The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (25 page)

“You are wrecked,
chouette.
And where is the young lady of the house? I thought I'd hear her wailing by now.”

I laid my head back down.

“Come here,
chouette.
What's this?”

“I was at Picot's—La Ratière. The guy took it out on me. Oh, Jolie. How did you get here?”

“They dropped two charges. Procuring and missing my
visite sanitaire.
I'm left with ‘willful destruction of property' and a couple of broken legs, but Nathalie Jouffroy guaranteed to cover the damages to the rue Jacob place. So I'm sprung. House arrest. With a whole doctor's bag of tricks from the Deux Soeurs' Dab too.”

“She did that?”

“Seems Nathalie didn't want to let me rot in there. A few m'sieurs have been asking. Or maybe it's too dull for Françoise without me! But I won't go back before I'm mended. So we'll fix you up. Fix us both up.” She paused. Empty silence; a void. “Maybe it's for the best, where you took her? I saw the newspaper picture. And old Boudet said you'd gone out with her, late.”

My fingers curled up then, into fists, hammers pounding. The hammer's friend was a chisel that struck a crack in my heart, deeper than any other; splintered it; made it a shattered, split thing.

 

I must have slept awhile, because it was dark when I came to the surface again, and the hammer blows had stopped. An infant's thin cry—but no, it was Clio, meowing from across the room, holding a vigil next to Berthe's crate. The cat did not come as she usually did to lick my hand with her rasp tongue, butt her soft ears into me, climb onto my chest to knead herself a place, each paw sinking before she settled. Her meow was reproachful, as if she knew everything. A pillow was under my head now, and some cloth bound my ribs. A bottle of drops of some kind.

“Are you awake,
chouette?
Here,
soupe
from the café. We both need it.” I slithered and slid until I reached the divan and could lean against it, and Jolie's thin arm, and could feel the hard splint under her skirt. Her fingertips were light, spidery against my cheek.

Oh, questions—so many, about what would be, how it would be. My milk-swelled breasts had only just begun to ache, and that was the very beginning. Soon I could not sleep, only sob for the pain, until at last we sent the café boy for Mathilde, after he'd brought us our
soupe,
so she could show me what needed to be done.

Gallantry is like war; to win one must employ tactics.

—Mogador,
Memoirs

J
OLIE'S LEGS RESTED
on a hassock, her cigarette burning in a saucer. Her head, with its stubble of hair growing back in like summer corn silk, was bent over a maquette in dim light. The slant-legged table was cluttered with paints and brushes, water jars that had been last night's wineglasses, and cartons of labels and sachet packets stenciled in outline, to be filled in with color—their product due on the shelves by Saint Martin's Day. Clio had settled atop an open box like a hen on her nest, ginger fur fluffed out over the edges. Jolie slid the labels out from under the cat and dipped her brush. Someone or other had a brother in Grasse, where they were inventing perfumes for the Paris stores; one of Jolie's friends had set her up as a piecework painter. Our provisions were to be paid down by finished labels at a few sous apiece for a man named Guimper, a task stretching to infinity, or at least until Jolie was on her feet.

“I was a lucky fool, wasn't I? Thought the roof would hold and I'd go down the drainpipe. The next thing I knew I was at Saint-Lazare with a lousy straw bed and a bowl of horse broth. I stared at it till I cried, and they locked me in and wouldn't give me anything better until I'd stopped. Horse soup, the cure for hysteria.” Jolie tapped water from her brush so abruptly that she spattered Clio, who flicked her ears and, stiff-tailed, abandoned her carton for a bathing session at the other end of the flat. I laughed in spite of myself.

Jolie continued. “I was just thinking about that fat Jean-Paul at Jacob, who had just been saying to me—before the door was banged down—that if he ran out of money he just went out and made more, like the soup pot that fills up again. There he was, swilling champagne that I paid for with both legs. Now for all his love notes I don't see
him
darkening the door . . . Idiot. Make me a cigarette?”

