by Sherry Jones
Maybe only animals and children had the capacity for love. Maybe over time, people’s hearts got knocked around and beaten up and bruised and broken so many times that a kind of scar tissue formed like a shield all around until love couldn’t penetrate either way, going out or coming in. The idea made her tired. Bobo patted her face and, feeling tears, whimpered as he wiped them with his monkey fingers. How she wished Bobo were a child, hers and Marcel’s baby. Then she would have the love she’d always wanted, and Marcel wouldn’t be ashamed of her anymore, because she would quit the stage—she was sick of dancing nude, anyway.
The scenario presented itself: Josephine with an infant in her arms and Marcel leaning in to admire the child, his son, his eyes turning tenderly to hers. They would go on picnics together, and to the beach, where Marcel would swim like a dolphin with their little boy on his back while Josephine squatted on the shore with their girl and made sand castles that the tide washed away, and if the little girl cried, Josephine would tell her that everything in life changes, that nothing is permanent, that all we build are castles in the sand except for love, which is the only thing that lasts.
She’d wrapped a colorful kerchief around her head and a silk robe around her body when Marcel stepped back into the boudoir, toweling his damp hair and skin. When he pulled off his swimming trunks she placed her hands on his hips to pull him close, murmuring her apology. She hadn’t meant to upset him, she loved him, was all, and wanted to celebrate his success with him. She pressed herself to him, felt his cock stirring against her belly, and offered her mouth for a soft kiss. “Je t’adore,” she whispered, feeling him growing and hardening in her grasp.
His kiss felt hot on her mouth and he pressed into her, pushing her toward the bed. At last; at last. “Je t’adore,” she said, emotion carrying her away like a tide, her mouth gasping. “Oh, Marcel, I want to have your child.”
He softened and withdrew, his face white. “A child? Are you pregnant?”
“You look like you seen a ghost, baby. What’s the matter? I’m not pregnant, but would it be so bad if I was? We love each other, don’t we?”
“Illegitimate children are messy.”
“Let’s make it legitimate, then.” She’d ask Billy for a divorce. After refusing to join her here, he wouldn’t say no, would he? She softened her voice, her eyes, every part of her as she pressed herself to his damp body once more and kissed his beautiful mouth. “Oh, baby, I love you so much, I’d marry you in a heartbeat, don’t you know?”
He got out of bed and went to the closet. She walked up behind him and reached around to stroke him some more—but he pulled away.
“What’s the matter, Marcel? You don’t want a family?”
He moved out of her reach and took up his clothes.
“Is it because I’m in show business? I’d quit to raise your babies, and I wouldn’t mind it a bit. I’d be the happiest woman in the whole world, in fact.”
He yanked on his trousers. “I don’t want to get married.”
But all men say that, don’t they? Willie Wells sure as hell wouldn’t have married her if she hadn’t pretended she was pregnant, and Lord only knows what Billy Baker would have done if she hadn’t been, and if Shuffle Along hadn’t been leaving Philadelphia. Marcel, though, was rich and good-looking and could fuck anyone he wanted. And so she told him now, her heart feeling like it might fly out of her chest, that she wouldn’t tie him down, she’d be a French wife in every way, she’d even get her citizenship. He could have a mistress.
He sighed as he buttoned up his shirt.
“I want things to remain as they are,” he said.
“Even if I quit? It’s because I’m a dancer, ain’t it?” As he looked in the mirror to knot his tie, she tried to meet his gaze but couldn’t bring herself to hold it as she added, “Or is it because I’m colored?”
He turned around to face her. “It is both.”
A deadly calm fell over her, then, as though the cyclone had shifted and she stood in its eye. This was what she had dreaded to hear, not just from Marcel but throughout her life: that the color of her skin made her unlovable. And then the storm moved in her again and her thoughts whirled and her blood raged. She looked around the room for something to throw, seized a pillow, hurled it at him. He ducked it, his face a closed door that all the pillows in the world wouldn’t open.
“That’s why you won’t take me to your dinners,” she said, her voice cracking. “That’s why I’m not invited tonight, isn’t it? Because I’m a Negro.”
