Frog Music (24 page)

She speaks through her teeth. “Get out of my building.”

“Not your now, Miss Blanche, sorry. Old lodgers gone, new lodgers coming. Top-quality Chinese rooming house,” he repeats confidently, like some huckster winding up his patter in the street. “You go New York, Mr. Arthur explain,” he assures her, nodding.

“Mr. Arthur tried to shoot me last night. Mr. Arthur’s gone Christ-knows-where,” she roars, “with your eighteen hundred dollars and everything I had in the world.”

For a moment, Low Long hesitates.

Blanche presses her advantage. “I’m sorry to tell you that you’ve been bilked out of your savings—swindled, you understand? He’s not my husband, and he never owned this building, so how could he sell it? It’s my name on the deed.”

Instead of frightening him, that last word makes his forehead clear. “Deed, I have deed.”

Isn’t it behind the lithograph in the—

The bedroom walls are bare, Blanche remembers. Arthur took down the print of the picnic, the black-jacketed dandies and the beautiful naked girl, and found the goddamn deed.

“He sold it to you under false pretenses, then. Hand it over,” she adds, holding out her palm in a queenly pose.

Low Long’s eyes bulge.

“Never mind about the furniture. Give me back my deed and I won’t fetch a patrolman.” Blanche watches him to see if the word shakes him. Are there police in the City who’d defend a Chinaman’s claim—defend it against a white woman’s, even if that woman was a female Frog “of no character”?

“I have deed,” Low Long repeats, dogged.

She examines the silk folds of his costume for any telltale bulge indicating where he might have put the document.

“Pay eighteen hundred dollar, all done official correct. My name, Low Long, on deed now.”

And suddenly the fight goes out of Blanche. All she’s lived through since last night catches up with her, and blackness swims across her eyes. She leans back, presses her hands to the wall so she won’t pass out.

“You go, Miss Blanche,” says Low Long, not ungently. “Men coming make bunk.”

She blinks to clear away the dark.

“Five minute, no more.” Low Long makes an absurd bow. She hears his steps move out of the apartment, down the stairs.

Then she lets herself slide down the wall until she’s on the floor. Her heels glide out in front of her. Limp as old cabbage. Her ankles are swollen. And her wrists. Thickened like P’tit’s, except that in her case, it’s due to the heat.

Whether Arthur’s really fled the country or is just hiding out somewhere in this teeming City where Detective Bohen will never find him … it’s over. It must be finished now, surely; their accounts settled. Eighteen hundred dollars he took for her building, together with whatever was in the pot and the boot, and what the bits of furniture would fetch, and her clothes. That hypocrite of a so-called bohemian who always claimed money wasn’t worth a rat’s ass!

Your husband
, Low Long called him; Arthur must have passed himself off as that. He could have had the title for real if he’d wanted it, Blanche realizes that now. She chose her man when she was fifteen and that was all there was to it, so of course she’d have signed some register if he’d asked her to.

But no, Arthur preached free love—meaning that he could do what he liked, and it was never him who paid. It occurs to Blanche that English doesn’t have French’s useful distinction between
libre
, meaning that something’s unconstrained, and
gratuit
, meaning that it costs nothing.
Free
thought,
free
speech,
free
love: the English word that Arthur was so fond of obscures the price of things. The man liked to come at life sideways, by a playful sleight of hand.
A certain grace to speculation
, wasn’t that his boast? And it strikes Blanche that she’s been just one of his more long-term speculations.

She stares from wall to empty wall. It’s not a spiteful message, this denuded apartment; she sees that now. Simpler than that: Arthur assumed Blanche wouldn’t be coming back from San Miguel Station. Wouldn’t need her clothes anymore once she was in the ground. Blanche is surer than ever that he was the killer, whether he pulled the trigger himself or handed the dirty job off to Ernest. This was his grand vengeance on Blanche, because she had the gall to walk away in the end—away from him, Arthur Pierre Louis Deneve, aerialist extraordinaire turned daring speculator and man-about-town, debonair beau of the sporting set. He’d loved her for almost a decade—as much as a man of his monstrous egotism could love—or seemed to, at least, but he decided on her death as simply as he might order another bottle of wine, with a snap of his fingers.

