Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  However far apart we are, we should thank God that things have worked out. Though I know you miss me, you must admit that Gary Cooper is in every way a more rewarding subject than the graduating class of our town’s Academy for Young Men.

  Mama and Papa, don’t bother refusing, but soon I will be sending a check for a fraction of what you sacrificed to help a son who never dared imagine he would be able to a make a living, doing what he loves. I thank you, I kiss you. Keep me in your prayers.

  Your devoted son,

  Gabor

  From Paris in My Rearview Mirror

  BY LIONEL MAINE

  A Season in Hell

  PARIS 1935

  WHEN I WAKE at 3:00 A.M., alone, as I often am now, I must try very hard not to think that one day, in the near future, I will have to leave Paris. If I let the thought cross my mind, I won’t sleep for the rest of the night.

  The gloom and doom economy, the coming war, unemployment, riots, street crime, financial scandals, serial killers, Nazis at home and next door—what red-blooded Parisian male would admit to noticing or caring? The women worry constantly, as women always do.

  Life goes on, as always. If you can scare up a franc or two, you can still go to the Café de la Rotonde, and it’s fun, like trawling, casting your net on the waves. You never know what you’ll find: lovely mermaids, tasty perch, or a shark like Lou Villars.

  I never understood Lou. She always wanted to talk about cars. She assumed an American guy would be conversant with the fine points of camshafts and piston thrust. Once she asked if I had the inside dope on what Detroit was up to. As if I gave a shit about Detroit! Did I ask Lou Villars about Rimbaud’s Season in Hell? Not that anyone talks poetry anymore. The conversation is all about speed and miles per hour. Lou’s language.

  When Lou realized I had no idea, she considerately changed the subject to some esoteric carburetor problem. I pretended to know what she meant. After all, she was in charge. Too bad I couldn’t bring myself to charm her into bed. It would have been the closest I came to having sex with a man. Lou had balls on the Hemingway scale. Bigger than Hemingway’s, maybe.

  Every few months there was a nasty crash at the track. But Lou never seemed afraid. She drove like a lunatic on Nazi speed. No one could predict how high and far she would rise. Whatever it took to win, she had. It was thrilling to watch her.

  I could never figure out how much Lou knew about the Rossignols. The right-wing lunatic junkie brother-in-law was her mentor and idol. People said Lou took elixirs distilled from bulls’ balls. I wish I’d had the nerve to ask her for a dose. That would have steered the conversation away from the secrets of Detroit. But Lou decided what we talked about. It was a new experience, for a guy like me to admit that a woman was, so to speak, in the driver’s seat.

  From The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars

  BY NATHALIE DUNOIS

  Chapter Eight: Teacher

  ARMAND OFTEN REPEATED himself, yet Lou was never bored. In fact she found it soothing. Repetition made it easier to memorize what he said, which she could then repeat to herself, like a catechism.

  He said, “No human wants another human to be smarter and stronger. It’s instinctive to want others to be stupider and weaker. Teachers have lost that instinct. They hope their students surpass them. Teachers are unnatural, if not actually insane. It’s proof of my insanity that I have taken on your education.”

  Whenever Armand spoke like that, Lou felt as if he’d taken her hand and led her out of the shadows into the sun. She was starting to feel lucky. She’d found the guidance she needed when she needed it most. So what if her helpers weren’t all saints? Human beings were imperfect.

  That was another of Armand’s subjects: certain races were more imperfect than others. The Communists wanted equality, everything fair and the same. But how did they plan to level the unequal playing field that was God’s plan for Creation?

  Armand rambled on about trust and the fellowship of the like-minded, about the chaos that will ensue if white men wait for the tortoiselike progress of natural selection to save the race from being overrun. He told Lou to trust no one. No one, not even him. Not even the mechanics.

  Before every race, Lou should inspect the car herself. Armand showed her what to look for. He made her take apart every bolt and screw and put the vehicle back together. High or sober, he knew everything there was to know about engines. He designed and manufactured automobiles. He’d driven an ambulance during the war.

