Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  No one knows what became of Sim. Supposedly the Corsican mob caught up with him, but no one believed that either. I heard he went home to Poughkeepsie and moved back in with his mom.

  If one could stand the boredom, one could map this century and a chunk of the last by tracing the craggy highs and lows of currency valuation. Certainly that determined the great population migrations. Why does someone leave country A for country B? And not just your poor huddled masses yearning to be etcetera. As my sainted Pop used to say, The rich eat chicken, it’s cheaper. That’s how they got rich. A millionaire always turns off the lights when he leaves the room.

  Will the future believe that a generation of artists migrated to Paris purely for the privilege of pissing against the same wall Baudelaire pissed on? Or will anyone think to cost-compare the price of a hovel in Montparnasse with the equivalent dump in Newark—and then ask why so many American geniuses came for the free rent, free food, free wine, and—ta da!—free love.

  None of this is lost on the French, who are not exactly the world’s least mercenary individuals. When the first tourists are sighted arriving for April in Paris, the hotel rates triple. And the bona fide artists who’d made it through the winter fight for the coziest spot under the Austerlitz Bridge.

  Then came 1929. No sooner had the stock market crashed than letters began arriving: Dear Artistic Genius, we regret to inform you that Mummy and Daddy can no longer send you the regular monthly pittance. As a matter of fact, dear Daddy has just jumped out the window! And on his way down he hit a pedestrian whose wretched widow is suing us for our last million.

  So the “artists” went home to put their affairs back in order, to fire the remaining child-laborers and evict the holdout tenement dwellers. The Right Bank jewelry shops felt the pain. Real estate took a hit. There was a fire sale on châteaux whose owners were back in Rhode Island.

  Some friends left, and some pretty girls who liked buying everyone drinks. Otherwise I hardly noticed the change except to register the blessed absence of that sinusoidal Yankee twang murdering English and switching over to murder tourist French. I still get teensy, sporadic checks from my ex-wife Beedie, God bless her. Her bootlegger husband has adopted little Walt. The gangster business is thriving.

  Unemployment was nothing new. My visa had long since expired. I’d lost my proofreading job. Every once in a century I got a writing assignment. Poverty is a bulwark against being swept in and out by the tide of money coming and going. It’s a kind of stability that no sane person would choose.

  What’s that sound I’m hearing? The slamming shut of books? You readers turning these pages on the increasingly slim chance that the payoff will be food and wine, Paris, sex, café life, and art—just about now you’re thinking: I didn’t buy this book so some loser could lecture me about economics.

  Though what is as sexy, as sweetly taboo as money? So secret, so unspeakable even among dear friends? How much did Daddy leave you? How much did you get for that painting? How did you buy that fancy car with no visible means of employment? I have friends who tell me about every kinky sex act, the lies they tell, the crimes they commit, their intestinal complaints. But they shut up like bad shellfish when you ask what they paid for their house.

  I understand. I do. You don’t want to hear me talk about cash or the lack thereof. You already know what the smelly old pauper will say. He’s going to try to make you feel good about how little you have, or guilty about how much. So to set your mind at ease, I’ll return to the subject of sex and slowly work my way back to the topic of dollars and cents.

  I’d gotten over my broken heart. I’d forgotten about Suzanne with the help of a dancer named Fatima I’d met at the Chameleon Club.

  My friend Gabor and his baroness had been spending a lot of time there. And for some mysterious reason, they liked taking me along. I absorbed or diffused something. I didn’t want to know what. I was like packing material, keeping something unbroken.

  What made it even stranger was that the baroness didn’t like me. From the minute we met, it was clear—for reasons too complicated and tedious to explain—that she and I had no sexual chemistry whatsoever. Which in a way was a relief, though we despised each other for it.

  Was she so shallow that her only desire was to stave off boredom? Or shallower still: a spoiled, stylish automaton attuned to the frequency of fashion that only rich women can hear? Or was it all about narcissistic vanity and pride, so that when she looked at Gabor and me, or even at the dancers, all she saw was someone ignoring her?

