by Brandy Purdy
Men and women behaved toward one another with a shocking degree of familiarity, as if they had completely forgotten that they were in a public place. We saw women sitting on men’s laps and allowing themselves to be fondled and kissed. They did not even slap the men’s hands away when they dared to slip boldly beneath their skirts. Sometimes coins changed hands before these actions commenced, so I doubted whether love had anything to do with it, but it was shocking to behold just the same.
We were in complete accord that we would leave just as soon as we had seen the famous dance—the Can-Can that everyone talked so much about.
All of a sudden the music stopped and the floor cleared before it struck up again, with an insistent, pulsing, lively, infectious rhythm as six women rushed in, shrieking and shaking their skirts wildly, black plumes billowing on their bonnets. The crowd began to applaud, raucously; some of the men whistled and stomped their feet or screamed out names, presumably those of the dancers they liked best.
The dancers’ costumes were the most revealing I had ever seen a woman wear in public. Their ruffled white blouses were so sheer their nipples glowed through like hot pink embers, and their pink skirts were so short they barely grazed their calves. In the center of the floor they paused for one tantalizing, teasing moment to lift their skirts to show row upon row of white ruffles sewn onto their petticoats and gossamer white pantalets trimmed with ruffles and dangling pink silk ribbons that danced along with them; then they began to kick their legs high into the air, higher than I would have ever thought possible, fast and free to the music, while emitting exuberant shrieks.
Miss Mowbry was so mortified that she fainted, and some sailors from the next table tried to revive her by throwing her skirts up over her head and fumbling with her corset. She came to her senses with a cheeky young rogue’s hands groping around inside her flannel drawers as though he was looking for buried treasure. She almost slapped his head off and, red-faced and weeping, she forgot all about her duties as chaperone and immediately fled, beating a path for herself through the gay and laughing crowd with her trusty black umbrella.
I had never imagined that the Can-Can would be so risqué! I sat there dumbstruck watching the dancing beauties’ black-stockinged legs rise and fall in time to the music, captivated by the coy and joyful smiles that lit up their faces as they swiveled their trim ankles in the air, making the laces on their black ankle boots dance. Their drawers were so sheer I was certain I could see dark triangles of hair beneath, and a blazing hot blush set my face aflame. But I could not look away. I sat there staring, mesmerized. And I felt the strangest sensation in the pit of my stomach, and lower down, a sweet, frightening fluttering, something I knew I should not be feeling, followed by a sudden sharp aching wetness between my thighs. Instantly I knew what it was. The pain that followed and nearly bent me double made it quite clear. In my distraction, I had completely forgotten the calendar, useless as it was with my maddeningly erratic monthly visitor. It might at least have given me some inkling when to expect its arrival so I could have strapped on a towel or at least worn a darker skirt!
The music soared in a dizzying crescendo and the dancers kicked and spun as pain gripped me in a series of stabbing, squeezing, clutching cramps, as if the pain were determined to wring every drop of blood from my womb. I knew the longer I sat there the worse it would be. Soon the blood would seep through my underclothes onto my pale blue satin skirt. It’s not going to get better; it’s only going to get worse, I kept telling myself over and over until the words began to blur and jumble and lose all meaning, yet I was powerless to make myself move, I just sat there staring at the dancers’ tantalizingly veiled crotches and feeling shame flood my face as my nipples hardened. I shouldn’t be feeling this, I told myself. It isn’t right; it isn’t normal! But I could not leave or look away.
I’m sure my anguish must have shown upon my face; it was all I could do not to burst into tears. I was so ashamed and confused I didn’t know what to do. And someone did notice my distress. One of those mannish women approached me—an older woman, with deep lines etched around her eyes and mouth. Her thick, cropped, curly black hair was liberally peppered with gray and she wore an English tweed suit and a lemon-colored waistcoat and kid gloves and spats of the same vivid shade. She stubbed out her cigarette on Nellie’s dessert plate, narrowly missing the remaining half of the chocolate éclair lying there leaking custard filling, and bent down as if to speak to me, but instead her lips lingeringly grazed mine. I was so stunned I could not react. I just sat there, blinking my eyes, surprised that my tears didn’t start to boil against my flaming face.
