by Ray Connolly
‘This is where girls come for company,’ said Ille. ‘Here they can find friends like themselves.’
They ordered more champagne and watched as the dancers moved together on the floor. One couple were necking quite openly, and Kathy felt embarrassed at such a public display. Gradually she felt the attention of the girls at her side begin to play on her. Carefully she kept her eyes away from them, but the attention of the black girl remained persistent. Ille watched Kathy’s efforts to pretend that she hadn’t noticed with some sadness, mingled, not a little, with some jealousy. The negress was exceptionally beautiful. Probably a model, she thought. A lot of models would come to La Belle Mort for relaxation with their own kind at the end of a day: for a place where they wouldn’t have to fight off the continual approaches which marked their profession. At last, embarrassed by the continuing gaze of the black girl, Kathy allowed her eyes to wander half curiously in her direction. That was all that was needed.
‘You would like to dance?’ came the instant almost rhetorical question as her eyes lingered for that instant on the other girl. Kathy’s immediate response was to make an excuse, but seeing a slight smirk of condescension sneaking around the mouth of Ille, she suddenly stood up, smiling back her answer. And together, one arm around each other they made the floor. Ille watched with some misgivings. Kathy could have no idea what troublesome situations she might be leading herself into. But from the floor Kathy grinned back happily. She looked, thought Ille, as though she had scored some kind of moral victory over her. She was innocent enough to see it in those terms. Well, we shall see, she thought, and turning to the now deserted blonde on her right she indicated the floor.
‘I think we have temporarily lost our partners,’ she said.
And as the rhythm of the music slowed to a sensuous soul number the blonde’s arms went around her and they danced close together, moving in tight and intimate circles, keeping up the polite small talk which complete strangers utter when forced in a situation of convention that requires physical intimacy and formal politeness.
The closeness of Ille and the blonde was not lost on the black girl, and seeing it as a sign for a furtherance of her own potential relationship, she allowed her hands to slide down the back of Kathy, letting them gently caress the contours of her hips, while at the same time pressing her thigh deep and hard between Kathy’s legs that she too might enjoy the sense of desire. Embarrassed by the situation Kathy looked across for Ille for some signal, or at least sympathy, but Ille was hidden in the arms of the blonde. Very delicately the negress began to nuzzle her neck, all the time pressing her body firmly into Kathy’s. Without being rude Kathy tried to smile and hold herself back, to preserve some element of distance between her and the predator. But it was impossible. Smiling, a sparkling, shining self-awareness, the black girl only held tighter on to Kathy, and as Kathy relaxed into her arms she began to find at first to her surprise and then to her growing self-disgust that she was actually enjoying it, enjoying the feel of this other girl’s body against hers, the small tight breasts like press-studs pushed firmly against hers and the warmth of their loins rubbing purposefully against each other. Again she looked towards Ille, ashamed that Ille might see that she was enjoying another girl, but again she couldn’t catch her eye. Self-consciously she wondered whether she and her partner were becoming the focus of attention in the club, but one glance told her that no one else had even noticed. And then, even as her mind revolted against it, she began to respond, to help the black girl increase their mutual pleasure, and sliding her fingers down from the girls’ hips she allowed them to creep inside the other girl’s belt, playfully searching out that soft ribbon of flesh around her partner’s waist, and allowing her fingers to trace the line of her midriff round the back until her fingers dangled erotically inside the front buckle of the girl’s belt. And as she did she felt the other girl writhe and press closer with growing excitement, murmuring into her ear words she could hardly hear or understand. And as the girl pressed even tighter, she smelt the slight aroma of heady perfume mingled with sweat, a smell that repelled her, but which did nothing to lessen her physical enjoyment.
‘Tu es trés belle, ma cherie,’ the black girl said, in quiet tones of open admiration. For want of anything more suitable to say Kathy thanked her for the compliment, wondering now how to get out of this situation, before it became out of hand.
‘Je ne tu y ai pas vu avant,’ the black girl went on.
