Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

Soon, I knew to do it at once, and it relieved me of my other tasks, much to my delight.

§

This long dream ended just before sleep as Odile sat in her chair and ran the numbers in her ledger.

I was making handsome sums, but my debts were also considerable. As Odile had paid my fines, I owed her for that. Also for the clothes she’d sent to me, and though she did not charge me for that sausage and bread, she did charge for each bar of soap, each meal, even a glass of champagne I might enjoy with a guest, and all came at a cost that soon overwhelmed my earnings. When I complained of it to Euphrosyne, she said only, It is like this for all of us, any house in the city. I checked myself, convinced it could be better elsewhere. At least here the food is not bad, and Odile, she likes her pipe, she does not beat us, only fines us. Her prices are only unreasonable, not absurdly so.

I was stunned to learn Odile charged even her daughter. She reached out and brushed my hair back behind my ears, smoothing it, and then leaned in and kissed my brow. We should be called filles en compte, not filles en carte.

The night ended always with us in bed, dressed in slips, our hair long on our pillows like wraiths. We lay together like the sisters we said we were, talking quietly to each other until we slept. Odile kept the dormitory dark with thick velvet drapes that also shut out drafts, a false night to keep us from waking until the afternoon when she opened them to prepare us to begin again.

§

I soon had my own tricks to get by. The less I told men, the better they thought they knew me. Silence was a mask of a kind; it let me be whatever or whomever they needed me to be in our hours together, a little cabaret of their loneliness, really.

Of theirs and ours.

To survive, much less succeed, I learned I could not give myself over to either pleasure or misery in excess. Whatever you felt was not important. To feel either enjoyment or self-pity meant you might allow them too much time, and this meant possibly missing your next monsieur. I soon found the pleasure I could sneak, which I preferred, enjoyed like something I’d picked from their pockets. But I somehow knew without ever being told that to really give myself to one of them was to begin to fray, to make in myself a weakness I could never undo, and so whenever some were able to pleasure me, here or there, I tried to bring the hour to its quickest end.

At Odile’s direction, I would make notes of habits, gifts received, preferences, and displeasures. I reviewed this before they arrived, and this made each client believe they were so important to you that you remembered everything they liked, every little gesture, each time they visited — an impossible act of memory, really, but one they never questioned, for it suited them to think it was so. This was, of course, part of what they paid for, perhaps more than any of the acts themselves — to be so remembered.

A great scandal appeared in the press shortly after I joined the house — all of the girls talked of it — a disappointed lover had rifled a famous courtesan’s books, hoping to find the truth as to whether she loved him, only to see she was not kind to him, at least there. She was made to seem insincere in the press, and this angered us. It was like charging backstage, shocked to discover Phèdre had been played by an actress when you knew all along you were in a theater.

Odile joked of hiring someone to write a diary for all of us in which each client was described only in the most flattering terms — and to leave them where they might be found easily, our real journals hidden elsewhere.

To keep ourselves safe, the system was simple enough. We named clients by their jobs, like minor characters in a play. I wanted it to be clear to myself as well as to whatever future spy might see it that I never really thought of him except like this. What’s more, names would have made a gentleman into someone I could feel affection for — love, perhaps, or hate. It was better, easier, to feel nothing — if you loved him, he could disappoint you; if he disappointed you, you might hate him; if you might hate him, you would still have to see him for as long as he had funds to pay. It was enough to remember them all; that was all that was needed, nothing more. But this lesson, to feel nothing for them, was one I seemed always to be tested on, never more so than by what happened next.

One night, after I had been there for several months, I returned to the salon to find it consumed with dancing. A man was playing a cancan on the piano, and the room had exploded with it. Even Odile, whom I rarely saw move more than her counting hand, had her skirts over her hips. The dancing spilled out into the hall and from there into the garden, not usually used. The night was warm, and the windows into the garden were thrown open so we could hear the music there as well.

We had been visited by a regiment. Odile didn’t usually let her doors open to enlisted men, for soldiers normally used women too brutally.

The piano music finished as I entered. I found Euphrosyne in the arms of one of the soldiers, a beauty. He was Prussian, had arrived that day from Morocco; the sun there had turned his skin bronze, his sleek blond hair bright.

This is her, Euphrosyne said, as she reached out and drew me closer, turning to face him again. She’s my friend who can sing, she said.

He’s not really a soldier, she said to me. He’s a singer.

A tenor, he said.

§

Here then is the one who owned me.

He was the only man Euphrosyne had ever competed with me for, the only one who ever came between us. She introduced us.

Of those I feared had betrayed me to this writer, he was the one I knew was not over me. He was the Prussian tenor at the Paris Opera, rumored to be marrying me, said to be the real reason I was leaving the stage — and the first man to insist I get on one.

IF WE WERE called to perform in a fantasy, we had to do so and do it with all our might. Most times the fantasy held. And so when Euphrosyne’s tenor friend suggested to Odile that I sing for him as he took Euphrosyne in the seats of the little theater, she sent me to change into a formal gown at once and put me on the illusion stage there in front of the boxes where no one had ever stood and sung before.

Odile prided herself on the education we received at her hands in preparation for these fantasies. She regularly took us to attend the opera, the ballet, and the symphony, each trip narrated by her, making points as to appropriate conduct, the way to gossip in an entertaining fashion, and then the occasional sharp remark for whichever of us had misbehaved. She had seen too many girls embarrass clients, themselves, and their houses in public with ill manners or ignorance; educating us this way was good for business, and then the sight of us, our little parade in our new dresses and jewels, meant she educated us even as she advertised us to the gentlemen in the room who would see her and then us, and know instantly we were the Majeurs-Plaisirs. Their friends might ask after us; their friends would explain.

I was new and had been to the opera exactly once. The opera was Lucia di Lammermoor, the story of a young woman who falls in love with a man her family despises. They love in secret, marry in secret in the woods, and when he becomes a fugitive, are then separated. While he is away, her brother forges a letter to tell her this lover has betrayed her and forgotten her, and urges her to marry the man they have chosen for her instead. Lucia does, reluctantly, and then murders her new husband on her wedding night, at which point her lover returns to find her mad and singing of how they can be together again as she drifts down the stairs in her gown covered in blood. She dies, and her lover, in order to be with her again, takes his own life as well.