“Surely it cannot be as bad as all that, mademoiselle?” she said kindly in heavily accented English. The same words Bridget used to always say to me!
I heard laughter all around me. Whether they were truly laughing at me, I do not know, but I felt like they were. I could not even turn and meet my companions’ eyes; I did not want to see the expressions upon their faces. Oh, the horror! The shame!
Life surged back into my limbs and I bolted up and ran, plowing through the crowd as if I were running for my life, certain that everyone was staring at the big red stain blossoming on the back of my skirt.
I don’t know how I got back to the hotel; somehow I found a cab. I filled the bathtub and scrubbed my skirts as best I could, then gave up and left them for the laundress. Then I tried to scrub the shame from my skin. I lay on the bathroom floor, huddled in my flower-sprigged nightgown upon the chilly tiles, with a towel pinned to the homemade blue calico waistband clutched tight between my thighs, curled up and bent double with cramps, and cried and cried as if my world were about to end and the sun would never rise and shine for me again. I don’t know how long I lay there before I finally dragged myself to bed.
All that night I was troubled by dreams of beautiful Can-Can dancers, taunting me with their raised skirts and veiled crotches and breasts, their diaphanous blouses and drawers suddenly dissolving before my astonished eyes like sugar crystals in the rain, and mannish ladies who were not afraid to put their lips, and hands, on me even though we both knew it was the dancing beauties with their feminine frills and hourglass figures, delicious and decadent as French pastries, that I truly hungered for. But I had to make do. What else could I do when the beauties only tormented and teased? Reminding me with every shake of their pink skirts and glimpse of what lay beneath that they, these glorious creatures, were not for me. Beauty wants beauty and only suffers plain or ugly to touch it if the dazzle of dollar signs and diamonds, the promise of opulent rewards, blinds its eyes. Suddenly their ranks parted to reveal one who was all in gold with yellow feathers and diamond-tipped pins in her raven hair. She was wearing black silk stockings and golden slippers with high diamond-encrusted French heels that flashed with every movement of her dainty dancing feet. She teasingly shook her skirts right in my face, the white ruffles and yellow silk ribbons on her petticoats tickling my nose, and I looked up, startled, to see that it was Bridget Sullivan, rouged and painted as I had never seen her before. The gold paint on her eyelids twinkled when she winked at me. Without thinking, I flung myself at her feet and yanked her cobwebby white drawers down right in front of everyone at the Moulin Rouge and buried my face between her legs, wallowing and kissing with such a powerful, hungry passion that I had never in real, waking life experienced.
I woke up with a start, feeling so hot and wretched, shaky and weak, that I staggered into the bathroom with blood trickling down my legs and filled the tub with cold water and sat weeping and shivering in it until I turned blue as a penance to mortify my shameful flesh.
Nothing was ever said about the Moulin Rouge or the Can-Can: we were all too proper and polite to mention it. We never went back, and we left Paris soon afterward. On our last afternoon I defiantly went out alone to a dress shop and, flying boldly in the face of every word of fashion advice that had ever been given to me, bought the two gaudiest dresses I had ever owned—an iridescent raspberry si
lk that gave winks of purple and blue whenever I moved, and a caramel-and-apple-green-striped linen suit that came with a necktie and a straw boater with a matching band to wear with it. Without a comment or word of complaint I paid extra for rushed alterations as though it were the most natural thing in the world for me. I didn’t care if Father dropped dead when he saw the bill.
Though Miss Mowbry and I could have done without the Riviera—we heard all sorts of unsavory tales about gamblers and suicides and crimes and affairs of passion—the others insisted. They were keen to see the grand casinos and parade about in their finest jewels and dresses with feathers in their hair pretending to be more sophisticated than they really were. So I let them lead me where they would. A certain ennui had by then stolen over me and I was too tired to protest; it simply wasn’t worth it. My heart was no longer in this trip, but I didn’t want to go home.
