by Primula Bond
The music suddenly increases in tempo, a contemporary backbeat to a fashion show, and a dazzle of very modern lights, pink, silver, blue, flash on and off, pulsate in time to the music.
‘So long as they don’t make you swallow swords or eat fire!’ I laugh. ‘Now stay right there, because I have to film this.’
The girls change their moves as if a puppeteer has jerked their strings. They gyrate on the stage and then like catwalk models they start to strut out along the runway into the body of the theatre, their hourglass figures sensational as their thighs flex and kick, the design of their corsets allowing a tiny velvet drape of material to cover their modesty.
‘Those post-Impressionists were all sex-mad. They all seem to have lost their virginity with prostitutes, hence their enthusiasm for tarts and showgirls.’ Gustav twirls his false moustache. ‘Pierre says that’s why they’ve set this up for audience participation. Bit risky, I’d say.’
‘Can’t we go outside for a few minutes?’ I wriggle my bottom against him, deep into his lap. ‘If you’re going all the way to Toronto, how about I get you alone in the car and show you what you will be missing?’
But something makes me turn towards the stage. Pierre is still up there. At first I think he’s watching his girls, checking they are moving right, but then I see he is standing just over to the side, watching me and Gustav as we sit entwined on the rickety chair.
Gustav follows my eyes and lifts his hand to greet his brother.
‘Tremblement de Terre means Earthquake. It was a lethal cocktail made from half absinthe, half cognac. And did you know that Toulouse-Lautrec was nicknamed the coffee pot?
I press myself up against him, hook my leg round one of his. ‘Because he was short, but with a huge spout?’
Gustav really laughs. ‘Now put your camera down for a moment and dance with me!’ He picks me up to swing me round in the air. I catch Pierre’s dark eyes on me. On both of us. And I realise, from the almost manic grin on Gustav’s face, that he is showing Pierre something. Me. He’s showing Pierre that I am his to dance with. No one else’s.
Gustav licks my ear as he whispers. ‘Pierre says they’ve had a lot of trouble casting someone well hung enough to be le coffee pot for the show!’
His arm tightens around me as we continue to spin. The pretend rapt audience of gentlemen around us crane forward in their chairs, adjusting their trousers, not watching us but reaching out to touch the girls’ ankles as they high-kick down the walkways with their feathers and fans. I wriggle out of Gustav’s arms to grab my camera again to catch an under-the-skirt view of the girls’ impossibly long legs. And impossibly tiny thongs, sparkling in the shadows between their thighs.
One of the pirouetting girls reaches down, pushes me aside with a sharp elbow and a wink weighted with sparkling pink eye-shadow and false eyelashes, and pulls Gustav up onto the walkway. He shakes his head in protest as she starts to dance around him, gesturing and beckoning. Now the other men, actors, audience, members of the press, who knows, are being pulled on stage.
It’s just a rehearsal. Any minute he’ll bow apologetically and retreat to me.
I shift forward on the chair, thankful that my camera keeps me busy, but Gustav doesn’t come back to me. Instead he stretches his arms and tries to take the girl into a waltz hold, but she laughs and turns her back, rubbing her backside against him as if he was a lap-dancing pole. Well, this is burlesque. As her arms and legs entwine around him like vines, dancing him away from me towards the stage, the music seems to flow into Gustav. As the girl shimmies at him, he shimmies back. When she bumps and grinds, he stamps his feet at her, his hips thrusting like a matador beneath the black trousers and frock-coat.
My chest goes tight with the unaccustomed sensation of jealousy. No other word for it. He’s watched me behave like this with other people, do far worse things, and yet I’m furious with him for making me sit here like a wallflower while he cavorts with another girl. It’s only play-acting, I know that, but these girls are trained not only to move and dance and strip but to focus your mind on one thing and one thing only, and that’s the sex act. This girl is limbo-ing, wriggling and thrusting, pushing out her fanny and tits, her knees spread, showing us all exactly where she would like to be: in bed. With my man.
And all he has to do, oh, God, he’s doing it, is one simple thrusting move, to show exactly what he would do to her.
