Frog Music (39 page)

The change of tack bewilders her. “What chicken farmer?”

“This Louis fellow, the Canadian. I checked, and he really has been in San Jose since Thursday. But it seemed a touch too convenient that he’d happen to leave San Miguel Station on the very morning of the shooting. And aren’t chicken farmers usually stone broke, and so perhaps ripe for tempting?” Cartwright speaks as if telling the plot of some thrilling dime novel.

“What are you talking about?” demands Blanche.

“The importer could have hired this Louis, you see? The wife—when I pressed her, she admitted that her husband did talk to an Italian on Wednesday, name of Lamantia.”

“You’re raving,” Blanche tells Cartwright, putting one finger on his lapel. The newsman is chalk-white in a lake of sunlight. Now that she’s taking the trouble to look at him, she can see that he probably hasn’t had any sleep since yesterday. “If this Canadian left San Miguel Station on Thursday morning then he couldn’t have shot Jenny, could he?”

“He might have contracted the job out to someone else,” says Cartwright uncertainly, “so he could go to San Jose and provide himself with an alibi, you see.”

A substitute for a substitute, like some corridor of mirrors? “It’s a crossroads in the goddamn scrublands,” Blanche retorts. “How many killers for hire do you imagine could be found there?”

“Phil Jordan?” he suggests with a shrug. “John McNamara?”

“It’s too complicated. It’s nonsense. My Arthur did it!” Blanche screams at him. (Why did she say
my
? Why, after all that’s come between her and that man, does she still slip into thinking of him as hers?) “I’ve been telling you, all of you, but none of you seems to listen.”

Cartwright’s breath hisses tiredly. “The problem is, you see, the lack of evidence—”

“Evidence be damned. Who wanted me and Jenny dead? Arthur. Because I dared to walk away from him after all these years,” says Blanche with a sob that’s almost triumphant, “and it was Jenny who gave me the strength to do it, and she died for it.”

She stalks away.

She’s almost at the gates of the cemetery when Cartwright hails her again. “Just one more question—”

Blanche groans.

“Only for background,” the journalist pleads, “to liven up the story. What was the appeal?”

Is that a legal term? she wonders.

“If I may ask, I mean—” His cheeks are rose red. “What was it that attached you so powerfully to this particular girl?”

Blanche stares at him. And growls, “You never met her.”

On Dupont, when she finally gets back to Chinatown from the cemetery, the evening heat’s streaking the burnt cork on a young song-seller’s cheeks. On arrival in America, Blanche was disconcerted by blackface minstrels, but now she doesn’t bat an eye even when they’re wearing skirts. This one is pealing out his song in falsetto, holding up the freshly inked lyric sheets in one hand and his petticoats in the other:

The bullfrog married the tadpole’s sister
,

Old Aunt Jemima, Oh! Oh! Oh!

He smacked his lips and then he kissed her
,

Old Aunt Jemima, Oh! Oh! Oh!

He doesn’t look at all bad, actually; prettier than some real girls. The music gives Blanche a reason to stand still and catch her breath.

She says if you love me as I love you
,

Old Aunt Jemima, Oh! Oh! Oh!

No knife can cut our love in two
,

Old Aunt Jemima, Oh! Oh! Oh!

Her thoughts move turgidly. She has to do it, this one last show for Madame Johanna tonight. After clearing her spurious debt to the madam, Blanche should have almost three hundred dollars left. That should be enough to buy her some kind of future. Rent, food, clothes. It’ll give her time to hide away from the
macs
, at least, and wait for P’tit—or for news that he’s never coming back. Blanche presses her hand to her face for a moment.

She steps aside to avoid a knot of tourists following their guide out of a temple, all of them clutching overpriced incense sticks. Then she walks the other way, toward the House of Mirrors.

In a few minutes she’s standing by the stately doors of the blue-and-white mansion. The sign is fresh painted and almost as tall as Blanche.

FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY!

THE LIVELY FLEA’S FAREWELL TO THE TOWN
.

LAST DANCE OF MURDERED GIRL’S BOSOM PAL
.

Well, Blanche might have known Madame would milk the tragedy. She’s almost surprised there isn’t a large drawing of Blanche wearing nothing but a bloodstained corset.

The expressionless doorman lets her in. She can hear waves of laughter from the Grand Saloon; she pauses and puts her eye to the crack between the doors as she’s passing. Some burlesque about the epidemic? Lola and Paquita with what looks like—could it be?—fresh cranberries pasted all over their arms, chests, and faces. A month since Blanche has been here. The gaudy thick carpets, oil paintings, marbles, and, above all, the long mirrors are a shock to her senses.

She turns down the corridor that’s just for performers. Her skin crawls. Just one last time.

The empty dressing room at the end has been freshly wallpapered. She fingers the familiar costumes. Hourglass-shaped ball gowns, orthodox enough until they end above the knee. Military: fringed trunks, frogging, and tassels. The Andalusian outfit has a calf-length split skirt and castanets. The alabaster statue costume, more or less transparent. Hamlet, complete with Yorick’s skull, and boots that lace to the thigh. A bowl of wax fruit, a bow and arrow … Nothing looks appealing. It was always shoddy glamour, Blanche can see that now.

Suddenly decisive, she pulls on a peasant skirt from one costume, a shiny bodice from the Andalusian set, a little bolero jacket.

There’s a faint tap at the door. “My dear, so glad,” says Madame Johanna, putting her head around the door. Then her eyebrows soar. “All in mourning black tonight?”

“It seemed fitting.” Blanche keeps her eyes on the tiny faux-pearl buttons she’s doing up. “Ever so tasteful, the sign out front,” she adds, scathing.

