The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R.

by Carole DeSanti

  “Don’t need to make him any richer. There’s plenty of vinegar in the kitchen.”

  “Douche with wine and turpentine; nothing can survive that.”

  “Has Delphine come back? Françoise sent her lover to the rue Thérèse.”

  “Think she’ll come clean?” asked another girl, small-boned and lovely, dragging on a cigarette.

  “I wouldn’t trust that bone-cracker,” drawled the tiger-eyed one. “He’s a murderer.” A brief silence.

  “The Dab will be here on Monday—tell him it’s in the name of public health.”

  A bell clanged from the stairwell. Cigarettes were stubbed out and the group shook itself out and stood, as during a second-act intermission when the play is bad. It sounded again and the unruly band paraded down the stairs, a flurry of thin robes and satin slippers. None of their flimsy toilettes looked to have cost ten francs, and not one appeared as though she’d need a shovel to hoist her diamonds. The tall girl with red hair was last to crush her cigarette. Gave me a long stare as she drew a fluttering dressing gown around her shoulders. I followed the others as though being lowered by a rope.

  And so it began. The price of ignorance paid, first, on tufted pouffes under chandeliers downstairs in the salons, where each client’s “choice” was made. Then upstairs, in fancily named rooms with theatrical furnishings; on bed linens more staged than laundered; and, at intervals, at the long, scarred dining table where we gathered for meals, silently rising and sitting for Françoise and the two madames, at noon, six, midnight, and two in the morning. It was paid especially at dawn, when I dragged my tender, insulted body up a rope ladder that led up to a sleeping bunk in the attic quarters, tugged aside the curtain hanging on brass loops. This was the sole place of retreat; but even there, my pallet was shared with another girl who wedged her body next to mine. Later, where her head had rested, would be a tangle of hair, tufts of it, soft and dark. Like the first hair of an infant when it falls.

  Crawling beneath that drape, pulling my knees to my chest, I listened to pigeons beat their wings and cluck and coo under the eaves. Willed myself back from oblivion. How, then, had it come to this? Was it the world’s justice, its further transgression—or a colossal, evil joke? How was I to contour myself to this new, distorted logic? To navigate blindly, hurtling ahead? For it was dark indeed, and my compass had failed.

  Memory has strange ways. Downy-throated geese in their pens, the beating of wings . . . Chunks of pigment in Maman’s palette box and the creamy weight of her dowry linens in the press. The uneven height of the stairsteps to Chasseloup’s studio, the slant of the light from the windows. Even the battered spines and torn covers of love novels, the rapt expression of a girl sucking sweets and turning pages in an attic bunk—all of these leave imprints. But those other initiations, events of absent flesh passing over my own, are darker vessels over the river. For increasingly, my attention retreated inward to its own emptiness, its frozen emergency.

  7. The Point of the Hook

  THE RHYTHMS OF LIFE at Deux Soeurs were not defined by nature. We worked until dawn, breakfasted, then slept until noon, when we rose from the dead to eat. Macaroni, potatoes, and pies; matefaim (a kind of fried dough) and roasts; wine and bread and viscous sauces weighted down our off-hours. My compatriots believed in minding the rules most of the time, stealing what they could, getting past the doctor—(called the Dab, after his loathsome instrument) and staying on the good side of Françoise. Hairnets at the table, gloves downstairs, rising and sitting and a facsimile of obedience to the madames; a schedule governed by bells and meals, by chits, by red marks and black marks collected in an old cracked-binding book. The place housed a collection of feminine spirits at odds with our keepers, collected here for a purpose but always ready to display a flagrant disregard for it. The Mignons, Ninettes, Blondines, Frisettes wore the shadow of the world on their flesh; the bruises from its fists and the marks of its teeth. They varnished over weaknesses, lacquered old sores. Hid this wound, sold what paid, tied off ruptures above the hemorrhage, and did what might (at some point) allow them to scramble up a rung or two; take half-measures toward better lives. Like flowery wallpaper peeling down in strips, or lacy hems dragged through the gutter, our sex took hard use here. But just for now. Not for long, not me! On Sunday, at a designated hour, they put on rented dresses at a stiff tariff and filed out to confess their sins. I watched them come and go.