I’m left on the chair as the other participants, planted or otherwise, dance around them, and Gustav is dragged further away from me. Up on the stage the bright coloured lights are slowly fading. I pan my camera round the theatre, focus for a moment on the swing doors at the side of the auditorium, which have been propped open. I can just see a black-haired woman dressed in bridal white emerging from what Pierre called the divas’ dungeon, and slipping down the side aisle towards the stage.
No one, not even Gustav, is looking at me now. I can’t do anything except go on taking photographs. The tables are being turned. I’m being forced to watch him cavorting with someone else. And despite fantasising about it, I don’t think I like it when it’s happening right in front of me. Or maybe I just don’t like being left out.
Pierre catches my eye from up on the stage. He’s been left out, too. We stare at each other a long time, the two of us isolated by dancers whirling like planets around us. Then the lights are all extinguished so that the theatre is buried in a thick blanket of blackness and silence. A slow, thick, heartbeat rhythm is tapped out on a single drum, actually the wooden flank of a guitar, and then the strings hum into a low, sensual Argentine tango.
The blackness is pierced by pin-sharp bright spotlights beaming on supposedly random markers on the stage. I can’t see Gustav anywhere. He might be one of the couples who are now stalking, elbows out, heads averted, in stiff tango holds in and out of the beams of light. Or he might have been dragged backstage by that randy showgirl.
I stand up anxiously, kicking my chair back with a loud clatter. A pair of glittering black Levi eyes is staring at me, but it’s Pierre. Still up on stage, still in costume. He takes a step towards me, and then a long white arm in a white satin opera glove reaches out of the shadows and grabs him.
The new dancer moves into the spotlight with Pierre, takes his jaw in her gloved fingers and turns him to face her. She is wearing the same costume as the others, low-cut whalebone, floaty tulle, ribbons and hooks, the whole designed to look as if it would fall off with one tug, but although there are slashes of cerise in the silk similar to my costume, hers is predominantly white. As is her face, which is so thickly painted and mask-like it’s as if they’ve used lead to obliterate her features like Queen Elizabeth I.
To render her even more otherworldly a white lace mask casts delicate shadows, swirls and flowers over her features, making her skin almost lizard-like. Beneath it her eyelids and brows are painted black, the eye-liner sweeping out to the edges.
Through the lace her cheekbones are high and sharp, the mouth coloured bright pink. She has an hourglass figure, tiny pricked ears and raven-black hair falling in tendrils beneath a ripped bridal veil peppered with tiny white flowers.
Who is she? She’s horribly familiar, but maybe that’s because I caught a glimpse of her just now coming up from the basement. Is she the one whom Pierre has picked to pleasure him tonight?
I continue focusing on the dimly lit stage. A single violin picks up the tango and her eyes suddenly lock onto mine just before the spotlight above her and Pierre snaps out. And just as suddenly I am grabbed from behind, lifted off my feet and bent backwards in a low lunge. A strong pair of arms stops me from falling as a long, slow kiss takes possession of my mouth, a warm wet tongue pushing open my lips.
A few soft pinkish lights come on in the ceiling, lighting the auditorium slightly, and I squeal with delight that Gustav has reclaimed me. I suck at his tongue, desire mixed with relief surging through me, all stoked by the music and the darkness, and the figures flickering up on the stage. I don�
�t want him catching sight of the woman dancing with Pierre, because there’s no getting away from the unpleasant fact that she looks very much like the sketches and paintings I saw stuck all over the walls of the master bedroom in the chalet in Lugano – of Margot.
But just as I respond to Gustav, parting my lips for him, showing him I want him, and try to waltz him towards the exit, the pocket of his nineteenth-century frock-coat buzzes against my breast, glowing incongruously. He plants me on my feet to take the call.
‘Don’t go without me! Let me fetch my clothes from up there and pack up my cameras!’ I yell into his ear, clinging onto his lapels.
‘You are halfway through a commission, Serena. Much as I’d love to get my hands on you, it’s impossible!’ He jabs his finger at the phone to cut it off. ‘I have to go. Stay here, finish the shoot and have that drink with Pierre.’
He unhooks me, kisses me again, then lifting his phone in farewell he backs across the room and out into the lobby.
