of its passenger's diamond bracelets. For him, for him, for no one else. And for me, if I was with him.

Often the dawn was coming up when we got back to his room. He pulled the shades, lit the blood-colored bulb, and made negatives from the plates. Watching our night alchemized into art swimming in clear liquid, I knew I'd become a very strange puppy, trained not only to wait for the signs of its master going for a walk but also to associate passion with the smell of developing fluid.

We went to bed at six. An hour later we fell asleep. I slept for another hour, then got up and dressed for work. On my way out I kissed him. Though he slept more than he admitted, this time he was awake. Insomnia had a starring role in the drama he played with his parents. It gave him something to write about instead of telling them about me.

“Will you do it?” he said.

“Do what?”

“Play dead,” he said.

No, I thought.

“Yes,” I said. “Tell me again. What time, and where do you want me?”

 

The morning was cold and bleak. Walking to the Métro, I dreaded lying on the damp sidewalk. If Gabor loved me, he wouldn't make me suffer. He couldn't bear to see what I'd look like, brought down by an accident or an illness. I could never tell Mama. She would advise me again to leave him.

But wasn't it also possible that this
proved
how much he loved me? He was using his worst fantasy—his lover dead, surrounded by strangers—to inspire his art. I was doing him a favor, but he was giving me something too. I would live forever as the pretty corpse on the sidewalk. I also knew what Mama would say about a man who promised you immortality instead of a wedding ring.

That morning, at the language school, I was no longer Suzanne the Liar, assuring the rich, unteachable Portuguese widow that her French was improving. Or Spineless Suzanne, absorbing the casual insults the Austrian businessman lobbed my way. Or Saintly Suzanne, refunding the money of the near-mute Chinese boy who shared an apartment—and my classroom—with nine other waiters. I was only pretending to be the underpaid, duplicitous, ineffective, struggling teacher of immigrant French. The real Suzanne was the lover and muse of a brilliant artist.

By lunchtime it was drizzling. Surely Gabor would cancel the shoot. But when I got to his hotel, I saw him standing outside with three photographer friends. They nodded to me, just barely. I'd met them before, in cafés, where they'd ignored me and talked to Gabor.

They've all brought umbrellas. Gabor had known what the weather would be. He wanted the puddled sidewalk, the drenched corpse, the scalloped black discs of the open umbrellas, the mourners' shiny black raincoats. He ran to me and embraced me. My doubts and resentments vanished.

He handed me a coat. He'd traded a dozen eggs to a corporal in the Hungarian army for this double-breasted greatcoat. It was the coat a homeless girl might wear with only a slip underneath, a fringe of lace Gabor could catch on film from his window, if he used the right lens.

I asked him where he wanted me to lie. He said, “Over there beneath the plane tree where the pavement is dry.”

I lay down beneath the tree. The pavement was cold and wet. He told me to roll onto my side, bend my knees, and shut my eyes. Lift the hem of my coat. Like that. He whispered that he loved me. He asked if I was all right. I said I was fine. He thanked me and said he was sorry.

I'd lied. I wasn't fine. Playing dead made me think about the dead who weren't pretending. I thought about my father and how, after he was killed, I believed I would always be counting the days till I saw him in heaven. I stopped believing in heaven long before I stopped counting. I remembered the letter from the army, edged in black. My mother said we were lucky to get it. After the war, she showed me a photo of unmarked graves. She said those were the unlucky ones. I said we were all unlucky. Mama's health was fragile. No matter where I was, I felt a pang whenever she had an attack.

Lying on the sidewalk, I wept for Mama, for Papa, for the widows and orphans, the maimed and wounded veterans begging in the streets. Lionel used to say it moved him to see women cry, but he was lying. I even wept for Lionel and for the unhappiness I'd caused him.

As the dampness seeped through the heavy coat, I thought how someday I would be dead and buried in the cold ground. Sooner than we could imagine, Gabor and I would be skeletons in distant parts of the earth. I would lie beside Mama, and he would return to his parents in the cemetery above the town he thought he'd escaped. He'd told me he wanted to be buried in Paris. But I didn't believe him, no more than I believed that Lionel liked to see women cry.

