The Painted Girls

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  I know where the talk is going—to the luck of all those convicts transported to New Caledonia, a far-off island colony of France, to carry out the hard labor of cutting down forests, building roads and harvesting sugarcane. More than once I heard Émile discussing the life there with Pierre Gille, who claims to know all about it from the cousin of a friend. An inmate keeps his head down and mouth shut for two years, or so says Pierre Gille, and next thing he knows, he is doing the light work of sewing prison garments or cooking up the sizable portions of meat the prisoners get served three times a week. He said, too, about the labor there being paid with a cut of the wages held back until an inmate gets himself released. Then he is handed over the nest egg, large enough to buy a patch of land for planting and harvesting himself. The government, he said, wanted only to establish a foothold in the land.

  Pierre Gille lights himself a smoke and, speaking loud enough for all the table to hear, says, “The cousin of my friend got the guards there liking him well enough that he ended up as gardener to the warden. When his time was done, that warden, he gave him his own patch of land. He got to use his prison wages for a pair a mules and a cart.” He swallows a mouthful of beer. “And the guards, none of them are above selling on the outside what the inmates arrange to steal. That cousin of my friend, before he was a gardener, he was a cook. He made himself a fortune pilfering the rum the inmates get four times a week. The bookkeeper was happy enough to take his cut and cover the whole business up.”

  “The guards are merciless with thumbscrews and whips. That’s what I heard,” Paul Kirail says. “They punish the inmates by sticking them in a pit without a speck of light.”

  Pierre Gille blows a puff of smoke into the face of Paul Kirail. “You only got to stay on the good side of the guards.”

  Émile opens up his mouth and, with him always backing up Pierre Gille, it is no surprise when he says, “Serving time in New Caledonia is nothing more than an apprenticeship for settling the land.” I hate when he talks such gibberish, like leaving me behind while he went off to some place neither of us could point to on a map would not bother him in the least. I know it is not true. But still.

  Pierre Gille tilts his glass to that of Émile, and then the two of them clink rims. Michel Knobloch lifts his beer, reaching to join the toast. “Better than being shut up alone to pace the narrow limits of a cell,” he says. “A fellow likes companionship.”

  Pierre Gille scowls. “About the corsairs,” he says, ducking his glass away from that of Michel Knobloch, “they disappeared from France more than sixty years ago, well before your papa was even wiping his own ass.”

  Then all the boys, like wolves, are laughing, reaching, clinking beers, choosing the pack over the runt. Michel Knobloch looks caught between fleeing the brasserie and forcing a crack of laughter to his throat. Émile snuffs out the stub of his smoke, plucks that of Michel Knobloch from between his fingers and then Émile moves that smoke to his own lips. It gives Michel Knobloch the jolt he needs to push himself up from the bench, fists clenched at his sides. I put a hand upon the tensing thigh of Émile, and then—stroke of luck—the tavern keeper climbs to standing upon a chair, cups his hand around his mouth and calls out, “My lords, this is the moment when people who have been well brought up call for more drink.”

  Michel Knobloch turns away from the table, stomps off toward the door, and Émile says, “Well, then,” and raises up his hand, beckoning the tavern maid.

  A dozen glasses of beer he orders. And then he hands over a five-franc note, waves away the change. Always, when we are in the cafés, he is pushing away my few coins and saying, “You got rent to pay.” Mostly it works to remind me that he don’t. No, he’s been lodging amid artificial flowers in the storage shed belonging to the father of Pierre Gille, and even so, he don’t appear to be putting anything aside for setting up house, like he said. I say nothing, not with those boys from the Ambigu gathered all around, just feel a hotness creeping into my cheeks. The tavern maid makes a show of blowing him a kiss, but she don’t get so much as a dipped chin back. Pierre Gille rolls his eyes and calls out after her, “I got a squeeze for that lovely rump of yours even if my friend here don’t.”

  “You’re a pig,” I say.

  “Weren’t you saying you wanted to suck on a bit of pork crackling the other day?”

  “Must’ve been old Paul here,” I say, even if it is not right, picking the boy least inclined to answer back.

