My Little Blue Dress (9 page)

That just left Karen. As I neared her house I heard laughter from her garden. Reaching her gate I saw that she had wheeled Greg out into the sun. He was mocking her gently as she tried to erect a deckchair for herself to sit. She was heavily pregnant, I saw also.

“Hey,” I called. Karen turned, gasped and came waddling ecstatically down the path. We hugged across the gate.

“
Oh
, tha's looking well,” she said.

“So are you.” I nodded down at her belly. “Though you may want to ease up on the candied violets.”

My best friend ever gave a tinkling laugh and fondly stroked her bulge. “Any day now says Proctor.”

“Wow. Can I?”

“Aye, o' course.”

I laid my hand upon the bulge. It was warm and round and wholesome, like a beachball after a day at the beach . . .

But I wasn't here to feel bellies. I was here to say good-bye. “Look, Karen.” I pulled back my hand and focused on a button of her burlap maternity dress. “I've got news. I'm leaving Murbery. I'm going to France to study art.”

“Tha's never!”

I looked up. Karen's eyes were sparkling.

“Yeah, I am. I love Murbery. I love you . . . and Davey. But . . . Well apparently things have gotten very loose over in France socially and, as you know, I've never found it
particularly easy fitting in here in Murbery. I think I need to go somewhere where people don't judge you for how you talk or act or ‘seem' and I think Paris may be the place.”

“Oh that's reet
fantastic
news,” said Karen. “I'll miss thee sumthin' rotten o' course but tha's definitely makin' the reet decision. Tha was allus meant for bigger things than just Murb'ry.”

I shrugged, embarrassed. “Well . . . you've got a life as well now, Karen. Greg, and the baby . . .”

“Aye,” she looked over at Greg in his deck chair, lifting his pale scarred face to the watery sun. “Tha's right. I do.” She faced me again. “Reckon we've both grown up, tha and me.”

“You're right.” I took a deep, deep breath and let it out, determined not to cry. “Look.” I laid my hand on her swollen belly again. “Promise you'll tell little him or her all about me?”

Karen giggled again, a bright peal of laughter defying the gravity of the moment. “Oh 'ow could I not? Though I may 'ave to water it down in parts just to make it believable.”

We hugged one final time and then without another word I pulled away and strode quickly off, making it perhaps twenty feet before I heard her call my name. I turned. She was still at the gate, fingering the ironwork with her face contorting. “Thanks . . .” she said, then had to look away. I followed her gaze. On the village green some children were playing, little girls and little boys, laughing and shrieking and chasing each other . . . “Thanks.”

“For what?”

Karen sucked a breath and swallowed. “Thanks for bein' lasses wi' me.”

I nodded, turned, and jogged away. She was utterly, utterly welcome.

1920–1929
A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF JAZZ

O
NE OF THE
astounding paradoxes of foreign travel—and there are several—is that nobody does it with quite as much composure and surefootedness as an untraveled yokel from a tiny little village. Contrary to what you might expect, such a figure does not get swamped by feelings of insignificance the minute she leaves the world she knows. No. So clueless is she as to the true size of the world that at least for a while as she travels she's able to continue sticking definite articles on the things she sees, adding them to her index of the familiar as if this is merely the other
half
of the world that she's exploring, as opposed to the other hundred percent. That's how it was for me on the way to Paris. I did not realize that there was a woman like that in every carriage of every train in all the world. On the boat I memorized a list of observations about the snack bar, under the assumption that everyone I was about to meet would have their own set of feelings
about it. And in Paris itself I was initially very pleasant with my surly cabdriver, genuinely scared that if I wasn't he might bad mouth me to the entire city.

