its ambience it owed to the Old. Shuttered windows erased all the distinctive qualities of the City of Light, most particularly light itself. Years ago someone had painted the brick interior of the rue Pigalle night club black and stained the soft wood floor. The newest owner, hoping to benefit from wealthy Americans spending cheaply purchased francs, had covered the walls with framed photographs of Valentino and Pick ford and pastoral scenes of western mountains and Indian braves. Illuminated by harsh spotlights, smoke-filled and noisy, Chez les Américains had little to offer the expatriates it so coveted.
But still, they came.
“Sure they come and keep comin’, Nickel girl,” Clarence said, chomping on the end of a huge cigar he wouldn’t light. “They comin’ to hear the best jazz in Paris. Hot jazz, not that pisspot stuff served up ‘round the corner.”
Nicky leaned on the top of the piano and watched as guests wandered from table to table. Clarence wasn’t boasting. Clarence Valentine and his band were the best in town.
Nicky adored Clarence, and had since the first time she heard him play, when she was still a young child. Since then, of course, her life had changed dramatically. She had gone from the child Nicolette Cantrelle to the woman Nicky Valentine, from Chicago to Paris, from a life with her beloved father to a very different one with Clarence. She had left everything behind when she and Clarence were forced to flee Chicago, everything except Clarence himself and her love of music.
And memories of her father’s death that still surfaced sometimes as nightmares.
“What’s you thinkin’ about, Nickel? Your face so long,” Clarence said.
She smiled fondly at him. “Is not!”
His face lit up in a grin. Clarence had made his living hauling bales of cotton on the New Orleans river front in the days before he could get jobs with his music, and he was a large man, although the years had begun to whittle away at him. He had little education, none of it in music, but he had taught himself to play the piano by listening to the music of others. His ear was so fine that he could play any song he heard, and usually a more thrilling version, at that.
Tonight he wore a shiny black suit with a scarlet vest and his signature diamond stickpin in his tie. In the harsh glare of the spotlight, his shirt was white enough to blind her.
“You gonna get to it?” she asked. “Or you gonna flex those old fingers all night?”
“We’ll get goin’ when we need to. Things’ll heat up soon enough.”
Nothing really got started at the Montmartre night clubs until well after midnight. The Americans and British had come to Paris to escape schedules and rules. In the process, they had established a new set.
Their days were predictable, and so were their nights. After dinner at cherished little restaurants, the serious drinkers among them went on to small, intimate bars like the Dingo or Parnasse, where they were on a first-name basis with the barman. But the others drifted to Montmartre for dancing and music. Those who came to Les Américains stayed until well after the sun was up, because as the clock ticked off the hours, the music got hotter and sweeter. The tips got more extravagant, too, and the praise more abandoned, which was why Nicky was preparing to ask Clarence if she could perform at the end of the night, instead of the beginning.
“Speaking of things heating up,” Nicky said, glad that he had given her an opening, “I can sing hot. You just don’t give me a chance, Clarence.”
“What you talkin’ about? You sing every single blessed night. You get everybody in the mood to stay here and listen. Weren’t for you, they wouldn’t come ‘tall.”
“They sure don’t come to hear me.” Nicky picked at a nail.
Clarence ran his fingers down the keyboard and started to play in earnest. She recognized the beginning of a bluesy medley, songs Clarence would consider too provocative for her.
She pouted—something she knew he hated. “They don’t come to hear me, because I never get to show them what I can do.”
“You better go show them now, else Mr. Yernaux’s gonna find himself somebody new for hostess.”
She made a face at him, crossing her eyes à la Josephine Baker, but he only shook his head. She straightened and shimmied to be sure her beaded dress fell into a perfect line; then she pasted a wide smile on her face and started for the door.
Some of the people who came to Les Américains were famous. From the moment Nicky and Clarence set foot on French shores, Clarence had been determined that she would have the kind of education and life her father had wanted for her. He had gone to work in a series of nightclubs, playing piano with one jazz band, then another, to fund school tuition and a comfortable apartment the two of them could call home. She had studied literature and art, language and deportment. Her French was perfect; her English was, too—just in case perfect English was ever called for. Best of all, the sisters had encouraged her love of reading, and Nicky knew, from all she had devoured, that people like Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, men who had danced and drunk at Les Américains, were men to reckon with.
Now she greeted a new group of guests. Two of the men were familiar, American journalists from some where in the Midwest who were in Europe on assignment for the next several months. They looked exactly alike to her, clean-cut, brown-haired youths wearing Sears and Roebuck worsted suits and friendly white smiles. The last time they’d appeared, they had talked endlessly about Lindbergh and given her stock-market tips she couldn’t use. She thought of them as Siamese twins, Bob One and Bob Two, but she called them “honey” and “sugar” to their faces. They ate it up.
“Honey, so glad to have you.” She kissed Bob One on the cheeks and turned to Bob Two. She had mastered the friendly kiss, the insubstantial but much appreciated greeting that made the guests at Les Américains feel welcomed. “Sugar.” She stepped back, extending her hand to those in the party she didn’t know.
She knew exactly who to touch and who to avoid. It was a sixth sense she had acquired, an intuition honed by subtle rejection and rib-crushing response. She had been the hostess for a year now, and she had learned which part of herself to share and which to hoard. Her livelihood was balanced somewhere in between—along with her self-esteem.
She seated the Bobs and their party, darting back and forth in her weighty green-and-rose dress like a ruby-throated hummingbird. By the time she left them, she knew they were comfortable and well on their way to finishing the first of many bottles of champagne.
Clarence’s piano grew louder, backed up now by the thumping of a bass and the mellow moaning of horns and a clarinet. Voices grew louder in response, and laughter rang through the room. She started toward a new group that had just arrived, a casual mélange of colored and white.
She had lived in Paris for eight years, and she had seen and shrugged off a world of experience. But she still wasn’t used to the coal black hand of a man on the chalk white arm of a woman. Black and white in public together still startled her, just as the lack of racism among the French did. She continued to be haunted by childhood experiences. When she shopped in Les Halles, she expected to be ordered to the end of every line. Once, not long ago, she had awakened screaming when car horns blared in the street below.
She greeted three of the men, jazz musicians who often played in a rival nightclub. She smiled at the women and watched them assess her. Their gowns were straight off the pages of L’Art et la Mode, carelessly worn and supremely designed. All the women slouched in the current fashion, their boyishly bound breasts
