Frog Music (18 page)

Blanche wipes her sweaty lip. She really hasn’t had time to make any plans yet. She musters a show of confidence. “The less I’m seen around town, the more the
michetons
will be willing to stump up when I do make myself available.”

“What the newspapers call the scarcity effect.”

“You’re quite a reader, ain’t you?”

“Ah, you figured me for an illiterate swamp-dweller?”

“No, I—” Blanche doesn’t know this woman well enough yet to be sure when she’s joking.

Jenny grins, tipping their meal onto two plates.

Blanche takes a chair, perches P’tit awkwardly on her lap.

Jenny blows hard on a pair of legs and leans over to offer it to the baby.

Who surprises Blanche by closing his hand over it, as if it’s some kind of toy.

“You mean to choke him?”

“He’s a Frenchman,” says Jenny. “Got to start eating real chow sometime.”

P’tit has touched the legs to his mouth, and he’s nuzzling them with wary enthusiasm.

“Was it at your circus that you learned to dance?” asks Jenny.

Blanche nods, her mouth full of rich, winey meat. “If our Monsieur Loyal ever caught us sitting around between performances, he’d coach us in schottisches and mazurkas. And Arthur used to take me to the Bal Bullier. We saw Rigolette dance the cancan there, with nothing under her skirt.” Happy days. Long nights, when Blanche could sleep whenever she wanted to, so she didn’t go to bed till dawn.

But Jenny’s eyes have slid to P’tit. He’s dropped his bone, and a huge piece of glistening flesh protrudes from his mouth.

“Putain!”
Blanche makes a grab for it, wrenches the slippery thigh from between his gums.

He lets out a cough of protest.

Jenny’s helpless with laughter.

Blanche is not qualified to be left in charge of this child. He might be safer back on Folsom Street, she thinks with a shudder.

They’re sampling a bottle of honey-yellow Sauternes now. “So if you’re not going back to Madame Johanna, is your fancy man going to rustle up
michetons
for you?” Jenny asks.

“Never,” says Blanche sharply. “Arthur’s my lover.”

“
Loafer
, isn’t that how it’s spelled?” asks Jenny with a lopsided grin. “I guess that’s how French
macs
differ from Yankee pimps: they prefer not to lift a finger for their pay. And what about the young ape?”

“Ernest? What about him?”

“Well, is he your man too, or just your man’s man?”

Blanche doesn’t like either phrase or the bluntness of the question. “He has his own
petite amie
, Madeleine.”

“
Macs
always seem to trot around town in matched pairs,” observes Jenny. She mimes a preening horse in harness so precisely that Blanche giggles. “Guess they need pals to talk to, for whiling away the idle hours.”

“Though Arthur and Ernest do have business affairs,” Blanche puts in.

A tilt of Jenny’s eyebrows. “You mean laying out your cash on one kind of bet or another?”

Blanche can only smile for an answer. Jenny’s like a good strong drink when you didn’t even realize you needed one. Maybe the reason Blanche has never been one for making friends is that the women she’s encountered till now have bored her. Jenny’s an odd kind of woman: part boy, part clown, part animal. An original, accountable to no one, bound by no ties, who cocks her hat as she pleases. Their closeness has sprung up as rapidly and cheekily as a weed. Blanche was meant to cross Jenny’s path on Kearny Street on Saturday night, she realizes with a surge of conviction—even if the encounter left her with a few bruises. This is the friend Blanche has been waiting a quarter of a century for without even knowing it.

The scrabble of a key in the door. “Speak of the devils,” says Blanche as she gets up.

The men reek of sweet, pungent smoke. “Ah, hello again, Frog Girl,” says Arthur to Jenny. “Very cozy,” he sums up, sweeping his cane around the room as a conductor might his baton.

Blanche stiffens. If he hasn’t got the wit to realize the kind of day she’s been having, left alone with the baby—

He crosses to plant a kiss on Blanche’s cheekbone and another on P’tit’s fist. “What do you make of my son and heir these days?” he asks Ernest. As if daring him to point out the obvious.

Ernest, taking P’tit in from sparse scalp to stubby toes, keeps his own counsel. He addresses Jenny instead. “Still in pants, I see. You wouldn’t look half bad in a dress.”

Is he flirting with her? Blanche wonders.

“Oh, I used to have a whole trunkful,” Jenny assures him with a grin, “but they just didn’t seem to fit.”

