Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  Once someone used that expression it meant that there were no rules. She wondered if there were rules at all in this place.

  By the time they’d finished their first drink, Ambrose was asked to dance by a man. He was nervously delighted, and he beamed at her over the man’s shoulder.

  Shortly afterwards, she was asked to dance by a man. She put her coat in the cloakroom, and they danced. She found that dancing relaxed her.

  As she danced past Ambrose and his man, she remained comically impassive, pretending not to acknowledge him.

  After the dance she was escorted back to their corner table where Ambrose was already seated, thankfully without partner. He was sitting elegantly, remembering to keep his knees together.

  After thanking her partner, who then went off, and sitting down, she said, ‘In our discussion about Australia the other day, about what Australian men might or might not wish to wear, I think I was being a little naïve.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I mean, there must be men in Australia who dress as women. Australia isn’t that different.’

  ‘I think that’s probably closer to the truth.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I think so. A little closer to the truth. Simmel or someone said there were not enough sexes.’

  ‘Oh, did he? Of all things, I hate being naïve, or maybe patriotic. Just as bad.’

  ‘It’s youth. Savour it. You’re given bonuses to compensate for being naïve.’

  ‘And I think two sexes are quite enough. Make quite enough problems. Well, two sexes and a half.’

  Ambrose laughed. ‘Very good, Edith. A little slow, but first class.’

  ‘And what are the bonuses of youth?’

  ‘Youth.’

  ‘That’s circular.’

  He thought. ‘Oh, litheness. That’s one.’

  ‘Litheness is little better than agility. It’s a rather gymnastic bonus. And in my case, it goes with red hair and freckles.’

  ‘Freckles are a rustic form of beauty, Edith. And I would describe your hair as rousse.’

  ‘Agility and freckles. Topnotch. And I’m hardly a youth. And giving the colour of my hair a French word no longer impresses, nor does it change a thing: its colour is fading. I would gladly give up my agility if I could also lose my naïvity.’ Thankfully her freckles were fading too; the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

  He looked at her. ‘You’re allowed to be naïve — for one more year. I think those are the rules. After that, you are just considered wrong-headed, not naïve.’ He smiled across at her. ‘Edith, I think you’re a handsome woman. A graceful woman. And I like your freckles.’

  ‘Thanks. So are you.’

  ‘I wish you meant it.’

  She did mean it. ‘I do. You are among the most beautiful here tonight.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Ambrose sighed, and looked around. ‘Among the men? Or both men and women?’

  ‘Don’t push for too much, darling.’

  She still didn’t know what was supposed to happen at the club that evening, between them. His earlier answers were not complete. She knew she should ask him, while there was time, although she wished she’d had it out with him before coming to the rotten club. ‘Ambrose, I’m confused,’ she said. ‘Are you looking for another lover tonight … a man lover?’

  She felt boorish, but it had to be asked. Anyhow this club was well on the other side of refinement. Boorish behaviour could hardly matter.

  ‘I want to be with you,’ he said.

  She sensed that he was being honourable. She coaxed him to answer honestly. ‘Come clean, Ambrose.’

  ‘Well, if I really did attract a man, and that is unlikely …’ Modestly, he made a woebegone face.

  She made a motherly, tell—the-truth-now face back to him. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘tell me.’

  ‘Oh — it might be fun to be with a man for the night. I suppose.’

  She thought about this. What did ‘be with a man for a night’ mean to Ambrose? ‘Maybe you’d better elaborate,’ she said, fiddling with her drink.

  He gathered himself, made his voice confident. ‘Yes, I might like to have a sexual act with a man.’

  His answer seemed to somersault onto her lap like an angry cat.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I see.’ She didn’t see at all, really, although she did see that his wish excluded her. They rested there in a conversational crater. She was not sure how much further she wanted to go with her questions.

  But he went on, sounding as if he was wanting to spill it all out. ‘No, not by a man. I think that most of all I want to have a sexual act with a man dressed as a woman.’

