Frog Music (2 page)

At the back of the Grand Saloon stands a nunnish figure in gray, the proprietor: Madame Johanna Werner. She gives Blanche a sober nod of approval.

Jump splits now, panting just enough to make it interesting:

You can’t love eight
,

And get through my pearly gate—

Darlin’, you can’t love eight
.

Did Blanche forget the seventh verse? Who cares. Down on her hands and knees, shaking her hips as she taunts the
michetons
over one round shoulder. “‘You can’t love nine, or you’ll run out of time!’” She jerks as if rammed by an invisible lover. “‘You can’t love ten, and do that to me again—’”

At the twelfth verse, Blanche shuts her eyes and belts it out as urgently as she can.

Darlin’, you can’t love twelve—

Darlin’, you can’t love twelve
.

You can’t love twelve
,

Or I’ll have to manage by myself—

She lets her voice crack with desperation. One hand slips inside the waistband of her pantaloons; now the other. Men are groaning, writhing in their velvet chairs. Every
cigare
in the house is smoking now. And Blanche is excited too. Her genius for this job is that she doesn’t have to pretend, because every throb of her salty little crack is real.

Flat on her back now. Legs thrashing in the air. Assailed by an unseen crowd of thrusting incubi. Blanche gasps: “‘You can’t love thirteen, or it’s gonna start hurting …’”

Later that evening, as she steps out of the International Hotel, her sleeves instantly glue themselves to her arms. The ink-black porter holds the door, and the quarter she drops into his pink palm is sticky from hers.

The organ-grinder at the corner is cranking out the Triumphal March from
Aida
, the same barrel he was playing more than an hour ago when a cab brought Blanche to the hotel. The man has stamina, she’ll grant him that. His organ must weigh a hundred pounds, and despite the spindly hinged leg it leans on, its strap is pulling his shoulders down like a millstone. His wife gives her tambourine a listless smack on every fourth beat, and their spaniel capers in a joyless, practiced way.

Twilight now, and the light is dimming but the warmth has only thickened.
L’heure bleue
, they used to call it at home, “the blue hour,” when the sky turns that serious azure and the jagged horizon blackens. Not that this cockeyed metropolis is a patch on Paris, to Blanche’s mind, even if some call it the Paris of the West. The Capital of the West, maybe, but San Francisco is a tenth the size of the City of Light, and it hasn’t a smooth boulevard, a promenade, even an avenue worth the name. The City, the locals call it, as if it’s the only one. All hills, like some feather bed that a giant’s shaken and left a crumpled mess. Blanche has been marching up and down these slopes with all the other human ants for a year and a half, since she arrived from France, but she’ll never get used to the dizzying gradients.

She’s tired now. It’s not the leg show at the House of Mirrors, or the quick glass of champagne at the International with the
micheton
she’s just left winded on the hotel’s fine sheets. (He wasn’t a regular of hers but a silver millionaire passing through town for the night who begged Madame Johanna to bump him to the top of Blanche’s line. Actually, Blanche rather prefers the fly-by-nights, since it’s easier to make a spectacular impression if it’s one time only.) No, it’s this strange heat that’s wearing her out. The summer began civilly enough, with warm breezes whisking away the morning fogs, but now, heading into the second half of August, the City can’t breathe. The air’s a stinking miasma of all the steams and soots San Franciscans can produce. One newspaper’s dug up an odd little fellow who’s been noting down what his thermometer tells him every day since he arrived in ‘49. This summer of 1876 is the hottest season in his records, with the mercury hitting ninety every afternoon.

Half a block down Jackson, that same opera seems to be dragging on at the Chinese Royal Theater, all screeching strings, drum and gong. Blanche shakes her head to clear it. She gathers speed as she marches down Kearny, fuchsia skirt swaying lankly, heels knocking puffs of dust out of the wooden sidewalk. She’ll be back at her apartment in ten minutes. Then she can get out of these sticky clothes, and maybe have a drink with Arthur, if he’s home.

The Pony Express Saloon is already advertising September’s grand-prize-gala dogfight. Spotting a yellow smallpox flag nailed over the door of a dress shop, Blanche holds her breath and veers away. Red dots on face, hands, or feet, that’s what you look out for, according to the so-called experts. Not that they can agree on how you catch it, whether by poisonous vapors leaking from the ground or invisible bugs jumping from the sick to the well. And really, who can bear to stay shut up indoors holding their breath all summer?