“Any dinner left,
chérie
?” Arthur asks Blanche.

“Désolée,”
she apologizes, “nothing but bones.”

“We’ll go down to the chophouse at the corner in a while,” he tells Ernest, filling two glasses with the Sauternes.

Arthur’s back’s been bad, so the men have spent half the day in a den off Pacific to see what a pipe might do for it. “I used to sprinkle the stuff on my food, but I found it burned my stomach,” he’s telling Jenny.

“Any luck tonight,
mon amour
?” Blanche asks him in an undertone, bouncing P’tit on her lap.

He pulls a few coins out of his jacket and tosses them in the air. “Ernest reckons the dealer’s box was gaffed.”

“I mean, any luck finding a nursemaid!”

“Ah, yes. No.” He sighs. “Girls in this city, it turns out they’d rather grind away at any degrading shop work so long as they can boast of keeping their
independence
. Every one of them too good to go into service!”

Blanche would have appreciated knowing how many Arthur asked before coming to this conclusion; where he looked, how hard he tried before lying down on a couch to smoke opium. But she can feel her voice screwed tighter in her throat already, and Arthur won’t stand for her getting shrill, particularly when they have company.

Arthur opens another bottle of wine but spits out the first mouthful.

“Corked?” asks Blanche.

“No, just Californian,” he says, squinting at the label.
“La vie est trop courte pour boire du mauvais vin.”
He quotes the proverb grandly as he shoves the window up to empty the wine into the street.

From the darkness below comes a shout that could be protest or jubilation, it’s hard to tell.

“You could have left it for Gudrun,” Blanche rebukes him mildly.

“Why isn’t
her
life too short to drink bad wine?” wonders Jenny.

“Swedes don’t know any better,” says Ernest, pulling the cork from a dusty bottle of whiskey he’s found at the back of a cupboard.

They talk gambling for a while. “The Chinese are the most loco for it,” Jenny asserts. “Cockroach fights, grasshoppers, frog races …”

“Frog races?” Arthur lets out a cough of laughter.

“It’s the San Franciscan way,” says Ernest through a yawn.

“It’s nature’s way,” Arthur corrects him. “What’s life but one big gamble? Born with good cards or bad, you still go bust in the end.”

“No, but this place in particular—when miners throw up a town pretty much overnight,” Ernest argues, “every clod of dirt’s a lottery to them.”

“The
foutu
miners may have got here first, in ‘49,” Arthur growls, “but it was we who really made something of the place.”

“Here we go,” murmurs Blanche to Jenny.

“So they squeezed us out of their filthy camps with their Foreign Miners’ Tax,” he goes on, pronouncing it scathingly. “Did we give a rat’s ass?”

“I thought you folks arrived only last year?” asks Jenny in an undertone.

“He’s speaking for all Frenchmen,” Blanche tells her, mouth twisting with amusement at the image of her lover hoisting a pickax.

Arthur’s declaiming as loudly as some street-corner agitator now. “We turned a stinking town into a real city of bachelors. Quick as the Anglos scrabbled gold out of the streams, we raked it into our restaurants, casinos,
bordels …
” He squeezes Ernest’s shoulder. “To our glorious race, masters of the arts of pleasure!” They lift their glasses. “And to San Francisco, La Ville Sans Honte,” Arthur roars, “beautifully shameless, best spot in the world to fuck money out of nothing!”

When the toasts are done, Arthur offers cigarillos all around, but only Ernest takes one. “‘Genuine Californian, Untouched by Oriental Labor,’” he reads off the label.

“No wonder they cost so much,” jokes Arthur. “You know your little cigarettes are only the sweepings off the floor?” he asks Blanche.

“I do,
chéri
, because you tell me every time.”

Jenny’s filling a little clay pipe. “Now, this is the real deal.”

P’tit, in Blanche’s lap, starts to cough, so Blanche waves the smoke away. “Speaking of Oriental labor, aren’t Chinese men said to make first-rate nursemaids?”

“There I draw the line. Me no likee coolie curling up in one of our cupboards.” Arthur yawns as he stretches out on the sofa.

Blanche gives him a hard look. After they’ve lived in this neighborhood for a year and a half, how can he come out with that nonsense?

P’tit splutters and starts to cry. Blanche stubs her cigarette out in a saucer and stands, swaying him a little.

