The bus bumped and knocked me around, getting me to wonder if this place was so out of the way that it had never heard of Renault or even Greyhound. I was on a budget package, yet I would have expected even such an old vehicle to have shocks and a muffler. The driver swerved around potholes—or into them—and glanced at me over his shoulder every five minutes.
Finally he asked, calling out to be heard over the growly engine, “Mademoiselle, are you ill?”
I had always been thin. And pale. The right clothes with good cosmetics can make the insipid look chic. But I was just like the girl-midget hybrid from the old 1959 beach movie. Sandra Dee’d had an excuse, being just a baby teen. I was twenty-four and still a gidget. One without Dee’s enthusiastic energy.
I hated it when people noticed. It was worse than impolite. It was cruel.
I frowned at him.
“Why do you ask?”
Sssssaaaaschoooongngngngngngngngngooooolllloooongngzu’schweeeemoooouuuurrrraaaavvvvuuuu…
Gibberish.
“Pardon me. It is just that you are going to Le Sang De Le Soleil. To soak up the sun.” He smiled apologetically.
Never meaning to offend.
I wondered what that had to do with it. The place wasn’t being shown as a spa of any sort. It wasn’t as if I was journeying to Lourdes dressed in sackcloth.
I scowled each time he looked back at me until he stopped. What was he looking for in my features? A death’s-head? A pentagram?
(Even those who are pure in heart…)
He drove me up what must have been the only main street of the village. It wasn’t even paved. I’d seen photographs of the beautiful cities along the C’te d’Azur, with brightly painted houses and green, fragrant, sprawling gardens. This was nothing whatever like that. I would have been disappointed had I not been so enchanted. There were no other cars on the narrow, cobblestoned streets. Many bicycles leaned against the walls of the ancient houses and small, tidy shops. It resembled nothing else but a town from the time of Napoleon. Sand bikes. Sans bus. And sans the one dark-eyed child that glided by on cobalt blue rollerblades. I had to look twice. I could have sworn at first that the child hovered above the ground, flying a few inches above the street, a toe tag dangling from one foot. But then the second glance showed the rollerblades, a string from his dingy sneakers trailing. I could hear him coughing.
The driver helped me to get my bags into the single hotel.
He tipped his cap to me.
“I hope you will be healed, Mademoiselle.”
The building where I rented my room had a shabby elegance, clean but quietly fractured, the way of frescoes after centuries of reverent neglect. The stairs creaked as those in the houses of grandmothers. The air was so balmy that every window was wide open. Looking out mine into the street I could see that some places had no windows at all, only empty square frames and stone archways. I unpacked and changed out of my traveling clothes. I slipped into an ankle length, gauzy cover-up. I took my medication and waited until my chest felt less confining.
I went down to the lobby. I stared at a rack of postcards by the desk that I hadn’t noticed when I’d checked in less than an hour before. Everyone was a photo of the sun, glaring into the camera lens: hot gas seen ejecting into space, cancerous-looking sunspots, elegant swirls of eruptions so bright I had to actually squint. The photographer must have gone blind. If not while snapping the pictures, then surely while in the process of developing them. They must have lit up the darkroom.
“You wish to buy?” asked the woman at the little gift booth.
“No thanks,” I replied, half-turning.
Her eyes were covered in cataracts. Her expression stared blindly beyond me.
“Did you take them?” I then whispered.
“Oh, no. My husband did,” she said, gesturing to a man in a wheelchair whose withered limbs gave a jerk now and then.
It didn’t occur to me until I left the hotel that her accent was American and that she’d spoken to me in English.
Walking down the street I thought I heard clocks in a shop. I peeked in an open doorway, expecting to see quaint timepieces and pendulums swinging. Tick tock tick tock. But there were only people sitting in chairs, reading a variety of newspapers. Each one made a clicking rasp as they breathed as if their lungs were full of bubbles.
And old man saw me there and grinned, saying, “I hope you get healed, honey.”
His voice tapped it out in Morse Code and phlegm.
I hunched my gidgy shoulders and hurried away. I went barefoot down to the beach. Naked bodies were everywhere. This was better. I’d begun to think I’d found the elephant’s graveyard of Miami.
