The Painted Girls

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  “She is the madam of the house where I live, and, yes, I work as a coquette, since it’s what you really want to know.”

  We turn into an alleyway running alongside a grey house, two stories in height with piano music and chatter spilling into the night from the tavern on the ground floor. The alleyway is dark except for the light cast by a lantern hanging in a cage above the nook of a door. “We leave the dog here,” Colette says, lowering her end of our bundle beside the stone stoop, reaching for a brass door handle. “We’ll get soup, maybe even a bath for you, depending on Madame Brossard’s spirits.”

  The wooden steps leading to the first floor are swept free of grit and brightly lit by three gas lamps, each with its shade polished clean. The walls of the staircase are thick, easily swallowing up the din of the tavern down below. From the alcove at the top, I glimpse velvet draperies and two girls in silk, each sitting sideways upon a brocade sofa, her chin propped up by an arm resting upon the thick cushions of the back, and giving her full attention to the gentleman lounging in between. Colette, who appears to be no second-rate whore, takes me by the arm, hauling me down a dimly lit corridor to a large kitchen with a roaring hearth.

  “My God, Colette,” says a jowly woman with a wineglass in one hand and a polishing cloth in the other. “Is that blood on your skirt?”

  “There is a dead dog beside the door in the alleyway, a dead dog wrapped in my woolen shawl.” Colette begins to sniffle, explaining between sobs about a boy kicking the dog, kicking it with all his might, snapping its pretty neck. Her shoulders heave, and Madame Brossard escorts her by the arm to a large oaken table, nudges her into a chair. She turns to me and says, “Won’t you have a seat, Mademoiselle …”

  “Van Goethem,” I say, taking up the chair beside Colette. “Antoinette.”

  She lays a hand upon my shoulder by way of greeting, and with her so near, her nose twitches at the stink of me after a week in the washhouse and an evening hauling a dead dog.

  “The dog’s got to be buried,” Colette says.

  “You’ll eat, the both of you, and we’ll get you cleaned up.”

  She picks up a tiny bell, muffling it sharply after the second ring, and I wonder if it means the house has more than a single maid, that each has her own call. She moves to the hearth, returns with a steaming pot and two bowls and begins ladling a thick soup of onion and beef into each. A maid, no older than Marie, comes into the kitchen wearing a starched apron, and Madame Brossard gives instructions about drawing a bath and a set of clean underclothes for me and telling Maurice, who I guess is a barman in the tavern down below, there is a grave to be dug in the courtyard. “Shall I send for the hairdresser?” she says to Colette.

  “I could use a little spoiling just now.”

  Near starved, I lap up the soup, more rich in meat than that served in the cafés. When there is not but a single shell of onion left upon my spoon, Colette glances over her shoulder to the doorway where Madame Brossard disappeared and switches her close-to-full bowl for my empty one. Sitting there, at the oaken table of Madame Brossard with its eight chairs gathered around, I picture the girls of the house assembled, playing a game of bezique, laughing, licking the grease of a roasted duck from their lips. For a moment, I let myself imagine staying on, with Madame Brossard providing the soup, ordering the baths, calling the hairdresser. But that dreamed-up life, it don’t include Marie and Charlotte. It don’t include Émile, and I want the three of them more than I want coddling and thick soup and a madam bearing the burden of deciding every detail of my day. “Madame Brossard is being generous?” I say.

  “Pauline, another of the girls, failed the medical exam. Her card wasn’t stamped.”

  “I got a job, working as a laundress in the rue de Douai.”

  “It’s a good house, Madame Brossard’s.”

  “No offense, Colette, but whoring isn’t the trade for me.”

  “Still. Might as well get yourself a bath.” In the fireplace a cauldron hangs from a hook. Orange tongues of flame lick its sides, and curls of steam feather out from above the rim. The tub waiting beside the hearth is more than double in size the one we have at home, and it has a high, sloping back just meant for lolling.

