by Ray Connolly
‘Well let’s give him a try anyway,’ said Ille. ‘At the very least he’ll be a source of amusement. And you never know. He may be the most potent stud in Paris.’
‘Okay. Why not? Beggars can’t be chosers.’
Ille laughed to herself: ‘I don’t think we are quite beggars yet, my love. Maybe whores. But never beggars.’
Hélène Arbus had been quite fascinated by what she had seen of Kathy and Ille, and she was under no misapprehensions as to the nature of their relationship. Indeed Ille had made no attempt to disguise what was clearly an overwhelming love affair for both of them. Hélène had met many gouenes before, butch ones escorting pretty little ultra-feminine fluffs around with them; but Ille and Kathy represented none of that. They seemed each equally sure of their femininity that the stage stereotypes found no relevance in them. On the way home she had mentioned to her husband that she liked his two gouene friends, but had met with such a perplexed response that she had not pursued the matter. Arbus, for his part, was excited by Kathy’s suggestion that they might soon get together: admittedly the two girls did appear to have a complex and deep relationship, but he had no doubts in his mind in which direction their libido swam. Probably their close friendship was some kind of front, some self-protection against unwanted, over-forward pushy young men. Certainly they weren’t lesbians. He was sure of that.
‘I think I should ask them for tea,’ said Hélène as they drove back towards Invalides. Arbus scratched his nose thoughtfully. Hélène couldn’t resist becoming involved in the lives of others. She was a butterfly that would suck a little nectar here, a little there and then be off before the involvement should begin to make any demands other than those which might satisfy her own sense of entertainment.
‘As you wish, my dear,’ was all he said, almost in an attitude of sad resignation, while his mind raced ahead and he wondered how he might manœuvre such a situation to suit his own purposes.
‘You have their telephone number?’
For a moment Arbus wondered whether Hélène might have guessed his motives: but she gave no sign of having done so. ‘I think it may be in the office. Nathalie will give it to you. Call her tomorrow, if you still want to see them then.’
And with that short discussion the matter was settled. Hélène would call them the very next day. What goodies lay in store for him, Arbus wondered to himself, while Hélène pondered on the frailties and strengths of women’s emotions which made them so fascinating. Had her husband understood (and she was now sure he didn’t) the true nature of the relationship between Ille and Kathy, his bourgeois background would have repelled them from him, while to her that relationship added a unique fascination. They were a couple to be observed: to be cherished. They didn’t need a man to make complete their lives: and now no man alive could make truly complete her life. Already she saw the beginning of an alliance between them.
In some ways she envied the freedom of modern girls. When at sixteen her best friend, a rather large and unattractive girl called Marie, had one day suddenly begun kissing her with a passion she neither understood nor cared for, she rather imagined that poor Marie had lost her senses. Today such behaviour would not have been out of the ordinary, and indeed had Marie been a more attractive girl she could have imagined a situation where such an advance would not only not have been repelled, but in those men-starved days, might possibly have been encouraged. Now, of course, it was too late.
The courtyard to the Arbuses’ house at Invalides was small and leafy, almost a grotto, built around two immense and ancient fig trees, which had coiled and twisted their lifetime’s way in between each other to form a shelter in the winter and a thick and deep sunshade in the summer. Every spring Hélène Arbus would have the gardener lop away a small segment of those branches – just enough to form a sun trap for the summer months; and into this little valley of light she would arrange sparkling white garden furniture, and take tea with her friends, gossiping about him and her and anyone who wasn’t actually present at that particular moment, while the only eavesdroppers in this secret cave of dense and spreading leaves would be the birds and the insects, going about their more fruitful day’s labours in the place they had been since before the Revolution.
Happily for Hélène the Indian summer continued into October, into the day she had invited Kathy and Ille for tea. She had considered asking other friends, possibly to make a more convivial bunch should conversation become stilted, but then again she thought that the presence of others might indeed have that very effect she wished to avoid and on reflection had decided that the conversation would be probably more free if there were just the three of them. She wanted to find out about these two extraordinary girls. She wanted to understand the secrets which drew them towards each other and away from men.
