The Painted Girls Read online

  Antoinette

  That old Pluque, such a louse, with the way he said my name, not a minute ago, when I was upstairs telling him I brought Marie and Charlotte to audition for the school. “Antoinette van Goethem,” he said, so full of scorn, like I picked his pocket a dozen times, and right in front of Marie and Charlotte. Not that either took notice—not with Marie blanched whiter than the pearly teeth of Charlotte and Charlotte curtseying like she was bowing down to a herd of abonnés, applauding on their feet. Old Pluque, he won’t like it, not a bit, such airs as she puts on.

  When the girls were in the toilet, changing into practice skirts—the loge of the petits rats was a hundred flights of stairs away—I said how it is with Papa dead and Maman turned to absinthe and me left in charge of two girls who don’t have the smallest clue about fending for themselves. I let him know I knew all about the abonnés, how there are some who don’t give a lick whether a girl is twelve or sixteen, and in a final bit of petitioning on behalf of Marie, that no way was Charlotte wandering the corridors of the Opéra without her sister close at hand. “You turn an eye the other way,” I said. “I know enough to know I can’t count on you.”

  And old Pluque, he had the nerve to say, “Those sisters of yours, they’d be better off looking after themselves.” But I did not blurt out about staying up half the night mending stockings and washing practice skirts and worrying myself to death. I did not say about pinching eggs on account of those two girls or fussing with their hair. No, I thought about Marie and Charlotte and clamped my lips tight.

  I spend a minute in the darkened stairwell, waiting for the hotness of my cheeks to fade. Sure as sure Madame Gagnon is going to step into my path, and I will not give her the happiness of seeing my face red.

  Passing by her loge, I peek past the door, and there she is, loathing in her slanty eyes that old Pluque is truthfully upstairs considering Marie and Charlotte. “Old Pluque said to thank you for not delaying the girls,” I say. “And don’t you worry none. I let him know you are good and miffed about the way he don’t bother with the register.”

  “Never did you know when to keep that trap of yours shut.”

  I lift my skirt and make a little curtsey. “Well, then,” I say, “off to see what Monsieur Leroy’s got for me.”

  Monsieur Leroy hires the walkers-on at the Opéra, signing us up for a week’s work at a time, and scowling Madame Gagnon—she knows she don’t have a chance of poisoning him against me. Forever he is walking clear around the office of the chief of singing, all so he don’t have to pass by her loge, not when she is always lecturing about the register he don’t often bother to update.

  I join the line outside his office and lean up against the wall, thinking it miserly that the Opéra don’t splurge on a couple of benches for the walkers-on, especially when the dressing rooms of the étoiles are all done up with draped silk and tassels and chaises longues an empress would see fit to use. I never been inside one. But I expect what I hear is true. Always, even when the evening’s entertainment is an opera, an abonné gets his moment of leering at the ballet girls upon the stage, at least the fifteen minutes of a ballet divertissement stuck between the acts; and if he wants more, just a stairwell away is the Foyer de la Danse. It is where the abonnés linger during intermission and before the curtains open up, always without their wives, all barred from going inside. Around them the most beloved of the ballet girls limber up, wearing close to nothing, an ankle upon the barre positioned at the eye level of the abonnés gulping champagne upon the banquettes. Those nearby dressing rooms of the étoiles, they have to be grand. No one would want the richest of the abonnés, the ones venturing up to the rooms as invited guests, complaining about the shabbiness of the decor.

  The lineup is not much, not yet, and I hate to talk low about my fellow walkers-on, even if my words are true, but plenty of them are dawdling on their lumpy mattresses, heads splitting and mouths pasty dry from drinking up the two francs Monsieur Leroy handed over after the curtain dropped last night. I reach second in line, so very close to sitting down across from Monsieur Leroy, when a boy I put at eighteen gets up from the spot. He is passing through the office doorway when he winks a saucy wink. Boys don’t wink usually, not at me, and I look over my shoulder, but there is only a child with a scabbed nose and then after him, an old lady missing both her eyeteeth. With the winker already stepping into the corridor, I miss the chance to look to my feet, smiling the smallest little smile, just enough so that saucy winker can guess about me being pleased. He was not much to look at, no, not with that scrub-brushy hair of his creeping low on his forehead and his black eyes sinking too deep beneath the weighty ridge of his brow and his jaw looking like the sort on those dogs it is best to steer away from in the streets. Still, I like a boy who winks.

