Mistress of the Ritz Page 6

  And Claude’s American bride was not shy in letting him know how she felt about those differences.

  Where is Lily?

  So many people disappeared in the chaos of the invasion: the woman who used to do Blanche’s hair, the little old lady with the storefront full of cats who she always bought lace from, an entire family who used to live in the mansion next to the Ritz. Waiters, chambermaids, cooks. A storekeeper here. A perfumer there. When she strolls the streets, Blanche can’t help but notice the number of storefronts with broken windows, debris gathering on the sidewalks. Flowers dying in window boxes, unwatered. Neglected—so much of Paris outside the Ritz was starting to look neglected now. She’d always admired how even the tiniest alley or courtyard looked ready for a visit from a king; flowers always blooming, pruned and watered; no litter, no dirt, railings blackened and polished, cobblestones hosed down so that they shined.

  Now there is an air of mournful waiting, especially in those tiny alleys and courtyards. And the population appears to be reduced by half, at least, to Blanche’s searching eyes.

  No, not reduced. For in place of the missing are the Haricots Verts, the Hanses and Fritzes and Klauses. They’ve taken the places of the vanished. And they don’t even seem to notice that they are parking their broad German asses in someone else’s café chair, someone else’s seat on the tour boats, someone else’s table at the restaurants, including the Ritz.

  Those early weeks of the Occupation passed quickly; it was a hell of a steep learning curve. At first, Parisians fumbled and stumbled about, eyes blinking in disbelief at this strange new world they’d been rudely shoved into, just like any newborn animal. They learned not to initiate eye contact with the Germans, but to respond with a cautious smile when they initiated it with them. They learned not to speak until spoken to. They learned not to stiffen at the sight of German soldiers gleefully buying up goods no longer available (unless you happened to live at the Ritz) when ordinary citizens had to stand in long lines to get a lousy loaf of bread.

  Oh, on the surface, if she squints, life here at the Ritz looks a lot like usual: the plush opulence, the polite manners, the idle—and not-so-idle—gossip. But it isn’t as usual, nothing is as usual. Yes, Blanche’s morning newspaper is still ironed, folded with edges so sharp she could cut herself on them, placed on a silver tray and presented to her with a single rose in a vase. But the paper itself is German propaganda disguised as news with headlines crowing about German victories in North Africa, illustrations of a jovial Hitler, the occasional photo of him in his château in the Alps, posing as if for a fashion spread. His favorite recipe for strudel, helpfully printed for all to see.

  There are still flowers everywhere in the Ritz, true—it seems that manure and dirt are the only things not being requisitioned for the German army these days—but those flowers, with their lush petals, dewy stems, can’t camouflage the Nazi flags sticking out of them. The soft chamber music always being played, somewhere, in the Ritz cannot mute the harsh German voices.

  The bar, though. Ah, the bar. It’s the pulsing heart of the Ritz and it always has been. And Frank Meier is its main artery.

  Frank was one of the first people Blanche met when Claude introduced her—his blushing fiancée—to his new co-workers, back in 1923. Their surprising engagement coincided with Claude getting his dream job: manager of the Ritz Paris. And when Claude brought her here, proud as punch—although to be frank, she wasn’t sure, she’s never been completely sure, just what he was proudest of, his bride-to-be or the hotel—Frank was where he always is, where he should be: behind the polished ebony bar, a shaker in his giant paw.

  Frank Meier looks like a longshoreman: beefy features, enormous arms, short, thick neck. His hair is always well oiled, parted precisely in the middle. And as much as he seems most at home behind the bar, making up his intoxicating concoctions, he’s just as at ease outside it, greeting his favorite guests like lifelong friends, even carrying their bags up to their rooms for them.

  But Blanche knows the real reason Frank is so hospitable: The guy runs a gambling ring outside the hotel. Much easier to collect bets away from the gossips and drunks.

  “So you’re the betrothed,” Frank said in his growling voice, giving her a kiss on the cheek when Claude introduced them. “Congratulations! Can I pour you some champagne?”

