Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  How theatrical—how French—of them to give the dead man a drumroll. The prisoner was marched out. Wearing dark trousers and a white shirt, he was trussed like a duckling with his arms behind his back.

  It was lucky they had him tied up in the neatest possible package. Because everything that could go wrong did. To be more blunt than I was in my article for the folks back home: it was a regular goat fuck. Naturally, I thought of myself to take my mind off the horror. I recalled my former fascination with the French Revolution and its ingenious method of decapitating unwanted aristocrats. What a fool I had been to imagine such things were romantic! Then I remembered Picasso’s drawing of the guillotine, which I had so desperately coveted and which he’d snatched from my grasp.

  When a plank jammed, the executioners panicked. There were hurried consultations. Someone gave an order, someone struggled with the rigging. Finally (it seemed long to us, so imagine how it seemed to him!) it was decided to stuff the prisoner through the opening. They draped his legs up over the board and crammed his head through the space, but it didn’t work from that angle either, so they had to shift him around.

  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask you: was there booing from the crowd? Was there any sign of moral revulsion or even disapproval? The answer is no. There was not. We’d worked hard to get our tickets, we didn’t want to get kicked out and spoil everyone’s good time. Besides which, what could we have done? I would have saved him if I could.

  Finally they got it right, or almost right. What would almost mean if it was your head on the block? Regardless of our personal views on capital punishment, everyone was praying that the repulsive contraption would function.

  Finally God—or something—got the blade to drop. The body fell into a bin. The head rolled onto the cobblestones. A guard picked it up. The crowd was silent. No one prayed or said “God Forgive Us” or “Vive la France!” or any such bullshit. We pulled our hats down over our eyes and shuffled off toward the railway station, only to face the part of the story that no one warned us about.

  A mob had gathered in Versailles. Thousands of people were only now hearing that the murderer was dead. They’d missed the main event.

  Beet red was the median facial hue of the assembled citizens, who proceeded to get drunk and destroy “downtown” Versailles. Needless to say, they left the palace untouched. They were French. As I made my way toward the station, sirens started to wail. Shards of glass were flying. A café table just missed me. The faces I saw were frightening. I had never seen, never want to see, expressions like that again.

  I looked at the people around me and thought, Enough. Adieu. Au revoir. It’s been fun. But now it’s time for this Jersey boy to go home. Maybe I’d try the West Coast. Hollywood, here I come!

  From A Baroness by Night

  BY LILY DE ROSSIGNOL

  EVEN THEN, WITH the sky falling in, there were still warm spring mornings when the greatest pleasure was to sneak out early and do errands, like a normal person in normal times. The lilacs were never as fragrant as they were that year. I’d buy an armful of snapdragons, put the flowers in my bag, along with cheese and a loaf of bread. There was rationing throughout the city, but less so in my neighborhood. All the merchants knew me, and if the authorities checked, I had a letter from Didi’s doctors saying that we were ailing and needed a bit more butter than our neighbors.

  It was outside the baker’s, on one such morning, that I saw Lionel Maine for the last time. By which I mean the last time until years later, after the war, when I gathered my old friends for a reunion at my château in Ménerbes, before the American tourists ruined it.

  Lionel had plastered himself flat—arms out, like Jesus—against the baker’s wall. Spread-eagled over the hot air duct, through which the ovens piped delicious smells onto the street. Lionel was breathing rapidly and deeply.

  I tapped him on the shoulder. He wheeled around, red-eyed and still bleary from the night before.

  He said, “My dear Lily, do you know how, when you’ve run out of cigarettes, sometimes, when you wake up, you can cough hard and get some of that good smoke taste in your mouth?”

  “Lionel, you smoke too much. That’s disgusting,” I said, even though I smoked that much too, and I knew what he meant.

  He said, “I’m inhaling Paris. I’m leaving tonight for Cherbourg. Somewhere over the ocean I can go on deck and cough, and the breath of a Paris bakery will still be in my lungs. I’ll give it an ocean burial.”