Past the Bella Union Theater, where what sounds like a full house is chanting for the variety show to begin. The Ice Cream Boudoir is stuffed to the gills, but City Hall’s deserted—except for a prisoner in the lockup who clangs on the bars of the basement window as Blanche walks by, making her jump. Portsmouth Square is fenced with iron spears dipped in gold. Confetti of limp flower beds. Snoozers stacked like war dead under every canopied tree. In the fountain, two drunks wrestle for a chance to lie full length under the spout. Children hover out of range, gathering their nerve to dash in for a faceful of water. The sight makes Blanche thirsty, but she doesn’t fancy pushing her way through the bums and
gamins
to take a drink.

The streets are filling up now the sun’s gone down. Folks burst out of their stifling rooms. When Blanche stares west, past Nob Hill, she catches the last of the light sinking into the Pacific. On the corner of Clay, she spots that old one-eyed woman dragging her stained valise. To avoid her, Blanche pivots to cross Kearny but has to wait for a horsecar to rattle by. The fist-shaped cobbles release all the stored heat of the day into her shoes’ thin soles. She steps out in the streetcar’s wake, watching for fresh dung in the uncertain dusk—which means she doesn’t see the thing till it’s on top of her.

Black antlerish handlebars, that’s all she has time to glimpse before the gigantic spokes are swallowing her skirts. Her scream seems to break the bicycle in two. Machine explodes one way and rider another, smashing Blanche to the ground.

She tries to spring up but her right leg won’t bear her. Mouth too dry to spit.

The lanky daredevil jumps up, rubbing one elbow, as lively as a clown.
“Ça va, mademoiselle?”

The fellow’s observant enough to read Blanche’s nationality from her style of dress. And the accent is as French as Blanche’s own. But the voice—

Not a man’s, Blanche realizes. Not a boy’s, even. This is a girl, for all the gray jacket, vest, pants, the jet hair hacked above the sunburned jawline. One of these eccentrics on whom the City prides itself—which only aggravates Blanche’s irritation, as if the whole collision were nothing but a gag, and never mind who’s left with
merde
on her hem.

A cart swerves around Blanche, hooves close enough to make her flinch. She gets up onto her knees, but she’s hobbled by her skirt.

The young woman in pants holds out a hand, teeth flashing in a grin.

Blanche slaps it away. For this female to run her down and then smirk about it—

A long screech of brakes: another horsecar at the crossing, bearing down on them. The stranger offers her hand again, with a theatrical flourish. Blanche grabs hold of the cool fingers and wrenches herself to her feet, hearing a seam rip under one arm. She staggers to the sidewalk, her skewed bustle bulging over one hip.

As she shakes out her aching right leg, she realizes she’s alone. The daredevil’s run half a block up Kearny and is roaring in English at some
gamins
who’ve seized their chance to make off with her fancy machine. Serves her right if it’s gone!

But by the time Blanche has hauled her bustle straight and slapped the dirt from her skirts, the rider’s back. Perched above the gigantic front wheel, she glides down the street to Blanche, then swings one leg over, hops down, and hits the ground running. “Jenny Bonnet,” she announces as if it’s good news, the accent thoroughly American now even if she says her surname in the French way, with a silent
t
. She tips her black hat to a natty angle. “And you are?”

“None of your business.” Blanche blows at the strand of hair that’s stuck to her damp lip and summons her crispest English, because what she lacks in height she can make up for in hauteur. “Listen, you he-she-whatever, the next time you get the notion to make the street your playground—”

“Yeah, this thing’s the devil to steer,” interrupts Jenny Bonnet, nodding as if they agree. She has only about six inches on Blanche, up close. “Didn’t hurt you, though, did I?”

Blanche bristles. “I’m bruised from head to toe.”

“No bones sticking out, though?” The young woman makes a show of looking her up and down, mugging for a laugh. “No actual bloodshed per se?”

“You might have killed us both, imbecile.”

“If it comes to that, I might have fallen off a steamer to Lima this morning, and you might have caught your death,” says Jenny, jerking her thumb at a smallpox flag on a tobacconist’s just behind them.

