The Painted Girls (10 page)

“Colette!” her gentleman calls out, sounding like he is scolding a dog.

“One minute,” she calls back.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Boys can be a lot of trouble.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Colette!”

“Open up your eyes and you’ll see I need a minute with my friend.” He stands stock-still a second, like he cannot quite believe such a girl speaking so harshly to him. Then he is gone, wandering into the blackness beyond the halo of a gas lamp.

“Go,” I say.

She shakes her head. “Prefer a gentleman not too cheap to stand me a glass of champagne.”

“I like your handkerchief.” I rub my thumb over the tiny C.

“Keep it,” she says. “Come back inside. Meet my friends.”

But sitting among the boulevard tarts, the drawstring of my blouse undone, forgot, my head thrown back, my skirt hiked, and the gentlemen agog, awaiting pleasure, don’t appeal to me, least of all now. No, I want a quiet life, like the one Gervaise dreamt up, a bed to sleep in, food to eat. And going back inside would mean Émile taking more jeering from Pierre Gille, and already I feel sorry about the harping, the carrying on, bringing him shame. “Émile wouldn’t like it,” I say. “And besides, I got friends to meet at the Rat-Mort.” In truth I am going home to cuddle up with Marie and Charlotte. What I want most is to feel the breath of Marie on the back of my neck, to feel her stir, to hear her whisper, “You’re home, Antoinette.” I am not going to ask her about what I done—the harping, the stomping off. She would take my side, but I have this idea she would do so too quick, too hopeful that I came to my senses about that riffraff called Émile Abadie.

“That boy isn’t deserving,” Colette says.

It would be a waste of my own breath, explaining about being adored, about his fingers tender on that little hollow between my collarbones, about his hand finding its way to my own, atop the table inside the brasserie. But those words of hers, hanging there like lead in the air, my mind falls upon that first time in the alleyway and then lands with a thud upon that other time, when I chased him through the Ambigu only to be twisted around until I was hunched over the chaise.

I rattle my head. Away. I need away from chirping Colette.

Marie

A
t the Ambigu I part the dusty velvet draperies hanging in the entrance-way to the fourth-floor balcony, the lowly benches tucked up under the eaves. Right away an ancient concierge is upon me, tugging my shawl from my shoulders, and then pointing to an empty bench. It gives me a little jolt, such quickness, considering the veins like blue cord riddling her hands.

Last night Antoinette came in at what has become her usual late hour, and I woke up to her crouching over me and quietly calling out, “Marie? Marie, you awake?” This, when she knew I would be slaving at the barre in the morning, same as always, nine o’clock.

I let out a sleepy moan. “What is it, Antoinette? All of Paris burning down?”

“I got you a ticket for tomorrow night.”

I sat up. Like the rest of the laundresses, she was promised a single ticket but only once they could no longer fill up the seats with paying customers. “You’ll be shutting down soon?” It meant the three francs she was paid for each performance would come to an end.

She shrugged, looking a little cross. “Maman’s been pleading for the ticket.”

“I want it.” I reached out from my nest of ragged linens and touched her knee. “I do.”

“Can’t complain,” she said. “We been running close to a full year now.”

Even in the dim light, I saw lips pulled thin, strained, and I knew she felt the looming hardship of her employment at the Ambigu coming to an end. “You’ll get something else,” I said, knowing it was true. She was quick-witted and venturesome and always she looked after Charlotte and me.

B
y the time I get myself slid over to the center of the bench, the concierge is back, with a little stool she tucks under my feet. She nudges a program toward me, and I say, “I’ve got one,” and pull from my pocket the program Antoinette gave me at home. The concierge looks a little vexed, even more so when she holds out her hand and says, “For the service,” and after a few seconds of nothing, I remove my feet from her little stool and push it back to her with the side of my foot.

The people coming to the fourth balcony are not so different from me, with their sagging cheeks and twisted teeth. “For the service,” says the old concierge, causing pockets to be turned inside out, sous to be dropped upon the papery skin of her reaching hand. Just once a footstool was handed back, by a lady, who came in wearing, same as me, two shawls instead of a mantle against the cold.

