Trick or Treat?

by Ray Connolly

  ‘Well, we haven’t been out much anywhere recently … maybe we should meet more people.’

  ‘So already you are bored with me?’

  ‘No. You know I didn’t mean that.’

  Kathy looked troubled. Then Ille began to laugh: ‘I know you didn’t mean that. Come here, my love, kiss me.’

  Kathy leant over and kissed her: ‘No, we won’t go. I don’t want to.’

  ‘But we will go. I think I rather want to go. If you don’t come I’ll tell him you were ashamed to meet his wife after your little romance.’

  ‘We never had a romance.’

  ‘You imagined you did, didn’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on. Admit it. When you were flying across the Atlantic with him did you not fantasize about what he might be like in bed? Come on. You can tell me. Did you not plan maybe a little affair here in Paris in the summer while poor Hélène was away. Come on, Kathy?’ Ille enjoyed baiting Kathy. It was easy now. She knew her so well. And anyway, it was true. The thought had crossed Kathy’s mind.

  ‘Well maybe I did think about it.’

  ‘Then the sin was committed. It is as much a sin to covet thy neighbour’s husband, sheep or goats as it is to fuck him … or them … or both … or whichever you prefer.’

  ‘So Arbus and I are adulterers by proxy?’

  ‘Yes … And me, too.’

  This surprised Kathy. It was the one thing she hadn’t expected Ille to say. Had she been trying to pull him that night she wondered: ‘You?’

  ‘I too have my fantasies, my love. Let us both kneel down and say good acts of confession by our bed – that the compassionate Lord might absolve us from our sins. Just like in school.’

  ‘You did that?’

  ‘Yes. Every night. And before they would put out the lights the nuns would come and tell us that God could see in the dark. And we had to be very careful what we did with our hands. God must have got very bored watching for us to start sinning. We were a very repressed year. I don’t think we even knew what sins he was supposed to be looking out for. Sometimes a couple of the girls would climb into each other’s beds in the middle of the night, but none of us knew what they were doing. I was thirteen, and I used to imagine that it was because they were cold and couldn’t sleep. I suppose God would spend all his time watching them, and wondering why the rest of us were so dumb. Then when I was a little older I would have fantasies about boys I had seen, but whom I had never met. And I would wonder how it was possible for them to do it to me. I was sure it wouldn’t fit. And then I would have to banish them from my mind because I could smell the sulphur of hellfire at just the thought of boys. When I thought about Arbus that time I smelt that old sulphur licking around my soul again.’

  ‘God can’t get much sleep these days, having to watch us all night then, can he?’

  ‘No. But we probably turn Him on. Men like to watch two girls. And if God made man in His own image and likeness, then God must have normal male appetites. Maybe He has a celestial cine-camera and makes blue movies about us to sell to the fallen angels.’

  ‘You know, I think you’re too sacrilegious to go to Arbus’s party. He publishes religious books. Probably half the clergy in Paris will be there.’

  Ille lay back on her pillow and considered the prospect: ‘Then, my love, I think we should give them all something to pray for. Two wayward souls travelling fast the road to hell-fire and perdition.’

  ‘You’re becoming an exhibitionist.’

  ‘Sometimes I think we are an exhibition. Are you ashamed, Kathy?’

  Kathy laughed, and re-read the invitation: ‘We have nothing to be ashamed about, have we?’

  ‘Not like Arbus.’

  ‘No. Not like the cuckoo.’

  And so it was with emotions of almost childish wilfulness that Ille and Kathy approached the day of Arbus’s publishing party. Exactly how they meant to shock what they assumed would be an eminently bourgeois gathering of church dignitaries and conservative publishers was a matter they left until the last moment to discuss. Vaguely and rather anxiously Kathy had in her mind that Ille would reveal some capricious vice, like hurling mouthfuls of obscenities at a bishop, or ripping off some of Arbus’s collection of first editions (if indeed there were any to rip off), and so it was with some surprise when Ille suggested to her that they toss for which of them should turn up looking the most masculine.