  After the first week, I was no longer inhabitant of my own skin but hovered some distance away; a vacancy of flesh and its ghost. Obscurely, amid the conversation that ebbed and sucked between the walls—often about ways and means to prevent pregnancies, or the various forces that could be marshaled to abort them—I had come to a new idea: that half-starvation, the filthy streams of the bedrooms, street gutters, excesses of coffee, and a too-sudden stagnation of love—this miasma had halted my body’s rhythms, stopped its courses. Indeed, everthing else I had once known had been suspended, thinned down, or dried up. If a second life had indeed begun in this body, perhaps it had now fled. I could not tell anymore; could feel no flicker of life.

  One of those mornings-that-were-not-mornings, a moody pall lingered in the attic quarters; a flurry of restless anxiety blew through the place like a shifty wind. Pots of powders, paints, and brushes were marshaled to the new task. The girl who slept next to me—she was called Lucette—was mixing kohl in a tiny pot, her hair hanging limp. The rest lined up for the mirror.

  I had endured a sanitary examination after my registration at the Préfecture, but it had been superficial and cursory, as though my relatively innocuous status was understood, despite what the paperwork had to say. From what I had heard up in the attic quarters, the ordeal ahead would be different.

  Lucette glanced me over. She had built a dark beauty mark on a flaking ulcer near her lip. “If you know what’s good for you, don’t ask questions, just get in and get out. It’s not much, just a poke and a turn-around. Routine. You’ve got nothing to worry about . . . There, how’s that?” Most of them, I knew, were only worried about being shipped off to the Saint-Lazare infirmary with the pox; the Dab wasn’t looking for babies.

  When my number was called, in my loose prisoner’s garb I followed the narrow-laced V of Françoise’s back, her pencil-thin nape under a heavy coil of hair. In the downstairs parlor, the same one in which I’d slept, the drapes were drawn. The doctor was young and a mumbler, not gentle; his coat, not quite black, was spotted with grease. The cool leather of the examining couch slid under me. Eyelids hot, I clamped shut my knees. He grunted; it might have been half a laugh, and then the pain made me gasp aloud.

  Afterward, he was wiping his instrument with a dirty cloth and shouting, “Stand up! Stand up!”

  But if I did, I would lose control of everything at once, bowels and guts together, and I rolled to one side and clamped my knees to my chest. “Sir”—I gasped. “My courses have—”

  “You can work. You’ll have no trouble, not from me. Stand and turn. Arms up. Very well. Out.”

  In the hall, my rubbery limbs collapsed onto the Brussels carpet, as tattered, half-formed notions flittered through my mind. Release, escape, rescue! Ships set sail; trains clattered down the tracks, flags waving aloft.

  Then somehow I was back upstairs. Françoise’s sharp features hovered above, sugared over like candied fruit. She was shaking my arm. Voices sang, somewhere, taunting like children playing in the distance. The submistress was seizing me now, forcing me upright. The Dab’s scrawl on a white sheet had marked me clean; fit to sell again. Routine. The ritual examination would recur, I was told, every week.

  “Come on, a little of Madame B’s hen en cocotte, a glass of wine, and la nausée will pass?”

  One thing, and one thing only was expected of us, the denizens of Deux Soeurs; and the forces were marshaled to it with an efficiency that not so many years later could be described as Prussian. The madames knew what kept business going and supplied it for the easy price of debt. O
f the two, Madame Trois was hated; Madame Jouffroy admired and feared. Trois was the implacable, the enforcer of rules; Jouffroy held the reins. It was she who chose and promoted her “favorites” and mingled with some echelon of Paris high society (she was mentioned in the gossip columns, took a carriage to the Bois de Boulogne, betted at Longchamp, and took the waters at Biarritz). Jouffroy set the tone of the place; brought in the top-end business.

