Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

The Monaco Grand Prix is three days away.

Angèle peels off her shirt and heads for the water. Fifty years after Le Pen’s death she’s still the only Arab girl I’ve seen who will bare her tits on a French beach.

I want to join her in the water. The afternoon has steam-ironed my face and my shirt is dripping sweat. I want to dive into sea so cold it churns the gut, but I can’t risk getting seawater in my jacks this close to a race.

It’s sunset. The haze turns brown and rotten before Angèle reaches the diving tiers.

When she falls her silhouette is as sharp and black as the wave shadows, a black slash piercing a hyphenated surface. I think of trajectories, Gs and vectors, fire masks, halogens, wheel jacks and robots, flags like bunting and visors filled with drunken kanji.

The jack behind my anus is itching.

I turn my back to the sea. The twin towers guarding the harbor are peach, grey, black: the colors sharp and entwined like a fractal surface.

We walk back to town along the seawall. The houses have moldings above the door—sextants and galleys scoured to shadows by the salt air.

We try l’Ocean—maybe a room with a view across the harbor? It’s hard to tell which they dislike most: my English or her color. We move on, through the arcades to the market. A man is hosing the forecourt with seawater. The gutters are full of tabloids and endive.

We get a room above a café with a view of the market roof. We fetch our luggage from the station. Angèle lays her PC at the foot of the bed, pulls out the IBCN lead and crawls about the floor cursing. We miss the first five minutes of Danseuses Nouvelles.

They came from Dijon a year ago and they’re top of the TVP ratings. They dance to Salieri and Skinny Puppy, to De Machaut and The Crucial Bridging Group.

They are a women-only company and espouse the politics of the Programme Pour Femmes Fermes—the Agenda for Expressionless Women. Last year the French parliament, outraged by the atrocities of Août ’34, placed a media ban on the Programme. The Amazons of the Sorbonne and the Academie Julienne are silenced now, but Danseuses Nouvelles, whose pieces grew out of their more sober semiotic researches, have never been more popular.

Few have forgotten or forgiven the sack of the Sacre Coeur, the onstage emasculation of Bim Barn’s lead guitarist or the siege of the Jeu de Paume.

And yet—

A glamour surrounds Danseuses Nouvelles. They weave space in strange, half-grasped rhythms. They convey strange messages, performing warped yet familiar roles with an inhuman grace. They are the Programme’s dream in its pure state—a glimpse of the end, uncompromised by violent means.

Their performances whisper of the world the Programme believes is to come: the world of strong women.

After the show Angèle and I make love.

I lay my head on her shoulder. She turns and strokes my hair. I lift her face up and kiss her lips. We sink back onto the bed. My fingers play with the buttons of her bodysuit. I slip a hand under the cloth and stroke her breast.

Angèle unbuckles my pants and pushes them down. She strokes the well of my erection through damp cotton. Her mouth is on my nipple—a wet, warm pulse over my heart.

I fumble the bodysuit down to her waist and stroke her legs apart. She shifts position on the bed. I slip a finger inside her, and stroke the firm dome of her cervix.

It is love with a fluid rhythm. There is a sweet, shared violence to it. Angèle gasps and clutches at me, the bed, anything; I gaze into her widening eyes. There, in the wet blankness of the pupil, I can see them. I gaze closer, closer—Angèle’s tongue flicks at my chin and I catch it in my lips, my teeth, suck at it like a baby put to the breast. Danseuses Nouvelles —missionaries from the land of strong women—are dancing in her eyes.

Catharine, I remember, used gestures as fluently as words. The first time I met her, she ordered Dublin Bay prawns. She broke their backs with casual, sadistic finesse. When her pointed red tongue scooped out the white pus inside them, she put me in mind of a cat, licking marrow from a rabbit bone.

It was six months ago, in Quimper. I don’t know how she got my number. She told me quite openly who it was she worked for, and since the Programme had never to my knowledge worked with men, I was intrigued at her invitation. Perhaps it was naive of me.

“They say racing drivers talk more and do less about sex than men in any other sport.” She held the orange carcass of her latest victim between finger and thumb and twirled it by its claw over her plate.

I treated her to a bitter smile. The playboy reputation, and its sarcastic flip side, is one we no longer deserve. There is no Baron von Trips on the circuit now, no Count Godin de Beaufort, no Inès Ireland, no Lance Reventlow. Everything has become too competitive and commercial. Indeed, by the nineties the playboy image had all but expired.

“Formula Zero has rekindled our infamy,” I explained. “New cars. New regulations. They want to rekindle the old magic. It’s plastic: packaged. Our sponsors twist incidents into publicity gimmicks. It helps the ratings.”

“It doesn’t anger you?”

I shrugged. “If it didn’t, would I be here?”

The claw broke and the gutted corpse soft-landed in a pillow of saffron rice. It was her turn to smile.

She pushed aside her plate, lifted her PC onto the table, licked her fingers and typed. She read: “Cool, rational, seldom angered, seldom sulks when disappointed—” She gave me a cool glance. “Bisexual, last cruised in Groningen four years ago, in ’42 had a short relationship with hypertext writer, male, in London, longstanding correspondence with lesbian activists in Seattle, New York, and with gays—ex-lovers—in Brisbane, Porto…”

She turned the screen round for me to see.

“Publish and be damned,” I said.

Catharine tutted. “I wouldn’t dream of it. What would be the point? It says here your public image doesn’t interest you.”

“It doesn’t. It interests Havers, of course, and she has a way of buying off the right people before things go too far.”

“You must be quite a headache for her; a ‘new man’ at pole position.”

“Maureen Havers is old ,” I said. “Because she’s old, she’s a legend. If a legend runs a company it has an interest in creating subsidiary legends— appropriate legends.”

“So she puts you in the closet.”

“I’m glad of the privacy. If I were Don Juan, she’d use it for a marketing gimmick: I wouldn’t get any privacy at all.”

Catharine stroked her chin. “Is she evil?”

“No,” I said, “she’s sad. She lost her son to Formula Libre in Brazil. Her engineers built a car that cornered too well for him. The Interlagos circuit curves the wrong way round. He wasn’t properly prepared for the G-strain.”

Catharine waved her hand dismissively. “I’m not interested in technicalities.”

I looked at her a long time. I said, “He was still burning when I pulled him out. His visor had melted into his face.”

She had the decency to blush: “I’m sorry.”

“ Formula Libre is just what it says”—I went on, ignoring her apology—“a free-for-all, a freak show for fast cars. But Formula One was outdated, and good new designers were turning to Libre rather than be straightjacketed. Havers built up Formula Zero to codify some of Libre’s better ideas. She made it, and dominated it; now, because she’s old, it dominates her.”

“And she is hated, is she not?”

“Havers’ constructors spend half their working lives stabbing each other in the back, but there’s no real power to be had until she goes. But that’s not what you meant, is it?”