One summer afternoon he’d been in his apartment, writing letters to Alice and Polly, one to Doyle and Mary, as well as notes on the backs of picture postcards for his granddaughters. They were the first he’d sent although composing them had proved easier than he’d feared. He made no mention of Lydia, even if she was a silent presence in his descriptions of places he’d been, things he’d seen, and within his final line in all the letters, the same for each—I’m feeling myself somewhat restored, regaining a hold on life did not feel to be an act of contrivance so much as one of kind omission. When a knock came at his door, an hotel bellman with a note from Lydia, whom he was already planning to meet for dinner. She’d heard of something that might be interesting that evening and suggested he consider a bit of casual dash for his attire. And then, as if knowing this might confuse him, she’d added, mischievously—Boat shoes? He considered this, smiling, knowing it wasn’t intended as a joke. After he’d walked down to send the letters and postcards he returned and bathed, then reviewed his wardrobe. Casual dash. Indeed. Besides her own example of careless sensual elegance about all he had to go on were the evenings they’d gone to Le Jas where he’d indeed felt overdressed, almost stuffy but for the quality of his clothes. It was a challenge—he had to pass muster for dinner, wherever that might be. And then it came to him. He’d dress as he wanted and she’d know exactly where to eat before this hinted adventure.
He met her at the Dam, outside the Krasnapolsky at the appointed hour. She looked him up and down. He was wearing his boat shoes, canary trousers, an almost smoky rose shirt, a black tie with muted gold paisley patterns and over that his only sport coat, a soft dark grey drape. He felt foolish but had done his best. It helped but little that she was in an oyster-shell sheath and nude stockings, black heels and a small black turban tipped and pinned in place. But she smiled and kissed his cheeks, then stood back at arm’s length and studied him.
“You’re missing one thing. Come quick.” He caught up her hand as she was off, into the midst of the square where she found a flower stall and left him stranded a moment as she waded through and he took delight in that moment, watching her intent and nimble and then she came forth holding a single dahlia, a crimson so deep as to be near black, which she tucked into his jacket lapel and then as if a magic trick, removed a straight pin from her mouth to hold the bloom in place.
“Where’d you get the pin?”
“I suspected you might need a flower.” She then looked over the square toward the looming Koninklijk Palace. “I heard the family is there just now. Shall we drop in?”
“You can’t be serious.” Somehow suspecting that she very well could be.
She dropped into a stagy British accent and said, “Wot’s the matter, luv? Scared of them royals, are ya? It might be yer chance, ya know. That Princess Juliana, she’s growin in to quite the fine lit-uhl piece, word ’as it. Might take a shine to ya. She be next up to the throwin. Queen-consort or wot, ya could be.”
They ate in one of the old brown bars, his first time in one. They drank the thimbles of gin chilled to a viscous deliberation, the genial bowls of soup and hunks of bread comforting, reassuring, and the variety of pickled fish that came not as condiments but as small helpings, some salty with brine, other hot and fiery, floating in red oil and pepper flakes, others in a light cream, were reward unto themselves. Every other person within was in working man’s clothes—in fact Lydia and one older woman far down the bar were the only women in the room. Glances came their way but Lydia was oblivious to them and Henry easily became so, mildly infatuated with the gin, which Lydia explained to him. “Always straight, very cold and small.”
It made sense to him.
They lingered and for a time Lydia struck up a conversation with the old man behind the bar, some version of bartender, waiter and perhaps cook—when they’d ordered their food he’d disappeared for long enough stretches so that more than once one of the old men seated at the bar would go back around and help himself to a refill but always leaving his empty glass beside the new one. Henry could not yet keep up with rapid Dutch, still struggling to make the transition from his scholar’s German. But he was happy with the Genever and any vestige of worry over his attire was long gone.
Finally Lydia turned, touched his knee and said, “Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Immensely. You were correct in your note. This is superb. Interesting was not quite the right word.” Thinking that the outrageous outfits for this place was simply part of Lydia.
She smiled. “You’re right. I do love these places. And they’re all over the city, you just have to know what to look for. But Henry. This is the prelude. We’re killing time.”
It was dark when they went out, although the sky was lit with the final slow threads of twilight. They walked along the pretty Rokin and then she led him closer to the buildings, clearly searching one of those narrow alleys.
“The Nes,” she said. “We cross over that way, where all the theatres are. But we don’t quite get there. I have to find just the right alley. I know it. I do. At least I will when I see it.”
He finally asked the question of the night. “So where exactly are we going?”
She stopped, turned and dug in a small gold chain-mail handbag for her cigarettes. He waited and when she was smoking, she thoughtfully blew off a smoke ring and then another that in the still air sailed through the first. “We’re not in the center of the world, Henry. Which I rather like, obviously. But there are interesting things going on in Paris and now in Berlin, I hear. But we’re also not, forgive me, in Elmira, New York. So things dribble in here. That jazz club, that’s a good place. Very hot. So tonight, tonight we see something else. It could be as good as the jazz or a homemade confection, an imitation of something somewhere else. But either way, as I said, did I say this in my note? It should at least be interesting.”