Within reach of Jolie's long arm were
Les
Malheurs de Sophie
and Perrault's fairy tales, gold stamping faded on its battered spine; but she had put those aside for the newspapers and a book called
La Case de l'Oncle Tom,
a pirated translation of a story about the American slaves, contributed by the schoolteacher Louise. It was the American Civil War that had really taught Jolie to read, squint-eyed, over accounts of the Battle of Bull Run, with Louise. Even I had to admit that Louise was formidable, sashaying around town with a man's certainty. I'd never met a woman like her—unafraid and no one's supplicant, even though she was neither rich nor married. She taught evening classes at a school for working people—not
les inscrits,
of course—but she didn't have qualms about taking Jolie on the side. While they discussed the Army of the Shenandoah, I smoothed the pages of spine-flayed books, visited the water pump and the cesspit, and traded Jolie's finished labels for cash.

“Guimper will reject those heliotropes. That color isn't on the maquette,” I said, examining the latest batch. Strung across the flat from the door to the back wall were strings that dangled the delicate advertisements, a line for bergamot, one for lavender, rose, and so forth.

“This is not exactly one of your art salons,
chouette.
No one cares as long as I stay inside the lines.”

“Guimper checks them under the magnifier and subtracts for every one that's not right.”

“Why don't you take this last batch and tell him we need cash toward next week. And slip in a question about those
académies.
” In the coloring-in business, the most lucrative work, if you could find it, was hand-tinting the rosy tones on pictures of female nudes engaged in various contortions. So far they had eluded us.

“The police are all over those; business has dried up.”

“Just in Paris. For the export market they turn a blind eye.”

“You've been reading the papers?”

“We need more than perfume to pay for your shopping trips, my sweet.”

I went to the window and stared. Our small household was precariously afloat on cigarettes and brandy; sugary treats and panicky self-denial; liberal doses of the Dab's laudanum. Ever since my terrible encounter at La Ratière and the fateful moment at the
tour,
the slightest tremor shook me, and Berthe's absence gnawed at my insides like insects hollowing out an old log. I felt her presence the way a soldier misses a lost limb, and blamed myself for severing it.

On the rose divan I delved for sleep; awoke with aching teeth and fingernails biting into my palms; thoughts racing. Some yearning, still-childish fragment in me sobbed and cried out for—
what?
Those who knew, who should have known, might have helped, could have,
should
have.
Should have what?

Still, Gascon bones knit well, and thanks to Mathilde my milk had dried and gone. My besieged body was my own again. Jolie's injuries were slower than mine to heal; the Dab said it would be dead winter before she went down the stairs, which probably meant spring. Still, she displayed the same steely will and bleak good humor she always had. Even with two broken legs she was still holding up the roof . . . But how long could it last, getting by on rags and bones and packet labels?

On my last trip to Guimper I had stopped and stared in the windows at Hédiard, Paris's gourmet emporium near the Madeleine. The “colonial display” featured a pyramid of hairy, wrinkled, head-shaped, and finger-shaped fruits. An advance on two weeks of sachet packets and labels was hot in my pocket and a wicked urge to cheer up Jolie carried me, trying not to look like a vagabond, inside the magnificent portals. I whisked past the chocolates, cheeses, cascades of sweets and savories, and all twenty-nine types of French mustard, and I negotiated the purchase of a “banana,” which the clerk ceremoniously wrapped in tissue and boxed like a gift. Jolie declared it delicious and, after she had devoured the fruit, sampled its bright yellow skin, which, after all, was too dear to waste. A few hours later she was sick as a dog and declared war on all colonial fruits thereafter.

“If you don't paint according to the maquette, I am coming back with a pineapple.”

“Don't be late or you'll miss Odette's chicken.”

“Roast fowl and a fresh round of advice?”

“She just wants to be a friend,
chouette.
”

“Hédiard has a new chocolate tart,” I said, changing the subject.

“Maybe not, I've invited Louise.”

“She doesn't approve of tarts?”

“She calls them ‘pacifiers for the middle class.' She doesn't mind us.”

Doesn't mind
you,
I nearly said, but bit my tongue.

