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.
My Lulu got arrested,
Ten dollars was the fine.
She said to the judge,
“Take it out of this ass of mine.”
That reminds her of Jenny, of course, Jenny with her flip appeals to the jury, her quips to newsmen, her crazy whims. So strange to think of Jenny coming to the House of Mirrors. This year, last year? Blanche wishes she’d known. Wishes she’d had the wit to notice Jenny with her hat down, in a chair at the back like any of the fellows, watching.
Bang away, Lulu,
Bang away good and strong—
Just another couple of verses. Blanche shuts her eyes and roars it out for Jenny. Dances for Jenny, who’s in a hole in the ground tonight. Who for her own reasons thought Blanche the crème de la crème.
When Blanche looks out into the audience next, she sees the silhouette out of the corner of her eye: the long, broad outline of Lamantia, elbow propped on the far edge of the stage. His eyes moist, his smile appalling. And she flees.
Before she slams the stage door behind her, Blanche hears the protests of the crowd and the Professor improvising a jerky cadenza to wrap it up.
At the Eight Mile House in San Miguel Station, the night of Wednesday, September thirteenth, is sticky. Jenny and Blanche have had a long ride and a hike up Sweeney Ridge, then a quarrel in the bar with the stableman from Marshall’s when he came for the buggy. There’s been a lot of merriment and even more liquor. Jenny’s in rare form. She insists on buying the hack from Marshall’s and John Jr.’s pony each a bag of oats for a treat, because you never know, it might be one of their birthdays.
It’s all quiet now. The saloon’s empty and the McNamaras have settled down in their back room. Blanche and Jenny are sprawled on the bed drinking cognac by the light of a single candle. Jenny’s shed her jacket and waistcoat, for once, and Blanche is down to chemise and petticoat but she’s still too hot.
“You’ll never give up, will you?” asks Jenny out of nowhere.
“Give up on what?”
“The kid.”
Without warning, a tear slides from Blanche’s left eye.
Jenny doesn’t move to wipe it away as a regular friend might.
It runs sideways across Blanche’s tilted cheek and drops to the wrinkled bedspread. She blinks back the others. “It’s only been …” She counts in her head, the exhausting stretch of time since she fled from the apartment last Thursday night, fled from the threat of rough handling by three men, but still, how could she have forgotten P’tit? “Six days, that’s all.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think you’d give up on getting him back even if it was six years. Even though—no offense,” says Jenny, “but you didn’t seem one hundred percent enamored of P’tit while he was with you.”
Blanche gives Jenny a hard look. But can’t deny it. One hundred percent enamored. Who can claim to be that? “It’s the training,” she says hoarsely. “Circus is all about persistence. In a play, if the actors fluff a line or a move, they just push on, don’t they?”
Jenny nods. “Got to keep the story moving.”
“Well, circus crowds don’t want the story, they want the trick they saw on the bill, and they won’t go home till they get their money’s worth.”
“So you’re saying that circus folk, once they dig their teeth in—”
“Arthur’s just the same, and so’s Ernest,” says Blanche, leaden. “No surrender.”
The silence that falls between them has hurt in it, but a sort of fellow feeling too.
“Apropos,” remarks Jenny, “you ever hear about the two frogs hopping through the woods?”
“Oh, just get on with it and tell me.” The green blind Jenny fixed has come off its nail again already, Blanche notices.
“Hopping along, happy as Larry”—Jenny mimes the frogs with her hands along the folds of the bedspread—“till they tumble into a pit. They screech for their friends, of course. All the other frogs gather around and peer down. Well, those two unlucky fellows try their damnedest to get out.”
Blanche fakes a yawn. “Is this going to be one of your longer stories?”
“They jump, jump, and they’re bang-up jumpers too but the pit’s just too high. They get tired. Then tireder.”
Another yawn, even wider. “I know how they feel.”
“‘Give over,’ the other frogs start calling down to them. ‘It’s never going to happen. You’re as good as dead. Hate to say it but we told you so. Always reckless, strayed where you shouldn’t …’ So one of those two frogs finally croaks.” Jenny acts his collapse and death, a final pathetic uh.
That gets a giggle from Blanche.
“But the other, he keeps right on jumping. ‘Damnation,’ the other frogs are shouting, ‘what kind of a crack-brained creature are you? What’s the point? You could be done with all your pain by now if you’d just lie down and let out your last breath.’ But you know what? That frog won’t leave off no matter what. Hops and gasps and hops and moans, worn out, blood on his feet …”
“Enough!”
“And now it’s getting dark.”
Blanche groans. “Is this poor fool going to suffer all night?”
“Poor fool, my ass. You know what? Finally leaps so high, he’s out of the hole!”
“Great,” says Blanche. “Bonne nuit.” She’s just saying that for impudence; in fact, she’s wide awake.
