Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  Perhaps my letter will be one of many addressing this travesty plucked from the garbage dump of our soulless, America-worshiping culture. Surely others will share my surprise that your long established, highly respected book section chose to review a volume that is, to begin with, self published by one of those new companies that will print anything its author has the euros to pay for.

  The brief length at which the review was assigned indicates how seriously (not very) your editors took this distortion of a history that should not be exploited and degraded by the sexual fantasies and sloppy research of a “writer” who claims to be related to a surviving heroine of the Resistance. Is this what one gets for surviving?

  Among the “facts” and theories your reviewer fails to challenge is the suggestion that my late husband, the world-famous photographer Gabor Tsenyi, owed Lou Villars a print of her portrait, the double portrait taken with her girlfriend at the time—his iconic “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.” And the “biographer” hints that his reluctance to hand over this valuable work of art was a sign of the self-involvement she imagines typical of male artists.

  Possibly your reviewer said enough about the dithering ’68er feminist mentality of seeking some psychoanalytical theory that might explain or even excuse the crimes that Lou Villars committed against France and the French people, before and during the war. And your critic should be commended for citing the errors of fact that are alone enough to discredit this abysmal book. Will your coverage increase the interest in this compendium of lies, and perhaps also its sales? I would never have heard of it, if not for your review.

  Let me backtrack and state that the author, Nathalie Dunois, who purports to be my grand-niece, is not related to me. At all.

  A few lines into her preface, I became alarmed when she described an apartment where she claims to have visited me, and which has no resemblance to anyplace I have ever lived. I never owned a “modernist” chair that children were forbidden to sit on. Are there no fact checkers left? That she calls my home “enviable” might have set off alarms.

  The laziest photo researcher could have tracked down pictures of me and seen that I often wore sleeveless dresses, well into old age. Thanks to good luck and good heredity, my arms remained shapely and were never scarred during the sadomasochistic orgy the author describes taking place in the torture chambers where Lou inflicted so much pain on my Resistance comrades.

  But not, as it happened, on me.

  The mad biographer’s claims could easily have been disproved by a publisher less interested in profiting from a salacious history of a cross-dressing Nazi lesbian spy, capitalizing on a name (mine) still remembered by a few as the heroine of a time that no one will discuss. The author’s references to the secrecy that still surrounds this shameful era are the only points on which we agree.

  To his credit, your critic mentions the “ill winds that continue to swirl around this vexed period in our history.” I would have said “unceremoniously buried like a vampire that refuses to stay dead.” Or “distorted in the carnival mirror of convenient lies and willful forgetting.” But that is what I would have said. Let that pass. I have left instructions to insure that my own journals and written reflections on that time and these subjects will be destroyed when I die.

  As I began the book, its author’s remarks on this topic led me—briefly!—to think I might find some of her work congenial. Though I suppose my suspicions and yours should have been aroused by her admission that she felt free to “embroider a bit, fill in gaps, invent dialogue, and make an occasional imaginative leap or informed guess about what (her) subject would have thought and felt.” One can only speculate about the motives that inspired her to write a book that so randomly mingles fact and fiction.

  Judging from the personal evidence and the many distracting personal confessions, this Mlle. “Nathalie Dunois” was obviously trying to add some drama, substance, and meaning to an otherwise lonely, unfulfilled, and disappointing life as a provincial schoolteacher. She admits this in her sad, if disingenuous, preface.

  Perhaps it will demonstrate the purity of my intentions when I say that, against the advice of friends and legal counsel, I have decided not to press charges against my alleged “niece.” That she has invented a family connection should tell readers all they need to know about the authenticity of her book. Is Dunois her real name? Has anyone looked into that? I cannot think what she means when she says I refused to help her write her “biography,” since, until I read your review, I was unaware that it existed.

  But that is not why I am writing, or not entirely. I want to correct two specific mistakes your reviewer cites as facts. Repeated enough, they will become facts.