  ‘But neither of us looks masculine, do we?’ she inquired, wondering rather nervously if the effects of her affair were not beginning to show in some way that she hadn’t yet noticed.

  ‘No. Of course not. I certainly hope not. But we must give them a show. Let’s keep everyone guessing. We can play a game with them. Arbus wanted to fuck you. And I’m sure that if he couldn’t have had you he would have taken me. Probably he still feels that way. Why else would he invite us? So, if his intentions lie below his pink spotted belly let’s confuse him a little. I tell you what, we’ll toss for it. Heads I go as the boy: tails you do.’ And taking out a one-franc piece she spun it into the air, and catching it swung it over on to the backside of her other hand and studied it. ‘Liberté, egalité, fraternité,’ she read. ‘In France that’s tails. So tonight you wear the trousers.’

  Kathy pulled a face: ‘I don’t want to look butch.’

  Ille laughed: ‘The last girl on earth ever to look butch will be you, my love. Wear your crushed velvet baggies and your tweed jacket. They’ll think you’re a model in this autumn’s fashions and you’ll probably have half the clerics in Paris trying to drag you into the confessional box for a little bit of practical mortification of the flesh – your flesh, not theirs.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I shall wear red. I’ll be a scarlet woman. A whore of great taste and beauty, an uncontrite Mary Magdalene – without that lady’s fetish about feet, though, I think.’

  Kathy began to wonder if they weren’t perhaps carrying the joke a bit too far: ‘You won’t do anything outrageous, will you, Ille? You won’t embarrass us?’

  ‘Never. Don’t worry. We’ll have our game at their expense. Their confusion about our roles, about our relationship will be our amusement. Nothing more. I promise. Now come on. Get ready, or we’ll miss the Agnus Dei.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Never mind, you heathen junkie. You get ready while I feed the birds.’ And leaving Kathy standing somewhat confused in the living room Ille entered the aviary and holding her arms out allowed the doves to flutter around her, two of them landing clawingly on her arm and shoulder, a couple of downy feathers floating from them. From the barred window Kathy watched her. When she was with the birds Ille became another person, a being Kathy felt she hardly knew, a girl she would never successfully approach. Although Kathy had taken her share of the chores in looking after the doves and parrots they had never taken to her with the confidence and affection they bestowed on Ille. To Kathy it seemed that she was a servant of the doves: Ille was their friend, and they were friends to her. Sometimes when Kathy had tried to speak to Ille while she was in the aviary she had met nothing but a blank stare, as if although Ille could hear her, the words had become meaningless, so transfixed was she by the beauty of the birds and the memories they evoked. The doves were a link with Ille’s emotional past that Kathy couldn’t fathom: and a part of their relationship which could not be wholly shared. And as she watched silently through the bars she felt a growing resentment towards those harmless bundles of fluttering white feather for the affection they gave and received from her lover. There in that corner of the apartment Ille kept a part of her personality forever secret, a closet of always private memories. And sometimes it seemed to Kathy that Ille loved those doves and those memories more than she did Kathy. Once or twice Kathy had tried feebly to articulate the absurd jealousy she felt about the aviary, but Ille’s blank staring and unsmiling response had shredded her nerves completely. ‘You can’t understand, Kathy. So don’t even try to,’ she had been told. A
nd that was the end of the conversation. Now Ille was once again alone and in a trance of glorious, happy solitude. And Kathy felt again deserted as she watched while Ille put a hand up to her shoulder, very gently took hold of a dove, and leaning out placed it delicately on a perch. ‘Sweet dreams my beauties,’ she heard her say, and as Ille began to winch across the blinds that brought a sudden night to the aviary Kathy went miserably and resentfully into the bathroom to prepare for their evening’s entertainment.