W
ith the orchestra stalls way down below, where the ladies have furs and the gentlemen pomaded hair and the concierges dresses trimmed with lace, and the benches way up here, and in between, the second and third balconies crowded with shopkeepers and tutors and clerks, it appears all of Paris has come out to get a look at
L’Assommoir.
Antoinette said she would not ruin the surprise by telling how the play turns out. So what I know is Gervaise is a laundress, poor and marked by a limp and left to fend for herself by a scoundrel called Lantier until a roofer called Coupeau shows up. I lean a little closer to the stage, wondering if the heavy curtain did not just budge, like someone had begun leaning his weight into the controlling crank.

Finally the curtains part, and the applause starts up, even before Gervaise turns to the audience from the window, where she was watching for Lantier, who does not come back. And it starts up again, when Coupeau sticks his head around the doorframe and asks Gervaise if he can come in. The three cane-bottom chairs around a little table, the iron bedstead, the bureau with a missing drawer and the mantelshelf holding pawn tickets and zinc candlesticks, I read all of it is exactly as Monsieur Zola wrote in his book. It comes to me, sitting there, that I could be looking down upon our very own lodging room, except that Maman and Papa’s bedstead went to the pawnbroker even before Papa took his last breath and Antoinette has too much sense to leave the pawn tickets for Maman to find. And there is Papa’s sideboard, too, with all six drawers in place.

I just about fall off the bench when the curtain opens up on the second tableau and Antoinette, fishing in a tub with real steam rising up and collecting on her dewy brow, says, “What’s become of my soap? Somebody’s been and filched my soap again!” Everybody laughs. Everybody except me. I sit there, marveling that she managed to keep the surprise of getting a speaking part to herself. “My sister,” I say to the lady beside me on the bench and point out over the balcony.

“The one who said about the soap?”

I nod, and then the woman is leaning over and whispering into the ear of the man with a waxed mustache next in line.

Antoinette mops her brow, beats her linen, shakes the suds from her hands, exactly like she is in the washhouse in the rue de Douai. I sit on the edge of my seat waiting and waiting for another word from her but it does not come and soon enough the curtain closes up on the washhouse looking so very familiar to me.

Émile Abadie crosses the stage in tableau three, amid a swarm of workingmen. Instead of walking with a bit of purpose like Coupeau, Émile saunters, stopping to blow warmth into his hands. In the next tableau Gervaise and Coupeau work day and night, finally saving up enough to get Gervaise a little washhouse of her very own, and I keep thinking back to sauntering Émile Abadie, a loafer, tethering Antoinette to a larder with empty shelves.

Monsieur Zola calls his book an experiment, and the newspapers like to say how he claims to have taken a particular woman and dropped her into a particular setting and then let the story unfold the only way it could, given Gervaise’s temperament and the neighborhood of the Goutte-d’Or, what Monsieur Zola calls the milieu. The story unfolding before my eyes, it has to be a tale about working hard and getting what you want most—a little washhouse, an examination passed and a chance upon the stage—even if you are living on the lower slopes of Montmartre, in such a place as the Goutte-d’Or or the rue de Douai.

But then in tableau five, Coupeau falls while working on a roof and in tableau six he is drinking in the taverns and in tableau seven Gervaise loses her washhouse and her taste for work and finds one for drink. In tableau eight the baker is refusing her any more bread and the landlord is demanding the money he is owed and in the last, tableau nine, she is wretched. “There are some women who are very glad when they are taken off. Oh, yes! I am very glad,” she says upon her deathbed, which is not a bed at all but the gutter of the boulevard de Rochechouart, not ten minutes from our lodging house.

Monsieur Zola’s tale is not about getting a washhouse or a chance upon the stage. It is about being born downtrodden and staying that way. Hard work makes no difference, he is saying. My lot, the lots of those around me, were cast the moment we were born into the gutter to parents who never managed to step outside the gutter themselves.

In the fourth balcony, same as the rest of the theater, people get to their feet, stamping and hollering, hands cupping their mouths or beating together overhead. Not me though, I sit, quiet and still, and wonder about the people around me, the woman with the footstool taken from her feet. Did they not see? Did she not see?

I stay put on the bench, the pads of my fingers rubbing my measly brow. Even when the balcony is empty of all but me and the old concierge, holding her back as she stoops to pick up ticket stubs and greasy wrappings from the floor, I have not cleared my head of Gervaise. I see her huddling to keep out the coldness of a winter’s night, also bits of paper fluttering down from behind the proscenium arch, landing like merciless angels upon her back.