  And what was she, exactly? A pretty French girl from nowhere who’d worked as an extra in Hollywood and found herself a wealthy, good-natured, homosexual husband willing to bankroll any life she wanted, as long as she left him alone. Her brother-in-law was a right-wing religious nut with an opium habit he blamed on a bogus war wound.

  For a woman I would never sleep with in this lifetime, the baroness Lily de Rossignol has staked out a great deal of territory in my overpopulated brain. But power is always fascinating, power and (to return to my subject) money. Why do some rich and powerful people only like to be around other rich and powerful people, while others, like the baroness, prefer the artistic and eccentric?

  Sometimes I watched her at the Chameleon Club. What was she seeing when she stared at the dance floor, predatory and alert, like an animal hunting? Hunting what? Information. One problem is, she’s a woman. Really, what do they want? Gabor simply wanted to take everyone’s pictures. He gazed at the couples like a kid too shy to ask for a date.

  For a long time the Chameleon Club had a select, loyal clientele, but suddenly it was the rage. Business picked up when the Americans left. It was always too much for them, frankly. Now it drew crowds of upper-class French kids, artists, film stars, socialites, diplomats, and bankers. From time to time one heard that the old-time butches were threatening to relocate, but they were having too much fun being regulars at a popular club with a famous floor show.

  The show was called the Chameleon Review. Girls dressed as boys and vice versa. You needed a forensics expert to tell them apart. You might think it would be a challenge to find two six-foot African bodybuilders of indeterminate gender performing strenuous duets to a score that alternated Tchaikovsky with jungle drums. But Yvonne had done it, with the help of her choreographer, Pavel, who is an artist. Under his direction, cheap cabaret was pure surrealist theater.

  The shows used to change fairly frequently, but the current program—“By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea”—had been running for a while. Water sloshes on the stage, and as the dancers and acrobats flop around, their fish costumes get wet and so transparent they might as well be naked. But the appeal was not about nakedness. Paris was full of nudie reviews.

  The show gave you a giddy, bubbly sensation deep in your chest, like a swallow of pricey champagne. It wasn’t great art, you knew that. But you couldn’t stop watching. You could feel your brain expanding with each tiny shock to your unexamined ideas of what it means to be male or female, an octopus or a human.

  One bright star was bound to emerge. And that stellar creature was Arlette—a slip of a thing with the body of a wood nymph and the voice of the hag who lives in the tree trunk. She played the little mermaid and sang a song she’d written, in which dirty double entendres were mixed with obnoxious references to the brave, handsome, superior French and the cowardly, ugly, inferior everyone else.

  The “plot” had something to do with the mermaid nearly drowning. Sailors from various nations and ethnic groups try to save her, or fuck her, or both. They all fail miserably—she bats them away like water bugs and goes back to drowning—until the French sailor gets the job done. Sex and patriotism are an unbeatable combination, even for people who imagine they are rebels because they like to dress up. Could a mermaid almost drown? No one bothered explaining. It’s hard to describe the experience of hearing a pretty girl with a voice like a cat yowling in the alley sing a terrible song—and being equally and simultaneously na
useated and aroused.

  When Arlette’s song ended, she hugged and soul-kissed chunky Lou, who played the French sailor who saves her. Lou half squatted, half sat on the air, and the mermaid rubbed her groin between the sailor’s open legs. It was dirtier than any sex show, hotter than any French postcard, though the models on those cards wear a lot less than the two girls onstage. The hard-ons their embraces inspired were intensified by gossip about their offstage affair.

  The first time Arlette sang her song, Fatima was so offended by its poisonous Frenchness that she went straight to Yvonne and quit. But since Fatima’s solo was also a popular number, Yvonne brokered an accord. She reminded Fatima that, in Arlette’s song, no Moroccan sailors got the chance to save the mermaid. If they had, Yvonne said, they would have succeeded.

  Fatima wasn’t stupid, but she stayed on at the club. Feeling isolated and aggrieved made her more receptive than she otherwise might have been to the attentions of a poor, aging American writer who (alone in that adoring crowd) came right out and said that Arlette was a filthy little pig and that Fatima’s belly dance was the best thing in the show.

