From the (Unpublished) Memoirs of Suzanne Dunois Tsenyi
To be destroyed on the occasion of its author’s death
(1928)
ONCE A BOYFRIEND told me, “Suzanne, there are two kinds of people. People who lean toward you and people who lean away.”
I said, “What about people who sit up straight?”
He said, “They haven’t decided.”
If I were like Lionel, I would write a book: Obvious Lies, Bad Advice, and Wrong Information I’ve Gotten from Men. A book? An encyclopedia! But in this case my friend was right. Gabor’s baroness not only leaned away, she seemed to levitate above the table and peer down at us from a great height as we waited like naughty children until her ladyship said, “Join us.”
For all I cared, she could have been looking at us through a telescope from Mars. There was a chance, a very good chance, that she was going to buy us dinner.
She asked Lionel, “Do you like oysters?”
Lionel said, “Suzanne loves oysters.”
“I’ll bet she does,” she said.
Oysters was the magic word the waiters lip-read across the room. Or perhaps they’d already been ordered, and the telepathic waiters knew to bring more.
Lionel had told me about a club where women perform erotic acts with fluffy kittens and lambs. Disgusting! But I could perform with oysters. Too bad no one was watching me have sex with a dozen bivalves. Lionel, Gabor, and the baroness were too busy talking. Well, fine. More oysters for me. I slurped a few and waited politely, then finished off the platter. I was never one of those girls who require constant attention.
Another boyfriend used to tell me, Watch and learn, Suzanne. And though he only said it in bed, I took his advice to heart.
I watched the baroness order. More oysters, escargots stewed with butter and cream, a mushroom bisque, lamb steaks, bloody, please tell the chef, haricots verts, and mashed potatoes. Then cheese, a sherry cake, wild strawberries, and coffee.
She’d let the waiter choose the wine. Something expensive, red, and delicious. She asked Gabor and Lionel, “Will that be enough?” Before they could reply she said, “If not, we’ll order more.”
When the second round of oysters came, the baroness forbid the men to speak until they’d eaten. How much did it cost to earn the right to tell people what to do? After the empty platter went back and she’d grabbed the champagne bottle from the waiter so as to refill her own glass, she began to question Lionel about his writing. In other words, was he famous, or was she wasting her time and money buying him dinner?
Disappointed by Lionel’s answers, she pouted at Gabor. Who was this American phony he’d swindled her into feeding? Three things kept me from jumping to Lionel’s defense: First, the baroness hadn’t actually said anything insulting. Second, I was still hungry. And third, I’d decided to leave him.
The baroness’s disdain had no effect, or almost no effect, on my decision. I was tired of his jealousy, sick of his belief that the only permissible topic of conversation was his unrecognized genius. In all our time together, he had never once asked how Mama was, or how my day had gone. Of course, had I been in love with him, none of that would have mattered.
The baroness remarked that her husband’s cousin had started a literary magazine called Tomorrow. Or Today. Or Right Now. Not Yesterday, she was sure of that. Who would call an avant-garde journal Yesterday? When she sobered up and remembered, she would give the address to Gabor. Lionel should submit his work.
The desperation with which Lionel wanted to be published in this magazine whose name the baroness couldn’t recall was painful to behold. I had long since lost my Catholic faith, but I still believed that I would be punished for my sins: crimes of heartlessness, mostly. The crime of not loving someone who loves you. The crime of making a man suffer. But I didn’t love Lionel. There was nothing I could do. A quick ending was more merciful, a clean cut would heal faster.
He said, “On Sunday nights I sometimes read my work aloud at the Café Dôme.”
The baroness said, “Oh, really? That must be wildly entertaining.”
The look that passed between Gabor and me was like a conversation in which we tried to decide who would wade in and save Lionel from drowning. Which of us would convince her that this crude American was the real thing? I believed in his talent, and so, I knew, did Gabor. But my opinion was not the one that would persuade the baroness.
