Read Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 for Free Online

grains, stewed fruit, but no meat and not the sweets that the girls enjoyed on birthdays. She didn’t miss the puddings and cookies, especially when Dr. Loomis bought her blood oranges from Sicily in the dead of winter.
    She spent hours on the stationary bicycle they called the Gymnasticon. Her calves and thighs became muscular and hard, and it seemed to Lou that an alien, stronger self was being born inside her. In the evenings she paced the corridors with a medical textbook balanced on her head. Once, when the book fell, the circulatory system tore loose and skittered across the pavement. Dr. Loomis said it was important to excel at a range of sports; each would develop a different set of reflexes and muscles. She was only mildly surprised when he produced a punching bag and announced that her training would now include the skills required to become a champion boxer. Flailing away at the bag, she thought dreamily of Robert.
    They began to travel to distant parts of France, in steamy second-class compartments smelling of garlic sausage and soggy diapers. Lou took part in athletic contests and attended meetings of local women’s sports clubs, groups of female athletes whose eyes blazed with the light of a holy mission and who admired Lou’s talent and hard work. She kept in touch, by mail, with a discus thrower from the Auvergne, a high jumper from Provence.
    One night she tiptoed through the convent and, lurking in the doorway of Sister Francis’s room, spied on the nun and her brother. They were speaking English. The only words Lou understood were Lou and the Olympics .
    Soon after, Lou was informed that they were going to Paris, with the Mother Superior’s blessing and with the consent of her parents, who sent word that they wished Lou all the best.

From Make Yourself New
    BY LIONEL MAINE
    Reflections on Self-Pity, Paris, October 1928
    Â 
    AMONG THE DEMONS that taunt a writer before he can open a vein and write in his own blood are the devils that whisper: Are you brave enough to tell the truth? Crazy enough to reveal the magic secret that will lose its power if even one other person finds out?
    Let’s say you have discovered a cure for the garden-variety psychic ills that plague mankind: guilt, anxiety, envy, dread, and, above all, self-pity. And let’s say the cure is: Paris. Let’s say you put this discovery in a book that, by some miracle, is read by millions worldwide. And some fraction of its readers decide to do what you did: sell everything, cut every tie, move to Paris with nothing but a good pair of walking shoes and the will to survive on cigarette smoke, wine, sex, music, poetry, and moonlight on the Seine. Pretty soon you can’t turn a corner without running into a crowd of Americans who have followed you here under the illusion that the City of Light is an asylum for Cincinnati neurotics.
    But I am determined to write a new kind of book. And so, despite the likelihood that I am sealing my own doom, I will shout it in uppercase letters: MAKE YOURSELF NEW IN PARIS!
    Self-pity makes it easy to write, thanks to the diabolic voice hissing in my ear: You can say whatever you want. No one will ever read it. You can write “Come to Paris and look me up and I’ll lend you fifty francs” without fear of one person taking you up on your offer.
    I was in a dark mood after I’d walked my girlfriend Suzanne home and kissed her good night at the door of the dump she shares with her widowed mother. My giant hard-on didn’t help. In fact it tipped me forward into the rabbit hole of self-loathing, poverty, unemployment, the depths of being unpublished, balding, ten years older than my friends at an age when ten years makes a big difference, evicted from my hotel (again!) for nonpayment of rent. The shame of being thirty and not having a room to which I can bring the woman I love. Okay, thirty-four. By the time he was my age, Jesus had been dead for a year.
    And yet, and