Free My Little Blue Dress by Bruno Maddox Page A

utterly classic evening, Eloïse, but I think I should probably zonk. I have to register for school in . . . four hours.”
    â€œI love your body” was what Eloïse said, not even looking at me.
    â€œEr . . . thanks.”
    â€œA woman’s body, I have always thought, is like the bottle of her soul. Do you not agree?”
    I yawned again, loudly.
    â€œAnd in your case, my new English friend . . .” Finally she turned. She had a smile on her face, a smile that spoke of imminent misbehavior. “I have come to suspect that your cork has not yet been removed.”
    I wasn’t a fool.
    I knew what was happening.
    These idle musings by Eloïse were the opening pawn moves of what she clearly hoped would become a full-blown lesbian chess match—involving actual naked sex, most likely—for which activity I had neither the energy nor obviously the requisite sexual orientation. To be sure: like every ingenue I had come to Paris to find myself, but not through trial and error, not by randomly trying on new selves like cheap sunglasses in a pharmacy until I found one that suited me. I’d been down that road already, and discovered that it didn’t really lead anywhere.
    â€œEloïse . . .” I began uncomfortably.
    â€œIt is like with wine, no?” She took a step in my direction. “The men, they gouge at the wine bottle with their corkscrews. Usually their gouging is successful. But once in a great while . . .” She took another step toward me and lowered her voice. “Once in a great while a bottle comes his way whose cork will not so easily be removed. Oh, it will yield up its exterior, its exposed upper surface . . .”
    From within her black velvet cape appeared a tiny white hand. It gripped the belt of my shapeless tweed house coat and tugged. I didn’t resist, for some reason, and now our faces were mere inches apart. I could feel her hot breath, and Eloïse still wasn’t finished with the wine thing.
    â€œBut still there remains a plug of cork lodged deep in the bottle’s neck, upon which his corkscrew can achieve no purchase. The man he grows outraged. He stamps his foot and shakes his fist. He tears at his hair and his mind it is filled with the most outlandish schemes. Should he push the plug of cork down into the bottle with some thin, pencillike object?” I felt lips on my throat. “Should he cut it to pieces with the tip of a knife and then strain the liquid through a piece of muslin in order to remove the suspended detritus?Oh, how . . .” Suddenly her hand was on my stomach, foraging south toward my panties, “oh how will he taste of the sweet, sweet, wine?”
    I twisted away. “Eloïse . . . Eloïse . . . look, I’m really, really sorry but I just really can’t do this. I’m not a homosexual, or even a bisexual or whatever. There was a time in my life when I thought I might be but . . . well, I decided that I wasn’t one.”
    I ran a hand through my ringlets, conflictedly, and gazed up in anguish at the barely lightening sky.
    â€œDo you know where I was this afternoon before you arrived?” said Eloïse, turning back to the river. A used croissant floated by on the water, puffy and pale as the moon.
    â€œWere you . . . were you out having sex with women?”
    â€œNo,” said Eloïse. “I was several boulevards away, delivering a letter to my lover and good friend Ernest Hemingway, the celebrated novelist. Ernest was not at home, unfortunately, and so I was forced to leave the envelope in the custody of his building’s concierge.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œAnd now I have a question for you, my new English friend.” She turned again. The fact that I delivered a letter today . . .” Eloïse cocked her tiny head. “Does that make me a