Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online

Rimbaud-esque fiancé who died of the shaking chills in some fly-infested shithole in the Congo or the Suez.
    Any male who pretends not to hate women’s tears is a coward, a liar, a traitor to his sex. Trust me, ladies, we fear your tears more than your vaginas, which can’t bite us unless we knock and ask to be admitted. Women’s tears can drip on us and dissolve us like acid. More poisonous than venom, tears are the mustard gas in the trenches of the war of women against men.
    Still, there was the undeniable fact of her beauty. She gave off that whiff of animal life that no man can resist, in this case a hint of the baby rabbit that might, with proper encouragement, become a dirty bunny in bed. I offered her the remnants of some stranger’s beer. I mumbled in my fractured French, What was wrong? Could I help? She answered in flawless English.
    She was crying for Rimbaud. That poor boy, the pain, the delirium, the loneliness, the death. She told my story back to me with twice as much feeling as I’d put in. With twice as much as I feel for myself at three o’clock in the morning! The lonely hospital ward in Marseille! The final hallucinations!
    I said, “What final hallucinations?”
    She said, “He imagined he was writing.”
    I said, “What’s your name?”
    With that, we introduced ourselves, which is usually the next step after the lady has had a good cry on your shoulder.
    â€œSuzanne Dunois.” She shook my hand.
    â€œLionel Maine,” I said.
    â€œGabor Tsenyi,” said my friend. I’d forgotten he was there. I gave him a look in the silent language that men have spoken since the first caveman muscled his pals out of the way and dragged the first cavewoman home to his lair. Mumbling some excuse, Gabor got up from the table and left.
    Suzanne told me she’d lived with her mother since her father was killed in the war. She’d been a toddler, she hardly remembered him, yet even now the smoke of certain cigars could bring on floods of tears. I prayed that no one in the café was smoking that brand. She’d wanted to go to a university, but there was no money.
    I complimented her English, and she told me she had an uncanny gift for learning foreign languages. She supported herself and her mother by teaching French at a school for foreigners and supplemented her salary by modeling at an art school. Somehow she and Mama got by, except when both the language and art schools forgot to pay her, which happened more often than I might think. She said my French was excellent, but I could use a few lessons.
    Let me digress a moment to talk about beginnings. How much simpler life would be if we were wise enough to stop at the first blush of romance, the start of a business transaction or a casual friendship. If we knew enough to pause and think: this is as good as it gets. Everything will go downhill from this moment on. So once again our instincts are the opposite of what they should be, propelling us forward exactly when they should be holding us back.
    In that first conversation, Suzanne revealed everything: her intensity, her empathy, the depths of her compassion. From the way she carried on, you would have thought Rimbaud was her dead brother. It is the rarest of qualities: to feel something—anything—for someone beside yourself. And in my experience it is rarer still to have empathy for people you don’t know. Alone among her compatriots, Suzanne can imagine what it is like to suffer the tragedy of not being French. It makes her a popular teacher among the foreign-born. Had I not been blinded by desire, I might have seen that there would be moments when all that gushing sympathy could be a pain in the ass, that her impulsiveness and her strong emotions would conspire against me.
    On our first date, I blew my last centimes on tickets to The Passion of Joan of Arc . That Dreyer’s film was so popular says volumes about the demented