Happily also for Hélène, Ille and Kathy decided to accept her invitation. As Ille so succinctly put it: ‘It looks as though we’ll have to court the wife that we may fuck the husband.’
And so the meeting was arranged. Slightly in awe of the militancy that two women together might conceivably present, Hélène decided that the wisest style of dress for her would be a cool cotton trouser suit: something slightly masculine, she joked to herself. And in keeping with her less than feminine dress she raked her hair back off her face, tying it back in a band, and momentarily regretting the lines which were beginning to set in her forehead and the folds of her cheeks, accentuated by the way the summer sun had found itself shut out from them thus leaving thin white rims in her brown complexion.
For tea Hélène chose a Shirpa tea from Ceylon: the presence of Ille would demand the exotic, and she had her maid prepare the most delicate China tea service she had. She had become preoccupied by the two girls. Their impending arrival frightened her unwittingly. She was as nervous as a young girl on a date. And, afraid to appear gauche, which seemed an absurdity in her own home, she tried to hide her butterflies by involving herself in first a jigsaw, and then as the panic increased, the rhythmic comfort of her knitting.
Amid much giggling and self-mockery Kathy and Ille made their way to Hélène Arbus’s house. Neither had much idea of why she should have decided to befriend them, but since it would clearly only work to their advantage neither cared. Since the question of a baby, a family, a future together, had been first raised it had become the subject of paramount importance in their lives. Ille, afraid that Kathy might find some jealousy in the fact that she was to have a man, insisted that Kathy, too, share the experience, all suitable precautions being necessarily taken. But Kathy was less sure. Indeed the idea that Ille might enjoy an orgasm from a man was not an unexciting prospect, and lying in bed with Ille at night she would become excited at the very notion of her lover’s planned but necessary infidelities. Strange, she thought, how sex produces such anomalies and ambiguities in fantasy.
‘And how did you two meet … ?’ That was Hélène’s first question and realizing that they were in for a polite cross-examination Kathy and Ille smothered slight titters of mirth. Was this what Madame Arbus considered a polite way of digging for dirt, they wondered. They knew she understood their relationship fully. Perhaps she wanted to be invited to partake in what she might imagine went on. Women in their late thirties were well known for exploding like Molotov Cocktails when given the right sexual ambience. Perhaps it was with these two girls that Madame Arbus imagined that ambience might lie.
‘We met in Ceylon,’ said Ille in perfect seriousness, tasting the tea and recognizing its origin. ‘Kathy’s father was ambassador there and my father owned a tea plantation. We fell in love in a plantation when I was thirteen and she was ten. We had tea for two, and she played with my tits. Very romantic.’
Unlike her husband Hélène Arbus was not afraid of being sent up. Indeed she liked it, and was quite happy to encourage such romantic lies. Truth and Hélène had never had much in common. Kathy for her part was too amused to speak, and allowing Ille to take the lead in this bizarre encounter, she was absentl
y viewing the black, glassy reflective interior of the Arbuses’ home with some admiration. Brought up in a city where chic meant carpets grown like fitted turf, and the exotic was a couple of hand-painted rhino tusks from a Nairobi market place, and stuck on the baby grand in between the candelabra and the family photographs (always silver frames, of course), Kathy was always visually bewitched by the intermingling of periods and styles, the kaleidoscope of colours, the variety of cultures and art forms, and the essence of sumptuousness in the array of beauty that the rich French would cram into their homes. By comparison California seemed to offer no more than a sunny newness, with every knick-knack a souvenir of some holiday in some place the owners thought was bizarre: a sixteenth-century door picked up in Mexico which a rich man might build a folly of a home around; some stained-glass ripped-off from a broken-down church in Peru; a set of Roman coins, paid for in good hard dollars in Naples during the war when denarii couldn’t buy pasta but dollars could. Like Ille she had become contemptuous towards the tastes of her own people, and although she found the French a generally difficult and unreasonable race to get along with, she was besotted with admiration for their sense of style.
