The Painted Girls (7 page)

Antoinette

I
n the lobby of the Ambigu, I blink away the sunshiny day outside and see old Busnach striding over all high and mighty to scold me about missing yesterday. I feel the urge to sneer, but thinking better than to fuel his flame, I wrap my shawl tightly, warming myself against the sickness lingering from yesterday. It don’t come naturally, swallowing sneers and holding my tongue, but I’ve got to. Along with a regular wage, the Ambigu means afternoons in the company of Émile. I let my breath out slow, but old Busnach only nods his head and thanks me for sending my sister with the news that I was not well. “The rest don’t bother,” he says.

Today we are rehearsing like it is the real opening night, with costumes and the stage all set up like a washhouse for the second tableau. There are tubs and hot water and steam rising up and dirty linen and clotheslines that work and my own arms plunged up to the elbows in suds, and I cannot help but think of the money spent making something those theatergoers could find in pretty much any shabby street.

L’Assommoir
is mostly about the pitiful life of a laundress called Gervaise, and the tableau with me onstage covers the part where she finds her lover, Lantier, is gone off and then fights with Virginie, who lured him away. When we were first rehearsing the brawl, Busnach wanted Virginie down on the floor, soaking wet and drawers ripped open, and Gervaise paddling her bare rump with one of those beaters for thrashing linens clean. It is what Monsieur Zola wrote, or so says Busnach, and he is always going on about
L’Assommoir
being a naturalist play and needing to be exactly true to life, just like the book. Always, he is reading out such and such a page and being a stickler about every last thing, drivel like the first bucket of water wetting only the shoes of Virginie. I was wanting to tell him I been to the washhouse a hundred times and never once did see a woman getting spanked with a paddle on her bare rump. But there won’t be a paddled bare rump, not with the censor bureau breathing down the neck of Busnach. Even so, with the dousing and the name calling and the blow that brings blood to the ear of Virginie, the theatergoers are going to be applauding on their feet. Already opening night is sold out, and not a speck of doubt, half those tickets were bought on account of all the fuss over the washhouse tableau.

We are starting at the top of the tableau, with the authentic actresses scrubbing away and the three real actresses—the ones with speaking parts—calling back and forth, waiting for the entrance of Gervaise. But Monsieur Busnach is not happy. No, he is shaking his head and clapping his hands sharp. “We need another line up front. You ladies,” he says, and I know he is addressing the authentic actresses because he calls the real actresses by name. “You ladies, tell me something you might hear at the washhouse.”

I poke up my hand after a while, when none of the others do. Never have I been one for licking boots, but old Busnach is not so bad and Émile is watching and a little idea flew into my mind and already I know the smile it will put on his face. “Mademoiselle?” Busnach says.

I fish in my tub, look up crossly, and then in a good, strong voice say, “What’s become of my bit of soap? Somebody’s been and filched my soap again.”

There is giggling from the authentic actresses, all of them knowing the way soap gets lost in sudsy water, the way it melts, the way it is easier to tell your mother it was pinched than that you were careless again.

“Perfect,” Busnach says. “From the top.”

He points a finger, and I say my bit, and he is grinning like he never does.

After that we make it through the rest of the tableau without the barking of Busnach, and it just about slays me, looking morose and bored and tired while wringing linen and wiping my brow and pushing up the soggy sleeves of my blouse. Busnach liked my bit about the soap enough to put it in his play, and now I have myself a speaking part.

I glance up at Émile from time to time, sitting in the third row, his feet propped on the seat in front of him, a home roll dangling from his lips. He don’t wink or nod, like he usually does. He does nothing to show a bit of pride. Maybe in the storeroom, between those tableaux when he is required on the stage, atop the chaise that is not a bit lonely, not no more.

