It took Lou and Arlette a few seconds to figure out how their table at the Chameleon Club could have traveled all the way across town.
“Fuck me, it’s a duplicate,” Arlette said, and they burst out laughing. How hilarious and strange that this wealthy woman and her pet artist should have gone to so much trouble to replicate their messy table. It occurred to Lou that the point was to keep the photo shoot a secret from Yvonne. And any secret she shared with Arlette strengthened the bond between them.
The waiter brought a whiskey. Lou lit a cigarette.
The baroness inspected Arlette and sent for a makeup girl to cover the blueberry-colored rings under her eyes and the bruise on her neck. All this exists in the diary kept by Gabor’s assistant.
Arlette said, “I was out late last night.” Her challenging look at Lou was lost on no one.
The baroness rolled her eyes at Gabor, then smiled. Their disagreement had been trumped by the strain between Arlette and Lou. So it often happens that a fighting couple is pacified, even cheered, by the sight of another couple with problems worse than their own. If the baroness worried that some tension between the women might sabotage the shot, she read, in Gabor’s expression, his opinion that a lovers’ quarrel might complicate it nicely.
And what was Lou thinking? How much they were getting paid. And where they could spend it on a delicious lunch that might improve Arlette’s mood.
Lou knew that Arlette was seeing Chanac and was going to leave her. It made her even more determined to have their picture taken. When she no longer had Arlette, she would have this evidence: she and Arlette had been in love. They had come here and done this together.
Lou sat at the table and put her arm around Arlette. How pretty Arlette looked in her shimmering gown. And how soon Lou was going to lose her. The silkiness of Arlette’s bare arm made Lou want to weep. Lou asked for another whiskey.
“Later,” the baroness said.
The photographer peered through the lens. He asked the baroness to look, and the assistant came over. All three shook their heads.
Gabor said, “I can’t use this funereal shit. Pardon my language, ladies. It’s fucking blue-period Picasso.”
“What language is he speaking?” Arlette asked Lou.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lou said.
“You are a beautiful couple,” Gabor said.
“Thank you,” Lou replied.
Arlette giggled the way she always did around anyone she thought might be rich or important. It had always annoyed Lou. Was it too late to start to love it?
The baroness approached their table. “Remind me. How much did we agree on?”
“Are these bitches Jewish?” whispered Arlette.
“No,” said Lou. “Shut up.”
“Seventy-five,” lied Lou. They’d said fifty.
“That’s what I remember,” the baroness said. “How about a hundred? In return for which, you ladies are going to have to work. Not physical work, psychological work. Put something behind those eyes. Think about your hopes and fears, your regrets and disappointments, your secret loves, your not-so-secret loves, your sweetest childhood memories, the thing you most want and will never have. Shuffle these thoughts and feelings around, in any order you wish.
“Gabor will take three shots of you and choose the one he likes best. His interest is in permanence, in capturing the essence of the face beyond its changing moods. The face at rest, when its owner’s soul has turned in on itself—”
Gabor said, “My dear Lily! Let’s not get carried away. That may be more about me than the ladies will find helpful.”
Gabor instructed Arlette to lean against Lou so her bony shoulder jabbed Lou in the breast. Lou hated it when anyone touched her there. She put one arm behind Arlette’s back and with the other hand cradled Arlette’s elbow, resting on the table. She tried hard to ignore the flashes of light, the gunpowder smell, the pain in her breast, the camera. The trick was not to breathe.
“Let’s take a break,” the photographer said.
The baroness brought more champagne and whiskey. When Arlette went to the toilet, the baroness asked Lou why she was so unhappy.
Gabor Tsenyi’s assistant overheard Lou Villars saying that she had a brother in an asylum somewhere in Paris. She didn’t know how to find him. Both her parents were dead.
The baroness said she knew whom to ask. She would help Lou track him down. When Arlette returned, Lou signaled the baroness to drop the subject.
Once more Arlette and Lou slid into the banquette. Lou snuggled close to Arlette and tenderly cupped her elbow. She felt Arlette’s pulse beating softly. For the moment they were happy.