  He said, “If things don’t work out at the track, you can always be a mechanic.”

  He and Lou laughed long and hard at that. She wasn’t going to be a mechanic.

  Armand never mentioned the possibility that Lou could get hurt. Those were the chances you took. Your chances improved if you were smart and skillful and driving the best car. The worst that could happen didn’t scare Lou. If she had to die the violent death that Yvonne’s lizard had predicted, let it be on the track.

  After months of training, Armand let Lou drive the 280 again. She pushed it hard, then harder, slipping into a dream from which she was jarred awake by Armand waving his arms and shouting to stop unless she wanted to blow the engine.

  The Rossignol went back under wraps, and they brought out a two-seater. Armand sat beside Lou and guided her around the course, pushing her to drive faster until the wind flattened their faces against their skulls. Each morning, Fraulein Schiller counted off jumping jacks and ordered Lou, in German, to murder the punching bag. But it was Armand who was teaching Lou how to win.

  Armand had driven an ambulance through the slaughter fields of World War I. Slaughter fields were easier to picture than the rivers of mustard Miss Frost had described. Armand explained what mustard gas did to men’s faces and lungs, the agonies into which it twisted the soldiers’ tangled corpses. A weapon, not a condiment. Lou understood that now. No matter how much opium he smoked, Armand was lucid about numbers. The numbers of wounded, the numbers of dead at the Ardennes and Verdun. Lou could never remember: Was it thousands, or tens of thousands, killed in one day at Charleroi?

  When Armand talked about the war, Lou could tell how much he missed the excitement, the camaraderie, the brotherly love. The Order of the Legion of Joan of Arc was made up of former soldiers whose spirits would never again burn as hot as they’d blazed under fire. They would never feel such passion. They would never be that young or that lucky, twice.

  They held meetings and staged rallies at which they tried to recapture what they had lost, but marching in a veterans’ parade was an enraging substitute for the real thing. They didn’t know what to do with their rage. Armand put a little of it into shouting at Lou to drive faster.

  Lou never minded his yelling. She envied Armand and the other veterans for having had experiences and felt emotions she would never know. Racing might come close. But she was alone in the driver’s seat, and they’d had each other. She imagined the men in the trenches squirming like litters of newborn kittens.

  Of all the things Armand repeated, this was what he said most often: “Drive like you’re driving the wounded over a muddy battleground pitted by bullets and shells. Each wasted instant, each idle second means that a soldier will die.”

  As soon as Armand said that, Lou knew how to drive the track. If only someone had said it before and skipped the crawling blindfolded with the Japanese priest. But it was thanks to the priest that Lou knew every pit in the road, every crevice and bump.

  Drive like you’re driving the wounded over a muddy battleground pitted by bullets and shells. Each wasted instant, each idle second means that a soldier will die.

  Lou would remember that all her life, until the hour of her death.

  Armand said, “Listen to the engine.” And Lou heard it speak. Too fast, too slow, too loud, too soft. She felt like a conductor, attuned to the voice of each instrument in a symphony of machine parts. Lou’s harmony with the Rossignol was what the musicians in the Chameleon’s jazz band had with each other
. Did it matter that her duet was with an automobile?

  Armand let her drive five, six laps. Then he’d make her stop. He’d take off his helmet and goggles and talk about autos and auto racing. The lives of the female drivers and the records they’d set. He paraded them past Lou like beauty pageant contestants.

  There was Elsie Dobbs, whose newspaper-sponsored effort to be the first woman to cross the United States by car ended on the first day, with the engine stripped bare by souvenir hunters outside an Albany church; Grace Welling, eaten by grizzlies when her car broke down in the Rockies; the millionairess, Ida Greene, whose older husband ignored her affairs with men and women she met at the track, where her specialty (Armand snorted) was endurance.

  What could one expect from American women? British girls were as bad. The English Jewess who came in third at the Isle of Man but was better known for the poses she struck when she pretended to change her own tire for the cameras. The Londoner, Agnes Richards, who drove to the Arctic Circle in a cocktail dress.

