Matteo, Prince of Paris
Renate Stendhal
A week later, the room for Matteo's Sappho show had been found. There was already a big crowd when I shook the snow and slush from my jacket. I detected half a dozen ex-lovers in the room. Carmen stood out because in the midst of sweaters and fur jackets her scrumptious shoulders were bulging out from her undershirt. I heard that Emma, a blonde with brown eyes the size of dessert plates, had announced a party for later that night, at the Palais Royal, i.e., her parents' posh apartment. Skylark (who would have thought?) was sitting next to her Katmandou dyke, waving to me with owner pride. I saw Malou, the little Algerian with the shy eyes who worked at the cash register of the Crazy Horse Saloon. Due to our liaison I had frequently been able to enjoy watching the beautiful bodies of the dancers, "painted" by the projector lights in stripes and dotted patterns like pretty carousel horses, their colors pulsing to the rhythm of pop hits. ("Big Spender" by Bette Middler was an all-time favorite.) Malou, with her chaste-little-girl hair cut and high-buttoned white blouse, would sit encased in the glass box of the cash register above the sinful fray, unapproachable like a unicorn. She had become Aicha's bosom friend. I waved to the two of them, but Aicha seemed unwilling to notice me. Aha, I thought, she knows something about Claude.
The unkempt studio space at the Beaux Arts looked like the garret in last year's La Bohème, with dust-blind windows and broken easels piled up in a corner. Matteo sat on a raised little step wearing her trademark black felt hat over her dark page cut. Everyone else was sitting on the floor, at her feet. As usual, she seemed to have a light beam trained on her, and the effect was heightened by the white dancer's shirt she liked to wear. The wide-sleeved shirt, gathered at the wrists, billowed around her slender body and disappeared in a pair of Jeans with a rough leather belt. She wore short black boots, as did her young companions, her "body guards," who sported boyish haircuts and rarely moved a facial muscle. This time, her sister Geneviève sat next to her, her soft, blond mirror image. Rumor had it that Geneviève was not necessarily (and perhaps not at all?) a lesbian. But it was clear as a bell that she adored Matteo, as everyone did. My occasional lover Harmony Nayle from California liked to refer to Matteo as a "he/she" but I called her our Prince – a Prince crowned by French literature with a Prix Goncourt, who wrote the hottest, inflaming, disturbing songs for us.
There she sat on that little step as on a throne, receiving our homage, waiting for the microphone to be hooked up. She had a round face with a full mouth that seemed to hesitate about its inclination: would it want to pout or kiss, curl its corners upwards invitingly or downwards scornfully? But her eyes were without ambivalence: big, black, moist, irresistible bedroom eyes. How hard they were to resist I knew from experience, from the time when I first ran into her. I was meeting some friends at the Beaux Arts when she came down the stairs with a little flock of admirers. She saw me and stopped. She smiled. Her slightly protruding eyes looked at me with a directness, a radiance that stopped my breath. In a single moist-velvety moment they took possession of me. I didn't know what to do. I should have fallen to my knees and adored her, but I was still a bit of a greenhorn back then, not quite believing that I had left Germany for good. I spent the moment in vertigo, trying to hold on to the air – and let her move on.
Now that the absence of Claude troubled my sleep I sometimes found myself going over the past, wondering what would have happened had I been faster on my feet that day. I would have entered Matteo's circle and been a close observer of her rising literary fame and the ever-growing circle of women gathered around her. I would have met Claude at a time when she was one of Matteo's favorites. I might have lived with them in the house in the suburb and have travelled to Lesbos with one or both of them…
The evening was getting into swing. Everyone was talking and shouting and not losing sight for a second of the little step where our Prince was sitting, tapping on the tip of the microphone, shaking her head. There also seemed to be a problem with the slide projector and a thickening ring of garçonnes was debating the necessary fixes. It turned out the slide carousel didn't fit the projector and no replacement was available. But the microphone finally worked, and Matteo stretched out her white-sleeved arm.
"We have to imagine what we can't see," she began in her surprisingly high, young girl's voice that vibrated with hidden indignation, "we have to invent what we cannot remember." All heads turned to the studio wall where she now conjured "the island, in morning mist. An aroma of anise and thyme in the breeze, dawn with gold sandals… Here, on the rock to the left," (everyone's eyes swung up with her eyes) "Aphrodite's temple, the graceful grove of apple trees and altars, the scent of smoking frankincense." Her arm swept outward in a beautiful curve. "And there cold water sounds through apple branches and with roses the whole place is shadowed and from the radiant trembling leaves…"
A hushed chorus joined in: "…sleep comes dropping."
"Who, O Sappho, Was Wronging You?" was a performance Matteo loved to repeat for an audience who knew it by heart and lip-synched lines from the poetic fragments Matteo had chosen. The romantic first part, her homage to "Eros, the melter of limbs," always ended with everyone reciting together, "The moon has sunk and the Pleyades / and midnight has gone. / The hours are passing, passing / and I lie alone." Many women had their eyes closed, sitting with rapt attention, embracing each other, some lying down, crying. Even the young body-guards looked dreamy.
The second part, however, held a different spice. Matteo would without fail zoom in on her question. Who was wronging Sappho? Everyone among the PATs (Plaisirs d'Amour Toujours) knew exactly who it was. It was the OWLs (One Woman's Love). The OWLs proselytized that Sappho, the "Tenth Muse," had been heart-broken over a man, her one and only true love, and had thrown herself from a cliff for him. Matteo would take them to task. She would scold the monogamous Freudian "Vaginellas" who were hunkered down at the Deux Magots. The OWLs in turn scorned the PATs, barricaded at the Café Flore across the street, calling Matteo's interpretation of Sappho's relentless passion for women "clitoridiculous."