  At first I was worried that Fatima might be a man. It wouldn’t have been the sneakiest trick played at the Chameleon. But lucky Gabor had photographed her naked and assured me that under her spangled bra and filmy skirts was a bona fide female.

  By our second night together, I couldn’t remember what life had been like with Suzanne. How could I have imagined that I would love her forever?

  And so it happened that Fatima and I entered that zone of tranced-out bliss until . . . Do I sound self-pitying when I say that bad luck kicked in? Not Fatima’s bad luck. Mine. But why should I blame myself? It was all Arlette’s fault, and to a lesser extent Yvonne’s, turning the club into a pigpen where French cochons went to feel French.

  One evening two cops in cheap blue suits asked to see Fatima’s papers. The next day her deportation order was delivered by a messenger with a mashed-in boxer’s face. On the following night, Clovis Chanac, the proto-fascist police chief who would later rise through politics to a career in professional crime, came to the Chameleon, just after the show ended.

  He drank on the house, smoked a cigar, and joined Fatima and me without being invited. In a tone that mixed the harsh vinegar of the interrogator with the oil of a flirt, Chanac asked Fatima if she’d ever read Les Misérables.

  “The novel,” he said helpfully. “The French classic.”

  I squeezed her hand: say yes. I would never have pegged Chanac for being much of a reader. Which he wasn’t. He was a bully who knew the name of one book, and decided to mention it, because I was a writer.

  Chanac said that if you read Les Misérables the right way, it was a story about Fatima’s chances of staying in France. But Victor Hugo had gotten one thing wrong, and that was the cash amount for which poor Jean Valjean could have bought off Inspector Javert and gone free.

  “How much would that have been?” I asked.

  Chanac gave us a number. I could have bought a car for that!

  “How long would Jean Valjean have had?” I asked. “To come up with the money.”

  “Two weeks,” said Chanac.

  As soon as he left the club, I took Fatima over to the table where Gabor sat with the baroness. I told them the whole story. Fatima’s tears would have melted a heart of stone, but not the baroness’s. She was staring at the dance floor. The band was playing a song called “My Little Pink Horse,” and several dancers were giving their partners piggyback rides.

  After a silence so long I thought she hadn’t heard, the baroness said she would love to enable Fatima to bribe Chanac. But then she would have no money left to help Gabor with his art. In other words, to put it bluntly, she was a useless bitch.

  Gabor stared into his ashtray. I didn’t know what I would have done, faced with the choice between my art and my friend’s girlfriend. Art, we’d agreed, was eternal. Girlfriends came and went. None of us should have to choose. The baroness wasn’t making Gabor choose. She had already decided.

  That night, after Gabor and I had seen the baroness to her car and we’d set out walking, he said he had an idea. He knew an old Hungarian who had gone to jail for counterfeiting. He told me some bullshit story about the guy’s family keeping pet bears for generations, and the guy missing a baby bear’s birth because he was in jail.

  He said there was a café where the old geezer hung out. We should find him and ask if he could mint enough cash to bribe Chanac.

  I said, That is so Hungarian. It didn’t sound terribly smart to me, passing counterfeit bills to a cop, a more serious offense than staying in France on an expired visa. But Gabor said the cop wouldn’t tell anyone, because it might lead to an investigation into how he got the fake money.

  It didn’t add up. But it was a better plan than letting Fatima be deported. The next morning, I picked Gabor up at his hotel. Suzanne looked down from the window. I waved at her and blew a kiss. Everything is forgiven!

  How often does it happen that in a city the size of Paris an ancient Hungarian relict is exactly where your friend thinks he’ll be? My heart sank when I saw the guy. If he was minting money, couldn’t he have sprung for a shampoo and shave? He looked as if he’d slept in his coat, under a bridge. Closer up I saw that he’d worked on that look, the style of a raffish aristocrat: a greasy shelf of swept back hair, cheekbones you could balance your coffee cup on, the hooded eyes and beak of a hawk, an eye patch for good luck.

  “Maestro,” said Gabor. “Good morning. Can we buy you a coffee?”

  The old man said, “Please. A café corretto.”

