Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 by Francine Prose

would never have let her touch a woman in labor or a newborn baby.
    One night, when the midwife was away, Eva was summoned by a rich Parisian vacationing with his Hungarian wife, who had grown up nearby. Eva reached inside the woman, who had fainted, and delivered a healthy infant just as its mother awoke.
    Like the magic fish in the fairy tale, the father told Eva she could have anything she wanted. She wanted her sailor boy not to be dead.
    She said, I want my own flock of ducks.
    He said, You can do better.
    She said, I want my own poultry farm.
    He said, You can reach higher.
    She said, I want to travel.
    He said, Where?
    Not long before, she’d read a newspaper item about a nightclub singer who had been murdered in Paris. The dead girl had left an empty space that needed to be filled.
    She said, I want to sing in Paris.
    Nothing could be simpler, said the grateful millionaire. He owned property in every neighborhood. He would inform his office. They would find her a place of her own. A nightclub was a small price to pay for a healthy wife and child. Parisians loved new clubs. No one talked about anything but the latest hot spot. Had she sung professionally?
    She nodded. She’d sung to the ducks.
    In Paris she looked up a childhood friend named Gyorgy. It took her weeks to find him, partly because he’d become Georgette. Georgette said that Eva too must change her name.
    In France she was Yvonne.
    Georgette knew artists, fashion designers, musicians, gangsters, people with shadowy pasts and mysterious new fortunes. Very modern, very free, very fond of dressing as the opposite sex. They needed a place where they could relax and have fun.
    Yvonne’s club was an instant hit. Georgette gave Yvonne her first lizard, which not only provided the name for her club but also everything she needed: the transfixed love of a duckling, the sandpaper touch of a man. She enjoyed watching it turn colors. She liked to decorate its little home. She was sad when the first lizard died, but she found a replacement.
    Yvonne’s clientele worshiped her. Her staff called her Yvonne the Terrible, but it was a loving joke. The musicians admired her voice but thought she should pay them more. She wrote songs about the sailor boy whose face she could hardly remember. Word got out that she liked sailors, which narrowed the field of men with the nerve to approach her. Among her lovers were captains, admirals, stokers, even an occasional fisherman who found his way to the city. She’d always liked the taste and smell of salt on a man’s skin.
    But none of these men understood, or wanted to understand, how hard she worked, how early she woke each morning to add up the books and order the wine and charm the delivery men who cheated everyone but her. What man wanted to hear about the constant money worries? No one knew what it took to go onstage and shed years of troubles, gallons of whiskey, and packs of cigarettes, and travel back through age and time to reenter the mind of the girl whose sailor never returned.
    Yvonne was thoughtful and discreet, alert for the scent of the predator. She warned her clients if she thought they were involved with the wrong person, but she respected their privacy and shut her eyes to a lot. Or pretended to shut her eyes. Nothing happened at the club without her knowledge. She protected her customers from voyeurs and unwelcome publicity. She’d turned away the Hungarian who wanted to take pictures, despite how much she’d enjoyed speaking her native language.
    Who had time and energy for a husband and children? For a few hours a week, she could lock her office door, smoke a little opium, and play with Louis the Lizard. And yet she always found time to adopt and nurture the strays who found their way to the club after hearing that it was a refuge where you would be taken in and not asked any questions.
    Most of the runaways were young. Yvonne put them to work doing odd jobs, taking coats,