‘C’est ma première fois.’
‘You are American?’ The black girl was speaking English with a thick and husky accent.
‘Yes.’
‘Then you will like it here.’ Then as a heavily romantic Italian song began to play the girl began holding her close again, her tongue suddenly finding Kathy’s ear, searching and darting delicately round the rim and then with the thrust of a sexual conquest entering it fully, so much so that Kathy shook her head in surprise and impulsive disgust.
‘I have an apartment in Montmartre. I think you would like it. You will come with me?’
Kathy looked desperately for Ille, but by now she was sitting down again talking pleasantly to the blonde. She clearly hadn’t met the kind of problem that Kathy had.
‘No. I think my friend would be upset if I were to leave her,’ she said, trying to pull herself apart from the girl. The girl held on.
‘But I want your body. I am wet. I want you to lick me. I want to lie with you. Your body must be beautiful. I want to lose my head between your thighs until I can feel you coming. I want you to push your tongue into me …’ And again the girl pushed her tongue forcefully into Kathy’s ear, gripping her tightly so that there was no escape. ‘Come, we can go now,’ she said. ‘You can pay me later.’
Suddenly the force of the situation in which Kathy found herself became fully apparent.
‘Pay?’ she almost cried out, shaking with shame and pushing the girl from her. ‘Pay you!’ She was virtually shouting with fear and astonishment now. From their table Ille watched impassively. She had been afraid that something like this would happen. Yet Kathy had insisted. In the frenzy of the moment Kathy backed away from the girl, and turned to Ille.
‘I tried to explain, but you wouldn’t listen to me, my love,’ was all she said.
Kathy’s mind was exploding. What had started out as a silly game had developed into a dreadful, ugly, dirty scene. The black girl sensing her mistake, hurriedly turned away, hurling some obscene insults over her shoulder, and while the other guests watched in astonishment to see what might next happen in the little drama, Kathy suddenly overcome with a need to vomit rushed up the steps and towards the doorway. She had to get out. Get away from the vileness to which she had been subjected. All the values she had grown up to believe in had been abruptly overthrown. And for the first time she began to see herself for what she had become.
‘Kathy,’ shouted Ille, as her friend stumbled madly through the door, but Kathy was out and gone before Ille could get up. As she moved towards the door in pursuit a waiter approached her: ‘That will be seventy-five francs, mademoiselle. And please, don’t bring your friend here again. We can’t afford to have such scenes. It will frighten away customers.’ Searching through her purse Ille found the money and hurrying outside looked for Kathy. There was now no sign of her.
Kathy hardly remembered how she got home. Somehow it was a headlong dash away from that place, away from the half smile of amusement and then anger that had grotesquely disfigured Ille’s features, away from that hideously sweet smell of sweat and perfume that had ghosted the body of the black girl. As she ran, tripping, down Boulevard Raspail, a couple of boys made loud clicking noises as she passed Alliance Française, and she recognized a cheap and obscene American wisecrack from a group of summer students. And that too made her feel dirty. Reaching Rue de Dragon she began to feel in her pocket for her keys. And then she realized: Ille had the keys tonight. She was locked out. How long Ille might be she couldn’t imagine. Perhaps she would
stay with the blonde. And when she did come how would she face her anyway? Standing, leaning and crying against the side of the doorway she began to vomit. Her mind was in a turmoil of confusion; her forehead swam with perspiration and her body shivered uncontrollably. Wiping her mouth on a handkerchief she looked around to see if anyone had seen her. What had begun as a joke had ended in a nightmarish spectacle. She felt reviled by herself: and even by Ille, too. What had happened to her she couldn’t begin to understand. Unconsciously her hand went out to the bell. Crying and sobbing through half-closed eyes she was blind to everything around her apart from her own self-disgust.
Suddenly the heavy glass doors swung open: ‘Vous êtes seule?’ Madame Diem was watching her from the slightly ajar door.