This time, when Lou stared (not straight at the lens, please, Mademoiselle!) into the middle distance, she gazed into a future in which she lived with Arlette and Robert. Perhaps they’d find a house in the country with wisteria over the pergola and a swing in the garden.
The lights flashed, the shutter clicked. The photographer and the baroness made pigeon coos of approval.
Afterward, when the baroness paid Lou and Arlette, she asked if Lou knew how to drive.
“Yes,” Lou said. “Very well.”
“My boyfriend taught her,” said Arlette.
Ignoring Arlette, the baroness said, “And do you like to drive?”
“More than anything,” Lou replied. How did the baroness know?
The baroness said, “I have an idea. We will be in touch.”
From the (Unpublished) Memoirs of Suzanne Dunois Tsenyi
To be destroyed on the occasion of its author’s death
WE MIGHT HAVE been more anxious about the economy, the worldwide Depression, the political murders and reprisals, Hitler ranting next door, if day-to-day survival hadn’t kept us so busy. The art school modeling had long since dried up, but the language classes were mobbed with immigrants trying to pass as French.
The French had been growing steadily more hostile to foreigners. The musicians’ union demonstrated outside the opera because its pit orchestra employed too many immigrants. The doctors tried to purge the wards and clinics of the foreign-born. The French were closing ranks like a fortress under siege, though it is unclear why Polish violinists and Argentinean surgeons should have seemed like dangerous assailants.
The director of the language school tripled the tuition. But still the students came. It was the only job I had. I wasn’t doing them harm. Many of my students seemed terrified, and I was frightened for them. For once I could buy enough food for myself and Mama, but thanks to the shortages, there was nothing to buy. There were riots at the market after people had waited for hours on line for some commodity that had run out.
We couldn’t afford a telephone, but there was one at the corner café, and they’d send a boy to knock on our door whenever Gabor called. I’d rush across the city to meet him. We’d have a drink and go back to his room, or stay out and walk all night. It calmed and energized me at once, squinting into the darkness, trying to see, before he did, what caught and held the light.
Ricardo and Paul still gave parties, but they weren’t as much fun. Gabor and I continued to go, for sentimental reasons and out of loyalty to Ricardo, who was barely hanging on to his job at the clinic. Many friends had left Paris, others were ill and unemployed. I kept hearing that Ricardo had been sent back to Argentina, but the gossip turned out to be false. Paul was making sculptures of fists clenched around pistols and knives. The few collectors left in Paris were buying up the Renoirs.
I remember their last dress-up party: come as the person you fear most. Gabor and I assumed that all the guests would come as Hitler. The silly mustache, the pasted-down hair: a cheap and easy costume. So we weren’t surprised, but still we laughed and exclaimed when dozens of male and female Hitlers showed up. Quite a few guests came as Clovis Chanac. That too was a simple masquerade: a pair of curled, pointed red brushes pasted on one’s upper lip.
Gabor photographed a painting of a blowsy Bouguereau nude and wore the
print around his neck. He hadn’t come as Hitler but as Hitler’s favorite artist. Out of pure perversity, I came as the baroness, in ropes of cardboard jewelry and moth-eaten furs from a charity shop. No one but Gabor caught the reference. He hardly spoke to me all night. People asked, Was I dressed as the Dutch queen? Why was I scared of her?
Of course, the baroness didn’t alarm me as much as Hitler or Chanac. She frightened me in a different way. I thought if I pretended to be her I might better understand who she was and what sort of threat she posed. I slunk around like a cat all night, but no one got the joke. That is, no one but Gabor, who didn’t think it was funny.
He was spending long hours in the studio that the baroness had set up. She often worked alongside him, though I wasn’t supposed to know. Afterward he returned to me, in his room at the hotel. I was glad he still used it as a darkroom, a place that was only his. There were still trays of fluids and fixatives, laundry lines hung with prints. The reason he’d been working so hard was that a prestigious publisher, to whom he’d been introduced by the baroness, had agreed to bring out a volume of his art.
