Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  She glanced up. Milord of the white gardenia was still watching. “You trot along quickly now. Don’t dally. Wrap his coin tight in your underskirt.”

  He put out his cigarette, pushed himself away from the lamppost, deferred to people moving about in front of him, and came toward her.

  “May I join you?”

  “An orange can buy a seat any day, milord. Come. Take your ease.”

  The waiter descended on them instantly and said, “Bonsoir, monsieur.” He had not yet brought her wine.

  “Would you like something?” the man of the white gardenia asked her.

  “I’d love a half plate of oysters. Portugaises, s’il vous plaît.” They were the inexpensive kind.

  “I will bring you marennes,” the waiter said. “They are superior.”

  The grand bourgeois inclined his head toward her to be sure. She moved her index finger from side to side.

  “The mademoiselle prefers portugaises.” He turned to her. “Only une demie-douzaine?”

  “A little hunger is good for the soul.”

  “Une demie-douzaine de portugaises pour la mademoiselle.”

  “And for you, monsieur?”

  “Blinis à la russe, and champagne, a demi.”

  His very white collar and very white teeth and very white handkerchief edged in black poking up from his breast pocket were right fine.

  “When I saw you sitting here so still, I thought you must be a model. And when you talked to the little girl, I thought you must be a teacher.”

  “A teacher! Oh, that’s rich. You were right the first time. Some days.”

  A certain cachet in that. It would let him know someone considered her desirable. “In fact, I’m going to model tomorrow.”

  “For whom?”

  “A talented man who doesn’t deserve to be so poor. Auguste Renoir.”

  “Indeed. And other days?”

  A calculated question, to determine if she was kept by a painter.

  “Sometimes I work at the flower stall of the Marché de Saint Pierre in Montmartre.” Specific in case he wanted to find her, intermittent to let him know she could use some money.

  “A flower seller ought to have one for herself.”

  He hailed a little girl selling roses. “Une rouge,” he told her. When the girl handed him a red one, he pricked himself on a thorn.

  “To flirt with a rose is more dangerous than to flirt with an orange, milord.”

  “No more dangerous than to flirt with a fan.”

  He put his finger to his mouth and sucked the dot of blood.

  “Lucky finger,” she said.

  The waiter served them. She felt the first oyster slide down her throat.

  “Do you come here often?” he asked.

  “I used to, a long time ago.” When she came up to his crotch, and pleaded with her eyes for people to buy oranges.

  “Then I’d be obliged if you would enlighten me. Who are these people?”

  His innocence must be a ruse. Well enough. She could play along.

  “Look there,” she said, “at that English jockey swigging beer and ogling the women. He makes more than that Russian prince in lilac gloves.”

  He chuckled. “Do you know them?”

  “No, but I wouldn’t mind.”

  “How do you know he’s a prince?”

  “The pink lining folded down over the top of his boot.” She winked to show she was just making it up. “Those three Catalonian women are hankering to dance. Their men are at the billiard tables. You could help out the ladies.”

  “I don’t speak Spanish or Catalan.”

  “You don’t need words. Dancing is a language by itself.”

  “So are your eyes a language, and right now I prefer the words they’re telling me.”

  “See that lady wearing a bustle? If those false cheeks were made of real flesh, they would have broken her back. And the man yapping at her shoulder in those starched trousers, stiff as what’s in them? See his hungry look? He’s fair itching after her and doesn’t know how to pace himself.”

  “You’re quite the flâneuse, mademoiselle.”

  “Looking is free entertainment.”

  She recognized Jemmy and Picklock, two thieves from Montmartre, and turned away from them. She didn’t want them swaggering up to her and spoiling things. “See those two behind me in the tweed jackets? Rogues from the Butte. Don’t let them near or they’ll pick your pockets as sure as I’m sitting here.”

  “They seem respectable enough.”

  “Upon my soul, they’re ogres in and out of Rochefort. Petty crimes, mostly. There’s plenty wickeder.”

