But the crowd seems sparse tonight, and her boasting just draws attention to the raggedy trappings of the joint. Either the cabaret has fallen into rapid decline over the last week or two, or I somehow never noticed the thin air heavy with must, the stained and frayed tablecloths, the threadbare carpet. A few frazzled lightbulbs shudder and buzz.
It’s pajama night at the cabaret, and all the waitresses are wearing negligees and serving cocktails with names like the Sleeping Pill and the Knockout Drop, full of syrups and sodas to hide the hair-tonic aftertaste of bad gin.
I order an Ether Dream, and it arrives in a martini glass, the gin turned cloudy with sugar-water flavored with rosemary and mint. The clever bartender floated atop it a cloud of beer foam. My barmaid, like all of them, is in a night-slip that’s as slight as a dream itself, practically an illusion. She carries, in the crook of her arm, a rag doll done up to look just like her. The doll, like the barmaid, has long false lashes heavy on her lids, and a heart-shaped pucker of red lipstick.
Those little lost dolls at the department store. I can’t stop thinking about them. When I saw them, their hats and skirts were askew, their delicate cheeks and limbs scratched, but I like to imagine they were loved when they were with their girls. I imagine each one was propped up, pretty and coy, on plump, lacy pillows like a bedridden princess.
Day takes her place at the microphone, in a silk dress printed with the signatures of French girls’ names, a mesmerizing scribble, all in different penmanship. Sophia, Manon, Margaux, Léonie. Each signature, each name, suddenly seems a plea. A chorus. Before singing, she thanks the soldier who bought her the dress. “I wrote this song for him,” she says. “And about him.” The men in the room whoop and bellow.
Day whisper-sings her song. All these villains open their hearts to her, and with just a few lyrics, and some sharp turns of phrase, she makes their tiny lives into something worth singing about.
Her voice soothes me like nothing else. It’s necessary, Day’s voice.
After her number, I coerce her to sneak away, to skirt the curfew. “Do you know how many songs there are about the night?” she asks me as we walk to Blue’s theater. “And about dreams? And the moon?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “How many?”
She takes a breath. She looks up and off. “Almost all of them,” she says. Despite the cold and the dark, she carries a paper parasol of a dandelion yellow.
We step up to the stage door.
After Blue’s play every night, the cast and crew gather in the basement. Day has an interest in the stoppeur, a tailor who takes your torn coat or ripped dress and mends it so magically, with such intricate stitches, you’ll never find the tear again. He has a shop of his own but also works as the theater’s costumer. “I’ve been to umpteen fashion shows this month already,” she says. “The Nazis can’t stop demanding dresses to send back to their wives. Or their mistresses. Or whoever. All the shops toss up a show in a heartbeat.” She taps her forehead with her finger. “I memorized the designs I want stolen. I can describe them to a T.”
To a T. Voss wants to re-create Pascal’s perfumes, but even if he does get all the recipes and formulas, could any of those roses ever smell as sweet again? Even when summer comes, if it does, even if we’re allowed to sit at the sidewalk cafés, won’t we just long for our last summer in Paris, before the war? Everything, even the sunlight, will have the Nazis’ fingerprints all over it.
Down in the basement, everyone’s still in costume, still in makeup, so when a woman in trousers passes by, a woman near my age, I assume she’s still in character. She wears her hair like a girl, long tresses that fall straight, and past her shoulders. A thousand strokes with a hairbrush. Only a few wires of silver coiling among the nut-brown locks.
Day whispers, “She didn’t seem to be wearing any perfume at all, but I certainly got a whiff or two of Gabrielle.”
Day takes my arm to lead me deeper into the party. At first I assume we’re heading for the makeshift bar in the corner, but then we angle back toward the woman in pants.
“What part do you play?” Day asks her.
“I’m not in this one,” she says.
“You’re not an actress?” Day says. Her elbow is in my ribs, giving me a gentle nudge. “You’re not in costume.”
