The Gorgeous Girls (8 page)

Part Seven

Wanda: Hey guys, I hereby convene this Yahoo! Chat with an astute literary observation from our beloved Mrs. P: “I hate writing, I love having written.” I thought of this quote yesterday on the Rue Descartes when we found the building where Hemingway rented a room in the 1920s.

Rose: Excellent quote, Wanda! (& I love Papa.)

Con: Moi aussi.

Wanda: Hem wrote this of that time and room: “But sometimes when I started a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think: ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.'”

Con: Brill.

Wanda: So here I sit in this internet café on the Place Maubert, struggling to write one true sentence for you guys. But all I can come up with is one true list of Paris purchases.

Rose: Merveilleux!

Wanda: Four French frocks, three pairs of sparkly earrings with those great European clasps, one poppy-red cancan skirt, a pair of black espadrilles and lingerie up the yingyang.

Rose: If you got thongs, they really are up your yingyang. :)

Wanda: :)

Con: I'm so fat right now all my lingerie, thongs and otherwise, disappears up my yingyang.

Rose: Not fat, Con. Just overdue.

Con: If this little person doesn't decide to come out soon my labour will have to be induced.

Rose: One of mine was induced, Con. It's no problem.

Con: Hey, did you guys read about those people who are keeping their baby's sex a secret so that there can be no behaviour toward it that sways it to one gender or the other?

Rose: Yeah, pretty remarkable.

Wanda: I don't get it.

Con: It's about bucking labels, Wanda.

Rose: With the exception of Chanel and Louboutin.

Con: Rose, you jester, I would add Vivienne Westwood. But other than our amusing little joke, all labels deserve to be bucked. And all the expected behavior that goes with those labels must also face the wrecking ball.

Rose: It's about a refusal to be typecast.

Con: People are searching for who they really are these days instead of having outside forces tell them how they should act and who they should be like.

Wanda: Now that I understand. I feel like ever since we touched down in Paris I have been searching—amid the garbage and the flowers—for who I am and who Wyatt is.

Rose: What have you found?

Wanda: Last night we rounded a cobblestoned bend and came across a man in a trench coat rummaging through a bag of garbage. A car with a driver idled nearby.

Con: Sounds like Dash Hammett. Was it foggy?

Wanda: This is Paris, Con, not London or San Francisco.

Rose: Go on.

Wanda: Sporting pale latex gloves and a funny little hat, looking more Clouseau than Spade, he searched for whatever he had lost in the streets of Paris. His heart? His wallet? His soul? Or perhaps his identity. Perhaps the same thing Wyatt and I are looking for. Breathing the silver air, smiling for the camera, we are strangers in a strange land and we are strangers to each other.

Rose: Wanda, I think you have just proved you love writing, not just having written!

Con: And how is Wyatt, Ms. Brontë?

Wanda: Wyatt is a complicated man, but kind. And oh, so wonderful in bed . . . or against a tree . . . . I had my first tree sex, Rose.

Rose: Fabulous! I have yet to get Joe in or even under a tree, but I'm still dreaming of it, for he is someone who knows me, someone who cares, someone who loves me.

Wanda: I am sure you will make it happen, Rose. Wyatt and I have also made good use of the bed, as I know you and Joe do. Our first night here he woke me from a deep sleep and whispered, “Look at the tower. They lit it especially for you.” My sleepy eyes tried to focus on the sights out the dormer window. There, beyond the rooftops and chimney pots, I saw the top of La Tour Eiffel twinkling and sparkling with thousands of silver fairy lights. We fell back asleep in each other's arms while Paris glittered all around us. When her silver-white light awakened us at dawn, we made love before touching down on the hallowed cobblestones where some of the greatest lovers and artists have tread, chasing Rimbaud and other dreams.

Con: You wrote more than one true sentence, Wanda. Congrats and have fun! Now I've got to go pee. Au revoir!

Wanda: Bonsoir, Con. Happy birthing!

Rose: See you in a few weeks, Wanda.

Wanda: Au revoir, Rose.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays.
Clutch it, and it darts away.