In the break, someone grabbed me from behind and put a hand over my eyes. "Lou, mon choux," cooed a well-known voice. "Who am I?"
"No idea, Kiki!" I turned around. Kiki Möller, a good looking woman with a pride of chestnut hair, was a librarian at the Goethe Institute, and one of the few forty-something women in the room. Kiki liked to help me when I had to do research for one of my articles. She was married and I had only recently introduced her to the PATs. She frequently still behaved like a novice.
She hung around my neck. "Save me!" she shouted. "Save me from these bewitching women!"
The women around us turned their heads. In the next moment I understood. I caught the glance Kiki cast at Matteo, who was striding past us to get back to her raised little step. Glued to her was Skylark, who right now had no time for me. The show was going to continue.
"Could I talk to you for a moment?" Kiki pleaded. "I really need to be saved…" I followed her out of the room. "You know I have this panel discussion next Friday, and Matteo… Matteo has just now cancelled out on me." She gave me such a wild stare, with so many furrows in her brow, that I said, "Come on, let's have a drink and you fill me in."
"I'm not going to miss anything?" Kiki asked anxiously. I laughed and took her arm. She unfolded her umbrella and we pushed against the wind.
"I can tell you what you're missing. After the tirade against the OWLs, there'll be an incantation of all the girls in Sappho's poems – Eirana, Gongyla, Anaktoria, Mika and of course Dika! Each name followed by the repeated chorus of, 'Anything goes…to bed!' The PAT motto – you know. A few chosen ones are going to recite favorite lines – 'Eros shook my mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees'. Or, 'If she does not love, soon she will love, even unwilling'."
"God, you heard this more than once!" Kiki said with envy.
"And then everyone will deplore the martyrdom of the young brides. That part you know only too well…"
She punched her elbow into my ribs as if I had told her at mass that the bishop was secretly drinking the wine himself. "And Matteo?"
"Gracefully extends her mercy to anyone who is, or once was, married."
Kiki sounded stricken. "She had no grace or mercy for me today…"
(…)
The minute Kiki left the café to catch the end of Matteo's event, I got a phone jeton at the cash register and went to dial Claude's number. No reply. I tried again. I was tempted to just drop by at her place. Something told me I was losing my chance with every minute of doing nothing. Claude was back in town. It felt as if I had already wasted hours since I learned about her return. Not to mention all the days I had imagined her in the south of France. "My insides are burning…" I had turned into Goethe's Mignon, yearning for a far-away lover – a feeling I hadn't had in a while. So what? another voice contradicted Mignon. It's just vanity! You feel indignant– what did you do to deserve this? True, Claude's way of dropping me without a warning and replacing me without an explanation was oddly radical. Why was I not supposed to know that she was back in town? Who on earth was suddenly controlling her?
Fifteen minutes later I went down again to the restrooms and the telephone (damn the French habit of placing the phone right next to the stinking bathrooms!). Again no luck. Laβ das, Luise! I told myself. Stop driving yourself crazy. I would be able to find her if I wanted to. Her theater group had a rehearsing space every afternoon at the Cité International Universitaire, a place I knew inside out. I would have answers. But maybe she was already on her way to Emma's party.
It was finally late enough to get on my Vespa (the rain had stopped) and drive over to the Palais Royal. Emma's parents lived on the fifth floor in Rue de Beaujolais. Emma herself had her own "atelier" in the 14tharrondissement, although she had nothing to do with art. Opening the massive, elaborate entry door I instantly noticed the "traffic" – the streaming to and fro of women in the hallway and the discreetly lit rooms. There was dancing in the salon. A few women had already shed half of their clothes and were dancing with naked torsos to Joan Armatrading. One of them was shouting and swinging her shirt through the air from the balcony where a crowd was gathered to admire the illuminated palace behind its French gardens. It was a pretty sight, the silhouette of the half-naked jerking, swinging bodies in front of the windows and the illuminated night sky. Apart from two Louis XV sofas and arm chairs, there were pillows everywhere on the floor. A few couples had stretched out to chat; others were smooching in darker corners. A side room, the "music salon" (as one could tell from the Steinway), was filled with a thick hashish cloud. The obligatory group on the floor was lit by candles. It was early; they were still dressed, attending to the extremities of the chosen one lying in the center. In a small guest room I saw several women worshipfully gathered around Skylark who was performing "Sweet Woman" for them on her guitar, looking like a benevolent lioness. Luckily she had her eyes closed; I could sneak out again unnoticed. I quickly scanned every room and bedroom for Claude, then followed the stream of women into the kitchen where Emma had lined up a battery of wine and whisky bottles. Everyone was in high spirits. There usually wasn't much alcohol at the parties because nobody felt responsible for procuring it. The less there was to drink the more everyone smoked. I was greeted loudly and Emma planted a kiss on my neck. She handed me her glass of red wine and opened a new bottle.
"Who's already there?" I asked.
Matteo was expected later, she told me. The huge eyes in her doll's face told me she had already downed a good deal of alcohol and hash. In the next moment, before I could ask about Claude, Emma had fallen into the arms of a sturdy youngster who dragged her into a hallway behind the kitchen. I followed them. The hallway led to several small chambers – provision and service rooms, I supposed. The area was packed. Women were standing around talking and discussing loudly as usual. Whenever one of the chamber doors opened everyone craned their neck as if the promised land could be glimpsed in there. I leant against a wall, chatting with friends, and watched. I felt a nervous pinch in my stomach, half expecting Claude to be part of the chamber mysteries. Women slipped into the little rooms, alone or in couples, and some instantly backed out again in shock. As in an unwitting comedy, doors were torn open and quickly banged shut – and in the flash of light falling in from the hallway, a sock, a naked leg, some sort of divan, a tangle of hair and arms came into view for a second. Every now and then an angry "Ferme la porte!" resounded, but most couples were perfectly oblivious to the doors. After a while I was sure Claude had no part in the comedy.