“I am an actress, but there aren’t a lot of parts for a woman over sixty,” she says. “I’m a printer by profession. A bookbinder. An artist. I do the posters for the show. And the programs. And some set design.”
“Oh, well, my, my, how about that,” Day says. Then she says, “Maybe you can point out the stoppeur. Which one is he?”
“I’ve not seen anything of him,” she says. She takes a sip from her martini glass. “Why are you asking, anyway? Who are you?”
She’s asking who we are, but she’s not all that friendly, this one.
“I’m Clem,” I say, holding out my hand for a shake. “This is Day. We’re friends of Blue’s.” I see him in the corner and point him out. She won’t shake my hand, so I lift it to wave at him. He waves back, and starts working his way over.
“Then you probably know we keep getting arrested,” she says. She means to impress us. “The stoppeur has been taking up…covert activities. Someone who can make a dress might stitch some secret code into a skirt. Or sew in some extra panels, where you can tuck away papers.” I glance over at Day, who drops her eyes. Were those her plans all along?
The woman continues, leaning toward me more, her voice lower, speaking out of the side of her mouth almost. “A printer might do some quick-sketch passports and forged papers. If somebody were in need of such a thing.” She winks. “I’m Annick,” she says, and now we have our handshake.
Blue steps in, and he hands Day and me martinis of our own. “Annick is the one who loaned me the books,” he says. A few days ago, he brought me books on the grammar of ornament, of shapes, designs, motifs, in the hope that it would bring me closer to the design Pascal drew at the end of his note to Zoé. I read the books looking for insights into the house’s patterns, that I might unlock a room just by knowing better the source of the curlicue. Egg and dart, bead and reel, Celtic knot, quincunx, acanthus, Egyptian patterns inspired by lotus flowers and egret feathers, the mathematical latticework of the Moors.
Annick is called over to the piano; the actors need someone to play so they can sing along. “They’re feeling sentimental,” she says. The basement is full of props and set pieces, all the old sofas and chairs from different eras and decades, the theater’s crew relying on donations of castoffs, or haunting the flea markets.
I like to imagine that the war will end soon, and the people who’ve lost their homes will return to Paris, to stroll through Greenspoon’s. This one, they’ll say, touching the black scar on the piano lid from where an uncle rested his cigarette that day, when he sat down to accompany the girls’ singing. And this one, they’ll say, knowing a china horse by the chip in its hoof. They’ll know a silver teapot by a dent in its spout. A fur coat by a rip in its lining. A wristwatch by a scratch in its glass. A doll by its torn dress. They’ll be newly grateful for all the old flaws, for the damage that left these precious things overlooked and unbought and distinctly their own.
“I’ll bet you had dolls as a little girl,” I tell Day. We sit on a divan with a lush pattern of roses, a piece from a nineteenth-century play.
“I had a beautiful doll from Paris, actually,” she says. “My father bought her in Marseille when his ship was docked there. I cut off all her hair, not because there was anything wrong with it, but because I found a pair of scissors. I went around cutting up everything. That’s one of the great discoveries in a child’s life, the power of scissors. The damage you can do. My mother was mortified, and took her to a dollmaker to have the wig replaced, and then the thing got put up on a shelf. I never touched her again.”
I never had a d
oll myself, but I loved seeing them clutched in the arms of other girls. And I loved seeing them seated in store windows, in their hats and pinafores. I never much wanted one myself, but I wanted to want one like those other girls did.
“The hair on my doll’s head was just painted on,” Blue says. “A little sailor doll I got one Christmas at the orphanage, when I was in between relatives to stay with. I got the doll, and a little sack of oranges. Me and my sailor boy, alone in the world.”
I ask Blue about Félix, his lover. He’s an actor in the troupe too. But Blue hasn’t seen him in a while.
“He goes looking for trouble,” Blue says. He touches his fingers to the ring Félix gave him. “I’m worried about him.” His voice has shifted, slips deeper. He’s gone serious, and sad.