I can’t get my stuff from the wings because the show is drawing to a close. The woman and Pierre are still circling each other in the sensual moves of the dance of love. He is totally mesmerised. Their bodies dip in and out of the single spotlight, the other dancers reduced to prancing silhouettes in the shadows. I lift my camera, but instead of taking more shots I zoom in on the couple to get a better look. In the intermittent light it takes a while, the focus blurring then sharpening then blurring again, like eyes waking from a drugged sleep.
The small film crew on the other side of the auditorium barely glance at the engrossed couple on stage as they study their lighting and sound boards, but one of the cameramen, thinking I’m photographing him, lifts his camera to his shoulder to take a tit-for-tat shot of me.
Now Pierre and his partner are clear in my viewfinder. The woman’s costume is deliberately bridal, I see that now, though ripped and ragged in the manner of Miss Havisham. The little flowers in her veil, threaded in her hair, are tiny and white, and the name comes to me. Edelweiss. The same Alpine flower that Margot held in her wedding bouquet in the most painful picture of all that I saw in Gustav’s chalet.
Pierre looks lost as he and the woman turn sinuously in slow motion, their bodies locked together, her leg up round his hip. I lower the camera. I don’t want to see any more. I shouldn’t be here, because I’m certain now that she must be Pierre’s new woman. I’m standing here looking at the cause of Polly’s heartbreak.
I have to get out of here. The spectacle may declare itself as a show within a show, performers merging with punters, reality blurred.
But this is all too real to me.
To my relief more lights come on. The conductor makes a cutting motion and the music stutters to an unexpected finale. Everyone stops dancing, becoming mortal again as they turn to listen to directions.
The black-haired woman presses her palm on Pierre’s chest to push him away. And as she spins into the shadows at the back of the stage I see that although she has the lithe, immortal body of a youthful goddess, her hand has the spindly fingers of an older woman.
CHAPTER TEN
It’s nearly dark outside, and a freezing sleet is falling over Gramercy Square.
I’m late for my drink with Pierre but after the shock of seeing him up on stage earlier with someone so spookily resembling Margot, and the anxiety that Gustav might catch sight of her before leaving so rapidly, I’m actually glad of the delay. The crazy half-hour I’ve just spent, when I was pleasurably waylaid by two of the randy dancers, has helped take my mind off the whirl of the burlesque show, and I now have some extra footage in my camera as well as a guilty conscience.
I give a residuary shiver remembering what those naughty dancers did to me. Maybe it counts as going behind Gustav’s back, but I only allowed them to seduce me and film it because I thought it would be a little visual treat to turn him on when he gets back from his trip.
The theatre cleared almost miraculously when the director called ‘Cut’. The spectacle was extinguished, like a candle flame. The auditorium swifly emptied of orchestra and cameramen, the lights changed to flat, bright electricity. Pierre was gone, deep in conversation with his colleagues, and even the dancers, nimble at changing out of their costumes, had mostly melted away, swanning off the set in their wild combination of jeans, hoodies and full theatrical make-up.
As the performers bustled round me I tried to check today’s shots, but it was no good. I’d have to wait till I could go over them with Pierre. So I went up on to the stage to find my clothes and other cameras, and without warning two girls pulled me behind a flimsy Japanese screen.
‘Can we have some quick pictures with you, on self-timer? We want to celebrate being together a whole month! It would be so cool, the white, the black and the redhead!’ One of them, an almost translucently pale girl with white-blonde hair and slanting grey eyes, was standing by my tripod, wearing nothing but her sparkly thong. Her friend, also in just her thong, was an Amazonian black girl with huge breasts and long, spindly legs like a gazelle. Their huge Bambi eyelashes, rouged cheeks and dolly-painted cheeks gave them the look of a cartoon.
I shrugged shyly, trying not to stare at their breasts. ‘I prefer auburn, if you don’t mind!’
‘You’re a trouper!’ The pale girl expertly set up my camera and timer and pulled me over to a battered chaise longue beneath an old hatstand. The other girl draped a feather boa round my neck and then round her friend’s throat, which brought our faces closer together, and as I heard the first whirring shots the pale girl framed my face with her white fingers to pull me close and flicked her tongue across my mouth.