  “Angèle!” Jemmy circled around her one way, Picklock the other. “Fancy seeing you here on the Champs-Élysées,” Picklock said in a voice as slick as oil.

  “Out from the underbelly of Pigalle for a change?” Jemmy wore that leer of thinking his reputation made him powerful.

  Milord of the gardenia grasped her arm and propelled her away. “Excuse us. The lady wishes to dance.”

  He ushered her through the gate to the dance floor, paid two sous, and they joined a polka, careening in a circle, bumping into other spinning pairs and laughing. Couples swirled around her. A waltz followed. He drew her closer to steer her, and she noticed his gold watch chain, his eyes taking her in, the strong fragrance of his gardenia unleashed in their turning, his clipped beard grazing her temple. He prolonged it with a third dance, the dizzying redowa-polka. She felt like she was flying.

  When they came back to the table, Jemmy and Picklock had moved on.

  “That was right gallant of you, and I don’t even know the name of my cavalier à la fleur.”

  “Marcel Olivier.”

  “You’re not a baron, are you?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “That song, ‘Ah, J’la trouv’ trop forte.’ I could sing it for a coin.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  At the Ball Mabille between two dances,

  A young man said he was a baron.

  He offered me a townhouse and carriage

  As proper setting for my good taste.

  She paused to blow kisses to two men at the next table, and then resumed singing.

  Lowering my eyes, I went toward him,

  Voilà! Here’s something new,

  I spied some scissors in his pocket.

  The baron was just a shop assistant.

  “Bravo, mademoiselle. You should be onstage.”

  “I was a few times. Once I sang the role of Venus in Orpheus and the Underworld at the Théâtre de la Gaîté. It was only a small part, but I danced the cancan in the finale.”

  “You are a woman of many surprises.”

  “You can bet your boots on that.”

  “Then you are a professional.”

  He drew a coin out of his pocket and slid it across the table to touch her hand. It was a gold louis worth twenty francs.

  “Oh, aren’t you a regular patron of the arts!”

  The two men from the other table added three-franc écus.

  “Oh, là là!” She gathered them up, laughing, and leaned toward him, pushing one shoulder forward, offering him her décolletage. “Merci, milord,” she said and kissed the air close to his neatly trimmed beard.

  “Truth to tell, I’m not a professional anything. Let’s say I’m a miscellaneous individual. Isn’t that the definition of Montmartre—a colony of miscellaneous individuals doing miscellaneous things to keep alive? Times are hard for miscellaneous people.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “North of place Pigalle you’ll find a butcher who plays the trumpet at a cabaret, and a trapeze artist who writes poetry.”

  “And south of Pigalle?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “South of Pigalle, they just work and eat and drink.”

  Near them, a young Zouave in a tasseled fez and blousy red trousers, an embroidered vest, and a wide green sash was bragging about his adventures in North Africa, becomi
ng loud and obnoxious. The regulator in long black tailcoat shook his finger at him. “Quiet down, monsieur.”

  “I didn’t come here to be quiet,” the Zouave bellowed. “Time enough to be quiet in my grave. Look again at all the empty glasses of my listeners before you tell me again to be quiet.”

  “Mark my words,” Angèle said in a low voice, “if he doesn’t close his head, he’ll be tapped on the shoulder and invited to leave.”

  He quieted down for the next song, “Alsace and Lorraine,” sung at least once every evening here and at the Ambassadeurs and the Eldorado. People stopped talking and stood as though it were an anthem when the music mounted and the chanteuse de la maison belted out:

  You will not have Alsace and Lorraine,

  And in spite of you, we will remain French!

  You could germanize the plain

  But our heart, you will never have it!

  And to prove it, the musicians began the long prelude to Offenbach’s quadrille and cancan from La Vie Parisienne.

  Above the cheers, the impresario shouted, “Avancez, Messieurs et Mesdames. A quadrille is about to begin.”