The first time he took me there, I could see the trouble he went to, shifting crates, wiping away dust, leaving a scarlet hair ribbon on the chaise, all so I would feel like a queen. There was none of the yanking and mauling, like behind the tavern that time. No. He lifted me up and set me on the chaise. And then, kneeling beside, he put the heels of his hands under my chin and spread his fingers on my cheeks. “Just looking into those chocolate pools of yours,” he said. I kept my eyes locked onto his, feeling no need to glance away. He put his lips on the sunken place between my collarbones. He touched the drawstring of my blouse and said, “Can I?” and I said, “You can,” just like we were countess and count. Blouse fallen from my shoulders, I watched his eyes grow large, taking in the paleness of my breasts, the rosiness of my nipples. His mouth tender upon my gooseflesh skin, his hands gentle upon my midriff, I closed my eyes, feeling like the most adored creature in all the world.

There was a tiny bit of clumsiness, both of us fumbling with the fancy clasps of a garter filched from the basket of Maman. The rest of the time we were there, in the storeroom, kissing and stroking and cleaving, until my back arched up from the chaise and I was shuddering, with him collapsed upon me and shuddering right back.

I suppose he knew I was no virgin, but I wanted to say how my first time was nothing, not compared to the lovemaking upon the chaise. I looked into his eyes, knowing he would see the glossiness of my own, and when he did not smirk, I said, “It felt like getting adored.”

“Well, Mademoiselle Antoinette, I intend to keep up the adoring every single day.”

A
nd now, every day, just like he said, I find myself laying back on that old chaise, and that bit of time in the storeroom, while tableaux four, five and six are taking place, is the sweetest hour of my day, the bit I put my mind on when the morning is cold and I don’t want to get up from the nest of my mattress, the bit I recount as I shut my eyes for the night.

It is on my mind even now, in the loge of the actresses, as I wiggle out of my washhouse costume. Any delay and it means being stuck waiting for the wardrobe mistress to come back from the room of costumes, her arms freed up for another load of aprons and skirts.

Marie’s been poking fun, laughing and saying I’ve got a sweetheart, that she never knew me to take such care with my hair, with my toilet. Well, she was until I told Émile to come up the stairs to our lodging room and show himself to Marie and Charlotte. The second he was gone, Marie leaned her back up against the door and said, “There goes a beast,” and then she started in about him disrespecting Maman, not shutting her trap until I said in my harshest voice, “Not a single word more.”

“Bluebeard,” Charlotte whispered.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. Like you said, not a single word more.”

“It’s a story I told her,” Marie said, “about an ugly king with a blue beard. He made a habit of hanging his slaughtered wives from hooks on the wall.”

“I can tell you the end,” Charlotte said.

I shoved a chair from my path, and she took a step away slow, but I could tell her legs were ready to spring. How was it those two girls could not see what was before their own eyes, how Émile made me step light and breathe deep? The feeling was like the one that comes on the first day of spring—with the sunshine and warm breezes and the whole world waking up—except that the day kept coming again and again.

T
he next morning Marie was up even before the tiniest fragment of light was reaching between the slats of the shutters. I dozed on the mattress, listening to the sounds of the rue de Douai stirring awake—the clatter of hooves; the rattle of cartwheels on cobblestones; the morning greetings of the baker, the fruiterer, the pork butcher.

Sprawled on her back, Maman was snoring, her breath catching, resulting in great snorts. Despairing about her ever shutting up and bracing myself against the coldness of the room, I heard Marie come back in, taking care to shut the door behind her without a sound. She stood there, blinking away, getting accustomed to the grey light, and then on seeing me awake, startling and jerking a small package wrapped in brown paper behind her back. “Our morning meal?” I said, knowing it was no baguette she was hiding there.

“What?”

“Behind your back.”

“Shush. You’ll wake up Charlotte.” She sucked on her lip a second. “I’ve been over to the rue Laval to see Madame Lambert.”

According to Madame Legat, downstairs, it was a tincture of Madame Lambert saved Lucy Roux from birthing a child. “Marie,” I said, “the odds are far against it, in case you never heard.” But inside, I was remembering my nervousness a week ago, those long days of stewing until my courses finally came. I even made a bargain, one I was dim enough not to keep. Let the bleeding start and I would say to Émile about pulling out in time.

“It’s vinegar,” she said, tossing the package to me. “Soak a bit of cotton and put the wad up inside before you let that boy have his fun.”

