Frog Music

by Emma Donoghue

  “Palace, quarter of an hour,” says the boy, jerking his head toward the gigantic edifice that takes up the whole next block. His hand is out—as if Lamantia wouldn’t have paid him handsomely already.

  “Don’t push your luck,” says Blanche.

  The City’s money is trickling south these days; the newly built Palace is an open plug hole sucking it all down toward Market Street. The biggest hotel in the world, it rears up like a cliff with seven thousand windows. Blanche shakes out her skirts and tries to muster some poise as she approaches the great doors.

  The lobby’s full of vast landscape paintings, old millionaires in top hats, and suave black staff in swallowtail coats and white gloves. It’s almost silent, because the Turkish carpets swallow up the sound. The air is actually cool, as if Blanche is walking into a gigantic icebox; how do they manage that?

  She has a brief, low-voiced wrangle with a clerk behind a shimmering desk. “Yes, Signor Lamantia will be covering all charges…. Of course I’ve been a guest here before.” Though in fact, this is her first time; Madame usually arranges such rendezvous in other hotels farther north, nearer the House of Mirrors. “Oh, and Signor Lamantia would like a bottle of champagne sent up right away,” she adds. Of course the clerk recognizes Blanche as what the mealymouthed call a fille de joie, a “joy girl.” She holds her dusty carpetbag low enough for him not to see it, but she’s horribly aware of the scab on her right cheek from last night’s flying glass.

  At last Blanche is riding up to the seventh floor in one of the famous elevators, her stomach sinking.

  “It’s water that do it,” the porter mentions in an accent she can narrow down only as far as the eastern states.

  She stares at him.

  “Water push it up,” he adds. “Hydraulics.”

  She still has no idea what the man’s talking about.

  “Also we got pneumatic tubes for carrying parcels …”

  Blanche shuts her eyes, which quells him.

  The corridor she steps out on looks down onto the internal courtyard of the Palace, where carriages sweep in and unload guests in a forest of potted plants. Dizzy, Blanche squints up at the dome of opaque glass that, on a day this bright, resembles an enormous sun.

  When the porter lets her into the bedroom, Blanche glances around carelessly, as if she’s seen bigger and better. When he hovers, waiting for his tip, she ignores him. Finally he leaves, thumping the door closed behind him.

  Cool in here, secluded behind the thick velvet drapes that seal off the bay window. Everything’s carved out of teak, rosewood, ebony … the ceiling must be fifteen feet high. Utter silence.

  Blanche uses the gleaming flush lavatory and puts in a little carbolic plug, to be ready. Wishes she were sure she had enough time for a bath, but she’ll make do with a sponge-down.

  Naked, she gives herself a judgmental stare in one of the many mirrors, wondering how to work some magic before Lamantia arrives. She could change into the orange-striped skirt in her bag, but that’s the last clean thing she owns. And what if he walks in on her when she’s halfway through reapplying her paint? How embarrassing that’ll be, if the busy merchant has to stand around waiting for her to ready herself to impress him. Like letting the audience into the dressing room before the show.

  Ah, here’s an idea: Blanche will make a virtue of having nothing to wear. Working fast now, she scrubs all her paint off with a wet fluffy towel, lets down her dark hair, and shakes the curls out with her fingers. Raw girl is the look, for a novelty; her costume is nakedness. All to the good if it’s not what Lamantia’s expecting. Sometimes what men pay highest for is surprise.

  Blanche dives between the crisp sheets. The bed is the most comfortable surface she’s ever lain on. Though she supposes, after the shocks she’s endured since this time yesterday, she’d think a haystack just as soft. Mustn’t sleep, though, she warns herself. Must be ready …

  The voices wake her with a start—Lamantia dealing with the porter at the door—but Blanche pretends to be deep in innocent sleep.

  She knows he must be tiptoeing to the bed and watching her. He leans so close that she can smell his hot breath, the bologna he had for lunch. He slowly slides the edge of the sheet away from her back. Sometimes men want to be seen looking, but other times, they congratulate themselves that they’re managing to watch while remaining unseen.