—Dorothy Parker

Melting. Chocolate in my
mouth. A man I've just met at a friend's Valentine's Day dinner asks me to find him the cherry. I do, and he pops it into his mouth as I take another bite from a pair of chocolate handcuffs.

Frozen. The world outside is covered in snow and ice. The man and I leave the dinner party together, slipping and sliding. At Gerrard near Logan, he stops and kisses me. He tastes like bourbon and chocolate and cherries.

Melting. Beneath my muskrat coat, I'm on fire.

Frozen. It takes him a month to call me.

Fire. We meet at Rosewater for drinks, then move on to Starfish, where, amid candlelight and hyacinths, the black threads of my fishnet gloves (a gift from Wanda) soak up oyster and lemon juice. In darker places other juices flow. I lean over and put my nose in the purple hyacinths and inhale deeply. He picks a few blossoms and places them between my breasts, where the lace of my camisole peeks out.

Hot. One of my fishnet stockings keeps falling down. In the ladies' room I perform a kind of Laurel and Hardy routine: off with the boot, off with the stocking, turn it right side in, put everything back on. Back at the table, I tell him about the vaudeville act in the cubicle and he wonders aloud how stay-ups stay up, so I whisk my leather skirt back to reveal not only the rubber-lined top of my stocking but also my thigh.

Later, he'll reveal how transported he was by that creamy sight. But on this night at this late hour, I am giddy as hell, having stayed up till the wee hours the night before discussing matters of love and life with a friend. Knowing this, he says he'll hail a cab and send me home. He helps me into my coat and we leave the restaurant.

Burning. The following week we meet at Canoe. Smoke from ignited sprigs of rosemary excites the olfactory sense, while creamy cheese inspires finger-sucking. Back at his place, hot tongues of flame lick the embossed fleur-de-lys on the inside of the fireplace. By the flickering light and crackling heat, his hot tongue licks my own flower.

Steamy. April brings fiddleheads and a Magic Wand. We share a plate of the tender ferns, steamed, soaked in butter and spritzed with lime, and for dessert we drive to Come As You Are, where he buys the above-mentioned crème de la crème of vibrators—along with a few other toys. They do not threaten him because he has the wisdom to know they don't replace his tongue, his fingers, his cock. These are all different mediums for exciting me, just as Super 8 and 70mm are for a filmmaker.

Burned. “Trust gets eaten away,” he says.

I reply, “Trust is always there, but life experience creates a murky film, and it gets murkier with each breach.”

“Then you meet someone—someone like you,” he replies, and the film clears, bit by bit. “Love—I feel as if we are inventing it.”

I say, “Yes. Love. It's not a path already taken. It's a living thing. It breathes.”

We decide we must invent new words for love, a new language for what we are together. We start with
hyacinthisized
.

Sweltering. It's one of those muggy days in late August. I'm feeling jittery as a bug in a jar, all jumpy nerves and wet heat. We stroll along the sidewalks, stop to buy lingerie and duck into Tiger Lily to suck back some noodles.

Iced. He orders me cool cocktails with umbrellas in them and watches as I drink. His eyes are green as fiddleheads, though the light emanating from them is pure silver. It glows through slits of merriment and wide circles of surprise—laughing silver, knowing silver, brilliant silver. And then there's the way he cares for me—that's brilliant, too, more brilliant than the silver light of the moon.

Dripping. In the ladies' room I kick off my G-string, as its pink-and-lilac lace butt strand is most assuredly contributing to my high-strung state. I step into my new green boy-cut undies. Tonight he'll pass his fingers over the embroidered flowers on the front, then pry beneath to find a pink bud of the flesh-and-blood kind.

As I approach the table, I swirl my cerulean circle skirt high so he can catch a glimpse of pink and green. He licks his lips and I sit to slurp noodles, sip Sling, twirl cocktail umbrella, gaze into eyes, make contact.

White heat. If the vibrations of om can harmonize the world, the vibrations of his cunnilingus growl can harmonize my soul—not to mention make me come.