  At least the Brits had Fay Taylour, disqualified from a race for not stopping until she ran over a flagman. To her credit, Fay was a friend and follower of Sir Oswald Mosley, who, despite his nationality, had political views that Armand found congenial. Sympathique. Then there was the Italian girl, whose name Armand forgot, who drove the Mille Miglia backward, the same race after which poor Florence Kelly required so much reconstructive surgery.

  French women had been pioneers. Armand called them road workers. They’d paved the way for Lou. They could drive, but they weren’t serious. They were sabotaged by their hearts. They fell in love with mechanics. Lou would not have that problem. Their promoters fell in love with them, also not a worry for Lou. She shared Armand’s contempt for the publicity-hungry girls who freshened their makeup as they crossed the finish line, the ones who wouldn’t drive without a Pomeranian drooling in their laps.

  Even before Lou won a race, the papers were running her photo. They bid for the pictures Gabor Tsenyi took of her checking the engine. Armand liked Lou to talk to the press. He told her what to say. She should say, I plan to win. I have talent. I work hard. I believe in God and France. I’m driving the Rossignol for God and France. The baroness told her to say Rossignol as often as she could.

  When the smoke and fumes became too much, Lou and Armand repaired to the cottage the Rossignols had rented. There Armand would smoke a pipe or two while Lou drank American whiskey, and he’d talk, first calmly, then more heatedly, about the enemies of France.

  He said France was a beautiful apple, the fruit in paradise. The serpent would not appear again until the apocalypse that Revelations predicted. In these dark intervening years, the country was infested by worms gnawing it from the inside, until the fruit was rotten beneath the skin. But the damage could be reversed. Unlike a real apple, France could regenerate and become crisp again—but only if the worms were eradicated. Lou felt surges of righteous anger on her country’s behalf. What if the solution were near? What if she could hasten it with every race she won?

  Sometimes, when Armand spoke about their wounded country, Lou felt he was talking about himself—about the pain of his war injury or a childhood hurt that would never heal. Lou wanted to comfort him, pat his arm. But she was afraid to touch him.

  After that first evening, Armand never again mentioned his wife polishing her crucifix during sex. There were many topics that Lou and Armand avoided, among them the fact that Lou dressed as a man and liked girls. When Lou decided to have her breasts removed, Armand gave her time off. He paid for the operation without asking what it was for and hired a nurse to care for her until she recovered.

  Lou had always hated the mirror, but now she liked looking into it when she applied the salves and ointments the doctors gave her to flatten her scars. But she hadn’t had the surgery to change what she saw in the mirror. Driving was safer and easier without two hazardous encumbrances bulging out of her chest. Now she had a better chance of escaping a crash without waiting for the mechanics to pry her out of the wreckage.

  As a feminist historian, I should devote more attention to the role that breasts played in Lou’s psyche, to her gender dysphoria, her sexual confusion, her lifelong discomfort with the restrictive female role. But the subject becomes much simpler when I try to think as Lou did: her breasts would make her suffer and, in her worst fantasies, kill her.

  Sometimes, in the evening, Lou drove Armand around Paris. Excepting those summer afternoons when she’d played in her parents’ garden, and her first nights in bed with Arlette, these were her happiest moments so far. The lavender light parted like veils of gauze as they wound their way up from the river to the highest points in the city. How strange and sinister Paris had looked when she first arrived. Now the crooked alleys seemed like the beckoning fingers of old friends. Come closer, they hissed. Don’t be afraid. We want to tell you a story.

  Everywhere she and Armand went, people stared, first at the car, then inside to see who was lucky enough to ride in that splendid machine. Sometimes strangers recognized Lou from her picture in the papers. She smiled and waved, and once, caught in traffic, she autographed a boy’s notebook, all of which pleased Armand.

  One evening they drove up to the cemetery of Père Lachaise and parked and looked down at Paris winking at them through the twilight.