  She was still excluded.

  ‘I think that’s what I want,’ he said, now satisfied with his reply.

  She made herself imagine the difference, the difference between him in a sexual act with a woman, and in a sexual act with a man dressed as a woman. They would be both responding sexually to the feminine image. She was still not sure, though, what Ambrose meant — did he mean that he and his lover-dressed-as-a-woman would both pretend to be women? Or that they both behaved like men, or what? What did they do with their male parts? So many quandaries. Instead, she said, timidly, ‘I see. At least, I think I do.’

  What was really foremost in her mind was that she did not want to be abandoned by Ambrose in this club. As she stared across at his made-up face, the cut of the wig hugging his head, the long pearl rivière necklace, the pretty shoulders framed in the square neck of the evening dress, she felt lost. Lost in the passageways of his sexuality, its turnings and its corridors and its doors — leading to where? Here in the club it was different from being back in his apartment when they played with clothes and make-up, sexually. She was part of it then — indeed, in control of it. In the apartment, she felt that wherever he went in his fantasies, ultimately she was with him and she knew that it all came to be focused on her and in the service of her bodily pleasure.

  ‘Can I be really straightforward with you?’ he said, drinking from his second cocktail.

  There in the smoke of the club with its low lights, its glitter-ball, its bizzareness, and the Negro music, she felt she had no way to restrain him, that the whole atmosphere extended the right to absolute, and even flammable, self-revelation and conduct and, anyhow, what was there about him that she did not already know. Probably too much. ‘Tell me. I thought I’d heard it all. Tell me the rest.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to know?’

  ‘How can I be sure I want to know? Stop being so coy.’ Her toughness was false. Her breathing was not quite right.

  He leaned a little towards her, which emphasised the innermost nature of what he was about to say. ‘I feel a definite need sometimes — I feel a real physical need sometimes, in my rectum.’

  She took this in. The low lights of the club concealed her blushing. For an instant, she thought he meant to go to the toilet but then the intended meaning swiftly arrived.

  ‘Rectum?’ She said the word. She wondered whether she had used this word before — maybe she’d used it to a doctor, maybe in science at university; had written it, maybe in a physiology examination. The word did not seem at all clinical there, then, in this club, with Ambrose dressed so appealingly, even voluptuously, the word coming from his pretty red lips, altered in midair to sound brightly lurid. She honestly didn’t know what to say next.

  He went on, ‘Desire — I feel desire in my rectum. Sometimes. A passionate desire for a man.’

  She felt herself mentally staggering back from this revelation. Obviously she hadn’t heard all. Where was the end to ‘all’? With what she thought was admirable calm, she said, ‘It’s all right if you do, if it happens. If a man wants to escort you home.’ She was astonished to hear herself saying conventional phrases such as ‘escort you home’. Who was going to see her home? She supposed Ambrose would be gentlemanly enough to call the depot for a taxi. ‘Or, a man dressed as a lady.’ But then who did the escorting?

  ‘
You don’t mind … if it happens?’

  ‘As long as you let me know what’s happening. I suppose. As long as everything is decorous.’ The word quailed in the atmosphere of the club. She was hesitant now, not being at all sure how far she wanted to go with the conversation, but an insensible, prurient curiosity pushed her along. ‘I suppose that a man dressed as a woman might be able to give you something that I couldn’t. Some stimulation that I couldn’t give you.’ She regained composure and altered her voice to a bantering toughness. ‘Heavens, darling, I wouldn’t want you to miss out on any of life’s pleasures. Who would wish that on anyone!’ But her tone hid her dismay, as Ambrose and some strange companion dimly acted it out in her imagination, despite the fact that some of the pieces of the puzzle were missing.

  ‘You’re very magnanimous,’ Ambrose said very seriously, reaching over and taking both her hands. ‘You are a very magnanimous person, Edith. Very.’

  ‘I am your friend, Ambrose.’ She strove towards a joking tone. ‘I suppose I am entitled to give the bride away.’