Looking at Gabor, I felt the first stirrings of that attraction, let’s call it desire, that can spark up out of nowhere when a woman and man can communicate without words. I felt guilty that the subject of our silent exchange was the imperiled dignity of Gabor’s friend and my soon-to-be-ex-lover. Why had I never noticed how beautiful Gabor’s eyes were? Because he had never looked at me the way he was looking at me now.
Before Gabor could speak, the baroness said, “I felt so sorry for that poor girl in the Vélodrome, that unfortunate creature whose body they’d deformed so she could do tricks. Like one of those beggar children whose legs have been broken, or those dwarf Japanese trees. Imagine running and throwing a spear in that unflattering outfit.”
Lionel said, “With a face like that, there’s not much you can do.”
It’s over, I thought. I’m leaving him. I’m telling him tonight.
The baroness said, “There is always something a woman can do.”
I said, “Maybe it was her idea. Maybe she wanted to break the record.”
The baroness could not have seemed more startled if an oyster had addressed her from its shell.
“Why would a woman want that? Is your little friend a feminist?” she asked Lionel.
“Suzanne’s a toughie,” Lionel said. “Watch out.”
“I too am a toughie,” the baroness said.
“Hot!” warned the waiters, settling down ramekins at our places. I leaned into the tendrils of garlicky steam curling up from the ceramic.
“Eat,” the baroness said. “Go ahead. I’ll just finish this cigarette.”
Parsleyed cream dripped from the snails I speared with my tiny trident. In a trance of pleasure, I forgot the others and scrubbed my dish with bread. Lionel too cleaned his plate. The baroness laughed, or semi-laughed, semi-amused by our ravenous hunger. Our empty dishes disappeared, and the lamb steaks arrived.
The baroness said, “Bloody means nothing anymore. Bloody means incinerated. Didn’t I ask for them bloody? Are these rare enough for you?”
“Excellent.” Lionel’s mouth was full. I didn’t want to look at his mouth.
While we ate, the baroness smoked and drank. Every time she tapped her cigarette, the ashtray was whisked away. When it was slow in returning, she made a trough for her ashes in the mashed potatoes she wouldn’t let the waiters remove.
Buoyed by the delicious food, my spirits began to lift. Pretty soon I liked everyone. The waiters, the other diners, even Lionel and the baroness. Especially Gabor. How witty they were. Lionel told his joke about limiting himself to one glass of wine per night but making sure that his glass, his one glass, was never empty. Laughing, we toasted the punch line. Fill it, please!
Poor Lionel! When he looked back on tonight, would he wonder when exactly I decided that our love affair was over? Fortunately, it was Lionel’s policy to look back as rarely as possible. What happened to Orpheus, Lionel said, was entirely the woman’s fault. Same with Lot. Blame the wife. If Lionel had looked back, he’d still be in Jersey with Beedie and little Walt.
The baroness told a story about her husband and her brother-in-law, Didi and Armand. They were in business together, manufacturing automobiles. Her story began with a long list of famous names I’d never heard of. Duke A said something to Viscount B, who said something to Princess C and the German industrialist D. The upshot was that Didi and Armand hired the world’s fastest auto racer to take their new sports car around the track and report any problems.
The driver agreed on one condition: that he test the car only at night, and that he hav
e the track to himself with no one there to spot him. For a while the arrangement worked until one night a cop saw headlights circling the track, and not having been alerted, found the driver doing a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, wearing only a helmet and a lady’s black lace nightie.
“What happened?” Gabor asked.
“Nothing,” said the baroness. “The driver delivered his report. It went to the engineers.”
“In America he would have been executed,” said Lionel.
“Hardly,” the baroness said. “I spent years in Hollywood. You think there aren’t perverts there? I knew a producer who could only achieve orgasm by having Asian virgins set off firecrackers on his chest. How does someone figure that out? Does he roll away from his wife one night and think, What would really make me happy is a Chinese schoolgirl blowing Catherine wheels off my nipples?”
The men laughed, a little nervously. Watch and learn, Suzanne.
