The Painted Girls (21 page)
Authors: Cathy Marie Buchanan
The curtains part, and starting with the lowliest of the production, which means the second set of the quadrille, the bowing begins. We flit to center stage and curtsey deeply, arms held in low à la seconde, one foot sliding out to the rear. We were told to be quick, that it is Rosita Mauri and Marie Sanlaville the abonnés want to applaud. I glance at Blanche, awaiting the left tilt of her head, the signal for the Breton peasants to turn and dart to our curtain call spot. But my ankle is hit with a soft thud and, daring to peek, I see a bouquet of roses lying at my feet. Another appears, then two more. From the wing, Madame Dominique calls out, “Pick them up. Pick them up.” But are the flowers, the hollered instructions meant for me? I cannot decide and next thing I know, Monsieur Mérante is there, on one knee, back to the audience, scooping up the bouquets. With a little flourish he offers the flowers to me.
I take the heaped-up roses, only because it is what I always do when a loaf or a sausage or a newspaper is held out to me. I catch Blanche’s eye, her flushed, glowing cheeks, her falling-open mouth. She tilts her head left. We were told to move to our curtain call spot, silently, gracefully, our eyes glued to the cap of the peasant ahead of us in line, but I cannot, not the part about the eyes. I glance toward the house, lit up by the chandelier now blazing overhead, searching. My eyes land upon the wildly applauding Monsieur Lefebvre, standing amid a group of black-suited abonnés in the stalls just beyond the orchestra. Half embarrassed, half choked with pride, I nod, a quiet nod, only for him.
He grins wider, holds his booming hands higher, a sylph reflected in the shine of his face.
His pen put to paper, the deplorable Émile Abadie has saved his skin as well as that of the sweet Pierre Gille. These two charming sorts touched the president of the Republic, and he has spared them the guillotine.
I watched this human carnival without publishing even the smallest argument against the rising groundswell of dangerous pity for a pair of convicted murderers. But now President Grévy’s clemency has roused the pen of this writer, who will take this opportunity to say what he thinks of the case of these villains for whom so many tears have been shed.
Little by little, the murderers were raised to the rank of martyr. Abadie’s fictitious memoirs awoke a perilous sentimentality in readers and stirred the pens of the most credulous of my colleagues. They painted Abadie as someone led astray, who now spends his days repenting and his nights in prayer. They played on the filial piety of this monster, who was not thinking of his mother the moment he slit the woman Bazengeaud’s neck. The storytellers transformed Gille into a good lamb of the Lord, shamed by the dishonor brought upon his worthy family.
Not once in the trial did Abadie shed a tear over his mother or Gille offer a rueful glance to the bench where his dismayed family sat. The two arrived cold and hardened before the court, and until the verdict, nothing touched them. Only once they found themselves condemned to die did terror rise, and these murderers, who felt no pity for the woman Bazengeaud, made others pity them.
President Grévy has been accused of heartlessness for not putting matters of state aside to more quickly take care of these most fascinating prison guests. They savage a woman and kill her for eighteen francs so that they might go and enjoy a drink. How dare we not handle them expeditiously! Far from feeling sorry about what has been called “moral torture,” I console myself with thoughts of Abadie and Gille trembling in the face of death for four months.
I save my pity for worthier folk and will not permit these two cruel villains to leave for New Caledonia with crowns of laurels on their august foreheads.
T
he cherub—Jean Luc Simard—likes to be told he is a magnificent lover. He likes to hear that for the two days since I last spread open my legs for him, I been pining, longing for his cock, a rough word, one he likes me to use. Even in the company of others, I whisper it quietly into his ear. “I long for your cock,” I say, by way of greeting, when he appears in the alcove at the top of the stairs of the house of Madame Brossard. From behind the sofa where he sits, I reach around, cupping his ear. “The sight of you,” I say, “and I feel my slit growing hot.” I pour his wine, lean in close. “I ache for your meat.”