They had great fun—and a great laugh at my expense, I suppose—dressing me up like a life-sized doll. Albert—snootily pronounced albear without the t—a genuine French coiffeur, with a fussy, fastidious manner, washed and combed out my long red tresses, then coiled and braided and twisted them up into an intricate arrangement entwined with strands of blue-green glass beads and, as the pièce de résistance, a fan of tall peacock plumes at the back of my head, all to match my first—and only—French ball gown, a shimmering peacock satin that looked at once blue and green, with a long train and a daringly décolleté bodice covered in glass beads. A French corset, a beautiful Nile-green creation of whalebone sheathed inside satin embroidered with gold and azalea pink roses, that was really more like a medieval implement of torture in disguise cinched my waist so cruelly that it felt like the stem of a champagne glass and my bosom and hips overflowed above and below it. I was almost scared to sit down or breathe! For once, Anna laced me and I felt the impersonal, imperious touch of her hands flying over my skin like brisk white doves. I almost had to sit on my hands not to grab and kiss them when she used her very own pink puff to powder me. Coughing amidst clouds of rose-scented powder, I wanted to lay those lovely hands on my breasts and whisper “linger awhile!” And Carrie applied shimmering blue-green paint mixed with gold dust to my eyelids and, despite my protests that it wasn’t ladylike, Nellie blackened my lashes and rouged my lips a vivid scarlet. When at last they led me to stand before the full-length mirror, I almost didn’t know myself; I thought it was a stranger reflected in the glass.
We must have looked like a flock of tropical birds as we entered the casino, all painted and decked out in our bright, showy finery, not at all like the prim New England girls we really were—Carrie in her canary satin garnished with golden laurel leaves with a stuffed yellow bird in a gilded nest with blue crystal eggs perched at the pinnacle of her root-straining pompadour of butter-gold hair; Anna in amethyst and mauve satin garnished with silver-veined diamond-dusted dusky-blue lace with a stole of silver foxes lined in lilac satin about her bare shoulders, silver-gilt hair piled high in a pompadour Marie Antoinette would have envied agleam with blue and purple gems and pale pink and mauve plumes and silk roses; Nellie in sunset orange encrusted with gold and silver embroidery and gold lace swags and flounces; and me, trailing behind, looking like an exotic redheaded peacock. But they said it was all in fun, like going to a masquerade ball, and no one back home need ever know unless we chose to tell them about it.
I found it unexpectedly thrilling, watching the dice roll across the green felt, the cards being shuffled and dealt and played out, to win or lose, the stacks of multicolored chips that grew higher or lower or disappeared altogether, and the little silver ball going clackety-clack-clack as the red and black roulette wheel spun around, making or breaking fortunes.
None of us, except Anna, were brave enough to make a wager, but we all watched, entranced by the games of chance.
And the men! There were a few Americans and Englishmen, many older men, some accompanied by fawning, clinging women young enough to be their granddaughters, but most of them seemed an altogether different breed. Tall and dapper in immaculately tailored evening clothes, with black hair slicked back and shiny as patent leather reflecting the electric lights, they clicked their heels and bowed suavely over our hands. They were very bold in approaching us. Every one of them was a count, a duke, or an exiled prince, all impoverished, alas, each with a tale of woe they were eager to tell about family fortunes lost, castles burned to the ground by invading armies, and so forth.
Some of them hung on the arms of much older women, holding their fluffy little dogs while they played roulette, fetching them glasses of champagne, draping a fur wrap about their shoulders, leaning in close to nuzzle and kiss their ludicrously rouged withered apple cheeks or sagging necks and whisper in their bejeweled ears. Those who were not already attached to someone were very attentive to us all—even Miss Mowbry in her funereal black velvet and snowy needlepoint lace was approached by a “prince” young enough to have been her grandson!—asking us a myriad of questions about ourselves and our lives in America and who our fathers were and what they did for a living. One of them, a duke with hungry eyes, actually proposed to Nellie when he found out her father was the major shareholder in the Crystal Springs Bleach Company! My father sat on the board of directors too, but I didn’t deem it worth mentioning; I just stood there gaping with all the rest as the duke dropped to his knees, grasping Nellie’s hand like a lifeline, and began serenading her with “My Nelly’s Blue Eyes.” I supposed it could still be accounted a great compliment even though her eyes were in fact hazel.
