Free My Little Blue Dress by Bruno Maddox

bizarre succession of mountain-locked boarding schools, lakeshore finishing schools and girls-only fencing academies before settling in Paris to pursue intensely sexual affairs with anguished young sculptors, famous American novelists and various rich old kinky world travelers that she only had sex with, apparently, because they reminded her of her father. To sustain herself she sold volumes of her diaries to an old Parisian publisher, with whom she was also sleeping, and twice a week she took her clothes off for the Senior Life Class at my collège , though she wouldn’t let them pay her because apparently nobody paid the starving kittens in the alleyways of Paris for their nakedness, which made a crazy kind of sense, I supposed.
    â€œWe two girls shall be friends,” said Eloïse eventually, tossing the last of her wine down her throat like a peanut. “You and I. And I shall consecrate our friendship by telling you a secret.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œStyves . . .” she hissed, her mouth to my ear. “Has a long smooth penis! As hard and as flawless as if it were carved out of wood by a master craftsman!”
    Across the street the sun was setting, a bubble of cosmic pink plasma throwing the jagged molding of the church’s old spire into razor-sharp black relief. And all of a sudden I wanted to cry. I wanted to wrap my arms around this newfriend of my mine and release the great ocean of tears I’d been storing up for the best part of fifteen years. I didn’t know who Styves was and I didn’t care one whit about his penis, but the very fact that Eloïse had felt free enough to even say a thing like that, a thing that outrageous, a thing that inappropriate . . . well, it was proof that coming to Paris had been the right decision, that I had finally found a home.
    â€œEloïse . . .” I said, about to try to give voice to these surging emotions.
    â€œBut come,” she said, standing and extending her hand. “The evening lies before us like a saucerful of freshly drawn cream before a pair of thirsty kittens. There is no time to lose.”

    W HAT DID WE do that evening, reader? We did it all. We painted the entire city a flaming, garish red. At a place called the Black Bongo in the bowels of the old city we slipped our fingers into castanets and cut a clacking swath across the dance floor. We sniffed powdered cocaine with the famous writer Henry Miller in his living room, then piled giggling onto the back of his bicycle for a wobbly ride down some alleyways to a whorehouse. We drank champagne with the whores, then absinthe with Eloïse’s hermaphrodite friend Mathilde in an abandoned, roofless church, and finally whiskey with a dwarf on a houseboat. The rest is pretty much a blur. Sometime around threeish I think I remember watching a trembling Czech nobleman peer at Eloïse through a monocle as she squatted and peed on a mirror, and though I know it sounds unlikely, I swear I remember two entirely separate instances that involved Eloïse and meknocking for ages on the door of a brilliant young sculptor’s studio, only to learn from the neighboring artist that the young man in question had hung himself that very afternoon after falling in love with one of his own statues. It was a wild night. We must have taken about fifty cabs. It was classic .

    F IVE IN THE morning found us down on a footpath by the river, leaning against a fancy wrought-iron railing as we watched the water slide by, all gray, silent and corrugated in the luminous, decadent predawn. To the best of my recollection, I was about sixty percent asleep at the moment the bells of St. Hunchback’s sent their sad tune rolling over the roofs of the sleeping city. Bong bong bong bong bong , they went, and I surged back to consciousness. Five in the morning, it occurred to me. That was pretty late.
    I yawned and shoved back from the railing. “Thanks for an