  Armand said, “Dear God, what a view. Wasted on the dead!” He said the artists should be exhumed and moved to lower ground, and the cemetery rededicated to the warriors who died fighting for their country, Frenchmen who had earned the right to spend eternity in this beautiful place.

  Nights when Armand preferred to be alone, Lou went to the clubs—the Safari, the Zebra, the Rio Grande—and met girls she brought back to her cottage near the track, but never for more than one night. Arlette had taught Lou about the danger of letting down her guard. Like many who have been wounded in love, Lou made rules for her own protection: No girls from the racing world. No dancers or singers. No girls who knew anyone she knew.

  After Lou won the medal at Brooklands, Inge Wallser sidled up to her and whispered that she was free for the evening. But even though Inge was blond and pretty and very much Lou’s type, Lou refused to break her rule about mixing business with pleasure, and she told Inge that she had a previous engagement.

  She was having dinner with Armand in the bar of their hotel. He brought along a crucifix he’d bought in a curiosity shop, in the cathedral town where the child martyr, Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, was murdered by the Jews for the blood they used in the ritual recipe for the Jewish Passover bread.

  Armand said, “Look closer. Do you notice anything strange?”

  Finally Lou saw it: the two nails in Jesus’ legs. One at the ankle, the usual place. And above it, midcalf, a larger nail, protruding at a sharper angle.

  Armand said, “The organization to which I belong has uncovered secret information proving that not one, but two, nails were driven into the ankles and legs of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  Lou said, “Why two nails?”

  Armand tapped his forehead. “One wasn’t enough for the Jews.”

  From the (Unpublished) Memoirs of Suzanne Dunois Tsenyi

  To be destroyed on the occasion of its author’s death

  I NEVER LIKED the photos Gabor took at the track. I would never have told him so, and I never did. I couldn’t have explained why the images moved me so much less than his earlier work. Besides, I worried that any criticism might be taken as an attack on the baroness, who’d introduced him to the world of auto racing, as she did to so many worlds through which the two of them moved more freely without me around to impede them. Had I been less selfish, less possessive and small, I would have been purely glad that he’d started taking pictures again after the dry spell that began when his book was published and his parents visited him in Paris. Had I been less self-centered, I might not have been so hurt by how little Gabor’s parents seemed to have heard about me.

  After the Austrian chancel
lor was murdered, one disaster followed another. Hitler, always Hitler. The Abyssinian crisis. Every morning we woke up and thought, How much worse will it get today? At home we had labor demonstrations, strikes, riots, right against left, each side afraid that the other would seize power and take revenge. Cracked skulls, sirens, ambulances, murders, a police force instructed to make sure that we were as frightened as possible.

  In the midst of this, what frightened me? The thought of my boyfriend at the racetrack with another woman, watching a woman dressed as a man drive a car that had been designed by the family of my rival. I imagined (wrongly, as it turned out) that I understood why I’d been so disturbed by Gabor’s portrait of Lou and Arlette. In her new incarnation as the Rossignols’ driver, Lou had joined the conspiracy to steal Gabor away.

  If Gabor was going to fall in love with the baroness, wouldn’t it have happened? But they had never spent the night in luxury hotels so far from home. All night I stayed awake, imagining them together.

  How many times had Gabor and I walked the streets when he couldn’t sleep. But I had no one to walk with. I was perfectly capable of going out by myself. But now the dark streets were only dark, as if Paris were blaming me for his absence and making sure I knew: it had confided its secrets in me only because I’d been with him.

  Having eaten well, stayed in downy beds, and spent his days at the races, he returned to the cranky girlfriend who had been teaching French and standing in line for bread so her mother could enjoy a stale crust with her vegetable broth. What fun that must have been! How romantic! Was it any wonder that we began to get on each other’s nerves? Suddenly awkward, we broke glasses, dropped and spilled whatever we touched. At the end of a tearful conversation we should never have had, he swore he loved me, only me. I wanted to believe him.