No one had a radio. There was no music playing. No one leaned on elbows to flirt. They were merely there, stretched onto their backs with their eyes closed. No sunglasses.
Their chests moved slightly. Leaning down I could hear the mellow rush of breath moving in and out of the woman nearest to where I stood, and from the man who lay next to her.
I nervously cleared my throat, fidgeting in my flimsy cover-up, fingering the bandage ties on it.
“Excuse me,” I said to her. “Is it all right if I sit here?”
No answer. She didn’t open her eyes to acknowledge me. I’d always heard that the French were supposed to be rude. Perhaps she hadn’t understood me.
“Pardon moi, si’l vous plait?” I tried to say, stumbling over the pronunciation.
She didn’t stir. Nor did she part her full lips.
The sand was shining white as salt, excruciating to look at fully.
(Almost as bad as the sun in the postcards and the sun overhead.)
The sea beyond was the deep blue that the Mediterranean alone of all the waters on the earth has—to listen to the locals anyway. It rippled toward the beach in graduated, white-capped kisses of lapis that shyly embraced the land, then lightly retreated to gently court it again.
I smelled olive groves within a mile or two. Could almost catch the scent of grapes on the vines all through the village. There were flowers by the truckload, grown there for manufacturing perfumes. And there was the acrid, oily cloy of sardines being fished from small boats that rose and fell, toylike, out at a distance on the sea.
But there was odor underneath it all. Salty and metallic, similar to busy sweat glands but thicker, more cardinal. Not quite blood. More like—what was like blood?
Meat?
I couldn’t help staring at the woman, her body perfect, voluptuous, demanding attention from the eyes. And the man by her side with his lithely muscled body. Was he a long distance runner? Her generous breasts those of a Playboy centerfold or an opera singer behind which swelled violet lungs and beat a strong ruby of a heart. His broad shoulders and flat, rippled stomach. Her -V- of spun flaxen pubic hair upon which glittered flecks of citron-to-platinum sand. His gleaming cylinder of organ surrounded by a thatch just as sun-bleached as the hair on his head. I who had never dated, never slept with, never caressed nor been petted, never been penetrated, watched them—ogled—with a hunger for their exquisite health.
They wouldn’t want me to lie down with them. They wouldn’t want such as I on their beach at all.
(Go home, kid. Your mama wants ya.)
All I could hear was the water and their breezes of breath.
If they woke up and saw this skinny, undersized, untoned body lathered in its cocoon of sunblock 45, they would do the aristocratic snarl. They would freeze me out by extravagant meters until I was at a distance more suitable to my wretched Gidgetdom.
(What? No one was playing in that delicious Curacao surf? No Moondoggy riding a sculpted board? No volleyball? No Styrofoam coolers filled with iced sodas or Perrier or even domestic beer?)
Just the sardine boats bobbing on the blue water, scooping up nets full of terrified fish.
If it hadn’t been for this sole activity beyond, I’d have been sure that time had been suspended around me.
Gidget Goes Transylvania
n.
Perhaps I’d only wandered onto a beach of the dead. Here was where the eldritch burial rites of the Riviera’s beautiful people were performed.
Did no one on this beach party or converse or sit up stretching impossible gazelle legs to rub oils of coconut and kiwi?
“Pardon?” I reached down and timidly touched the golden Bardot woman’s arm. The hair on it was downy, almost transparent.
Her skin was cold. I drew back, shuddering.
Oh, sweat. The body’s air conditioning system cooling her down. The job it was designed to do.
I touched the man’s arm. His body was as cool as hers.
He must have been asleep, too.
I was sorely tempted to touch his cock. I was only curious, understand. It looked so soft. All the sexy novels I’d ever read described them as rigid, throbbing. But I didn’t touch. The excitement might have been too much for me.
Gidget Has Heart Attack Fondling Strange Beachcomber.
How would that have looked to the folks back home?
What did I know? I’d never been to the beach before except for vicariously through old movies with surfers in hair helmets. This was my first vacation anywhere, ever. I wasn’t counting the summer my parents took me up to the Ozarks. I’d had to stay on the cabin’s porch the whole time, fitting together the pieces of scenic jigsaw puzzles.
