Authors: Emma Donoghue
Back in the middle of August. When Jenny Bonnet heads off across the City in the green shirt Arthur’s lent her that humid Sunday morning, the other three fall into their beds.
Blanche wakes hours later, twisted in her nightgown with a head that’s pounding worse than her bashed-up leg, sun stabbing her in the eye. (Arthur claims it would be intolerably bourgeois to hang curtains. He and Blanche have squabbled over it just about every morning since the heat wave began.)
Her dream comes back to her now, an endless loop from last night’s conversation about the photograph.
What’s wrong with your baby?
Nothing
.
What kind of farm?
It’s for his health
.
What’s wrong with him?
Beside her lies Arthur, very still, his cheek marble. Tiny black hairs thrusting through perfect pores: a forest sprung up overnight. Blanche should keep gazing at her naked fancy man instead of brooding over some stranger’s nosy questions.
Will Arthur mind if she wakes him up? Not if she does it right. Not if her hand takes its time snaking through the crumpled sheets.
Her eye falls on the little carte de visite in its frame. So much of the baby’s swaddled, it’s hard to get a sense of his face from it. Two weeks old, three? She remembers carrying P’tit up a flight of stairs to her Scottish lodgers’ studio. Blanche was feeling almost enthusiastic that day; not yet too exhausted, because P’tit slept a lot. They may not have welcomed the news of a child, she and Arthur, but they had good intentions, didn’t they? They meant to make room for the little stranger in their life somehow, to carry the metamorphosis off with grace. Family life, bohemian-style. But everything changed a little while after that photograph, when P’tit got hungrier and began to gnaw Blanche, and her breast swelled monstrously, the fever making her loco …
So who was that jailbird to interrogate Blanche about having him nursed out, anyhow? To make her feel negligent for not having inspected the Hoffmans’ farm inch by inch, and obscurely guilty for not keeping P’tit at home in Chinatown!
On his visits to her, at the House of Mirrors, he’s always so … limp. Blanche has a private uneasiness—so private that she’s never spoken it aloud—that he may have been born a little lacking. That perhaps all those things she did with all those
michetons
while she was carrying P’tit inside her did some obscure damage. But surely someone would have mentioned it, if so—the midwife, Madame, Arthur, the uniformed nurse who brings him into town once a month; somebody would have told Blanche if he was defective. So, then, the way P’tit is must be the way babies are.
She shakes her head to banish these gloomy thoughts. And begins to sing, very faintly, to get herself back in a lewd mood, that melody that was on every woman’s lips when Blanche, Arthur, and Ernest left France, and when they stepped off the
Utopia
on the other side of the ocean.
“‘Voici la fin de la semaine
—
’”
It’s the weekend, and the lady’s looking for love wherever she can find it. The lines prowl up and down, feline.
Qui veut m’aimer?
Je l’aimerai
.
I’ll love whoever loves me, and why not? Looking down at herself this morning, as she slides closer to her sleeping man, Blanche is grateful for her white sleekness; inside her nightgown, hip and belly and breast are seal-plump and ageless. When her clothes are off, who’d know she’s twenty-four? She murmurs on:
Qui veut mon âme?
Elle est à prendre
.
Who wants me should take me, the singer urges.
Blanche finds Arthur’s sleep-swollen
cigare
with her hand, then with her lips, casting the lightest of spells. As cocks go, it’s not particularly long, but it’s the thickest she’s ever encountered. She could have him jammed inside her before he even knows it. She did that all the time when she was pregnant—desperate, night, noon, and morning, and Arthur liked her that way. If you have an itch, why not scratch it?
And surely Blanche has got the right. Doesn’t she treat her
mac
well, lavish gifts on him, fund every scheme he dreams up? Arthur’s still asleep, but who could object to waking this way, up to the hilt in a woman’s mouth as if some dirty dream has come true? Besides, what better cure for a sore head …
“Putain,”
Arthur swears under his breath, eyes suddenly wide, and he smiles, because what man wouldn’t? And what woman wouldn’t be glad to make him smile that way with every trick her grappling tongue can invent?