I fought back tears. A weeping dead girl would have spoiled the shot, though only Gabor would have noticed. Anyone else would have thought: raindrops.

Again Gabor asked if I was all right. I nodded. He said he was going upstairs. I heard him shout down from his window—but not to me. I lay still. The wet earth stank of dog piss. Gabor's friends stood above me. One knelt and felt my wrist for a pulse. He remained like that for a while. I heard the voices of strangers. Gabor's friends told the gathering crowd that the police had been called.

A woman said, “How tragic! So young!”

A child was crying, “Let's go, Mama! I'm cold! I'm scared.” Obviously I couldn't tell the kid not to worry. The crowd's reaction to
that
would have been something for Gabor to film. But not the image he wanted. He would punish me by spending more time with the baroness. I didn't think he was sleeping with her. But she gave him money, bought his prints, introduced him to glamorous people. I was ashamed to be thinking about her when I was supposed to be dead. Was this how I would spend the afterlife, competing with my rival, worrying because Gabor had mentioned that the baroness had offered to set up a studio where he could work, instead of in the hotel room where he and I spent almost every night?

At last I heard a van pull up. Hands loaded me on a stretcher. It was even colder inside the van, which reeked of blood and poultry. The engine started, we pulled away from the curb, then stopped. Gabor was still taking pictures. The van turned a corner and stopped again.

Only then did I open my eyes. An elderly man was driving. His helper rode beside him, reading a magazine with a naked girl on the cover. The driver asked if I could walk back on my own.

He said, “Forgive me, Mademoiselle. But you look unwell, and your coat is soaked.”

I said, “It's my boyfriend's coat.” He seemed to find the mention of a boyfriend reassuring, though I could tell they both wondered why this boyfriend didn't take better care of a girl like me. I couldn't bear their pity. I'd rather they thought I was a whore who'd gotten paid for posing. I didn't want them knowing I'd lain on the sidewalk just because a man asked. Did they know that another woman had paid them to cart me away, a rich woman who was in love with him and could buy him whatever he wanted?

I walked back to Gabor's hotel. It wasn't far, but my legs shook. I felt as if I'd died on the street and been resurrected. The strangers had dispersed. Gabor's friends were leaving. Gabor looked ecstatic, though normally he was too superstitious to be happy until he saw the final print.

He said to me, “I'm glad you're alive.”

“So am I,” I said.

He took my face in his hands and kissed me. It was difficult to stop, and when we did, the looks we exchanged contained (or so it seemed to me) a promise about the future.

First I had to go back to work. I returned his wet coat. He seemed shocked by how heavy it was.

He said, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Suzanne.”

I said, “Don't apologize. I love you.”

I waited to see him appear at his window and wave. Someone grabbed my arm. It took me longer than it should have to recognize Lionel. How strange that, only months ago, this stranger had been inside me.

Gabor had said they'd had a drink, and that it was all right with Lionel if Gabor and I were together. Who was Lionel to approve or not? How sweetly old-fashioned of Gabor to ask his friend's permission. The thought was infuriating, and yet I had to admit that it pleased me to know they'd been talking about me.

Lionel hadn't changed much. But our lives had changed. I might have recognized him sooner if I hadn't known him so well.

I said, “Lionel, I was just thinking about you.”

“Thinking what?” He was hoping I'd say I missed him.

“Thinking about your writing,” I lied.

“Suzanne, I'll always adore you,” he said. “But he's a thieving son of a bitch.”

Lionel put his arm through mine. I wished that
we
were friends. I wanted to know what he thought about my loving a man whose bills were being paid by another woman. He was the last one I could ask. It would have been too cruel.

I'd asked my friend Ricardo, who said that one had to put up with a lot when one loved an artist. I knew he was talking about Paul, who was said to have slept with every eligible man, and many ineligible men, in Paris.