The Painted Girls (12 page)

“He drew bracelets upon my arms. There isn’t money for that.” I shrugged, then smiled, thinking of myself passing the examination and joining the quadrille. My pay would increase—fifteen extra francs a month, plus a bonus of two francs for every evening I spent upon the stage.

“Dancers are always collecting trinkets from their admirers,” he said. I felt a creeping bit of pleasure that maybe Monsieur Degas and this gentleman believed that one day someone would think enough of my dancing to put bracelets upon my arms. But the idea made me jumpy, too.

Sometimes the girls talked about admirers—or protectors, as they were usually called—gossip they collected in the Opéra corridors or at home from older sisters and cousins and neighbors holding spots in the corps de ballet. Always I stayed quiet, gripping my ribs, the hair upon my arms standing straight up. They were the finest of men, Perot claimed, wishing only to make a ballet girl’s life easier so she could keep her mind on her work. They were ambitious, Lucille said, wanting nothing of a girl except her name linked with his and envy stirred up among the rest of the abonnés. Blanche and Ila and Louise held that they were gentlemen, tired of their wives and looking for a bit of pleasure. But Josephine shook her head, and speaking in a low voice, her eyes always on the lookout for Madame Dominique, told how abonnés dreamt up the unnatural and forced it upon a girl. Fingers creeping where they did not belong. Girls pushed to their knees. Licking. Orgies. I sucked my lip and willed Josephine to stop but never once pulled away from the mass of huddled girls.

I
glanced from the picture of me to the one of the girl in the blaring red shawl, and I remembered, back in Monsieur Degas’s workshop, how the picture made me dream up her life and try to guess what had put the weariness on her face. “New painting?” I said.

He nodded, and I nodded back.

“I don’t see why he’s drawing Marie,” Blanche said, her face in a pout. “He’d be better off drawing an étoile.” She did not like the prophesy of the bracelets. She did not like me singled out. Yes, I was her friend, but it did not change that there were only so many spots in the second quadrille, that the two of us were vying for the rank.

“The first of his ballet paintings was of Eugénie Fiocre, starring in
La Source
,” the gentleman said, and the pout on Blanche’s face grew.

M
adame Dominique calls out, “Josephine, Marie, Perot,” and the three of us move to center and stand in fifth position. The violinist shifts his bow to hovering over the strings. I manage the sissonne, the entrechat, the glissade before Madame Dominique’s sharp clap stills the room, quiets the violin. “Glissade dessous, Marie,” she says, meaning that my front foot is to finish behind.

Again the music starts up, again the sharp clap. “It’s two brisés, Marie.”

After my third blunder, her voice is curt. “You may sit down, Marie.”

I move to the bench and huddle there like the brokenhearted girl in the blaring red shawl. With one arm wrapping my waist and the other propped upon my thigh, I wonder if it was being told to sit down that had that other girl wiping her eye upon the bench.

Always at the close of class, the girls together glide through a révérence, each of us bowing low to show our respect to Madame Dominique, who keeps behind any girl failing to lower her eyes and then raise them to meet her own. “A tradition from the days of courtly dance,” she says. “Sacred. Inviolable.” I join the girls in center as is expected and make a révérence with every speck of grace I can muster, bowing extra low to show humility. I say a little prayer, too, for Antoinette, vague hopes that she does not make a habit of staying out through the night, that she does not end up pierced full of holes. Each of us in the class holds still in the ending position of the révérence, arms à la seconde, a foot stretched in a tendu to the front, until Madame Dominique gives a tiny nod and says, “Dismissed.” Then there is the clamor of girls laughing and chatting and scuttling down the stairs to the petits rats’ loge.

The loge is three times longer than it is wide, with a strip of low cabinets in the center, running from end to end. Each of us has our own spot—two feet of countertop holding a looking glass and a gas lamp, the cupboard underneath, a stool we seldom have the time to use. The din picks up as we put on boots and toss practice skirts into satchels and mothers holler from the doorway for their daughters to hurry up, to wrap their shawls a little tighter, to be gentle with the tarlatan skirts. “Fifteen francs for a new one,” says a mother. “It’ll be the washhouse for you before I get another skirt.”

I am rolling my sash into a neat coil, when I see Madame Dominique’s black skirt before me. I lift my eyes and stop myself from sucking on my lip. “See me before you leave,” she says.