I noticed the looks and sideway glances in the packed hallway. Amidst the high of excitement, anxiety was painted on the walls like a mocking Mona Lisa, following everyone with her eyes. Looking at me, too. How would I face Claude and her new flame if they were to appear? At the beginning it had taken me some effort to outwit my misgivings when I was flirting with a woman who was already taken. De facto, everyone agreed that the hour of monogamous couples was over, but this did not seem to apply to Claude any more. I thought with a tinge of nostalgia how it used to be more exciting to turn the second member of a couple around when she already knew what was going on and was supposed to be mad – until she decided there was something more pleasurable than being mad. A few times, the result had been a delightful triangle – delightful because triangles are notoriously unstable; the transient quality of the moment is written in their skin.
(…)
I went back to the salon where people were still dancing. Most women were dancing for themselves, at least so it seemed. But there were plenty of virtual spectators on the balcony and on the pillows around the room. Some couples were shoving along in a tight clasp, ignorant of the beat of the music, entirely concentrated on their rotating hips. Kiki, I discovered, was dancing among all the other half-naked women and had only abandoned her shoes. She had her eyes closed and was shaking her chestnut mane from one side to the other. No trace of Claude and her troupe. I sat down against a wall where I could keep an eye on the door, listening to Nina Simone. After some time, Kiki dropped onto a pillow next to me.
"Great music," she said catching her breath. "Great atmosphere."
A small, reed-slender woman with a dark, shaggy head of hair came dancing toward me. She was wearing only a skirt with ruffles and a fringed shawl tied around her belly. Her smoothly circling hips and her snakelike arms with many clicking bracelets were beckoning me onto the dance floor. I raised my shoulders with regret, signaling her to continue dancing. She took it as an invitation to dance for me. With a seductive smile, she started shaking her upper body. She had a small bosom but her movements were so perfect that her entire breast began to vibrate. Every bit of skin, muscle, fat was transformed into the geometry of a landscape of waves. It was so bewitching that a ring of women formed around her, egging her on. I threw the dancer a kiss and realized that Kiki at my side was speechless. When the cluster of women had danced away toward the balcony, she cleared her throat: "You know her?"
Sure I knew her. The same dance had more than once cast such a spell on me that I landed on one of the party mattresses with the dancer.
"That's Mariza," I enlightened Kiki. "She teaches belly-dance. She has gypsy blood. You ought to dance with her."
"I would never dare," she said with indignation.
"You could go and watch her class."
Kiki was still following Mariza with her eyes. "I believe she wanted to dance with you."
"Not today," I said. "We've danced together many times." After each tribadic "belly-dance" with her on the mattress I had woken up the next morning with the most beautiful muscle ache in my derrière. But that was not the only reason I had declined the invitation. I did not want to give up my observation post and, with some bad luck, end up being surprised in flagranti by Claude's arrival.
"Already past midnight," Kiki looked at her watch and yawned. "A pity that Matteo didn't come." Matteo usually came late, if at all, watched a while and disappeared again with her inner circle. There were wild rumors about the small private partouzes or sex parties that occupied her time.
"Apparently she never dances," Kiki continued. "She only watches. Strange, no? I would find that somehow embarrassing if somebody was watching me like that…"
I shrugged. "Embarrassing or erotic," I said. When I saw her troubled face I added, "Depending on your mood."
I, too, had puzzled over Matteo at first. I had watched her entry, the way she sat down with her dark-haired, boyish lover on a canapé in the middle of the room and observed what happened on the pillows, at her feet. She sat there motionless for a long time, with a wanton and yet closed-off expression on her face, pouting as if her mouth couldn't decide whether the taste was pleasing or not.
I got distracted by Velvet Underground's rasping "Shiny shiny shiny boots of leather/ Whiplash girl child in the dark…" Everyone roared out the major lines. "Comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him/ Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart."
It used to irritate me that Matteo wouldn't let anything personal transpire. You aren't going to watch me! I would rebel and withdraw from whatever woman was just unbuttoning my shirt.
"Downy sins of streetlight fancies/ chase the costumes she shall wear…"
She always acted as if it was her birthright to post herself in the center of the room, as a voyeur. The resentment I used to feel – and still felt – was undoubtedly rivalry. As soon as Matteo entered a room, the temperature would shoot up several degrees because everyone was eager to catch her eye. Back then, I would much rather have been in her position than get my shirt unbuttoned in a tangle of women on the floor.
"I am tired, I am weary/ I could sleep a thousand years/ A thousand dreams that would awake me/ different colors made of tears."
I felt indeed weary like "a thousand years," while the women were dancing and carrying on in a display of manic exuberance that looked put on like a costume, every one a "Venus in Fur."
My eye caught sight of a familiar visor cap atop a men's shirt and cravate. It was Katman Cat, steering a PAT woman over the parquet. What in the world was going on? Apart from the flagrant treason of all Carmen stood for, this conversion of a night club owl to a private party guest seemed as incongruous as the fact that with her cap and cravate she was the only dancer fully dressed. To all appearances she was having a jolly good time. I thought how many new "girls" she was going to steer across the floor in this new hunting ground among the PATs, and I was overcome by the strangest vision of everyone twenty years older, broad in the bottom, sporting leathery tans and leathery smiles, flirting and seducing and whirling around senselessly forever.
"Don't you think French women are more extroverted than we Germans?" Kiki asked.
"Exhibitionist. Narcissistically gifted," I said with mixed feelings.