  After a minute or two Blanche stretches and blinks. Confusion—then Sleeping Beauty smiles for her tall, dark, heavy-fleshed prince, who is even more massive than she remembered. Lamantia wears no facial hair, but the shadow breaks through on his cheek by midafternoon.

  “Amoruccia, mia!” he whispers, planting a kiss on her cheek. “All these weeks, my dearest! Where have you been?”

  So he knows nothing about her entanglement in a murder case. But the last thing Blanche wants to do is explain or say why she’s come looking for Lamantia today instead of letting Madame Johanna set up the encounter … so she silences his mouth with hers. She’s got a job to do.

  This is one of her specialties: giving michetons the impression that what’s happening is happening not so much because they want it as because Blanche, in her lip-biting, helpless way, needs it. Right here, right now: her desire is so urgent that she might just scream the whole hotel down if he—this particular man, out of all the men in the world, who possesses the secret power—if this man doesn’t part her pearl-sheened thighs and bang the living daylights out of her.

  Lamantia hasn’t had time to take any clothes off. Blanche twists herself around and lies back, slides with every thrust of his so his long cigare seems to be shoving her farther and farther off the enormous bed. “Oh!” It’s a simple backbend, nothing compared to what she used to manage in her circus days. Upside down, she keeps herself from falling on her head by pressing her splayed fingers to the floorboards. (Well waxed, she notes, with a lemony polish.) The pose reminds her of a Sabine-captive act she used to do, hair trailing behind her, on the most asthmatic of the circus’s ponies. Blanche keeps her eyes on the glossy molding around the door, the sparkling chandelier, and lets herself imagine that she’s cantering farther and farther and farther away … “Ah! Ah!”

  Won’t be long now till she’s brought Lamantia off; they’re coasting. So Blanche switches off the tick-tick of her brain and tightens her cul as if resisting each thrust. Sometimes for a day or a week she forgets how much she needs this: to be used, abased, crushed into something else. The Sicilian’s not Arthur Deneve, of course. He’s got none of that ruthless precision. (She scolds herself for thinking about Arthur, for summoning up that particular thick cock, those intelligent fingers.) But Lamantia’s a man giving her what men give women and that’s all she requires, surely?

  Now she lets out a gasp so unladylike, so dreadfully guttural, that the businessman sobs like a boy who’s appalled at his own badness and pumps even harder. Blanche always puts on a good show, but performing doesn’t mean shamming—she’s never needed to fake it. From the day Arthur taught her to do it, behind the elephant stalls, she’s relished nothing as much as a fuck: the stuffed-to-bursting sensation that erases thought, the steam train of its movement, the frantic mazurka for two. And on that kernel of truth Blanche has built a legendary persona. She feels sensations and cries them out as arias, takes every urge and tears the roof down with it: not a dry hole in the house. How did Ernest put it? That Blanche was obsessed with cock, lived and breathed it? It’s awful, but there’s a grain of truth to it. Men are tools Blanche uses for her satisfaction. Dancing, dancing, over a cliff into merciful darkness—

  The two of them catch their breath, finally.

  Lamantia leans up on one elbow and pours the champagne. The man’s such a bourgeois, thinks Blanche. He’s smacking his lips with satisfaction at his own wickedness because he’s taken an afternoon off from facts and figures to bed the Lively Flea.

  She slips away to the bathroom to douche because she can’t trust the little plug on its own. The carbolic stings
hard enough to make her hiss. Blanche has always had to do this, whether at home or with michetons, because most men balk at the clammy grip of rubber safes. She’s meticulous about it. P’tit is the only accident she’s ever had.

  Tomorrow. At the inquest. If she does exactly what Ernest requires of her—

  She mustn’t think about P’tit and her hope of getting him back. Not here, not now. One task at a time.

  “Bella bianca,” Lamantia murmurs when Blanche returns, “what have you done to your lovely face?”

  She rearranges it into a smile—but it’s the little cut he’s fingering.

  Blanche considers evasion and rejects it quickly. No doubt Lamantia will hear about the murder at some point, and he can’t stand to be lied to. In the past, he’s thrown the odd jealous fit on nights when she’s claimed illness but he’s suspected she’s been with another micheton. So she lets her face crumple. “I was … it was a piece of broken glass. Someone shot my friend through a window. In front of me.”