  On the nether end—our end—for what seemed a few sous (but ended up being a pile of them) soft hands rubbed sweet oils into aching flesh; washed and brushed hair; pedicured, plucked, waxed, and polished. The establishment’s chambermaids were a cadre of upright working girls whose jobs had been passed down through an aunt or a cousin; or whose mothers and grandmothers had served before them. They professed to envy us but perhaps did not, as they ran errands, fetched pins and baubles, droppers of tincture and phials of powder. They lied to Françoise and poured glasses of lemon water; flattered our attributes of hand or foot, lips or skin or hair; our skills, our great loveliness; our faked-up privileges. Cheered and stole—cakes and liquor, cigarettes from the salon boxes; and were exquisitely sensitive, all for a price. “Oh, mademoiselle—you need some tincture of arnica there; and how about a flower in your hair?” Evenings came and went according to an organization so old and so sturdy, a discipline so well-practiced and severe, that soon enough it seemed as though Deux Soeurs must set Paris’s clocks, and the rest of the world was upside down.

  Slowly, like a headache that will not retreat, I learned the twists and turns of the place. The two first-floor reception salons; the bedchambers off a central staircase for entertaining “guests.” I became familiar with certain stretches of carpet runner, draperies that concealed false exits and secret entries (meant for those who eschewed public access) . . . actual doors to the outside that were barred and locked to us. Sitting alcoves were cozily furnished, dusted daily but never used; bronze nymphs reclined with greater comfort in their niches than we did in ours. Flowers stood majestically in their urns; briefly fresh; replaced as soon as they showed a tinge of brown. Along the many corridors, doors opened and closed to reveal a glimpse of trouser, a dangling set of cuffs.

  The house had two reception rooms. In Salon Deux, for better-heeled clients, the furnishings were ornate with gilt, the rugs plush, the drapery several folds deep. Champagne sluiced from magnums; the chandeliers had crystal drops that the maids climbed ladders to polish. The clients there were men of government, business, and industry; they were judges and factory owners, lords of the realms of lace and ribbon, armchairs and ottomans, railways and racehorses; hand-picked for their silk-lined pockets, leather soles, and largesse of possibility. Each in his turn abandoned hat and umbrella or stick in the entryway and swung down the corridor leading to the house’s deep interior.

  Salon Trois, on the other hand, stood at the front of the house and was where we new recruits were stationed (and by way of Françoise’s inscrutable system a rotation of others, which ensured variety—blondes and brunettes, dusky-skinned and fair; long-limbed and plump; vivacious and smiling, dreamy-eyed and wistful; the joker, the ingénue, the cynic, the blasé). The décor of Salon Trois was that of the bourgeois household, its sofas and drapes meant to make guests feel better off than they generally were. Its clients included half-formed spendthrifts from good and indifferent families, and it was the refuge of the wealthier students; the artistic and their hangers-on; young men light of pocket or green of seed; and the less important agents of the police. No customer was ever actually refused, unless unable to afford the ticket of entry. And it was here that I (wistful, brunette, of medium build) was tethered nightly to a sofa until chosen or called.

  My compatriots, with few exceptions, saw through the ploys and deceptions exerted upon us; still, they did not want to act on what they knew, and would rather argue (slap, weep, pull hair, kiss, and make up) over pins and chocolates and chits above and beyond what their own five senses could tell them. Cake stealing, wild crushes; sudden maladies of mind and body like flashing storms; the making of mountains from trifling matters; spats and squabbles over hairpins; pecking orders, scapegoats. Whatever had landed each of us here had narrowed our eyes to slits. And then too, life was such that one would do anything to forget it even as it was happening. Trivia became an outlet for misery, tears passed through a needle’s eye. I quickly learned, myself, not to think of certain things: when I did, terrible ideas seized and flattened me the way that heavy irons scorch cloth.

  I was not, at that time, immune to shame.

  Françoise’s feet were small, clad in blue boots that laced up the calf and rested on a fat ottoman. What a strange creature she was: thin and blanched; anxious and jutting about with hair gathered up or falling; her eyes enormous pools. She quivered with intensity as she paraded up and down, affectations jangling like bracelets. The submistress exerted her tyrannies and then insisted she be pitied for her lot, sulky until coddled by those on whom she practiced her torments. This morning she wore a loose-fitting jumper with big pockets, cinched at the waist; her boots indicating that she might certainly go out and walk if she liked, or perhaps had just come in. Her hair was done up messily, as though mussed and tossed by the wind. The squat ottoman on which her boots rested was embroidered with a fish on a line, the point of a hook piercing its jaw. A drop of blood stood out, and its scales were etched in silver. I was beginning to understand the humor of the place, although I didn’t laugh much.