Gabor and Lionel excused themselves and got up to go to the toilet, leaving me with the baroness. She leaned so far away from me, she was practically horizontal. Then she lit another cigarette and said, “If my brother-in-law were here, he would only speak to you—and not one word to the others.”
“Doesn’t he like men?”
“Armand likes men fine. He is married and very religious. In fact he belongs to Opus Dei. He was among its first members. A pioneer, one might say.”
I was afraid to tell the baroness that I didn’t know what Opus Dei was, though later I would learn from Gabor that it was an extreme right-wing Catholic sect with radical ideas about how the universe works and with practices that, one heard, included self-flagellation.
“Apparently,” said the baroness, “this cult or coven or whatever it is has no problem with . . . never mind. I meant: the only reason Armand would talk to you is because you are French. Unlike our two friends, who are foreigners, in case you hadn’t noticed. Armand is patriotic to an almost fanatical degree. Correction: a fanatical degree. In addition to his religious manias he is a founding member of the Order of the Legion of Joan of Arc. Though I don’t believe that he agrees with the thugs who go around roughing up immigrants, Jews, Bolsheviks, and the rest.”
The baroness looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time all evening. As if I’d evolved from a talking oyster into a fellow human in whom she was confiding, or whose opinion she wanted. The flicker of her shifting moods bathed her face in a flattering, honeyed light. I wanted to tell her something. I wanted to talk about my father’s death and my mother’s poor health. I can’t imagine why I thought that she would be sympathetic.
“What about your husband?” I asked. “Does he share his brother’s political views?”
“Ah, my husband. Didi is a different story completely.”
The baroness flapped one hand at the waiter and told him he had forgotten the brandy. He returned with four snifters. He was sorry. The management was sorry. The Armagnac was on the house. Should he leave the gentlemen’s glasses? The baroness waved him away.
Where were Gabor and Lionel? I finished my cake and brandy. As the baroness rooted around in her purse for more cigarettes, I switched my glass with Lionel’s and drank his brandy too.
When the men came back they seemed disappointed that the baroness and I weren’t talking. Had they imagined that any two women will become intimate friends the minute the boys leave the table? Our silence was infectious. Gabor drank his brandy. Lionel picked up his empty glass and looked at me but said nothing.
“What now?” the baroness asked. “You’re the racy young crowd. Wait. I have an idea. Gabor promised to take me to that cross-dressers club. What a perfect conclusion to our day at the Vélodrome!”
“It’s Tuesday,” said Gabor. “The Chameleon is closed tonight.”
“Pity,” the baroness said.
After another long silence I said, “I know about a party.”
“Whose party?” Lionel asked.
None of your business, I thought. After tonight I would never again have to find a way to subtly communicate the fact that the friend I was going to visit was female or homosexual: not a sexual threat. Another boyfriend used to say, “Your lover’s jealousy knows you better than you do.” That statement will not be included in my encyclopedia of misinformation I’ve gotten from men.
“Ricardo and Paul,” I said.
I’d met Ricardo and Paul at the language school where I taught and where they’d enrolled to improve their French. Ricardo was a medical student from an old Argentinean family. His lover Paul was a Malaysian sculptor who’d stowed away on a steamer from Singapore. Ricardo was tall, handsome, reserved, Paul an extroverted sprite. They were opposites in every way, but what they shared was a generosity of spirit: Ricardo gave freely of his money and time (already he diagnosed and treated half of Paris for free) while Paul lavished unlimited energy on their parties, and on changing his appearance—his hairstyle and outlandish costumes—to amuse their friends.
It was through them that I’d met the painters and poets who’d admitted me into their circle—mostly because I was pretty, I knew, but that was how it was. Beauty and money were the only keys with which women could open the door to that locked room. I’d gone to meet Paul and Ricardo in the Café Voltaire on the night I met Lionel, the night he’d spoken so movingly about Rimbaud. He should never have told me—later—that he only did it for the free drinks.
“You know this Ricardo?” the baroness asked Gabor.
“Slightly,” Gabor said.
