“Export trade, my foot,” Lilyan said. “Who are you really?”
“I’m nobody,” I say.
“You act like a gangster. All jumpy. That’s what I said to myself when I saw you downstairs.”
“But you still approached me. What kind of dame are you? Are you on the make?”
“Would I have kissed you like that if I was a working girl?”
“Good point.”
My hands poured wine and I passed her a glass. I tossed Jack’s hat across the room and made to sit on the bed. My life had become a series of encounters with people in taverns, movie houses, hotel lobbies, and at ball games. Don’t you have anyone of your own? Laura. No, to hell with her. Christ knew who she was with right now, frequent speculation. What had Jack said about seeing her at a dance? For that matter, where was Jack? The Mount Royal Club, the mayor’s house, a gambling den, or penthouse suite? His course was impossible to imagine. Same as mine. Who was this woman sitting opposite? What was I doing?
Lilyan smiled and waggled her glass. When I came over with the bottle she reached up and pulled me to her. The lovely creature kissed me, and I kissed back. Softly she pushed me away to pull off her hat. I lifted her up while she peeled away her gloves. We locked together, swaying and turning with the music from the wireless, a low piano rag. She kissed me in the French fashion and stuttering black-and-white Nickelodeon images played out on the screen of my mind’s eye. Lilyan moved in just such a way as to reacquaint me with the erotic reality behind feeble half-remembered pornography.
She anticipated me and somehow floated us elegantly to the bed and onto it, so easily, so smoothly, unfreighted with hesitations or fears. This was the modern age of love as finally revealed to me, with a modern woman who knew what it was she wanted. She had none of the inhibitions of others I’d known. Lilyan pulled herself back by her elbows and propped herself up on the bolster, looking at me with sleepy blue eyes, her hair a dark blond unpinned and falling around her face, her full bosom respiring and breathing deeply, her throat flushed hot and pink. That black ribbon with a charm on it tied around her supple, delicious neck.
“Do you have a French letter?” she asked.
“Ha-ha.”
“I confess I don’t normally carry a prophylactic on my person. I know I should. I was a medical man, after all.”
“Were?” she asked.
“Not anymore.”
“And what are you now?”
“I’m currently without portfolio.”
“You’re strange,” she said. “But I like it.”
“If you want I’ll go out and see if there’s a chemist’s or barbershop open. There must be somewhere.”
“Why don’t you hand me my purse?” she interrupted.
“You’ve done this before.”
“Why not? It’s legal and it’s free.”
Rummaging through her handbag Lilyan found a tin disc, a Merry Widow. A black bottle dropped to the floor and I picked it up.
“What’s this?”
“You’ll never believe it,” she said.
“Try me.”
“Belladonna.”
“Nightshade? What on earth do you need that for?” I asked.
“Trick of the trade. We put a little white make-up at the corners of our eyes and a few drops of the stuff in. Makes your peepers look bigger and brighter.”
“You’ll go blind. It’s poison.”
“So’s everything,” she laughed. “Come on.”
My boots were off and I poured more cold Champagne. The radio played a peppy number by the Happiness Boys about a man and a canoe and a cherry phosphate and what was the girl’s name in the refrain?
Laura. I froze solid.
“What is it?” Lilyan asked.
“Nothing.”
She drank my proffered cup of cheer and coaxed another kiss, more deeply now. She was right. We were two taxpaying adults of voting age. Together, with eager fingers, we unbuttoned my shirtfront, unhooked her corsetry, her tresses loose and tangling between our lips as we kissed, our lips together, mouths open, her tongue darting hot and wet into me and then she slipped from her underclothes like a hand from a muff and I felt her warm powdered skin beneath my hands as I caressed her. Her fingers were toying with me. There were light brown freckles on her heavy, swollen breasts. Her warm breath, her wet lips, her tongue again, lavender and wine. She looked at me with kind, amused eyes. I was rusty, out of practice, but she guided me out of my clothes and under the covers, teasing me, laughing, whispering in my ear: “Where’s your gun, Michael?”
The wireless played a tone and retreated to a sea roar. A shaded electric light burned over the dresser. Lilyan helped the preventative device onto me and we began to fuck. I didn’t care if it was going to cost me or not. I closed my eyes and got lost in her for as long as I could.
“So this is Paris,” I said.
She laughed softly and sighed.
AFTERWARDS, SHE TOLD ME about her life.
“I’m from a small town in Illinois. Everything was peaches and cream growing up. We’re Episcopalians and I remember church socials and watermelon and cake on the Fourth of July. I knew I wanted to be an actress after we did the manger scene one Christmas when I was ten. I was the Virgin Mary, if you can believe it. Well, since then I’ve done everything short of murder to keep clear of the life my parents were preparing for me. We were quality people, respectable, you know? There was a sweet boy they wanted me to marry, he’s a dentist now, but I convinced them to let me go to a finishing school in Chicago first and live with my aunt. When I got there I was your standard moonstruck small-town girl milling around the stage door, desperately trying to get noticed. I sang, I danced, I did anything I could. After awhile my folks became suspicious and demanded I come home. Of course I couldn’t. For them an actress was little better than a prostitute and in those days, well, anyhow, maybe they were right. But I stuck with it, and eventually I started to get a few small parts and my name in reviews. Just Vaudeville turns, but I wanted to be a real actress, like Sarah Bernhardt or Lynn Fontanne, you know, cosmopolitan, sophisticated. I made a little money in a couple of revues and got by teaching singing and the piano to rich little boys and girls. But it was a hard life, oh boy. And the men, well, they thought the same thing as my parents, that we were all just roundheels. This was before the war. That changed everything. My little brother was killed in France and I think it broke my folks. Then I told them the truth, that I was going to try my luck in New York and that was it. They told me they never wanted to see me again. Oh, but I had stars in my eyes back then, I doubt I’d recognize myself now if I climbed into Mr. Wells’s time machine. I wish I could too, sometimes. Do you know New York? It’s no place at all to be broke and alone so I got married! He was a swell fellow, a songwriter and we lived in a little apartment and I went out for auditions and honestly I don’t know what happened. One play after another and parties and gossip and out-of-town revues and somehow ten years went by and here I am on the road again, babbling away. We’re divorced now and I don’t know how long I can hold down parts with all the young girls coming up to take the ingenue roles and soon enough I’ll be playing mothers and spinsters and then what?”
She’d been kind enough to relate all this, considering at some point in the night my vigour had flagged, draining to nothing, and I’d withdrawn from her body ashamed and impotent. We’d lain together, smoking the rest of my Sportsmans as she plied me with tender gestures to placate the shame that moved through me. It happens all the time, she said. But hollow anger simmered. I wanted to break glass, destroy things, apologize on my knees. Pride prevented me, another weakness.
“And what about you honey, what’s your story?”
It came out, halting at first. I omitted Jack. I was a backwoods boy, born in the Far West of mining camps and switchback trails through black forests. My father was a preacher of the Word in saloons and mess halls to the scourings of mankind, sinners lusting after gold, whiskey, and women. Finally he’d been given a summons to