I’m waiting for him to sigh, to gasp, to swoon, to balloon it all up into melodrama, like he usually does, which so often works to carry the despair away, to let it float out of reach, and comfort us. It can’t be as bad as all that, we get to say to him, the grand tragedian. Instead, he droops lower, slowly stirring his martini with the toothpicked olives, leaning closer and closer to his glass, like he might just slip into the gin and drown.
Day reaches over to squeeze his hand. “Blue’s inconsolable,” she says, with a pout. “Clem, tell us another story. About M. About New York. Immediately.”
As I’ve told my stories as part of my plot to keep Voss close, I’ve repeated them to Day and Blue. I haven’t spoken of any of it in so long, if ever, that I can’t bear for Voss to be the only one in Paris to know me so well.
This mere suggestion works to perk Blue up. He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, lifts his chin, as if taking clean air into his lungs. “I live for your stories these days, Clem,” he says. “You have to remember everything, so you can tell me, or I’ll fade away.” Ah, thank God, there’s his theatrical flair. I wonder if he learned it as a child, shunted from relative to relative, tossed from one pack of cousins to the next. He threw fits to insist his way into their families.
“Why did you never tell Clem about Annick?” Day asks Blue.
I should object to this line of inquiry, but I know Day has caught me looking Annick’s way. I’ve decided I like watching her play the piano, though she’s graceless about it, hunched over the keys, her hands in claws, her hair in her face. Gracelessness can be a kind of grace, after all.
Blue shakes his head, dismissive. “She’s trouble,” he says.
“She’s trouble,” Day says, pointing at me. Then she says to me, “Tell Blue to stay out of your love life.”
But I do like that Blue is looking out for me.
“It’s your turn to tell a love story,” I tell Day.
“I’ve already told you all my love stories,” Day says. “You’ve turned them all into perfume.”
“So of all those perfumes, which lover did you love the most?”
“It’s the perfume I wear the most,” she says. “My music man.”
The varnish of a violin, phlox, the smoke of a blown candle. He was an American too, here in Paris, Day says. “I was twenty-five, twenty-six. He wrote songs for me, about me. He would pencil in the notes, then change them all around, then change them again. So his sheets of music were full of these ghost notes, half erased.”
“There’s a word for that,” Blue says. “Palimpsest. When something’s erased but you can still see it on the page.” Blue, my librarian.
“Palemsest,” Day says.
“Pa-limP-sest,” Blue says. “P-p-p-p-p-p.”
“I would run my eyes over the song, and hear all the other notes too,” Day says. “His was the only marriage proposal I ever accepted. But I took too long actually going to the altar, so he fell in love with someone else.” She raises her glass to us. “To palemsests…palimpsests,” she says. “You can still see all our old lost lovers just by looking at us.”
Day hands me her martini glass, and I put my lips to her lipstick print to take the littlest lick of gin.
39
I proposed marriage to M, with his own ring. I put the snake ring I’d stolen on his finger, but then he took it off, and he put it back on my finger. He said he wanted me to keep it. And he said he couldn’t marry me.
He was already married.
M had a husband. M was twenty when they met, but the man was in his forties. Walked with a cane, because he had taken a bullet once. From an oyster pirate. Poachers. He owned a long stretch of oyster beds in Long Island, and a number of oyster cellars throughout the city—little basement saloons where oysters were served raw with lemon and vinegar. He always boasted that he’d shot more pirates than pirates had shot him. An ugly cuss, but M was living in a cramped flat with six girls, so he didn’t seem so bad. Especially since he promised M could live however M wanted to live. Within reason.
How can you survive on what few pennies I likely pay you? the oyster farmer asked. I can picture M then, with braids coiled up, pulled back, and gathered in a net. A long black dress, a starched white apron. M worked as a waitress in one of the oysterman’s all-you-can-eats.
And that was when M first dabbled in poisoning. To keep you from eating all you can eat at those all-you-can-eats, they eventually slipped you a bad oyster. It was up to M to keep track of who was next up for a rotten one.