  Mlle. Dunois writes that I accompanied Lou Villars in her search for her mentally handicapped brother in a Paris asylum for children. The writer admits there is no evidence of this unpleasant outing.

  That is because it never happened. I never went with Lou Villars to a mental hospital where she learned that her brother had died of “powerful seizures.” I would remember if I had. I cannot imagine why any sane person would invent a story like that.

  The second major error occurs in the chapter about Lou Villars’s work for the Gestapo.

  Mlle. Dunois notes correctly that I was arrested after an incident at the notorious Chameleon Club and the escape of its owner, Eva “Yvonne” Nagy. She notes that Lou Villars and I knew each other from before. Less correctly, she claims that Lou tortured me for hours.

  As much as I would like to take credit for holding out long enough to give Yvonne Nagy time to reach the Spanish border, I must inform your readers that it wasn’t like that.

  I did know several heroic Resistants who were beaten and burned with a cigarette lighter by Lou, which was part of the terror I felt when she entered the interrogation chamber, dressed (as the author describes) in a white shirt, khaki pants, and a rubberized apron.

  But when Lou looked at me, was she really seeing a vision from childhood, as the author suggests? My impression—but what do I know?—was that she recognized me at once.

  She closed the door behind her.

  Only someone who has been in my position can understand what I felt when a grin spread across Lou’s face. She slapped me on the back, shook my hand, and said something like, Well, hadn’t we gotten ourselves into a pickle? She asked how Gabor was. I said he was fine. Considering that his girlfriend had just been arrested.

  Lou looked puzzled. Did she think I was making fun of her?

  “Me,” I explained, infusing the word with all the false friendliness I could muster.

  Lou asked me to tell Gabor she’d acquired a print from a private collector, a Jew. At a reasonable price. One of Gabor’s photos of her at the track, inspecting an engine before a race. She liked the picture very much! Better times, and so forth.

  I remarked that life seemed to be agreeing with her. She hesitated, as if to make sure that she hadn’t missed another insult.

  She told me that now she was going to punch me in the nose. The blow would not be especially painful but would produce a lot of blood.

  She struck me with her open palm. It stung, but not that much. Then she told me to yell as loud as I could. She said, “Scream, but don’t ham it up. Someone is always listening.”

  No one who has not faced a nearly certain, protracted, and agonizing death can know what it is like to have one’s life given back. With a snap of the fingers. Like that. Having since recovered from several serious illnesses, I can say that what happened to me that night in the rue Lauriston was something like, though not the same as, hearing goods news from a doctor. The killer changes his mind, drops the gun. The pistol doesn’t go off.

  Through the walls, I heard screaming. I listened and learned and did what my suffering comrades did, while Lou sat there and read the newspaper on which there were photos of Hitler and Maréchal Pétain. It took her ages to finish. Then she used the paper to mop up my blood and smear it all over my face. Sh
e crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it in the corner.

  Lou Villars left the room and returned with two German officers. She told them she had tried everything, but I wouldn’t talk. They didn’t think I looked messed-up enough, but they didn’t care. This was about an incident in a nightclub. Somebody’s pride had been hurt. I was glad they seemed to assume that having helped Yvonne escape was the extent of my work for the Resistance.

  Perhaps Lou told them what to assume. They knew Lou had her reasons. They trusted her. Anyway, what was at stake? A Hungarian woman who ran a nightclub for cross-dressing male and female perverts?

  One of Lou’s bosses said that if Lou couldn’t get me to talk, no one could. And then they let me go. More than a half century later, I still cannot believe it.

  Though I am opposed to violence, I believe that Lou Villars deserved her fate, by which I mean her execution by the agents of the Resistance. Not only for the crimes she committed during the war but for facilitating the invasion. My blood too was on her hands, but no more than I needed to shed.

  What I do know, and why I am writing to you, is what didn’t happen. And those are the lies (I assume only two of many) that this Nathalie Dunois has written about me in her mendacious book with its cheap romance-novel title.