The black girl cackled. ‘I think I prefer the movie setting. That OK with you, madame photographer?’
As she took her turn to fiddle with my camera I wasn’t able to reply because the other girl kissed me again, her hands stroking my breasts, which were still straining against the red corset. My mouth opened to the delicate flicking of her tongue.
‘No. Keep the dress on her. I’m not having you going the whole way with her!’ ordered the black girl, settling behind me so that I was sandwiched between the two beauties. She ran her long fingers up my legs and under the tattered red skirt of my costume while her pale girlfriend pushed herself closer to me, her white breasts rubbing against mine, her breath soft and scented as she moved her mouth down my throat and licked my cleavage, making my nipples perk up against the stiff whalebone.
The black girl had lifted my skirt and was grinding her crotch against my bottom. The scratching sensation of the tiny crystals of her thong against my bare crack made me wriggle. The thong slipped sideways so that I could feel her wetness against my skin, and at the same time her fingers hooked themselves inside me. She started to buck harder and pushed her finger in deeper, and as I began to gasp with surprise and pleasure the other girl cupped my breasts out of the corset and sucked them.
The camera whirred and filmed as the girls moaned and the first pulsating throbs reverberated through me, too quick, taking me by surprise. These girls knew what they were doing, and as I my head went loose with pleasure they withdrew their fingers and lips, leaned across me, squashing me between them, and proceeded to kiss each other’s brightly painted lips as they fingered each other to climax.
‘All on your one clever camera,’ sniggered the black girl after a few moments. ‘You’ll email us a copy? How about a meal out with us one night, as payment?’
‘Sure. I’d love to. I’ll keep a copy for myself, obviously. All good for the portfolio!’ I pulled my jeans on quickly under the dress, feeling the wetness snag on the denim as I buttoned them up. Yet another pair of knickers gone missing. ‘Here’s my card, girls, but I’ll be seeing you again back here, I’m sure!’
‘The boss man Levi said we could take the extra time with you after the show, but now he’s waiting for you at the Gramercy. Don’t want to keep him waiting. You can collect all your other stuff later, he said,’ announced the pale girl, switching off all
the lights. ‘Hey, Miss Photographer. You sure you’re not the sweet thing on his agenda for tonight?’
They laughed throatily, waiting for me to grab my coat and scarf before pushing me through the dark auditorium, out into the lobby. Then, leaving me on the theatre steps, they ran off down the street in the other direction.
Now I hurry round the garden square. No, I’m most certainly not Pierre Levi’s after-hours pickings.
The fading winter light, the sharp edges and silhouettes of rooftops and trees, the railings, the dark clothes of the people hurrying past, all make me feel more dazed, not less. The throbbing behind my eyes speaks of the input from an extraordinary day spent in the midst of sumptuous, exquisitely organised chaos.
I don’t realise until I step inside the grand hotel where we’re to meet that my scarf is dangling round my neck and I haven’t zipped up my green leather jacket. Even my hair is still coiled up as if I’m about to dance out in front of the footlights. I managed to take out the feathers before I left the theatre. But over my jeans I’m still wearing the ripped red dress.
I must look like Orphan Annie as I shuffle through the huge foyer, but the tall Scandi-guy behind the desk doesn’t bat an eyelid that I seem to be wearing nothing but a red corset, my breasts barely concealed.
The butterflies doing somersaults in my stomach after my encounter with those girls should be for Gustav. I would much rather be meeting him here. I wish I could catch sight of him in a corner somewhere, see the amused arch of his eyebrows as his messy girlfriend tries to compose herself amongst the expensive, classy people mingling beneath the vast chandeliers. I wish his dark eyes were resting on me possessively like they did earlier, for Pierre’s benefit. Most of all I wish I could just walk into his arms, continue with that long, wet kiss and forget everything else.
I pull my jacket round me to hide my theatrical costume, although it seems that anything goes in this bohemian haven. Anything goes even more when I tell the staff that I’m meeting Pierre Levi in the Rose Bar and they direct me knowingly.