V
VIVE LA ROSE

P’tit sobs from the skirting board. He’s just figured out how to roll, but only one way, so he always ends up with his face mashed against the wall. Every day, some inconvenient new skill, as if he’s catching up on a whole year’s worth of tricks.

Blanche snatches him up and hovers, looking at his pallid scalp through the wisps of hair. She can’t carry him and a tureen of soup at the same time.

“This place reeks,” Arthur remarks.

She’s strangely embarrassed; she thought they were all going to pretend that they couldn’t smell his illness.

“It’s the baby,” says Ernest.

Oh, that. “This morning’s diapers,” Blanche corrects him. Arthur lets out a bearish roar.

She thinks it’s about the diapers. Then she registers that he’s rubbing his jaw savagely. A scab flakes off, leaving a puckered white hollow, as if some ghostly assailant has gouged him with a fingernail.

Ernest leans over and locks Arthur’s hand in his own as if they’re sailors arm-wrestling in a bar, but very gently, putting no pressure on the lumpy palm.

Arthur hisses. “I have to just—”

“You were a handsome man,” his friend cuts in, “and you will be again, but only if you don’t scratch.”

Blanche looks at the place on the floor where the flake fell. Her own skin itches.

Arthur breathes out, his wasted muscles shifting under his shirt. Closes his eyes and moves his teeth as if he’s biting an invisible rope.

P’tit starts to keen again, industriously.

“‘There’s a good time coming, boys,’” Blanche carols in his ear, swaying him from side to side,

How does the rest of it go? What’s so good about the good time, and when exactly is it going to come? she wonders. Blanche doesn’t even know where she picked this song up. She repeats what she remembers, hoping to recall the next line:

“You’re making my head ache as much as he is,” remarks Arthur, eyes still shut.

“Your son likes music,” she tells him. But switches to a waltz.

Arthur groans.

“Pick another satané tune,” snaps Ernest.

Blanche breaks off, realizing what she’s humming: He’d fly thro’ the air with the greatest of ease, / A daring young man on the flying trapeze … She wishes she had the courage to carry on. To persuade Arthur that P’tit should know that his father once flew, that Papa was a god among men. She longs for Arthur to look up and nod, let her sing the song as proudly as Léotard’s young acolytes always used to sing it. Past times, long gone, but does that mean they have to be forgotten? You’ve survived, Blanche wants to tell him. Let’s celebrate that much.

But Arthur’s altered face remains locked like a safe.

Blanche is swinging P’tit from side to side now, fast enough to make him dizzy, and it’s hushed the child; she suspects she’s happened on a sensation he really enjoys. Doesn’t it make sense that the son of circus folk should have a taste for whirling? Even if he’s inherited none of his parents’ grace.

“Soup,” Ernest reminds her, jerking his head toward the street.

His eyes flare, then slide to Arthur.

Who’s looking up now, with eyebrows that cut arcs in the knobbled mask of his face. “My friend here,” he says quietly, “has saved my life by risking his own while you’ve been playing at motherhood.”

“Playing?” She screeches the word.

He winces, holds up one misshapen hand. “But what’s past is past. What worries me is that you’re so besotted with this baby, you seem to have forgotten the need to earn a living.”

Ernest is nodding like a puppet. “It must be more than three weeks since she’s danced at the House of Mirrors,” he points out.

“You know why I won’t go back to that bitch,” says Blanche, addressing Arthur only. “Besides, I don’t need Madame to peddle my cul for me.”

He shrugs, a movement that she can tell pains him. “That’s the spirit. So why don’t you go ahead and peddle it yourself?”

“The chamber pot’s not empty yet, is it?” she demands.

“It’s certainly not full.”

“I thought you preferred to live for the day,” Blanche mocks.

“Arthur prefers to live in style,” Ernest tells her.

“Oh, he does? You mean you both do, and at my expense.”

Arthur clears his throat exhaustedly. “Let’s stick to practicalities. Why haven’t you looked up some of the silver men? Or that railroad fellow, or that big Sicilian—what’s his name, Lament? Lemon?”

He knows Lamantia’s name perfectly well. “I’ve been busy looking after your son,” says Blanche.

“Ticktock, ticktock,” murmurs Arthur. “Let’s not forget”—with a rueful, spasmodic gesture at himself—“how fast looks can be lost.”

She stamps her way into the bedroom, baby on her hip. Her room, or it used to be, before it had the reek of death. She pushes the window ajar and takes some long breaths. Arthur’s inching back from the very brink, she reminds herself. He has a right to be bitter. No wonder he doubts her love, considering. She does love him, of course she loves him; Blanche has loved Arthur since she was old enough to know what the word meant. Their fondness has just gone temporarily astray. These are not ordinary times.

“Look,” she says, staring down at a passing cart, “horsies.”

But P’tit’s turning his head away from the window, sniveling again. “Chut, chut,” Blanche hushes him, trying to make her voice sound more fond than weary. Besotted? What a joke, when Blanche is often as maddened by this baby as by a sliver under the skin.

Mothers in the street who caress their children—they may all be faking it, it occurs to her now. Like the girl in the story who was forced to open the door to the frog, let him feed off her plate, even allow him into her bed. The horror of it: the slime trail across the sheets.

All week, heat continues to fill the apartment like an invisible gas. Blanche’s clothes seem to soak through the minute she puts them on. Ernest comes and goes, reeking of strange smoke; he’s burning all the sheets and cloths in an oil drum in the street outside. Arthur shuffles around or lies in the bedroom in more or less speechless convalescence, fingers locked in his armpits to prevent them from scratching the remaining scabs.

Blanche is always yawning. Always on the verge of sleep, but P’tit won’t let her have more than an hour at a time; it’s the heaven she can never quite reach.

One evening, the seventh of September, Arthur asks if there’s any wine, and Blanche fills his glass, as courteous as a stranger. If they’re very careful, she believes, they should be able to edge their way back to where they were. Before the smallpox, before Blanche went to Folsom Street, before Jenny Bonnet and her questions. (Jenny hasn’t turned up in a week, not since that walk they took, that sticky evening when Blanche didn’t know if Arthur was going to live or die. That’s the sort of friend Jenny is, Blanche reminds herself; no more to be counted on than a leaf on the breeze.)

Arthur dresses to the nines tonight—shakily, with Ernest tying his cravat for him, and doing his pearl waistcoat buttons, and hanging his gold watch just so. When Arthur practices a smile, the effect is grotesque. Still blackly forested all over his leprous face, because Ernest won’t let him shave yet.

Blanche is not invited. She doesn’t even know where the macs are going. She wonders whether Madeleine will be with them tonight. The woman has to be pushing thirty, but she’s still angel-faced, Blanche thinks with a twinge of envy. Being saddled with a baby, Blanche feels as if she doesn’t quite count as a woman anymore.

A sudden loud crack: another blasted lamp! Blanche spots the one with the shattered chimney and hurries over to blow the flame out. Cleaning the burners, that’s one of those tasks that don’t get done now. Blanche has assured all the lodgers that Arthur’s no longer contagious, but they look askance at her if they pass her on the stairs, and Gudrun still refuses to step across the threshold.

Blanche picks him up and props him, sitting, against some cushions. But before she can get away, P’tit is clawing himself to his feet again, heaving himself up on her brown polka-dot skirt like a sailor climbing rigging. Or, no, like Quasimodo straining at the ropes of the great bells …

She disengages his fingers. “Hold that,” she says, standing him up against a table and pressing his small hands around the leg.

P’tit stares at her suspiciously. Blanche steps away, smiling.

He wails even before he topples like a felled tree.

Every time she tries to bed him down in his trunk for the night, P’tit leans over the tin rim as if plotting a jailbreak. Blanche can’t leave him because he might fall right out. She crouches there in the dark room, on the edge of the sofa. “Go to sleep,” she chants softly. “Go the hell to sleep.”