  Yours respectfully,

  Mme. Suzanne Tsenyi (born Dunois)

  Postscript to the Sixtieth Anniversary Edition of Lionel Maine’s Make Yourself New

  BY ALTHEA MAINE

  IN THE LOVELY sun-splashed house, high above the Oregon coast, where my grandfather spent his final years surrounded by beautiful young women, I became obsessed with taking his pulse. He suffered from a heart arrhythmia, and I’d been instructed to call his cardiologist if (to be honest, I was never quite sure what this meant) his heartbeat changed from its normal trippy staccato.

  I was supposed to check his pulse in the morning and again in the evening. But every few hours I found myself reaching for his frail wrist and pressing my fingers into the sinewy hollow between the bones. My grandfather allowed this, extruding his arm from under the bedclothes with a look of beatific forbearance.

  I waited for a signal, the flutter of blood, a hiccup, another bump, two faint beats, then several strong throbs in succession. Was there something sexual, even incestuous, about this intimate communication, my fingers probing for the secrets of his heart? Grandpa’s “interns” seemed to think so, and they raised their perfect eyebrows. How could I have explained that when I took my grandfather’s pulse, I imagined that I was feeling the pulse of a generation, the rhythm of his prose style, the syncopated jitterbug of his salad days in Paris?

  By that point, Grandpa Lionel had some bizarre fixations. He was obsessed with Carrie, the horror film based on the Stephen King novel about the innocent, awkward teenager whom the bullying popular kids turn into a knife-wielding, flame-throwing engine of gory vengeance. In fact he was only interested in the final scene: Carrie is dead, but her bloodied arm rises up out of the ground, terrifying the penitent girl who has come to lay flowers on Carrie’s grave.

  This was in the old days of clunky VHS tapes. My grandfather used to say, “Rewind it. Play it again.” No please, no thank you. Not Grandpa. There was always a young beauty nearby who was thrilled to do what he said. The honey girls, we called them, as they posed around the house, pretending to read Grandpa’s books. He liked girls with long, shiny, straight hair: easy to find in those years.

  It was no longer even faintly alarming when Carrie’s arm punched its way out of the ground. It was much scarier to watch the tape rewind so her arm was sucked back under.

  The grandchildren—myself, the daughter of the son Grandpa called little Walt in his books, along with my three stepsiblings, Rain, Jeremiah, and Max, the offspring of the kids he fathered in the 1960s and 1970s, with Alison and then with Lauren—thought Grandpa’s mind could have stayed more focused if he’d been encouraged to do something more demanding than watching the end of a horror film.

  But our cousin Alan argued that, given Grandpa’s age (well into his nineties) and uncertain health, maybe it wasn’t so bad if the guy wanted to watch someone coming back from the dead. Alan is a therapist, so the rest of us tended to listen, though later we had reason to wonder if he was any saner than anyone else. My theory is that we all inherited some rogue gene from Grandpa.

  Anyway, we never argued with our grandfather, who loved us, I still believe. But he was first and finally his own creation and the center of that creation: the irrepressible, eccentric, reprobate bad-boy genius. We knew that he would rip us apart if we got on his bad side. If, for example, we so much as mentioned another writer besides Lionel Maine and possibly Rimbaud.

  When we asked about his Paris years, he’d growl and say, “Who wants to hear those old stories?”

  He did like telling a story about an evening he spent with Picasso, who, for reasons that became murkier over time, drew a sketch of a guillotine. Grandpa desperately wanted the drawing. But Picasso, that stingy bastard, wouldn’t give it away.

  We looked at each other and shook our heads. The guy had hung out with Picasso!

  There was another story he liked to tell. It took place after the war.

  Apparently, he and some friends attended a reunion at the baroness Lily de Rossignol’s château in the south of France, where some of them had taken refuge after Grandpa left Paris.

