“He says these disparaging things about women he thinks fuss about their looks,” I told my sister.
“Yeah, well, that just means he’s lying, or he’s not paying attention. All women fuss with their looks. The smart ones just look like they didn’t fuss. Men like to think they pick and choose what they notice, but that’s hooey. We do the picking and choosing. Don’t listen to him. Listen to me.” It was true that seeing myself in the mirror in heels, snug waists, and costume jewelry was startling, but startling in an exhilarating way.
And I could feel Charles reacting to the heels, the Shalimar, the tinkling accessories, no matter his stated distaste for “fussiness.” The first time I swung the door open to greet him after Lilly and I had put me together for a purposefully provocative effect, I could feel the immediate spike in interest as well as a little surprise. I think I actually stood back a bit and tilted my head, ready to be admired. I was in the hands of something I could only call desire, though at the time I didn’t know that I wanted to be desired more than I desired the man himself.
“That’s a beautiful woman,” I said to him one day as we waited in a movie line. I was watching a tall, composed brunette across the street slip her arm around a man and pull him closer until he declined his head. She kissed him—a serious kiss.
“She’s well dressed, elegant. But she’s vulgar.” He shrugged. “The woman’s on a public sidewalk! Forward women think they’re attracting men because of how bold they are.”
“Well … they do attract men.”
“Men who use women. The wrong men.”
The kiss at the end of that evening, like the few kisses that had preceded it, was brief and direct. I brought the question of kissing to my sister.
“You’ve got to be kidding.” She was sincerely amazed. “He’s never so much as gotten his hand on your ass? Do you think he has an idea of gentlemanly behavior that says you should make the first move?”
No. I didn’t think so.
“Are you sending some kind of ‘Go slow’ signal?”
I didn’t know. Had I? I entered every evening with Charles in a slow burn of anticipation for … something. But what? When I tried to imagine the something I wanted, it was tangled up in the idea of a kiss but it wasn’t exactly a kiss. I wasn’t a child, but my knowledge of adult sexual love came from places like Electra Gates’s life rather than my own. I didn’t have any of my own. Somewhere deep in reflected imaginary thirdhand experience, Electra was ripping her skirt away so she could force herself through the narrow break in the wall that separated her from Basil Le Cherche. Such ferocity! And then the two lovers left silenced and stilled. I had never been silenced and stilled; nevertheless, I believed in it. All of it.
I set The Pirate Lover aside and picked up my battered Walt Whitman, scanning the strange words about leaves of grass for the hundredth time. If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it. Translucent mould of me it shall be you! Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!… You my rich blood! Your milky stream pale strippings of my life! Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you! My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!
The first time I met these words, they summoned up the dress from the Marais. Now I spread a beautiful skirt out and considered its effect myself, but there was still a mystery here that Electra Gates had figured out, and I hadn’t. I felt fairly sure that whatever I felt about Charles, it wasn’t the feeling that Electra knew.
That Saturday, Charles invited me to a party at his firm that he described as a key business event. Lilly approved. “It means he’s really confident about you. Ready to have you looked over by his most important audience.”
I was pleased and then surprised that I’d felt a little spark of relief when he’d invited me. Why wouldn’t I be able to be looked over? I was the co-owner of a successful business, an independent and, with some help from Lilly, a very well-dressed woman. So what if I was also a boiler-room worker’s kid from Lynn whose claim to fame before lipstick was M&M’s pie? I wasn’t hard to look at. A big law firm party was not over my head. But still, there was that spark of relief to be admitted into the deeper recesses of Charles Helbrun III’s world.
I dressed myself and just checked in with Lilly to see what she thought. She changed the shoes, the purse, the skirt; she kept the hat and gloves; she added a necklace. “Now you’re fine,” she said. “Go forth.”
On this date the care I’d taken didn’t seem to have any effect on Charles, who was focusing on cultivating two possible new clients. He’d given me a quick glance at the door and only said, “This won’t be something you’ll need the hat and gloves for.” I left them behind. There were only four other women at the party, and they were, as he’d somehow known they would be, hatless and gloveless. I asked him who they were. Two were wives, he said; two were models, hired to make the event more glamorous. He excused himself, said he was sure I’d do fine, and strode purposefully to the other side of the room, where a tight circle of men was jabbing the air with the drinks in their hands. As I watched, he inserted himself into the conversation and then, with a deft turn, he cut one of the men out of the herd and drew him to two comfortable chairs in an area apart from the thick of the party.
“Got him,” he said with satisfaction when he rejoined me. “That’s twenty thousand in billing for next year.”
That night we had our first serious, serious kiss. It left me breathless and hollowed out, but not, to my surprise, more enamored with or attached to Charles Helbrun. I closed the door on him that night, both satisfied and not.
LILLY
My First Husband
The dog didn’t criticize everybody when he was an actual mongrel, but now that he’s a military man, and dead, he spends some time making judgments from the high moral ground. This is an unattractive feature, and it occurs to me that one of the reasons we all like dogs is that they’re a totally judgment-free species.
“You used to be nicer,” I said to him. “You used to like everybody.”