Queenie Read Free

flowers like a bouquet for Jersey, is still solid under my feet—I know it’s only my vision, my vertigo, that’s performing here. It wasn’t the man at my side—though I’ll always remember him nicely. Or the twilight hush into which he tells us he’s going abroad, and where—even that word stretches the beautiful horizons far.
    …It’s what is called a concatenation of events. Or, in my old Latin book, natura naturans , nature naturing. It was all of a parcel. That is, I am. The storm has passed over and I feel its salt like a whistle in my trembling teeth, and in my shaken ear a magical chord, “—Switz-er-land.”
    How can one all but faint away in the blessedness of all things come together in colors, in aunts, uncles, landscape and weather—and not have people pay the least attention to you?
    When I come to, Aurine is giving him her hand, much more friendly, telling him her ancestors came from there, and he is kissing it. And Oscar doesn’t look at me much. Or, since I’ve grown breasts, tries not to. So there I am, hot and cold on my own two feet, with not a prayer of what has happened to me…
    It’s nothing really—as a British client of Oscar’s once said on television, after the emcee asked him to describe how it felt to land the gondola of his transatlantic balloon when it began losing gas 14,000 feet up over the sea below. He was never asked on television again. But I hope to have my experience over and over, maybe in other company. For it was nothing really, except the beginning of everything. It was just that I’d never had an orgasm before…
    So then of course, I feel so grateful and open—the famous female feeling, Miss Piranesi—and have to put my gratitude somewhere, and by instinct, or more likely training having its effect at last, turn to thank the nearest man for it—not beyond noting either that he wears a Piaget watch—and say to him what everybody does remember: “Oh—the best view’s from my bedroom on the other side. Would you like to go upstairs and see it from there?”
    “Alexandra Dauphine!”
    But the mole at the corner of my aunt’s lip—a beauty mark no one disputes—is lifting. Also, maybe she too has seen that the portfolio under our guest’s arm is that costly, turd-colored calf which comes only from Hermès. But Oscar too is beaming, and he never knows things like that. I’m their darling, that’s all—oh, happy noose! Why is the love you’re sure of so much more troubling than the kind you’re waiting for?
    The stranger is giving me the once-over, my first. Or the first I know about, from a man like that. Under that eye (all I can see now is that it was hazel) the skin on my left ribcage twitches—a little muscle I’ll come to know well in the next four years. And the belly around my navel is blushing, reaching; like a kid, I look down to see. Finding only the brass buckle on my hip huggers, which I’ve cut off at the thighs, to show body jewelry pasted all over them. A juvenile mistake; good legs never make me feel amorous even when they’re my own, and a girl should push only the parts of her body that do. Half the pushing is for yourself, isn’t it?
    This man doesn’t look at my legs. Not to begin with. The truth of one of Aurine’s countless adages hits me. “The best ones never do begin there.”
    …Dear Aunt, they all come true, your adages, your men. I’ve been watching. Why else must I leave you? I can scarcely bear to have you open your mouth these days; my future’s in it.
    That’s why I wish I could lift my own eyes—in the violet glance you say any dark ones can acquire—and scrutinize that stranger again, giving him the eye from top to toe. In a way I can, turning out his pockets, zipping open that objet from Hermès, warming his watch in my palm, and breathing softly over the gray behind his ear—going all over him, like the expensive little kitten, scratchless for him, that I am being trained up to be.
    But I can’t see