  Not fifteen minutes later I lean back in the tub and know I have failed Marie. But maybe Émile is right about coddling being hurtful, about Marie needing to toughen up, about Charlotte never figuring out the world don’t spin solely for her. I close my eyes, and after a while there comes the gentle pull of hair being combed and combed again and finally curled with hot tongs by a hairdresser accustomed to his customers sighing in a tub.

  “Enjoying yourself there, Antoinette,” Madame Brossard says, skirt swishing by.

  I smile, arch my back, like a cat getting scratched beneath the chin.

  “Colette tells me you were a ballet girl with the Opéra?”

  “A long time ago.”

  Once my hair is set and my skin wiped dry, she laces me into a corset—my first since the Opéra stage—tight enough that even the very little I have is heaved up, and then buttons me into a fine dress of mauve silk. She pours a glass of red wine, hands it to me saying, “On the house.” She dusts my nose with rice powder and brushes my lips with tinted pomade and walks me over to a round looking glass hanging from a chain over a buffet. At my neckline white flesh mounds above mauve silk. That pretty dress is smooth upon my ribs and tapers to my clinched-to-narrow waist. My hair gleams from the combing, my lips from the tinted pomade. My skin is soft, like velvet, from the powdering. And all I want is Émile, for him to see me looking maybe not so pretty as Colette but the prettiest I ever been. “Well?” says Madame Brossard.

  “You’re wasting your time on me,” I say, but she only shrugs, like a licked-clean bowl of soup, a cauldron drained of water, a hairdressing bill, a swallowed glass of red wine are nothing at all.

  In the alcove just outside the salon, Colette says, “See if you can’t enjoy yourself tonight. Madame Brossard will be watching and you’ll tire of scrubbing linens soon enough,” but my mind is on tomorrow being Sunday, my day of freedom from the washhouse. I will search for Émile, starting at the storage shed of the father of Pierre Gille, then calling in at the Brasserie des Martyrs, those other taverns preferred by him. Colette clasps her hands together and tucks them up under her chin, like she is making a tiny prayer, and then, she is off, smiling, kissing the cheeks of all but one of the six men in the salon, and after that approaching the neglected gentleman and putting her hand upon his chest, “Now, you’re new at this house, no?”

  “Monsieur Arnaud,” he says, and she takes his glass, which is only half drained.

  “You need more wine, Monsieur Arnaud. At this house, we are all for having a jolly time.”

  She strokes the lapel of another gentleman, one thinking he is at the Opéra, judging by his walking stick and white gloves. “I see you’re keeping the tailor busy, Monsieur Barbeau,” she says. “That cut suits a man who keeps his back so good and straight.” Then she is across the room, ruffling the locks of a gentleman, who might as well be an owl with his small, sharp nose and eyebrows, like tufts of fur sticking out from his brow. “Such a fine crop of hair,” she says.

  I stand in the alcove, swallowing red wine, glad to be feeling the nerve that comes with a drained glass before the eyes of those six gentlemen wander off from following Colette, slinking about the salon, a regular minx. And then Madame Brossard is there, tilting a bottle. Again, I swallow, finding the bottom of the glass a second time and with it, enough boldness that when I see a gentleman, hardly old enough to have sat beneath a straight razor, look me up and down, I let my lips grow pouty and give him the sauciest of smiles. Émile, he don’t appreciate me like he should.

  That boy, he lifts up his wine a bit and his eyebrows, too; and, with nothing more behind me than an oaken door, I know his raised glass is for me, my mauve dress, my powdered nose. He is like a cherub, except stretched tall: lips like a woman’s, a cleft in his chin, sk
in like milk, flaxen curls—a pretty boy like Pierre Gille. I lift my again-filled-up glass, and at the thought of Émile watching from the corner of the room, I run my fingers along my neckline of mauve cord.

  Colette’s got her arm linked around that of Monsieur Arnaud, and she is strolling him around the room, saying, “Now this is Monsieur Picot, a timber merchant,” and about the cherub, “This is Monsieur Simard, who is apprenticing to be a banker like his papa,” and about two men side by side on the sofa, their foreheads close, “This is Monsieur Mignot and Monsieur Fortin, who own a fish-packing house in Le Havre and have been like brothers to each other ever since meeting in the lycée there.” The almost brothers stand up, shake the hand of Monsieur Arnaud; and, glimpsing their trousers and mustaches, I want to blurt out about them sharing a tailor and a barber, too. The cherub glances my way and swallows another mouthful of wine.