The door squeaks slightly.

“That wasn’t five minutes,” she barks.

But the face that comes around the door is not Low Long’s.

Blanche leaps to her feet so fast her heels slam like a flamenco dancer’s.

“I’ve been in the café across the street watching for you,” remarks Ernest.

Blanche’s mind chatters to keep the terror at bay. He’s twenty-one, but with the face of a skeleton. If this man is Arthur’s shadow, it’s the distorted, serpentine shadow of the end of the day.

Ernest takes a step closer.

“Low Long!” Blanche screeches like a parakeet.
Perfect
, she groans internally; first she threatens to set the cops on the man, and then she calls on his gallantry for protection.

“Stop that racket,” says Ernest.

“Low Long!” No furniture to put between her and this elongated ape.

“Have you no shame,
salope
?”

“Shame?” She repeats the word in confusion, keeping her eyes on the impeccable curves of Ernest’s dark jacket. Could he be hiding a pistol? A stiletto, more likely.
Won’t spoil the line of a suit
. Why didn’t Blanche pay attention over the years when the two friends made jokes like that? What stopped her from glimpsing what they’ve always been capable of?

“Telling the papers such
conneries
,” he growls. “As if Arthur knows or cares what happened in some dive at the end of the railroad track!”

Blanche blinks at him. Is this really a declaration of his friend’s innocence? The last thing she was expecting. Her eyes keep searching for any hint of that stiletto. Of course, all Ernest really needs are his steely fingers around her throat.

“Probably one of those boozy hicks set off his varmint gun by tripping over it.”

She nods, to pacify him.

“It could have been anyone,” Ernest barks at her. “With a history like Bonnet’s—the fool made enemies wherever she went. She couldn’t go a block without running into a fight.”

Blanche considers sprinting to the door, reckons her chances of reaching it before Ernest can grab her skirts.

He takes a step closer.

“Don’t hurt me,” Blanche says, softly. Despising herself, even as she knows there’s no other way to play it. Ernest is hardly going to throttle her here and now, with the building full of carpenters, she tells herself. If he meant to, he’d have done it right away, because killers don’t waste time lecturing. Which means it’s worth lowering herself to beg. “I’ll leave town, tonight,” she murmurs. “I’ll go so far away, you’ll never have to—”

“You won’t go anywhere till you’ve cleared my friend’s name,
putain!
”

She’s nodding automatically, head bobbing like a toy on a spring.

“You had Arthur Deneve,” Ernest marvels, leaning in very close to her. “You cold piece of veal, to turn your back on such a man at his lowest hour! To make him so sick of this city that he abandoned it—”

So that much of what the paper said is true, it occurs to her. Arthur’s really gone. Absurdly, she feels the faintest pang of loss.

“—whereupon you defamed him in print, for sheer spite, as a murderer!”

Blanche is lost for words. What can she say, what can she do, to buy herself out of this? She’d get on her hands and knees and bare herself for this raging man if she had anything to offer that he hasn’t had a dozen times before.

“So tomorrow,” he growls, “you’re going to walk into that inquest and tell the jury how wrong you were.”

“Yes,” Blanche breathes.

Ernest turns on his polished heel.

Relief floods her. She can’t believe that’s all it took: one magic word.

The young man spins around as if he’s heard Blanche’s thoughts. “And if you shilly-shally or equivocate—” Ernest is almost on top of her now, his breath heating her cheeks, the rope of tendons in his neck standing out. But he doesn’t touch her. Strange, when you think how familiar he is with every inch of Blanche, that he can’t seem to bring himself to so much as lay a hand on her now. “If you mess this up, goddamn it—”

Here it comes. Blanche waits for the threat as for a blade parting her skin.

“—I swear you’ll never see the kid again.”

Her mouth falls open.

Ernest doesn’t notice her shock because he’s spun away. Out the door already, shoes thundering on the stairs. He’s gone.

She breathes in, so sweet it hurts her chest. Terrible hope hooks her.

P’tit!

He must be alive. How could Ernest threaten never to let Blanche see her baby again if her seeing him again is not at least a possibility? The man wasn’t being crafty and calculating, just now; she’s known Ernest long enough to read his tone, and she’s convinced that he spoke from the heart. A malevolent, jealous, septic heart, but still. This much she’d bet: P’tit’s alive, and Ernest knows where he is.