He is not a magnificent lover. He is a boy who cannot last, no more than two minutes, and plenty of times, I don’t allow him even that. Feeling mean or selfish or tired, I take his sex in my hands, giving him the pleasure of a few gentle strokes before working him hard. Those occasions he bucks, writhes, collapses, my mauve silk still fully in place. Other evenings, lying naked on my back and growing fed up, there is a place I can reach around to, the softest of skin just beyond the taut, ropy flesh bearing the weight of his sac. When I caress, even the tiniest bit, he is gripped by bliss. “Wait,” he says, gulping air. “Stop.” But I want out from beneath his pale, near-hairless body, those shoulders, so frail compared to Émile’s. Like a woman’s.
“Can’t help myself,” I whisper moan. “Honestly, I can’t.”
Of course there are times when, on all fours, with him thrusting inside me from behind and calling out, “A hound riding his bitch,” I let him continue. His neck arches with pleasure, and I swallow the laughter rising up in my throat.
A month ago I gave my word to Émile and that same day submitted to the speculum, the medical examination that meant a stamped card. I went to Madame Brossard, showed the proof I was an approved, uncontaminated coquette. She took me on, and in the days since, I collected two hundred and twenty francs and saved every sou except the eighteen weekly francs Maman and Marie and Charlotte were used to me contributing. I kept the stash and those fifty francs handed over to me by Émile out of sight, tucked into the little drawstring pouch hanging from a nail behind the sideboard. I did not want them to know my plan for New Caledonia—firm, now, with the president sparing Émile—not yet, and worse, I did not want Marie with her forever-churning mind considering how I was earning passage.
My savings, so far, amount to one hundred and ninety-eight francs. Such a tremendous sum. But no one I asked, not even Émile, knew the cost of getting to New Caledonia. In a moment of clear thinking, I struck up a conversation with Monsieur Mignot and Monsieur Fortin, seeing how they owned a fish-packing house in Le Havre. “Any boats come into port from New Caledonia?” I said.
“From New Caledonia? The whalers, you mean? You’d be more likely to catch sight of one in Marseille.”
“Marseille?”
“Down south. On the Mediterranean.”
“Of course,” I said, thinking I would ask Marie to draw an outline of France and point out the location of this Marseille. “I’m only asking because a cousin of mine wants to be a settler in New Caledonia. Whaling would suit him just fine. It’s Marseille, then, where he’d find a boat heading that way?”
Monsieur Mignot lifted up his shoulders, gave Monsieur Fortin a quizzical look.
“I suppose,” Monsieur Fortin said.
“His sister might accompany him,” I said. “What would it cost? How long would it take?”
More lifted shoulders. A bit of chatter back and forth. And then, Monsieur Fortin said, “A thousand francs for steerage, maybe more, but it is nothing a lady should endure, not for the six weeks such a journey would take.”
“Oh.” Another six months of putting up with Jean Luc Simard, and even then, nothing extra for bribing the guards like Émile said. I held my face from slipping. “She’s a hardy girl, a country girl, used to hard work. Maybe the captain would take her on as a cook?”
“Best to pay the extra for a cabin and keep herself locked up,” Monsieur Mignot said. “Those sailors, all that time without the comfort of a woman.” He shook his head.
A
week ago I ran my fingers through the blond curls of Jean Luc Simard and asked what he pays to Madame Brossard for the pleasure of my company. “Now?” he said. “Twenty francs.”
“Now?”
“I used to pay fifteen.”
And so I told Madame Brossard it was not fair, him paying more, her handing the same old ten francs over to me. “I want a cut of fifteen francs,” I said to her. “Monsieur Simard is dedicated to me.”
“Twelve and you can take the spare bed in Colette’s room.”
“Thirteen,” I said. “You know there are young ones counting on me at home.”
I had spun a story about the death of Papa and the debts left behind, and the drinking of Maman, and Marie with her crippled leg, and Charlotte always wanting candles and chrysanthemums for the graves of the three babies we put in the ground. She’d listened with her hand over her heart.
“All right, then,” she said. “Thirteen.”
J
ean Luc Simard is lounging on his back, his fingers laced together behind the nape of his neck. His elbows, sharp like the edge of chiseled stone, point out to the sides. I lie turned toward him, head propped by one arm, going rigid with his words. He is saying how he will be married in a week, to a girl—Patrice—with blue eyes and white skin, like freshly fallen snow. “Her papa has a forty percent stake in Papa’s bank,” he says.