One night, for a change, I couldn’t sleep. And though I respected Gabor’s privacy and never looked at his work unless he showed it to me, I got up and switched on the blood-colored bulb. He was sleeping soundly, though in the morning he would insist that he hadn’t shut his eyes all night. There was just enough light for me to see the single photo hanging on the line.
He’d made a new print of “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.” He was deciding whether to use it on the cover of his book. I’d seen the photo many times, but something made me look again.
I am, and have always been, a sensible, down-to-earth person. I’d modeled, I gave language lessons, I supported my mother. Later I was an undercover agent in the French Resistance. I married Gabor Tsenyi and since his death have efficiently and conscientiously managed his estate.
I was never superstitious. But looking at the photo, I felt a warning chill. Gabor and his photographer friends were always talking about the moment: the fleeting, precious instant of unrecoverable time. But that photo made me think that I was seeing more than one moment. I was being shown the future: a glimpse of what Lou and Arlette saw as they gazed past the camera. A bleak and sinister shadow of what was to come.
Was it a warning about the night, a decade later, when Lou Villars would walk into the interrogation chamber in which I was being held at the Gestapo prison?
Even after I switched off the light, an afterimage of the couple floated in the darkness. I crawled into bed beside Gabor and lay awake for the rest of the night.
February 8, 1934
Dear parents,
It’s kind of you to keep saying how much you love my book, that you’ve shown it to all the neighbors, and even the butcher, dependable Fritz, who gave you a rope of bloodwurst to celebrate my success. And Uncle Ferenc called it the greatest masterpiece since the Mona Lisa! Poor Uncle, whom you tell me is nearly blind, cannot be bothered, as I am, by quality of the reproductions. How dark and streaked the prints are, and that portrait of Madame Suzy—I flip past it so as to not see the leprous white blotch on her forehead.
Wasn’t it thoughtful of the publishers not to show me the final proof until it was already at the printers? But why am I complaining? I should, as you say, take pleasure in getting what every artist wants: a chance to have my work seen by the public.
I’m glad you like the cover. I can’t remember if I wrote you that Lou Villars, the woman in the tuxedo, is the athlete I wrote about, years ago, for the Magyar Gazette. I think I told you that I gave her the Chameleon Club’s card.
Now there is talk of her going to work for the baroness’s husband. Strange, how certain individuals keep appearing in our lives, though not necessarily the people whom we would have chosen.
I need to tell you a secret. I have been having attacks. Heavy breathing, skipping heartbeats. Paranoid terror seizes me, and I become convinced that Paris is punishing me for revealing her mysteries in my book.
On the night you left Paris after your heartbreakingly brief visit, I took to the streets, as always when I am sad. I walked until dawn and came home with nothing. I felt that Paris was saying, Isn’t a book enough? Now look at your book instead of me. I owe you nothing more.
I set up my camera near the Place de l’Opéra, but the scribble of headlights could have been the writing on the back of a tourist postcard. Or (joke) the writing on the wall. As photographic subjects, the inky puddles of rain had all the originality of a depressed adolescent’s poetry.
The next night, I tried again. I’d see how a year had affected the clochards under the bridge. My pictures of those unfortunate souls are not only popular favorites but among my best. They inspired the government to offer the men shelter for the night, though that program was soon quashed by the Paris police prefect, Clovis Chanac, who thinks the poor should suffer more than they do. Chanac is a type we saw often in the Empire, before the war: the bureaucrat who sits in his office and, when no one is looking, tosses your papers in the trash, where they will never be found again.
Now those blanket-wrapped larvae roiling under the bridge made me think of my work with horror. How many pretty pictures of these miserable souls are, thanks to me, decorating the fanciest walls in the city?
The icing on the cake, or should I still say on the strudel, was what happened in the rue Quincampoix. The ladies scattered when I approached, though they’d always been glad to see me. Was it because of my book? I should have shown them the prints and asked them if they wanted to be included. No wonder Paris is angry. I’d exploited her hardworking daughters to advance my career.