Kathy jumped with surprise: it was two in the morning, yet Madame Diem was still fully dressed. Kathy nodded.
‘I’m locked out,’ she gulped. ‘You have another key?’ She was frightened by the concierge. Yet she needed her.
As if she understood that some great emotional drama had taken place to which she was not to be privy, Madame Diem nodded and leading Kathy down the entrance passageway of the apartment house, invited her to enter her own apartment. An unknown terror gripped Kathy at the entrance and stammering for words she replied that she would wait by the door. Everything about Madame Diem and Ille and La Belle Mort disgusted her. There was so much of which she appeared to be unaware. Ille left so many questions unanswered. The concierge shrugged her shoulders coldly at Kathy’s refusal to enter her apartment and withdrawing inside for a moment returned with a set of keys. For a moment Kathy imagined she could smell the arid aroma of burning opium from inside the apartment.
‘Vous devriez allez bien maintenant,’ sniffed the concierge and without a further word closed the door in Kathy’s face.
Fighting back tears of loneliness and isolation Kathy climbed wearily up the stairs, occasionally taking backward glances to be sure that she wasn’t being followed in the dark shadows. The automatic lights had a nasty habit of going off before she had time to get from floor to floor. At the entrance to Ille’s apartment she stopped. For the first time she felt afraid to go in by herself. The apartment was Ille’s and though she had lived there with her for three months it was still swamped in Ille’s personality. Nothing that was personal to Kathy’s way of life prior to her trip to Paris had any physical presence there. She opened the door gingerly and felt for the light. She needed the brightness of the bulbs to comfort her.
Inside the living room she pulled a crocheted shawl away from a lamp, and allowed the fullness of light to fill the room. Everything was too mock mysterious: too purposely enigmatic for her. She looked round derisively at all of Ille’s antiques, her lamps and pipes and tapestries, pieces of porcelain, dead flowers left in vases that their leaves might fall and form a brittle pattern around the tray; the buddhas and the mandarin patterns. And inside herself she laughed at Ille’s pursuit of a culture that possibly she had once known, but of which she was no longer part. And going into her own bare, white cell, she rejoiced in its simplicity and modernity. She had never slept there. But she would tonight, she resolved. That would show Ille. She didn’t need her: didn’t want anything that Ille had to offer anymore. It was all a sham: a joke: a fake to keep her living in the past: to hold on to memories of her childhood: remembrances of her brother. And Kathy hated all of it. Outside in the living room she heard the doves stirring, soft cooing noises, wakened, no doubt, by her own entry. And angry that they should try to sleep when she would be unable to, when she had been dirtied and pawed by a person she had detested, she moved towards her record player and finding the loudest possible music she turned it on to full volume, and dancing and jerking alone went into a reverie of her own illusions. She didn’t need Ille, she told herself. She didn’t need anyone. And resolving that tomorrow she would go out and at last enroll at the Sorbonne she turned the volume higher so that it filled the apartment and the whole building with its raucous and unrestrained excitement. And assaulted from their sleep by this unexpected music the doves began to disturb increasingly in the aviary. Above the music Kathy heard a parrot squawk, an obscene unnecessary sound. Wandering back into the living room she opened the screens into the aviary, allowing the full bright and naked lights to shine on to the already disturbed birds. In fear one of them flew up towards the shuttered skylights and Kathy watched with amusement. Ille’s little playthings, she thought. The things that Ille loves more than me. Her tame toys. The beings to whom affection is guaranteed without any down payment being necessary. And staring at those doves she felt a sudden destructive urge. They represented everything that tonight, possibly every night, she had come to hate about Ille: they were Ille’s past: a past she could never be allowed to share. And she wanted nothing of them. But more than that she wanted Ille to want nothing of them. They and the opium and Madame Diem – they were all part of a past that Ille could not and would not let her share. Possibly La Belle Mort was another past about which Ille had lied. Kathy couldn’t tell anymore. But