Disturbed by Her Song Read online

  “Excuse me. Madame’s water has a fly in it.”

  “A fly? In winter? Never. There’s no fly.”

  “Please look there. It’s a fly.”

  He raised the carafe, squinting in, his large, hopeless, unfair eyes expanding through the glass into a pair of ghastly swimming eye-fish.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  But Madame Cora flew into a temper. “Let her take it away. There’s a fly! Of course! Do as you’re told.”

  He cowered and I sped out with the decanter.

  Coming back in after a moment with, of course, the same water, I saw Madame Cora was now sitting alone again, the Chief Waiter spun off like a displaced molecule to the other side of the restaurant.

  When I set the carafe back down before her, she put out her hard and bony hand and gripped my wrist, as at our meeting. This time I bent willingly towards her.

  “Did he have you?” she asked in a low rasping voice.

  She meant the Patron.

  I said, truthfully, “He spent a night in my bed, Madame.”

  “Ah, good, good.” She nodded and let me go. “He must be appeased,” she said, obscurely. Her old eyes – what was she – seventy, seventy-five? – were dark yet filmed over. Her sad and disappointed lips turned down. And yet there was to them, those lips, something that once had been gallant – the lines running upward before the depression of gravity and age pushed them earthward. “He may wish to do it again,” she said. She shot me a look.

  “Very well, Madame,” I said, meekly.

  “Good. You’re a good girl.”

  I filled her water glass. She seemed thoughtful. I said, “Madame, that young woman who passed us that day in the corridor, she had brown hair and very black eyes. Who is she?”

  Madame Cora glanced at me again, and she smiled, pressing her sad mouth upwards.

  “So you saw her?”

  I straightened. A chill ran over my back.

  “Yes. I did. What – who – is she?”

  Her smile closed like a secret lock. She said, still locked smiling, “I don’t want the fish. Bring me some cake now, and cheese.”

  She saw my defeat. She seemed to take definite pleasure in it. I understood it would be currently useless to try to question her further. Even so I said, “I call her Suzanne.”

  “Do you?” she asked. She laughed. It was a spiteful little bark, like her grandson’s, the Patron. “Suzanne? That was never her name.”

  She must have made some gesture to him, for the Chief Waiter was suddenly there again, hustling me aside. “Go back to the kitchen at once! What are you at, bothering Madame?”

  And back to the kitchen I went.

  That night, in bed with Sylvie, I let her feed me chocolate, and told her I was unhappy as I’d been thinking of my dead mother, and my father, who was a crook. This launched her into some long epic tale of her own family and its vices, and in the end I was able to avoid making love with her. That night I felt I couldn’t. But in the early hours of morning, before the yammer of Madame Ghoule on the door, I seized Sylvie in my arms, waking her to sensation so violently and harshly she began to cry, though her weeping was soon lost in other passions. “You’re so unkind, Esther,” she told me, snuggling into my body afterwards. “Don’t you like me, really?” “I think you’re quite wonderful,” I said. “No,” she said. “But never mind. Do you know,” she went on, as I was drifting off again to sleep, “who gives me these chocolates, and the wine?” “The Patron,” I suggested dreamily, She giggled. She said, “Oh no, it’s...” I was asleep before I heard what she said.

  I dreamed I was standing by a vast expanse of water, brown and glowing, a river. Palm trees rose above me, with pleated tines like sculpted bronze. A crocodile waddled like a green sausage on legs across a mud bank, and I heard my mother’s long-ago, exasperated sigh.

  When I woke up, in the moments before her knocking, I thought, It’s Madame Ghoule who is this way too, and who accordingly gives Sylvie confectionary and wine. And when the knocking came and Sylvie only stirred in my arms, I called out loudly, “Thank you, Madame. We are awake.”

  To her credit I heard her answer steadily, “Excellent. Please see you’re both downstairs and at work in twenty minutes. “

  The snow which had loosened and regrouped, now sagged, and turned to a thick dirty sorbet, that ran off the town, leaving the roofs with loud bangs like the concussion of bombs. Released, the trees lifted black arms to a wet sun, against a scudding sky. Soon feathers of new life appeared on them, a tawny northern fuzz that, in a handful more weeks, might break to pale green.