Kiki laughed. "How on earth do they do it?"
"You know. 'Living like God in France,'" I quoted the old German saying that captured the longing for, and the envy of another culture. "They are closer to the Mediterranean." Soon I would be twenty years older, too.
"We up north always long for the south," Kiki sighed.
"Where every woman is a courtesan." I was thinking of Claude. Time was getting away from me.
"You really believe that?"
I was not in the mood to tell her what I believed. "My friend Tanja would say, nonsense. French women are simply more sophisticated. 'Elles prétendent, ma chère/ And in bed they do it just like they do their scarves!'" I imitated Tanja twisting her upper body, winding her arms and hands in the air like an odalisque.
Kiki gave me a funny look. I felt foggy and restless. I couldn't keep my eye from being drawn to Katman Cat. Where the hell was Claude?
"I need a drink," I said.
Kiki got up to leave and I followed my impulse to check the traffic zones one more time.
The kitchen looked like a battle field. No, like a bee-hive after a bear has reached in a paw. A lot of buzzing. Glasses and bottles everywhere. Women on the floor, half-dressed, swigging from a bottle; two of them on top of each other on one chair, while a third was trying her acrobatic best to climb on, too. Another few were emptying out the fridge. One woman was wrestling a wine bottle and cork screw from Emma's hands and squeezing her into a cupboard, smooching. Charlie and Marlène were watching with interest, ready, it seemed, to either take over the bottle or join the action.
"Has anybody arrived?" I asked Charlie and Marlène.
"Only everybody who's nobody," Charlie grinned.
Two young "cowboys" from Matteo's entourage were leaning against the fridge, oblivious to the eating binge going on right next to them. They were talking to Marie-Jo who was part of the new media project Centre Simone de Beauvoir. I was searching for a fresh glass among the piles of used and half emptied glasses on every surface when my ear caught Claude's name. "Claude? … that takes the cake," I heard. I pricked up my ears. Matteo's boys said something like, "… dominated," and "… new man…" Marie-Jo responded, "Very busy, the lucky one!" They laughed. In that moment, a trio of tipsy Irish women jumped up from their chairs, linked arms and sang, "Here come the Lesbians!"
I was unnerved. Dominated? New man? Was it possible that Claude had gone off with a guy? Why not? Claude wasn't a "pure et dure." In her early theater years, she had slept with anybody. It was obvious even if she didn't talk about it. On the phone she had told me, "It's new." I had taken it for granted that she was referring to a new woman and perhaps she simply wanted me to think so. A guy would certainly be news. Maybe she had even let Matteo think there had only been women in her life, and I was the one who had guessed the truth because my attitude was different. Still, I didn't believe it. Party gossip! It seemed unthinkable that Claude…
A sudden hush. Several women stopped in their tracks and turned their heads. A second later, everybody pressed out of the kitchen toward the entry hallway. Matteo had stepped into the salon, flanked by two slender boy-girls in black leather. She was wearing her indispensable felt hat over her page cut. She went to the balcony, immediately followed by the two "bodyguards" from the kitchen, and for a moment it looked like the royal procession of five dark knights. The white, open collar of Matteo's dancer's shirt was the only brightness, catching the light and reflecting it onto her face as she turned and slowly scanned the room. The smallest, pleased smile curled her mouth. Her big, dark eyes looked moist and drugged.
I surveyed the excited movement of bodies toward her for a moment, then turned on my heels and left.
The unkempt studio space at the Beaux Arts looked like the garret in last year's La Bohème, with dust-blind windows and broken easels piled up in a corner. Matteo sat on a raised little step wearing her trademark black felt hat over her dark page cut. Everyone else was sitting on the floor, at her feet. As usual, she seemed to have a light beam trained on her, and the effect was heightened by the white dancer's shirt she liked to wear. The wide-sleeved shirt, gathered at the wrists, billowed around her slender body and disappeared in a pair of Jeans with a rough leather belt. She wore short black boots, as did her young companions, her "body guards," who sported boyish haircuts and rarely moved a facial muscle. This time, her sister Geneviève sat next to her, her soft, blond mirror image. Rumor had it that Geneviève was not necessarily (and perhaps not at all?) a lesbian. But it was clear as a bell that she adored Matteo, as everyone did. My occasional lover Harmony Nayle from California liked to refer to Matteo as a "he/she" but I called her our Prince – a Prince crowned by French literature with a Prix Goncourt, who wrote the hottest, inflaming, disturbing songs for us.
There she sat on that little step as on a throne, receiving our homage, waiting for the microphone to be hooked up. She had a round face with a full mouth that seemed to hesitate about its inclination: would it want to pout or kiss, curl its corners upwards invitingly or downwards scornfully? But her eyes were without ambivalence: big, black, moist, irresistible bedroom eyes. How hard they were to resist I knew from experience, from the time when I first ran into her. I was meeting some friends at the Beaux Arts when she came down the stairs with a little flock of admirers. She saw me and stopped. She smiled. Her slightly protruding eyes looked at me with a directness, a radiance that stopped my breath. In a single moist-velvety moment they took possession of me. I didn't know what to do. I should have fallen to my knees and adored her, but I was still a bit of a greenhorn back then, not quite believing that I had left Germany for good. I spent the moment in vertigo, trying to hold on to the air – and let her move on.