I have always craved a partner who embodies all-out animal lust as well as human intelligence and caring. Someone to watch over me; someone to make me thrill to his touch; someone to inspire me. I had begun to think these qualities could never coexist. But here he is, warm mountain lion and wild baboon all in one.

Sizzling. We walk along the busy Saturday-night street, crowded with summery coquettes and jump-jive boys. I steer him into an alleyway and push him against a wall of chaotic graffiti. We kiss, and I feel ease in my muscles and bones. There's a hush now, the hubbub far away.

Fire escape, light falling in slats, mud puddles, men in shadows, drug deals, the smell of chop suey and cappuccino. We kiss, long and hard. A red light glows through an iron grate; trees push up, defying concrete; garbage, exhaust, overwrought city planning. And two people, just passing through and wrapped in love, blossom.

Now, look, baby, “Union” is spelled with five letters.
It is not a four-letter word.

—Dorothy Parker

The cab speeds through
the winding cobblestone streets before spitting us out in front of Agent Provocateur. Lingerie on birdcage-like forms, all black bars and feminine curves, adorns the warmly lit window. Inside, turquoise-tulle panties and champagne-satin bras decorate the black-and-cream shop, and mannequins sport garter belts of shiny fuchsia silk. There is a vintage vibe, a noir feel, as if all should be hidden under a trench coat. Wyatt and I pluck a few things for me to try on.

“I'm her dresser,” he tells the shopgirl as we sashay to a fitting room. She smiles knowingly and offers flutes of champagne.

The little room is decorated like a boudoir, all hot colours, sensuous fabrics and movie-star lighting. Wyatt sits in a purple, plush velvet chair in the corner, his fedora pulled appropriately low, shadowing his eyes. We toast and sip as I strip down to my heels, drawing the striptease out with my new scarf. His arousal is evident.

He holds a pair of vermillion-tulle panties for me to step into. As he draws the tiny scrap of fabric up my legs, he kisses and caresses my thighs, forcing them apart so he can lick my velvet pussy. His hat falls off and I pull at his salt-and-pepper hair to steady myself as his tongue lingers and plays, making me weak with desire. I feel like I might fall off my heels when he stands and steadies me, then grabs a bra.

“Madame,” he says, proffering it. Then he moves behind me, gazing into the full-length mirror, taking in the merch. He holds the sizzling-hot vermillion push-up bra toward me. While he fastens it, his lips, his teeth, his tongue caress my neck.

“You have the loveliest collarbones ,” he says, looking at my reflection appreciatively.

“I look like . . . a Christmas present,” I say, appraising myself in the looking glass.

“Let me open you.” His hands move around to determine what this wrapping holds. He runs his palms over the smooth, satiny fabric of the bra, feeling the warmth of my tits beneath. His fingers probe to find my erect nipples. His hardness is hot against my ass.

As he nuzzles my ear, his eyes drift up to meet mine in the mirror. I reach around to unzip his jeans and release the magic within. He thrusts against me, his rock-hard, vermillion tool nudging the soft vermillion tulle, pleading to get in as he slips one hand down the front of the panties. He finds my velvet heart and proceeds to drive me wild.

And soon these fresh-off-the-rack panties are christened, with his and my sex juices releasing across their sweet red ribbons.

“We're definitely getting these,” he says, zipping up.

People are more fun than anybody.

—Dorothy Parker

The summer before I
met Joe, I auditioned for roles almost every day but couldn't find work. With two teenagers at home, I had to bring in an income, so I took a job as an extra—or, rather, as a background player.

Now, whether you give the BG a better name or not, they are still considered the lowest of the low on set. In the industry they are commonly referred to as “the meat.” Not only that, they are classified into different cuts of meat. Union extras are round steak and non-union are rump. Sirloin tip extras are relatives and friends of the cast and crew. They are treated with kid gloves.

One sweltering July day, the meat was stewing by six in the morning. The early call was for period makeup, hair and wardrobe. They put me in a vintage brown tweed suit and a wide-brimmed felt hat circa 1939. I'd been cast as a spinster who wears sensible, stifling tweed suits, but beneath those staid garments I wore underwear to die for.