A
ntoinette stayed behind with Émile Abadie, so I am alone when I open the door of our lodging room. The stifling heat comes as a shock after the bitterness of the night outside, after months of shivering, even under the bedclothes, and wrapping myself around one of my sisters to share our warmth. I take in Charlotte sleeping soundly on our mattress, the warmest of our blankets in a kicked-off heap at her feet. Maman is slumped over on the table, her arm serving as pillow to her head. In the corner the fireplace is ablaze, casting the room in a pretty glow, in warmth. Stepping into the room, I see the black hole of a missing drawer, like a gaping mouth in Papa’s sideboard.

I drop onto a chair. A life, unfolding the only way it can, or so Monsieur Zola said. “Well, never mind about him.” I whisper it to myself twice, the second time a little bit louder than the first. I push myself to standing up. I make my shoulders straight.

I have Madame Dominique’s class in the morning. I have my chance.

1880

Antoinette

T
he widow Joubert is dead, bludgeoned to death with a hammer, according to the baker and the pork butcher and Marie, who should know, with that nose of hers always stuck in the newspapers she brings home from the workshop of Monsieur Degas. It is not right to speak badly of the dead, but old widow Joubert, she made a habit of snooty looks. High and mighty, she was, with that newspaper shop of hers, always putting on airs and chatting up the gentlemen buying their evening papers, always scowling when I was close, not even bothering to make a secret of watching me. What would I want with a lifted newspaper? Sure
L’Illustration
has got pictures, but when you cannot sort out the words underneath, those pictures don’t hardly make sense. Still, I lingered near, if only to make her batty. But smashed ribs and a broken-open skull, teeth shattered to smithereens? No one is deserving of that. And so I stand huddling with the crowd gathered at the place where the rue de Douai, the rue Fontaine and the rue Mansart all meet up, at the spot where the shop of the widow Joubert is still shuttered closed.

By the time the mortuary carriage heads up the rue Fontaine, the pavements are lined three deep. It is not possible to see the casket, covered up as it is with bouquets and wreaths, one bearing the inscription
To Our Mother.
It must be her two sons driving the carriage and their two wives, leading the women’s procession trailing behind. At the spot just opposite the shop, one of those women lays a hand upon her heart and, weakness coming to her knees, staggers forward a few steps. As the crowd gasps, the other woman goes to her aid and the procession stops. The widow is to be buried in the cemetery up in Saint-Ouen, and when the staggering woman waves the brothers onward, they have the good sense to know she is not going to make it and escort her to the seat between them on the carriage bench.

The sun is dull and grey in a sodden sky, and I wrap my shawl a little tighter against the dampness of a spring not yet properly come. With winter lingering and the contribution of Maman little other than the reek of her hot breath, I don’t know just where the wood to heat our lodging room is coming from, unless, of course, she takes it upon herself to burn up more of the sideboard drawers.
L’Assommoir
shut down the end of last week and Monsieur Leroy at the Opéra says there are not enough roles even for the walkers-on who did not abandon him for more than a year. Marie and Charlotte are getting paid seventy francs by the Opéra each month, and even if Marie is not visiting the workshop of Monsieur Degas so regular anymore, she’s got herself a new job, at the bakery across the street, kneading the dough for eighty baguettes every morning between the hours of half past four and eight o’clock. It was a surprise, the boldness of Marie in looking for work, but the bakery taking her on was not. Forever the baker’s son—Alphonse—went to smoke on the stoop of the shop at the exact time she passed by on her way home from the Opéra. More than once I watched that boy part his lips, working up his nerve, but Marie kept her eyes steadfast on the door of our lodging house instead of giving him a tiny look, the little nudge he needed to call out “good day.” New job or not, that girl is turned stingier than a wolf and, every chance she can, bothers to tell about the slaving. “Tires me out,” she says. “My legs are fine for dancing, though. But, oh, my arms ache.”

The hardship of it—working alongside a nicely stoked oven, surrounded by the stink of fresh-baked bread. I said as much yesterday, and that girl, she turned her attention from rolling her knuckles over the knotted-up muscle of her calf, and said, “You aren’t home enough to see my weariness. Always off with that boy, out half the night in the brasseries when you haven’t yet found work.”

“At least I don’t got my own private stash hidden away.” It was true. All of the three francs I was paid each performance at the Ambigu was long ago spent on rent and milk and eggs and the bit of pork put onto the table from time to time.

“I match what you used to contribute, and there’s the baguette I leave every day.”