It’s the slight movement of the sticky air that lets her know the door of the bedroom has opened. Blanche is only half surprised when she notices Arthur’s eyes fixed over her shoulder: that luxurious look of watching himself being watched. The expression he used to wear on the platform, standing very erect, waiting to catch the fly bar.
“Don’t let me interrupt,
mon vieux
” comes Ernest’s voice, half yawning, from the doorway.
And from this position Blanche can’t see if Arthur’s beckoned to his young friend or if Ernest has simply walked in or if Blanche could even be said to have invited him, by a wriggle, if ever so slight, or by simply not protesting, because her mouth is full, after all. “You don’t mind,
chérie
,” Arthur murmurs, his damp hand coiling her hair, not a question but a statement, a reminder, a reassurance, because why would Blanche mind being looked at from any angle? The lovely motion of her hips under white cotton, the dip and duck and bend of her head … Blanche la Danseuse, known for movements so beautifully obscene that customers spill down Sacramento Street boasting of the banknotes they’ve thrown under her smooth heels.
So she says nothing, does nothing but carry on doing what she does best as Arthur starts to groan. Isn’t she his, hasn’t she always been Arthur’s? And what’s Arthur’s is Ernest’s, because that’s the kind of man Arthur is: generous to a fault. He’s never cared about the stupid
michetons
who lavish their cash on Blanche, and in return she doesn’t care—well, doesn’t much care—about other women. The
possibility
of other women, that is, because she doesn’t know of any in particular. But a man so handsome—there must occasionally be other women, no? Arthur would never rub her face in it. He has manners. It’s all part and parcel of being a free spirit, because if love isn’t free, then, as Arthur says, it’s just goddamn marriage without the name.
Ernest is a watcher; sometimes that’s all he requires. But not today. When Blanche feels the younger man’s fingers sliding the nightgown up over her hips, does she mind? That’s the curious thing: sometimes you object and sometimes you don’t and sometimes you crave it so much it makes you sick. Right now, for instance, Blanche can’t tell whether she wants Arthur’s friend.
Their
friend, she supposes, though never exactly
her
friend. Ernest is an ape below the line on his neck where his razor stops—one black swoop from shoulders to shins. The pelt ages him, so no one would guess he’s only twenty-one. Blanche can’t see him right now, can’t see anything but the pale swoop of Arthur’s belly, a little softer than it used to be when he was young. She mustn’t get pregnant again, she really mustn’t. Her little box of carbolic plugs in the bureau. “Wait,” she says, “I ain’t—”
“Prends-la dans le cul,”
he murmurs to Ernest, playing her nipples the way he might the strings of a guitar.
So Ernest does. It blurs Blanche’s senses, the gentleness on her breasts and the hard insistence at her ass. Confusion swindles her into sensation.
Qu’importe
; whether or not she wants Arthur and Ernest to take her at both ends hardly matters at this point. The trampling on her will rather excites her; her body likes having its mind made up for it. So she gasps, letting Ernest in.
The rhythmic friction between desire and disgust; Blanche knows that from the little stage at the House of Mirrors where she doles it out Wednesday and Saturday evenings. Right now she’s panting and aching, her jaw crammed to bursting with Arthur’s hot girth, her wrists taking her weight as Ernest speeds up the terrible pressure deep inside her, but she knows there is in fact no limit to what she can take. Blanche is the conduit, the river, the rope, the electrical current. They’re fucking right through her, the smooth man and the hairy man, and she’s going to drink down every drop they’ve got, their spill one unbroken seam of gold through the shattering rock.
Sunday’s payday at the House of Mirrors, so Blanche strolls down the block to the
bordel
that afternoon in mid-August. A new red-and-white costume, but no jewelry, because she’s always dressed so eye-catchingly that she needs none. Arthur’s the magpie of the two of them, his fob always thick with baubles; like most men of the sporting set, he prefers to wear his gold.
She pauses to listen to a harpist pluck out a serenade. Her right leg is aching from last night’s collision with Jenny Bonnet’s high-wheeler, and the rest of her still throbs in a better way from what she and Arthur and Ernest got up to this morning.