  Standing in the bathroom in my slip, hammering as usual on the hot tap, I watched in astonishment as the entire faucet gave way, spewing out fairly hot water across most of the room.

  By the time I’d summoned assistance, the bathroom was flooded, the water, now growing cool, spooling away down the corridor in a glowing river.

  Madame Ghoule summoned me.

  “This is a disgrace, Mademoiselle.”

  “I’m sorry, Madame.”

  “Sorry is no use. Do you know how much it will cost to repair the damage?”

  “No, Madame.”

  I thought she would dock my already meager wages. Instead she proclaimed, “We haven’t been at all satisfied with your work, besides. You’re slapdash, tardy, off-hand with the customers and, I hear, leave bits of food stuck on the plates when you wash them.” I could say nothing to that. It was all true. “The cook has said you eat too much. In addition, you were told you’re allowed only one bath a week, yet I gather you’ve been bathing almost every day.” Also undeniable. I thought to myself, Yes, and you’re jealous that I get into bed with Sylvie. But Madame Ghoule didn’t list that among her sequence of complaints, of which there were several more. When she concluded, I waited for the axe to fall. It fell. “I think we shall wish to dispense with your services. Indeed, I think we shall be overjoyed to dispense with them.”

  Spring was coming. Despite my small gifts to Sylvie, and various essentials I’d had to buy for myself, I had by now accumulated enough to tide me over. I had been at the hotel called The Queen for almost two slow months – I would have been off anyway before much longer.

  “Very well, Madame. Can I expect any wages owing to me?”

  “Certainly not. Think yourself lucky you’ll be asked to contribute nothing to the repair of the bathroom and corridor. “

  There are few things so liberating, I’ve found, as being summarily sacked. Not even any guilt attaches.

  I went straight upstairs to my cold room (noting in passing, the Patron had been in my neglected bed again, this time smothering the pillow with hair oil), and changed into my own clothes and high-heeled shoes. I brushed my hair and left it loose on my shoulders, and applied my reddest lipstick to my mouth.

  Then I went straight down to the bar.

  “What are you doing here like that?” demanded Jean, caught, I could see, between abruptly noticing me as female, and prudish slavish disapproval. “You can’t wear all that rouge, or those shoes – and some drunk’s sure to spill something on that dress.”

  “I’ve been fired,” I announced. “I’ll have a cognac. Here,” and I slid the coins to him across the counter.

  Bewildered by this painted fiend, who only an hour ago had been meekly pouring out alcohol or coffee beside him, Jean measured my drink and handed it to me. Behind me, I heard a dim stirring and rustle, as Mademoiselle Octopus laid down her sewing in the kiosk.

  “I want to know something, Jean,” I said, boldly. “That dark woman the beery Monsieur liked upstairs – who is she?” He blinked, and I went on, “I know there was someone, though you were at such pains to deny it. I did too, remember, to help you out. But now I’d like to be told.”

  Jean opened his mouth. Stubbornly closed it. Then took a breath and said, “It’s none of your concern.”

  “Did I say it was? I just want to know.”

  “Oh,” said Jean, also abandoning a
ny reserves of the commonplace, “I know why you’d want to know. Oh yes. I’ve heard about your sort of girl. Oh yes. Sylvie’s said to all of us, she’s not safe when you’re around. Had to lock her bedroom door, she said, you were so persistent.”

  I shouldn’t have been startled by betrayal. Being betrayed, one way or another, had become symptomatic of my existence. But for an instant my guts gave a sick lurch, and I downed the cognac, and thrust the empty glass back at him. “Another. And watch your tongue, sonny. It’s Sylvie you should be careful of. And that Ghoule. Also your Patron. This hotel is a madhouse.”

  Jean wouldn’t refill my glass, so I grabbed the bottle from him, and sloshed two glasses full. Clattering down more coins I said, “Drink up, before the sewing witch comes over.”

  Sheepishly, used I suppose, as many of them seemed to be, here, to being overridden by women, Jean swallowed his glass-full.

  He said, to the counter, “You’d better not go after that woman upstairs, though. Just better not. Not if you’ve been entertaining the Patron.”