  To Claude Arbus the Galerie Arbus was more of a status symbol and a tax loss than a serious attempt at running a business. It was a front, a shop window, for a much larger industry in providing books on subjects vaguely connected with religion for the schools, libraries and bookshops of all French-speaking countries. Had he been forced to rely on the small trade that went in and out of Galerie Arbus then he could never have adopted the grand life style he and Hélène Arbus had come to know and accept, but his real business lay in the binding and printing of holy works at modern plants in Limoges and Lyons. Galerie Arbus pleased him because it was his hobby: it was the place where he might meet with his fellow publishers; and it was a place Hélène could pop into from time to time to do a piece of token work, displaying the best and most expensive of her husband’s company’s products to her rich friends in between her social rounds. And as befitting a bookshop in that area of Paris the emphasis on the wares displayed was less upon the written word than the volumes of coloured plates, none of which sold for under two hundred francs. Fifteen years earlier the Arbus family had had some misgivings about being so deeply involved in an avenue of publishing which depended so heavily upon a church-going and catechism-reading society, when all the signs pointed to a rapid decline in religious participation in Western Europe. But then, just as Arbus was beginning to wonder if he shouldn’t branch out into something like the engineering or metallurgical field, subjects which deeply offended his concept of himself as an aesthete, spiritualist and man of culture, along had come the camp new fashionability of Eastern religions. And before he knew it handbooks on Babism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Moslemism, Taoism, Zen and Yogism had turned his ailing old-fashioned little Christian concern into a rapidly expanding and even avant-garde publishing company. Now wherever one looked in Galerie Arbus pictures of Christ and his Virgin Mother had to fight for wall space with contemporary gurus, life-size posters of Baba and even photographs of Mormon founder Joseph Smith. Of course Arbus’s father would have turned over in his grave: in his time he hadn’t even allowed the Huguenots space on his shelves. But Arbus was a man of his time: and if there was a market for the infidel and dissenter then who was he to wilfully narrow the field of learning. And he was quick to discover that not only did books on Buddhism open up a whole new market to him, they also opened up new fields for art work: expensive coloured meadows: and really profitable ones.

  His reception for September 30th was one of about five such gatherings that he held during the year, when he thought he might have a school text book of some high sales potential. An Illustrated History of Christianity in North America was an obvious for the French Canadian market, and it was while pondering the misfortune that had led the United States into becoming an English-speaking country that he remembered Kathy. He had thought about her and her strange friend frequently during the summer, but repulsed by them once, he had been uncertain how he might once again approach the situation without setting himself up for another verbal savaging. When he had seen them together he hadn’t understood their relationship in any way, but he had found each of them arrestingly attractive. Now he had an excuse, thin though it may be, for seeing them again, and in a situation where he would be safe from their games. If they turned up: excellent. If they came and didn’t behave themselves, he would simply move away from them and mingle with his other guests. And if one of them came alone, preferably Kathy since it was she with whom he felt he might have the most chance, then who could tell what might happen. The summer had been pleasant but dull: stuck with Hélène in Corsica for a whole month was about as much as he could bear. He loved his wife, enjoyed her body, and was proud of her beauty, but he found that the older he got the more he needed little amusements from time to time to stimulate that love. He had had a few affairs, nothing adventurous, nothing gained, and most certainly nothing lost: but he enjoyed that element of surprise which only other women could give him; and he had been gratified that younger women should find him attractive. As a young man he had had no more than his share (and possibly somewhat less than his share) of good fortune with girls, and now that middle age was giving him wealth, position and indeed even a worldly embellishment to his features, he felt that it was almost his earned reward to have a little affair now and again. Of course Hélène had never guessed, he was sure: and nor would he let her. Sometimes after a particularly messy little episode he wished he could go home and tell her and beg her forgiveness: but he knew that would have been breaking his own rules. The situations he occasionally found himself in were his alone: and he must bear whatever guilt might come to bear on him.

  And now that the summer was over, a summer of visiting guests, of other people’s children which Hélène would invite to their summer home, a summer that had left him suntanned and even more confident than usual, he felt again the wayward tugs which took him periodically beyond the marital bond. And Kathy Crawford, despite her sudden change in attitude, still intrigued him.