  “How romantic,” I said.

  I’ve said that I never liked Lionel, but it wasn’t that simple. It was partly the sexual element, or the lack of a sexual element. The insult of knowing he’d tried to seduce every woman in Paris but me. He was Gabor’s friend. I’d spent time with him. And everything that had happened—my sad misunderstanding with Gabor, the death of my brother-in-law—had so toughened me that I no longer cared whether an aging American poseur happened to find me attractive. Except that a woman is never immune to insecurities of that sort.

  Lionel said, “I’m leaving Paris.”

  “You mentioned that,” I said.

  Then he told me he’d attended the public guillotine execution in Versailles. I remember his exact words. He said it was a goat fuck.

  I said, “You went to see a man’s head chopped off. What did you expect?”

  He’d written about the execution to earn a little money. But he was glad that he did. What he’d seen in Versailles had finally enabled him to leave Paris.

  I said that sounded like something he would put in a book. Surely he had other reasons for leaving.

  I had always expressed a certain contempt for Lionel’s writing, though to be honest I’d never read it. I assumed it would be the literary gushing of your typically self-involved, hard-living, tough-talking “man’s man,” madly in love with his penis and with no understanding of women. They are all repressed homosexuals, as one still sometimes hears, mostly from feminist academics on literary TV talk shows.

  When I finally read his work, not so very long ago, I discovered that I’d been right. Though by then the formerly shocking stuff seemed as mild as milk. And by then I was doing my own “literary gushing,” writing, or trying to write, the memoir you hold in your hands. Curious to see what Lionel said about me, I skimmed his books for my name. I was especially interested in how he described our nights at the Chameleon Club. That I’d studied the dancers for information about sex was one of the few things about me that Lionel got right.

  That last morning, outside the bakery, I felt I owed Lionel something. I suppose I still felt guilty for not defending him when he spoke up, as Gabor and I should have, against Arlette’s disgusting song. Also he’d written a useful piece for an American newspaper about Lou’s trial; the story was widely reprinted. He’d always complained that he’d gotten cheated on the fees. Thanks to his essay, several rich Americans custom-ordered Rossignols, but the war interceded before they could be delivered.

  Standing with Lionel in the delightful cloud of yeasty vapors, I felt warmer toward him than I ever had, and not just because we were surrounded by balmy gusts of fragrant air. It certainly wasn’t because he kept repeating that he was leaving Paris, in that aggressively tragic tone, as if his departure was my fault. The thought of him leaving made me sad; that is all I can say.

  I told him, “We’ll see each other again. I know.”

  He said, “Maybe if you’re paying, baroness, we can all get back together.” He really could be a bastard.

  I said, “By then, Lionel, you’ll be able to pay for us all.”

  Lionel gave me a vigorous hug, the way he might hug a man. He kissed me on both cheeks.

  “Good-bye,” he said.

  “Au revoir,” I told him.

  “So they say,” he called over his shoulder.

  Lionel’s shirtsleeves were rolled above his elbows. I noticed that, as he left. At what age do men start walking with their shoulders turned out, so their elbows are facing backward? A man
walking like that has crossed the line from a young man to an old one.

  It depressed me to watch him, bent over, walking away from the bakery, from me, from Gabor. From Paris. I too left, very soon after. For the rest of my life I would remember the sight of Lionel walking away, his elbows receding into the distance. And happily, he was still walking that way, healthy and vigorous, at our reunion, after the war.

  PART THREE

  From the (Unpublished) Memoirs of Suzanne Dunois Tsenyi

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

  A FEW DAYS before the German invasion, I saw a group of people gathered on the corner near the Sèvres-Babylone Métro station. Everyone was looking at the sky, silent except for one boy whining that his mother was squeezing his hand so hard that it hurt.

  “Fighter planes,” his mother informed me. I looked up and saw a flock of swallows catching the silvery light.

  “Birds.” I said it louder. “Birds.” It was like one of those dreams in which you shout but no sound comes out.

