Frog Music Read online

  “How much of a fine?” Ernest wants to know, sitting down.

  “Ten bucks—and then there’s the lawyer’s fee on top,” complains Jenny. “Once I made mine tell the judge that I considered the whole thing an infringement on the rights of women, and the son of a bitch fined me twenty.”

  “How come you ended up in jail this time?” asks Arthur.

  Jenny makes a face as if she has a toothache. “Sacked my lawyer and demanded a jury instead of a judge. I told them the truth, that I don’t have any other clothes, and would they prefer me to walk around naked as a worm?”

  Hoots all round.

  “Turned out twelve good men and true didn’t look any kindlier on me than one. Now, spending forty days dry,” she adds ruefully, “that was the real kick in the pants—as it were!”

  “Speaking of which—some cognac?” proposes Arthur, getting up.

  “I can’t believe you sacked your lawyer,” Blanche tells Jenny. “When your Maman said not to touch the stove because it would burn you, I bet you went right ahead and touched it.”

  “How else was I supposed to know if she was lying?”

  “Why would somebody lie about a stove?” wonders Blanche.

  “Folks always lie to kids, don’t they?”

  “Tell me we’ve still got ice,” Arthur calls theatrically from the passage.

  “In the closet, under a blanket,” Blanche calls back. “It was the coolest place I could find.”

  “Alaskan or Nevadan?” Ernest demands.

  Blanche gives him a look. “Are you claiming you can taste the difference?”

  “Got both? We could test him blindfolded,” suggests Jenny.

  “Well,” says Ernest, conceding, “so long as it’s not that machine-made muck.”

  “Practically a puddle,” complains Arthur, coming back in with the bowl. He hands the ladies their cognacs with a few pebbles of ice in each glass.

  “Any luck at the game tonight, mon beau?” Blanche asks him under her breath.

  Arthur winks.

  Well, that’s a pleasant surprise. She’s more used to hearing about “disappointments” or “mishaps,” as the fellows of the sporting set refer to losses.

  “Heureux au jeu, malheureux en amour,” Ernest intones lugubriously from the floor.

  “Oh, I think I’m lucky in both lines, gaming and love,” says Arthur, giving Blanche another long, spirituous kiss.

  She wishes they could go to bed, right this minute.

  “What’s your game, gentlemen?” Jenny’s asking.

  “Faro, of course,” says Ernest. “It gives the best odds, unless the bank’s rigged.”

  “You know a house in America where it’s not?”

  “My friend and I seem to make out all right,” he says sleekly.

  Jenny breaks into satirical song. “‘For work I’m too lazy,’” she trills, beating time on her thigh.

  And beggin’s too low,

  Train-robbin’s too dang’rous,

  To gambling I’ll go.

  The men cackle at that. Blanche thought they’d have sent Jenny on her way by now, but they seem to be enjoying her no end. Clearly Blanche should bring strangers home more often.

  “Was your petite amie out with you two this evening?” Blanche asks Ernest.

  “Madeleine?”

  “As if you ain’t sure which I mean because you have so many lady friends and not just one loyal old blonde!”

  A rueful smirk from Ernest. Blanche has teased him about Madeleine’s age so often, it has no sting anymore. Madeleine’s placid as well as lovely, and she never seems to object to the fact that her young man spends at least as much time here, in the spare bedroom of his old intimates from Paris, as he does at her place.

  “No, we were a pair of lonely bachelors tonight,” says Arthur, striking a mournful pose. “Is that your bicycle we tripped over in the hall?” he asks Jenny.

  “Such a pleasure to study one up close,” says Ernest, “if only in the dark, with our shins. I saw one just like it selling for two hundred bucks the other day,” he tells Arthur.

  Blanche’s eyebrows soar at the price. “Jenny, ahem, found this one on Market Street.”

  “Ah, the divine workings of chance,” says Arthur, blowing a kiss toward the sky. “Five foot, is it, that front wheel?”

  “Four foot nine,” says Jenny fondly. “It shoots down California or Sutter at about twenty miles an hour. The next best thing to being an eagle.”

  “And on the flat?” asks Ernest.

  “Smooth as silk. The knack of it is, prop your feet in front of the handlebars so if you meet an obstacle you can jump free.”