  Pierre Gille looks down that pretty nose of his a good while. Then he shrugs and says, “I see the beer is making you brave, Mademoiselle Antoinette.”

  After another glass of beer for me and two more for each of the others, I stop thinking about what cutting thing I should’ve said back, and I feel a growing warmth, like a circle of light shining upon these friends of mine and Émile. The boys start forgetting themselves, turning right around in their chairs and leering at the few girls in the brasserie. Colette is giddy, making a fuss over the silk waistcoat of Pierre Gille, going on to Paul Kirail about how plenty of women like their men in uniform, even bothering to admire my hair, which I have arranged in a puffed-up chignon with a black ribbon running around the edge and the silk flowers of Marie tucked in at the back.

  Émile is laughing, making a habit of touching my hand, clinking glasses, and we are having such a lovely time. But then Émile orders another round of twelve, when between the two of us, we drunk no more than seven glasses of beer. “Émile,” I say, quiet. “It isn’t your turn.” Always he is spending instead of saving up.

  “Isn’t your business.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out another five-franc note.

  The tavern maid brings the beers. The beers are drunk up, and then Émile is calling the tavern maid over and ordering cassis all around. I swallow the cassis, twist sideways on the bench, away from Émile, who is slapping the table at the hilarity of every other word that comes out of the mouth of Pierre Gille and calling out for the tavern maid yet again.

  Colette gets up from our table, makes her way across the room to a lively party of slumming gentlemen, judging by their polished shoes. The rue des Martyrs is one of those places that has people calling Paris the city of love, and the ladies sharing the table of those men—flesh escaping their necklines, lace of their underclothes in plain view—don’t come as a surprise. But I gape at Colette, so chummy with all those boulevard tarts, so cool when a gentleman twice her age puts his hand upon the stocking her skirt is arranged to show off. Of course they are slinking off together before I even get used to the idea of her being a coquette.

  At first I ignore the hand of Émile, beneath the table, secretly upon my thigh. But it starts creeping higher, and I bat it away.

  “What?” he says.

  “How much you got saved up, Émile?” I blurt it out.

  He looks at me, blank.

  “Not a sou. Isn’t that right, Émile? Not a single sou. You going to offer me a home holed up with you and Pierre Gille in a storage shed? Is that it, Émile?”

  Pierre Gille, he puts down his glass with enough of a thud to draw the attention of the boys from the Ambigu, even those already entirely soused. “Already harping, is she?”

  “Certainly is,” Émile says.

  I grab at my shawl, feel the wetness of the corner left dangling in the swill of the floor, and get up from the bench, bothering to brush my breast against his arm as I turn away.

  But outside Émile is not upon my heels. Of course not, not with all those boys gawking inside. It takes less than a count of three to remember about all those plates of mussels with parsley sauce I took from him, those glasses of cassis, those bits of barley sugar. Never once did I say no. The sniffles come, then the swallowing, the hot tears.

  When I look up, Colette is not a stone’s throw away with her back up against the wall of the brasserie and her arms around the neck of her gentleman. With me sniffing, both their faces turn to gawk. “Antoinette?” Colette says.

  How I wish for a handkerch
ief. With a handkerchief I could blow my nose. And why don’t I have a single one when they are there for the taking, by the handful, in the delivery basket of Maman? Then Colette is close, her gentleman calling out for her to come back. She gives me a handkerchief, and I see the C embroidered into the corner, proof of a girl making plenty more than the Ambigu pays.

  “Colette!” her gentleman calls out, sounding like he is scolding a dog.

  “One minute,” she calls back.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Boys can be a lot of trouble.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Colette!”

  “Open up your eyes and you’ll see I need a minute with my friend.” He stands stock-still a second, like he cannot quite believe such a girl speaking so harshly to him. Then he is gone, wandering into the blackness beyond the halo of a gas lamp.

  “Go,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “Prefer a gentleman not too cheap to stand me a glass of champagne.”

  “I like your handkerchief.” I rub my thumb over the tiny C.