He shrugged again, and now her blood rose. She must know, he said, that her music-hall life was a fantasy, that not everyone in France embraced le jazz hot or its lifestyle.
“I must consider my family. And my position, which I will lose if I disgrace my father.”
“Disgrace?”
“He does not see life the way you and I do. Nor do his friends.”
“I will charm him!” She’d won Pa Baker’s heart so easily.
Marcel came over and put his arms around her waist. He smiled into her eyes. She melted a little. “You cannot change the world, ma petite chou,” he said.
“Yes, I can!” she cried, and slapped him in the mouth, wanting to strike out that ugly, negating word, disgrace. Plenty of men richer than Marcel or his daddy would love to marry her. She got proposals every day from men who were rolling in dough. He touched his hand to the place where hers had struck.
“No,” he said, “you cannot.”
His blue eyes mooning at her now, he looked like he might cry, but she didn’t care. He didn’t love her. He had only been using her, and as soon as he got tired of the same pussy every night he’d be giving some other woman his come-hither looks and moving her into this place. Josephine saw what might have been their future unraveling like a piece of cheap cloth. All the animals he’d given to her, the mice with their little pink ears, the parakeets, the champagne he brought, the flowers he sent, the tender kisses, the nights spent holding her while they slept—it had all been lies. So why should she believe anything he said?
“I can change the world!” she shouted. He touched a finger to his lips, which made her scream.
Goddamn him and his phony morality, him and his fucking “class.” Goddamn him and his family and his high-society hypocrites. She spat the words, he flinching as if every one were a blow.
“Yes, I’m talking about you! You go along with it, don’t you? Looking down on people because of their skin. You’re no better than . . . Americans!” There—she’d done it, compared him and his lot to the people he disdained. “At least Americans don’t pretend.”
His eyes drooped. “You hate me.”
“You’re the one who hates me.”
“Josephine, I adore you.” That sad face! He looked like he’d just lost his best friend. Maybe he did love her, after all. But—he said “adore.” He had never said “love” to Josephine. She crossed her arms over her breast, covering her heart.
“Not enough to have a child with me.” He said nothing. She pushed past him into the bathroom, where she locked the door and turned on the bath, the sound of the water drowning out her sobs, which drowned out the sound of his knocking, so tentative that she wasn’t sure whether he wanted to talk or to use the bathroom.
“Josephine,” he called, more loudly now. “Josephine, open the door. Please.”
Let the bastard stand there all day if he wanted to. If he had to piss, he could use the sink, or his stupid, pointless pool. She didn’t care what Marcel did, not anymore.
CHAPTER 14
“Frenchmen don’t marry foreign girls, colored or not.” Bricktop, reclining in a booth and glistening with perspiration after her set, sat up straight when she said this, as if making an announcement to the group at their table: Cole and Linda Porter; Sara and Gerald Murphy; Elsa Maxwell; the Prince of Wales; Josephine’s friend Bessie, visiting from New York; and the rakish journalist Georges Simenon. Sim was the only Frenchy, but they all nodded, the insistence o
f Frenchmen on having French wives being something everyone knew, it seemed, except Josephine. And this after listening to Sim complain about his miserable marriage to Tigy, a Frenchwoman with that closed-up look so many of them had, like they’d just stepped out of a cold bath.
“You knew this and never told me?” Her best friend had seen heartbreak coming and never said a word. “Damn, Bricky, if I can’t trust you, who can I trust?”
The first time she’d met Bricktop, before leaving for Berlin with La Revue Nègre last year, Josephine had felt like she’d found the big sister she’d always wanted. Besides being a fellow Southerner and Negro, Bricky worked as a dancer and manager of Le Grand Duc, and had started her career, like Josephine, performing on the “chitlin’ circuit” in Negro vaudeville shows. Being with her was like being home.
“It’s no wonder you’re a hit,” Bricky had said that first night. “You look like a Frenchwoman, the way you carry yourself.” But Josephine hadn’t felt like she fit in, so Bricky had helped her, choosing her clothes from the piles the designers sent every day and teaching her the words and phrases she needed to know: Voulez-vous dancer? Donne-moi un bisou. Combien ça coûte?