Wanting the other girls, especially Blanche, cleared out before I get the scolding I am due, I take my time wrapping my slippers with their ribbons, folding my tarlatan skirt. Humble works best with Madame Dominique, and I try to push my mind from Blanche’s meanness, but I am stuck—a peddler with his cart too loaded up to pull—thinking how I will work harder, how one day I will be at the front of the barre and demonstrating exercises while Blanche is made to watch. But in truth there is little chance of me catching up when almost always she is first in the practice room, when never does she waste a minute pampering tired legs, easing the soreness from her back. She means to dance upon the Opéra stage. She means to have roses flung to her feet, bracelets upon her arms. Once when I said the thing I wanted most was to pass the examination elevating me to the quadrille, she said, “The quadrille is only the beginning for me.” I nodded, because I knew it was true. She has no father, never has, only a brother gone to Saint-Malo years before, a sailor on the high seas. Her mother went from brothel to brothel in the afternoons, arranging the coquettes’ hair. Afterward she washed dishes from early evening and right on through the night in the kitchen at Le Meurice. Mornings she bawled and told Blanche she would not last another week, that the Opéra was their only hope. She was too careful with her wages to spend them on absinthe; and it gave Blanche, who already had a two-year head start at the Opéra, the added advantage of not kneading the dough for eighty loaves before class every day.

When all the girls, all except Blanche, are cleared out—galloping the stairs and smirking about me staying behind—she comes over to me. I watch her lick her lips, wring the skirt clutched in her hands. “Monsieur Degas was right,” she says, “putting those bracelets upon your arms. You’ll be elevated to the quadrille. You’ll be admired.”

I pull my satchel tight against my belly, tug at the frayed skin of my thumb.

“I should have helped. It was mean not to help,” she says and sinks down to a crouch. She leans her head against the stool where I sit. “I’ve got to grow another three inches, or I have no hope of being an étoile.” Then she tells how her mother measures her height twice a month and is undertaking to lengthen Blanche’s spine. She is made to lie on her back, her toes wedged under the larder’s apron, while her mother curls her fingers around the base of Blanche’s skull and pulls. “It doesn’t work. What I need is meat. I haven’t grown a speck in four months.”

Before I manage a word, she is up and through the doorway leading to the corridor. And I wish I was quicker. It was true: Not a soul among the étoiles or even the premières danseuses was as small as Blanche. But still, I should have said how everyone knew her talent, how she outshone every other petit rat.

Madame Dominique comes into the loge and settles her backside upon a low cabinet in front of my stool. “You have a new skirt, no?” she says.

I nod.

“Extra lessons with Madame Théodore?”

“Twice a week,” I say.

“The abonnés, they want their protégés upon the stage, and yet they keep a girl out half the night.” She shifts her body sideways so that she is looking me fully in the face.

I make the smallest shrug, not a bit sure.

“You know the examinations are not far off, and still you come to class exhausted.”

“I made the mistake of going to bed too late.”

Her lips pull tight. “The shadows under your eyes are nothing new.”

She taps the coral ring she wears on her pinky against the cabinet, waiting, and I scrape the frayed skin of my thumb, hidden, behind the shield of my other hand.

“I could speak to him?” she says. “To your protector? He must be made to understand the rigor of the examinations.” She touches my hand, stilling the picking going on underneath. “You must arrive rested for class. You need an allowance for meat. A new skirt isn’t enough.”

It comes to me that she thinks I have a protector, that he bought my skirt. “I work at a bakery.”

A line appears between her eyebrows.

“I’m only kneading dough, saving my legs,” I say. “I go in the morning, first thing.”

“Before class?” A palm moves to her cheek, holding up her heavy head.

“Half past four. I’m finished by eight o’clock.”

“Oh, Marie. Every morning?”

I nod. “I’m modeling, not as much as I was.”

“I see.” Her hands drop. “It’s noble. But, oh, Marie. It’s impossible. Already you’re wearing yourself out.”

I was told to sit out class, would not have got the combination right even if she gave me a fourth chance.

“There are other ways.” She says it quietly, eyes upon the floor.

“A protector?”

“I thought you’d taken one on. I saw your new things. Madame Théodore said about the classes.”

“You’ll help me? I don’t know the abonnés.”

“No,” she says, too fast. A decision already made, before, on behalf of some other girl. “I won’t.”