Blanche jerks back and takes a few steps away.

“Instead, it appears we’re both safe and sound, and so’s my high-wheeler.” Jenny lets out a cowboy whoop.

And oddly enough, Blanche’s wrath begins to lift a little. Maybe it’s the whisper of a breeze rising off the Bay, where the masts of the quarantined junks and clippers seem to be swaying a little, unless that’s a trick of the dusk. Or the soft trill from a flute player in some apartment overhead. The lights are flaring on in the cafés and shops along Kearny, and soon Chinatown’s border will be as glittering as a carousel.

“Let me buy you a drink,” suggests Jenny, nodding toward Durand’s brasserie.

Blanche always likes the sound of that. “As an apology?”

“If you like. Never found them worth the candle myself.”

Blanche hoists her eyebrows.

“If you’re sorry, folks can tell,” remarks Jenny. “No use piling on the verbiage.” She lays her bicycle flat outside the brasserie’s door and beckons a boy over to guard it.

“Do you reckon this kid won’t run off with it as fast as the others did?” asks Blanche, sardonic.

“Ah, I know where this one lives.”

That disconcerts Blanche. “I never imagine them as living anywhere in particular.”

Jenny nods up at the building’s rickety overhang: “He’s a Durand.”

As the two of them step into the garlicky fug, a couple of customers glance up, but nobody gives the young woman in pants a second glance. This Jenny must be an habitué.

Monsieur Durand greets her with a nod and clears a space at the bar with his elbows. His fat mustache is leaking wax as he comes back and slaps down their glasses and a carafe of wine. Blanche pours the wine, takes a long drink. Ah, that’s better. She wipes sweat out of her eyes. “Aren’t you sweltering under all those layers?”

A shrug as Jenny fills her own glass.

“September can’t come too soon for me. It has to cool down by then.”

“The City’s the exception to any rule,” says Jenny. “I’ve known it to be hottest in October.”

Blanche groans at the prospect.

Durand returns with two bowls of
cuisses de grenouille au beurre noir
they didn’t ask for. Discovering that she’s hungry, Blanche rips the firm, aromatic flesh from the frog thighs. “These aren’t like back in France.”

“No, they’re better,” Jenny counters. She lets out a grunt of pleasure as she chews. “Only ten minutes dead, that’s the trick. But a touch too salty. Tell him he’s still oversalting,” she throws at Durand.

The owner thumbs his mustache off his unsmiling mouth. “Portal,” he roars over his shoulder.

“How long have you been here?” Jenny asks Blanche.

“Since the winter before last.”

“So why’ve you stayed?”

Blanche blinks at the question. “You have no manners, miss.”

“Oh, I’ve got some,” says Jenny, “they’re just not what you might call pretty. Diamond in the rough, that’s me.”

Blanche rolls her eyes. “And why shouldn’t I have stayed, may I ask?”

“Most move on through,” observes Jenny. “As if the City’s just a mouth, swallowing them whole, and the rest of America’s the belly where they end up.”

Blanche winces at the image and pours herself more wine. California was Arthur’s choice, she recalls. Blanche couldn’t have found it on a map. All the French they got into conversations with on the ship were heading, like Arthur and Blanche and Ernest, to some big city—New York or Chicago if not San Francisco—where, it was said, the hospitality and entertainment trades paid well. “We came because we heard you can cock your hat as you please here,” she says, “and stayed for the same reason, I suppose.”

“Who’s
we?
”

But Blanche has had enough of this style of questioning. “And you, when did you arrive?”

“Portal!” roars Durand again.

“I was three,” says Jenny, neat teeth nibbling her last frog leg, “but even then I was choosy about my food.”

“What are you now?”

“Still choosy.”

“No,” says Blanche, “I mean—”

A chuckle. “Twenty-seven.”

Really? “Huh. That’s three years older than me, and I still look pretty fresh.”

Jenny grins back at her, neither agreeing nor contradicting.

“It must be your outfit,” says Blanche with a sigh, nodding at the pants. “It’s as odd as all get-out, but it does take years off you.”

They’re bantering as if they’ve always known each other, it occurs to Blanche with a prickle of unease. She’s not one for making friends with women, as a rule.