It was small on the outside, with windows painted in blue and black stripes and outside a string of tiny blue electric lights above the black door. The man at the door was muscled and tall with a shaved head and a sleeveless undershirt died blue, baggy oversized black trousers that bunched above his working-man boots. A thin goatee, also blue, sprouted from his chin. He watched them approach with something close to loathing. Then stepped around the head of the line, his face split into a smile.
“Ly-dee! Is that you?”
“Who else, Denis?”
“Ah, love,” he said and kissed her hand. “So you came to this. And you brought a friend!”
“Oh, yes, Denis. My dear friend Henry.”
“Henri?” A ripple of curiosity flowed over the man’s face, Henry watching the blue goatee quiver. Then Denis said, “Ah, Henk! Correct? Henk. The one who has stolen Ly-dee so much from us! Welcome, welcome. Come with me.” And extended a muscled arm, almost a jab toward Henry.
Henry shook hands and then all three of them passed back around the waiting people and Denis opened the door and they were inside. Into blackness with a small stage lit by a single hot wide-angle, gas powered footlight. There were no chairs but planks on blocks and two women wearing only tight black short shorts and obvious wigs of shiny black hair circulated with trays holding small glasses in size somewhere between a cordial and a small wine glass, the cups holding an opaque greenish white liquid. Their bare breasts had yellow circles painted around them. Lydia stepped and took two of the glasses and holding them, moved toward a small opening in the middle row of rough seats.
She handed him a glass. “Sip it very slowly,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Shhh, love,” she said. “It’s about to begin.”
People came in around them and the seats filled. He sipped the drink, almost medicinal, flowery with herbs, recalling him of the hard licorice drops of his youth. Almost immediately something ashen spread through his limbs and up into his brain and the room shifted and seemed to brighten in his focus. Soon the two women came upon the stage holding baskets over one arm—with the other hand they tossed out slow floating petals of flowers that were the exact color of the flower in his lapel, although these petals were different, how he couldn’t tell. At first he thought they might be silk instead of real but then as the women continued and the layers grew the scent also filled the room. A man in blackface came onto the stage wearing a bass drum strapped over his bare chest and began to beat a slow sad tattoo just as Henry realized he was not a minstrel but a naked negro, his face and limbs and torso striped and dotted with white paint, his penis painted white but shrunk tight above his testicles below the brass fittings of the drum. He held mallets and as he stood the force of his beat grew and grew, the mallets blurring in the air and deep within Henry’s head. Then the man turned, his back to the audience, the only white paint here on his upper arms, his buttocks tight as he slowed to a ponderous dragging and off-beat striking of the drum. As if he no longer knew how to play but knew he must.
This discordant slowed booming grew, almost too great to bear but impossible to escape. Henry drank a bit more from the fragile glass and within moments the slowed chance rhythm was absolutely perfect.
Girls floated onto the stage. These not the young women of earlier but true girls of twelve or fourteen. Each nude but wrapped in the lightest of gauze, filmy material more tease than covering, their small nipples protrudent, the swell of their buttocks and curve of their waists and legs, the patches between their legs visible. Their motion was constant, fluid but if choreographed Henry could not discern a pattern—more as if each girl had some twining vinelike route to follow independent of the others, their arms swinging up with curved wrists, hands pointed birdlike although there must’ve been a larger plan as none collided or touched another and then without his predicting or seeing it coming the girls had encircled the drummer—only then did Henry realize the slowed drumbeats had stopped and the sound was duplicated and changed by the stamp of feet in the same discordant pattern, the feet stamping and swishing as brushes through the layered petals upon the stage floor, the girls now pressed together with arms raised, bodies straining upward as if to fly, making a cone of white light around the drummer no longer visible and then slowly the cone came down, down, down, the drummer hidden beneath until the girls no longer girls but some joined diaphanous female creature which just as it seemed could go no lower each again split from the cone and rolled outward, opening as individual petals of a flower, rolling in sinuous controlled backward somersaults to reveal the black man rising again, the drum gone, disappeared, his body cloaked from the neck down in an indigo robe and upon his face a mask of giant yellow eyes above an extending broad black bird’s beak, red and blue ostrich feathers rising high above those eyes and the girls now were crawling, hauling themselves with great effort, the legs writhing as if only their arms worked toward the wings of the stage and then the stark white backdrop that Henry had thought was painted brick rose as the bird/man dropped onto the audience floor and ran swiftly through the seats and out the street door, while at the rear of the stage before what Henry thought was a real brick wall, another cacophony began, five men seated, one at an upright piano, one with a banjo, one a mandolin, one with a clarinet and one, outlandishly with a bow and a saw, a shining new metal saw of the sort a carpenter cuts planks with, the saw tip caught against one foot so the saw blade was bent and the man bowed against the blunt edge while maneuvering the tension of the saw by depressing or lifting the handle, the sound a tremulous high-pitched endless wavering sigh of sound, not unpleasant to the ears and blending with the very fast ragtime the other men were pounding out—those men dressed in the bowler hats and checkered three-piece suits of decades before and then all began to sing and he realized they were playing breakneck versions of minstrel songs, singing in high pitched voices, the banjo flailing furiously, the quavering saw growing ever higher and higher and then the young girls were back, now in high leather boots, bright yellow riding breeches and buttoned black velvet vests, all now with long hair down as they began a stylized romp, flitting and swinging each other by the elbows, boots stamping hard to meet the thumping rhythm of the piano in elaborate parody of a country dance Henry thought and then the two older women, still in their shorts and wigs, came out with riding crops and began to swat at the girls and, fairly enough, Henry thought, the musicians as well....