  “An obstacle such as … me,” Blanche can’t resist adding.

  Jenny’s grin is devilish. “Well, even birds crash, the odd time. Those high buildings going up downtown, with their yards of plate glass—I’ve seen a gull break its neck against a window.”

  “Ah, you ain’t a true citizen of this city until somebody’s run you over,” Ernest says with a yawn.

  “Sounds as if you’ve had quite a night, ma puce,” murmurs Arthur to Blanche, caressing her neck.

  Oh, she could ride him right here in the chair. Leaning back, Blanche straightens her stiff leg, rotating her ankle. “You owe me a spin on that machine of yours sometime,” she tells Jenny.

  Who grimaces. “I know you’re a dancer, but I’m afraid that, to master the high-wheeler, you’d have to be something of an acrobat.”

  Ernest and Blanche burst into simultaneous laughter.

  Blanche lets the visitor in on the joke. “The three of us happen to have forgotten more about acrobatics than you’ll ever know.”

  “My partner here was the best flier in the Cirque d’Hiver,” boasts Ernest, patting Arthur’s glossy shoe.

  “Ah, les jours anciens.” A dark edge to Arthur’s voice. “Ancient history now.”

  How much does her man miss being the lean aerialist of those past times? Blanche wonders. Arthur’s muscles aren’t gone, just softened, looser on his frame, and from his perfect carriage, you’d never know about his back. Who can take their eyes off him?

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” murmurs Jenny. “The Cirque d’Hiver in Paris?”

  Blanche spreads her hands as if to say, Where else? “That’s where we learned our English, from a pair of genuine Yankee cowboys in the troupe.”

  “The Cirque d’Hiver’s where our master Léotard invented the flying trapeze,” Ernest puts in, “no matter what charlatans claim otherwise.”

  “Hey, did you wear those skintight fleshings?” asks Jenny.

  “As the maestro used to tell us,” Ernest remarks, stroking his thigh, “if you want the crowd to love you, the trapeze is optional, but the fleshings are compulsory.”

  “Enough nostalgia,” commands Arthur, cutting through Jenny’s laughter. “We were always cold, underdressed, and underpaid.” He gets up and stalks over to refill his glass.

  “And you, Blanche,” Jenny pushes on, “what class of artiste were you? Wait, you mentioned horses earlier—”

  She listens, this one, Blanche notes.

  “An equestrienne?”

  Blanche smiles. She knows Arthur wants to drop the topic, but—

  “Bareback?”

  She nods. “Jumping ribbons, bursting hoops, scenic riding, Roman …”

  Jenny lets out a respectful whistle. “The Wilson Circus came to town when I was a kid,” she reminisces, “with this dazzler of a Creole rider, Mademoiselle Zoyara. Turned out after, she was actually one hundred percent man.”

  “Des conneries!” scoffs Ernest.

  “Just telling it as I heard it. Well, I guess this is my lucky night. Genuine stars of the Cirque d’Hiver,” Jenny marvels. “How high up was your trapeze hung?”

  She throws the question in Arthur’s direction, but he ignores it, sipping his cognac.

  She persists. “What was your riskiest trick?”

  “They’re called passes,” Ernest corrects
her.

  “No nets, I hope?”

  He gives a snort of contempt.

  “Ever fall?” asks Jenny.

  The young woman doesn’t know it, but she’s gone too far. “Everybody falls,” says Blanche, to close the subject. She means it to sound nonchalant, but it comes out shrill.

  “Speaking of risky,” says Arthur, staring under the sofa with his head on one side, “is that a revolver?”

  “My single-action army .45,” says Jenny with satisfaction. She hooks it up with one finger to show it off: reddish wood and silvery metal. Blanche reckons the thing must be a foot long.

  “This is one strange class of female,” Ernest remarks to Arthur.

  A shrug from Jenny. “Why should your lot have all the firepower? As they say, God made men and women, but Sam Colt made them equal.”

  Arthur bursts out laughing. “Who says that?”

  “I bet you’ve never fired that thing,” Ernest mocks, weighing the revolver in his hand.

  “Into the air, a couple times,” Jenny tells him.

