Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

She stood and came around her desk, leaning against it to lift my chin with her own hand, and brought her face down before mine.

Do not be sad, then. Be proud. The night is a wonderful country to rule. Welcome to the Majeurs-Plaisirs.

§

Afterward, as I sat in that dark hall, moving from peephole to peephole, turning the hourglass as I did, I felt as if I were a ghost hidden in the walls. The peepholes were either scratched into the silver at the back of a mirror, or looked out through mantels, or were an “eye” set so as to resemble the eye in a painting, or one of a series of glass beads along the base of a lamp.

In the first, I saw a stout soldier, naked, his face firmly between one woman’s buttocks as another smacked him from behind and he cried out without lifting his face or running away or striking her. In the second, a woman I soon realized as Euphrosyne in performance as a young girl, waiting for the return of her chaperone at the opera and surprised by her visitor. She was enacting a melodrama, during which he called her by another name, that culminated in her being ravished by him — at which point Odile, playing the chaperone, returned to catch and punish him. In the third, a woman held out her delicate bare foot, and a man spread across the floor kissed it, murmuring her name, begging to do more than that.

She refused until he perfected his kisses to her content.

Anytime you wonder, Odile said later, as to a lover’s devotion to another, anytime it seems ridiculous, there is only ever one reason.

What reason? I asked, for I knew it was a prompt. We were seated in one of the theaters as a man waited on us, naked, his eyes downcast in obsequious submission. We were toasting my agreement, signed on the table between us.

He paid me for the privilege of serving us, she said, as the man finished his pours. I am charging him more for you. What is the reason they are loyal? Why would he pay for such a thing? They have found someone to do the one thing they’ve always longed for, and they are afraid they will never find someone to do it again.

I laughed, and she said, Don’t laugh. It’s a loyalty greater than love.

She stroked her champagne glass and looked off into the distance over the rim. She did not meet the eyes of the man trembling now by the wall.

It may be the only loyalty there is, she said, and held out her glass to be refilled.

§

Did you get them? I asked Euphrosyne, once we were alone in the dormitory, the long attic hall of beds I now knew was where she slept. I had written to her, asking her to go to my room at the Cirque Napoléon and take my things before they were sold or thrown away.

She nodded her head. Yes… except your little rose, it was gone.

Gone?

She laid out my little kit on the bed we were to share — no girl in the house slept alone. Yes, gone, she said. That and your money. But these remained, and she gestured at the contents now on her bed.

I had feared the rose lost already when it was not with clothes returned to me at Saint-Lazare. The coat seemed still quite good as did the rabbit-fur bonnet; and the sight of my little route book, my cancan shoes, and the dagger all cheered me. But I had hoped to sell the brooch to Odile to raise what I owed.

I’m so sorry, my friend, Euphrosyne said. I went as fast as I could.

She then showed me the dresser where I could keep my things, and the salle de bain, and as I bathed, she told me of her ordeal after jail, how she had returned to discover she owed fantastically huge fines to Odile for our escapade. When I offered to help her pay them, she refused. You already have, she said, somewhat sadly; and then she told me she would receive a generous recruitment fee once it was determined that I would stay.

My lucky charm was gone, and with it, it seemed, my luck. I survived the first week and was allowed to stay.

If I had felt, back with my widower farmer, like the victor in a battle, here I came to feel like a fighter, a soldier even. Euphrosyne taught me everything she knew I could not learn through a peephole: that a man could be fooled into thinking he’d entered you; that the finger, well placed, could hasten his release; that if you learned to know when he was to release, you could slip him free and guide his emission onto the floor, sparing both bedding and clothes.

All of this, then, as well the names for whatever a customer might request, the etiquettes as well. All of the words for cunt, for example, and in several languages. There was only one I liked, minou— to me it sounded like something innocent, though this was not the connotation in French.

Euphrosyne taught me a great deal in the care and use of it. The method of a douche, for example, very important, as if it was to be sold, it had to be clean and beautiful. And if it was clean and beautiful, business was good. But here there were also salves for making it easier for the man to enter you, to help you heal after he was done. One to make him hard, and one to make him soft, if that was needed. And if you became with child, you were to speak to Odile, and there were her tisanes, and if that did not work, her doctor.

To keep the child, well, this was expensive. But this, I eventually understood, was how Euphrosyne had come to be here. Her mother was Odile.

This was why everything here was funny to her; it was her childhood home.

There was even a method for rouging your cunt, though you never did that if you knew the client wanted to put his face down there, Euphrosyne explained.

I asked why.

I did once, and he surprised me and went down there, she said. When he left, he said he didn’t want to wash his face, but his whole face had all the color. It was terrible! And I could not stop laughing! Now I charge for it in advance, and then I know.

§

Each night there was like a long, strange dream of many parts, different each night and also the same. You washed once before the evening began and then after each client, usually a splash of cologne between the thighs, which sometimes stung, a wet cloth to the rest of you, a cold glass held to the face to reduce any redness before you fixed your makeup — to do more was to have to redo the face. Between men, I ran the back stairs to clean myself and return, sometimes two stairs at a time. I returned via the front stairs, stately, renewed, descending again to the salon.

My uniform: fine leather riding boots, stockings held up with leather garters, a man’s riding jacket, and, at times, a top hat. I was a horse act with no horse now, dressing each night as a hippodrome rider, satisfying the fantasies of usually three gentlemen, often with a cropping and beginning first in the actual stables and then soon in a room outfitted as a stable stall, much as the other fantasy rooms were.

There was a Moorish palace room, a Tuileries bedroom, a peasant’s room, a formal dining room, even a train car.

A prix d’amour was agreed on beforehand, but men always tried to have more than what they had agreed to, especially if you were new. It was best if you knew how to do sums in your head. Odile watched over us via her trick mirrors and peepholes, though such surveillance was mostly done on new girls like me, to criticize them, and then on troubling clients and, of course, any important visitors.

Afterward, you returned to the salon, where you were to display yourself at leisure to the men gathered there. But as I had a specialty, I was never much there — the men who sought what I offered soon knew of me, and I was busy at once.

I discovered this specialty quite by accident — the new boots made my feet sore, and so I took them off in front of a client, who then stared as if I had presented him with feet made of gold.

And I suppose I had. This is why those carriages stopped, I thought.