I understood then that more games were being played here than cards or roulette. These impoverished “noblemen” were shopping for rich American wives. It was a game of barter—my title to impress your American relatives and friends in exchange for access to your fortune. This was a game of titles and bank accounts, not love.
I let the other girls chatter away and play what games they would and wandered out alone onto the terrace.
How eerily white the marbled terrace glowed in the silvery-blue moonlight, lined with Grecian nudes of hard men and soft women, standing there like frozen, vacant-eyed ghosts. I stood between the two, one hand resting upon each heart, and felt myself desperately, hopelessly torn, longing for a man’s strong arms and hardness tempered by tenderness and chivalry, and a woman’s softness, sympathy, and secret places.
I never understood why I should be tormented by such thoughts. My eyes were always open wide to the danger of desiring either sex. I liked men well enough; I always thrilled to the heroes of the romance novels I read and the actors strutting handsomely across the stage to sweep their lady love up in a passionate embrace and smother her with kisses. I would always gasp and sigh along with the other ladies in the audience and pretend it was me in the actors’ arms. And tenors with beautiful voices soaring up as though upon divine wings to Heaven always sent me into weak-kneed raptures. Yet I was always a little afraid of them.
Caution always tempered my desire. Every day of a woman’s life from the cradle to the grave, by word, deed, or example, it is drummed into our heads that men are our masters, that we are born and bred to serve them. A woman belongs first to her father and then to her husband—he rules the roost and controls the purse strings, and she is entirely in his power; any freedom she is given is his gift to her, not her God-given right. Most women accepted this without complaint or question, so why did it frighten me so?
I suppose I was afraid that I would end up with someone like Father. People change with the passage of time, and if I married in love I might wake up one morning to discover that my loving, adoring, and indulgent husband had suddenly turned as tight-fisted and begrudging as my father, and I couldn’t bear that. I wanted love. I wanted romance. I craved the ecstatic physical expression of passion, to be held and touched and caressed, to feel like I belonged to someone body and soul, but the coldhearted legalities attached to the formalization of that sweet submission made me quail back in uncertainty and terror.
&
nbsp; What was wrong with me? Was it a disease of the body or of the brain? Sometimes I thought of going veiled and giving a false name to consult a doctor in another city where no one knew me; the idea had even crossed my mind once or twice in Europe, but fear always got the better of me. What if the doctor considered my condition so dire that he called the police or summoned strong-armed men from a hospital and had me taken away in chains to wherever they put such troubled and afflicted people and I never saw the light of day again? I’d heard such horrible tales of ice-water douches, of women set in tubs of ice water to freeze the desire out of them, or else left lying wrapped like mummies in cold sheets until their skin turned blue. And then there were the stories about surgeries to cut lust from the brain or even where it reposed nestled amidst pink petals of flesh between a woman’s legs. That terrified me! I’d rather take my secret to the grave than have it exposed and cut out of me.
I first became aware of this strange duality of desires in my nature when I was in school. I would watch my favorite teacher standing in front of the class and dream that I was invited to spend the night at her house, and sleep in her bed with her, and that before we retired she would bathe me, sometimes even sharing the tub with me, brush my hair until it crackled like a comforting fire, and help me into my nightgown; then we would cuddle in the warm bed and hold each other under the quilt and share chaste kisses all night long. As I grew older, the dream kisses lost their chastity to red-hot ardor, and evolved into fantasies in which she took a hand mirror and held it between my legs to patiently instruct me in the secrets of my womanhood, mirroring my own private, secret explorations. But I never revealed my crushes except in hot blushes and flustered stammers whenever I was called upon to read aloud or answer a question in class and in shy gifts of flowers, fruit, and candy I bought with my pocket money, sacrificing my own greed for sweets for the even sweeter thought of the pleasure they would give my secret love.