“His friends—so they call themselves,” Jenny adds darkly, “they gather round. ‘Why’d you keep on jumping when we told you it was impossible?’ That frog grins at them, and says, ‘It just so happens I’m stone-deaf.’”
Blanche puts up one hand like a child at school. “That makes no kind of sense. If he’s deaf, how can—”
Jenny swats Blanche’s hand down. “He’s reading their lips, I suppose, close to. ‘When I was down in the pit,’ he says, ‘I figured y’all were cheering me on.’” She lets out a huge whoop of laughter.
“‘Cheering me on!’”
Blanche shushes her. “Everyone’s asleep.”
“We’re not.”
“I would have been, half an hour ago, if you hadn’t insisted on talking my ear off.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
Blanche flips over onto her back. “I should be worn out after trekking all that way up a mountain and down again.”
Jenny chuckles. “Sweeney Ridge is hardly a mountain.”
“Ain’t you one bit tired?”
“I don’t get tired.”
“You lying hound.”
“Unless I’ve been up for a week,” Jenny concedes.
“Everybody gets—”
“I ain’t everybody.”
“Oh, hold your bragging tongue for once.” And Blanche flings out her hand to cover the woman’s mouth.
Jenny catches her wrist this time, holds it hard.
All of a sudden Blanche knows why she’s so awake. Knows what she’s itching for, desperate for, what she hasn’t had in what seems like weeks.
Jenny’s not looking away, like you’d expect. She’s on the verge of laughter.
Blanche tugs her wrist out of her grasp.
Jenny reaches for her cognac on the bedside table and finishes it with a swirl and a gulp, but without taking her eyes off Blanche.
Is the woman a cold-blooded thing, Blanche wonders, beyond ordinary human urges? “Stop watching me,” she says, for something to say.
Jenny’s eyebrows go up.
“Some like to watch more than they like to do. Is that why you came to the House of Mirrors that time?” Shaping the question into a dart. “Is that your particular poison?”
A ghost of a smile.
“I’ve had men pay through the nose to watch other men take me,” remarks Blanche, turning away and rolling onto her belly. “Some like to peek through a knothole in the wall. Or loll in an armchair and know that I’m seeing them watching. Some prefer to give instructions: ‘Pull her nipples, rub her bit …’” She waits.
“And you?” asks Jenny after a few seconds, oddly courteous.
“What about me?” Too loud. “I’ll rub anything. I lick, I swallow, I fuck.” The words stir Blanche as reliably as touch. “I suppose you’re expecting me to say that I hate it all? That I’m some downtrodden little angel yearning to rise above the muck of my trade?”
“Why would I be expecting you to say that?”
The tone, its calm neutrality, pushes Blanche over the brink. “I like it all, even the stuff I don’t much like,” she says, spelling it out. She needs Jenny to understand this. “Whatever’s done to me, as a general rule, suits me fine.”
A nod.
“You might as well know what you’re dealing with.”
Jenny says nothing, only nods again. Not smiling anymore.
The silence between them, like a heavy blanket, unbearable. “You just going to lie there like a bump on a log?” demands Blanche hoarsely.
“It’s all right,” says Jenny.
“What is? What’s all right?”
“Whatever you do. Whatever you want.”
“Don’t you dare tell me what’s all right,” spits Blanche.
“It’s all hunky-dory.” Jenny rolls up one sleeve.
It’s panic that’s making Blanche so mean. “Don’t do me any favors,” she warns Jenny. “You’ve got nothing I need.”
The woman takes her time. Starts rolling up the other sleeve.
“You know what you are, Jenny Bonnet?” snarls Blanche. “Not one thing nor the other, just some kind of gelding.” Arthur’s insult is the only weapon she can grab hold of this minute.
Jenny doesn’t say anything to that.
What happens then—
What does it matter what the two of them get up to, exactly? It’s just bodies doing what they must.
Same old notes, Blanche thinks at one point, but arranged into unfamiliar music. How do you know until you try? What Jenny does to Blanche, what Blanche finds herself surprised into doing, none of it’s so very different from what she’s done a thousand times before, and she reminds herself of that at certain moments, to keep from howling, because they’re only a thin partition wall away from the sleeping McNamaras.
She’s lost every stitch she was wearing but Jenny’s clothes are still on. At one point Blanche reaches under the hem of that shirt and Jenny collects that hand, does something to it that makes Blanche’s whole body double over and convulse. Jenny’s trousered thighs are hard, much like a man’s; her small hands are as dry as a man’s; her mouth on Blanche’s prickling skin is nothing like a man’s. She’s a slight woman who looms huge in the candle’s yellow light. That contemplative expression, those burning eyes.