  His bushy eyebrows soar.

  Her misery is true, so why does it feel like she’s putting it on? “The papers are full of it—it happened down at San Miguel Station.”

  “I’m too busy to read the papers,” he scolds her gently. “What friend was this?”

  “Jenny Bonnet,” says Blanche, choking on the name. “She caught frogs for the restaurant trade.”

  “That crazy girl in pants?”

  So he’s heard of her.

  He goes off on one of his tirades in Italian.

  Blanche can’t make out more than a word or two. “I thought you were too busy to read the papers,” she says sourly.

  “This so-called friend of yours”—he’s back to English now, rubbing at the scab on Blanche’s cheek as if to erase it—“dragging you into her criminal circles—”

  “Jenny didn’t fire the gun!” And then Blanche locks her lips because if she lets out her wrath, it’s going to wreck everything. She’s here to make some money, she reminds herself.

  So she produces a few weak sobs, though her eyes are bone-dry, and rolls around on the creamy pillows until Lamantia strokes the small of her back. “I hate for you to be mixed up in such things,” he complains. “Exposed in the press—”

  Blanche almost laughs. As if she has some respectability to lose!

  “My name won’t need to come up, I presume?”

  “How could it?” she murmurs. The egotism of the man!

  She lets him pour her another glass, to comfort her. The iced champagne is bitter in her mouth. He’s dressing already. Lamantia’s never stayed a night with her; Blanche is not sure whether he’s married or just nervous about what his clerks might say if he came to the office in the same shirt two days in a row. Just as well that he’s going—she’ll be able to get some real sleep—but she finds herself offended that he’s gotten all he needs from her already. Most men tire too soon for Blanche. (Not Arthur; he can ride all night. Stop it, she snaps at herself. Does she not have enough pride to give up panting for a man who’s tried to kill her?)

  The Sicilian lays some banknotes on the glossy bedside table. Since he’s such a devoted regular, Blanche leaves the amount up to him, because in her experience, graciousness pays off. But she’ll be needing some substantial funds soon to set herself up in a new apartment with a whole new wardrobe. (Room for P’tit? A live-in nursemaid? Don’t you dare, Blanche! Her hope’s like some eager dog straining hard enough to break its leash.)

  “I may be dancing at the House of Mirrors tomorrow,” she mentions, realizing that it’s true. The fact is, Blanche can’t think of a faster way to raise a good lump sum—almost three hundred dollars’ profit in a single evening—than to swallow her bile and do one last show, since Madame’s offered her such a bonanza for it.

  Blanche expects Lamantia to be glad to hear that. Her michetons generally love to watch her dance in front of other men, lesser men who can’t have her afterward. Sometimes she thinks what a man is really paying for is not actually a rendezvous in a hotel room but the right to interrupt the dance, to yank Blanche off her pedestal and treat her like any ordinary woman. And yet they remain nostalgic for the mystery, the spectacle …

  But this time Lamantia’s round, stubbled face doesn’t light up. “I wish you could be done with all that, my darling.”

  “A girl has to live,” she says uncertainly.

  “Perhaps Madame and I could come to some arrangement. Yes.” He’s looking startled now, exhilarated at his own daring. “If you could be a very discreet companion—perhaps we could settle on something private, exclusive—”

  As Blanche told Madame this morning, she never wanted a keeper. But that was when she thought she had other resources: legal title to a six-story building on Sacramento Street, for one thing. Now Blanche has nothing. The notion of not having to find herself lodgings, clients … The temptation of letting somebody take charge … If any man can keep her safe from now on, surely Lamantia can?

  A pulse bounds in her throat. Should she trust him with the whole story at once? The fact of the baby, and of his having been spirited away by his father, and of Ernest blackmailing her to lie to the coroner tomorrow if she ever wants to see P’tit again?

  No. A superstitious conviction seizes Blanche that if she pronounces P’tit’s name, that’ll be the last time she ever hears of her son.

  Besides, Lamantia might well be put right off her by these entanglements. Men never feel quite the same about a woman’s body once they know it’s done that thing: widened and torn to push out a baby’s head.