Her eye twitches then, something I have never seen, not with her steady gaze. And it makes me wonder if in that twitch there was not a flickering bit of shame at failing a girl, a girl she is charged with pushing along from petit rat in her practice room to ballet girl upon the Opéra stage.

Antoinette

C
olette insists upon gathering up the dead dog with its twisted neck and blood-leaking mouth. She is carrying on, blubbering and sniffling, not bothering to wipe the snot from her face. Part of me is all for joining in, bawling and pounding my fists upon the ground, but how would it all end? There is no mother coming with a soothing teat, no sweetheart with embracing arms. Colette and me, we are on our own and all the blubbering in the world won’t change a single thing. She spreads her shawl over the ground and shifts the dog’s hindquarters onto the wool. “You got to leave it,” I say.

She slides one hand beneath its muzzle, the other beneath its breast. Taking great care with the neck, she spares that broken mutt the cold stone of the pavement. “Well, help me,” she says.

Marie is waiting for me, I know, dipping only her toe into sleep. Always she stirs awake the second I settle under the covers and then, with my heat beside her, sighs and drifts into proper sleep for the first time of the night. I know the look of peacefulness come to a slumbering girl, also the dusky hollows brought on by losing rest. But Colette is watching me with the naked eyes of an urchin new to the streets.

Together we lift, begin walking, each of us holding a gathered edge of the shawl and in between, the weight of a dead dog swaying in time with our steps. It appears Colette knows where we are headed, and I put one foot ahead of the other, following. My heart is cleaved that Émile should take a smoke from a boy who slapped my face, crushed that he walked away. Already I know I want his hot breath upon my skin again, his stroking fingers upon my flesh. If he don’t come begging to me, I am going begging to him, and I don’t see any point in pretending something different for an evening or a day. Maybe it was something he understood even as he put that offered smoke to his lips. Maybe it was not so much choosing Pierre Gille ahead of me, not if already Émile knew it would not change a single thing between him and me.

As we turn the corner Colette says we are going to the house of Madame Brossard on the lower slopes of Montmartre and continues at an even pace. I know the parents of Colette are dead, that her family name is not Brossard but Dupree. She was chummy with the boulevard tarts at the brasserie, also a gentleman twice her age. She owns four dresses, all of them silk, none of them worn out, and tonight, upon her neck, she wears the fanciest of watches. It hangs there, winking, catching the flickering light of the lamps, drawing the eye. But to her it is only a trinket, something to toss in a drawer. She is not the smallest bit modest, the smallest bit shy about her heaving breasts, her pretty calves, her plump lips. Not an hour ago she was lifting up her skirt and taunting Pierre Gille and calling out for the world to hear, “It isn’t free.” All of it says there is only one possibility: The house of Madame Brossard is a brothel, a shuttered house of Paris. Still it takes a further block of trudging before I say, “Just who is Madame Brossard?”

“She is the madam of the house where I live, and, yes, I work as a coquette, since it’s what you really want to know.”

We turn into an alleyway running alongside a grey house, two stories in height with piano music and chatter spilling into the night from the tavern on the ground floor. The alleyway is dark except for the light cast by a lantern hanging in a cage above the nook of a door. “We leave the dog here,” Colette says, lowering her end of our bundle beside the stone stoop, reaching for a brass door handle. “We’ll get soup, maybe even a bath for you, depending on Madame Brossard’s spirits.”

The wooden steps leading to the first floor are swept free of grit and brightly lit by three gas lamps, each with its shade polished clean. The walls of the staircase are thick, easily swallowing up the din of the tavern down below. From the alcove at the top, I glimpse velvet draperies and two girls in silk, each sitting sideways upon a brocade sofa, her chin propped up by an arm resting upon the thick cushions of the back, and giving her full attention to the gentleman lounging in between. Colette, who appears to be no second-rate whore, takes me by the arm, hauling me down a dimly lit corridor to a large kitchen with a roaring hearth.

“My God, Colette,” says a jowly woman with a wineglass in one hand and a polishing cloth in the other. “Is that blood on your skirt?”

“There is a dead dog beside the door in the alleyway, a dead dog wrapped in my woolen shawl.” Colette begins to sniffle, explaining between sobs about a boy kicking the dog, kicking it with all his might, snapping its pretty neck. Her shoulders heave, and Madame Brossard escorts her by the arm to a large oaken table, nudges her into a chair. She turns to me and says, “Won’t you have a seat, Mademoiselle …”

“Van Goethem,” I say, taking up the chair beside Colette. “Antoinette.”