  She knew then as she made the joke that they would never marry, not that it had ever been discussed.

  ‘I don’t always yearn for it,’ he rushed to say, ‘that sort of thing. I don’t lie about every day yearning for a man dressed as a woman, or wanting you to be a man dressed as a woman. I don’t always want those sort of thrills.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I want you, just as Edith, most of the time, nearly all of the time.’

  ‘That’s good.’ She was still struggling to comprehend all this and not to show any dismay. She’d heard of physical sex via the rectum as a birth control measure. She and Ambrose had never done it. When men had physical sex with other men, she had thought that they probably fondled each other and used their mouths. But the rectum, now that she thought about it, seemed obvious.

  At this moment, Ambrose’s two friends arrived. Ye gods. They were men dressed as women — one very young and one not so young. They were British and on holidays, old friends of Ambrose from London.

  ‘We’re travelling as two sisters,’ the older one said, as if it were an especially clever thing to do.

  The younger one seemed sulky. He went by the French name of Laure. Edith gave him marks for his choice of name.

  Edith found it difficult to talk to them ‘as girls’, yet they probably didn’t want to talk about themselves as men. It was all very difficult. She sensed they did not wish to talk about their occupations, for instance. From some of their cryptic remarks, she thought they might be British Foreign Office. She let Ambrose talk to them. Their chat sounded to her like a feminine burlesque. They talked about the places where they’d be able to pass themselves off as girls. They seemed to enjoy talking about make-up, hair, and the pumicing of legs. She speculated about how they might have come to know Ambrose, how they came to share the same predilection. She would ask later. She wondered about Ambrose’s feminine voice, now heightened by their company — from his mother, his sister?

  She was relieved when a man came to her and asked her, in French, to dance.

  The three men dressed as women pretended to be put out that she had been asked and not them. There was much giggling.

  The man was swarthy, maybe even dark, but in the low lights of the club it was hard to tell.

  As she danced with him, he seemed morose, maybe slightly drunk.

  She asked him, in French, where he was from.

  He replied, ‘Azerbaijan.’

  She guessed he was an émigré. Geneva was a home for these émigré people, in flight from fallen countries like Azerbaijan. She tried to recall what she’d read about Azerbaijan. It had been refused membership of the League because its boundaries were obscure.

  ‘You’re an émigré?’ she asked.

  ‘I am a castaway.’

  ‘I am sorry about your country. You will return to it one day.’

  ‘I do not have hope.’

  She wondered why he was at this club. Maybe his masculinity was also castaway.

  He asked her before she could ask him. ‘Why do you come here?’

  ‘Oh?’ She looked around as if she had just found herself there in the club by mishap. ‘Oh, I have a friend — a friend who comes here.’

  ‘You are not a lover of women?’

  ‘No.’ She nearly answered that her friend was a man but it was tripped up by a new thought — when she coupled with Ambrose which sex was she loving? Where was she in all this ambiguity? Did she make love to his ambiguities? ‘No, not at all,’ she said, wanting to have this man’s approval and attention.

  He said, ‘I relax in this place because here all is lost too.’

  ‘I suppose so. How, though, do you mean, “lost”?’

  ‘These people are outside of it all, lost from the ordained paths.’

  She was having trouble with his accent and his French but she followed his thinking.

  ‘I am lost from the soil of my nation. But these people,’ he nodded his head at the club crowd, ‘they are lost from the natural world. This is a netherworld.’

  She too, glanced around, seeing it through his eyes, and yes, it was a netherworld. She changed the subject. ‘It is difficult here in Geneva — being an émigré?’

  ‘I am more than an émigré — I am also government in exile. With me, the government of my country resides.’

  He said he wanted to drink — would she join him? He did not dance well and she was glad to leave the dance floor. They went to his table where he had a bottle of cognac. He said that here in this club he was doubly exiled. ‘I am a man of normal feelings. And here, here I feel double exile and that takes me beyond the pain of the first exile. I am a normal man in pain.’