Perhaps I should have gone instead to St. Tropez or to Antibes, but I couldn’t afford them. There would have been music. A constant fashion show of bathing suits no larger than flashy microchips. Games. Laughter. Seduction. Fire and energy.
Risk.
“The place is not famous,” the travel agent had whispered in her husky accent. “But it all all nude. There is no better way to commune with the sun.”
So tanned she’d been, with shining hair wound around her head in a sleek lemon turban. In a few years would that skin sprout cancers, grand canyons of wrinkles? Not that such possible sun damage frightened me. I wouldn’t grow old enough to see the drying of my flesh.
“None of the other travel agents mentioned this place,” I mumbled, looking through the glossy pages of a brochure, the cover of which was nothing but a huge solar disk.
“None of the others know of it,” she admitted, shrugging smugly. She examined her long nails. I couldn’t tell if they were painted or not. If they were, then the polish was faintly golden. “The train that links the rest of the resorts does not stop there. This keeps it very exclusive.”
“Then how come it’s so inexpensive,” I asked her.
She laughed and winked one doe eye at me. “We are running a special package for a few dreamers.”
Her lashes hadn’t had mascara on them. They were the same glittery blonde as her hair and nails. It was strange to me how the sun darkened the skin but paled the hair, as if it felt obliged to make up for the rich flesh by fading part of us away. I was sure that, once there, all of me would fade, disappearing into nothing but a thin imprint in the sand which the tide would fill up.
Standing on the beach, I looked out on the many motionless, naked forms—all tawny and chiseled. Were there any other package “dreamers” out here like me, courtesy of the special rate from Ventouse Tours?
They all seemed to belong to such a beach, as if they had risen whole and bronzed from the sand. All cold as if it was really hoarfrost in the generative.
I peeked under my layer of gauze.
Gidget Could Use Silicon.
(No, that stuff was hazardous.)
I was dying anyway. Of a hole in the heart and the subsequent boredom. Big dif if I put a pair of voracious rats in my breasts to gnaw me to the insides of my bones. Or if the sacs merely leaked like pillows full of tears. Most of what we do is at least a little false and often a lot dangerous.
At least I could have dyed my mousey brown hair.
“Nobody’s looking, are they?” I half-shouted, smirking.
Would they jump. Could they jump?
Nothing whatever transpired. Nobody yelled or pointed or fainted from desire for me.
I sighed, held my breath, and self-consciously removed the coverup. It fluttered like a crepe paper banner in my hand. I rolled it to put it under my head so it wouldn’t blow away. I didn’t want to have to walk back in the buff to the village. I was uncomfortable enough, being this defenselessly nude among others so distressingly undressed.
Gidget On The Beach Of The Living Dead: Now I Lay Me Down To Sun. I Hope I Don’t Get Too Well Done. And If The Zombies Wake In Spite, May They Think I’m Too Small To Bite.
Xylophone ribcage. Sharp elbows and knees. And closer? Oh, the little bruises everywhere from each bump and tap. Each one was as obvious as a plague bubo on my white body. Perhaps it was good that no one could see me.
If I tanned, would these be lost in the golden glow? Would it appear as if the sun had cured me?
(I hope you will be healed, Mademoiselle.)
It wasn’t easy to lie down on the sand with both arms folded over my chest, trying to keep my thighs pressed shut so that nothing of my virginity showed. The sand wasn’t hoarfrost. It was baking soft, thermally yielding. With my arms still crossed over my small breasts, I must have appeared ready for burial. And there I was, another corpse laid out on this graveyard beach, with the breeze whispering prayers.
I closed my eyes.
I saw the sun imprinted on my retinas polarize from a bright circle in a shining vision’s field to a flickering—almost remming—orb in a dark sea.
It burned itself out there.
It burned itself out.
««—»»
The first thing I noticed was that damn tuneless bat bongo, sax-from-hell jazz again. Twisting through my tortured eardrums as if it was being wrung out of the air by a brute force. I opened my eyes, frowning, wondering how long I’d been asleep.