P’tit’s cry goes up a jagged notch, and suddenly Blanche can’t bear the injustice of it. She crouches, putting his goblin face up against hers, and shouts, “Ta gueule!”

And if she can’t look after him properly, do this one thing right, then Blanche has no business making a hash of it. She should carry P’tit to Portsmouth Square and set him down on the grass. Walk away, leaving him to the mercies of whoever will take him. Never say she had a baby, never dare to call herself a mother …

The thought makes her squeeze P’tit so tight that he howls even louder. She couldn’t walk away. Not now, not ever.

Pressed against her, belly to belly, P’tit clamps his bowed legs around her, and his head takes refuge on her collarbone.

“‘There’s a good time coming,’” Blanche croons under her breath, “‘a good time coming,’” and she swings him from side to side. Things must get better, simply because they can’t get any worse.

A shuffling dance, the smallness of him so heavy in her worn-out arms. Like a bareback act, its perfectly timed, smooth sway. She sings, P’tit calms; she sways, he breathes. It seems Blanche’s muscles have already said yes. And this boy is made of her, after all, his bones formed from hers. Unbeautiful, but her own.

Much later, the sharp sound of a key in the door wakes her with a jolt, and she realizes that she and P’tit have been in the deepest, most peaceful sleep, face to wet face, sprawled on the sofa.

“Chérie?”

What’s Arthur been drinking that’s made him sound fond of her again? She extricates herself from P’tit’s small limbs, sits up, and dresses her face with a smile, blinking, because Arthur’s turning up the lamps.

“We’ve got company,” he remarks, slurring only a little. He straightens his jade tiepin in the over-mantel mirror.

With pocks still clustered around one of his eyes like milk bubbling in a pan, Arthur’s in the mood for company?

“Someone I know?” Automatically, Blanche scoops up the baby and carries him into the dark bedroom, pressing his face against her so the light and bustle won’t wake him. As she lays P’tit in the middle of the bed, irritation ticks behind her eyes. She roots out a clean bodice, not able to tell the color, and not caring, because the last thing she feels like doing is primping to charm some business associate at this time of night. But she does want to be helpful, to match Arthur’s civility with her own. She’ll be—or at least give a decent impersonation of—the old Blanche.

She squeezes her heat-swollen feet into a pair of mules.

Arthur’s opening a bottle of brandy. In the glare of the salon, Blanche sees that her bodice is light blue. She finds a stain on her skirt and picks at it, but it’s too late to change, and the polka dots will obscure the mark. Well, at least she’s made a visible effort. “So who’s this—”

But she doesn’t get to finish her question because the front door’s opening. Ernest leads the way with the grandiose gestures of a butler; he always hams it up when he’s drunk. The American behind him is short and scruffy, but then most men look so beside Ernest. This one must be important somehow, or surely Arthur, barely out of his sickbed, wouldn’t have brought him home?

“Enchantée,” cries Blanche, gliding over.

The man is in the Alaskan ice trade, so they run though all the possible jokes about how much he’s making these days. Mind blank, Blanche brings out Ernest’s line about the nasty residue left by the manufactured stuff, and the American howls with mirth as if it’s a dazzling bon mot.

Nobody alludes to Arthur’s scarified face.

Blanche swallows a yawn and smiles even harder. When are the men going to get on to the meat of their tedious business and let their hostess slip away?

Then she peeks out; if they seem to have forgotten about her, she won’t go back …

But Ernest’s eyes are watching for Blanche, hawkish. He jerks his head, beckoning.

Arthur throws his arm around her waist and kisses her on the neck as if they’ve been parted for years.

Blanche flinches, and tries to hide it. She reminds herself that he’s cured. No reason to shrink away.

“Be nice to him, hein?” Arthur breathes spirituously in her ear. “Give him a dance.”

The euphemism sticks in her craw. “Not now,” she whispers, “not here.” Still smiling in the American’s direction.

“Our room,” murmurs Arthur, with a tiny jerk of his head.

“That’s not what I meant,” she hisses.

“You need a stage?”

“This is where I live.”

“What’s the difference, exactly?”

Blanche doesn’t know how to explain, but there is one.

Ernest refills their glasses, muttering in her ear: “Don’t be a bore.”

The chatter’s died away. The American is grinning at her almost bashfully.

And then Arthur reaches out and finds her left nipple through her bodice. Presses it hard. It works, of course it works, as always, as if he’s a lamplighter opening the valve and igniting the flame. But just because Blanche is getting wet doesn’t mean she’s not getting angry. She slaps his hand away.

“Let’s not stand on ceremony,” he remarks, no longer bothering to lower his voice. “It seems a late hour to play the prude.”

“Especially,” adds Ernest, “when we’ve gone to some trouble to—”

The American’s going slightly purple.

“I’m sorry, sir, but you’ve been misinformed,” she tells him, with an imperious gesture that starts him backing toward the door.

Arthur snatches at her elbow. “A quarter of an hour, that’s all I’m asking. Now you’ve thrown off Madame Johanna, we need to bring in the trade. My investments require—”

“We?” she exclaims. “There’s no we. I carry you—the pair of you—like monkeys on my back.”

Now the American’s looking mortified. “I don’t mean to cause a quarrel.” He’d be out the door by now if Ernest weren’t gripping him around the shoulder with all the conviviality of a guard dog.

Arthur’s asymmetrical eyes narrow at Blanche. “I’ll have you know that I bring in sums, sometimes considerable—”

“A fraction of your keep.”

“What are you, some penny-reckoning housewife?”

She lets out a sharp laugh. “I whore myself out to buy you suits and gems, to fund all your speculations—”

“Whore yourself out?” Arthur repeats, puzzled, disfigured head to one side. “But you were born a whore, Blanche. It comes naturally to you.”

She stares. He’s never called her that before.

Ernest spits the words. “You want to make a liar of Arthur, shame him in his own home, after all he’s suffered these past weeks?”

“I’m going to bed,” Blanche snarls.

“Not till you’ve spread yourself for our guest,” says Ernest.

The American blinks, appalled.

She turns to Arthur. Is he really going to let his friend talk to her this way?

Blanche doesn’t recognize him. The nasty residue of the man she used to love.

She marches toward the bedroom. But Ernest’s put his long limbs between her and the door. “Don’t relish hearing it said out loud?” he asks. “But you love getting banged every which way, up, down, and sideways. Why, when you were pregnant, Arthur complained you were constantly frantic for it, dripping like a melon.”

She shuts her eyes, swallowing the shame.

“You’d fuck a nigger in a haystack,” says Ernest. “You’d fuck a broom handle.”

Is it me he hates, Blanche wonders, or all women?

“So get off your high horse and fuck this Yank.”

Red spots before her eyes.

“Or kneel down and give him a below-job, at least.”

Blanche Beunon of the Cirque d’Hiver. By what circuitous descent through stages of humiliation has she come to this?

“Cock, cock, cock,” Ernest tells the American, pronouncing the word with a guttural relish. “The lady lives and breathes it. She’s never met a cigare she doesn’t fancy.”

The visitor is edging backward.

“Stay!” cries Arthur. “I tell you what it is, she’s angling to be forced a little. What say my friend and I hold her down for you?”

“Get away from me.” Blanche’s eyes shift between these crazy men.

“We can all join in,” says Arthur, “make a sporting party of it.”

“I better get going,” whimpers the American.

Blanche sidles up to him as if to whisper in his ear.

He blinks at her, almost hopeful.

Then she dives past, smooth as in the days when she could skip on a horse’s rosined back as easily as on solid ground.

Arthur lunges at her and grabs her wrist but she wrenches herself out of his grasp, and the American shoves between them, protesting …

In the confusion Blanche is gone. She rattles down the dark stairs, her pulse thumping with exhilaration. Out into the steaming night, but she can breathe, at least, as she races down Sacramento, lanterns glimmering in windows, folks carousing on stoops. A beggar playing on—could that be a stovepipe? Blanche doesn’t know where she’s going. Qu’importe; in any case, she’s out of there.