‘And what happened then?’ Hélène Arbus was anxious that Ille should continue with her romancing. It was a game that they could both play, and as they could see that Kathy was paying no interest they continued in a mixture of French and English.
‘We met again in North Africa,’ said Ille, thinking fast, wondering how best she might entertain the lurid interests of this woman. ‘We would play with cactus plants together. D’you understand? Before the plants would have a chance to flower we would rip out their heart … the long, thick, soft stems. You understand?’ she said, demontrating as though holding a phallus. ‘And that was how we lost our virginity … together, under the palm trees in the afternoons, when there were no boys there, and where we would have no need of boys. And until today we have no need of them.’
Hélène Arbus laughed a little nervously, and picking up her knitting worked vigorously for a few moments. She had been expecting the girls to be outrageous, but nothing quite so specific. Not that she believed any of it. She knew for a fact that when Kathy had come to Paris she had never met Ille. Claude had told her that. But their relationship was now clearly so intense that neither of them cared what the other might say. And in a way she envied this romanticism for a past that they had neither shared, but which each was happy to pretend to belong to. In their way it was as though their lives had begun anew with their relationship and everything before that had been blotted out. Probably had she asked Kathy similar questions she would have received equally bizarre and imaginative, though different, answers. It was as though they were both purposely laughing at her as an outsider, a member of an establishment which their relationship had forced each of them to reject. So instead of taking her invitation seriously, instead of boring her and each other with the truthful tittle-tattle of their day-to-day existences they were, for her benefit, and possibly for anyone else who would care to ask, creating stories which they thought might shock most, a calculatedly grotesque parody of tea-party conversations. For not the first time in her life Hélène wished she had a bugging device pinned to the underneath of the table that she might preserve these stories.
But then it became Ille’s turn: ‘Kathy tells me that you have no children.’
Instantly Hélène was on her guard. This was a subject which was no longer mentioned directly to her: she viewed it as an embarrassment. ‘My tubes are blocked.’ She replied quickly and sharply, and in a hurry: and with a forcefulness that surprised herself.
Ille looked at Kathy, who pretended not to be listening and sipped her tea discreetly. So Arbus had been telling the truth. The disability did lie with Hélène.
For a moment there was a hostile moment in the meeting, and then Kathy, always the lively and affable American at such moments of potential embarrassment, reached across and pulled her velvet jacket around her shoulders: ‘It’s getting chilly. It’ll soon be Hallowe’en. Do you celebrate Hallowe’en in France?’
The question came out of nowhere, and quite broke the slight tension that had arisen between Ille and Hélène. And amused at her own ultra-sensitivity Hélène laughed loudly and long, quite enchanted by her afternoon’s entertainment. It was, she was sure, the beginning of a long and fascinating friendship.
Chapter 7
Claude Arbus was never given a chance: he was like warm plasticine in the hands of a couple of wilful, skilful children: two craftswomen well educated in the pliant arts of manbaiting. To another woman, had there been one in a position to observe the ritual that Ille and Kathy took upon themselves to perform, the motive would have been clearly transparent. But Hélène Arbus was the only other person who might have been involved, and it suited the purposes of none of the participants to let her be a spectator to the game. So Arbus, swimming in his own narcissism and self-delight, fell an easy and over-willing prey to the pummelling, shaping and humbling which was handed out to him. And for reasons which neither of them ever stated or ever tried even to analyse Arbus came to represent all that was to be denigrated in manhood, and all the values which he, in his charming pomposity, stood for. And at some moments the two girls would forget the whole object of the exercise and see it only as yet another game which together they might play, using Arbus as their pawn.