I have a collection of amazing retro underwear, most of it purchased at Divine Decadence, and for this gig I wore a pair of 1930s buff-pink silk knickers, tap-shorts style, trimmed with cream lace. Jean Harlow would have loved them. And since Harlow never wore a bra in her motion pictures, neither am I for this flick.

The men were transformed into farmers, rednecks, shopkeepers and gentlemen-about-town. They all looked pretty charming in their suits and bomber jackets, but there, in the middle of a group of them, stood a very handsome young man dressed in overalls and a newsboy cap. I caught his eye and he smiled a killer smile.

If the young man only knew about my fabulous knickers, I thought. I stole a glance to find him also stealing a few, and he looked as if he did know my little secret. Like the proper lady of the Dirty Thirties that I was, I batted my lashes but sublimated my desire by turning my attention to the BG women who were being turned into church ladies and society mavens, all with gloves, hats and neat little handbags. Eventually, save for the fluorescent lighting and Styrofoam cups, the room looked like a Depression-era soup kitchen.

At 8:00 a.m., fifty or so BG players walked out of the holding area and onto the set of a small town square, where a shiny black Dodge was parked outside a theatre. The marquee read “
Gone with the Wind
. All Seats 15 Cents.” The BG were to form the lineup waiting to see the Civil War epic for the first time. In real life, I have seen
GWTW
eleven times.

In 1939, Hattie McDaniel became the first black actor to win an Academy Award. She and the other black actors in the movie were banned from its world premiere in Atlanta, Georgia. Also that year, Billie Holliday sang “Strange Fruit,” that dangerous song about lynching in the South. Thinking on this, it made my skin crawl to see the redneck BG, but I was relieved when I spotted a group of them playing cards with a few black BG. And there, putting down three aces, was that dreamy shy guy, an absolute knockout in his pancake hat and denim overalls. Beads of sweat had formed on his dark skin. He licked his lips, then cast a glance my way.

At about 10:00 a.m. a craft-service woman brought baskets of food for the extras. My dreamboat bit into a huge hot dog, making me hungry in more ways than one. But breakfast had been small, so my desire for food trumped my desire for him. As it turned out, the dogs were for union extras only—round steak, like me—but I couldn't stand the hungry eyes of an elderly man standing next me, so I gave my dog to him. He insisted that I eat it, but he was a pensioner without enough money to eat right. He had been made up to look like a prosperous old gentleman, but in reality he was nothing but rump.

“Eat it,” I said, and he did so with thanks. I caught Dreamboat watching. He smiled and walked away, then looked back, tilting his head to suggest I follow. How could I have resisted the invitation? This man was a prime cut. He disappeared behind the faux theatre front.

My hunger for food suddenly forgotten, I joined him in a makeshift prop room, where we instantly tore at each other's period threads, scarcely a thought in our heads about the movie. Through it all, I was aware that if it really had been 1939, this man would have been strung up if we'd been caught. I couldn't shake the thought, so I backed off and told him what I was thinking, hoping I might get beyond it. Moments later he took me beyond by dropping to his knees, hoisting up my schoolmarm skirt and eating me through my Harlow knickers.

Impatient, he tugged at the knickers till the buttons popped off. Bypassing silken nostalgia to get to silken cunt, he used his teeth like a velvet buzz saw on my clit.

If we'd been caught, we'd have been fired and banned forever from all sets, blacklisted from the BG and probably the FG, too. We couldn't have cared less; such is the power of sex. I ached to explode in his mouth.

He lay on the bare floor and pulled me onto his face, and almost instantly I came in waves of cosmic glory. I felt as if I were ascending to heaven, all the while stifling my vocals with my sleeve.

Then he put me on the floor as I grappled with his overall straps, desperate to get at his hardness, but he had quicker means and was suddenly slamming his fantastic rod inside me. My pelvis rose to meet him and he broke, convulsing with orgasmic shivers.

I spent the rest of the shoot with a silly smile on my face, no longer wearing knickers under that sensible tweed.