Halfway along the next block, a gull cuts past her with a yawp, and only then does she remember P’tit.

“Question: Who put you on the town in the first place?”

Eastern light slants in the window, stabbing Blanche in the eye. It’s been a long night since she fled from the apartment. That medicinal cognac she let Jenny buy her when they bumped into each other in a dive off Clay Street, and then some cocktails, and more recently a bottle or two of Durand’s inimitable wine. “Nobody put me on the town.”

“Oh, come,” says Jenny, thumping the long table at the back of the brasserie, “are you telling me you took to it spontaneous-like, for pure fun, when you stepped off the steamer?”

“So how was it?”

“I don’t quite remember now,” admits Blanche, the words tripping over one another.

“You sound bored of the game, that’s all I mean,” says Jenny.

“Do you think it was ever interesting?” snaps Blanche, contemplating the stain on her polka-dot skirt. “Seen one swollen cigare, seen them all.”

“Ever think of throwing the whole thing over, then?”

She struggles to focus her eyes on Jenny. “You have some objection to girls on the town?”

“Not to the girls, just to what the town does to them.”

Blanche shrugs. “It’s as good a trade as any.”

“Maybe, for a while. Till it trades them in. All I say is”—Jenny points one brown finger at Blanche’s forehead, right between her eyes—“there’s more to you than cul.”

Blanche can’t decide whether to feel irritated or flattered. “How can you be sure?”

Jenny grins, as if that’s an answer.

“What, should I give it all up and take to the vagabond life, like you?” Blanche scoffs.

A shake of the crop-haired head. “Nah, you don’t have the calling. I can’t see you bedding down under a tree. I picture you as your own boss, or bossing other folks.”

Blanche laughs at the word boss.

“What would you say to setting up your own dancing academy,” proposes Jenny, “and knocking all those so-called Professors into a cocked hat?”

“You could rent a hall.”

“I can just imagine what Arthur would say to that.”

Jenny sits up straighter at his name. “Question: Which—”

“Enough of your questions!”

“This is my last, then: Would you prefer to have one child on your hands, or three?”

Three? Ah, Blanche sees what she’s getting at.

“Those connards,” Jenny marvels. “A pair of fat skeeters swollen up with your blood.”

Blanche’s mind zigzags with fatigue. “I keep wondering which of them’s changing P’tit’s diapers—Arthur or Ernest.”

Jenny guffaws. “Maybe they’ve tossed a coin.”

“Serve them right, to have to look after him for one night, at least. Puddles on their pants!” But despite her flippancy, Blanche is feeling sick. Will the macs be awake to let the iceman in? If not, P’tit’s milk in the sweating icebox could turn. If he spits it out, will they think to sniff it, or will they jump to the conclusion that he’s just being cranky? “I should be going back,” she says, sobering.

“I’ll come along. I could do with forty winks,” Jenny remarks, yawning.

Beside them at the table, Blanche belatedly notices, is a Durand boy—the one who guarded Jenny’s bicycle that first night, or is this a smaller one?—fiddling with a cap pistol. It’s not real, she realizes, just a novelty. When he shoots it, there’s no crack of gunpowder, just a little metal man popping out and kicking a cowering coolie in the rear end. Her nose wrinkles. Really, the things folks find funny …

The waiter’s slapping at the wood with a wet cloth now. Taking the hint, Blanche looks for her pocketbook, but in her flight from the apartment she didn’t think to grab her bag. She’s got nothing with her except her keys on their little chain.

They head out. Blanche’s feet are stiff from the long night roaming around Chinatown. She staggers a little, squinting against the morning light. Really, the last thing she feels like doing is going home. But she can’t sleep until she knows someone’s at least given P’tit his bottle.

She and Arthur need to sit down and talk, today, without Ernest’s snaky interference. Other doves have these bust-ups with their macs. You hear of them (and actually hear them, loud in the street) every night of the year. Never Blanche and Arthur, not till now. Last night he acted like a demented boar. But nothing actually happened, Blanche reminds herself, and perhaps nothing would have happened after all that threatening and posturing to impress the micheton. Sticks and stones, that’s all. Arthur’s not himself, and who would be, after coming back from the brink of death? The same goes for Ernest. The young man almost lost the friend he treasures most in the world. Blanche must make allowances.

First I need to sleep, she’ll say, very dignified, when she enters the apartment. Later she and Arthur will share a bottle and civilly discuss how they mean to go on.

Jenny falls in beside her, thrumming a branch along the metal fence the way a small boy might.

Blanche turns her head. “You don’t have to stick by my side.”

“No particular place else to be,” says Jenny. “And you could do with a hand, maybe, if those fellows have still got their dander up.”

Blanche half laughs. “You sniff out any prospect of a scrap, don’t you—like a dog getting wind of a sausage. You’re packing your revolver, I hope?”

She says it mockingly but Jenny pats the outline along her leg with assurance.

“Arthur’s still my man,” Blanche warns her.

“Why, what do you say?”

“Why ask me?” counters Jenny.

“Don’t you shrug at me. I need some goddamn advice,” says Blanche.

“Advice? As in, some wise old saw?”

“If there’s one that fits.”

“Here’s one for you, then,” says Jenny. “Life’s too short to drink bad wine.”

Blanche stares at her.

Heading up the second flight of stairs at number 815, Blanche prepares her arguments. She’ll tell Arthur she’s back, but only on fair terms. No more bringing michetons home or speaking to her—or letting Ernest speak to her—as if she’s dirt under their shiny heels …

When she opens the door of the apartment, it’s the silence that hits her. Everyone asleep—could it be?

It’s all just as Blanche left it last night, except there’s nobody here. The empty bedroom still stinks of disinfectant. She rushes to look in the trunk beside the sofa. Empty except for the black doorknob with its tidemarks of spit. “Where the hell have they gone?” she says to Jenny.

Out for a drink, taking the baby with them?

That’s absurd.

Are the men roaming the streets hunting for Blanche so she can change the baby’s shitty diaper?

She flops down on the bed. “I don’t know what kind of game Arthur’s playing.”

“Can I take the sofa?” asks Jenny with an enormous yawn.

Alone in the room, Blanche sinks onto the pillows and tries to ignore the lingering whiff of sulfur from the fumigation. A little sleep will freshen her mind, she tells herself. By the time she wakes up, the macs will have wandered back in with P’tit, surely.

Men are bending her backward across a table; any number of men, she can’t count. Their movements are deliberate. The pleasure brutal. When she cranes her neck around to see who they are, Blanche can’t make sense of the faces, because they’re melting, features dripping like candle wax onto her arms and legs. She cries out, in her dream, but can’t stop, can’t do anything but feel this, take this, the unbearable perfect pressure of—what is it? What is this slippery thing rammed inside her?

A doorknob, she realizes, letting out an appalled sob so loud it wakes her up.

P’tit’s not here, still.

The parched sky has turned black, as if there’s a tornado on its way. Blanche stumbles around the apartment. Everything the same, but horribly darkened, as if the world’s beginning to char, paper held too long to a flame. Jenny like a dead woman on the sofa … Then blinking up at her.

“It’s gone dark,” Blanche wails.

Jenny glances at the window. “It does that, come evening.”

“But—” Can she and Jenny really have slept the whole day away, since after breakfast at Durand’s? And where could the men be? They can’t have been lugging P’tit around all these hours. Blanche thinks of Ernest’s blandly smiling Madeleine and wonders if they’ve gone to her place—above a grocery on Dupont, is that right? Free love; it occurs to Blanche to wonder whether the boon companions are sharing the ripe blonde now. With P’tit sniveling in some box in a back room. “I have to find him.”