  A surge of people squeezed through the wickets, and Mademoiselle Irma, the famous cancaneuse, mounted the stage. Angèle grabbed Marcel’s hand and pulled him between tables and people. He dropped the sous into the box again, and they joined three other pairs to make their square.

  All eight jigged forward to meet their opposite and skipped back, executing the five figures until the music signaled the freer chahut. Shouts erupted all around them. Men danced as if the workings of their bodies were out of order. Limbs attached with elastic bands flopped about uncontrollably. Angèle and all the women shook their skirts from side to side, raised them in a tease, kicked to the side, the front, the side. One woman in their quadrille launched a kick that knocked off the hat of her partner when he bent forward.

  On the stage around the musicians’ pavilion, the dancers in the chorus line lifted their skirts high in the cancan, revealing a froth of ruffled organza against black-stockinged legs, kicking high, and then holding the kick above their heads with their hands, pirouetting, cartwheeling, sinking to the floor in the splits, springing back up again, while the crowd cheered and mimicked them.

  The music was too spirited for her to contain herself. Angèle pirouetted and pranced, first with low kicks, then raising her knee and letting go a half kick, not high enough to show the bandeau at the top of her white stockings, but enough to make her chignon come undone.

  “Dansez, milord!” she urged in a throaty voice. “Let yourself go!”

  Marcel cavorted too, looking astonished and letting out one “Mon Dieu!” after another as the music mounted faster and faster, until the wild whoops of the crashing finish.

  “Bravo, milord!”

  He held on to her waist with both hands as they wobbled back to the table, hot and out of breath. “I’ve surprised myself,” he said.

  “One must dance the cancan when one can,” she said.

  He signaled the waiter for more champagne. They touched hands and drank and watched the mazurka, the galop, the grandpère, and they joined on the sedate Boston. She liked its free, sliding movements which made her feel graceful, and its advance and retreat which was flirtatious. What couldn’t be said could be sung, and what couldn’t be sung could be danced.

  On the table, his hand covered hers. “When I saw you alone in the promenoir, I thought you looked sad,” he said. “How wrong I was!”

  “No, you’re a smart one. During the barcarole, I ran up against a face that reminded me of someone. Near to shook the stuffing out of me.”

  “A tragedy?”

  “For many people.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  She tapped her glass with her fingernail, considering. Telling it might get him to digging in his pocket, but it was cheap to use Père l’Epingle for a coin.

  “It’s not the type of story you’re likely to hear in your circles.”

  “I am a republican. I ride the omnibuses. If it’s about a human being, I’d like to hear.” He slid another gold louis across the table. “Tell me.”

  Mon Dieu! Forty-six francs altogether. Now she had to tell him. It might sound fake, it was so woeful, and he’d think she made it up. Put a tarnish on the evening, that would. She had to treat it with pussy gloves.

  “It’s about Père l’Epingle, a ragpicker I used to know in the ragpickers’ colony of the Maquis.” She looked at him, taking his measure. “Where I grew up.”

  He didn’t bat an eye.

  “Father of the fatherless, he was. A clean, gentlemanly old man.” She took a quick gulp of champagne. “They called him Père l’Epingle out of respect. He could pick a silver pin out of a heap of rubbish.”

  “An enviable talent, in his line of work.” He tilted his head. “And in life, I suppose.”

  “True as tears.” She took another drink. “When I was a little girl, he moved into the quarter and began to help the ragpickers. He organized their picking territories and settled their quarrels. He set up areas for burning garbage and for latrines. He brought medicine when there was cholera. Everybody in the Maquis called him the Governor. When he was sickly, the whole ragpicking colony surrounded his shanty, wailing up a racket until he came out and told them he would live. He gave me the very hare skins I slept on.”

  She finished her drink and looked off to the pretty couples spinning around the pavilion under the colored lanterns. All that pleasure and prettiness. Who was she, really, to be here when she carried the Maquis in her veins? Its piles of filth. The refuse of Paris, stench, mud, dampness, ugliness.

  Marcel took her hand in both of his. “Finish the story,” he murmured.