  He sniggers. “Can’t bite? Don’t bark.”

  “The air’s the best place to shoot,” she insists. “A gun’s for keeping trouble at bay.”

  Arthur holds out his hand for the Colt, takes it, and fingers its metalwork.

  “Well, tonight at Durand’s, it welcomed trouble in,” mutters Blanche.

  “Because tonight’s fellow was a foolhardy loggerhead,” says Jenny.

  “Oh, he was foolhardy?” Blanche rolls her eyes. All that makes this creature halfway tolerable, she decides, is that she delivers her bluster with a wink.

  “It’s the weather,” says Ernest, “making tempers flare all over. At the table beside ours this evening, a pair of Spaniards went for each other’s throats.”

  Jenny grins at the image.

  “Well,” says Arthur, handing the Colt, butt-first, back to Jenny, “I suppose if a girl means to swagger around Chinatown in pants, she’s as well off carrying something.”

  Blanche snorts. “I’ve never had any difficulty. The neighborhood’s notoriety is more than half invented, to give tourists a thrill. Ying upstairs told me the guides have taken to staging brawls in Fish Alley, paying fifty cents a man!”

  “Yeah,” says Jenny, jerking her head north, “the Barbary Coast dens are ten times more dangerous than Chinatown.”

  “Nowhere’s dangerous if you know what you’re doing,” says Arthur silkily. “My friend and I go all over the City, wherever our affairs happen to take us.”

  Blanche holds her tongue. Affairs, he always says, as if he and Ernest are partners in some serious line when all they do, between faro games, is hand wads of cash to dodgy characters they call “business associates,” money they rarely see again. Or they wine and dine richer suckers in the hopes of persuading them to share the risk of one of the schemes in which Arthur and Ernest are already entangled.

  “Do you bring protection yourselves, gentlemen?”

  Arthur smiles. “Americans are so gun-crazy. A knife’s more reliable and won’t spoil the line of a suit.”

  Blanche couldn’t swear to whether her lover’s ever used it, the stiletto he’s carried as long as she’s known him. She can imagine it, though. Arthur stays good-humored longer than most men, but when he finally loses his temper, it’s not a pretty sight. A couple of times over the years, he and Ernest have made vague references to having to persuade a fellow of something, or teach him a lesson … But Blanche doesn’t ask. She does her leg shows and meets her michetons, and the men lay their wagers and run their schemes.

  Ernest’s asking Jenny what she lives on. “Frog-catcher—is that slang for something dirty?” he wonders hopefully.

  “It’s what it says.”

  “What a deliciously bizarre trade,” says Arthur.

  “These free spirits despise all trades,” Blanche warns Jenny. “Arthur claims the only truly honest way to make a buck is by chance, whether at the gaming table or the Exchange.”

  Her lover grins. “There is a certain grace to speculation.”

  “Blanche is just not naturally indolent enough to be a true bohemian like us.” Ernest sighs. “Nose to the grindstone, night after night …”

  His graphic mime of her giving some micheton a below-job makes Arthur burst out laughing.

  Blanche feels irritation grip her temples like the claws of a bird. It’s true, and it’s no secret, so why should she mind? It’s just that Ernest’s bobbing head is like a distorted reflection of herself in some filthy pool.

  Jenny’s eyes are on her, watchful.

  Blanche makes herself giggle too. “Just as well I work so hard, or there are times we might have starved.”

  That came out wrong: not witty but biting.

  Arthur’s smile has faded at the edges. Then he leans back languidly as if posing for an artist. “Starving’s terribly bohemian.”

  He’s saved the moment, Blanche thinks with a rush of relief.

  Ernest puts in a caveat: “So long as we’ve always got a bottle and a cigar!”

  Without anyone noticing, the apartment seems to have filled with light. Blanche squints at the windows: another satané sunny day.

  Hoisting herself to her feet, Jenny begins her round of thanks.

  “Is that your blood or the cow’s?” Arthur wants to know.

  Yawning, as she buttons her jacket over her shirtfront: “A splash of each. The puke’s definitely mine.”

  “You can’t go out there looking like that,” scolds Arthur. “We Français must maintain our reputation for chic.”

  “I’m hunky-dory,” says Jenny, dropping her revolver into her trouser pocket.