“Arthur?” says Jenny.

The hours of the evening go by in a blur of sweat. Hours of trailing from café to bar, tapping at the doors of opium shops to inquire about a Frenchman with a bad back and a freshly pocked face, enduring the nosy questions, the satire, asking if anyone has seen two men with a baby. Blanche finds she has to tip a quarter each time she puts her head in a door because of some nonsensical new bylaw banning women from bars in the evening.

It’s nearly midnight when, after ponying up a full half-dollar to the jet-faced doorman of one of the better-class gaming saloons, she finally spots Ernest’s long black-jacketed back tilted over an oval faro table. And Arthur beside him, his face still looking as if it’s been splashed with acid.

On the little stage, a fat soprano is giving “Una Voce Poco Fa” her best shot. Blanche makes her way through the crowd, which is pretty mongrel: a few black players, Mexicans, women, even Chinese—who must be high rollers for the white men to have let them in. She wishes she were wearing a less motley outfit, because the grubby blue bodice does nothing for the brown skirt or the egg-yellow mules. Blanche knows faro—one deck only, and the rules are child’s play: you just set your stake on or between the cards you fancy on the board with its pasted layout—but she finds it about as entertaining as picking her teeth. Like all banking games, it’s technically illegal in this town. It’s her private conviction that if it weren’t, nobody would bother playing it.

Standing in the table’s cutout, the Scottish dealer wears its green baize like a skirt. “L’une pour l’autre,” he calls out, “the game’s drawn.”

Blanche looks for Jenny—who’s still stuck at the door, she sees, in some kind of altercation with the doorman. “Arthur,” she tries again. He’s wearing a fob charm she’s never seen before, snakes coiling around a bloodstone. Who gave him that?

“Double paix-paroli,” the winner of that round calls in the dealer’s direction, bending his cards in half.

“Arthur!” Urgent, but still quiet. Her temper shakes off the reins. “Where have you left P’tit while you’re out carousing?”

“Well, if that don’t beat all,” murmurs Arthur.

“Monsters, the pair of you,” she hisses.

“Oh, that’s rich. This slut abandons her child,” he remarks to Ernest—Blanche blushes despite herself, because the other gamblers are overhearing all this, and one diamond-studded old widow in particular is smirking—“and when I take steps to ensure his—my child’s—well-being, she calls me a monster?”

His child now?

“May we proceed, gentlemen?” inquires the dealer.

“Steps,” repeats Blanche in his ear, “what steps?” The two of them got tired of the wailing and stinks in a matter of hours, that’s what he must mean, so they’ve dumped P’tit with someone else like Doctress Hoffman.

“What do you care?” asks Arthur.

“Masque,” says a Mexican.

“Sept-et-le-va,” decides the fat man beside him.

“I didn’t abandon him,” Blanche insists. “Just one night I was gone, that’s all, and only because you made it impossible for me to stay, you disgusting animals! So tell me, who the hell is looking after P’tit?”

“Que ça pue!” Ernest sniffs the air. “Brought in something on your shoe, did you, Blanche? Something froggish?”

“Oh, you’re hilarious,” Blanche tells him.

“I treated her too well, I believe,” Arthur remarks to his friend, straightening his stacks of checks. “Spoiled her.”

“If we were to let her come back,” says Ernest, nodding judiciously, “it would have to be on certain conditions.”

“She’d have to make up with the Prussian, for one,” proposes Arthur. “And two, she’d have to start earning again, pronto.”

“Treat you with respect,” adds Ernest, counting on his fingers.

“And my friend the same,” says Arthur, nodding at Ernest.

“And any visitors of ours.”

Blanche’s eyes meet Jenny’s.

“Joke’s over. Where’s the kid?” demands Jenny in a voice that suddenly expands to dominate the table.

“You’re interrupting the game,” warns the dealer.

“And she’d have to begin by shaking this mischief maker off her tail, of course,” adds Arthur.

Blanche is a pot boiling over. “Va te faire foutre,” she spits; he can go fuck himself. “Jenny’s my only friend in the world.”

Jenny turns her face toward her with a curious expression that Blanche has no idea how to read. Blanche looks back at her, refusing to qualify or explain what she’s said.

“It’s entirely up to you, of course,” says Arthur. “But if you want your precious P’tit …”

There’s a second, a single second, when she could swear it hits Arthur, the fact of losing Blanche. And then—

“As it happens,” he says, eyebrows tilting in the old confident way, “I’m thinking of going home.”

Ernest pulls out his watch by the thick gold chain. “The night’s still young, mon vieux …”

“Funny he calls it home,” Jenny remarks to Blanche, “when the whole building belongs to you.”

The dealer raps dully on the baize. “Play or settle up, gentlemen.”

“Home to France, I mean,” says Arthur.

The world splinters. Blanche looks at Ernest to see if this is his doing and reads shock on his hollow cheeks. Clearly it’s the first he’s heard of it.

“This foutu town, it’s turned you into one of these American harpies,” Arthur remarks to Blanche. “Back in Paris, I’ll get myself a real woman like that.” Snapping his fingers.

This is a stage trick, she’s sure of it. Arthur’s always singing the praises of the City of Liberty, so why would he ship back to the old country with his mangled looks and no prospects there? It’s an utterly implausible volte-face, improvised to startle Blanche into falling to her knees and groveling for forgiveness, unbuttoning his pants and kissing his stubby cigare.

“With that face? You reckon you’d get another woman?” inquires Jenny mildly. She comes up close to examine Arthur, grimacing. “Whew, what an eyesore! String yourself with sparkles, but that won’t make a Christmas tree.”

Arthur pushes her an arm’s length away and growls, “Why don’t you crawl back to your swamp?”

“Bon voyage, then, and good riddance,” says Jenny, “but first give the lady back her goddamn son.”

“What makes you so sure of that?” asks Blanche through her teeth.

His expression tightens as he understands her.

A lie, of course, but one she couldn’t resist throwing in his face, just to see how he’d take it.

“Salope, are you daring to suggest—” Ernest begins.

But Arthur cuts him off with a gesture. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed who’s behind Blanche’s new caprices,” he says, turning his glittering gaze on Jenny. “What kind of freak barges around breaking up happy ménages?”

Is that what it was, Blanche asks herself, a happy ménage? Their life, the one they shared until that bicycle hit Blanche one Saturday night in the middle of August, seems centuries ago, far out of reach.

The tight-lipped dealer’s gesturing over their heads to the doorman.

“She’s a whore too, you know,” Arthur remarks to Ernest.

Blanche turns to tell him that the word holds no sting for her anymore.

But it’s Jenny he’s nodding at. “That’s how she earned her crust, folks say, back when she wore skirts.”

Oh, this is fatuous. Why do men assume that every female in the world who draws the least attention to herself is theirs for hire? “You credit everything folks say?” Blanche scoffs.

“You’ve got the wrong Jenny Bonnet there,” Jenny remarks with a slight grin.

“Jamais de fumée sans feu,” intones Arthur. “No smoke without fire.” He sniffs the air as if he smells it.

“Imagine paying cash for a chew of that leather.” Ernest hoots.

They don’t believe this ludicrous rumor, Blanche sees now, they just want to cut Jenny down to size.

“May the rest of us please get on with the game?” demands the fat man.

“Gelding,” Arthur barks, loud enough for half the saloon to hear. “Swaggering around town in muddy pants … don’t forget you still have to sit down to make water.”

Jenny bursts out laughing. “That’s your trump card, really? You believe I lie awake at night wishing I could piss standing up?”

Arthur breaks out in a falsetto.

“You reckon I pine for what you fellows have?” asks Jenny.

He sings on, getting shriller.

“Oh, trust me, I could glue one on if I thought it was worth a dead rat,” says Jenny, stepping up and bending one wing of his waxed mustache.