The Prussian spreads her cloud-gray sleeves. “My doors are open to all who seek sensation. I don’t discriminate.”

“Well, that’s for sure,” Blanche mutters, tugging an opera glove up past her elbow. She needs to ask about Lamantia, just to put to rest that strange theory of Cartwright’s that she’s been turning over and over in her mind. But she’ll wait until after she’s danced, because she can’t afford to start another quarrel right now.

“The Professor wants to know what you mean to treat us to tonight.”

“‘Flea’ and ‘Bang Away, Lulu,’” says Blanche.

A pause. “Just two numbers?”

“Oh, I think that’ll provide enough
sensation
.”

Madame is clearly debating whether to press the point, to demand a lot more for the extraordinary fee of five hundred dollars. Instead she withdraws.

Blanche goes to stand outside the door to the stage, recognizing the final thumps of Fabienne’s flamenco skipping-rope act. The piano’s been tuned, which is some relief. She goes over her routines in her head, trying to block out the sound of Madame’s hushed, thrilling voice as she warms up the crowd for the enigmatic Blanche la Danseuse.

Blanche opens the door a crack to check whether the lights have gone low. She waits for silence. The excited babble of the audience dies away in the near dark.

She walks onto the little stage, as formal as some courtier. A storm of applause when the lights flare up. Blanche averts her face until the cheering subsides. She makes a rapid scan of the whole room: not a single velvet chair is empty, and there’s no sign of Lamantia, thank Christ. He can’t have been involved in the murder; he just can’t. But then what was he doing out at San Miguel Station on Wednesday?

The tune is a nervous tarantella, slow at first, then it starts to hurry, and Blanche twitches. It’s a simple routine, no intricate steps to remember or feats of flexibility to perform. She simply pretends there’s something in her clothes, flea, spider, skeeter, bee, wasp—it really doesn’t matter so long as she imagines it vividly enough. The music’s half the trick of it: stop and start, itchily agitated, then more and more maddened as the invisible parasite starts to bite. Madame’s always advertised the Lively Flea as Blanche’s specialty, “straight from gay Paree,” and in June, when some girl on California Street started doing it, Madame sent a bouncer over to put paid to that. But the fact is, Blanche picked the gist of the act up from another showgirl who spent only a few weeks at the House of Mirrors before heading off to Chicago. The only difference is that Blanche plays it in earnest, not for laughs.

Tonight what she pictures is one of the vicious mosquitoes from San Miguel Station. She flinches, twists, spins around on herself. Her fingers pursue the invisible invader up her gloves, down her neck, under her sweeping black hem. Every
micheton
in the house must be able to imagine where the bug’s got to, every tiny fold and crevice.

The tarantella’s driving Blanche out of her mind now, and she’s peeling her gloves off and flinging them away, her own hands molesting her, plunging up her skirt, raking her thighs, clawing at her skin as if she wants to shed it … No flesh-colored tights tonight because she’s broken with protocol, and her pale, flawless legs are bare. Her eyes are terrified. She wrenches off the bolero jacket, hears a seam rip. She fights her hair in its chignon until it falls down. She tears the black satin bodice open down the middle and fake pearls explode onto the floorboards.

Some of the
michetons
in the audience look more alarmed than aroused, it occurs to Blanche, but does she give a good goddamn? She goes into one last fit of frenzy and collapses in the middle of the stage.

“Whoooooo!” Men are throwing up their hats and catching them, roaring “Blanche! Blanche! Blanche!”

She waits for the clamor to die away. Do they like her like this, laid low? Hair in her eyes, kohl halfway down her cheeks, kneeling in a plain corset and drawers like any destroyed woman?

The Professor’s eyes are as neutral as ever. He gives Blanche that private nod that means
Ready?
Then launches into the simple, jolly chords of her last number.

Rage; Blanche recognizes the feeling at last. Deep down revulsion at the prospect of spending another night of her life turning this old crank.

She summons her forces and stands. Hand on one hip, like some slapdash streetwalker. “‘I wish I was a diamond,’” she begins sweetly,

Upon my Lulu’s hand
,

And every time I wiped my ass

I’d see the promised land
,

Oh, Lordy—

Her gestures are broad, almost clownish, and the men love it. For the chorus she throws out her arms, conducting the audience like an orchestra.

Bang away, Lulu—

Bang away good and strong
.

Oh, what’ll we do for a damn good screw

When our Lulu’s dead and gone?

Blanche used to find this song funny, used to relish its casual obscenity. Tonight for the first time, she’s struck by how sad it is.

She capers blithely across the stage. “‘My Lulu had a baby—’” Her voice wobbles badly over the word; she didn’t see that one coming. But she presses on, only a note or two behind the piano.

She named it Sunny Jim
.

She dropped it in the pee-pot
,

To see if it could swim
.

P’tit in a culvert, a storm drain, a sewer?
Don’t. Don’t. Sing on
.

First it went to the bottom
,

And then it came to the top
.

Then my Lulu got excited

And grabbed it by the cock
,

Oh, Lordy—

She won’t falter, won’t offer Madame any excuse to dock her pay tonight. She’ll give all the sons of bitches their money’s worth. She dances faster and faster. The verse about the candle, the verse about the railroad coupling pin. The
michetons
join in the chorus every time, thrilled by the filthy words. Blanche has the impression she could sing on forever and these men would stay here, hunched over their erections, roaring their part back at her.

Some girls work in offices
,

Some girls work in stores
.

But Lulu works in a hotel
,

With forty other whores
,

Oh, Lordy—

She trots out the verse about the sister with syphilis, the one about the minister, the one about the trucker. This song is never going to end. As in some dance of death, the characters parade in Blanche’s mind’s eye, all these grotesque humping revelers.