Now that the absence of Claude troubled my sleep I sometimes found myself going over the past, wondering what would have happened had I been faster on my feet that day. I would have entered Matteo's circle and been a close observer of her rising literary fame and the ever-growing circle of women gathered around her. I would have met Claude at a time when she was one of Matteo's favorites. I might have lived with them in the house in the suburb and have travelled to Lesbos with one or both of them…
The evening was getting into swing. Everyone was talking and shouting and not losing sight for a second of the little step where our Prince was sitting, tapping on the tip of the microphone, shaking her head. There also seemed to be a problem with the slide projector and a thickening ring of garçonnes was debating the necessary fixes. It turned out the slide carousel didn't fit the projector and no replacement was available. But the microphone finally worked, and Matteo stretched out her white-sleeved arm.
"We have to imagine what we can't see," she began in her surprisingly high, young girl's voice that vibrated with hidden indignation, "we have to invent what we cannot remember." All heads turned to the studio wall where she now conjured "the island, in morning mist. An aroma of anise and thyme in the breeze, dawn with gold sandals… Here, on the rock to the left," (everyone's eyes swung up with her eyes) "Aphrodite's temple, the graceful grove of apple trees and altars, the scent of smoking frankincense." Her arm swept outward in a beautiful curve. "And there cold water sounds through apple branches and with roses the whole place is shadowed and from the radiant trembling leaves…"
A hushed chorus joined in: "…sleep comes dropping."
"Who, O Sappho, Was Wronging You?" was a performance Matteo loved to repeat for an audience who knew it by heart and lip-synched lines from the poetic fragments Matteo had chosen. The romantic first part, her homage to "Eros, the melter of limbs," always ended with everyone reciting together, "The moon has sunk and the Pleyades / and midnight has gone. / The hours are passing, passing / and I lie alone." Many women had their eyes closed, sitting with rapt attention, embracing each other, some lying down, crying. Even the young body-guards looked dreamy.
The second part, however, held a different spice. Matteo would without fail zoom in on her question. Who was wronging Sappho? Everyone among the PATs (Plaisirs d'Amour Toujours) knew exactly who it was. It was the OWLs (One Woman's Love). The OWLs proselytized that Sappho, the "Tenth Muse," had been heart-broken over a man, her one and only true love, and had thrown herself from a cliff for him. Matteo would take them to task. She would scold the monogamous Freudian "Vaginellas" who were hunkered down at the Deux Magots. The OWLs in turn scorned the PATs, barricaded at the Café Flore across the street, calling Matteo's interpretation of Sappho's relentless passion for women "clitoridiculous."
In the break, someone grabbed me from behind and put a hand over my eyes. "Lou, mon choux," cooed a well-known voice. "Who am I?"
"No idea, Kiki!" I turned around. Kiki Möller, a good looking woman with a pride of chestnut hair, was a librarian at the Goethe Institute, and one of the few forty-something women in the room. Kiki liked to help me when I had to do research for one of my articles. She was married and I had only recently introduced her to the PATs. She frequently still behaved like a novice.
She hung around my neck. "Save me!" she shouted. "Save me from these bewitching women!"
The women around us turned their heads. In the next moment I understood. I caught the glance Kiki cast at Matteo, who was striding past us to get back to her raised little step. Glued to her was Skylark, who right now had no time for me. The show was going to continue.
"Could I talk to you for a moment?" Kiki pleaded. "I really need to be saved…" I followed her out of the room. "You know I have this panel discussion next Friday, and Matteo… Matteo has just now cancelled out on me." She gave me such a wild stare, with so many furrows in her brow, that I said, "Come on, let's have a drink and you fill me in."
"I'm not going to miss anything?" Kiki asked anxiously. I laughed and took her arm. She unfolded her umbrella and we pushed against the wind.
"I can tell you what you're missing. After the tirade against the OWLs, there'll be an incantation of all the girls in Sappho's poems – Eirana, Gongyla, Anaktoria, Mika and of course Dika! Each name followed by the repeated chorus of, 'Anything goes…to bed!' The PAT motto – you know. A few chosen ones are going to recite favorite lines – 'Eros shook my mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees'. Or, 'If she does not love, soon she will love, even unwilling'."
"God, you heard this more than once!" Kiki said with envy.
"And then everyone will deplore the martyrdom of the young brides. That part you know only too well…"
She punched her elbow into my ribs as if I had told her at mass that the bishop was secretly drinking the wine himself. "And Matteo?"
"Gracefully extends her mercy to anyone who is, or once was, married."
Kiki sounded stricken. "She had no grace or mercy for me today…"
(…)
The minute Kiki left the café to catch the end of Matteo's event, I got a phone jeton at the cash register and went to dial Claude's number. No reply. I tried again. I was tempted to just drop by at her place. Something told me I was losing my chance with every minute of doing nothing. Claude was back in town. It felt as if I had already wasted hours since I learned about her return. Not to mention all the days I had imagined her in the south of France. "My insides are burning…" I had turned into Goethe's Mignon, yearning for a far-away lover – a feeling I hadn't had in a while. So what? another voice contradicted Mignon. It's just vanity! You feel indignant– what did you do to deserve this? True, Claude's way of dropping me without a warning and replacing me without an explanation was oddly radical. Why was I not supposed to know that she was back in town? Who on earth was suddenly controlling her?
Fifteen minutes later I went down again to the restrooms and the telephone (damn the French habit of placing the phone right next to the stinking bathrooms!). Again no luck. Laβ das, Luise! I told myself. Stop driving yourself crazy. I would be able to find her if I wanted to. Her theater group had a rehearsing space every afternoon at the Cité International Universitaire, a place I knew inside out. I would have answers. But maybe she was already on her way to Emma's party.