  “You bet your sweet ass you can,” Blanche said, and was halfway into the bar before both Claude and Frank were pulling her back outside of it.

  “You can’t go in there, Blanchette,” Claude said with a stern shake of his head.

  “Why not?” She smiled; it had to be a joke, right? Because the Ritz had seduced her from her very first step inside.

  As it seduces everyone. It whispers your name in a satin caress, it shows you unimaginable treasures—the tapestries on the walls should be in an art museum—it seduces you into thinking, even if you haven’t a sou in your pocket, that simply by rubbing elbows with the barons and duchesses and movie stars and heiresses who glide through the halls on the wings of fortune, you, too, are something special. But the spell wore off some for Blanche that day, when she was told that women weren’t allowed in the bar.

  “What do you mean?” Blanche asked; she, the newly liberated flapper from New York, where she’d rolled her stockings and tucked gin flasks in her garter and knocked on the doors of speakeasies. There wasn’t a speakeasy in all of Manhattan that didn’t allow women. After all, they’d just gotten the vote!

  But women in Paris in 1923, Blanche was about to discover, had not. Married women in Paris in 1923 couldn’t open bank accounts and had to turn over all their money to their husbands. Women—married or not—in Paris in 1923 weren’t allowed in the bar of the Hôtel Ritz.

  “It’s simply the way it is,” her new fiancé said with the shrug she was beginning to know too well. “It is how it’s always been. Ladies wait in the salon, where Frank will be most happy to bring you a glass of champagne, won’t you, Frank?”

  Frank—his alert eyes scanning her face, piercing through her mask of makeup—nodded.

  That day—because, and only because, Blanche was still anxious to fit in and be a good wife for her Gallic knight in shining armor, and he was about to start work here—she allowed herself to be ushered into the stuffy, compact little wood-paneled ladies’ salon, where matrons with yapping dogs sat sipping tea or, at the strongest, one of those glasses of champagne (with a fresh rose in the glass), gossiping about the newest clothes. Vionnet was to die for, but have you seen the new fashions from the young Mademoiselle Chanel down the street? Shocking, simply shocking!

  Waiting—impatiently—for her champagne (when what Blanche really craved was a martini), she happened to eavesdrop on two very large women who sat down next to her. They were stuffed into their tight crepe de chine dresses, swathed to their eyebrows in furs, but their feet were clad in very boring, very utilitarian black laceup shoes. They began to talk in German; the language of Blanche’s childhood.

  “I do enjoy the Ritz,” one said as she began to remove her gloves. “It’s where I always stay in Paris.”

  “Yes, I agree,” said the other, who evidently preferred to keep her gloves on even as she reached into her handbag and produced a small box of chocolates; she took one and offered her companion a choice.

  “They don’t take Jews here, of course,” said the one without the gloves. Then she bit into her chocolate, not very daintily.

  “I don’t think even the staff is allowed to be Jewish,” the one with the gloves—Blanche was delighted to see she now had chocolate streaks all over the white kid—agreed as she dug around for another piece. “Or if they are, they aren’t obviously Semitic.”

  “It is a relief. One feels safer, in a way. More at home.”

  “That is what the Ritz does—it makes one feel at home. Better than at home—I don’t have gold taps in my bathroom.”
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  “Who does in Germany? The war has bankrupted us.”

  And then the two were talking about postwar economics and the new Nationalist party and some guy named Hitler who apparently was in jail, but Blanche didn’t care about that.

  Suddenly she looked up; Frank Meier was standing next to her, a champagne glass on a silver tray and a grim expression on his broad face. He had heard the women, Blanche suspected. Evidently Frank also spoke German.

  They looked at each other for a long moment. Frank handed Blanche the glass and said, so softly concerned, she couldn’t believe it from such a gruff-looking man, “If you ever need anything, mademoiselle, just ask me. Anything.”

  It wasn’t long before Blanche did.