Held down, Blanche grinds her face into the mattress. Filled, crammed, crushed, taken, and strangely enough it turns out a fist can be just as much of a cock as a cock. More purposeful, even, because of the curiosity with which that fist moves, plotting Blanche’s undoing. Blanche bites down on the pillow to stifle her cries. She’s a breaching whale, a powder blast in a mine. Her nails score the sheet, and her spine cracks like a whip. Bullets of bliss go through Blanche, blowing her apart.
Saturday, the sixteenth, Blanche is undressing at the House of Mirrors. Three days since Jenny laid hands on her. Hands that lie boxed underground tonight, holding a white flower.
With shaking fingers Blanche yanks off her tights in the little dressing room, not caring when the gauze rips. She’s climbing back into her own sweaty pink dress when Madame appears in the doorway with a glass of brandy. “A rather ungracious exit, hein? No encore for your devotees?”
“Lamantia, in the front row,” says Blanche, rounding on her. “Did you see the way he was looking at me?”
“That’s what they pay for.”
“No, he was different tonight. Hungry.” The words burst out of her. “He was seen in San Miguel Station on Wednesday.”
Madame’s eyes are wary, as if Blanche is gibbering.
“The day before Jenny was shot! You’re the only one who could have told Lamantia I was there.”
A sigh as the Prussian hands Blanche the glass, as if it’s medicine. “Yesterday you insisted I gave Monsieur Deneve the same information. Is this to become a daily accusation?”
Blanche gulps the brandy. She doesn’t know what to think. Think isn’t the right word for the fog of suspicion that fills her head. It just can’t have been Lamantia who shot Jenny, nor this Louis fellow. Arthur left town a week ago, and Ernest’s friends claim they were with him and Madeleine all that evening. The case is goddamn unsolvable.
“Was that really your last dance?” says Madame.
“My last for you,” mutters Blanche as she carries on dressing, fast.
A silence. She feels the madam’s appraising eyes on every line of her body. “Of course, one can’t help but wonder how many years longer these opportunities will be within your grasp.”
Blanche presses her lips together, fumbling with buttons.
“You do have a head on your shoulders and a certain natural stamina,” remarks Madame Johanna. “What I ask myself is, Are you entirely lacking in ambition?”
Blanche is going to ignore the baiting and get this cuff fastened if it kills her.
“This Californian dream is just that, for most folks who make it this far,” observes Madame with a wintry note of pity. “There are still fortunes to be made, but only by the energetic, and that’s how it must be, I suppose; ninety-nine in the gutter for every one in a mansion.”
In a matter of minutes, Blanche promises herself, she’ll walk out the door with her cash in hand and never come back.
“At thirty-three, with business so demanding …” A sigh.
Only thirty-three? Blanche is appalled. That creased skin, like a much-turned ledger …
“I sometimes find myself drawn to the idea of taking on a junior partner,” Madame goes on, “a protégée to train up. Perhaps open a branch house.”
Bl
anche doesn’t understand for a second. And then: “You can’t mean me. A madam?”
“You’ve never aimed so high?”
Blanche doesn’t answer, but her face shows what she thinks of that.
“Ah,” says Madame, “you prefer to carry on letting one man after another use you like a toilet?”
Blanche’s eyes narrow.
“You’ve always lacked judgment when it comes to carnal matters, my dear,” says Madame. “I really fear for you. If you follow your sentimental heart and take on another handsome parasite, the pair of you may starve by Christmas.”
“I loved Arthur.” The words explode from Blanche.
“Yes,” says Madame. “It’s the downfall of this profession. Really, love—one might as well put a blade in the other party’s hands and guide it home.” She mimes the cut along her throat.
“You talk like someone who’s never been fucked,” retorts Blanche.
“It’s not an experience I’ve felt the need to try.”
That startles Blanche. “But—Mr. Werner?” Staring at the gold ring on the bony finger. “Just a mari de convenance?”
“He only ever existed on paper,” says Madame, “which I would call the most convenient kind of husband of all.”
Blanche lets out a gulp of hilarity. To think that this emporium of all the vices, this auction block for maidenheads, has been run all these years by a virgin!
“I thought perhaps I glimpsed certain potentialities in you,” says Madame regretfully. “That under my guidance, you might turn out to share my flair for substitution.”
“Substitution?” Blanche puzzles over the word.
“Swapping other bodies for our own, I mean. Taking a managerial role. All business is a matter of trading one thing for another, isn’t it?” The Prussian’s warming to her theme. “Wouldn’t you prefer to be a chess player, for once, my dear, rather than a pawn?”
Blanche shakes her head, marveling.
“I’d take a smaller cut than Deneve did, and do it more honestly. I wouldn’t use you up and call it love.”
The word makes Blanche’s voice crack into a laugh. “You and I have never even liked each other.”