Parasols and umbrellas form a flotilla along Sacramento Street, silk shields held up against the merciless flood of light. A general air of dishevelment, businessmen in shirtsleeves, women half bare and mopping at themselves with handkerchiefs. Every store Blanche passes is crammed with loiterers who’ll stay in there as long as the shop boys will let them; every bar filled with whoever can afford a drink an hour.
Madame Johanna’s Italianate mansion is angel blue, with snowy paintwork; the epitome of taste. The porter’s muscle-bound in his cyan livery. He’s said to be Dutch, though Blanche has never heard a word out of him, nor out of the black maid who brings her downstairs to Madame’s private parlor. Blanche once teased Madame about hiring mutes, but Madame told her that all of the servants came fully equipped; they just knew how to hold their tongues.
The parlor walls are a muted lavender. This could be a visiting room in a well-endowed convent instead of the City’s most notorious brothel. Bookcases bulwark the walls, heavy with volumes in German, French, English. The carpet is primly patterned with lozenges—so unlike the red-tufted extravaganza in the Grand Saloon upstairs. Blanche can hear the Professor there now, practicing a crowd-pleaser at top speed, with too much pedal.
The proprietor sits at her desk, in ashy silk as always, with colorless hair as sleek as plaster; she could be any age at all. Madame holds up one finger to make Blanche wait. “‘Reduced rates for parties from out of town,’” she murmurs, finishing her copperplate-script sentence, then lifting the page to check the carbon paper.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to get up your circulars on a typewriter?” Blanche wonders.
“Ah, but our visitors appreciate the personal touch.” Madame sets down her pen, lets her little glasses drop on their gold chain, and stands up to kiss Blanche lightly on both cheeks. “Who’d have thought this business would require so much paperwork?”
Blanche picks up a cabinet card from a stack of photographs beside the envelopes: a girl with heavily kohled eyes, bare limbs sliding out of Moorish draperies. “Sal’s too skinny for Eastern,” she comments. “Those matchstick legs!”
“She’s got a notion to try a number with fringed tights and a hat in the shape of a horse’s head,” mentions Madame.
Blanche cackles. She chooses an overstuffed chair. She thinks back to her eight years at the Cirque d’Hiver: at least there the horses were real, even if the pay was much lower than what she makes at the House of Mirrors.
“Well, variety’s the main thing. Though Madame Bertha is still stuffing all her girls into frilly white nightgowns,” Madame Johanna adds, jerking her head contemptuously in the direction of the rival brothel down the street, “presumably to disguise the fact that half of them are over twenty.”
Is that a jibe at Blanche’s age? She counterattacks: “Have you any auctions coming up?”
“Oh yes,” says Madame, pretending not to register the barbed tone, and she reads from her circular:
The House of Mirrors is celebrated not only for the
range
of delights on offer but for their
utmost freshness
, notably on the first Friday of every month.
“Does it ever stick in your craw?” asks Blanche.
Madame’s gaze is saintly. “Just because bidders may fancy that a girl is nine years old does not mean that’s the case.”
Blanche grimaces, picturing Madame’s supplier; she’s met the man only once, in a corridor upstairs, but that was enough to give her the creeps. “It doesn’t mean she’s fourteen either.”
“Since to consent—legally—she must be ten, logically she must be that, at least.”
“Logically! Anyhow, I bet your fellow’s notion of consent is a little bottle of laudanum,” says Blanche.
The Prussian shrugs her shoulders as if they’re stiff. “Well. You wouldn’t deny a girl her one chance to make a real killing? The fortunes some fools will throw down to stake a first claim, or to delude themselves that’s what they’re doing … The virgin trade should really be considered a way of milking money from mugs, rather like the forms of speculation on which the loafers of California spend their all. Or their lady friends’ all, of course.”
Blanche leans back in the chair and smiles. “I don’t think I’ve ever come to pick up my wages without your managing to get in some dig at my fancy man.”
“True,” says Madame, “I’ve never quite grasped the point of Deneve. Talented on the trapeze once—I’ll take your word for that—but what can he do on the ground?”
The funny thing is, Arthur calls Madame
the splendid Prussian
; he has no idea that she holds him in contempt. “He did bring me here,” Blanche observes.