By four in the afternoon, though, I was feeling frazzled and overwhelmed. Over the 'phone from Murbery I'd rented a set of lodgings through my art
collège
and by some combination of my imperfect French and the even more imperfect 'phone technology of that long-ago era (my French was actually pretty good, I'd discovered, thanks to me grand-da's early tutelage) we seemed to have gotten the directions garbled. Down boulevard after boulevard my cabbie whipped his tired horses, contemptuously flicking another handful of beads across on his abacus every time I sprang out, had a conversation with a veil-wearing concierge, and returned disappointed. By the time we eventually found the place, nestled away in a narrow, twisting boulevard some distance from the Eiffel Tower, I was literally on the brink of tears. From the street my building was dark and ugly, and although the concierge was very friendly, hugging me like a daughter and hefting all six of my hatboxes herself, she then proceeded to lead me up about eleven steep flights of rickety stairs that smelled of snails and old croissants. As she unlocked the door, I braced myself for the worst.

But, reader, it was love at first sight.

Located at the very top of the building, the
apartement
I had rented consisted of one large room, dark and homey, with paneled walls, a sloping ceiling, overstuffed armchairs, and a large bay window with a cushioned seat that gave onto a lovely old church across the road and then just an endless roofscape of cupolas and minarets and terra-cotta tiling. In the rear, behind a curtain, was a tiny little kitchen and on a table by the door sat a child's ballet shoe filled with
potpourri. It was, I decided as I threw myself onto one of two freshly made single beds, the most comfortable and inspiring place to live I'd ever visited. Decades later I would find myself reminded of it very strongly by the cozy, slightly louche set of rooms shared by Sherlock Holmes and his friend Dr. Watson in one of the filmed adventures of that world-class detective.

“No,” said the concierge nervously.

“I'm sorry?”

“That bed is being the sleeping place of your room-friend, Miss Eloïse.”

She spoke in French, but for the purposes of this narrative I shall follow the convention of translating all foreign dialogue into English, using awkward grammar and word choice to indicate that the speaker is saying something potentially annoying.

“What do you mean?”

I had a roommate, she explained, a girl of about my own age who'd been living there a few years. Why hadn't I been informed of this over the 'phone? I inquired. Because it wasn't relevant, she told me. Eloïse lived an almost entirely nocturnal existence. If I could refrain from sitting on her bed during the day while she was actually sleeping in it there was a good chance the two of us would never meet.

This was nonsense, patently, but I was far too tired to argue. I merely heaved myself up, tipped the concierge, showed her to the door, and dragged myself over to the other bed where I found a packet of registration materials from the
collège
. I kicked off my shoes and lay down to study the curriculum.

The program for that first year looked pretty daunting. In three short months I was expected to learn how to render
objects in the distance by painting them smaller than you would have done otherwise, how to do birds in a seascape by making a little M-shape with your smallest brush, how to whittle a piece of charcoal so you could use it as a pencil . . .

When I awoke the light was different, and someone nearby was sobbing. I lifted my head. There on the cushions of the window seat, silhouetted against the day, was a compact brunette in a red satin bathrobe, face pointed out the window, shoulders shaking. She also had an expensive-looking “bob” hairstyle, I noticed.

“Oh hail . . .” I racked my boat-lagged brain. “Eloïse, right?”

The eyes that swung to meet my own were huge and black and haughty, spewing forth great gouts of mascara down the smoothest and whitest cheeks I'd ever seen toward a delicate, quivering chin. “
Bastard,”
spat Eloïse, with venom, in French.

“Me?”

“No. Not you.”

“Who then?”

She turned away with a snort. “It does not matter.” From her sleeve she fished a square of lace, parped her nose on it, and seemed, for a second, to be pulling herself together. Then she lost it again.
“Styves,”
she wailed.

“Who?”

“Who is Styves?”
Eloïse turned and glared at me like I was the stupidest person in the whole world. “Why, Styves is
nothing
. An awful
banker
. A purveyor of financial
instruments
. An executor of such
monies
as are due the undersigned.”

“Um, I'm sorry to hear that. Look, do you want some wine? I've got some duty-free in one of my hatboxes.”