  So Blanche plays for time. “I’m afraid I ain’t Madame’s to dispose of,” she murmurs. “She and I … we’ve come to a parting of the ways. In fact, tomorrow night will be my final appearance at the House of Mirrors.”

  “All the better,” cries Lamantia. “You’re too good for that mob. That settles it. Let me look after you as you deserve.”

  “I’m overwhelmed,” she says, honestly enough. “I’ll have to give the matter the most serious thought …”

  “You could have been killed last night,” he lectures her, gigantic finger wagging in her face.

  And Blanche gets a glimpse of how tedious it might be to be this man’s mistress.

  “You should take it as a sign to give up your disreputable associates, all that scum that floats around town,” he says. “I’m offering you a fresh start.”

  But he hasn’t specified dollars per month. The two of them have never mentioned figures, in the elegant game they’ve played. If Blanche were to put herself entirely into the hands of this man, she’d need to know the numbers first.

  She blinks, clouds her gaze, as if desire has distracted her again. “Will you be there in the audience tomorrow night?” she murmurs, reaching out to put her small hand in his hot grip.

  Early morning on Monday, the eleventh of September, and Blanche is lying awake in a cheap, odorous hotel on Commercial Street where she’s spent the last three nights. Well, not so much a hotel as a house of assignation; girls thump up the stairs with their customers at every hour, breaking up Blanche’s sleep. She’s brooding on P’tit, wondering whether anyone is picking him up when he cries. Has he been doped with something “quieting”?

  She hasn’t dared go back to 815 Sacramento Street since the terrible scene in the faro saloon. You’re a no-account son of a bitch, and I would beg on the streets before I’d live with you again, she told Arthur, and how fine the words rang out. But Blanche should have made sure she held better cards before indulging herself in grand declarations. Should have gotten firm possession of her apartment, her clothes, and her money before provoking the macs. (Why didn’t she think to grab at least the nest egg from her old boot, at least, before she rushed out with Jenny to look for the men last Friday?) Above all, Blanche should have kept her mind fixed on P’tit. Couldn’t she have managed to stay polite, even humble, until Arthur revealed what steps he’d taken for the care of the baby? What the hell did she think she was doing thro
wing down the gauntlet when the men still had P’tit?

  This is why women don’t start wars, she thinks with a flash of contempt for her whole sex. It’s the blasted babies.

  Blanche tries to make impossible calculations. Knowing Arthur as she does … but does she really know him at all, this enraged, scar-faced man? What’s the best—or the least stupid—way to proceed? At night he and Ernest will be drunk. In the morning they’ll be asleep. In the afternoon, the worse for wear. How long should Blanche wait for their wrath to calm down? Approach too soon and they’ll scorn her, just like they did in the faro saloon. Delay too long and—could there be any truth at all to Arthur’s boast that he’s going back to France to get himself a real woman? Every day she waits is full of gnawing uncertainty about P’tit, his whereabouts, and his welfare, and Blanche is not sure she can bear many more of these days.

  If she tracks the men down in a bar or at the gaming table again, knowing they have an audience will harden their arrogance. But if she goes to the apartment—steps into a room with them once more—then all the power is theirs. The last time she was there, after all, Arthur proposed to the American that they hold her down and take her three ways. No, Blanche decides, she has to speak to Arthur one to one, but in a public place.

  A few hours later she’s standing on Sacramento Street, watching the second-floor windows. This is her own building, she reminds herself with a sense of dull resentment, so why is she skulking outside it like a burglar?

  Because she needs to know who’s there. She’s waiting to glimpse Arthur on his own, without his malign companion at his side to egg him on. Surely if Blanche catches Arthur coming out of the front door of number 815 or approaching it from the street, she can run up and throw herself beautifully, pathetically on his mercy? Appeal to his vanity, his boredom with this elaborate bluff, his wish to be master. It doesn’t matter what cruel things he says to her, so long as he tells her where in this whole sweltering city she can find their son. She’ll take P’tit off his hands, gratefully, and the two of them will be no further trouble to Arthur, ever.