She lays a hand upon my shoulder by way of greeting, and with her so near, her nose twitches at the stink of me after a week in the washhouse and an evening hauling a dead dog.

“The dog’s got to be buried,” Colette says.

“You’ll eat, the both of you, and we’ll get you cleaned up.”

She picks up a tiny bell, muffling it sharply after the second ring, and I wonder if it means the house has more than a single maid, that each has her own call. She moves to the hearth, returns with a steaming pot and two bowls and begins ladling a thick soup of onion and beef into each. A maid, no older than Marie, comes into the kitchen wearing a starched apron, and Madame Brossard gives instructions about drawing a bath and a set of clean underclothes for me and telling Maurice, who I guess is a barman in the tavern down below, there is a grave to be dug in the courtyard. “Shall I send for the hairdresser?” she says to Colette.

“I could use a little spoiling just now.”

Near starved, I lap up the soup, more rich in meat than that served in the cafés. When there is not but a single shell of onion left upon my spoon, Colette glances over her shoulder to the doorway where Madame Brossard disappeared and switches her close-to-full bowl for my empty one. Sitting there, at the oaken table of Madame Brossard with its eight chairs gathered around, I picture the girls of the house assembled, playing a game of bezique, laughing, licking the grease of a roasted duck from their lips. For a moment, I let myself imagine staying on, with Madame Brossard providing the soup, ordering the baths, calling the hairdresser. But that dreamed-up life, it don’t include Marie and Charlotte. It don’t include Émile, and I want the three of them more than I want coddling and thick soup and a madam bearing the burden of deciding every detail of my day. “Madame Brossard is being generous?” I say.

“Pauline, another of the girls, failed the medical exam. Her card wasn’t stamped.”

“I got a job, working as a laundress in the rue de Douai.”

“It’s a good house, Madame Brossard’s.”

“No offense, Colette, but whoring isn’t the trade for me.”

“Still. Might as well get yourself a bath.” In the fireplace a cauldron hangs from a hook. Orange tongues of flame lick its sides, and curls of steam feather out from above the rim. The tub waiting beside the hearth is more than double in size the one we have at home, and it has a high, sloping back just meant for lolling.

Not fifteen minutes later I lean back in the tub and know I have failed Marie. But maybe Émile is right about coddling being hurtful, about Marie needing to toughen up, about Charlotte never figuring out the world don’t spin solely for her. I close my eyes, and after a while there comes the gentle pull of hair being combed and combed again and finally curled with hot tongs by a hairdresser accustomed to his customers sighing in a tub.

“Enjoying yourself there, Antoinette,” Madame Brossard says, skirt swishing by.

I smile, arch my back, like a cat getting scratched beneath the chin.

“Colette tells me you were a ballet girl with the Opéra?”

“A long time ago.”

Once my hair is set and my skin wiped dry, she laces me into a corset—my first since the Opéra stage—tight enough that even the very little I have is heaved up, and then buttons me into a fine dress of mauve silk. She pours a glass of red wine, hands it to me saying, “On the house.” She dusts my nose with rice powder and brushes my lips with tinted pomade and walks me over to a round looking glass hanging from a chain over a buffet. At my neckline white flesh mounds above mauve silk. That pretty dress is smooth upon my ribs and tapers to my clinched-to-narrow waist. My hair gleams from the combing, my lips from the tinted pomade. My skin is soft, like velvet, from the powdering. And all I want is Émile, for him to see me looking maybe not so pretty as Colette but the prettiest I ever been. “Well?” says Madame Brossard.

“You’re wasting your time on me,” I say, but she only shrugs, like a licked-clean bowl of soup, a cauldron drained of water, a hairdressing bill, a swallowed glass of red wine are nothing at all.

In the alcove just outside the salon, Colette says, “See if you can’t enjoy yourself tonight. Madame Brossard will be watching and you’ll tire of scrubbing linens soon enough,” but my mind is on tomorrow being Sunday, my day of freedom from the washhouse. I will search for Émile, starting at the storage shed of the father of Pierre Gille, then calling in at the Brasserie des Martyrs, those other taverns preferred by him. Colette clasps her hands together and tucks them up under her chin, like she is making a tiny prayer, and then, she is off, smiling, kissing the cheeks of all but one of the six men in the salon, and after that approaching the neglected gentleman and putting her hand upon his chest, “Now, you’re new at this house, no?”