  “We are all friends here, Monsieur Arnaud,” Colette says and, even without the bobbing chins of the gentlemen, I know it is true, that these gentlemen, with their joking and knee slapping and foreheads leaning in, don’t come to the house of Madame Brossard only for the company of Colette.

  She moves on to the girls. “This is Adèle from the Loire. We call her Petite. This is Odette, a bona fide Parisian. And Constance, all the way from the Pyrenees.” Petite is fair and small and plump enough that her arms are like dough, poked by a finger at the spot where the elbows should be. Odette looks like a ballet girl with her long neck and sloping shoulders and pretty waist. And Constance is tall and dark as a Spaniard. It puts me to thinking that variety was on the mind of Madame Brossard when she brought each of the girls into the house and, then, to wondering if Pauline with her unstamped card was not skinny like me with a crop of dark hair. Only Colette is a great beauty, but I can see all the girls are cheerful, laughing and petting, bounding to their feet the instant a gentleman finds his glass half empty.

  “And this here is Antoinette,” says Colette, steering Monsieur Arnaud to me. “We met at the Ambigu. A bit of fun the two of us had there, as walkers-on in L’Assommoir. Antoinette was clever enough to get herself a speaking part.”

  The gentlemen turn in my direction and the cherub says, “Well, Mademoiselle Antoinette, why not share your talent with us.”

  All those fine men are looking, none turning away, wandering off down the pavement with a smoke hanging from their lips. I set my glass upon a half column holding a potted fern, and even half soused, I know enough to keep the thickness of the wine from my tongue. “Now gentlemen.” I say it quiet and those men lean in, hold their eyes steady, same as for Hélène Petit at the Ambigu. “You must imagine me as a laundress, bare arms dripping with suds, a bit of collected steam rolling down my neck. It is sweltering hot in the washhouse.” I brush imagined sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand, open up my shut eyes to ten pairs staring back, the lips of the cherub parting. “Peek through the shutters of a washhouse closed up to the street for the day, and I promise, you will not find a single laundress with her blouse laced up tight.” The cherub licks his lips. Colette laughs. And I loosen the cord at the neckline of my mauve silk.

  The timber merchant claps. The cherub slaps his thigh. Colette puts a hand over her heart. I feel a warmth, like soup in an empty belly, and I hold up a palm. “But, gentlemen, back to the washhouse of L’Assommoir.”

  I fish in my imagined tub, just like upon the stage of the Ambigu, and look up, away from the tub, and bring anger to my face. “What’s become of my bit of soap?” I say. “Somebody’s been and filched my soap again.”

  Everybody is laughing, clapping, lifting glasses. The cherub says, “I remember you. I remember that line.”

  “Me, too,” says one of the gentlemen owning the fish-packing house in Le Havre.

  “As do I,” says his almost brother.

  My eyes float from face to face, each friendly, rosy with warmth, and it don’t feel all that different from being adored. Then Colette is beside me, arm linked around my own. “Our Antoinette has danced upon the Opéra stage.”

  The knuckle of one hand presses against the cherub’s lips. Getting to his feet, he calls out. “Encore.”

  “Yes,” says Colette, dropping my arm and beginning to clap.

  These gentlemen, each picked the lower slopes of Montmartre over a dull reception, a respectable dinner. Starving for a lark is what they are, and the same can be said for those showing up in the orchestra stalls or the Foyer de la Danse of the Opéra without their wives. It puts a little gloating in my heart, being the choice of these gentlemen when Émile and Pierre Gille and the rest of those boys don’t bother with a bit of regard. I wonder about a string of fouettés en tournant. Those few words about the soap are nothing compared to the spectacle of a ballet girl lifting a leg and whipping around fast.