  I make up my mind then and there to wink back next time, but then I start to wonder about missing my only chance. I ditch the lineup, figuring that boy cannot have got much past the back gate of the Opéra. But outside there is no sign of him. “Dunce,” I say. Now it is back to waiting all over again in that miserable line of Monsieur Leroy, but as I turn back to the Opéra, there is the winking boy, leaning up against the wall, his foot propped behind him and a home-rolled smoke hanging from his lips.

  He winks, and I wink back.

  He pulls on his smoke. “I like a girl who winks,” he says.

  Looking to the scuffed toes of my boots, I say, “You a walker-on?”

  “Just for a bit of fun. You?”

  “I appear on the stage pretty regular, most nights, some afternoons, too, if they are figuring out about the blocking and need someone for holding a spot. You get anything today?”

  “Old Leroy says I got to pay a fine before I get anything more,” he says. “Three minutes late and he tells me I owe half an evening’s wage.”

  I don’t say about the fines being nothing new, just shift my weight onto my back leg, thinking to chat for a bit.

  “Those ballet girls and singers, always on the stage, they aren’t paying fines.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” I say. Almost always when I tell about being a ballet girl, back before, a boy leans in close. “Was once a ballet girl myself.”

  His eyes wander over me, head to toe and then back up again. “A coryphée?”

  I nod, finishing with my chin jutting a little high. It is the posture I take when I lie, particularly with Maman, and most often my lofty chin is enough to shut her up. I never did pass the examination elevating me from the second quadrille to the first, never mind the ones coming after that; but the winker, he don’t know one rank from the next and no need to start explaining about the lowest rung—second quadrille—and the rungs that come after that—first quadrille, coryphée, sujet, première danseuse, étoile.

  He takes another pull and tilts his head back, his chin ending up just a little higher than my own. “Prove it,” he says.

  Arms croisé, I plié in fourth position, and then, rising onto the toes of my left foot, I bring the toes of my right to my knee and whirl around fast, whipping that lifted leg out to the side and then pulling the toes back to the knee. I make the turn again and again—eight very nice fouettés en tournant, even with my skirt getting in the way. I stop steadily, and feeling foolish now that I showed off the only step that ever got me a nod from old Pluque, I make a lowly curtsey, worthy of a walker-on.

  He breathes out a whistle, long and low. “Got time for a glass?” he says.

  Marie and Charlotte are meeting me at the bench just inside the doors when they are done, and I’ve got to see Monsieur Leroy, and there is the broom of Madame Legat to borrow, the clipped locks of Marie’s hair to be swept up. Also there is Charlotte, who is going be leaping with excitement and expecting kisses and Marie filled up with trepidation no matter what the morning held.

  “Can’t,” I say to the winker. “Waiting for my sisters.” Smoke drifting up from his parted lips, I jerk my thumb in the direction of the rear entrance. “They are
seeing about spots in the dance school.”

  “Not you?”

  “Done with all that.”

  The weighty ridge of his brow lifts up.

  I hold my back good and straight. “Not pretty enough.”

  “You got pretty eyes,” he says. “Like chocolate pools.” The winker leans in, putting his face close enough that I smell his smoky breath. “I like how straight you stand up, too.”

  “No slouching. Not in the ballet.” I tilt my chin toward the couple of practice rooms tucked up under the rafters of the Opéra roof.

  “Come for a glass,” he says. “A glass and a few laughs.”

  “Maybe a drop of cassis, so long as it’s somewhere close.”

  “I’m Émile.” He squashes the butt of his smoke on the Opéra wall, leaving a sooty streak. “Émile Abadie.”

  “Antoinette van Goethem,” I say, and he takes my hand from hanging at my side and puts a kiss just beneath the wrist.

