The Gorgeous Girls (5 page)

His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets.

—Dorothy Parker

In the movie
White Christmas
, Dean Jagger faces losing his beautiful country inn because there's no snow to attract guests. I've just returned from an inn as beautiful and bucolic as that celluloid lodge, only there was plenty of snow and Dean Jagger was a cat.

I recorded the details in my fireside journal . . .

I'm sitting on a plush sofa in the lodge expecting Bing Crosby to show up with his pipe to do some crooning by the big stone fireplace. He doesn't. But a Dinah Washington CD fills in quite nicely, lulling Dean Jagger to sleep on the back of one of many sofas.

It's Valentine's Day, and Joe and I are celebrating the anniversary of our first encounter. We're at the Domain of Killien in the Highlands of Haliburton. I'm watching Joe now through a small window by the main fireplace as he trounces through the snow snapping pictures. To most eyes there's nothing much to shoot out there—just white, all white. But my beloved has a seventh sense when it comes to these things. He can hear music in silence, and he'll find the hidden heart of you.

At a dinner party one year earlier, where we first met, we spent the evening alternately flirting with and ignoring one another. We played a guessing game with the multitude of chocolates on offer and ended up walking home together in the snow, him bourbon-soaked like the ham we'd had for dinner and me with my arm hooked through his for safe negotiating of icy sidewalks. Deep connections were forged on that wintry night, as candy hearts melted in our pockets and magic and mystery bloomed beneath the cold stars and gleaming icicles.

There are ten or so cabins scattered about the grounds here, all with women's names: Ophelia, Roseline, Angelique, Sidone. Roseline is ours, and she has a fireplace, a Jacuzzi and a vast, uncluttered view of the snow-covered lake and the hills beyond. Out there, there's cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, skating. But our pleasure is mostly found indoors: lounging in the whirlpool, making love by the fire, reading, writing, shooting.

We slumber like babes in Roseline's arms and in the morning rouse to crunch through the snow arm in arm for breakfast at the lodge: freshly baked croissants, homemade jam, fresh and dried fruit, then eggs, ham, bacon, sausage, pancakes and waffles.

The dining room, too, has a big stone hearth, where a fire constantly crackles. We soon have a favourite table by a window, and we look out over the frozen lake and snowy hills. We can also see the small skating rink.

I put jingle bells on my skates this year, reviving a childhood tradition, but it is no great tragedy when we learn the rink is unlikely to be cleared. I'm more fire than ice, anyway—more a fan of indoor sports than outdoor ones. So, after the divine breakfast, Joe and I retreat to the cabin to hit the sheets for another breakfast of champions.

Afterward we jump into the Jacuzzi, and I pretzel my legs around so that a powerful stream of water aligns with my clit. The pressure is so intense that I have to wiggle about to dodge the stream, let it play toward the top then the bottom of my most sensitive sexual part, then allow it to blast me full-on for as long as it remains in the realm of pleasure and out of the vicinity of pain.

Joe mutters something, his voice faint beyond the whirr of the whirlpool and the hum of my sexual excitement. “Tell me to come,” I plead. I need to hear him say it; he has a voice that sends shivers down my spine, and someday I expect to climax just to the sound of it.

Now, I know him well enough to sense when he is exactly ready to come, and at that moment I let the water hit full-on, so that my orgasm is a soaring, crashing, screaming crescendo of something beyond pleasure. Joe releases his own jet stream, and through eyes of delirious pulsations I see the great arc of his cum. My clit throbs with intensity, and like a beacon of pleasure it sends ripples of sensation to every part of my body.

Wrapped in towels, we flop down on the bed and slowly return to planet Earth. In time, we dress and head back to the lodge for lunch. I sit in the lounge by the fire, my body still buzzing, completely open and relaxed by our watery ecstasy. Polishing off a chicken sandwich on a fresh baguette, I embrace the warm scent of burning wood combined with the strong aroma of coffee. My mind drifts back to our first date, a month after we met.

We went to Starfish and, between us, ate four dozen oysters, two lobsters, four sardines and a crab salad. We also drank a few bottles of wine. He picked a hyacinth bloom from the centrepiece and placed it in my décolletage and I showed him how my fishnet stockings stayed up.

Through a window that admits a streak of bright winter sunlight, I watch my intrepid lover traverse the white landscape. Even though there is endless, glaring whiteness out there, I know he will find a revelation of texture, a miracle of shape. He sees and captures a world that lies beyond our senses but is revealed through them. Last summer he shot a shadow on a brick wall—that of an unseen woman watering plants. It was a quiet moment etched in golden light and red brick, a bookend to these hushed winter snapshots of glittering icicles.

He comes in to shoot me and Dean Jagger, a commanding puss with a stub for a tail. Legend has it that he lost it to frostbite before the innkeeper gave him refuge. I learned from the receptionist, though, that he was born that way. He's a Manx, and a rather surly host—I've got scratches to show for it. His name isn't really Dean Jagger, but that's what I call him.