V
VIVE LA ROSE

Arthur gets stronger fast once his scabs form. On the fourth of September, he hobbles out of the bedroom on his friend’s arm, looking like some mummy from a pyramid. Patches of scalp show through his hair. His nose wasn’t this big before, was it? Two weeks of dark beard obscures some of the lesions, making him even less recognizable to Blanche.

She runs over to him, to hide her reaction. The almost sugary stench of his scabs.

“Watch out, it might still be catching,” Arthur says, deep in his throat.

She falls back.

He seems to have lost all the lashes on his right eye. Blanche tries to smile. Arthur’s dark pupils see right through her.

“Are you hungry?” she asks, to fill the silence. She tries to remember what there is: butter but no bread … “I could go out for something.” She rakes through the detritus on the sideboard for that strip of twenty meal tickets for the corner noodle house.

“He won’t be able to eat anything solid,” Ernest rebukes her. “Is there soup?”

“I’ll get some.” Durand’s horse-meat soup, perhaps: that delicious broth would restore any Frenchman to health.

“And more ice. Lake ice,” he orders. “That factory-made stuff leaves a nasty residue.”

Blanche watches Arthur letting himself down onto a cane chair by the window, as if everything hurts him.

P’tit sobs from the skirting board. He’s just figured out how to roll, but only one way, so he always ends up with his face mashed against the wall. Every day, some inconvenient new skill, as if he’s catching up on a whole year’s worth of tricks.

Blanche snatches him up and hovers, looking at his pallid scalp through the wisps of hair. She can’t carry him and a tureen of soup at the same time.

“This place reeks,” Arthur remarks.

She’s strangely embarrassed; she thought they were all going to pretend that they couldn’t smell his illness.

“It’s the baby,” says Ernest.

Oh,
that
. “This morning’s diapers,” Blanche corrects him. Arthur lets out a bearish roar.

She thinks it’s about the diapers. Then she registers that he’s rubbing his jaw savagely. A scab flakes off, leaving a puckered white hollow, as if some ghostly assailant has gouged him with a fingernail.

Ernest leans over and locks Arthur’s hand in his own as if they’re sailors arm-wrestling in a bar, but very gently, putting no pressure on the lumpy palm.

Arthur hisses. “I have to just—”

“You were a handsome man,” his friend cuts in, “and you will be again, but only if you don’t scratch.”

Blanche looks at the place on the floor where the flake fell. Her own skin itches.

Arthur breathes out, his wasted muscles shifting under his shirt. Closes his eyes and moves his teeth as if he’s biting an invisible rope.

P’tit starts to keen again, industriously.

“‘There’s a good time coming, boys,’” Blanche carols in his ear, swaying him from side to side,

A good time coming
,

A good time coming
.

How does the rest of it go? What’s so good about the good time, and when exactly is it going to come? she wonders. Blanche doesn’t even know where she picked this song up. She repeats what she remembers, hoping to recall the next line:

A good time coming
,

A good time coming …

“You’re making my head ache as much as he is,” remarks Arthur, eyes still shut.

“Your son likes music,” she tells him. But switches to a waltz.

Arthur groans.

“Pick another
satané
tune,” snaps Ernest.

Blanche breaks off, realizing what she’s humming:
He’d fly thro’ the air with the greatest of ease, / A daring young man on the flying trapeze …
She wishes she had the courage to carry on. To persuade Arthur that P’tit should know that his father once flew, that Papa was a god among men. She longs for Arthur to look up and nod, let her sing the song as proudly as Léotard’s young acolytes always used to sing it. Past times, long gone, but does that mean they have to be forgotten?
You’ve survived
, Blanche wants to tell him.
Let’s celebrate that much
.

But Arthur’s altered face remains locked like a safe.

Blanche is swinging P’tit from side to side now, fast enough to make him dizzy, and it’s hushed the child; she suspects she’s happened on a sensation he really enjoys. Doesn’t it make sense that the son of circus folk should have a taste for whirling? Even if he’s inherited none of his parents’ grace.