  I had been summoned to the “business” parlor, where Jouffroy and Trois hid out when they weren’t on the floor, and the submistress held court on Saturday. It was the room in which I’d stayed, that first night. Françoise told me to sit. I was looking less peaked, she said, was I feeling better?

  Yes, thank you. Conversations with the submistress made me feel as though my head was being held down under water. She turned back to the escritoire and fiddled with a fountain pen, one of the newly patented ones with its own ink resevoir inside.

  Madame B’s cooking agreed with me, then. Ah, well, she has always been the genius that kept the place running. Françoise herself was rail-thin, “a boy forever,” as she often said. It left her unfit for the grand work we others accomplished, though rumor had it that Françoise had done a stint on the Register.

  The parlor had a sweet, mothy odor of bank notes; the acrid tang of silver mingled with leaking gas that made me sneeze. I had peeked inside this room once, after a busy night, when bills and coins covered every surface like a gambler’s counting table, and Madame Jouffroy and Madame Trois were draped over the divan, pleased and fresh as a summer’s day. Today it looked like the business office of a lingerie merchant.

  “You have made a good beginning—didn’t I tell you that you would? The madames have noticed, you know, that you are often selected.”

  “Too often,” I muttered.

  Among the regulars in Salon Trois, each had her method. Olga angled for the most promising-appearing clients and made sure Françoise knew about it, as she had aspirations for Salon Deux. Tall Lucette, my pallet mate who pulled out her hair in her sleep, lived for her lover “outside”—the police officer who’d been assigned (unfortunately) to the Morals Brigade. She bided her time, dreaming of escape and erasure from the Register, a tidy domestic arrangement to call her own; she went by the rules and was thus favored by Émilie Trois. Two carefree, gray-eyed beauties who both went by the named Mignon pretended to be cocottes in training—at least that’s how they saw it—competing with Olga and skimping on tips to the maids. Blonde Claudine had come over from Maison Chevillat. She looked like a juicy plum ready to burst, and kept up a flow of opinions on how things were run over there—easier access to muffes, the old rich men who spent a fortune, tipped, and left gants d’amour. (In Salon Trois we were not permitted gants, and tips were pooled.) Delphine, discussed on my first night, was still absent; her place taken by a succession of Belgians. And there was Banage, gamine and pointy-chinned, slight and strong as
a cart horse. She was the mistress of colorful jokes, pointed humor about the clients, and she claimed no aspirations at all. Her brother was on the stage; she was supporting him until he made his name.

  We played by the same rules, and there was a certain esprit de corps. It did not take long to determine the pecking order on any given night: if a girl wanted to pass or play, initiate the untested or bear up under the ugly. The least desirable (any obvious deficiency of face, form, or fortune) was passed to the newest aboard. This, at least, on nights when business was good, which it was generally. The basis of the invitation extended, the frisson of interest, appeared by sleight of hand (a stretch, a yawn, a turn of the head) to travel from customer to girl rather than the reverse, but in fact the merchandise came to life to play a part in the sale. If a guest stood dazzled or hesitant, uninitiated into the signals or unsure (as he might before a selection of goods at the Bazar de Hôtel de Ville), Françoise chose for him. If she was absent, he was “sent down the line” according to his qualities: the cut of a coat or the fall of the trousers, how a beard was trimmed.

  “You have made an excellent choice, monsieur,” Françoise would murmur, catching up to the scene, turning over one of the brass tags.

  For each customer taken upstairs, we received a token, one marker apiece. Françoise kept track with sharp black strokes next to our numbers in her ledger, and at the end of the night, we compared our chits to her tallies and assigned tips to the maids. It was not untrue that I deferred when I could, with a careful disinterest or (apparent) absent-mindedness. Banage, slight as she was, seemed untouched by each trip, as if it were a Sunday turn around the Luxembourg, while I languished after the first tag was turned, and my knees shook on the stairs. I had not learned how not to take each encounter personally and I could see that this weakness would be a death sentence.