the doves. The fucking doves: she knew about them all right. And almost without thinking the hate which welled inside her forced her through the doorway and into the aviary. And everywhere the doves fluttered in the fear of having been awakened. And parrots stirred on their perches, and looked at her masculine dress. And she hated them even more for their arrogance. And going to the ropes she first drew back the blinds to let in the city lights and the stars; and then in an anger which she could never have fathomed she began to winch open the skylight windows themselves, so that for the first time in their lives the world was free to the doves: for the first time the world was more than the four white walls of the aviary. And winding strongly and determinedly against the rusted bobbins which held the skylight, she persevered and pulled, and suddenly the aviary was no longer a prison: the inmates were free to escape. And in an anger she could neither understand nor control, she ran wildly, giddily about the aviary, disturbing the birds, arms flapping, beckoning them up towards their new freedom, frightening them out of the sanctuary, up and out into the night. Until one by one they discovered the open skylight, the night and the city and fluttered away across the slated rooftops of Paris, away from Ille and away from Kathy. Only the parrots remained calmly and inscrutably in the aviary, neither moving more than a few paces along their perches nor being threatened into flight by the gesticulations of Kathy: a Kathy now out of control with self-disgust, anger and confusion. All the time the music played as the doves made their separate ways out above the city and away from the aviary. And so loud was the music that Kathy neither heard nor saw Ille enter the apartment shortly after her: neither saw nor heard her as she stood silently by the door to the aviary and watched her beloved birds fly away in fear, while her lover danced a macabre, lonely ballet of self-hate.
‘So, you are ashamed?’ Ille had entered the aviary. Her eyes went up to the skylight and watched the last of the doves make their bewildered exit from the mania of emotion below them.
Kathy felt no shock, nor shame at seeing Ille. She looked mockingly at the parrots: ‘They’re too stupid to go,’ she said. ‘Too frightened. Like me. They can see freedom from you, see the way out. But still they sit there and wait. D’you know what they’re waiting for? You don’t? I don’t either. Maybe they’re waiting for some kind of signal: something that tells them they’ve been released. Something signed by Mademoiselle Ille. Because they’re prisoners, too. The doves can fly away. But the parrots, they’re like me. They’re tied by stupidity. Shackled by their own vision of beauty, and love and goodness. That’s ironic, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’
‘The whole thing. You and love and goodness. That makes me want to laugh. You know, all the time I’ve been living here I’ve been blind. Hiding my eyes behind some kind of rose-coloured shades that only let me see the things I wanted. I thought you were so pure and so good. Some kind of Joan Baez without the voice. Something holy: something untouched by the gru
bby realities of fucking. You were the one with the holy cunt. The blessed virgin Ille. The woman men thought they had, but who remained aloof, untouchable. Unattainable. Is that a joke, or isn’t it? Come on! Tell me the truth for once about the perfect Ille. As perfect as those doves. Well, can you see? I’ve let them all fly away. So you’re by yourself now. No doves. No memories. You surrounded yourself with memories. But even they can fly away from you.’
Ille looked at the open skylight, but her calmness of expression never faltered. As always she was in supreme control of her emotions.
‘You don’t know what you’ve done to me, Kathy,’ she said simply. ‘It’s late. Why don’t you go to bed?’
‘What you mean is why don’t I just go away and leave you? So that you can continue with your lesbian friends. Am I in the way? Do I embarrass you? Or maybe you’re ashamed of me? Come on, you can tell me. Remember how we vowed to tell each other everything?’ By this point Kathy’s voice had risen to a virtual scream.
Ille regarded her coldly: ‘You’re tired, Kathy,’ she repeated herself: ‘You must go to bed. We’ll talk in the morning.’
‘That’s right. Send me to bed. But not with you. Never again with you. I hate you. I hate everything you stand for. I hate all of this. Do you understand? I hate you!’
Ille paused and regarded her. Quietly she crossed to one of the parrots motionless on its perch.
‘You mean you hate yourself. You hate yourself for being a lesbian.’