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

French intellectuals’ idea of entertainment. Night after night the theater was packed with people paying to watch a jury of thugs torment a beautiful girl who resembled one of the prettier butches from the Chameleon Club.
    First we watched a newsreel about the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Rows of suits in top hats gathered around a long table. The brightest bulb in the ballroom was the photographer’s flash. Another American genius had persuaded his fellow diplomats to sign a treaty making war illegal!
    â€œHa-ha,” I said. “That’s hilarious.” Maybe a little too loud. Suzanne scowled. I remembered that her papa had died in the trenches.
    â€œI love you,” I whispered in her ear. A lemony perfume rose from her neck.
    The French still want to believe in peace. I envy fanatics. But they scare me. So why was I sitting through a film about a heroine who chooses to be burned alive rather than even pretend to give up her goofy religious convictions? When she fainted in the torture chamber, the crowd stamped and shouted like spectators at a bullfight.
    No matter. From the very first frame I recognized the hand of a master. Even so, a part of me—the male part—thought, Can’t someone make her stop crying? The film would have lasted five minutes if she could have answered a simple question without her eyeballs jiggling in their sockets. When the judges asked Joan how old she was, and she counted nineteen on her fingers, Suzanne lost it. The guy in front of us turned around. She was projectile weeping all over the back of his neck. Clearly, I hadn’t thought this through. We should have gone to see Buster Keaton. That Joan of Arc was a soldier in a war in which thousands were killed was something you might not have deduced from this film. There will always be wars, no matter how many treaties are signed.
    I understand that you, my reader, should I have a reader, haven’t stuck around all this time to hear me pontificate on the inevitability of war. You want to know how the date went, and . . . let’s get to the point. Did I fuck her?
    Lest anyone imagine that Suzanne’s excessive emotionalism was a problem, let him also imagine what it’s like to have sex (which we finally did, after a somewhat awkward courtship) with a woman who not only feels twice what a normal woman feels, but also every sensation that you are feeling too. It turned out she would try anything and had a few ideas of her own. I didn’t ask where she’d got those ideas, or if she’d just figured them out. We went at it till the sheets were so wet that we wrung them out in the sink, then groped each other and, laughing, lost our balance and fell back on the bare mattress.
    In bed, Suzanne was the greedy beast most men can only dream of. Out of bed she was the soul of patience, an angel of reassurance. She read and reread my work, she had total faith in my talent, she knew I’d be famous someday. So many fans would follow me here that we would have to leave Paris.
    Reader, if you were beside me, you would hear me groan out loud, stabbed by the pain of remembering the time when Suzanne and I were in love. Belief can be very seductive if what the person believes in is you.
    How could all that intensity not be as contagious as a yawn? And how could all that rawness confine itself to useful emotions? I turned into a jealous shithead. Was she sharing Mama’s bed tonight? Where was she—really—when she claimed to be teaching? Whose hard luck story had moved her to take off her clothes? When she modeled at the art school, she started with her clothes off.
    Until then, there had been plenty of women. Sometimes, after they left, it took me weeks to notice that they were gone. But now I’d come to Paris to become the lovesick, pussy-whipped ninny I’d thought existed only in the estrogen-poisoned brains of Marcel Proust and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
    It wasn’t