“Everyone goes there,” I said. “Sometimes there are costumes. Sometimes Kiki and Man Ray get into a fight.” Why was I talking them into this? Was I showing off? Or did I want to lure the baroness into my territory, where we would see who had more power?
Gabor said, “My papa is a passionate fan of Kiki’s.”
“Even in Hungary?” said the baroness. “How marvelous. Do you know her too?”
Gabor said, “I’ve seen her at parties. But only with her clothes on.”
The baroness said, “I collect Man Ray’s work. I have from the beginning.”
Watching her, I could see the prospect of fun battling her reluctance to visit a kingdom where she wasn’t yet the queen.
I said, “Picasso came to one of their parties, dressed as a toreador.”
“Picasso?” That magic word trumped whatever doubts the baroness might have had.
No bill was presented. No money changed hands. The smiling maître d’ hoped to see us again.
The baroness’s red Delage sedan was waiting for us outside. She sat up front with the driver. Her cigarette smoke wafted out and back in through the windows. Wedged between the two men, I was conscious of their thighs against mine. Lionel pressed against me: forceful, possessive, hopeless. My contact with Gabor was more tentative but eloquent, nonetheless.
We pulled up in front of Paul’s atelier, where we pushed our way through the partygoers overflowing onto the street. A turbaned genie guarded the door, his brawny arms folded. Pussycat was the password, as the whole city knew.
Tonight’s guests had been instructed to dress as famous sculptures. Medieval kings and queens had arisen from their tombs. Several women had come as the Venus de Milo, powdered white, in white drapery, their arms pinned behind their backs. Two American boys were pretending to be cowboys à la Remington, riding the backs of two other boys wearing horses’ heads. Sure enough, there was Kiki, in an extremely short toga. She kept on announcing that she was The Dying Gaul; then she’d lie on the floor and giggle until a man helped her up.
Paul and Ricardo had sprayed themselves silver and were nude but for loincloths made of peacock feathers. I kissed them and told them how marvelous they looked. The musicians were on break, so we could hear one another.
“And who are your feathered friends?” the baroness said, with a laugh.
When I introduced them, Paul said, “I believe I’ve met your husband.”
Ricardo slapped the back of Paul’s han
d.
“I’m sure you have,” said the baroness. “What sculpture are you supposed to be?”
Ricardo said, “In Buenos Aires there is a fountain on which there is a statue of two splashing lovebirds.”
“I’ve been to Buenos Aires,” the baroness said. “I don’t remember a fountain like that. If I go back, will you tell me where to find it?”
“Next time,” said Paul, “we will take you.”
Gabor said, “I’d like to photograph you two in those costumes.”
“Impossible,” said Ricardo. “My family would disown me.”
The baroness said, “Masks would do the trick. Not even your own mother will recognize you.” She rested her hand on the small of Ricardo’s back, just above his silver ass. “The four of us can have dinner. We will eat and drink well. Then Gabor can set up the shot. And we’ll take it from there.”
The band couldn’t have chosen a better moment to start playing.
“They just performed for the German ambassador,” Ricardo shouted in my ear.
I said, “I saw them last month at le Jazz Cool Club.”
In fact it had been two months ago, the last time Lionel had money. I looked around for Lionel, but I couldn’t see him.
“They’re playing for us for free,” said Paul.
“Oh, are they?” the baroness said. “In that case, we should show our appreciation.” She grabbed Gabor’s hand and led him onto the dance floor. I was surprised and saddened by how gracefully they moved together. Lionel danced terribly. The only time we’d gone dancing, he pretended it was funny to stumble and drag me across the room.
Ricardo nodded at Paul, who led me out among the dancing couples. Paul was quite a bit shorter than I, so at first it was awkward. But after I’d had a few pulls from his brandy flask, the difference in our heights seemed amusing, as did the fact that my partner was not only silver but naked except for a few strategically placed feathers.
Someone cut in, another medical student who must have imagined that a Roman helmet and an armored breastplate would be irresistible to the ladies. It was infinitely resistible, but he too had cognac in a flask. By the time the song ended, I was grateful for the centurion’s steadying hand on my back.
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 Page 6