“It’s not good to fuss over them at the first peep,” remarks Ernest.

“Mm. You should always wait five minutes, my mother used to say,” says Arthur.

She waltzes P’tit from side to side, trying to keep her temper.
“‘Mais il est bien court,’”
she croons,
“
‘
le temps des cerises …’”
It’s very short, cherry time.

Arthur groans. “Something jollier, would you mind?”

“It’s all code for the Commune, you know,” Ernest remarks to Jenny, from the floor.

Blanche bites her lip. She shouldn’t have sung that one and got him started.

“You reckon?” asks Jenny.

“Well, the cherries stand for bullet holes …
‘Cerises d’amour au robes pareilles,’
“ Ernest belts out in a passable baritone, “‘
tombant sous la feuille en gouttes de sang …’
Drops of blood!—what else could it mean?”

It’s hard to hear him above the baby’s shrieks. Could P’tit be tired again? Hungry? Must Blanche scrub another bottle and hope the milk in the icebox hasn’t gone off?

Jenny’s voice has turned excited. “Five years ago, in Paris—you must all have been there!”

Blanche, remembering the Commune—the piles of splayed bodies in the Luxembourg Gardens—says nothing.

“We were in it up to our necks,” says Arthur.

“What, did you serve in the Guard?” Jenny, sitting up now, lets out a whistle.

“That wasn’t the only way to be a revolutionary,” snaps Ernest.

“Ernest was only a boy then,” says Arthur, patting his friend’s knee.

“We couldn’t abandon the circus,” Ernest puts in gruffly, “but we played our part …”

“We workers pushed the cannon all the way up Montmartre,” Arthur reminisces.

Blanche holds in her snort.
We workers!

“Now, that must have been some class of excitement,” marvels Jenny.

“Liberty or death! Those were the days. We turned Paris into a little republic under the red flag—for two months, anyhow,” says Arthur.

Blanche marches P’tit into the bedroom, trying to shut out the sound of Arthur going on as if he’d manned the barricades during those last battles instead of just getting into his tights and spangles as usual.

Her eyes catch on the lithograph on the wall, so familiar to her that she rarely notices it anymore. The naked girl sitting at ease on the grass beside her man, her lovely foot extended so casually between the legs of his friend in the tasseled hat, who doesn’t seem to notice … That used to be Blanche, she thinks, startled. The one everyone wanted. And now look at her, lugging a baby like some ground-down servant out of an old Dutch painting.

“Did Gudrun bring the laundry back?” asks Arthur, putting his head around the door.

“I—” Best not to say that Blanche forgot to ask Gudrun to do it. “She never took it down in the first place,” she says instead, wrinkling her nose at the basket.

“
Bordel!
I haven’t a single presentable shirt to go out in.”

“I can run down to fetch you some noodles—” Blanche’s spirits lift at the thought of even five minutes away from the baby.

Arthur shakes his head. “I need to see an Australian at the docks about a rather splendid opportunity.”

Blanche purses her lips.
Rather splendid:
that’s the chamber pot emptied of money again. “Your shirt looks fine.”

He lets out a little grunt of impatience, searching his trunk.

Blanche recalls a minstrel number a Belgian blonde does in top hat, tails, and blackface at the House of Mirrors. “‘When I go out to promenade,’” she croons with only a touch of satire, bouncing P’tit in time with the verse,

I look so fine an’ gay
,

I hab to take de dog along

To keep de gals away …

Not so much as a smile from Arthur. “A new collar, at least.” He brandishes one. “This is clean but the points need crisping up …”

She walks past him, arms full of his thrashing son, into the salon, where Ernest is teaching Jenny the last verse of the tragic ballad about the Commune.

Jenny watches as Arthur lays out the fresh collar on the table and uses tongs to set the iron into the stove’s embers. “Don’t those things poke you in the throat?” she asks.

“That’s the whole idea,” he murmurs, eyes on his work.

“The whole
point
,” puns Ernest from the sofa. “Two stilettos to the jugular saying,
Head high, monsieur
.”

“That never occurred to me,” admits Jenny.

“Because you, Mademoiselle Bonnet, are a slob who borrows the garb of our sex only for the purpose of wallowing in muck.”

She laughs at that. Then addresses the baby in Blanche’s lap, intoning with mock gravity:

There’s too much of worriment goes to a bonnet—