  I’d been on my way to the language school for a two o’clock class with a trio of obese German businessmen who had bullied the director into charging all three the customary rate for one student. They were importers, they said. When I asked what they imported, one of them—the fattest—imitated a cuckoo clock, and the others laughed. Ho ho! Their joke was on me.

  Since the start of the phony war, many German citizens had been interned in French prison camps. But my students were well connected. They came and went as they pleased. The words they wanted to learn belonged to the lexicon of governance, prison, industry, civic control. The only way I could live with myself was to teach them mistakes. They left my classroom convinced that the French word for curfew was parsnip. I made them repeat it until they got it right.

  On the day I saw the crowd watching the swallows, I understood that disaster was really about to occur. Now it seems like hindsight. But I remember the ominous certainty. Though I knew that the director of the language school would be angry, I canceled my lesson with the Germans. What if they were the ones who would call in the fighter planes behind the swallows? The ones who would order the soldiers to impose an early, strict parsnip on the citizens of Paris?

  I walked to Gabor’s studio. He was working in the darkroom. I paged through a book of Rodin drawings as I waited for him to finish. We went back to his room and spent the rest of the day in bed. I can still see the striped sunlight sliding over his shoulder. I watched him sleep in the zebra light.

  Until then we had been acting. The drama of the baroness, the comedy of my playing dead on the sidewalk. The war put an end to the theatrics and made things very simple. What did we want to keep? What couldn’t we stand to lose? For me, it was Mama and Gabor. My mother was old and not well. And Gabor was foreign. Many foreigners had been deported, though not yet famous artists, like Gabor. The baroness had protected him. But she had left Paris for a mountaintop in the south and was constantly writing Gabor that we—Lady Bountiful included me—should join her.

  Germans are like bears, she wrote. You can escape them by climbing.

  Gabor and I decided to leave for the baroness’s. We would go back as soon as we could. That is how I tell the story: a mutual decision. The truth is, I wanted to stay. Paris was home. My mother was there. Gabor refused to remain in the city and wait and see what the Germans would do about his being Hungarian. And I wanted to be with him. Time makes it hard to remember how the racket of passion drowns out the measured voices of loyalty and common sense.

  Ten, twenty times a day, I promised Gabor that his prints and plates would be safe. We worked for weeks, packing and storing everything in waterproof, fireproof containers in his basement. Every friend, acquaintance, and former assistant was enlisted to help.

  The baroness had sent ahead several crates of plates and photos. But we tried not to talk about that, not only to avoid the subject of the baroness but also because we knew what a small fraction of the whole she had managed to save.

  That might have been the moment to finally insist that Gabor tell me the truth about his relations with the baroness. Had they been lovers? Did she resent me? How could I be her houseguest unless I knew? But it was the wrong time to ask. Our country was being invaded, our city was in danger. I was ashamed to be taking orders from my jealous heart.

  What were we afraid of losing? For Gabor, it was his life’s work, his negatives and prints. I didn’t want to leave Mama, but she refused to leave Paris. She was stubborn, either from bravery or fear, I never knew. She insisted we go without her. She made me promise to stay with Gabor until after the invasion she’d been expecting since my father was killed. The only thing that surprised her was that it had taken so long, and that anyone was surprised.

  The sirens made it scarier, though we knew they were wailing to warn us, not panic us, which they did. Stalled cars and frightened pedestrians stoppered the streets. Overloaded baby carriages and horse carts fell off their wheels and slammed to the ground. The horses balked and reared up, and we navigated around them. Bicycle riders straddled their bikes, walking bowlegged and cursing. It was a miracle that more people—more children—weren’t trampled. Every so often I had to bend over and take a breath because my heart was jittering like a drop of water on a griddle. Before I could collect myself, someone shouted at me to move on.