  I let my gaze linger upon the cherub’s gawking eyes and lift my arms to croisé, getting myself ready to turn. But the salon shifts, the corner where the timber merchant sits between Petite and Odette dipping up and the corner where Madame Brossard stands, looking on, dipping down. I lift my glass from the half column, toasting the room instead. “Another time, gentlemen,” I say. “Another time.”

  The cherub waves me over, and I scour my mind for his name. He pats the sofa beside him, and I sit down clumsily, with a bit of wine slopping over the rim of my glass but only onto my hand.

  “You belong upon the stage,” he says.

  “Don’t know about that.” I lick up the wine from the patch of skin at the crook of my thumb, and the cherub don’t look away. No, his pretty face is transfixed.

  He reaches for a lock of my hair, curled and arranged around my face. I shift my head, jostling that curl from his fingertips, and he snatches his hand away, a scolded child. He fiddles with the rim of his glass, and with him turning shy instead of bitter, when we are sitting upon a sofa in a place such as this, I give him a little wink. “Just got those curls,” I say. “Don’t often get curls.”

  “Suits you,” he says. “More wine?”

  I hold out my glass, bothering to wonder if Madame Brossard minds me swallowing wine that was not offered by her. He pours half his wine into mine, and both of us put those glasses to our lips, peering at each other over the rims.

  “Such eyes,” he says. All those ladies turning and looking out over their fans on the grand staircase at the Opéra, their beauty is nothing more than curling tongs and rice powder and a dozen sewing maids put to work on a single dress. I put my attention on the mouth of the cherub, which is pink and full and soft instead of thick and chapped and holding a smoke handed over by Pierre Gille. “Pretty lips,” I say. “Cherub lips.”

  We talk about L’Assommoir and the opera stage, about me appearing in Coppélia and La Sylphide and Sylvia even if the first two were before my time. He remembers me, he says—a sylph with wings upon my back. He is certain. He really is. He fills up my glass and we toast the Opéra and the house of Madame Brossard and the bank where he don’t much like sitting behind a great desk, and we keep up the toasting until our glasses are drained and filled up again and then we toast some more—the Empress Eugénie and Napoleon III hiding out in England since the Prussians ran them out of France, then Jules Grévy, who the cherub says is a better billiards player than president. When I say, “To the Republic,” and lift up my glass, he fills it up with wine but don’t take a swallow himself.

  Colette and Monsieur Arnaud are gone from the salon, and Petite is combing her fingers through the hair of the timber merchant, her dress gaping open, baring her pink nipples. Constance is dealing out cards to the almost brothers and Odette.

  The cherub touches the curl closest to my ear. “No squashing,” he says, and I laugh and feel fingers, not so calloused as those of Émile, upon my cheek. I shut my eyes, breathe in the scent of him, which is cloves and soap instead of tobacco and skin gone unwashed too long, and feel those fingers upon my throat and then upon the neckline of my dress and then upon the silk over my breasts. There is
a stirring, low, an ache, and then the mouth of the cherub upon my own. I let it fall open a little, tasting the sweetness of him. He pulls back a little and whispers into my ear, “I’ll speak to Madame Brossard.”

  I could pretend, I tell myself, it is the old chaise underneath my back. It is something half the sewing maids and flower sellers and charwomen of Paris undertake from time to time—an easy cup of chocolate, a glass of champagne, a pair of gloves, the landlord held off another day. But before that boy gets up from the sofa, he strokes the hollow between the two ends of my collarbones, that special place of Émile, and I open up my eyes and know I will not follow him to wherever it is that Colette and Monsieur Arnaud disappeared to from the salon. A hotness gathers behind my eyes, a bulge swells in my throat, and I don’t dare blink. I look away from the cherub, count the gas lamps in the shifting room. Five. Or is it six. The potted ferns. Four.

  “Another time,” he says. He is but a boy, unsure.

  I stand, feel my head swirl. I turn back to that boy and totter, stepping on the hem of my skirt. “I never been so soused,” I say, “and I don’t recall your name.”