  She saw how he was using the bizarre atmosphere to dilute his pain but she still did not trust his normality. Was she looking for a normal friend, here in this club?

  She looked across at Ambrose who was dancing with the younger travesti. The older travesti now looked sullen.

  Edith felt the evening was slipping the reins of her personal order, and she felt she might very well fall, fall down some trap door into a dark, sensual chamber. Maybe a silken chamber in Azerbaijan. Did they have silk? She tried again to recall what she’d read about Azerbaijan. Nothing much was coming up. She knew that after the Soviets had taken them over, they had applied as a government in exile to be accepted by the League but had been refused because of the border problem.

  Ambrose and his young dance partner stopped where she and Mr Huneeus were sitting.

  ‘Introduce us, Edith,’ Ambrose said, in a jealous falsetto voice, standing there holding the hand of the younger man.

  She stumblingly introduced Ambrose by his female name of Carla and the young Englishman also by his nom déguisée.

  ‘Mr Huneeus is an émigré from Azerbaijan,’ she said, thus recklessly granting him his claim, she observed.

  It turned out that the younger one knew much about Azerbaijan and displayed his knowledge. This pleased Mr Huneeus.

  After some small talk, Ambrose and the young man danced on.

  When they’d finished their drink she felt it was safe to invite Mr Huneeus to join the others. He gathered up his bottle of cognac and the glasses. She was uncertain whether Mr Huneeus was now attached to her for the evening, and what he might construct on their remaining together after the dance. But what did she care? Here in this club her own etiquette seemed inapplicable, rules of behaviour were either nonexistent or they were ‘unspoken’. What, she asked herself, are ‘unspoken rules’, and from where do they come? No, she was sure that even in this inverted world, there were rules. She knew that you couldn’t always see the rules simply by looking at people mixing together, but she suspected that strict rules always commissioned social life even when there was a claim to social illicitness. She had no intention of bothering to learn them.

  Ambrose exchanged inquisitive glances at her, curious and maybe unsettled by Mr Huneeus’s presence. It wasn�
�t possible to answer him, and she then realised that she couldn’t answer herself — what was she at the club for? Why was she in the company of this Mr Huneeus? Was she also laying herself open to the turn of events? Was Mr Huneeus a ‘turn of events’?

  She hadn’t had quite enough to drink, nor was she yet quite relaxed about the nature of her surroundings, to be free to throw herself into the turn of events. She knew about a timidity within herself when it came to allowing things to just happen. A threshold over which she had to be led, preferably blindfolded, or which she had to make herself jump like a shy horse. She landed well, though, she thought, on the other side. When and if she made the jump. On those two or three occasions in her life that she had made that jump.

  During a toilet absence of Mr Huneeus, Ambrose, in a lapse back to his everyday self, leaned across to ask her if she’d told Mr Huneeus about their being League officers.

  She said she hadn’t.

  Ambrose said that it might be wiser to avoid the subject, and then said, ‘But if it comes up, so be it.’

  Edith wasn’t sure that so be it at all. Émigrés always had problems to be solved and always looked to the League to do the solving. Problems of constitutional legitimacy. Problems of missing treasury gold. She did not wish to be used as an intercessor for the forsaken Republic of Azerbaijan.

  ‘And has he become your escort for the evening?’ Ambrose asked, in a quite different voice from that which had talked about their being officers of the League; he had returned to the effeminate voice belonging to his role that evening. It carried a suggestion of jealousy, but it lacked sharpness. His was a played-out jealousy, some sort of obligatory courtesy. As well it should be, given his own early musings and declarations of desire.

  Before she could answer, there was a commotion at the bottom of the stairs, where the foyer opened into the club.

  About ten youths with black armbands entered the club, most wearing black leather caps, black leather gaiters, and many carrying batons, pushing aside the doorman, and causing a scared lull in the exhilarated noise of the club. The lull was immediately followed by a louder nervous resumption of the noisy chatter, competing with the music — as if the club guests were pretending that nothing was happening.