Arthur’s fist comes up fast, but Jenny’s already ducked. She dances out of range, her eyes exuberant, and then the bouncers are herding the two women toward the door.

She passes a whole gang of pigtailed workmen carrying planks and ropes. Low Long’s bunks, she realizes, as she turns her head and sees the carpenters filing through the door of number 815. Their denim overalls remind her of Jenny.

Old lodgers gone, Low Long told her a quarter of an hour ago, new lodgers coming. She wonders where the old lodgers scattered to when Low Long evicted them without notice, the Corfu men and the Irish and Chinese, the two Scotswomen and Gudrun; have they somewhere to lay their heads tonight? And Blanche, their stylish, top-of-the-bill landlady, is no different from them.

P’tit. His the one face that she can hold on to. Jenny’s dead but P’tit’s only lost. Ernest spoke—in the apartment just now—as if P’tit was alive, as if that went without saying. Blanche has no reason to trust him, but her years of familiarity with his every tone tell her to believe him. So she might get her baby back if she can somehow fix what she so clumsily broke this morning by blabbing about Arthur’s guilt. All Ernest seems to require of her is that she walk into that inquest tomorrow and untell her story—whitewash Arthur’s name, persuade the jury that everything she told Detective Bohen about vengeful macs was just the improvisation of a hysterical female. Easy! Blanche la Danseuse has never been afraid of an audience.

The heat’s taken on the solid quality of a sponge. Thunder faintly rolls, and she keeps thinking she feels a drop, but it’s only sweat squeezing out of her skin. Surely the weather must break soon and grant San Francisco the mercy of a storm? The cool mists for which Fog City is nicknamed must be hovering out there in the Bay, waiting to reclaim their peaks. So close, so close, like ecstasy just out of reach when you’re riding the wrong man …

A baby on a woman’s shoulder babbles and sucks its fist. Younger than P’tit, but fatter, healthier, pink-faced in the heat. Blanche looks away. Somewhere, down one of these sloping streets, hidden in some apartment in a skinny alley: P’tit. Only eight days since Blanche raced out of the apartment to escape the macs and their rich American and forgot to take him with her. Be honest: she’d briefly forgotten, in her panic and rage, that she had a child at all. That was eight days ago, which is a blink for a woman but a long stretch of sleepings and wakings for a baby. Eight days since she’s held P’tit—not that he’s ever been entirely fond of her touch. Does he retain any memory of Maman who plucked him away from Folsom Street and minded him night and day for a grand total of, what, two and a half weeks? Her thoughts strain toward him.

Tonight. She drags herself back to practicalities. Where will she spend tonight?

Of course she has resources to draw on. It’s just a matter of picking one of her michetons and tracking him down in a way that doesn’t stink of desperation. The answer’s obvious at once: Lamantia, L’amant de Blanche, as the Sicilian likes to call himself, her most devoted admirer, who’s been offering Madame Johanna considerable sums just to discover her whereabouts. Blanche already knows his.

She runs along the tracks following the next horsecar and jumps onto the step, almost catching the heel of her grubby white mule in her hem. She readjusts her carpetbag on her arm with a surge of revulsion for the few pieces of clothing inside it. They’re all she owns in the world now, so she mustn’t chuck the whole bag in the gutter and ride off with light arms.

Blanche tips back her green parasol and stares up at the long windows of the granite building where she knows the Sicilian must be sitting, sweating over imports and prices at his mahogany desk, as he does every day except Sunday, when he visits his mamma. Is Lamantia daydreaming of his bella bianca, his beautiful white flower? Has he already read about Blanche in the news reports about San Miguel Station?

Two Specials lean against the wall. Blanche thinks for an awful moment that they’re the same ones she and Jenny had to bribe last Monday on Waverly Place. She grabs a passing boy, his head soaked from the fountain: “Take a message for me?”

He puts a dripping paw out right away.

“You’ll be paid when you’ve earned it,” she snaps. “Go in those big doors and ask for Signor Lamantia. Don’t give the message to anyone but the boss, you hear?”

“What message?” He’s wiping his hands on his shirt.

She doesn’t have paper or pen, and besides, Lamantia prefers to put nothing in writing. “Tell him that … that there’s a white flower outside his window.”

The gamin sniggers.

Blanche clips him around the ear. “Say it.”

“White flower outside his window.”

Blanche stands waiting where she can be seen from the window, her carpetbag tucked behind her skirt. She tries to twirl her parasol charmingly, as if she just happens to be in the neighborhood.

“Company, miss?” mutters a passerby in a bowler.

She ignores him. Pretends to be listening to a dipso who’s yowling cheerfully in the fountain, some gospel song.

She jumps when she feels a touch. It’s the boy, tugging at her sleeve; she shakes him off.

“I said, I said, ‘Miss,’ but you didn’t hear.”

“All right,” says Blanche, steadying her breath. “What’s the answer?” She steels herself in case it’s humiliating: pressure of business, or some more convenient occasion … Perhaps Lamantia will be too horrified by this showgirl’s entanglement in a sordid murder to risk being seen with her?

“Palace, quarter of an hour,” says the boy, jerking his head toward the gigantic edifice that takes up the whole next block. His hand is out—as if Lamantia wouldn’t have paid him handsomely already.

“Don’t push your luck,” says Blanche.

The City’s money is trickling south these days; the newly built Palace is an open plug hole sucking it all down toward Market Street. The biggest hotel in the world, it rears up like a cliff with seven thousand windows. Blanche shakes out her skirts and tries to muster some poise as she approaches the great doors.

The lobby’s full of vast landscape paintings, old millionaires in top hats, and suave black staff in swallowtail coats and white gloves. It’s almost silent, because the Turkish carpets swallow up the sound. The air is actually cool, as if Blanche is walking into a gigantic icebox; how do they manage that?

At last Blanche is riding up to the seventh floor in one of the famous elevators, her stomach sinking.

“It’s water that do it,” the porter mentions in an accent she can narrow down only as far as the eastern states.

She stares at him.

“Water push it up,” he adds. “Hydraulics.”

She still has no idea what the man’s talking about.

“Also we got pneumatic tubes for carrying parcels …”

Blanche shuts her eyes, which quells him.

The corridor she steps out on looks down onto the internal courtyard of the Palace, where carriages sweep in and unload guests in a forest of potted plants. Dizzy, Blanche squints up at the dome of opaque glass that, on a day this bright, resembles an enormous sun.

When the porter lets her into the bedroom, Blanche glances around carelessly, as if she’s seen bigger and better. When he hovers, waiting for his tip, she ignores him. Finally he leaves, thumping the door closed behind him.

Cool in here, secluded behind the thick velvet drapes that seal off the bay window. Everything’s carved out of teak, rosewood, ebony … the ceiling must be fifteen feet high. Utter silence.

Blanche uses the gleaming flush lavatory and puts in a little carbolic plug, to be ready. Wishes she were sure she had enough time for a bath, but she’ll make do with a sponge-down.

Ah, here’s an idea: Blanche will make a virtue of having nothing to wear. Working fast now, she scrubs all her paint off with a wet fluffy towel, lets down her dark hair, and shakes the curls out with her fingers. Raw girl is the look, for a novelty; her costume is nakedness. All to the good if it’s not what Lamantia’s expecting. Sometimes what men pay highest for is surprise.

Blanche dives between the crisp sheets. The bed is the most comfortable surface she’s ever lain on. Though she supposes, after the shocks she’s endured since this time yesterday, she’d think a haystack just as soft. Mustn’t sleep, though, she warns herself. Must be ready …

The voices wake her with a start—Lamantia dealing with the porter at the door—but Blanche pretends to be deep in innocent sleep.

She knows he must be tiptoeing to the bed and watching her. He leans so close that she can smell his hot breath, the bologna he had for lunch. He slowly slides the edge of the sheet away from her back. Sometimes men want to be seen looking, but other times, they congratulate themselves that they’re managing to watch while remaining unseen.

