Free My Little Blue Dress by Bruno Maddox Page B

postman?”
    I bit my lip and looked at her.
    No.
    It didn’t.
    It didn’t make her a postman.
    And right then I fell to the ground and had an epiphany. There was nothing wrong with me, and there never had been. All my life I’d been desperately trying to solve the equation
    Me = a normal girl + X
    frantically trying to determine X , why I was the way I was, why I spoke the way I did, why I had no feelings for Davey and all of that nonsense. Never had it occurred to me that there might be no X , that I just was the way I was because I was. Twenty long, difficult years I’d been searching for a category , a little social slot labeled “Was Read to as a Child” or “Allergic to the Past” or “Sexual Orientation Number Four” that would account for all my oddities, when the truth of the matter was no such category need exist. Just as Eloïse delivering a letter didn’t make her a “postman,” just as me kissing her—and I did, I wobbled to my feet and slid my tongue into her hot, tight mouth—didn’t make me a “homosexual,” my talking funny and having trouble relating to men didn’t mean that I was necessarily any particular type of freak.
    I was just me.
    Nothing more, nor less, than that.
    Disentangling my face from Eloïse’s, I mumbled something like “We need just one more cab,” and shortly after it was all just warm skin and clean sheets and tiny little strangled cries.

    T HAT WAS THE only time we ever made love (as far as I know; masked balls were all the rage) but quickly we were closer than lovers, more like sisters, sharing every detail of each other’s lives, helping each other deal with the endless logistics of being a woman about town in 1920s Paris.
    Like Eloïse with her diaries, I threw myself into my painting and ended up making some really quite serious money. My final project for that first semester at the collegewas a piece called Bachelor Pad (1921), a medium-size gouache of a man with both eyes on the same side of his nose peering hungrily into a fridge containing nothing but a box of baking soda and a lime, and it sold for U.S. $10,000 to a major French bank that wanted to hang it in its Main Conference Room.
    Buoyed by success, after taking the summer off I devoted the next year and a half to a far more ambitious and conceptual piece called The Living Experience. The Living Experience (1923) was a set of four high-quality colored clay and papier-mâché dioramas mounted in glass cases depicting the various facets of human life. The Quest for Nourishment showed a farmer and his son hand in hand in a field beside a skinless cow that had the different cuts of beef labeled while crops surged from the ground all around, and in the top right corner in a patch of vivid blue felt ocean, a jubilant sailor was sitting on the prow of this ship waving a pineapple that he was importing. Oh, What a Feeling! featured seven roommates, in an apartment that looked a lot like the one I shared with Eloïse, each standing and reading a newly delivered letter and reacting with a different facial expression: grief, irritation, joy, amusement, curiosity, awe, confusion. The Life of the Mind depicted the famous author Charles Dickens hard at work in his book-lined study, scribbling in a pad while in a thought-bubble attached to his head by a wire, a giant lizard did battle with a giant monkey, and in my favorite, titled simply Sport! , every face of a city marathon’s starting pack was turned to watch England’s most famous cricketer, W. G. Grace, lob a rugby ball at Sir Roger Bannister, the famous sprinter, who seemed unlikely to catch the thing because he was thirty feet in the air, pole-vaulting. It was witty, it was weird . . . there was a poignancy theresomewhere . . . It sold for U.S. $50,000 to an American rubber magnate who told me, postcoitally, that he would install it in his