William Kennedy: Very Old Bones

We went to Germany instead of Korea, the first troops to go back to Europe since the war, and we headquartered in the Drake Kaserne , a comfortable old Nazi Wehrmacht barracks outside Frankfurt, which brings me to Giselle, my somewhat excruciating wife, and the cause of my using my talent with cards for the second time in my life to enhance my net worth.

The enlisted men of our PIO section were throwing a Christmas party that year (it was 1951) and invited the Captain and me to stop by for a bit of wassail. I was already there when the Captain arrived with this remarkable beauty on his arm. They’d have a drink, then go to dinner; that was their plan. The men had hired a belly dancer named Eva to elevate the lust factor at the party and she was dancing when the Captain and Giselle arrived. The troops were yelling at Eva to remove garments, but she wouldn’t even lower a strap. She did a few extra bumps, but that didn’t cut the mustard with the boys, and half a dozen of them backed her into a corner. Because of who knows what reason, Giselle spoke up.

“Leave her alone,” she said. “I’ll take over.”

The Captain looked stricken as Giselle picked up a high stool from a corner and carried it to the center of the room. All eyes went to her as she sat on the stool with her hands in her lap, evaluating her audience. Then she undid the two top burtons of her blouse, revealing a contour — the quartering of a small moon. She lifted one leg, pointed her toe, her instep arched inside her elegant black pump, the heel of her other shoe hooked over the stool’s bottom rung. One up, one down. The upward motion of her right leg moved her skirt a bit above the knee. She swept the room with her eyes, engaging everyone like a seductive angel: madonna of the high perch.

The swine who had been attacking Eva suddenly realized that Giselle’s panorama seemed to be accessible. They didn’t even notice Eva backing off to a corner, snatching up her coat, and running out the door.

The swine grunted when Giselle brought her right leg back and hooked her shoe on the highest rung, her skirt going higher still. Oh how they grunted, those swine. They were all in uniform, their Ike jackets swinging loose. They jostled each other to solidify their positions. They knew, as others jostled them , that their turf nearest Giselle had become valuable. They could have rented it out.

One of them leaped into a crouch, inches away from Giselle’s knee, and he stared up the central boulevard of her shadow. But no one dared to touch her, for they intuited that vantage was all they would ever get, and the jostling grew stronger.

They moved in an ellipse, the ones with a clear view of the boulevard being the first to be shoved out of the vista.

Shoved out of the vista, imagine it.

Poor swine.

But they ran around the ellipse, got back into line, and shoved on. “Keep it moving” was the unspoken motto, and on they shoved, those in the best position always trying to retain the turf. But they’d lose it to the needy, then circle back again.

Giselle started to sing, in French, “Quand Madelon.”

“ Et chacun lui raconte une histoire, une histoire à sa façon. . ” she sang.

Then she moved her blouse to the right and exposed more of that region. My impulse was to photograph her from a low angle, but when I told her this later she said she’d have considered it rape. She touched her breast lightly and I thought, “Phantom queen as art object.”

“ La Madelon ,” Giselle sang, “ pour nous n’est pas sévère. ”

The swine kept moving round and round, like the old ploy of running from one end of the photo to the other in the days when the camera panned so slowly you could put yourself into the photo twice. I see those piggies still, moving in their everlasting ellipse — that piggy-go-round — shouldering one another, hunkering down as they moved to their left for a better view of that boulevard, lowering themselves, debasing all romance, groveling to Giselle’s secrets with bend of knee and squint of eye.

I still can’t blame them.

And what did the swine see? Quite amazing to talk about it afterward. One saw wildflowers — black-eyed Susans. Another said she wore a garment. Yet another no. A sergeant who’d been in the Fourth Armored during the war said he saw a landscape strewn with crosses and corpses, the reason why the war was fought.

And then she gave one final rising of the knee, stood up, and put herself back together. Slowly the troops started to applaud, and it grew and grew.

“More, more,” they called out, but Giselle only buttoned the last button, threw them a kiss, and returned to the Captain’s side. The troops shook the Captain’s hand, congratulated him on his taste in women, and when he went for their coats I asked Giselle her name but she wouldn’t tell me. Then the Captain came and said, “All right, Giselle, let’s go.”

“Ah, Giselle,” I said.

It took me only a few days to track her to the office where she worked as a translator for diplomats and army bureaucrats.

“I’ve come to rescue you from old men,” I told her.

“I knew you would,” she said with a foxy smile.

But she resisted me, and professed fidelity to the Captain, who, though twice-and-a-half her age and going to fat, was flush with money from his black-market adventures in coffee and cigarettes.

“Can you take me to Paris for the weekend as he does?” she asked me. “Can you fly me to the Riviera?”

“How direct the mercenary heart,” I said. “I understand your point. I suspect we are much alike.”

But the truth was that I never valued money except when I had none. And Giselle’s hedonist remarks were a façade to keep me at bay. You see she was already starting to love me.

Each day I sent her a yellow rose — yellow the color of age, cowardice, jaundice, jealousy, gold, and her own radiant hair. In a week the flowers softened her telephone voice, in two weeks she agreed to dinner, and in three to a Heidelberg weekend, which was the first stop on my road to dementia.

We stayed at a small pension and left it only for meals. Otherwise we inhabited the bed. She put all of her intimate arenas on display and let me do with them what I pleased, with a single exception: I could enter none of them with my principal entering device.

I had never been more excited by a woman’s body, though I know the relative fraudulence of memory in such matters. Denial of entry was of small consequence to a man of my imagination, given the beatific pot of flesh to which I had access in every other way. Giselle said she was fearful of pregnancy, of disease, of sin, even of vice, can you imagine? But I know she was actually testing my capacity to tolerate her tantalizing. I’ve known exhibitionistic women, several, but none with the raw, artistic talent for exposure that Giselle demonstrated in Heidelberg. This was my initiation into the heavenly tortures of Giselle-love.

In the days that followed, she and I moved together in a delirium, I sick with love. When I was away from her I fell into what I came to think of as the coma of the quotidian, my imagination dead to everything except the vision of her face, her yellow hair, and the beige, angelical beauty of her sex, though that describes only the look of it, not the non-angelical uses to which she put it.

One understands addiction, obsession. It begins as the lunacy of whim, or desire, but ends as the madness of need, or essence. I could not be without her, and so all my waking movements were the orchestration of our next meeting.

I bought her gifts: Hummel dolls, a cuckoo clock, a Chanel suit, Italian shoes, cultured pearls (I could not afford diamonds). I bought her books. She’d never heard of Kafka, or Christopher Marlowe, or Philip Marlowe, for she was a visual animal, fascinated by art and photography, the twin provinces of her mother, who ran an art gallery in Paris.