“Monsieur Arnaud,” he says, and she takes his glass, which is only half drained.

“You need more wine, Monsieur Arnaud. At this house, we are all for having a jolly time.”

She strokes the lapel of another gentleman, one thinking he is at the Opéra, judging by his walking stick and white gloves. “I see you’re keeping the tailor busy, Monsieur Barbeau,” she says. “That cut suits a man who keeps his back so good and straight.” Then she is across the room, ruffling the locks of a gentleman, who might as well be an owl with his small, sharp nose and eyebrows, like tufts of fur sticking out from his brow. “Such a fine crop of hair,” she says.

I stand in the alcove, swallowing red wine, glad to be feeling the nerve that comes with a drained glass before the eyes of those six gentlemen wander off from following Colette, slinking about the salon, a regular minx. And then Madame Brossard is there, tilting a bottle. Again, I swallow, finding the bottom of the glass a second time and with it, enough boldness that when I see a gentleman, hardly old enough to have sat beneath a straight razor, look me up and down, I let my lips grow pouty and give him the sauciest of smiles. Émile, he don’t appreciate me like he should.

That boy, he lifts up his wine a bit and his eyebrows, too; and, with nothing more behind me than an oaken door, I know his raised glass is for me, my mauve dress, my powdered nose. He is like a cherub, except stretched tall: lips like a woman’s, a cleft in his chin, skin like milk, flaxen curls—a pretty boy like Pierre Gille. I lift my again-filled-up glass, and at the thought of Émile watching from the corner of the room, I run my fingers along my neckline of mauve cord.

Colette’s got her arm linked around that of Monsieur Arnaud, and she is strolling him around the room, saying, “Now this is Monsieur Picot, a timber merchant,” and about the cherub, “This is Monsieur Simard, who is apprenticing to be a banker like his papa,” and about two men side by side on the sofa, their foreheads close, “This is Monsieur Mignot and Monsieur Fortin, who own a fish-packing house in Le Havre and have been like brothers to each other ever since meeting in the lycée there.” The almost brothers stand up, shake the hand of Monsieur Arnaud; and, glimpsing their trousers and mustaches, I want to blurt out about them sharing a tailor and a barber, too. The cherub glances my way and swallows another mouthful of wine.

“We are all friends here, Monsieur Arnaud,” Colette says and, even without the bobbing chins of the gentlemen, I know it is true, that these gentlemen, with their joking and knee slapping and foreheads leaning in, don’t come to the house of Madame Brossard only for the company of Colette.

She moves on to the girls. “This is Adèle from the Loire. We call her Petite. This is Odette, a bona fide Parisian. And Constance, all the way from the Pyrenees.” Petite is fair and small and plump enough that her arms are like dough, poked by a finger at the spot where the elbows should be. Odette looks like a ballet girl with her long neck and sloping shoulders and pretty waist. And Constance is tall and dark as a Spaniard. It puts me to thinking that variety was on the mind of Madame Brossard when she brought each of the girls into the house and, then, to wondering if Pauline with her unstamped card was not skinny like me with a crop of dark hair. Only Colette is a great beauty, but I can see all the girls are cheerful, laughing and petting, bounding to their feet the instant a gentleman finds his glass half empty.

“And this here is Antoinette,” says Colette, steering Monsieur Arnaud to me. “We met at the Ambigu. A bit of fun the two of us had there, as walkers-on in
L’Assommoir.
Antoinette was clever enough to get herself a speaking part.”

The gentlemen turn in my direction and the cherub says, “Well, Mademoiselle Antoinette, why not share your talent with us.”

All those fine men are looking, none turning away, wandering off down the pavement with a smoke hanging from their lips. I set my glass upon a half column holding a potted fern, and even half soused, I know enough to keep the thickness of the wine from my tongue. “Now gentlemen.” I say it quiet and those men lean in, hold their eyes steady, same as for Hélène Petit at the Ambigu. “You must imagine me as a laundress, bare arms dripping with suds, a bit of collected steam rolling down my neck. It is sweltering hot in the washhouse.” I brush imagined sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand, open up my shut eyes to ten pairs staring back, the lips of the cherub parting. “Peek through the shutters of a washhouse closed up to the street for the day, and I promise, you will not find a single laundress with her blouse laced up tight.” The cherub licks his lips. Colette laughs. And I loosen the cord at the neckline of my mauve silk.