  * * *

  —

  AND THAT’S HOW IT’S been between Frank and Blanche. He was her ally in her fight to open the bar up to women—Christ, it took the Depression to put ol’ Madame Ritz over the top about that, but with empty rooms and empty barstools, Madame really had no choice but to let in Blanche and her fellow thirsty sisters. And Frank, along with all of Blanche’s new bar buddies—Ernest Hemingway, whom she’d known since he was a poor, starving tagalong to Scott Fitzgerald; Cole Porter, whose little bright eyes shone like polished onyx; Pablo Picasso, whose laughter and speech were as bold and singular as his paintings—celebrated. She was the Mistress of the Ritz Bar—and she’s remained on her throne ever since.

  Blanche has her own little table facing the door, so she can see, before anyone else, what illustrious personage is entering. Every day Frank places a fresh rose in a bud vase, and there’s an ornately framed, handwritten Reserved for Madame Auzello sign in exquisite calligraphy (of course, there is a staff calligrapher here at the Ritz whose sole job is to write place cards for private dinners). And it’s in the bar that Blanche hears everything there is to hear. This is no different now, even though instead of Hemingway—who disappeared after the invasion—laughing at a table, a row of martinis lined up in front of him, there is Hermann Göring. Instead of Fitzgerald toppling off his seat, because the man cannot hold his liquor but always has to engage in a contest of the liver with Hemingway, there’s ol’ Spatzy, that German son of a bitch who frequented the Ritz even before the war, charming as ever, but Blanche doesn’t laugh quite so hard at his jokes as she used to. She detects the malice hidden inside the humor and shrinks from his hands, always reaching out to caress a shoulder, cup an elbow. Instead of Picasso and Porter whispering about which guest is unable to pay his bill, there are various Hanses and Fritzes in their uniforms, tittering over a Bee’s Knees or a Singapore Sling. Instead of Garbo and Dietrich reclining seductively—although Claude forbids them both from wearing their famous trousers here at the Ritz—there’s Chanel with her sharp nose and the movie star Arletty with her patrician forehead and etched cheekbones. Drinking with Spatzy and his friends. Doing more than drinking, if you believe the gossip.

  Gossip—which, if you ask Blanche, is the main trade of the Ritz—has only increased since the invasion. There’s the gossip that Göring dresses up in women’s clothing—he’s especially fond of marabou feathers, apparently—and dances with the poor waiters he summons to his suite at every hour of the day. He’s hopped up on morphine most of the time, too. And he had to have a special bathtub installed just to contain his bulk—this, she heard firsthand from Claude (since she, like everyone else not in uniform, either of the Third Reich or the Ritz, is confined, courtesy of armed guards, to the rue Cambon side), so it must be true. For her Claude, bless his pompous little heart, does not gossip.

  There is another kind of gossip, too, now, the air practically snapping with secrets, secrets, secrets. And Frank oversees it all from behind his post. He accepts a napkin, folded just so; he covers it with his giant hand, slides it so fast across the bar, tucks it into a pocket. Minutes later, he goes outside for a smoke. Someone might decide to join him.

  So much of what the Ritz—less officially—provides is provided by Frank. Do you need an abortionist? A blackmailer? An illegal gun? Some forged papers?

  Frank Meier will provide. And he will keep your secret, too, at only a little extra charge, a small deposit in that bank account he keeps in Switzerland, but he has no idea that Blanche is aware of it.

  And so, today, walking past Germans standing sentry, Germans ordering champagne, Germans calling out her name while patting the seat next to them, she knows who to go to about Lily. Blanche has asked Frank for things in the past; things she can’t ask from Claude. And Frank has always provided. So what’s one more favor, between friends?

  What’s one more secret between husbands and wives who started out so much more than that to each other?

  Where they lived together in wedded bliss…

  She was gone.

  Her wardrobe at the Ritz was empty; so, too, was the one at their apartment in Passy—the apartment she had insisted they move into, for she could not stand his bachelor quarters. He had done that for her; he had done so many things for his ungrateful wife! The apartment he couldn’t afford; the designer dresses she insisted she needed as befitted his position; the rooms at the Ritz she demanded. Demands, demands—it was all she ever asked of him, it seemed. It turned out that marrying a woman new to a country, with few friends, no family, and a tenuous grasp of the language, required a lot more attention and energy than Claude had planned to give. After all, it was the wife who was supposed to maintain a marriage, who was supposed to provide and soothe and cook and clean.

