Free Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 by Francine Prose

night but making sure that his glass, his one glass, was never empty. Laughing, we toasted the punch line. Fill it, please!
    Poor Lionel! When he looked back on tonight, would he wonder when exactly I decided that our love affair was over? Fortunately, it was Lionel’s policy to look back as rarely as possible. What happened to Orpheus, Lionel said, was entirely the woman’s fault. Same with Lot. Blame the wife. If Lionel had looked back, he’d still be in Jersey with Beedie and little Walt.
    The baroness told a story about her husband and her brother-in-law, Didi and Armand. They were in business together, manufacturing automobiles. Her story began with a long list of famous names I’d never heard of. Duke A said something to Viscount B, who said something to Princess C and the German industrialist D. The upshot was that Didi and Armand hired the world’s fastest auto racer to take their new sports car around the track and report any problems.
    The driver agreed on one condition: that he test the car only at night, and that he have the track to himself with no one there to spot him. For a while the arrangement worked until one night a cop saw headlights circling the track, and not having been alerted, found the driver doing a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, wearing only a helmet and a lady’s black lace nightie.
    â€œWhat happened?” Gabor asked.
    â€œNothing,” said the baroness. “The driver delivered his report. It went to the engineers.”
    â€œIn America he would have been executed,” said Lionel.
    â€œHardly,” the baroness said. “I spent years in Hollywood. You think there aren’t perverts there? I knew a producer who could only achieve orgasm by having Asian virgins set off firecrackers on his chest. How does someone figure that out? Does he roll away from his wife one night and think, What would really make me happy is a Chinese schoolgirl blowing Catherine wheels off my nipples?”
    The men laughed, a little nervously. Watch and learn, Suzanne.
    Gabor and Lionel excused themselves and got up to go to the toilet, leaving me with the baroness. She leaned so far away from me, she was practically horizontal. Then she lit another cigarette and said, “If my brother-in-law were here, he would only speak to you—and not one word to the others.”
    â€œDoesn’t he like men?”
    â€œArmand likes men fine. He is married and very religious. In fact he belongs to Opus Dei. He was among its first members. A pioneer, one might say.”
    I was afraid to tell the baroness that I didn’t know what Opus Dei was, though later I would learn from Gabor that it was an extreme right-wing Catholic sect with radical ideas about how the universe works and with practices that, one heard, included self-flagellation.
    â€œApparently,” said the baroness, “this cult or coven or whatever it is has no problem with . . . never mind. I meant: the only reason Armand would talk to you is because you are French. Unlike our two friends, who are foreigners, in case you hadn’t noticed. Armand is patriotic to an almost fanatical degree. Correction: a fanatical degree. In addition to his religious manias he is a founding member of the Order of the Legion of Joan of Arc. Though I don’t believe that he agrees with the thugs who go around roughing up immigrants, Jews, Bolsheviks, and the rest.”
    The baroness looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time all evening. As if I’d evolved from a talking oyster into a fellow human in whom she was confiding, or whose opinion she wanted. The flicker of her shifting moods bathed her face in a flattering, honeyed light. I wanted to tell her something. I wanted to talk about my father’s death and my mother’s poor health. I can’t imagine why I thought that she would be sympathetic.
    â€œWhat about your husband?” I asked. “Does he share his