“You keep an entire baguette for yourself.” It shut her up, me knowing about her pay at the bakery including two baguettes, not just the single one put on the table for me and Charlotte to divide into three before Maman gobbled more than her share. Maman told me about being shamed near to death when she went to the baker on behalf of Marie, demanding a second baguette, only to find out Marie was already, every morning, leaving with two.

Her bottom lip disappeared into her mouth. “I’ll put both on the table for dividing up tomorrow,” she said. “I really will.”

By nightfall I was feeling remorse and snuggled close to her on our mattress. Maman was God knows where and Charlotte was on the other side of Marie, breathing the slow breaths of sleep, likely dreaming up herself curtseying low upon the stage with a heap of hurled roses at her feet.

“About
L’Assommoir
,” Marie said. More than two months come and gone since she was in attendance at the Ambigu, but still, like a half dozen times before, she was fixed on going over the play. “If Coupeau hadn’t fallen and turned to drink, then Gervaise would’ve got her dream.”

“Don’t know about that. She showed a talent for picking the wrong sort of men. First Lantier, then Coupeau.”

“So you’re agreeing with Monsieur Zola?” Her back grew rigid against my breast. “About Gervaise’s life turning out the only way it could?”

“It’s a story.” I said what I should’ve been saying from the start. “Nothing more.” I put my fingers into her thick locks, gave a little rub. “The rue de Douai isn’t quite so grubby as the Goutte-d’Or. You aren’t Gervaise.”

“I’m not pretty like her.”

“You got twice the brains. I don’t hear no one else thinking things through the way you do.” I did not say about the colossal waste of time all her fussing amounted to, how it never accomplished a single thing except a thumb picked raw and a mind fully awake in the middle of the night, not to a girl sounding so sorrowful as she.

“You’re not going to poke fun?”

“Not tonight.”

She threaded her fingers between mine, and we lay still a long while, and I knew she was feeling my warmth, same way I was feeling hers. “All that money you’re bringing in,” I said, “where’s the rest of it?”

“Don’t want to end up like Gervaise,” she said. “I really don’t. I need meat on my bones, or I can forget making the quadrille. I can’t be kneading bread and dancing and modeling and just allowing the troughs between my ribs to grow and grow.”

“Maman? You’re still giving money to Maman?”

She sucked in a deep breath, let it out slow. “I bought a practice skirt, at the pawnbroker. Got it for ten francs, and it’s good as new.”

“It don’t add up, Marie.”

“Josephine—the one with a different-colored sash for every day—her mother made arrangements for private lessons with Madame Théodore.” She stopped and even in the darkness of the room I knew her to be sucking her lip. “I did the same for myself, twice a week. I’m behind, Antoinette. I got started late. And the examinations for promotion to the quadrille are only three months away.”

That will of hers, it knocked me over, especially coming from a girl so inclined to doubting herself. “You’re like Baron Haussmann, flattening half a Paris once he got it in his head to widen the boulevards.” The air was thick with the ambition of Marie, trying to raise herself up from the gutter to the stage. “Keep that second baguette,” I said. “Keep it for yourself.”

The night was a long one, full of tossing and turning and a dream of Marie growing larger and me shrinking to a speck, and I wondered if what I saw was the view from the heavens, Marie approaching, me falling away. What was it made that girl want so much? She craved the stage. But why? And was there something lacking in me that I was over it in a week when old Pluque kicked me out of the quadrille? Was she truly meant for dancing, while I was not? Yes, that was it. But was I intended for something else? Then my mind went to those fifty francs, tucked into a little drawstring pouch and hung from a nail behind the sideboard of Papa. Émile came with the pouch the morning after I left him at the brasserie. He stood in the doorway of our lodging room and said, “It’s not much. But you put it someplace safe.”

What I was thinking, lying there, feeling each breath Marie took, was that not a single sou in that pouch of savings was put there by me.

T
oday is Saturday, my sixth day as an apprentice laundress, and the overseer, Monsieur Guiot, tells me I can expect to be working late. Everyone wants their best starched and pressed for attending Mass. “How late?”

I say.

“Until you ladies finish up.”

Already Maman was gone, leaving the washhouse after making a little show of putting her hand on my arm and reminding me about the widow Joubert getting bludgeoned just around the corner and being careful on my way home.