  “I know a place.”

  We walk side by side, passing two cafés, both with maître d’s out front, wearing aprons stiff with starch. We come to a corner and instead of saying “We turn here,” he puts his fingers on my back, steering me off the main boulevard, and then he leaves them there, hovering light and then a little heavier when I don’t do anything to dodge those hot fingertips.

  The tavern we enter is musty smelling and dimly lit with yellowed tiles covering the walls. I like it right away, reminding me as it does of a place Papa used to take me for a five-sou meal up in the place Pigalle. We slide in, along one of the straight-backed benches lining the walls, so that we are sitting side by side behind a long table that could stand the touch of a rag.

  For me he orders cassis and water and for himself, a glass of red wine. The drinks come fast, and I gulp mine down, thinking a bit of bolstering can do no harm. “Smoke?” he says, nudging a home-roll across the tabletop.

  “Don’t smoke.”

  He lights up, makes a little smirk on seeing my glass close to drained and says, “I’ll be getting you something a little stronger next time around.”

  “A glass of red,” I say, “since you’re such a bossy boy.”

  I ask where he lives, and he says he used to stay at his mother’s place, the place where he spent most of his years, in the faubourgs, east side. He is moving around just now, splitting his time between one friend and the next. “You know how it is, wherever I find an empty corner.” I keep my eyebrows from creeping up that he don’t have so much as a mattress and yet is gulping red wine.

  By the time he gets around to asking about my family, my third glass is ordered and drained, and I feel a growing warmth toward a boy so accustomed to enjoying himself. He makes a habit of nodding when I talk, and he keeps his eyes from straying, even when a pair of giggling girls comes into the tavern, and I have this feeling, like there is not a single place he would rather be than beside me on the bench. I tell him about Marie and her nose always stuck in a newspaper and Charlotte and her dancer’s feet and Maman and her swelling sadness. I say about Papa being a fine tailor and coughing until he could not go to the porcelain factory to stitch the overalls no more and taking his last breath with his three girls all cuddled around and then Maman blubbering for us to get him onto the floor before the mattress got spoiled. Émile says about his own father, how he was gone even before Émile was born. He says it is something I should think about when I feel down about Papa. And it is true, I remember him bouncing me on his knee and plucking a button from behind my ear and singing good and loud and twirling around each of his girls and then Maman when we heard the fiddle music through the planks of our floor. Émile got none of that, only a string of no-goods who came and went as they pleased. One of them pawned his slingshot. Another busted his clavicle. He undoes two of his shirt buttons and pulls the collar wide, showing me the lump left behind. I put two fingers on the lump, the black hairs creeping high on his brawny chest. He buttons up his shirt, shrugs in a way that says it don’t matter in the least and orders another round.

  We drink up, and there is no denying my drunkenness, not when he says about his mother siding with the brute and throwing Émile’s belongings out into the street, and I lay my hand upon his arm. “Another?” he says, and I want to say yes, but already he spent a lot and I don’t have so much as a single sou. I wave away the question and take the smallest mouthful of red wine. I keep talking, spacing out my sips, dreading the bottom of the glass and leaving that musty tavern where the bristle hairs of his forearm are tickling the skin of my own.

  I tell about Monsieur LeBlanc standing in our doorway, his belly bursting from beneath his waistcoat, about him demanding three months’ rent, and maybe it lets Émile in on me being without a single sou, or maybe it is just that he is dreading the bottom of the glass, too. Either way, he says, “Come on, Antoinette, let me buy you another glass. We’re having such a lovely time.”

  He orders another round, also mussels in parsley sauce and a plate of radishes, and I know the moment when I could’ve got myself back to the Opéra in time for Marie and Charlotte is long past. He puts the mussels into my mouth with his fingers and bites into radishes and slides the leftover half onto my tongue. We stay late into the afternoon, laughing and licking wine from our lips, his hand on my thigh, back and forth, moving ever higher and me not minding in the least.