  “Keep it,” she says. “Come back inside. Meet my friends.”

  But sitting among the boulevard tarts, the drawstring of my blouse undone, forgot, my head thrown back, my skirt hiked, and the gentlemen agog, awaiting pleasure, don’t appeal to me, least of all now. No, I want a quiet life, like the one Gervaise dreamt up, a bed to sleep in, food to eat. And going back inside would mean Émile taking more jeering from Pierre Gille, and already I feel sorry about the harping, the carrying on, bringing him shame. “Émile wouldn’t like it,” I say. “And besides, I got friends to meet at the Rat-Mort.” In truth I am going home to cuddle up with Marie and Charlotte. What I want most is to feel the breath of Marie on the back of my neck, to feel her stir, to hear her whisper, “You’re home, Antoinette.” I am not going to ask her about what I done—the harping, the stomping off. She would take my side, but I have this idea she would do so too quick, too hopeful that I came to my senses about that riffraff called Émile Abadie.

  “That boy isn’t deserving,” Colette says.

  It would be a waste of my own breath, explaining about being adored, about his fingers tender on that little hollow between my collarbones, about his hand finding its way to my own, atop the table inside the brasserie. But those words of hers, hanging there like lead in the air, my mind falls upon that first time in the alleyway and then lands with a thud upon that other time, when I chased him through the Ambigu only to be twisted around until I was hunched over the chaise.

  I rattle my head. Away. I need away from chirping Colette.

  Marie

  At the Ambigu I part the dusty velvet draperies hanging in the entrance-way to the fourth-floor balcony, the lowly benches tucked up under the eaves. Right away an ancient concierge is upon me, tugging my shawl from my shoulders, and then pointing to an empty bench. It gives me a little jolt, such quickness, considering the veins like blue cord riddling her hands.

  Last night Antoinette came in at what has become her usual late hour, and I woke up to her crouching over me and quietly calling out, “Marie? Marie, you awake?” This, when she knew I would be slaving at the barre in the morning, same as always, nine o’clock.

  I let out a sleepy moan. “What is it, Antoinette? All of Paris burning down?”

  “I got you a ticket for tomorrow night.”

  I sat up. Like the rest of the laundresses, she was promised a single ticket but only once they could no longer fill up the seats with paying customers. “You’ll be shutting down soon?” It meant the three francs she was paid for each performance would come to an end.

  She shrugged, looking a little cross. “Maman’s been pleading for the ticket.”

  “I want it.” I reached out from my nest of ragged linens and touched her knee. “I do.”

  “Can’t complain,” she said. “We been running close to a full year now.”

  Even in the dim light, I saw lips pulled thin, strained, and I knew she felt the looming hardship of her employment at the Ambigu coming to an end. “You’ll get something else,” I said, knowing it was true. She was quick-witted and venturesome and always she looked after Charlotte and me.

  By the time I get myself slid over to the center of the bench, the concierge is back, with a little stool she tucks under my feet. She nudges a program toward me, and I say, “I’ve got one,” and pull from my pocket the program Antoinette gave me at home. The concierge looks a little vexed, even more so when she holds out her hand and says, “For the service,” and after a few seconds of nothing, I remove my feet from her little stool and push it back to her with the side of my foot.

  The people coming to the fourth balcony are not so different from me, with their sagging cheeks and twisted teeth. “For the service,” says the old concierge, causing pockets to be turned inside out, sous to be dropped upon the papery skin of her reaching hand. Just once a footstool was handed back, by a lady, who came in wearing, same as me, two shawls instead of a mantle against the cold.

  With the orchestra stalls way down below, where the ladies have furs and the gentlemen pomaded hair and the concierges dresses trimmed with lace, and the benches way up here, and in between, the second and third balconies crowded with shopkeepers and tutors and clerks, it appears all of Paris has come out to get a look at L’Assommoir. Antoinette said she would not ruin the surprise by telling how the play turns out. So what I know is Gervaise is a laundress, poor and marked by a limp and left to fend for herself by a scoundrel called Lantier until a roofer called Coupeau shows up. I lean a little closer to the stage, wondering if the heavy curtain did not just budge, like someone had begun leaning his weight into the controlling crank.