When Josephine had confided one of her most shameful secrets—that she could barely write, even her own name, the result of skipping all that school as a kid—Bricky had given her a stamp to use for signing autographs. She took care of Josephine and asked for nothing in return: a first, in Josephine’s experience. But Bricky hadn’t warned her about Marcel Ballot, hadn’t told her about all the many women he’d moved into that apartment who’d moved out again because he wouldn’t marry them: a Congolese maid, an Algerian student at the Sorbonne, a Russian dancer at the Casino de Paris. “He loves foreign women, but his family does not,” she said now—too little, too late. But if he’d loved Josephine enough to spend all that money on her, why not tell his snooty family to take a hike? She earned almost as much as he did, and would happily take care of him, but he wouldn’t even think about it. Men and their pride.
“All the Parisians I know love me,” Josephine said. “Don’t they?”
“I love you,” Sim said with a wink. Josephine pretended not to hear. It would be a cold day in hell before she wasted herself on another Frenchman.
“Loving somebody is one thing,” Bricky said. “Marrying them is another.”
“You should have warned me,” Josephine said. “I wasted all that time.”
“Ain’t no way you would have listened to me,” Bricky said.
“You’ve heard that love is blind?” Cole said. “Guess what? It’s deaf, too.”
“A good friend tells the truth. Bricky, I don’t know how you could watch me making a fool of myself without saying a word.”
“I like my eyes, and don’t want them scratched out,” Bricky said, and Josephine, on cue, lifted her long, gold-painted fingernails and aimed them at her friend’s face, lightening the mood instead of pointing out that Bricky, her best friend, knew she would never attack her. Blinding anybody was the last thing Josephine would ever do. She still had nightmares about the day Daddy Arthur had knocked out Willie Mae’s eye. Poor little thing had spent her life looking for a man who could love a woman wearing an eye patch and had gotten a venereal disease right off the bat. Somebody should have told her to be careful, to guard her heart and her body. Somebody should have told her that a man would say anything for pussy, that he’d do anything, too, even spend a fortune on a swimming pool that you didn’t want.
“Bricky, the next time you see me doing a fool thing like that, you’d better say something. You ain’t my friend if you don’t.”
Speaking of people who weren’t friends, Johnny Hudgins walked into the club and Bricktop went to greet him. “Don’t bring him over here,” Josephine muttered, but she must not have heard, because in a minute he was standing in front of her with a big smile.
“I’ve just spoken with Mildred, and she asked me to give you her love,” he said. “I’m sorry you had to rush off the other night—I wanted to show you these.”
He opened his wallet and pulled out two photographs of Mildred, looking somewhat pudgy in the neck and arms and holding as ugly a baby as Josephine had ever seen, its eyes protruding from an outsize head.
“How sweet,” she murmured, handing the photos back to him. “He’s the spitting image of his daddy, I must say.”
“Thanks, Joe,” he said. “That means a lot.” Josephine’s insides seemed to bunch up and twist. Why had God given Mildred a child and not her? Maybe she’d been with the wrong men. Marcel didn’t have any bastards running around that she knew of. He was probably sterile! Thank the good Lord he’d refused to marry her, as badly as she wanted children. Maybe Sim would get her pregnant tonight, wife or no wife. That was all she needed a man for, anyway. She could take care of a child by herself, she had plenty of money to give and even more love. And a child would love her back—it would have to, wouldn’t it? She loved her mama, mean streak and all, had just sent more money even though she still hadn’t received a word of thanks. We love our mothers no matter what damage they do.
She slid her hand under the table and across Sim’s thigh; he was a journalist who “must be discreet,” he’d said when they’d danced together at Le Chat Noir, but the lust on his face now was open and raw. Should she?
But no, she ought to blow this joint now, before she got herself in trouble again. Standing up, she said her goodbyes: she and Bessie were going over to Zelli’s to get the caricaturist Zito to draw their picture.