My shutterbug man: I love him like I love oysters, orange blossom honey, tea, diamonds, Picasso's shades of blue, hyacinths, James Dean's hair, children, lavender.

At dinner we sit at our favourite table and gaze out at the sparkly lights that adorn a gazebo near the rink. In the dining room it's all amber and gold, good service and extraordinary food. Against one wall is an assortment of liquor bottles glittering in golden light on an antique bureau. I remark to our server that there should be seltzer bottles on that bureau, too. “And ashtrays and Zippo lighters,” she adds.

After dinner Joe and I play a game of chess in the lounge while the handful of other guests chat, sip liqueur and coffee, read or nod off. Three tall grey regal sisters play Scrabble, quibbling amiably about this word or that. The place is too wonderful to mind getting romped at any board game, and I simply smile at my lover and lay my king on his side in defeat.

Dean Jagger stretches out by the fire as we make our leave for Roseline in snowbound bliss, ready to take on another year of good loving.

Deep in my soul let your words be singing.

—Dorothy Parker

Words are sensuous creatures,
waiting to be rolled off tongues, sung in harmonies, whispered in ears. The books that contain them beg to be touched, opened, fingered. They wait, those handsome volumes with sleek bindings and smooth covers, on bookshop shelves and in library stacks, to disseminate their pleasure if only one would just open. . .

My friend saw a guy at the Toronto Reference Library not long ago having his own personal sex fest on the fifth floor. Had he reached for Henry Miller or the Marquis de Sade and found in their pages the inspiration to undulate across the broadloom to wet orgasm right there in Literature? Did he sniff along the stacks, inhaling row upon row of books imprinted with black ink spelling out words that anyone could dress up or dress down to suit their own fantasies? Did he crack open volumes hiding luscious secrets like lovers' throbbing hearts, crying out to be plucked from the shelf, thumbed, caressed and ravished?

Not at all. My friend was reading in one of those big, cushy library chairs when she broke to gaze through the window at the panoramic view. What caught her eye instead was a man—a young man, as far as she could tell—lying prone on the floor.

She watched, frozen in the unreality of the moment, as this man slithered across the carpet toward a woman seated in another cushy chair.

A blonde woman dangling a sandal from her foot.

I'm sitting in a neighbourhood library reading Anaïs Nin (good Gorgeous Girl lit) and wearing not sandals (it's snowing outside!) but soft, Argentinian-leather boots called “Daily Miracles” by their creator, John Fluevog. All around me, students stare blankly at blue monitors, clueless of the lustful thoughts racing through my mind as I consider the fifth-floor orgy my friend witnessed.

While the dull regulars seated around me snap newspapers and chew gum, out of the corner of my eye I see a guy in a navy-blue pinstripe suit enter the library. I turn to watch him. Brushing a little snow from his natty jacket, he heads straight for the stacks, knowing exactly what he wants.

What book has set him in such fluid motion? He plucks it from the shelf and sits at my table. I bury my face in my book and inhale deeply as I peer shyly over the page at him. My mind drifts again to the sex scene my friend witnessed. I imagine four library patrons watching the young man's actions, including the blonde whose feet he lusts after. No one does anything. It's one of those dreamlike moments, questions moving vaguely through the mind: What is happening? Does she need help? Is she part of it?

The blonde drops her sandal to the floor.

No one moves. Except the man. His dishevelled hair falls across his eyes as his movements quicken. The woman looks uncomfortable. Is she in on the game? Is her discomfort part of it? Maybe the woman is frozen in ecstasy.

Much like the kind I'm experiencing now.

A teenager seated near me, mesmerized by some computer game, bangs the keyboard to my left, while I dream of banging the man in the pinstripe suit.

But while I may fantasize that I'm a nymph with bare toes, I'm not about to enter into some carnal carnival for the whole library to watch. Perhaps that little study room upstairs?

Of course, that room is rigged for maximum visibility, but then so is the Reference Library. The whole episode there, my friend related, took approximately fifteen minutes. Once he reached her naked foot, he came.

If only the rule-enforcing librarian here were prim and proper Marian the Librarian. She might understand how I feel. I'm certain the Music Man quite dashed her morals to kingdom cum on one of those ladders that move about old library shelves on wheels.

The man in the suit leans into his book, his face within licking distance of its pages. Okay, so fucking in that room upstairs isn't possible, but fondling each other beneath the table while pretending to study is.

I dare not look at him. Behind me, a Staff Only door clangs open and shut at regular intervals. A stairwell, perhaps? Jam the door. Ram the cock. Bang the dude. Wham, bam, thank you, man.

But wait. He's getting up to leave. He exits as swiftly as he entered. I glance at the book he left behind.
A
Moveable Feast
, Hemingway's account of his Paris years.