This was the right thing to say, as it turned out. A hundred and eighty seconds after making that remark I was nestled in the window seat with a crystal goblet of Pinot Grigio, my knees resting against hers, and bantering away like we'd been friends all our lives. Hardly pausing for breath, I jabbered out the entire story of my life and then Eloïse told me hers. The only child of Middle-European aristocrats, she had spent her youth in a bizarre succession of mountain-locked boarding schools, lakeshore finishing schools and girls-only fencing academies before settling in Paris to pursue intensely sexual affairs with anguished young sculptors, famous American novelists and various rich old kinky world travelers that she only had sex with, apparently, because they reminded her of her father. To sustain herself she sold volumes of her diaries to an old Parisian publisher, with whom she was also sleeping, and twice a week she took her clothes off for the Senior Life Class at my
collège
, though she wouldn't let them pay her because apparently nobody paid the starving kittens in the alleyways of Paris for
their
nakedness, which made a crazy kind of sense, I supposed.

“We two girls shall be friends,” said Eloïse eventually, tossing the last of her wine down her throat like a peanut. “You and I. And I shall consecrate our friendship by telling you a secret.”

“Okay.”

“Styves . . .” she hissed, her mouth to my ear. “Has a long smooth penis! As hard and as flawless as if it were carved out of wood by a master craftsman!”

Across the street the sun was setting, a bubble of cosmic pink plasma throwing the jagged molding of the church's old spire into razor-sharp black relief. And all of a sudden I wanted to cry. I wanted to wrap my arms around this new
friend of my mine and release the great ocean of tears I'd been storing up for the best part of fifteen years. I didn't know who Styves was and I didn't care one whit about his penis, but the very fact that Eloïse had felt free enough to even
say
a thing like that, a thing that outrageous, a thing that inappropriate . . . well, it was proof that coming to Paris had been the right decision, that I had finally found a home.

“Eloïse . . .” I said, about to try to give voice to these surging emotions.

“But come,” she said, standing and extending her hand. “The evening lies before us like a saucerful of freshly drawn cream before a pair of thirsty kittens. There is no time to lose.”

W
HAT DID WE
do that evening, reader? We did it all. We painted the entire city a flaming, garish red. At a place called the Black Bongo in the bowels of the old city we slipped our fingers into castanets and cut a clacking swath across the dance floor. We sniffed powdered cocaine with the famous writer Henry Miller in his living room, then piled giggling onto the back of his bicycle for a wobbly ride down some alleyways to a whorehouse. We drank champagne with the whores, then absinthe with Eloïse's hermaphrodite friend Mathilde in an abandoned, roofless church, and finally whiskey with a dwarf on a houseboat. The rest is pretty much a blur. Sometime around threeish I think I remember watching a trembling Czech nobleman peer at Eloïse through a monocle as she squatted and peed on a mirror, and though I know it sounds unlikely, I swear I remember two entirely separate instances that involved Eloïse and me
knocking for ages on the door of a brilliant young sculptor's studio, only to learn from the neighboring artist that the young man in question had hung himself that very afternoon after falling in love with one of his own statues. It was a wild night. We must have taken about fifty cabs. It was
classic
.

F
IVE IN THE
morning found us down on a footpath by the river, leaning against a fancy wrought-iron railing as we watched the water slide by, all gray, silent and corrugated in the luminous, decadent predawn. To the best of my recollection, I was about sixty percent asleep at the moment the bells of St. Hunchback's sent their sad tune rolling over the roofs of the sleeping city.
Bong bong bong bong bong
, they went, and I surged back to consciousness. Five in the morning, it occurred to me. That was pretty late.

I yawned and shoved back from the railing. “Thanks for an utterly classic evening, Eloïse, but I think I should probably zonk. I have to register for school in . . . four hours.”

“I love your body” was what Eloïse said, not even looking at me.

“Er . . . thanks.”

“A woman's body, I have always thought, is like the bottle of her soul. Do you not agree?”