Already he got what he comes to the house of Madame Brossard to get. He talks, breathes with the laziness of a satisfied man. Still, instead of the usual rushing off to wash what remains of him from between my legs, I put a hand on his measly chest, the dozen fine hairs a boy so soft has managed to sprout. “This girl,” I say, “your fiancée, she knows her good luck in finding a lover so magnificent as you?” I lick his nipple, the one closest to me, tell myself that a girl with skin like fresh snow don’t take even the pleasure of an afternoon in the sun.
“Can’t say.”
“But when you kiss her?” I want to know does she dodge away or kiss back. I slide my hand lower, to the blaring whiteness of his belly.
“You’re worried,” he says. He cackles, the only word to describe laughter so womanly as his, and how I want to smack his cherub face. “Needn’t be. I tried putting my tongue in her mouth once, and she jerked away like it was a snake.”
A cold fish, then. I roll away from him, onto my back, breath coming easier.
“After the wedding, we’re visiting Patrice’s brother in New Orleans. We’ll be gone five months.”
“Five months?”
“You’re jealous,” he says. Laughed-out words.
I pick myself up from the bed, plop back down on top of him, and feel his sex stir. Such a puppet. Putting on my sulkiest face, I say, “Once more. On the house. No need to tell Madame Brossard.”
Then I paw and nip and writhe and moan, all the while racking my brain.
Afterward he falls asleep, facedown, the featherweight of his scrawny arm across my belly. I leave him, still asleep, while I think, staring at the ceiling, at the chandelier I know so well, the six crystals hanging down, the shape of teardrops, the color of blood.
Do I find this Patrice? Would she break with Jean Luc Simard, son of a banker, apprentice banker to her own father, if I told her about the evenings at the house of Madame Brossard? Would he turn from me, hate crushing lust? One thing for sure, Madame Brossard would put me out, a blight upon her house.
Was there some other patron of the house who could take his place? Monsieur Arnaud prefers Colette; Monsieur Picot, Petite. Monsieur Mignot and Monsieur Fortin only want company. A dozen of the others are too old, desiring the flesh of a woman no more than once a week. Monsieur LaRoche is always patting my rump, pawing at my skirt, but with the way he sips his wine, Colette says he don’t have a sou to spare.
The walls, the ceiling, the blood-dripping chandelier grow close, and I shift the weight of the arm of Jean Luc Simard, move like a snail, bit by bit, until my feet reach the floor. I pour water from a pitcher dotted with tiny blue roses into a basin ringed with the same, make a cup with my hands and drink. I run wet palms over my face. In the looking glass beyond the basin, my wet lashes are clumped together, appearing like the points of a star. I blink those eyes Émile Abadie called chocolate pools, think they are more like the brown glass of an elixir bottle—brittle, hard.
As I turn away, the bulging breast pocket of the frock coat of Jean Luc Simard snags my eye. I step closer to the fine wool coat, draped over the back of a chair, and place a hand upon the square lump, the wallet underneath. Glancing over my shoulder, I listen for the deep breathing of that sleeping boy. Then I reach inside the pocket, open up the wallet, and count out more than seven hundred francs in twenty- and fifty-franc notes.
I wonder about my eyes landing upon the bulge, about it happening now, about the wallet being crammed to such an extent. What was it that caused the coat of Jean Luc Simard to be draped with the bulging breast pocket calling out to me?
New Caledonia is my destiny. The crammed wallet is the parting gift of Jean Luc Simard, of Providence. And a girl would be a fool not to take what is held out on a silver plate. Calmness comes. Sureness. A feeling of strength.
I put on my stockings, my rushing fingers clumsy in attaching the silk to my garters. I pull closed the front opening of my corset, fumble with the long row of hooks. I lift the mauve silk over my head, squirm, helping it fall into place. And that wad of notes, I roll it into a thick cylinder and push it into the hollow place between the two mounds of my breast.
In the corridor, I look left and right, wanting to spy Colette or Petite, someone to button up the dress clutched to my ribs. And more Providence, there is Ginny—a housemaid—making the rounds with fresh linens.
“Ginny,” I say. “Would you mind?” I point to my back.