  “Find her something, would you, my sweet?” Arthur asks Blanche.

  Who goes into the bedroom. First she puts the rest of the cash she earned this evening into a shabby high-heeled boot under the bed. (A little nest egg she’s never felt the need to mention to Arthur.) The deed to the building she keeps tucked behind a lithograph of his favorite painting: a strange picnic in which a naked woman sits on the grass between two black-jacketed dandies.

  Then Blanche opens a tin-covered trunk, still bearing its pasted labels from when they arrived on the Utopia. (Arthur likes to keep his things perfectly folded but refuses to succumb to anything as respectable as a chest of drawers.) She picks out one of his shirts—not the newest, because they may never run into this Jenny character again, but still an elegant one, greenish, with a flowering-vine motif.

  By the time she gets back to the salon, Arthur’s dusted off the steak and thrown it into a chafing dish over the flame of the spirit lamp. He’s scrambling some eggs too. Jenny goes into the bedroom to change. Arthur sends Ernest out for bread, and Blanche back into the bedroom to see if their visitor needs anything else.

  Blanche finds Jenny pulling the shirt on over her head; the way men do it, it strikes her.

  “A little privacy,” snaps Jenny.

  Blanche recoils, turning her back. What the hell does Jenny think she’s hiding? As if it’s not perfectly clear she’s got a pair of little breasts under there …

  “Thanks for the shirt,” says Jenny, her voice so civil now it’s as if Blanche imagined her angry tone. “First time in a fancy-patterned one.”

  Blanche doesn’t answer, just heads for the salon.

  “Who’s the baby?”

  That freezes her.

  Jenny’s plucked the silver frame out of a litter of kohl, rouge, and jewelry on the small table.

  “Our son.” It sounds grand, solemn. Blanche has never had to explain the photograph before. “P’tit,” she adds, diffident. She calls him that, but really it’s P’tit Arthur—Little Arthur.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh no, he’s not—he’s being nursed out, on a farm, for his health,” Blanche clarifies. “I was taken sick after he was born …”

  Memories like flotsam looming through the fog of that dimly remembered milk fever. How the creature leaked from every ap
erture—emerald pus in the corners of his eyes, even—and wouldn’t touch her right nipple but worried her left till it bled, and keened from five o’clock every afternoon on until the whole building seemed to shake … Blanche was delirious and vomiting by the time Arthur carried the infant away to ask Madame Johanna’s advice. His decisiveness filled Blanche with gratitude, especially when Madame found some compatriots of her own, the Hoffmans, to take P’tit in at once. Even though Blanche hurt twice as much when P’tit was gone—her left breast swelling up like something out of a dime museum, so ugly that she refused to let Arthur set eyes on her without a wrap for a week—it was such a relief, being quiet, alone with the pain.

  Jenny’s scrutinizing the carte de visite. “But you said for his health. What’s wrong with him?”

  Blanche blinks at the blunt question. “Nothing.” Nothing in particular, that is. True to his name, P’tit’s still tiny, except for the huge eyes. There’s a lassitude to him, a dullness that disappoints her. But Blanche’s siblings were all older than her, so what does she know about how babies should be? At least his belly’s round; when she reports this to Arthur, he always says it’s proof that P’tit must be eating well at the Hoffmans’. “It’s the done thing, you know, back home,” she says, her voice defensive.

  “Is it?”

  “You wouldn’t remember, because you left so young. One never sees a baby in Paris; they don’t thrive in cities. And rents are so high, mothers have to work … We were all farmed out to country folk,” she goes on, struggling to remember the name of the woman who looked after her. “I barely set eyes on my family till I was—” Three? Four? Blanche doesn’t recall how old she was, the day she was brought back. Just the feeling of being deposited among strangers, in that narrow house on the urban islet of Ile Saint-Louis that, she was informed, was home.

  “So how old is your P’tit now?” asks Jenny, setting the picture back on the table.

  “Almost—” Blanche reckons the months in her head, and is startled. Last week. How could the date have gone right by without her noticing? Was she drunk that day—drunker than usual? “Just about a year,” she says vaguely. Oh, well, never mind; a one-year-old doesn’t know what a birthday is.