The young man on the fifth floor stops moving, and all is silent, quiet as a library should be. He gets up, dishevelled and sticky, and walks away.

But Pinstripe returns for his book, which I am now reading. Politely he asks for it and politely I hand it over. He turns to go. Then, as if the other sandal had dropped, he turns back and asks me if I would consider meeting him for a drink that evening. “The Library Bar at the Royal York Hotel. Six-ish?”

“Yes,” I answer, wiggling my toes in my black leather Miracle boots.

Oh, both my shoes are shiny new . . .

—Dorothy Parker

When I was a
girl, I would sometimes fill my bed with shoes. I'd line them up at night beside my eight-year-old self and fall asleep. I welcomed them into my bed at night to protect my soul, just as their tough leather protected my soles by day.

A couple of years ago I bought twenty pairs of shoes at an estate sale, all but two of them high-heeled, pointy-toed splendours. Their owner had died a month before. I never knew her, but on sunny summer days I used to see her getting into her lipstick-red convertible. She had big, puffed-up hair atop a big, puffed-up body that was invariably clothed in black baby-doll dresses. Her jewellery was oversized and clangy and caught my eye with flashes of sunlight on gold. Perhaps that's why I never noticed her feet or what she had on them. But, oh, those shoes!

I was in her apartment the day of the sale selecting a number of large, radiant rhinestone earrings when a woman called out from the basement. “The ruby-red slippers!”

I swiftly made my way downstairs to lay my eyes on the fabled red shoes. They were glowing in the dim light on the feet of some Dorothy wannabe.

Her feet were too big for them, so I was spared the embarrassment of having to beg. I swooped in and casually picked up the crimson-sequined pair before the four other shoppers could blink an eye. I went on to look through four large boxes filled to the brim with still more shoes in clear plastic bags, all cousins and sisters and aunts of the ruby reds. Every glittery toe and spiked heel was in mint condition.

Colourful sequined shoes dot my living room, breaking the monotony, posing heel-to-heel atop door ledges and side-by-side on windowsills and bookshelves in their glittery artfulness. Were their original owner alive to witness this display, she might disapprove of their naked, de-bagged, dust-gathering lollygagging.

But I'd like to think that the Mistress of the Shoes is now joyously wondering why she'd rarely let these babies out to breathe and pose and cavort, to kiss rhinestone to sequin, to dance shiny heel to scuffed sole.

“Ah,” she might lament, “shoes as art!” To hell with looking pretty in dazzling but body-warping shoes—shoes that lead the eye up to shapely calves that lead the eye up farther to an hourglass figure, if only one could achieve such a thing!

Her daughter told me that her mother had custom-made outfits that matched each and every pair of shoes. I saw some of these ensembles—large dresses in black lace or pleather, all with enough fabric to make three dresses for me, were I to get crafty.

But no, I'm perfectly happy with my haul: eight pairs in black, including two almost identical pairs of sequined pumps; one pair of jet beads on sheer netting; two pairs of strappy sandals with pavé rhinestones; one pair of sassy cabaret shoes; and two pairs in patent leather, one with gold studs and the other with hot-pink trim. Five pairs are sequined—the above-mentioned black and red, plus electric blue and silver. There are two pairs of champagne pumps, one with faux pearls and the other of textured fabric shot with silver. Another are rainbow sparkle pumps; still another are Cinderella-style wonders made of clear plastic with black patent leather accents. Lastly, I found a pair of metallic-blue kitten heels and a set of gold mules.

I seldom wear them—only to private fashion shows in which I tramp about my living room. On the other hand, I've only worn the ruby slippers in public, jumping into cabs and landing at parties where they're instant conversation-starters and friend-makers.

Once, at a local film director's soiree, two prepubescent girls stood across the crowded room pointing and chatting excitedly. Eventually they came over to compliment me and ask where I got them. I made sure to impart my Philosophy of Footwear, something I have successfully impressed upon my own daughter, who prefers stylish flats and funky Converse to high heels.

“They are merely for dress-up, not for actual living,” I instructed like a modern-day Auntie Mame. What I wanted to tell them, but didn't, was that in drop-dead stilettos you are likely to end up just another urban doll with blisters and a broken heart.

That said, I am now perched in the amazing ruby-reds at the sensual, historic oak bar upstairs at the old Winchester Hotel. It's an evocative, amber-lit room that even has what Joe calls a “shoe light” beneath the bar. This light sets my fabulous footwear ablaze.

At the end of my fishnet-stockinged legs, any of these twenty pairs can flash a lustful message. They can fuel a passionate encounter with just a glint of sparkle, a flash that flares from rhinestones or a ray of moonlight kissing crystal.

Not long ago, Joe took a picture of the ruby reds in their place on my bookshelf atop volumes of Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams. He says it's the best portrait he's ever taken of me.