  Only a woman sitting slumped across the tavern stays as long as we do, always gazing down, just past the glass of cassis she cannot muster the will to take. It breaks my heart, the loneliness in the face of that woman, the fellow sitting beside her, reading the newspaper and dozing off without so much as a moment’s notice given over to her, and here is what I imagine brought her to this place. She spent the evening before at the Élysée Montmartre, watching all those ladies with black stockings and ruffled petticoats kicking up their legs but mostly lifting a glass and mingling and flirting and seeking out a way not to be so lonesome no more. After the dance hall, it was off to the Rat-Mort for her and more laughing and carrying on and maybe a bowl of soup before putting down her head in a tiny room off the likes of the rue Bréda or the rue de Douai. Half past eleven in the morning, she got herself up and tied the soiled petticoat from the night before around her waist. She put on that drab cloak, not bothering about the wrinkles or even half the ties, and slunk her way to the tavern, counting on a glass of cassis to take the sting out of another day. But now, sitting here, she finds herself not wishing in the least to start the rigmarole all over again.

  I whisper some of this to Émile, letting his scrub-brushy hair tickle my nose, letting my bottom lip dampen the lobe of his ear. He shuts his eyes, tilts his head back, leaning it against the yellowed tiles. “Let’s go, Antoinette. Let’s get out of here.”

  He steers me out of the tavern, hanging on to my arm, me stumbling and bumping the table of that lonely lady as we go. She looks up from her knocked-over glass, and I see her hopeful, her sagging cheeks lifting to round. But we don’t strike up a conversation. No, Émile only reaches into his pocket and, into the pooled cassis, he puts two francs, enough that he don’t owe her a moment of his day.

  Then we are behind the tavern, in the shadows there. I have my back against the wall, and the hand of Émile is on my neck, tender, but then he is pressing up against me, and he is not so gentle no more. Against my hip, I feel what I done to him, the hardness there, and I open my mouth to his rooting tongue. My head swirling, his hands pawing at the drawstring of my blouse, yanking at the neckline, I think about this being what a lip—my lip—on the lobe of an ear brings.

  My first time it was a boy, a walker-on at the Opéra. He said to follow him, and I trailed behind, through the labyrinth of passageways beneath the Opéra. Why not? His face was pretty, except for the pockmarked skin, and it was not a bit usual for a boy to pay attention to me. He kissed me and stroked me and got down to doing what it was he brought me to the passageways to do. But back upstairs, that boy, he did not have the decency to call me by m
y name. No, he just looked the other way, and I guessed it was seeing me so up close or maybe the way I held myself so rigid beneath his pumping body that pushed him into ignoring me.

  Émile is like a madman, sucking, mauling, pressing in, and none of it feels very nice, not like the slow moving hands of the boy at the Opéra. I think about calling him off. And then my heart pounds, just a little, because I doubt him listening even if I do. He hikes up my skirt and hauls down my drawers, and I wonder about this moment being the cost of wine and mussels in parsley sauce and bristle hairs tickling my arm. His fingers grope and poke and prod a tender place, and I call out, “You’re hurting me,” and when it don’t alter anything at all, I put my hands upon his shoulders and one foot upon his thigh and give a mighty shove. He staggers back, his dark eyes upon me, my half nakedness. I pull my blouse up over my shoulders with trembling hands. I remember my ugliness and turn away.

  “Antoinette,” he says. “You make me crazy, is all.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “I’ll walk you.”

  “I want to go by myself.” Hauling up my drawers, holding my blouse in place, I set out.

  Close to where the alleyway meets the street, he catches up. “Antoinette,” he says, grabbing my arm, letting go when I jerk it away. With him staying put, I know he don’t have the intention of keeping me prisoner, and I stop.

  “Give it to that landlord of yours,” he says, holding out a fistful of coins, plenty of them silver, a couple of them gold.

  “A soldiers’ mattress. That’s what you think?” I sound like Charlotte, sniveling over the smallest slight.

  “It’s what I got left.”

  “Don’t want it.”

  He nudges those coins toward me. With my own belly full and those of abandoned Marie and Charlotte empty, empty like my evenings next week now that it is too late for Monsieur Leroy, I turn my back in a pitiful show of pride.