Outside the anonymous cabaret or whatever it was Henry had waited off to the side while Lydia briefly mingled. He was in a curious condition, intoxicated, yet certainly not drunk but rather as if some element of what he’d just witnessed yet infused him. Reverberations of the saw jangled waves in his mind and also his vision. There seemed an unusual luminescence about not only the people but the fittings and structures of the buildings around him. Then Lydia retrieved him and they walked along the Nes, slowly entering a greater throng from the larger theatres with illuminated marquees. The night was warm, their passage through it languid, careless. They were holding hands, the connection just right, needed it seemed as both wandered a bit in their walking. Untethered he could image a sudden and embarrassing lurch but any closer, arms around each other, could be equally disastrous.
“What did you think?”
“What was that?”
“Umm.” She tipped her face toward him, the yellow electric lights throwing shadows of color over her face. “A good effort, I’d suppose. A bit raw but that may not only have been part of the charm, but intentional. It lacked a bit of the spectacle but that might’ve been the point. Absurdity is difficult to pull off because too much loses the point and yet too little feels strained. Oh! But I wanted to know what you thought.”
“My question,” he said, knowing his tone was arched from his uncertainty but unable to refrain or redirect himself tonight. “My question, although not without interest in the performance or spectacle we just witnessed, but my question was what exactly was that beverage?”
“Absinthe. I should’ve warned you. Are you not familiar with it? No, of course you’re not. I’m sorry. Are you all right? It can overwhelm a bit.”
“No, I’m quite fine. Better now I suppose. Do you consume it regularly?”
“I’ve had it before. Like most things, it has its time and place.”
“I’d certainly say that was one of them.”
“Precisely. But I do apologize. I should have warned you. I’m naughty, I suppose. Perhaps I should have absconded with one of those crops, for later.”
“Lydia.”
She looked at him, the bright sprite. “Every backside can do with a good tender warming from time to time. If you haven’t tried it, don’t condemn the idea. But, Henry, what did you think?”
After a bit of walking he said, “It was very strange. Somewhat like a dream where things are vivid and make full sense while they’re occurring but when you wake the order of it all is a bit confused. And the sense drains away.”
“Quite good,” she said. “Certainly something of what they were trying to achieve. Pressing boundaries, that sort of thing. I saw quite a bit of it in Paris last winter. Some much more sophisticated, of course. But then there’s the bitchy part, as well. People form factions, take sides, apply names to different ideas and soon the raw gist is lost and it all becomes a failure or success of a philosophy. Which makes for wonderful arguments but hurts the work, eventually.”
“So you consider it art?”
She looked at him. “Until it becomes pure commerce, yes. Didn’t it shake you up and make you think about things a bit differently? Of course it did. Now, what do you say? How about a coffee?”
“That’s an excellent idea.”
“And then,” she paused. “I have another idea.”
“Jesus,” he said. “Lydia.”
“That’s my name,” she said, laughing.
An hour later he sat in a stuffed chair, looking down on the nighttime fever of the Dam. He had a glass of wine draped down in one hand, the bottle on a lamp-lit table across the bed, waiting for her to come from the bath. His shoes and jacket were off, his tie rolled into a jacket pocket, his shirt opened a couple of buttons down his chest. The dahlia from his lapel lay on the sideboard dresser, near black in the shadow, the door to the bath and dressing room ajar, the scent of soaps swimming in the air. The coffee and then the wine helped regain himself and he was calm, easy, relaxed. Waiting for the woman to come from her bath. He again recalled the nudity of the young girls and thought But we are born sexual, without it we’d be nothing at all. He tasted the wine, a dense dark slow velvet in his mouth and throat.
She came naked and rosy from the bath and stood before him, then slowly turned so her back, her spine and shoulderblades like wings under her skin dropping down to the sudden white of her buttocks and then her thighs and legs. He stood and held her shoulders, his face a moment in the damp hair at her nape, then turned her toward him.