It was finally late enough to get on my Vespa (the rain had stopped) and drive over to the Palais Royal. Emma's parents lived on the fifth floor in Rue de Beaujolais. Emma herself had her own "atelier" in the 14tharrondissement, although she had nothing to do with art. Opening the massive, elaborate entry door I instantly noticed the "traffic" – the streaming to and fro of women in the hallway and the discreetly lit rooms. There was dancing in the salon. A few women had already shed half of their clothes and were dancing with naked torsos to Joan Armatrading. One of them was shouting and swinging her shirt through the air from the balcony where a crowd was gathered to admire the illuminated palace behind its French gardens. It was a pretty sight, the silhouette of the half-naked jerking, swinging bodies in front of the windows and the illuminated night sky. Apart from two Louis XV sofas and arm chairs, there were pillows everywhere on the floor. A few couples had stretched out to chat; others were smooching in darker corners. A side room, the "music salon" (as one could tell from the Steinway), was filled with a thick hashish cloud. The obligatory group on the floor was lit by candles. It was early; they were still dressed, attending to the extremities of the chosen one lying in the center. In a small guest room I saw several women worshipfully gathered around Skylark who was performing "Sweet Woman" for them on her guitar, looking like a benevolent lioness. Luckily she had her eyes closed; I could sneak out again unnoticed. I quickly scanned every room and bedroom for Claude, then followed the stream of women into the kitchen where Emma had lined up a battery of wine and whisky bottles. Everyone was in high spirits. There usually wasn't much alcohol at the parties because nobody felt responsible for procuring it. The less there was to drink the more everyone smoked. I was greeted loudly and Emma planted a kiss on my neck. She handed me her glass of red wine and opened a new bottle.
"Who's already there?" I asked.
Matteo was expected later, she told me. The huge eyes in her doll's face told me she had already downed a good deal of alcohol and hash. In the next moment, before I could ask about Claude, Emma had fallen into the arms of a sturdy youngster who dragged her into a hallway behind the kitchen. I followed them. The hallway led to several small chambers – provision and service rooms, I supposed. The area was packed. Women were standing around talking and discussing loudly as usual. Whenever one of the chamber doors opened everyone craned their neck as if the promised land could be glimpsed in there. I leant against a wall, chatting with friends, and watched. I felt a nervous pinch in my stomach, half expecting Claude to be part of the chamber mysteries. Women slipped into the little rooms, alone or in couples, and some instantly backed out again in shock. As in an unwitting comedy, doors were torn open and quickly banged shut – and in the flash of light falling in from the hallway, a sock, a naked leg, some sort of divan, a tangle of hair and arms came into view for a second. Every now and then an angry "Ferme la porte!" resounded, but most couples were perfectly oblivious to the doors. After a while I was sure Claude had no part in the comedy.
I noticed the looks and sideway glances in the packed hallway. Amidst the high of excitement, anxiety was painted on the walls like a mocking Mona Lisa, following everyone with her eyes. Looking at me, too. How would I face Claude and her new flame if they were to appear? At the beginning it had taken me some effort to outwit my misgivings when I was flirting with a woman who was already taken. De facto, everyone agreed that the hour of monogamous couples was over, but this did not seem to apply to Claude any more. I thought with a tinge of nostalgia how it used to be more exciting to turn the second member of a couple around when she already knew what was going on and was supposed to be mad – until she decided there was something more pleasurable than being mad. A few times, the result had been a delightful triangle – delightful because triangles are notoriously unstable; the transient quality of the moment is written in their skin.
(…)
I went back to the salon where people were still dancing. Most women were dancing for themselves, at least so it seemed. But there were plenty of virtual spectators on the balcony and on the pillows around the room. Some couples were shoving along in a tight clasp, ignorant of the beat of the music, entirely concentrated on their rotating hips. Kiki, I discovered, was dancing among all the other half-naked women and had only abandoned her shoes. She had her eyes closed and was shaking her chestnut mane from one side to the other. No trace of Claude and her troupe. I sat down against a wall where I could keep an eye on the door, listening to Nina Simone. After some time, Kiki dropped onto a pillow next to me.
"Great music," she said catching her breath. "Great atmosphere."
A small, reed-slender woman with a dark, shaggy head of hair came dancing toward me. She was wearing only a skirt with ruffles and a fringed shawl tied around her belly. Her smoothly circling hips and her snakelike arms with many clicking bracelets were beckoning me onto the dance floor. I raised my shoulders with regret, signaling her to continue dancing. She took it as an invitation to dance for me. With a seductive smile, she started shaking her upper body. She had a small bosom but her movements were so perfect that her entire breast began to vibrate. Every bit of skin, muscle, fat was transformed into the geometry of a landscape of waves. It was so bewitching that a ring of women formed around her, egging her on. I threw the dancer a kiss and realized that Kiki at my side was speechless. When the cluster of women had danced away toward the balcony, she cleared her throat: "You know her?"
Sure I knew her. The same dance had more than once cast such a spell on me that I landed on one of the party mattresses with the dancer.
"That's Mariza," I enlightened Kiki. "She teaches belly-dance. She has gypsy blood. You ought to dance with her."
"I would never dare," she said with indignation.
"You could go and watch her class."
Kiki was still following Mariza with her eyes. "I believe she wanted to dance with you."
"Not today," I said. "We've danced together many times." After each tribadic "belly-dance" with her on the mattress I had woken up the next morning with the most beautiful muscle ache in my derrière. But that was not the only reason I had declined the invitation. I did not want to give up my observation post and, with some bad luck, end up being surprised in flagranti by Claude's arrival.
"Already past midnight," Kiki looked at her watch and yawned. "A pity that Matteo didn't come." Matteo usually came late, if at all, watched a while and disappeared again with her inner circle. There were wild rumors about the small private partouzes or sex parties that occupied her time.
"Apparently she never dances," Kiki continued. "She only watches. Strange, no? I would find that somehow embarrassing if somebody was watching me like that…"
I shrugged. "Embarrassing or erotic," I said. When I saw her troubled face I added, "Depending on your mood."