An hour later I came to be watching, rather diffidently, a white-aproned boy too young for chin hair demonstrate to mutton-chopped old gentleman how to delicately remove the pines from a pineapple; golden juice dripping from his knife. To one side, a cartful of bright lettuces, cascades of sticky-fresh
haricots verts,
radishes glowing like damp jewels . . . all this glut, this plenty. Down another aisle, displayed like the empress's tiara, was the
tarte
du jour.
Creamy dark chocolate, the bitter kind, topped with halves of fresh walnuts, ripe from the Périgord. Dear as the bottom of a pocket; a tourniquet between misery and my pumping heart. (Around the corner a replica could be had for half the price; but its chocolate would be grainy, its pastry stiff, and the walnuts would be last season's.) My ribs began to twinge, along with my head; the dank sniff of Picot—La Ratière—was a shadow amid the heavenly perfume of coffee and chocolate and washed cheese rinds . . . Holy mother of God, I dreaded being back on the streets. I was dragging my feet, had already missed a health check.

“I'll take one of those, please,” I said to the clerk, and watched while he took it from the pastry case and placed it in a fine red-and-white box, tied it up with gold string. It cost all I had, of course; and my heart pounded giddily until I was once again outside, slapped by the cold. So what, Jolie wouldn't care the money'd been spent; she'd grin like a cat.

 

Back at the rue Serpente, candles flickered and the labels and paints were pushed aside. Roasted beets and onions steamed on the hall stove and the aroma of brasserie chicken heralded the luxury ahead. Clio, from her roost on the label box, eyed Odette's peacock-feather earrings. Odette had acquired a government protector and a gigantic new flat near Notre Dame de Lorette. Louise had turned up with a stack of books and nothing for the table. With her sharp features, plain skirt, and pulled-back hair, she made a marked contrast to Odette, tight-laced, lovely, and perfumed as usual. Jolie reclined, looking with wry amusement from one to the other. Odette was deep in conversation with the schoolteacher, whose bank of knowledge apparently did not include the finer points of how an iron latticework of rules meant to deprive us of our last free breath.

“ . . . And, in the recent announcement by the chief of the first division of the Morals Brigade, Paris Préfecture de Police: ‘when a woman is virtuous, she does not live in furnished rooms.'”

“Why in the world is that?” asked Louise. “What's wrong with renting a girl a few tables and chairs and a bed to sleep in?”

“According to the Préfecture, the only honest way of obtaining a chair is to marry it. Rented furnishings prove that she is wayward and has abandoned domesticity.”

“What I don't understand is why we aren't allowed to share a flat,” I said, joining the conversation. “Even if the furniture is bought.” Living under the same roof, Jolie and I were at anyone's mercy. If Madame Boudet, on a bad cabbage night, decided we were an immoral influence, she could complain about us.

“Because they think you're setting up in business for yourselves. The boys have to take their cut—the doctors and the police and the tax-revenue people, and so on. Of course, it's not how they put it. But take it from me, I've heard them talk. In private, they don't even pretend it's not the reason.”

Louise mused, “For centuries the whole question has been up for debate, of course—but as I understand it, the teeth of the present system come from the work of Parent-Duchâtelet in the 1830s.”

“Yes, a doctor who made a study of sewers and drains and then moved on to describing women along similar lines.” Odette shook her head, peacock feathers shimmering. “But I'd rather approach the entire matter as a businessman would. Just look around at the money circulating these days—the ordinary man doesn't know what to do with it. In Paris even the worst of enterprises turns a profit. Not just silver and gold, but tin and lead as well, if you know what I mean. If a woman saves and invests—who, really, should mind if she takes a lover or two? It's an invasion of privacy, if you ask me. When I'm too old I shall retire to the countryside and plant a vegetable patch. I already have my eye on a slice of land just outside the
enceinte.
Darling cottage there already. Or I'll build.” She reached for the bottle that Jolie had uncorked and poured wine into four jars.

“It sounds simple enough,” said Louise. “There's got to be a catch.”

“Sure, there's bound to be a Morals Brigade officer prowling around whom she hasn't paid off,” I said. “And a rat on every corner to tip him off.” I reached for a thick-lipped glass, sipped blessed relief.