Very Old Bones Read Free

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