  People still marveled about the champagnes they drank at that château. No one but the baroness could have procured those vintages during the war. Grandpa always said that one of the things he regretted about leaving France when he did was that he’d missed sipping those legendary champagnes right under the Nazis’ noses.

  By the time of their reunion, most of the guests were middle-aged. Some were older. Grandpa, for example. The oldest was Professor Tsenyi, the father of Grandpa’s photographer friend Gabor. Gabor’s ancient Papa had traveled to Provence from his home in Vienna, where he’d escaped from Hungary after the war. He still had a grin for his hostess and a wink for the sexy French girls.

  Grandpa and Gabor went for a walk, mostly to get away from the baroness, who, after her wartime heroism, had reverted to her old habits of making scenes and bossing people around. At least that’s how Grandpa told it. His books make it plain that he didn’t like the baroness much.

  Grandpa’s former girlfriend Suzanne, who had recently married Gabor, distracted the baroness with conversation while the two men made their escape. According to Grandpa, that was the least of the sacrifices Suzanne made for her lucky husband.

  The two old friends were strolling in the garden when Gabor grabbed Grandpa and whispered, Don’t move! He pointed to a shadowy space between some lavender bushes.

  In the gravel was a dragon with a bright green frog’s head and a striped serpent’s tail. It was alive and breathing. Its black eyes met theirs—and blinked.

  Grandpa and Gabor hunkered down. It took them a while to crouch because their knees were stiff. They had a good laugh about that. How old and creaky they’d grown. How had they managed to live so long? That was something they’d never expected.

  The dragon turned out to be a snake that had swallowed a frog. Half swallowed a frog. The frog’s head and front legs and the front of its body protruded from the snake’s unhinged jaws. The snake couldn’t finish digesting the frog, which was so fat that the snake couldn’t move. So it was a standoff. Gabor and my grandpa could have watched forever, if they’d wanted.

  It was too late to rescue the frog.

  Gabor had his camera. He took a picture. A great one. According to Grandpa, it was always that way: truth and beauty flinging themselves in front of Gabor’s lens.

  Gabor told Grandpa, Take a look. You think only humans are cruel?

  Grandpa knew that nature could be brutal. He also thought, but didn’t say, that a snake swallowing a frog was not the same as what Gabor and Suzanne and the rest of Europe went through during the war—which Gabor seemed to be implying, in his cr
yptic Hungarian way. But who was Grandpa to tell Gabor what Europe had been through?

  Grandpa didn’t need to say anything. The two friends understood one another. In the hearts still beating beneath the wrinkles and frangible bones, they were still the two young (as Grandpa realized only then; at the time he’d felt old) guys who’d finished each other’s sentences as they’d knocked around Paris looking for someone to buy them a drink.

  Sitting up in his king-size bed, high above the Oregon shore, Grandpa asked one of the honey girls to bring him the massive volume of Gabor’s photographs.

  Like a litter of puppies, we jostled for position around the photo of a snake eating a frog.

  I couldn’t look at it very long. Grandpa picked up the remote.

  Gabor was dead. They all were. Grandpa, the oldest, had outlived them all, except for Gabor’s widow, Suzanne.

  My grandfather loved her, all his life. Even when he was old, his eyes misted whenever he mentioned her name. But he made fun of her, quite cruelly, for the ferocity with which she guarded Gabor’s estate.

  In that glowing golden room, high above the Pacific Coast, the girls looked at the snake and the frog while Grandpa’s attention drifted, and he watched and rewatched the end of his film.

  One afternoon, while Grandpa napped, I played the tape all the way through. I had to keep the sound low, but I could follow the plot. I was curious as to why my grandfather was interested in the story of a pubescent girl so betrayed and humiliated by her classmates that she turns into a killer. It was an odd choice for Grandpa, who by that point mostly preferred romantic comedies, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

  I rewound the tape and stopped it just before the only slightly romantic scene, the calm before the bloodbath. Carrie and her blond Adonis prom date are flirting at the school dance.