  Unnatural woman and also floozy, it seemed.

  “Why is that?”

  “She’s his regular. Class. Brown hair and black eyes and that swarthy skin from the south. That’s her. He makes her dress like a chambermaid in one of the old uniforms. We all know. We keep quiet.”

  A dank disappointment listed through me. One more betrayal. For my mystic Suzanne of the Black Eyes was not a ghost, only some upstairs classy whorey convenience of the hotel owner’s, of whom we must all pretend unawareness.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said, casually. “How could you know anything about what the Patron does?”

  “Well, that’s where you’re wrong, see. I do know. She’s the widow of a living man. He’s crippled, and they’ve fallen on bad times. Not a servant in the house. Also she can’t get anything from him, in that way. So she comes up to visit the Patron now and then. Her name’s Henriette de Vallier.”

  “What an invented-sounding name.”

  “It’s not. It’s her name. She lives in one of the rich houses on the rue Rassolin.”

  A presence was at my shoulder, breathing on me a camphor-flavored pastille. Mademoiselle Coudeban, seamstress of bags for octopuses.

  “What is happening? Why is this girl here dressed in this sluttish manner? Go up at once, girl, and wash your face. “

  I turned and beamed at her. “Can I buy you a drink, Mademoiselle?”

  “What effrontery! It’s forbidden to drink on duty in the hotel. As for you, Jeanot, I quite plainly saw you swallow a glass of brandy.”

  “I gave it him for the shock,” I said. “I’m no longer the employee of this strange building. I can do as I please.”

  “And I, miss,” snapped Mademoiselle Octopus, “can have you put straight out of the door.”

  Although she had set down her sewing, I could see it over her shoulder, lying across the chair arm in the open kiosk. It was a shape like a map of India, perhaps, and of a deep amber color. I had seen such shapes and shades in the patchwork coverlet of my lover Sylvie. Suddenly I knew quite well who else had given Sylvie presents for her favors, and who else, too, had been betrayed. In that instance, to me.

  I didn’t have to say a word. By some bizarre osmosis of our brains, Mademoiselle Coudeban and I immediately and completely understood each other, and that, for now, I was potentially the more dangerous.

  Her thin crunched-together face turned bitter and pale like a sour fruit sucking on a sour fruit.

  I said, “Won’t you take a drink with me, Mademoiselle?”

  “It isn’t allowed. But for yourself, since you say we no longer employ you – well. You must do as you like.”

  After my earlier onslaught on Madame Cora in the dining room, I’d done nothing else, not knowing what else I could do.

  Sometimes I had, during my breaks or on some excuse, gone up to the top corridor and walked about, passing several doors unmarked, or marked Private, but no longer knocking. In fact at that juncture no one at all seemed to be on the top floor. The hotel guests were, all told, very scarce; one came across them only in the bar or restaurant, or very occasionally on the stairs between the second and third stories. I’d already arrived at a surreal conclusion, which was that the hotel was primarily run only in order that its own weird, deviant and deranged life might go on. The enlisting of guests – even staff – being simply camouflage.

  Now I’d been manumitted from slavery to the organism, however, I stalked out into the town, warmed by the brandy, and set off towards the street Jean had stipulated. I had seen it before, gone down it once on one of my solitary, aimless walks, which only gained meaning after I began to buy gifts for the faithless Sylvie.

  The houses were tall and joined, with sloping ridged pestles of roofs. Iron railings enclosed clipped cold gardens the snow had spoiled, and here and there was a courtyard, one now with a little horse standing alone in it, browsing at a tub of wintry grass. Few cars moved along the avenue.

  As in the hotel’s upper corridor, I went to doors and knocked. Generally a maid appeared. “Oh, excuse my troubling you. But I’ve lost my kitten. Have you seen it? A little ginger cat, tiny—” Some were sentimentally concerned and took up my time suggesting various means to recapture the errant feline. Some gave me a gimlet glance and saw me off with a “No, Mademoiselle. You must try elsewhere.” But all managed to inform me, in roundabout ways they never noted, that theirs was not the house of Madame de Vallier.

  At the fifth house along the right-hand side, where a bare peach espalier clawed at the wall, a woman answered the door who wasn’t a maid.