  Gabor ordered coffee with brandy, then introduced me as his American friend. The counterfeiter grasped my hand in his tattered cashmere glove. The rest was in Hungarian. Gabor had said that a Hungarian couldn’t refuse anything if you asked in his native language. But how could that be true? Hungary was a place like any other, full of citizens denying and rejecting each other.

  Gargling those garbled consonants, Gabor was a different person: charming as ever but shyer and more quietly respectful. Perhaps he was just deferring to age or social rank, but the tenderness and humility with which he treated the elderly grifter made me think of his parents and the grand opera of their letters back and forth.

  When Gabor got to a certain point, the old guy leered at me and said, “Ah, amour.” I did my best to leer back. Amour was the issue, all right. Amour, money, power, and nationalism, to be exact.

  Switching to French, Gabor said, “Didn’t you mint all that money to paper your mistress’s room?”

  “I don’t recall that,” the old man said.

  Could he manufacture a few francs more? The counterfeiter shrugged. He was out of practice. They switched back to Hungarian. Then Gabor produced a roll of bills, which, to paraphrase Karl Marx again, spoke the international language of yes.

  Apparently, the old guy had a friend who had a studio. . . . How much money would we need? The old man whistled between his last few teeth, a sound like a Japanese flute. He’d see what he could do. He named an absurd fee. Gabor agreed. It was less than Chanac was asking.

  A day went by, then another. Gabor was optimistic. On the fourth day we met the old guy at the same café. This time he had a briefcase. He insisted on getting his cut before he handed it over. And he suggested that we might prefer to inspect his work in the men’s room. No point alerting the customers of a cheap dive to their sudden proximity to a million francs, fake or not.

  Gabor paid him. Don’t do it! I thought. But I couldn’t interfere. It was a Hungarian business transaction financed with money that the baroness thought was being spent on photographic supplies.

  Gabor and I took the suitcase and hurried off to the toilet. God knows what the barman thought. By the flickering light of a urine yellow bulb, we examined the ragged bills. This was surely the only time in the history of France that the fifty-franc note carried the portrait of an elderly Hungarian with long white hair and
an eye patch. Gabor and I ran back out, but the old man was gone.

  Gabor tracked him down and got back most of the baroness’s money. Having run out of options, I took Fatima to the police station. We were crying our eyes out, but she stopped crying before I did. At least she would see her dear mama.

  That was when she told me that she wasn’t going to see Mama. In fact, to be honest, she wasn’t leaving France. She pointed toward the handsome young guard assigned to escort her to the border.

  For all I know, they’re popping out half-Moroccan babies in some prefecture in the provinces. So I would like to ask Mr. Karl Marx about this part of the story. Could it be that there are more important things than money?

  Gabor saved a few counterfeit bills. One night, at the Chameleon, he gave two of them to Yvonne. Apparently the old shyster was a Hungarian national hero. She was delighted to find out that he was still alive, though sorry that his efforts had led to Fatima running off with a cop. She loved it that the old man had put his face on the bills. She took the phony Hungarian francs. A lucky charm, she said.

  That night she sent to our table a bottle of champagne, which I drank to get over Fatima and to imagine a heaven in which Karl Marx was wrong, and money didn’t matter.

  From The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars

  BY NATHALIE DUNOIS

  Chapter Five: First Love

  DURING THE WRITING of this book I have repeatedly tried to build a bridge I could cross to reach Lou Villars. What could make someone sympathize with a torturer and a traitor? If empathy and pity are unavailable, then which of the higher emotions is left? Kindness? Compassion? If one is looking for explanations or exculpation, one could cite Lou’s troubled brother (heredity?), her gothic childhood, her lonely adolescence, culminating in the near rape by her mentor and trainer.

  Then why do I feel most strongly for Lou when I think about her doomed passion for the little blond viper Arlette? Everyone knows what it is like to fall madly in love with an ice cube. Many women (including myself) imagine that only men are naturally incapable of showing warmth or affection. But this book has been an education for me—and, I hope, for the reader. As we learn from the story of Lou and Arlette, a woman can be as calculating and cold as the most chilly, self-centered man.