It was night so it must have been quite a nap.
No one lay comatose on the sand anymore. They were up and dancing around a bonfire. I could smell sausages on sticks. Wine, sharp and dry, obviously red. They weren’t naked now. They were wearing sequin gowns and satin tuxedos. Gowns that twinkled like constellations of stars and nocturnal tuxedos.
I gasped and sat up.
Not to worry. I wasn’t naked either. I was in a long sheath covered in pearls. This wasn’t really comfortable. It was rather like lounging on a gravel bed.
(Wonderful, I sulked. More bruises down my back.)
They were all singing that weird diddy froo-froo stuff. In so many voices that it ceased to sound really French. It seemed more German, full of gutturals and diphthongs that defied the way the human mouth was made. But German jazz was more Brecht than that, wasn’t it. More Mack The Knife. The shark has pretty teeth, dear.
(Wow, talk about cosmic. Bobby Darin sang that song in 1959 and married Sandra Dee. What a coincidence, huh?)
Someone guzzling wine smashed their glass down into the branches of the bonfire, laughing hysterically.
I wondered who the hell had dressed me, down to what felt like silk panties. What golden fingers had traced my bruises, golden mouth turned down in disgust? I twisted every which way trying to stand up in the confining gown. I was still barefoot.
Was Gidget Expecting Glass Slippers?
Let’s Not Confuse Fairy Tales.
Obviously if they took the trouble not to leave me bare-assed, I must have been invited to this party.
I took baby steps toward the bonfire, that slim skirt hugging my knees dangerously.
“Hello, we’ve been waiting for you.”
It came out more like Ah’lo. Accent on the first syllable spoken by the Bardot woman I’d lain down next to.
“Why didn’t you just wake me up?” I asked, smiling shyly. “I could have dressed myself, and I’d hate to have missed anything.”
“But you have only just arrived. You have missed nothing,” she replied, her voice a purring contralto.
People were wading in gowns and striped tuxedo pants into the tide,
far enough to dip their glasses into it. It wasn’t until some of them carried this back to the bonfire that I could see that the seawater was dark red. A trick of the light—or lack of it—maybe.
“You from America, honey?” asked another woman, also gorgeous and bronze in a low-cut sapphire halter. “Me, too. Diane Walker. I’m from Oakland. How ‘bout you?”
“Philly,” I replied, nodding. I shrank, intimidated by her beauty. Was she one of the dreamers here on budget? No wonder I hadn’t picked her out when I scanned the beach. Well, from California. Did it figure? All the world’s goddesses sprang from either the Mediterranean or California. I hadn’t been born near the ocean so I was doomed. “You here on the package?”
I’d asked it as politely as I could.
“Heck, no. I’ve been here for years.” Diane chuckled. Then she admitted, “I came here on the package then though.”
On long green sticks, in the blaze of colors that is firelight, it looked as if they were slowly toasting eyeballs to a blackened mush. I gulped and swayed, nauseous. Then I realized they must be marshmallows.
I mistook the sausages for having foreskins. Must have been the way they shriveled in the fire. I shivered. But what did I know? I was a virgin.
“Now Todd here is on the same deal as you,” Diane said. She grinned as she tugged on a man’s sleeve until he turned around.
He blushed and cocked his head.
“Hi,” he said reluctantly, staring at his toes. Then he coughed and self-consciously wiped his mouth.
Tick tock. It rattled in his lungs, almost counterpointing the bizarrely uneven rhythm of the music. If there was a radio nearby that they were singing along with, I couldn’t spot it. But the drums were there in the air, hollow and unmistakably covered in leather. It was a sound that no other drum covering could produce—that off a slapping against peeled, hardened skin. The sax was there, too. Wailing in windy heaves and squawking bursts, as if Mad Pan had traded his old flute in on something which swung jively into the coolly combustible.
Coughing. Tuberculosis maybe. That was making a comeback in the cities in the States with a vengeance. Here, too, I thought when I remembered what I had assumed was a clock shop. It might have been beaujolais he was hocking up but it was probably blood.
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