The oysterman, quite smitten by M’s tomboyish swagger, took M aboveground, to the Murray Hill Hotel, for top-notch bluepoint oysters, and sweet cider, violet beans, pheasant pie, baked deviled lobster. M had never eaten so good.
In the cellars, you have your oysters with beer, he told M. Up here, you have them with champagne. But let me tell you something, Miss M. I’d sooner own the cellars. The rich will make you poor, and the poor will make you rich.
M only told me all this some years later, in a letter, when I was traveling, when I was following the paths of things worth thieving. After M refused my proposal, and told me we could only ever live apart, that he could only ever see me on the sly, I couldn’t bear to hear any explanations. Or promises. Or alternatives.
I went to work for the widows. The young ones and the old ones. They were in great need of a gentleman thief. When you can afford to have anything you want, you only really want the things you can’t have. In my months of serving lunches to the Widow Waverley and her club, I’d stoked their fascination for perfume. All I had to do was tell them a scent was priceless, and they were prepared to pay anything.
Unlike the widows and their children, I’d not won any prizes just for being born. Even the blanket they swaddled me in belonged to a neighbor and had to go back, cleaned and pressed. I had no heirlooms looming in my future, to be passed down. Not even a needlepoint sampler. I left the farm with only the clothes on my back, and I outgrew even those within weeks. I have nothing from my childhood, or from my ancestors, whoever they were and wherever they came from.
When M told me he was committed to the old man for as long as the old man lived, I felt, again, bereft of everything. The floor left my feet. The city I was in slipped out to sea. I was a thief, and I’d been a thief since girlhood, and yet I somehow had nothing of anybody’s. Once again I was as empty-handed as the day I was born.
I was lighter than ether. Fainter than glass. I could slip through keyholes. Shimmy through pipes.
I met with each of the widows privately, plotting my disappearance, assignment by assignment. They gave me newspaper clippings. Pages torn from books. Pieces of correspondence, all outlining what they most coveted. And they had the names and addresses of other rich women in Manhattan who’d hire me too. And from them I learned about women in cities all across the country. They requested not only the rare but the impossible. I promised I’d bring them both.
The Widow Mott craved an ancient perfume bottle from Athens, in the shape of Aphrodite on the half shell, carved from alabaster, housed in a museum with weak locks. The Widow Burnham had
read Casanova’s memoirs, and wanted the small crystal bottle he wore on his watch chain, in which he kept cotton soaked in otto of roses. The girlish Widow Henry was inclined toward a tabletop guillotine, from the age of the French Revolution, that beheaded dolls and sprayed a pink mist of orange-flower perfume.
They wanted colognes that sat on the floor of the sea in shipwrecks. Soaps dredged from the ashes of Pompeii. The fragrant, holy tears of weeping statues. Fumes captured from rare orchids.
When the Widow Hazzard said she’d heard tell of a lepidopterist’s collection of butterfly scent, I knew she must be talking about that old lover of M’s. I knew that fate was pitching me out, casting me away, with this divine coincidence. I wrote down everything the Widow Hazzard could tell me about the lepidopterist, and where I might find her, and the next day, I left Manhattan determined to steal every drop of that butterfly perfume.
40
Our covert cocktail party isn’t the only one in the city tonight. As we walk home from the theater, people stumble out of pitch-dark bistros and sway down alleyways. We’re none of us much worried about the curfew and the cold. The risk of madness from constant lockup is starting to seem every bit as troubling as the threat of citation, I suppose.
Blue and I drop Day off at Café Roche along the way. We’re arm in arm and tipsy from martinis, and we can almost convince ourselves we’re above it all. The confidence we get from the gin gives us vision, and an end’s in sight, we’ve decided. We love seeing people out and about at this late hour, as if we’re striving backward, to the way it was.
Tipping me more into tipsiness is the thought of Annick at that piano, and her surly charm. She hunkered down over the keys like she was pounding out something all blood-and-thunder, but the melody she played was featherlight.
The Perfume Thief Page 20