She puts down the linens, gets to work on the buttons. “Such a dress,” she says.
When she finishes, I put my hands on her shoulder and kiss both her cheeks, making her laugh. And then, using the back staircase and without seeing a single soul, I leave the house of Madame Brossard.
I
n our lodging room, Maman is quiet upon her mattress and Marie is tucked around Charlotte on our own. I hover over my sisters, hearing only breathing, low sighs. And then there is a snort from Maman—soused and remembering to breathe. She turns onto her side.
I fish behind the sideboard until I touch the drawstring pouch. I lift it from the nail, add to the stash the roll of notes. From the dresser I gather my belongings—two blouses; two pairs of wool stockings, both with the heels worn through; three pairs of dingy drawers; two skirts, one not fit for wearing but useful, now, as a carrying sling and someday as a source for the patches I will sew onto the trousers of Émile. I leave behind my calendar, the black leather covers and in between, the pictures of robins and strawberries, all those tiny
x
s marking out the happy days on the chaise, my old life.
In the larder I find a length of salami and a round of hard cheese. I cut away a large chunk of each, wrap them in cheesecloth and tuck the parcel into the sling of my skirt.
With my plan of gathering my things and scrounging in the larder done, I sit on my haunches in the corner of the room, knees under my chin, arms wrapped tight around my shins. I count and breathe, an old trick Madame Dominique told to the girls turning pale with fright in the wings of the Opéra stage. Back then I never once felt the need, and I remember Madame Dominique folding her arms and saying to me that any ballet girl worth her salt should feel her senses heightened, her flesh prickling, her heart racing with the desire to be admired, even loved, before setting foot upon the Opéra stage. “Don’t know that I much care about arousing the old pisspots in the crowd” is what I said back, and she slapped my face.
The breathing works, and I coax the thousand thoughts rattling in my head into a line, starting at our lodging house, ending, for now, in Marseille. I will walk southeast in the rues Fontaine and Notre-Dame de Lorette and du Faubourg Montmartre, east on the boulevards Poissonnière and de Bonne Nouvelle and Saint-Martin and south on the boulevards du Temple and Beaumarchais and rue de Lyon, all leading me to the Gare de Lyon, where I will get onto the first train headed for Marseille, somewhere in the south, on the Mediterranean, or so said Monsieurs Mignot and Fortin.
At the edge of the mattress of Charlotte and Marie, I lower onto my knees. I memorize the sight of Marie’s arms draped over Charlotte, Charlotte’s fingers laced with Marie’s, and know that without me, Marie will step up to mothering Charlotte, that without me, Charlotte will figure out the fragileness of Marie. In the grey light, I see the imprint of creased linen on the cheek of Charlotte, pink even in sleep. I bow lower, my lips floating over her ear, and then I whisper to her about conjuring up the desire to be loved before stepping onto the Opéra stage. For Marie, I whisper not to worry, not to suck her lip, not to scrape her thumb raw. I tell her she is pretty, and it is almost true, now, with a bit of meat on her bones. I say there is nothing to the nonsense about protruding jaws and bestial sides. And for a moment my mind shifts from her to me, to my own pushed-forward jaw, to the stolen seven hundred francs and my pleasure in the suffering of Jean Luc Simard. It is for both our sakes when I whisper about Pierre Gille having the face of an angel, yet the heart of a fiend. It is risky, but I put my lips on the soft skin of her cheek and kiss her with a tenderness that makes me want to cry. “I love you, Marie van Goethem, best friend of mine in all the world.”
I unfold my knees, linger, looking at Maman. Did she ever stand with her life before her, trembling but sure? Did she ever make a choice? Did she ever love Papa enough to follow him to the end of the earth? “Goodbye, Maman,” I say.
I take the steps of our lodging house two at a time, push open the narrow door leading to the rue de Douai. I breathe in the cold morning not yet arrived and turn to the east. Immediately I see the carriage of Madame Brossard, the curtain shifting. And there she is in her grey hat with the tall feathers, striped yellow and black. She looks at me with no trace of the pity that comes so easy to her face. She gives a short nod, and I hear quick footsteps behind me and snap around to take in the two gendarmes grabbing at my arms.