  I looked at her, her fair hair held back by clips, her white face, green eyes and narrow mouth. No Black Eyed Susan she.

  “Your kitten? Well, Mademoiselle, how can you have been so careless as to lose it?”

  “Oh come, Lise. Don’t be harsh.” This from the shadowy stair along the hall. The voice was low and eloquent, and then there came the faintest slenderest gust of violets—

  I stepped back, my heart hammering like the broom-handle on the tap of my ribs, to disrupt them and let hot hope explode outwards, splashing the espalier, the blonde woman, and anything else within reach.

  Why do I put myself into such positions? Quivering down some alien street, knocking at doors and lying, in case I might find the barbed blade of a perfect, dreadsome love—

  Then she was in view, the second woman who had spoken.

  I said, before I could prevent it, “Madame de Vallier!”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Do you know me?”

  “Forgive me, Madame. Not at all. I saw you – in a shop in the town, and someone spoke your name.”

  “How odd,” she remarked.

  She stood looking at me, not five feet away, the other woman, who she had called Lise, eclipsed and slunk aside.

  Madame de Vallier paused in thought. Then: “Now the best thing,” Madame de Vallier said, deciding on being firm and kind, “if the little cat has a favorite food—”

  As she proceeded to give me her good-natured advice, I gazed at her, dumbfounded. Here was the woman with whom the Patron slept, presumably sometimes even in the beds of hotel staff such as myself. And she was exactly as Monsieur Beer had described her. Her chestnut brown hair was strictly tied back into a snood of black velvet. Her honey skin and faultless figure encased in neat black clothes that did indeed additionally reveal slim and well-formed legs. She was apparently in sartorial mourning for the living man of whom she was a ‘widow.’ The man who couldn’t give her any more sex, or servants. She was pretty, certainly, in a pre-cast, unsurprising way. And her eyes were the dark brown of damp cedar wood. But not black, not black at all. Nor was she Suzanne. That is, she wasn’t, nor could I ever have mistaken her for, the black-eyed creature I’d glimpsed in the corridor during my first hour at the hotel. Monsieur Beer and I, evidently, had seen two different women.

  Henriette de Vallier finished her treatise on cat-retrieval.
I thanked her effusively, and paced back down the path, looking as dispirited as any girl might who had just mislaid her beloved kitten. (I heard Lise malignly whisper, “She’d been drinking, too. You could smell it on her.”)

  I went and sat under a plane tree in the Place de la Fontaine, which was fountainless and winter-grim.

  The life of the town mechanically passed me, up and down. Everyone was so involved, slotted each into their niche, whether comfortable or not, with a kind of self-satisfied assurance. I am angry, so angry, would say one face going by, or another, I am in such a hurry, or I am lost in my thoughts – ask me nothing. Even the smaller children who appeared seemed already enlisted in this army of the predestined, and already in the correct uniform and with the correct rank ascribed.

  Only I sat there, outlawed flotsam – or jetsam more likely, hurled from the floating insane asylum called the Hôtel Reine.

  I don’t believe in ghosts, or think I don’t. Or didn’t or thought I didn’t, then.

  But I had seen her. She had gone by. And if the delicate whiff of violets was only some leftover of the other presence of Madame de Vallier, Black Eyed Susan had still been as real as I, or as the dotty old Cora, hanging on my arm.

  Which brought me again, of course, to the Patron’s grandmother. For she alone had been with me, when that being crossed our path. And she alone had later said to me, “So you saw her,” and “Suzanne? That was never her name.”

  That night I dined in the restaurant of the Queen Hotel.

  I wore my one reasonable dress, which really was quite reasonable. I had an omelet, a salad, and something that may have been pork. Also a bottle of wine.

  I was scrutinized by everyone, both the waiters and the customers, who all knew me by now as “That one, that Esette.”

  At ten minutes to eight, Madame Cora came in, leaning slightly sideways, as if on an unseen companion, and so moving rather like a crab. She sat down at her usual table, and the Chief Waiter hastened to her side. As always happened she took a long while, questioning every dish, clicking her tongue over the cook’s efforts, asking for water, saying her napkin was soiled.