  “Last Sunday, when I was having a pretty time posing, he hanged himself from a tree.”

  His hand grasped hers tighter.

  “He had kicked over his basket beneath him and had used the cord that strapped it to him as his noose.” Her voice cracked. “In his coat they found a photograph of a beautiful woman in jewels and finery.”

  “Even ragpickers are capable of noble love.”

  “That’s right good of you to say.”

  He drew her head onto his shoulder, and what she’d been holding in all week gave way and she dropped a tear or two until she remembered her part in it. She raised up.

  “They buried him the day before yesterday. A fine coffin they pinched from the morgue of Montmartre. I did the flowers. The usual white chrysanthemums weren’t good enough. I threw in my week’s wage and added white roses, white carnations, white fleurs-de-lis. Père l’Epingle deserved everything clean at last.”

  “I’m sure they were beautiful.”

  “I was all to bits over it the whole week. Lost my rudder, I guess you could say.”

  “Perhaps I can make you forget for a while.”

  “That you have, milord.” Milord, not Marcel. To keep it business.

  “Shall we take a walk?” he asked.

  They strolled along a gravel path. She darted to a swing hanging from a tree, stood on it, and he made it go. At every swing toward him, she lightened up a little. He tried to kiss her on each pass, but she teased him by turning her face away at the last instant.

  “Smile at me, milord. Better than that. Voilà, like that.” He caught her and lifted her off the swing and took his pleasure with a kiss that sucked the sadness out of her.

  They sat on a bench overhung with vines. “I came tonight,” he said, “thinking I would just watch how other people lived. You’ve taken me quite by surprise. Is your name really Angèle?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s too perfect. May I ask your surname?”

  “Montmartre. Surnames mean you belong to a family or a man. All I belong to is Montmartre.”

  She let him kiss and touch, and she’d be a liar if she said she wasn’t enjoying it.

  They went out onto the avenue. Here was the moment. By the code of Mabille, he co
uld just drop her a coin and disappear. That would be fine with her, but maybe she could mine a little deeper. Such a sweet cuss he was. She could give him another quarter of an hour. His elbow pressed her hand against his side to keep her walking—down avenue Montaigne past the dark boutiques, to stand above the Seine on Pont d’Alma. It was a signal, a turn in the evening. He was not going to hustle off with her to a hôtel de passe, which made her breathe more easily.

  The gas lanterns along the four arches of Pont des Invalides upriver cast golden lights in the water like sea creatures wiggling with life. Music from a floating café concert rolled softly toward them. Below them, the stone head of a Zouave on the bridge pier honored their role in the Crimean War. She thought of the Zouave at Mabille. Mighty glad she was that she didn’t have to endure that bounder to earn her trap money for Auguste.

  A crowded pleasure boat, a side-wheeler, tipped down its steam pipe and slid under the bridge in the darkness. Murmurings from below came up to them.

  “Do you think the people on that boat are slipping through their lives without noticing how excruciatingly beautiful everything is?” he asked.

  “My, you are a sentimental one.”

  He lifted her chin. “Au plaisir de vous revoir,” he said, a wish to see her again.

  Now, that was something else again.

  “Will you come to the Mabille next Saturday?” he asked.

  “I can’t say.”

  “Is it too much to ask that a fine evening be repeated?”

  “Yes. A body can’t do things over again.”

  “In your words, I’ve been ‘all to bits’ for too long. Tonight was the first night I attempted to find my rudder.” His hand petted her cheek as if she were a cat. “A thing is never cherished so much as when a man lacks it.”

  “Or a woman.”

  “I know you’re probably expecting me to take you somewhere. Is it so terrible that a man tired of grief steps slowly into life again?”

  Now she understood what the black border on his white handkerchief meant. A brave fellow, to enter the stream of life again. He pressed another coin into her palm. She didn’t look, but it was bigger in her hand than the others. It had to be a Napoléon III fifty-franc piece. He’d come prepared. Not conscience money. Sadness money. The story must have twanged his strings.