There are four of us left, ironing, one using a headblock and a little iron rounded at both ends for the fussy work of the bonnets, two more working away at a huge pile of shirts and petticoats and camisoles and drawers, and me, doing the lowly work of stockings and pillowcases and handkerchiefs. Ironing is the easiest of the jobs I been rotated through this week, and I was surprised when, this morning, Monsieur Guiot said, “The ironing table for you, Mademoiselle Antoinette.” But now I know it was only that the ironers finish up last on a Saturday night. I look to the pile of damp linens keeping me from Émile, that boy I was planning to meet in a quarter hour, that scrub-brushy head of hair I have not dragged my fingers through all this week of working from seven o’clock in the morning until seven o’clock in the evening. From the stove, I pick up a hot iron and, like I been taught, scrape it across a brick and wipe it clean on the rag tucked into the waistband of my skirt.

Monday it was twelve dragged-out hours I sat alongside Monsieur Guiot in the overseer’s booth, unpacking bundles of stinking linens, and watching him mark the items in his book, and then me stitching to the inside of each the colored thread indicating just who the linen should go back to once it was clean. I pricked my finger three times, bled onto two shirts and one petticoat, causing a brute of a laundress called Paulette—her sideburns reached around to form a mat of black hair on the underside on her chin—to gripe about the extra bleaching and my sloppiness. Maman gave me a shock by bothering to call out from a nearby zinc tub, “Don’t hear no one grumbling about the extra work of picking that shedding beard of yours off the linens.”

And then Tuesday through Thursday I was put at the tub beside that of Maman, and she showed the patience of a clock as she explained about starting with the whites and spreading the linens over the washboard and soaping one side before turning them and soaping the next. The linen was then to be pounded with a beater, rinsed, soaped a second time, scrubbed with a brush, rinsed again and hung soaking wet over the trestles where it dripped onto the tile floor, just slanted enough to drain away the slop.

Friday I was at the trestles, dipping the whites into a small tub of bluing and cranking the handle of a wringing machine, causing the linens to pass between cast-iron cylinders and the skin of my palm to blister and tear away. Maman made a bandage from a worn-out duster and whispered into the ear of an old woman with a scar cutting across her lip. Soon enough, that old woman held up palms yellow with calluses and turned away to crank the wringing machine, and I went to hang the wrung-out clothes over the brass wires of the drying lines. I cannot say for sure what got into Maman, turning her all motherly, but I suppose she was happy enough to have me back earning a steady wage and maybe just a tiny bit prideful about a daughter catching on so quick. Whatever it was brought about the kindnesses all week, it kept me from hurling linens into the face of Monsieur Guiot and trooping out the door.

I
spread a pillow slip, the last of the linens in my basket, over the thick padding of the ironing blanket, and seeing the number of shirts still awaiting an iron, I send up a little wish, asking for the other ironers to see that there is no sense in teaching me about shirts, not tonight. “I suppose it’s about time to see Monsieur Guiot about my wages,” I say to no one in particular but loud enough for all the women around the ironing table to hear. “And just in time for the last Mass, too.”

The stoutest of the women looks up from her work and licks her fleshy lips. “Monsieur Guiot,” she hollers, and he leans his head from the overseer’s booth. “It isn’t fair, not a bit, you assigning an apprentice to the ironing table on a Saturday. And now she’s got the nerve to suggest leaving first when she is the very reason we are so late tonight.”

“Mademoiselle Antoinette,” he says, with a sternness that don’t match the rest of his face, “all the ironers stay until the ironing is done.” Then he steps down from his booth, out the front door, and starts unfolding the shutters, closing us and the steamy windows of the washhouse off from the rue de Douai.

The griping ironer sends a little huff my way and drops a dozen shirts into my basket. Even with the zinc tubs empty and the boiler simmering instead of bellowing out hot steam now that the stoker is gone home, the washhouse is sweltering, steamier than the thick soup of Paris in July. I feel the heat of the iron-warming stove on my back, the sweat trickling down, the clamminess mounting under my arms, my breasts, between my legs. I smell the dank odor of my sweat rising up. A week ago the warmth of the place was a relief after the chill of our lodging room. But just now, with soggy underclothes clinging to wet flesh and time parading forward, trampling to nothing those minutes I need to cross the street to our lodging house, fly up the stairs and put on a fresh blouse before going to Émile, the boiling air is a curse.

Before Monsieur Guiot is through with the shutters, the laundresses are freeing themselves of neckerchiefs, loosening their blouses, hitching up their skirts. He comes in, rubbing his hands together against the cold outside, and don’t appear in the least baffled by the naked arms, the bare necks. No, he goes back to his overseer’s booth without a single word, and I loosen the drawstring of my own blouse.