When they got there, though, Zito was packing his pencils and pens and easel and blowing his nose, saying he was malade and going home. Then, a dark-haired man wearing a monocle was standing beside him, bowing to Josephine and Bessie and kissing their hands. A thrill ran through Josephine’s blood. He was the spitting image of Adolphe Menjou, the movie star, but he was even better than that: bowing, he introduced himself as Count Pepito Abatino, from Italy.
“A count? With a castle and all?” Bessie said.
“Of course that’s what he means,” Josephine said, straightening her back a little more as though she were royalty, too. Forgive my friend’s ignorance, she tried to say with her eyes, and in his gaze she read a response that had nothing to do with Bessie.
Not only was he a movie-star-looking Italian count, he was also a dancer who taught the Argentine tango. Josephine and Bessie watched from the bar as he steered various women through the sexy dance, then Josephine put up money for their turns. If he was a count, why did he need their money? Bessie wanted to know. Josephine explained that, in Europe, a lot of nobles walked around as poor as church mice, run out of their castles and their countries by all the politics going on. Josephine saw the old French comptes and comptesses all the time in the clubs and tea gardens, their tiaras, silk sashes, and coats of arms faded testaments to past glories, their families having lost everything to Napoleon except their titles. The same thing was happening in Italy under Mussolini, she told Bessie.
“So is he a real count, or a has-been count?” Bessie said.
“I can spot a phony a mile away,” Josephine said, watching an older woman slide her foot down his calf. “He’s the real thing.”
BY THE TIME their tango had finished, Josephine didn’t care whether Count Abatino was real, fake, or imaginary. The press of his hand to her back, of her breasts to his chest, of his cheek to her cheek, of his thigh against her thigh as they moved on the crowded floor, all made her body and mind yearn for one thing only: this man in her bed as soon as possible.
But first she had the throbbing heart of Paris at night to present to her friend. She’d promised Bessie they’d paint the town red, and so off the three of them went in Josephine’s snakeskin dream, her chauffeur André driving them up and down the Champs-Élysées, to the bulldyke bar Le Monocle in Montparnasse, to Le Chat Noir in Montmartre, and, finally, back to Le Grand Duc for breakfast, to end the night, as always, with Bricktop.
But Bricky wasn’t in
her usual good mood when they walked in. She looked at Pepito as though the sight of him made her queasy. Josephine felt, for a minute, like she’d lost her way. Had she failed to see something, a deformity of some kind? Slender, elegant hands; sleek, dark hair and mustache; slight figure barely taller than she; deep-set eyes as black as coal; nice smile with a crooked front tooth.
“Your handsome man looks familiar.” Colette’s shrewd eyes followed Pepito and Bessie to the dance floor.
“That’s Pepi,” said Elsa Maxwell, giving him the same breathless looks every other middle-aged woman had sent his way this evening. “He comes to my tea garden every afternoon and dances with the wealthy widows. I’m told he’s a gigolo, but I don’t mind—he’s very popular.”
“He’s an Italian count,” Josephine said. “And a dance instructor.”
“He doesn’t speak English, does he?” Elsa said. “Maybe I’ve misunderstood.”
Josephine smiled, feeling like the cat that swallowed the canary. She had understood Pepito perfectly before he’d said a word.
After an obligatory dance with Bessie he took Josephine in hand, steering her through the fox-trot, Charleston, shimmy, and the Brazilian samba to the Argentine tango, Josephine jazzing up each dance with moves of her own. The floor cleared and a crowd formed around the perimeter to clap and cheer. Josephine laughed, giddy, the room spinning although she’d hardly drunk a drop. She was dancing with an Italian count, and her blood was racing like music in her veins. This would be Pepito’s night if he wanted it, and tomorrow night, and the next.
As he turned her this way and that, his hand sliding across her bare back, their legs intertwining, flashbulbs popped like fireworks around them. Josephine turned her face to the left and the right, striking poses. By the time she found the photographer, though, he’d stopped taking pictures. Bricktop stood next to him, a restraining hand on his arm. What the hell? La Folie du Jour wasn’t doing well, and the publicity might help. She didn’t have time to think about it much, though, not with all the footwork and handwork and eyeball work and heavy-breathing work she and Pepito were doing.