I imagined her blushing and chewing her lip and hardly able to explain to Madame Lambert what it was she came to get. “I know it wasn’t easy, going to Madame Lambert.” Color crept onto her cheeks, and she said she was getting water and, in a flash, was out the door and upon the stairs.

When I next went to the storeroom with Émile, I said about those bits of cotton and the vinegar and asked him not to look. “Don’t mind in the least,” he said, turning his back. “I got to salt away a few sous before we set up house.” Oh, I was grinning, even as I fumbled, drawers around my knees. The future he saw for himself included me. He imagined us settled down, a lodging room of our own, and I was more than just another girl, a link added to the chain.

So now I have two tiny chores on those days I get myself adored, which is very nearly every single one. The rinsing out of those bits of cotton, I take care of at the pump, six doors down from our lodging house. For the laying out to dry, I spread the cotton flat upon the highest shelf of the larder. The second tiny chore is putting a little
x
in the calendar I snatched from the desk of Busnach. The old goat deserved it, the way he kept me waiting for near half an hour. He excused himself from the office, saying it would take but a minute to sort out why the payroll clerk could not find my name on his list. But I could hear him chuckling in the corridor with Monsieur Martin and not rushing in the least. He won’t be missing that calendar. No. On his jumbled desk it was opened up to a page showing the fluttering leaves of autumn, when already the trees were stripped to bare.

The covers, front and back, are leather with gold lettering, and the pages inside, scalloped and painted up with snowflakes or strawberries or leaves turning yellow and red, depending on the month. Every page has a few words, too, fancy letters with curlicues becoming vines sprouting with leaves. Someday I might ask Marie what it all says, but for now I keep it in a hiding place, wedged into a gap between the chimneypiece and the wall, only getting it out late at night to make a little x, marking the day as a day I was adored.

Why do I bother keeping track? Maybe I only want to make use of the calendar, pretty as it is. Maybe it is my way of marking a day as momentous even if it looks like there are going be ten momentous dates for every one left blank. It makes me happy, putting down an
x
, counting them up, seeing that there are now twenty-seven when yesterday there were only twenty-six.

S
till basking in the rosy glow of getting myself a speaking part, I pull my washhouse costume over my head and tie the two ends of the drawstring at the neckline in a hasty knot. It is what we been told to do to keep the drawstrings from ending up on the floor. “Always rushing,” says Colette, another of the authentic laundresses, one I have no fondness for, not with the flesh always spilling from her neckline, not with the way she is always brushing up against the authentic laborers, even Busnach, in the corridor when there is no need. Just the other day, she puffed up her chest and gave herself a little stroke. “Like peaches,” she said to Pierre Gille. “Sweet on the tongue.”

“I like to watch the play,” I say, and it is true. After the washhouse tableau comes the descent of the laborers tableau, with a river of workmen coming into the city from the heights of Montmartre and Saint-Ouen. It is where Émile—a mason—first appears, crossing the stage in white canvas trousers with a trowel and a half loaf tucked under his arm. With the reddish glow of the gas lamps lighting up shops that match those of the rue des Poissonniers, it is easy to be tricked into thinking it is early morning in the Goutte-d’Or. If I don’t dawdle—never mind sluttish Colette—with a bit of luck, I will catch the part where Émile halts mid-stage and blows a bit a warmth into his hands.

After that the tableau grows syrupy as caramel, with a roofer called Coupeau shunning the workmen stopping in at L’Assommoir for drink and half the time losing their reason in the bottom of a glass and not bothering to head back out to the forges and mills. He halts Gervaise on the pavement and declares his true love and hears her pretty little speech about the life she wants for herself. “My ideal, you know, would be to work quietly, to be sure of always having some bread, a clean room, a bed, a table and two chairs,” she says. “That is all I should like, and life would be happy.” Syrupy talk, but I admit to a lump in my throat and I saw tears in the eyes of some of the other girls. I imagine it is a dream we all dreamt, and with Coupeau proposing marriage and promising Gervaise she is going to get her wish and her saying yes, it don’t seem impossible she is lifting herself from the gutters of the Goutte-d’Or. It is the place in the story brimming with hope.