I, too, had puzzled over Matteo at first. I had watched her entry, the way she sat down with her dark-haired, boyish lover on a canapé in the middle of the room and observed what happened on the pillows, at her feet. She sat there motionless for a long time, with a wanton and yet closed-off expression on her face, pouting as if her mouth couldn't decide whether the taste was pleasing or not.
I got distracted by Velvet Underground's rasping "Shiny shiny shiny boots of leather/ Whiplash girl child in the dark…" Everyone roared out the major lines. "Comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him/ Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart."
It used to irritate me that Matteo wouldn't let anything personal transpire. You aren't going to watch me! I would rebel and withdraw from whatever woman was just unbuttoning my shirt.
"Downy sins of streetlight fancies/ chase the costumes she shall wear…"
She always acted as if it was her birthright to post herself in the center of the room, as a voyeur. The resentment I used to feel – and still felt – was undoubtedly rivalry. As soon as Matteo entered a room, the temperature would shoot up several degrees because everyone was eager to catch her eye. Back then, I would much rather have been in her position than get my shirt unbuttoned in a tangle of women on the floor.
"I am tired, I am weary/ I could sleep a thousand years/ A thousand dreams that would awake me/ different colors made of tears."
I felt indeed weary like "a thousand years," while the women were dancing and carrying on in a display of manic exuberance that looked put on like a costume, every one a "Venus in Fur."
My eye caught sight of a familiar visor cap atop a men's shirt and cravate. It was Katman Cat, steering a PAT woman over the parquet. What in the world was going on? Apart from the flagrant treason of all Carmen stood for, this conversion of a night club owl to a private party guest seemed as incongruous as the fact that with her cap and cravate she was the only dancer fully dressed. To all appearances she was having a jolly good time. I thought how many new "girls" she was going to steer across the floor in this new hunting ground among the PATs, and I was overcome by the strangest vision of everyone twenty years older, broad in the bottom, sporting leathery tans and leathery smiles, flirting and seducing and whirling around senselessly forever.
"Don't you think French women are more extroverted than we Germans?" Kiki asked.
"Exhibitionist. Narcissistically gifted," I said with mixed feelings.
Kiki laughed. "How on earth do they do it?"
"You know. 'Living like God in France,'" I quoted the old German saying that captured the longing for, and the envy of another culture. "They are closer to the Mediterranean." Soon I would be twenty years older, too.
"We up north always long for the south," Kiki sighed.
"Where every woman is a courtesan." I was thinking of Claude. Time was getting away from me.
"You really believe that?"
I was not in the mood to tell her what I believed. "My friend Tanja would say, nonsense. French women are simply more sophisticated. 'Elles prétendent, ma chère/ And in bed they do it just like they do their scarves!'" I imitated Tanja twisting her upper body, winding her arms and hands in the air like an odalisque.
Kiki gave me a funny look. I felt foggy and restless. I couldn't keep my eye from being drawn to Katman Cat. Where the hell was Claude?
"I need a drink," I said.
Kiki got up to leave and I followed my impulse to check the traffic zones one more time.
The kitchen looked like a battle field. No, like a bee-hive after a bear has reached in a paw. A lot of buzzing. Glasses and bottles everywhere. Women on the floor, half-dressed, swigging from a bottle; two of them on top of each other on one chair, while a third was trying her acrobatic best to climb on, too. Another few were emptying out the fridge. One woman was wrestling a wine bottle and cork screw from Emma's hands and squeezing her into a cupboard, smooching. Charlie and Marlène were watching with interest, ready, it seemed, to either take over the bottle or join the action.
"Has anybody arrived?" I asked Charlie and Marlène.
"Only everybody who's nobody," Charlie grinned.
Two young "cowboys" from Matteo's entourage were leaning against the fridge, oblivious to the eating binge going on right next to them. They were talking to Marie-Jo who was part of the new media project Centre Simone de Beauvoir. I was searching for a fresh glass among the piles of used and half emptied glasses on every surface when my ear caught Claude's name. "Claude? … that takes the cake," I heard. I pricked up my ears. Matteo's boys said something like, "… dominated," and "… new man…" Marie-Jo responded, "Very busy, the lucky one!" They laughed. In that moment, a trio of tipsy Irish women jumped up from their chairs, linked arms and sang, "Here come the Lesbians!"
I was unnerved. Dominated? New man? Was it possible that Claude had gone off with a guy? Why not? Claude wasn't a "pure et dure." In her early theater years, she had slept with anybody. It was obvious even if she didn't talk about it. On the phone she had told me, "It's new." I had taken it for granted that she was referring to a new woman and perhaps she simply wanted me to think so. A guy would certainly be news. Maybe she had even let Matteo think there had only been women in her life, and I was the one who had guessed the truth because my attitude was different. Still, I didn't believe it. Party gossip! It seemed unthinkable that Claude…
A sudden hush. Several women stopped in their tracks and turned their heads. A second later, everybody pressed out of the kitchen toward the entry hallway. Matteo had stepped into the salon, flanked by two slender boy-girls in black leather. She was wearing her indispensable felt hat over her page cut. She went to the balcony, immediately followed by the two "bodyguards" from the kitchen, and for a moment it looked like the royal procession of five dark knights. The white, open collar of Matteo's dancer's shirt was the only brightness, catching the light and reflecting it onto her face as she turned and slowly scanned the room. The smallest, pleased smile curled her mouth. Her big, dark eyes looked moist and drugged.
I surveyed the excited movement of bodies toward her for a moment, then turned on my heels and left.