  Finally the curtains part, and the applause starts up, even before Gervaise turns to the audience from the window, where she was watching for Lantier, who does not come back. And it starts up again, when Coupeau sticks his head around the doorframe and asks Gervaise if he can come in. The three cane-bottom chairs around a little table, the iron bedstead, the bureau with a missing drawer and the mantelshelf holding pawn tickets and zinc candlesticks, I read all of it is exactly as Monsieur Zola wrote in his book. It comes to me, sitting there, that I could be looking down upon our very own lodging room, except that Maman and Papa’s bedstead went to the pawnbroker even before Papa took his last breath and Antoinette has too much sense to leave the pawn tickets for Maman to find. And there is Papa’s sideboard, too, with all six drawers in place.

  I just about fall off the bench when the curtain opens up on the second tableau and Antoinette, fishing in a tub with real steam rising up and collecting on her dewy brow, says, “What’s become of my soap? Somebody’s been and filched my soap again!” Everybody laughs. Everybody except me. I sit there, marveling that she managed to keep the surprise of getting a speaking part to herself. “My sister,” I say to the lady beside me on the bench and point out over the balcony.

  “The one who said about the soap?”

  I nod, and then the woman is leaning over and whispering into the ear of the man with a waxed mustache next in line.

  Antoinette mops her brow, beats her linen, shakes the suds from her hands, exactly like she is in the washhouse in the rue de Douai. I sit on the edge of my seat waiting and waiting for another word from her but it does not come and soon enough the curtain closes up on the washhouse looking so very familiar to me.

  Émile Abadie crosses the stage in tableau three, amid a swarm of workingmen. Instead of walking with a bit of purpose like Coupeau, Émile saunters, stopping to blow warmth into his hands. In the next tableau Gervaise and Coupeau work day and night, finally saving up enough to get Gervaise a little washhouse of her very own, and I keep thinking back to sauntering Émile Abadie, a loafer, tethering Antoinette to a larder with empty shelves.

  Monsieur Zola calls his book an experiment, and the newspapers like to say how he claims to have taken a particular woman and dropped her into a particular setting and then let the story unfold th
e only way it could, given Gervaise’s temperament and the neighborhood of the Goutte-d’Or, what Monsieur Zola calls the milieu. The story unfolding before my eyes, it has to be a tale about working hard and getting what you want most—a little washhouse, an examination passed and a chance upon the stage—even if you are living on the lower slopes of Montmartre, in such a place as the Goutte-d’Or or the rue de Douai.

  But then in tableau five, Coupeau falls while working on a roof and in tableau six he is drinking in the taverns and in tableau seven Gervaise loses her washhouse and her taste for work and finds one for drink. In tableau eight the baker is refusing her any more bread and the landlord is demanding the money he is owed and in the last, tableau nine, she is wretched. “There are some women who are very glad when they are taken off. Oh, yes! I am very glad,” she says upon her deathbed, which is not a bed at all but the gutter of the boulevard de Rochechouart, not ten minutes from our lodging house.

  Monsieur Zola’s tale is not about getting a washhouse or a chance upon the stage. It is about being born downtrodden and staying that way. Hard work makes no difference, he is saying. My lot, the lots of those around me, were cast the moment we were born into the gutter to parents who never managed to step outside the gutter themselves.

  In the fourth balcony, same as the rest of the theater, people get to their feet, stamping and hollering, hands cupping their mouths or beating together overhead. Not me though, I sit, quiet and still, and wonder about the people around me, the woman with the footstool taken from her feet. Did they not see? Did she not see?

  I stay put on the bench, the pads of my fingers rubbing my measly brow. Even when the balcony is empty of all but me and the old concierge, holding her back as she stoops to pick up ticket stubs and greasy wrappings from the floor, I have not cleared my head of Gervaise. I see her huddling to keep out the coldness of a winter’s night, also bits of paper fluttering down from behind the proscenium arch, landing like merciless angels upon her back.