  Was it wrong that, amid all that suffering, I was proud of how well my lover knew Paris? Far from their own neighborhoods, most people kept to the boulevards so as not to get lost, but Gabor took back alleys. I wanted to compliment him. But I didn’t want to remind him of how he’d acquired that knowledge, taking pictures, many of which he was leaving behind. All those rainy nights when I’d struggled to keep our cigarettes lit as I handed him the plates guided us out of the city and onto the open highway. Only the bicycles outdistanced us as we headed south, well ahead of my terrified countrymen and the German planes strafing us from the sky.

  Farm families gave us milk still warm from the cows. We slept in the meadows beside the road. The fireflies watched us make love. We’d fallen in love all over again, more intensely than before.

  The prospect of death is a strong aphrodisiac. Years later, I read a novel about refugees from an earthquake who take shelter in a theater; all day and night the orchestra pit roils with couples making love. And many years after that, on an airplane, I sat beside a hospice nurse who told me the most delicate part of her job was fending off the amorous, grief-stricken relatives of the dying.

  During those anxious nights before the invasion, Gabor and I had stayed awake staring into each other’s eyes, as we used to when we first realized we were made for each other. On the road south from Paris, all Gabor had to do was take my hand. Was it a sin to be thinking of sex, surrounded by so much death? I was embarrassed by how my body responded, despite or because of the suffering that we knew was about to get worse.

  The baroness’s garden teemed with reptiles, and I wandered among them in the haze of the displaced, a stupor induced by troubled sleep and nightmares about my mother. Once I made the mistake of announcing I’d seen a snake. The baroness became so hysterical she had to be sedated.

  After that I kept quiet about my game with the lizards. The geckos sensed I was watching them and went totally still, so that my observations were more meditation than research. Finally I’d throw a pebble, not to hit or tease them but just to get them moving. Then I’d watch them run. They’d come back to the same spot, and we’d play again. Stasis, pebble, escape. Any routine was soothing compared to the mood in the château.

  The lizards made me think of Yvonne. Was her club still open? Her chameleons belonged to another life, when people had the energy and time to work at becoming legends. With her songs about a dead sailor, her lizards and red dresses, Yvonne had been as brilliant as any artist (except Gabor) who’d frequented her club. Her customers trusted her to protect them by knowing when to stand up or back down. Moral courage, talent, and business s
ense are a rare combination.

  What would the Germans do about a club for chic transvestites? They might think it was like Old Berlin, but they would say it was French. Loathsome French degeneracy. The Chameleon would stay open. But no more jokes about Germans.

  Unwilling to leave his auto business, the baroness’s husband had stayed in Paris. Every few minutes the baroness said, “I am worried about Didi.” She didn’t know or didn’t care that she’d said it minutes before.

  It is always shocking, what the rich can do. Despite the downed communication lines, Didi managed to phone every evening at six. When the phone rang in the main salon, the rest of us left until we heard the baroness sobbing, and we returned to console her. That is, Gabor comforted her, while I and an audience of artistic refugees watched.

  Each of us adapted or not, in different ways, or not. None of us were “ourselves.” No one knew what to do with our time, though Gabor took some pictures. Days of gloom were brightened by lavish dinners. The baroness found local farmers to sell her scarce, delicious food.

  The champagne was exquisite. Legendary. People talked for hours about the magical champagne. And it did work magic. If we drank enough we believed that the Germans would be defeated soon, and we would be back in Paris.

  It bothered me, how we were living compared to the rest of the country. I’d get angry at the baroness, as if it were her fault. But I didn’t leave, and I said nothing, not even to Gabor. We weren’t hurting anyone by drinking good champagne.

  Even as she indulged us and tried to foresee our needs, the baroness exhausted us. All those white Shetland puppies she bought from a breeder nearby, purebreds that ate only special food and had diarrhea on the silk sofas. The scenes about their behavior! It was her house, her sofas, her silk. Who else could have procured all those lobsters, so far inland and in wartime? When we cracked the shells, an oily black liquid oozed onto our plates. The dining room fell silent but for the grating of the chairs being pushed away from the table.