At the Café Boum, I ran into Petite Marguerite, the one with the corkscrew curl. She’d heard I’d made a fortune off her and her friends.
I said, “Not a fortune. Pennies!”
I promised to give them copies of the book. Tomorrow night. I’d buy the drinks.
I’d given away all my free copies to you, Lionel, Suzanne, and Yvonne. Lou Villars has several times asked for a print of her portrait, but I have none left to spare. And now I’ve spent my entire advance on copies of my own book, for the girls.
I carted the books to the Café Boum. The champagne began to flow. I didn’t know how I’d pay for it. I’d ask the baroness, if I had to.
Anyhow, the girls loved the book. I was flattered by the pleasure they took in how I’d made them look, how I’d captured how brightly our city shines during their working hours.
They insisted I take their picture. They lined up, as if for a class portrait. I didn’t like what I saw through the lens, but I felt obliged. I went home and developed the film. My instincts were right. I had taken a photo of the dead, the soon to be dead, women on their last legs and at the end of their tether.
For me to begin to explain would take a complicated disquisition on my aesthetic principles, an unblinking examination of certain aspects of my art that have been secrets even from me. The photo was dishonest, cold, poisoned by everything I never wanted to see in my work. How exhausted the women looked! Could Marguerite be ill? I never aimed to flatter them, but I never wanted to destroy them.
I watched the picture come up in the tray. Can you guess what I did next? Having just seen the visible evidence that the muse had abandoned him forever, your insomniac boy lay down and fell fast asleep. Explain that, Papa, if you can, oh expert on human nature!
Of all the things connected with the publication of my book, my greatest joy is the fact that you two could finally come to Paris. Reunited at the station, we flew into each other’s arms and managed to hide our surprise at how much we had changed (in my case, for the worse) during the years apart. All of us were crying, though Papa and I tried not to.
I will never forget the pleasure on Mama’s face at that delicious Saturday lunch at the Orangerie, where the baroness made you both feel so welcome. Or Papa’s ecstasy when he climbed the steps of the Louvre. Or the way Mama put her
soft white hand over Suzanne’s when Suzanne said she wanted to see the town where I was born.
If only you could have swallowed your pride and let the baroness put you up at the (admittedly expensive) hotel for more than the few days we could afford. If you’d agreed to camp out at my (admittedly uncomfortable) studio, you could have stayed longer. Yet despite my grief at having to say good-bye so soon, I admire you for this, as I admire everything you do.
Paris will forgive me, or I will go someplace else and find another subject. I forgot to tell you that I have begun to get work, shooting celebrity portraits for an American magazine. This may also take me elsewhere, geographically and artistically, though I will always remain near you, in spirit.
I live for another visit from you. Meanwhile, I kiss you.
Gabor
From The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars
BY NATHALIE DUNOIS
Chapter Seven: A New Job
WHAT IS ONE to make of Gabor Tsenyi’s repeated refusal to give, or even show, Lou Villars a print of her own portrait? He pleaded absentmindedness. He was busy. Or he forgot. Can we ascribe his behavior to the typical self-involvement of the successful male artist?
So it was by accident that Lou finally saw the photo. It was on the cover of Tsenyi’s book, in a bookseller’s window. She stopped and grabbed Arlette’s arm. She heard herself moan, a sexual moan that briefly froze Arlette’s face in a grimace of distaste.
At first Lou saw only her radiant Arlette seducing the camera with her twinkly charm. An impartial viewer might think Arlette looks distracted, drunk, her makeup clownish. But Lou worshiped every wave in her beloved’s hair, the polished but bitten fingernails, the tilted half moon where her skinny neck emerged from her collarbone.
It took Lou a while to recognize the woman dressed as a man, lucky beyond all creatures to sit beside a goddess and cradle the heavenly creature’s elbow. Looking into her own eyes, Lou saw what she’d seen when the photo was taken: gardens, a swing, wisteria, all her loved ones together.
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