  But what did any of it matter now? Like a child, a spoiled, petulant child, Blanche was gone. And for such a reason as this?

  He should have realized; he did have an uneasy feeling about telling her, if he was being honest. Claude had seen how ridiculously Americans behaved about these things—the soldiers on leave during the war who were overcome with guilt. The businessmen who checked in to the Hôtel Claridge under assumed names.

  Americans! Why were they so puritanical about sex? Sex was merely a physical act, a necessary act, particularly in these years, and naturally, that was how he attempted to explain it to Blanche.

  “My love,” Claude began one evening after they had enjoyed an hour of passion; he thought this would be the appropriate time, when she might understand, physically as well as emotionally, the situation from a woman’s point of view. For Claude prided himself on being a generous lover, and this was one area in which Blanche seemed to agree with him.

  “Yes, Claude?”

  “These last years—these last hundred and fifty years, actually—France has been a nation at war. We have committed mass suicide, in a way—look around, how many young Frenchmen do you see in Paris?”

  “Not many. Dammit, Claude, you sure have an odd idea of pillow talk.” She sat up and put on a thin wrapper and began to brush her tangled blond hair.

  Claude watched her for a moment. He did enjoy seeing women brush their hair; it was one reason why he was not fond of those bobbed hairstyles.

  “Blanche, we have just made love—don’t you agree, it’s a necessary part of life?”

  She grinned at him, put the brush down, and plopped back on the bed, arranging her wrapper so that the tops of her breasts heaved most enticingly. “Now you’re talkin’!”

  “So, we agree—a woman without a man in her bed is half a woman?”

  “Hmmm mmmm…” She began to nuzzle his chest, her lips making angel kisses against his flesh, and it was with great effort that Claude managed to continue the conversation. But it was imperative that he did.

  “So you understand.” Claude gently pushed her away; he needed her to hear what he was about to say. There could be no confusion about the matter. “You understand, then, that I will be spending my Thursday nights elsewhere.”

  “I—what?” She rubbed the middle of her forehead with her thumb—a habit that made her look heartbreakingly childlike and naïve; Cla
ude had to swallow before continuing.

  “I will be elsewhere on Thursday nights. That is the night I will be with—her.”

  “Her?”

  “My mistress.”

  “Your mistress?”

  “Yes. Only Thursday nights, as is proper. But I did not want you to worry, or to come looking for me. Now, you know. Would you like me to warm up some of the bouillabaisse from last night? I’m quite hungry.” He reached for his trousers, for it was chilly.

  As he bent down to pull them up, she pushed him from behind, and he fell to the floor in an undignified heap. Claude turned around; Blanche was standing on the bed, her eyes blazing.

  “Blanche! Why did you do that?”

  “Your mistress? You have a mistress? Goddamn you, Claude! You tell me, when we’re in bed, after we have just fucked, that you have another woman?”

  “Shhh! Blanche, lower your voice.”

  “I will not!”

  “Blanche, calm down. I will not discuss this with you until you have controlled yourself.”

  “Controlled myself?” But she did lower her voice.

  “Yes. Come, sit.” Claude sank back down on the bed and patted the space next to him with a charming smile; she glared at him, jumped off the bed, and took a seat on the small chair next to the window. But she only perched on the edge, looking like a bird—a wild, exotic bird—about to take flight.

  “First, I am your husband. I honor, I respect you.”

  “How can you say that when you have a little chippie on the side?”

  “A little—what? I don’t understand that word.”

  “A whore.”

  “A mistress, not a whore. If I wanted a whore, I could have one. But why would I pay for what I can have for free? I couldn’t dishonor you in that way.”

  She opened her mouth, shook her head. “I have no idea what the hell you just said.”