After a minute or two Blanche stretches and blinks. Confusion—then Sleeping Beauty smiles for her tall, dark, heavy-fleshed prince, who is even more massive than she remembered. Lamantia wears no facial hair, but the shadow breaks through on his cheek by midafternoon.

So he knows nothing about her entanglement in a murder case. But the last thing Blanche wants to do is explain or say why she’s come looking for Lamantia today instead of letting Madame Johanna set up the encounter … so she silences his mouth with hers. She’s got a job to do.

This is one of her specialties: giving michetons the impression that what’s happening is happening not so much because they want it as because Blanche, in her lip-biting, helpless way, needs it. Right here, right now: her desire is so urgent that she might just scream the whole hotel down if he—this particular man, out of all the men in the world, who possesses the secret power—if this man doesn’t part her pearl-sheened thighs and bang the living daylights out of her.

Lamantia hasn’t had time to take any clothes off. Blanche twists herself around and lies back, slides with every thrust of his so his long cigare seems to be shoving her farther and farther off the enormous bed. “Oh!” It’s a simple backbend, nothing compared to what she used to manage in her circus days. Upside down, she keeps herself from falling on her head by pressing her splayed fingers to the floorboards. (Well waxed, she notes, with a lemony polish.) The pose reminds her of a Sabine-captive act she used to do, hair trailing behind her, on the most asthmatic of the circus’s ponies. Blanche keeps her eyes on the glossy molding around the door, the sparkling chandelier, and lets herself imagine that she’s cantering farther and farther and farther away … “Ah! Ah!”

Now she lets out a gasp so unladylike, so dreadfully guttural, that the businessman sobs like a boy who’s appalled at his own badness and pumps even harder. Blanche always puts on a good show, but performing doesn’t mean shamming—she’s never needed to fake it. From the day Arthur taught her to do it, behind the elephant stalls, she’s relished nothing as much as a fuck: the stuffed-to-bursting sensation that erases thought, the steam train of its movement, the frantic mazurka for two. And on that kernel of truth Blanche has built a legendary persona. She feels sensations and cries them out as arias, takes every urge and tears the roof down with it: not a dry hole in the house. How did Ernest put it? That Blanche was obsessed with cock, lived and breathed it? It’s awful, but there’s a grain of truth to it. Men are tools Blanche uses for her satisfaction. Dancing, dancing, over a cliff into merciful darkness—

The two of them catch their breath, finally.

Lamantia leans up on one elbow and pours the champagne. The man’s such a bourgeois, thinks Blanche. He’s smacking his lips with satisfaction at his own wickedness because he’s taken an afternoon off from facts and figures to bed the Lively Flea.

She slips away to the bathroom to douche because she can’t trust the little plug on its own. The carbolic stings hard enough to make her hiss. Blanche has always had to do this, whether at home or with michetons, because most men balk at the clammy grip of rubber safes. She’s meticulous about it. P’tit is the only accident she’s ever had.

Tomorrow. At the inquest. If she does exactly what Ernest requires of her—

She mustn’t think about P’tit and her hope of getting him back. Not here, not now. One task at a time.

She rearranges it into a smile—but it’s the little cut he’s fingering.

Blanche considers evasion and rejects it quickly. No doubt Lamantia will hear about the murder at some point, and he can’t stand to be lied to. In the past, he’s thrown the odd jealous fit on nights when she’s claimed illness but he’s suspected she’s been with another micheton. So she lets her face crumple. “I was … it was a piece of broken glass. Someone shot my friend through a window. In front of me.”

His bushy eyebrows soar.

Her misery is true, so why does it feel like she’s putting it on? “The papers are full of it—it happened down at San Miguel Station.”

“I’m too busy to read the papers,” he scolds her gently. “What friend was this?”

“Jenny Bonnet,” says Blanche, choking on the name. “She caught frogs for the restaurant trade.”

“That crazy girl in pants?”

So he’s heard of her.

He goes off on one of his tirades in Italian.

Blanche can’t make out more than a word or two. “I thought you were too busy to read the papers,” she says sourly.

“This so-called friend of yours”—he’s back to English now, rubbing at the scab on Blanche’s cheek as if to erase it—“dragging you into her criminal circles—”

“Jenny didn’t fire the gun!” And then Blanche locks her lips because if she lets out her wrath, it’s going to wreck everything. She’s here to make some money, she reminds herself.

So she produces a few weak sobs, though her eyes are bone-dry, and rolls around on the creamy pillows until Lamantia strokes the small of her back. “I hate for you to be mixed up in such things,” he complains. “Exposed in the press—”

“My name won’t need to come up, I presume?”

“How could it?” she murmurs. The egotism of the man!

She lets him pour her another glass, to comfort her. The iced champagne is bitter in her mouth. He’s dressing already. Lamantia’s never stayed a night with her; Blanche is not sure whether he’s married or just nervous about what his clerks might say if he came to the office in the same shirt two days in a row. Just as well that he’s going—she’ll be able to get some real sleep—but she finds herself offended that he’s gotten all he needs from her already. Most men tire too soon for Blanche. (Not Arthur; he can ride all night. Stop it, she snaps at herself. Does she not have enough pride to give up panting for a man who’s tried to kill her?)

The Sicilian lays some banknotes on the glossy bedside table. Since he’s such a devoted regular, Blanche leaves the amount up to him, because in her experience, graciousness pays off. But she’ll be needing some substantial funds soon to set herself up in a new apartment with a whole new wardrobe. (Room for P’tit? A live-in nursemaid? Don’t you dare, Blanche! Her hope’s like some eager dog straining hard enough to break its leash.)

“I may be dancing at the House of Mirrors tomorrow,” she mentions, realizing that it’s true. The fact is, Blanche can’t think of a faster way to raise a good lump sum—almost three hundred dollars’ profit in a single evening—than to swallow her bile and do one last show, since Madame’s offered her such a bonanza for it.

Blanche expects Lamantia to be glad to hear that. Her michetons generally love to watch her dance in front of other men, lesser men who can’t have her afterward. Sometimes she thinks what a man is really paying for is not actually a rendezvous in a hotel room but the right to interrupt the dance, to yank Blanche off her pedestal and treat her like any ordinary woman. And yet they remain nostalgic for the mystery, the spectacle …

“A girl has to live,” she says uncertainly.

“Perhaps Madame and I could come to some arrangement. Yes.” He’s looking startled now, exhilarated at his own daring. “If you could be a very discreet companion—perhaps we could settle on something private, exclusive—”

As Blanche told Madame this morning, she never wanted a keeper. But that was when she thought she had other resources: legal title to a six-story building on Sacramento Street, for one thing. Now Blanche has nothing. The notion of not having to find herself lodgings, clients … The temptation of letting somebody take charge … If any man can keep her safe from now on, surely Lamantia can?

A pulse bounds in her throat. Should she trust him with the whole story at once? The fact of the baby, and of his having been spirited away by his father, and of Ernest blackmailing her to lie to the coroner tomorrow if she ever wants to see P’tit again?

No. A superstitious conviction seizes Blanche that if she pronounces P’tit’s name, that’ll be the last time she ever hears of her son.

Besides, Lamantia might well be put right off her by these entanglements. Men never feel quite the same about a woman’s body once they know it’s done that thing: widened and torn to push out a baby’s head.

So Blanche plays for time. “I’m afraid I ain’t Madame’s to dispose of,” she murmurs. “She and I … we’ve come to a parting of the ways. In fact, tomorrow night will be my final appearance at the House of Mirrors.”

“All the better,” cries Lamantia. “You’re too good for that mob. That settles it. Let me look after you as you deserve.”

