My Little Blue Dress (10 page)

I yawned again, loudly.

“And in your case, my new English friend . . .” Finally she turned. She had a smile on her face, a smile that spoke of imminent misbehavior. “I have come to suspect that your cork has not yet been removed.”

I wasn't a fool.

I knew what was happening.

These idle musings by Eloïse were the opening pawn moves of what she clearly hoped would become a full-blown lesbian chess match—involving actual naked sex, most likely—for which activity I had neither the energy nor obviously the requisite sexual orientation. To be sure: like every ingenue I had come to Paris to find myself, but not through
trial and error,
not by randomly trying on new selves like cheap sunglasses in a pharmacy until I found one that suited me. I'd been down that road already, and discovered that it didn't really lead anywhere.

“Eloïse . . .” I began uncomfortably.

“It is like with wine, no?” She took a step in my direction. “The men, they gouge at the wine bottle with their corkscrews. Usually their gouging is successful. But once in a great while . . .” She took another step toward me and lowered her voice. “Once in a great while a bottle comes his way whose cork will not so easily be removed. Oh, it will yield up its exterior, its exposed upper surface . . .”

From within her black velvet cape appeared a tiny white hand. It gripped the belt of my shapeless tweed house coat and tugged. I didn't resist, for some reason, and now our faces were mere inches apart. I could feel her hot breath, and Eloïse still wasn't finished with the wine thing.

“But still there remains a plug of cork lodged deep in the bottle's neck, upon which his corkscrew can achieve no purchase. The man he grows outraged. He stamps his foot and shakes his fist. He tears at his hair and his mind it is filled with the most
outlandish
schemes. Should he push the plug of cork down into the bottle with some thin, pencillike object?” I felt lips on my throat. “Should he cut it to pieces with the tip of a knife and then strain the liquid through a piece of muslin in order to remove the suspended detritus?
Oh, how . . .” Suddenly her hand was on my stomach, foraging south toward my panties, “oh how will he taste of the sweet, sweet, wine?”

I twisted away. “Eloïse . . . Eloïse . . . look, I'm really, really sorry but I just really can't do this. I'm not a homosexual, or even a bisexual or whatever. There was a time in my life when I thought I might be but . . . well, I decided that I wasn't one.”

I ran a hand through my ringlets, conflictedly, and gazed up in anguish at the barely lightening sky.

“Do you know where I was this afternoon before you arrived?” said Eloïse, turning back to the river. A used croissant floated by on the water, puffy and pale as the moon.

“Were you . . . were you out having sex with women?”

“No,” said Eloïse. “I was several boulevards away, delivering a letter to my lover and good friend Ernest Hemingway, the celebrated novelist. Ernest was not at home, unfortunately, and so I was forced to leave the envelope in the custody of his building's concierge.”

“Oh.”

“And now I have a question for you, my new English friend.” She turned again. The fact that I delivered a letter today . . .” Eloïse cocked her tiny head. “Does that make me a postman?”

I bit my lip and looked at her.

No.

It didn't.

It didn't make her a postman.

And right then I fell to the ground and had an epiphany. There was nothing wrong with me, and there never had been. All my life I'd been desperately trying to solve the equation

Me = a normal girl + X

frantically trying to determine
X
, why I was the way I was, why I spoke the way I did, why I had no feelings for Davey and all of that nonsense. Never had it occurred to me that there might be no
X
, that I just was the way I was because I was. Twenty long, difficult years I'd been searching for a
category
, a little social slot labeled “Was Read to as a Child” or “Allergic to the Past” or “Sexual Orientation Number Four” that would account for all my oddities, when the truth of the matter was no such category need exist. Just as Eloïse delivering a letter didn't make her a “postman,” just as me kissing her—and I did, I wobbled to my feet and slid my tongue into her hot, tight mouth—didn't make me a “homosexual,” my talking funny and having trouble relating to men didn't mean that I was necessarily any particular type of freak.

I was just me.

Nothing more, nor less, than that.

Disentangling my face from Eloïse's, I mumbled something like “We need just one more cab,” and shortly after it was all just warm skin and clean sheets and tiny little strangled cries.

T
HAT WAS THE
only time we ever made love (as far as I know; masked balls were all the rage) but quickly we were closer than lovers, more like sisters, sharing every detail of each other's lives, helping each other deal with the endless logistics of being a woman about town in 1920s Paris.