Working notes
I was working on a Paris memoir three years ago when I had a sudden need for escape. Instead of hunting down the remembered lesbian-feminist "truth" of the mid- seventies, heyday of sexual freedom and erotic inspiration in the Mouvement de libération des femmes, I jumped into a fictionalized, lighter-hearted version of my experience. The time-frame and setting remained la même chose. But in fiction I had the privilege of suspending an entire era at its peak, when every lesbian was still fully "reinventing the world."
Paris back then was a place where the L-Word would have found its inspiration. The MLF wing of the movement I encountered as a young German exile was at least as erotic as it was political, thanks to its "muses" – the writers Monique Wittig and Christiane Rochefort who set the tone from the start. Both of them played a role in my life; both had to play a role in my novel. I opted for a mix of autobiographical androman-à-clef elements but decidedly allowed myself freedom of invention in my use of "real" materials. Monique Wittig's real movement name was Théo; I named her Matteo. (Christiane became Josiane.) Behind the sexual Comédie Humaine lies the shadow of the political drama; the informed reader can easily detect it but the unaware or politically disinterested or younger reader can overlook it as easily. My own alter ego is Lou, a German journalist who needed French culture to liberate her from the undesirable name "Luise." The creation of Lou allowed me to recreate my twenty-eight year-old self as a heroine who is young enough to be a fool for love (i.e. sex), and wise enough (in hindsight) to face the risk of change.
My portrait of Monique Wittig in this excerpt is faithful even if Wittig never actually performed a Sappho slide show in Paris. What and how she performed her role in the women's movement was close enough to my fantasy scene – I am almost certain that she would have approved of the translation.
"Who on earth wants to still hear about the F-word?!" This is what I first heard in different tonalities when I sent out an earlier version of the novel with more "historically correct" feminist content. After some inner struggle, I had to agree. Feminism had to be moved out of the way, into a parenthesis: there but not there.
I chose to turn the French movement into a tender caricature of the original heavy hitters; the MLF appears as the PATs – "Plaisir d'Amour Toujours," its countergroup Psych et Po as the OWLs – "One Women's Love" (reflecting an only slightly shifted focus in their fundamental opposition). Promiscuous, anarchic lovers slugging it out with monogamists. Mirroring the classic feuds of French intellectuals, I set them up at the Café Flore and across the street, at the Deux Magots. (In reality, this feminist feud has also turned into a classic: last June, at the 40-year anniversary celebrations of French feminism, the two groups fought over who had invented feminism first.)
I wanted to pay homage to the magic of Parisian lives, Parisian women, and remind everybody how incredibly sexually alive and high and on top of the world lesbians were before the backlash hit. Before so many of us slowly resigned, backed away, melted into "normalcy," went back underground, went "extinct" in sex-change operations… Yes, a consciously chosen escapist move: I tried to reinvent the complex, conflicted historical past as a glorious, timeless "comedy of manners."
Paris back then was a place where the L-Word would have found its inspiration. The MLF wing of the movement I encountered as a young German exile was at least as erotic as it was political, thanks to its "muses" – the writers Monique Wittig and Christiane Rochefort who set the tone from the start. Both of them played a role in my life; both had to play a role in my novel. I opted for a mix of autobiographical androman-à-clef elements but decidedly allowed myself freedom of invention in my use of "real" materials. Monique Wittig's real movement name was Théo; I named her Matteo. (Christiane became Josiane.) Behind the sexual Comédie Humaine lies the shadow of the political drama; the informed reader can easily detect it but the unaware or politically disinterested or younger reader can overlook it as easily. My own alter ego is Lou, a German journalist who needed French culture to liberate her from the undesirable name "Luise." The creation of Lou allowed me to recreate my twenty-eight year-old self as a heroine who is young enough to be a fool for love (i.e. sex), and wise enough (in hindsight) to face the risk of change.
My portrait of Monique Wittig in this excerpt is faithful even if Wittig never actually performed a Sappho slide show in Paris. What and how she performed her role in the women's movement was close enough to my fantasy scene – I am almost certain that she would have approved of the translation.
"Who on earth wants to still hear about the F-word?!" This is what I first heard in different tonalities when I sent out an earlier version of the novel with more "historically correct" feminist content. After some inner struggle, I had to agree. Feminism had to be moved out of the way, into a parenthesis: there but not there.
I chose to turn the French movement into a tender caricature of the original heavy hitters; the MLF appears as the PATs – "Plaisir d'Amour Toujours," its countergroup Psych et Po as the OWLs – "One Women's Love" (reflecting an only slightly shifted focus in their fundamental opposition). Promiscuous, anarchic lovers slugging it out with monogamists. Mirroring the classic feuds of French intellectuals, I set them up at the Café Flore and across the street, at the Deux Magots. (In reality, this feminist feud has also turned into a classic: last June, at the 40-year anniversary celebrations of French feminism, the two groups fought over who had invented feminism first.)
I wanted to pay homage to the magic of Parisian lives, Parisian women, and remind everybody how incredibly sexually alive and high and on top of the world lesbians were before the backlash hit. Before so many of us slowly resigned, backed away, melted into "normalcy," went back underground, went "extinct" in sex-change operations… Yes, a consciously chosen escapist move: I tried to reinvent the complex, conflicted historical past as a glorious, timeless "comedy of manners."
About the author
Renate Stendhal, Ph.D. (www.renatestendhal.com) is a German-born, Paris-educated writer, writing coach and spiritual counselor with a private practice in San Francisco, Berkeley and Pt. Reyes Station. Among her publications are True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships and the Lambda Award-winning photobiography Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures. Her Gertrude Stein blog "Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein" is on http://www.shewrites.com, her cultural reviews are on http://www.scene4.com as well as on her website http://www.renatestendhal.com/news. She just finished her Parisian novel, Catch Her If You Can.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.