“I’m overwhelmed,” she says, honestly enough. “I’ll have to give the matter the most serious thought …”

And Blanche gets a glimpse of how tedious it might be to be this man’s mistress.

“You should take it as a sign to give up your disreputable associates, all that scum that floats around town,” he says. “I’m offering you a fresh start.”

But he hasn’t specified dollars per month. The two of them have never mentioned figures, in the elegant game they’ve played. If Blanche were to put herself entirely into the hands of this man, she’d need to know the numbers first.

She blinks, clouds her gaze, as if desire has distracted her again. “Will you be there in the audience tomorrow night?” she murmurs, reaching out to put her small hand in his hot grip.

Early morning on Monday, the eleventh of September, and Blanche is lying awake in a cheap, odorous hotel on Commercial Street where she’s spent the last three nights. Well, not so much a hotel as a house of assignation; girls thump up the stairs with their customers at every hour, breaking up Blanche’s sleep. She’s brooding on P’tit, wondering whether anyone is picking him up when he cries. Has he been doped with something “quieting”?

This is why women don’t start wars, she thinks with a flash of contempt for her whole sex. It’s the blasted babies.

Blanche tries to make impossible calculations. Knowing Arthur as she does … but does she really know him at all, this enraged, scar-faced man? What’s the best—or the least stupid—way to proceed? At night he and Ernest will be drunk. In the morning they’ll be asleep. In the afternoon, the worse for wear. How long should Blanche wait for their wrath to calm down? Approach too soon and they’ll scorn her, just like they did in the faro saloon. Delay too long and—could there be any truth at all to Arthur’s boast that he’s going back to France to get himself a real woman? Every day she waits is full of gnawing uncertainty about P’tit, his whereabouts, and his welfare, and Blanche is not sure she can bear many more of these days.

If she tracks the men down in a bar or at the gaming table again, knowing they have an audience will harden their arrogance. But if she goes to the apartment—steps into a room with them once more—then all the power is theirs. The last time she was there, after all, Arthur proposed to the American that they hold her down and take her three ways. No, Blanche decides, she has to speak to Arthur one to one, but in a public place.

A few hours later she’s standing on Sacramento Street, watching the second-floor windows. This is her own building, she reminds herself with a sense of dull resentment, so why is she skulking outside it like a burglar?

Beside her, Jenny tilts her cap and squints up. Does a little shuffle. Jenny can’t stand still; Blanche registers that only now, because it’s the first time they’ve ever had to wait in one spot.

The half-moon, up in broad day, looks like some cheap bit of stage scenery.

Blanche returns her gaze to the second floor of the building.

“Seen that?” Jenny asks.

“What?” she says, jumping.

Jenny’s jerking her thumb not at the building but at a broadside pasted crooked on the wall behind them. Evangeline: A Burlesque. “I dozed off in the middle,” she remarks, “but the spouting whale was first-rate.”

Blanche tilts her parasol and blinks up at the glittering windows. P’tit. P’tit. His name a hiccupping heartbeat.

Jenny flicks her cap up into the air and catches it on her elbow. The second time, she spins it way above her and crooks her neck so it lands neatly on her coal-black hair.

On the corner of Dupont a thick knot of workmen has formed around a fellow talking himself hoarse on a box. Blanche catches only a few phrases: evil empire and—noisome vermicelli, could she have heard that right?

“Just the anti-coolies,” says Jenny, following her gaze.

A single clap from someone beside him.

“They have opened the gates of this city to Oriental labor, whose octopus of disease now extends its fell tentacles into every quarter. Soon workingmen will rise up and deluge it in blood and fire!”

The applause is limp. As if San Franciscans have the energy to so much as pick their noses in this heat, Blanche thinks, let alone set a fire!

Arthur, Arthur, she calls in her head, watching the second-story windows. Does he still love her, a little, in some poisoned way? Is he keeping P’tit as bait to lure her back? But he must realize that after the things they’ve said and done, the two of them can’t take up their old dance again. And why would he even want Blanche back if she’s the nasty piece of shoddy he thinks her?

“‘Mardi i’ r’viendra m’ voire.’” Jenny sings the old ballad under her breath, as if reading Blanche’s mind. “‘O gai! vive la rose.’”

He’ll come back to see me on Tuesday; hey, long live the rose. Of course Blanche knows the carefree lyrics of the old song, but she’s not in the mood.

Jenny lilts as sweet as some bird on a branch relishing the sun on its feathers.

Can she be taken at her word, Blanche wonders, the girl in the song? Is it true she won’t open her arms to her man if he does crawl back to her? Or is that just something girls insist when their men dump them? She turns to look at Jenny. “Ever had your heart broken?” she demands.

“Well, aren’t you a slippery fish.”

“Hope so,” says Jenny. “It’s the other kind that end up in the pot.”

Blanche lets out a long, blistering breath. It’s clear they’re only going to annoy each other today. If this is friendship, no wonder she’s never had much truck with it. “Don’t you have any place you need to be?” She waits. “No frogs that need catching?”

“Delivered a couple sackfuls yesterday,” Jenny assures her.

“This is my business.” Blanche eyes the windows, the door, waiting for the slightest glimpse of Arthur. She realizes that she doesn’t want Jenny to witness her abasing herself, offering anything at all just so long as he’ll give P’tit back. “You ain’t obliged to get tangled up in it.”

“That reminds me,” says Jenny, ignoring Blanche’s comment, “you ever hear about the frog who got acquainted with a mouse?”

“I have the feeling I’m about to.”

“‘Hey,’ says Froggie, ‘what say we declare our friendship by tying one of your feet to one of mine?’”

Despite herself, Blanche half laughs.

“Mousie’s persuadable,” says Jenny. “So the two hop along together to the meadow for their dinner. Then Froggie goes, ‘What say we stand at the edge of the pond and admire ourselves?’”

“Oh no.”

Jenny mimes the yoked animals leaning out dangerously over the water. “Froggie falls in—or jumps, some say, but there’s no proof, and afterward Froggie can’t say, for obvious—”

“Get on with it!”

“‘How do you know until you try?’” supplies Blanche. Then, after a moment: “That’s a terrible story.”

“The best ones generally are.”

They lapse into silence.

Blanche returns her gaze to the apartment windows. In her imagining of it, Arthur’s going to step out of the building any minute now with P’tit on his hip. The man will look hollow-eyed, harried; the child radiant with relief at the sight of his mother. In the daydream, Blanche runs up, as graceful as a prima ballerina, and Arthur lets out a single sigh of capitulation and puts P’tit in her arms …

“Now, in the song, they get married, if you prefer that,” says Jenny.

“What?” she asks distractedly.

“‘Frog and Mouse.’ ‘A Frog he would a wooing go,’” she croons, grunting very low in her throat and keeping time with her boot on the sidewalk,

“Something tells me this is going to be a long courtship,” Blanche mutters, her eyes still fixed on the bland panes.

“I’ll skip to the wedding, if you like,” offers Jenny. “It was some party, let me tell you.” She starts singing and tapping her sole again.

“Jenny—” Blanche interrupts hoarsely.

But Jenny keeps on as if she’s getting paid for it.

Blanche is chewing her lip raw. What possessed her, the other night at the faro saloon, to hint that P’tit wasn’t Arthur’s? Of all the lies she might have invented in a spirit of malice, none could have put the baby in more danger. Is Blanche some kind of idiot or just too addicted to the pleasure of the moment to think about anybody but herself?

Jenny sings on relentlessly:

Now she slips her arm through Blanche’s and tries to swing her.

Blanche shakes her off harder than she needs to. “Is it possible for you to shut your trap for one almighty minute?”

“Girard, right?”

Blanche doesn’t know what to make of that till she follows Jenny’s gaze across the street and flinches. Ernest, hovering on the curb, staring in her direction: Could he have emerged from the building while she was looking away for a second? A horsecar clanks between them, cutting off her view.