Like Eloïse with her diaries, I threw myself into my painting and ended up making some really quite serious money. My final project for that first semester at the college
was a piece called
Bachelor Pad
(1921), a medium-size gouache of a man with both eyes on the same side of his nose peering hungrily into a fridge containing nothing but a box of baking soda and a lime, and it sold for U.S. $10,000 to a major French bank that wanted to hang it in its Main Conference Room.

Buoyed by success, after taking the summer off I devoted the next year and a half to a far more ambitious and conceptual piece called
The Living Experience. The Living Experience
(1923) was a set of four high-quality colored clay and papier-mâché dioramas mounted in glass cases depicting the various facets of human life.
The Quest for Nourishment
showed a farmer and his son hand in hand in a field beside a skinless cow that had the different cuts of beef labeled while crops surged from the ground all around, and in the top right corner in a patch of vivid blue felt ocean, a jubilant sailor was sitting on the prow of this ship waving a pineapple that he was importing.
Oh, What a Feeling!
featured seven roommates, in an apartment that looked a lot like the one I shared with Eloïse, each standing and reading a newly delivered letter and reacting with a different facial expression: grief, irritation, joy, amusement, curiosity, awe, confusion.
The Life of the Mind
depicted the famous author Charles Dickens hard at work in his book-lined study, scribbling in a pad while in a thought-bubble attached to his head by a wire, a giant lizard did battle with a giant monkey, and in my favorite, titled simply
Sport!
, every face of a city marathon's starting pack was turned to watch England's most famous cricketer, W. G. Grace, lob a rugby ball at Sir Roger Bannister, the famous sprinter, who seemed unlikely to catch the thing because he was thirty feet in the air, pole-vaulting. It was witty, it was weird . . . there was a poignancy there
somewhere . . . It sold for U.S. $50,000 to an American rubber magnate who told me, postcoitally, that he would install it in his foyer.

Much of the rest of the decade is a blur. For I was having fun, and therefore time flew.

T
HE LAST TIME
I saw Eloïse was December 31, 1929. She was heading home to Bavaria to spend the New Year with her father the count. An urchin had just carried her trunk down to the street and she was putting on her cape, getting ready to leave. I was in the armchair with an absinthe.

“I wish I had a dad,” I announced, watching her fiddle with the chin strap of her gray cashmere traveling helmet.

She snorted. “You do not wish you had
my
father. We have no relationship. We sit at opposite ends of a very long table. He is a man.”

“Still. You're lucky to have a dad.”

“Lucky?” She pouted. “Oh what a monster you are. You know that I am not lucky, that I inhabit a world constructed entirely of pain. Only
very
occasionally, on those rare, rare nights when the music races high and fast, when the wild beat of the bongo takes the place of my own heartbeat and I am whirling,
whirling
 . . . entirely given over to the dance . . . a flame of flesh licking at the twig of life . . . only on those rare, magical nights would I say I was ‘lucky.' ”

“Oh, come now,” I chided her, standing to help with the chin strap. “Are they really so rare, Eloïse? Those nights?”

She tutted. “Well, then you are lucky to have a mother. Why do
you
not go home to Muffington and visit her? Do you not think she misses you?”

A bell clanged down in the snowy boulevard.

“There's your cab. And it's Murbery.”

“You are scared, I think.” She narrowed her eyes. “For all that you have become, for all the happiness you have found here in Paris . . . some part of you is haunted by the memory of childhood awkwardness. You feel you do not deserve your successes and your joy. You suspect that if you were to return to Mubford they would strip you of your finery, expose you as a fraud and you would once again find yourself to be a lonely little girl who does not belong.”

“Eloïse, the place is called Murbery. And I don't want to talk about it.”

“Oh. So you will go?”

The cabbie's bell rang again. “That remains your cab and no. I am absolutely one hundred percent not going back to Murbery.” I shoved her out the door, slammed it playfully in her face.

“That is a large number of percentage points for someone who is not one bit scared,” came her voice through the oaken slab. They were the last words I would hear her speak while “Bye! Safe journey!” were the last she would hear from me.

E
LOÏSE'S PARTING WORDS
had certainly had the ring of truth to them, yet at the same time she could not have been more wrong. I wasn't
scared
to go back to Murbery. I just didn't
want
to. In a few short days I would be thirty years old and I was impatient to move on with my life, in a mood to
free
myself of old attachments, before I entered my life's next phase. Youth had not been easy for me was the fact of the matter, and I couldn't help feeling that the best thing to do was to make a clean break. With a big white piece of
paper torn from my old student sketchpad I headed downstairs to get a drink and make plans. The restaurant next door was deserted but for the barman polishing glasses.