  Hélène Arbus enjoyed her husband’s publishing receptions as much as he did himself. A gregarious, highly sophisticated and intelligent woman she enjoyed company and conversation, playing dilettante fashion at any number of roles, hostess, wife, and even on two enormously discreet and fleeting occasions that of mistress. And although she had a tendency to fits of depression, acute panic syndromes and nervousness, together with a temperament which displayed an exuberance of spirits not always comprehensible, she did, her friends and contemporaries agreed, compensate for her lack of that dearly wanted family with admirable courage. For Arbus her inability to bear children was disappointing (he had let it slip once to her that he regretted not having a son to whom he might pass on the family firm, which was as callous a motive as any she could imagine and for which he would never be truly forgiven), but for Hélène it had become almost an affront to her view of her own femininity. Perhaps that explained those two slight affairs, she had once tried to tell herself. But since she felt no guilt about either of them, she decided that perhaps they had merely been the result of lust inflamed during the long hot sunny times when Claude would work in Paris and she would retire ahead of him to the beach. She had enjoyed those moments, the first few times with a stranger were always more exciting than the comforts and tenderness of the familiar, but Claude was her man: the man she most liked to spend time with: the one she most liked to make love to her. That he might have had a few unadmitted peccadillos of his own she suspected rather than knew, but it was of no import. They had a good marriage, and had they had children then it would have been for her the perfect marriage. Adoption had at one time been counselled for them after gynaecological science had proved her infertility beyond doubt, but that would never have suited. It was Claude Arbus’s baby she wanted to carry: and afraid of her own recognizably selfish emotions she shied away from the possibility that she might find herself unable to take on the role of mother to some other woman’s child. And instead she would act as surrogate mother during the vacations to the children of her friends, giving generous presents on birthdays, always knitting when friends’ babies were expected, and ever delighted to be asked to be godmother at christenings. Adoption was not for her: that she knew. And in moments of depression, she would muse ironically on the days before her marriage when in mortal fear of pregnancy she would rush to the bathroom immediately after love-making to douche out her insides lest some germ of semen might have found a home there in which to lodge, in those far off days of fifteen years ago when sexual liberation was a matter of temperament, male care
and much good luck. And was all quite unaided by the pharmaceutical industry.

  Ille followed Kathy into Galerie Arbus with mixed feelings. She had expected to find a stuffy old establishment book shop, with pictures of the lives of the saints Sellotaped to the windows, and she had been quite sure that the place would be thick with black serge and dog collars. But from the pavement the Galerie appeared more like the opening of an art exhibition, the rich and fashionable eating and drinking and talking and shuffling about inside, and hardly a cleric in sight.

  Arbus met them at the door, beaming a gratuitously enchanting welcome: ‘Kathy … and Ille. I’m delighted.’ He was, too.

  Kathy smiled, suddenly nervous in the presence of so many people: for two months she and Ille had lived like virtual recluses: ‘Like Carmelite nuns,’ Ille had joked. Behind her Ille smiled a long, knowing look at Arbus, bright, sharp blue eyes, instantly beginning to question his motives.

  ‘Let me get you something to drink … to eat …’ gushed Arbus, determined not to be disturbed by Ille’s air of patronization.

  But instantly Ille was too quick for him: ‘That’s right. Follow Claude for the body and blood.’

  Arbus shrugged away the impiety, and began to edge through the guests in search of a drinks tray, while at that moment Hélène moved through the crowd to his side. She had noticed the girls’ entry. They were both quite stunning, she admitted to herself, and admiring that quality in other young women that she herself possessed, that ability to turn all eyes on an entry, she wished to be introduced to them. The possibility that either might have been one of her husband’s little flirtations she dismissed instantly from her mind. Claude was too bourgeois, too much of the closet chauvinist, to ever allow his girls to meet his wife.

  With a gesture Arbus accomplished the introductions as economically as possible. Kathy, he explained, he had met somewhere over the North Pole. Ille was her friend. And with a smile he cruised away into the fashionable throng, pretending to search for the completely overlooked author of the book he was publishing, but really making a timely exit from any verbal lacerations that Ille might be preparing to inflict on him. If he wanted Kathy he would have to get her alone, he decided. Maybe Hélène would be able to help him, albeit unwittingly.