But first there were decisions to be made: Kathy was determined that she wanted nothing to do with the ‘procuring of Arbus’s semen’, as she put it, but Ille was as equally determined that they each share whatever relationship might develop. The conversation arose inevitably over a particularly drunken dinner at home one night. A major development in their relationship had been reached: a celebration was called for: and too much red wine had been drunk.
‘But I don’t want to fuck him,’ argued Kathy, when Ille insisted on their sharing Arbus.
‘And you think I do?’
‘Well, do you?’
Ille paused and considered the situation: Arbus and her: in bed: him on top: feeling proud of himself: cheating his wife: imagining that he had achieved something, when, on the contrary, it was being thrust upon him: Arbus inside her: mutual excitement: heat: and sweat: and she turning away afterwards and wishing he would leave: but no, he will want it again and again: she knew men like him: and no doubt he would demand to know if she had had an orgasm. ‘A long one?’ Wanting to be told that it was the best she had ever experienced. And she would be thinking of Kathy; and companionship. And hating the sweat, saliva and sperm of the man. She thought of all these things, and then she answered: ‘No. Not at all. Not alone. We must fuck him together. He will be spoiled for choice. There will be three in the bed….’
‘… and the little one said “roll over”.’
‘What?’
‘It’s a nursery rhyme, I think.’
‘Oh. Anyway. First you, then me, then you, then me….’
‘D’you think Arbus will be able to cope?’ The idea of a tournament was becoming appealing to Kathy. Two on to one. Idly she wondered what Ille’s expression might be when she made love to a man: when she made love to Arbus. Would she dig her fingers into him? Would she go down on him if he asked her? Would she really enjoy it? And what of her own reactions? Would she come? With Ille she often felt herself coming almost before they had touched, her body convulsing and her womb aching as Ille would playfully tickle and kiss and lick her feet and toes; then she would shiver inside while Ille would lie on top, that perfect body straddled across hers while Ille would paint lacquer on to her toe nails, always teasing, always testing the limits to Kathy’s eroticism.
‘No.’ Ille was laughing. ‘But he’ll have to try. His ego will force him into all kinds of gymnastics.’
‘Maybe we should feed him some hormone pills. He might need monkey glands to handle both of us,’ said Kathy.
‘So we chose the right man.’
‘Supposing I get pregnant, too. Or suppos
ing I do and you don’t. Or what if we both do? We’ll have to open a nursery.’
‘No, my love.’ Ille had thought of this argument. ‘You take the pill. I don’t.’
‘That won’t make us equal.’
‘But you don’t want a baby.’
‘I like the idea of us having a baby together. It doesn’t matter who actually carries it, does it? Or does it have to be you and only you? Are you so selfish?’
Ille considered for a moment. Was she being selfish, she wondered. She looked at Kathy. Had she misjudged her? How much would Kathy do for her? How far could she push her?
‘You would have a baby for me?’
‘I would have our baby. But not for you. For us. You want a baby. Maybe I do, too. I never thought about it until now. But yes … yes. I would.’ Having committed herself Kathy suddenly felt awkward. Ille was watching her to see if she would have a sudden change of heart and drop in a couple of provisos which might let her off the hook. She couldn’t back down now. She’d pinned her colours to the sails. She decided to push on. The chances of her having to ever face the situation didn’t seem high. She wondered how much Ille could tell of what she was thinking. Ille was smiling. The expression could have meant anything. ‘I tell you what we do. I’m not having you running everything. Let’s draw lots for which one of us should be mother.’
‘No.’ Ille was amused again. ‘It isn’t a competition. You’re quite sure you’re willing?’
‘Yes. Yes. I’ve said I am.’
‘All right then. The first one to get pregnant. Maybe you, maybe me. If he manages to get us both pregnant we toss for who takes the flight to London to get rid of one. But that’s hardly likely. We’ll give him a concentrated three months’ effort. If he can’t manage it in that time then we go and find someone else.’