“Ready,” announces Jenny, rubbing her hands.

This was a bad idea. Blanche hurries away down the street.

Jenny gallops after her. “What are you doing?”

“We shouldn’t be here.” Glancing over her shoulder, Blanche can’t see Ernest in the crowd.

“Hey,” Jenny objects, “we’ve been waiting half the day.”

“Waiting for Arthur, not Ernest.”

“I’ve seen what happens when you won’t back down. You’re a born fight-picker,” Blanche cries. Where’s Ernest gone? Not on the opposite curb now. Is it possible he didn’t catch sight of the women after all?

“Some fights are ripe for the picking,” insists Jenny.

And he’s there, all at once, in front of Blanche, moving with the gait of a long-legged bird, eyes red-rimmed and his face so drawn and clammy that she wonders if he’s ill.

Ernest seizes her by her elbow and marches her down the nearest alley, holding her close—a parody of a suitor. These Chinatown lanes all close in overhead like pleats in stained cloth. Waverly Place, that’s where they are: Blanche recognizes the barbershop with the Tin How Temple on its top floor. Fifteen-Cent Alley, some call this, for the price of the haircuts.

“How dare you show your face,” he’s demanding, “you infernal whore.”

He’s not sick, she realizes, except with rage.

Jenny’s right behind her but not saying a word. (Small mercies.)

“Ernest.” As softly as Blanche can. “I’m so sorry for everything that’s happened.” There’s a face watching through a sliding panel in the nearest door: a mui jai. Then a small hand, beckoning. Is the girl offering Blanche a refuge from the furious man, or inviting him in? Two bittee lookee. She forces her eyes back to Ernest. “All I’m asking for is my P’tit.”

“How do you have the gall to pretend you’re a woman? If you wanted that baby,” says Ernest in a wolfish snarl, “if you’d ever really wanted him, wouldn’t you have held on tight to him when he first dropped out of your hole?”

She cringes away from the words more than from his spirituous breath.

“No answer to that one?” He grabs her jaw with one hard hand, squeezes her lips together. “Then why don’t you shut your mouth?”

He barks over his shoulder. “Stand down, Bonnet, or I’ll see to you.”

“No, you stand down. You’re hurting the lady.”

“What lady?” Ernest yelps with a sort of laughter.

Blanche feels his grip relax a moment, and she shoves with both arms and wrestles her jaw away from him, staggering backward. The pain brings tears to her eyes. The mui jai’s pale face is gone from the door; the panel slides shut.

Instead of seizing Blanche again, Ernest turns to Jenny. “Settle something for the record, would you? Arthur maintains you’re just an interfering meddler. But my money’s on your being a dirty gouine who wants this muff for herself.”

He flicks one finger at Blanche, who goes rigid when she understands him.

“Fact or fiction, chérie?” he asks, stepping close enough to Blanche to make her leap out of range again. “I just hope you charge high, for the dignity of the trade. Don’t tell me you’re doing this piece of filth for free.”

Jenny cuts in relaxedly before Blanche can answer. “I declare, you fellows are the limpest pair of leeches I’ve ever encountered. You sponge off Blanche for the full of a year, then sulk like cast-off mistresses the minute she decides to go solo. Castor and Pollux!” She lets out a snort of mirth. “I say it’s high time you get out there”—she waves toward Sacramento Street—“and peddle your own handsome asses.”

Blanche can’t believe Jenny just said that.

For a moment Ernest only stares, and then he’s clawing at Jenny’s jacket.

“Oy,” she shouts, “hands off.”

“That’s my friend’s shirt,” he snarls, “the one that he—gentleman that he is—was kind enough to lend you the night we found you stinking up the sofa, and you never gave it back, you goddamn thief.”

Putain de merde. How did Blanche let it come to this, murder about to be done in a Chinatown alley on a Monday afternoon in September?

“I give you fair warning—” Jenny speaks levelly, even though she’s out of breath. With the hand not holding the gun, she wraps the ripped shirt around her to cover up her pale ribs, shoves it into her pants.

“Warning of what?” sneers Ernest, standing tall the way Monsieur Loyal always taught them. “It’s not your clothes I’m going to rip to pieces, Bonnet, it’s you. Whale the tar out of you, fix you for good and all, so you can’t ever lure a woman from her man again.”

“That’s not what happened,” Blanche protests, “you crack-brained—”

But the click of Jenny cocking her Colt makes a little pool of silence in Waverly Place. “Fix me?” Jenny says, smiling at Ernest. “You ain’t the only one to try that. But I’ll dance on your grave first.”

“Jenny!” Blanche shrieks.

Ernest’s eyes slide to Blanche, then back to Jenny. He jerks his head over his shoulder toward Sacramento. “You really mean to gun me down in broad daylight with witnesses all around?”

The three of them are standing very still.

“He’s not worth hanging for,” Blanche roars at her. Blanche could end up in jail for this business, along with her so-called friend.

Jenny purses her dry lips.

He strikes a pose at the corner of Sacramento. Peers in both directions, then lets out a piercing whistle through his fingers. “Officers!”

Is he bluffing? Blanche wonders. Police almost never come into Chinatown.

“Come on,” she says, dipping to pick up Jenny’s scattered buttons from the dust, out of an obscure instinct to erase all traces of the encounter.

Jenny’s pocketing her Colt, very cool, and straightening her clothes. Waverly Place opens onto Clay Street at the other end, so they can be out of sight in half a minute.

But here comes Ernest, marching down the alley with two Specials. How the hell did he rustle them up so fast?

“Run,” Blanche whispers.

“Ah, that’d be called resisting arrest,” Jenny murmurs, “and those two know my face.” She sounds faintly proud of the fact. “Afternoon, Officers.” She tips her cap as she strolls to meet them.

“Well, if it isn’t our old friend the frog-catcher,” says the taller, red-faced one. “Done your time in County already?”

“Don’t time just fly,” Jenny replies.

“Been hunting today, I assume, from your costume?”

“Always on the lookout,” she assures them.

“Ribbit!” croaks the shorter man.

“What is this, a strawberry social?” demands Ernest hoarsely. “This female is clearly in male attire. Do your duty and arrest her.”

“Did this pup just try to tell us our duty?” the taller asks the shorter.

“As it happens, I’m on my way home to change,” Jenny puts in.

“Into bonnet and flounces?” asks the shorter one, deadpan.

The taller puts a hand on her torn sleeve as she slides by. “Thirsty weather, this.”

“Isn’t it, though. Could I wish you well to the tune of two bucks?”

“I told you, she pulled a gun on me,” protests Ernest.

“Try ten,” the Special tells Jenny.

“Fellows! That’s as much as the judge would fine me.”

He shrugs. “Less fuss for all concerned, though. This way your evening’s your own.” His gesture takes in the whole City, as if he’s offering it to her on a plate.

“What would you say to five?” Jenny asks.

“I’d say come down handsome now, Jenny, or you’ll be back in the cells for supper.”

“Five’s pretty handsome,” she argues, still smiling.

Jenny hasn’t got ten, Blanche realizes, and she starts digging in her carpetbag for her own pocketbook.

“Take my five and call it quits?” Jenny splays the notes like a hand of cards.

“She’s a thief too,” Ernest bursts out. “That shirt belongs to Mr. Arthur Deneve—”

“And another five for your trouble, Officers,” says Blanche, holding out the coins she’s finally added up.

Jenny throws her an irritated look, as if Blanche has spoiled the game.

But the faces of the Specials have relaxed. They collect their winnings from the two women.

“Come on,” says Jenny in Blanche’s ear. She hooks her by the elbow and hurries her up the alley toward Sacramento Street. “It’s all hunky-dory now.”

“Do we look as if we give a rat’s ass about a shirt?” the shorter inquires.

“Dandy Frogs and their goddamn clothes,” says the taller, rolling his eyes as they turn away.