Wild Nights Read online

  I lay in the darkness, listening to her breathing, feeling the slow rhythm of her heart beneath my palm. I smiled, remembering how I first saw her. How she had walked out of the crowd and into my life.

  I have no idea what will happen tomorrow. I hope we’ll make love, perhaps even be a little shy with each other.

  Later, I’ll take her back to her sister’s to finish her short vacation. Then she’ll be gone. I smiled softly as I drifted off to a peaceful sleep.

  I hear Michigan is gorgeous in the fall.

  Eva

  Jean Byrnell

  Whenever I remember the night I met Eva, I think of the dress Gilbert designed for me. Gilbert and I became friends in the fall of 1962 when he was giving a costume design seminar at Stella Adler’s theater school in New York. He made his living designing drag. The gorgeous dresses he made sent a stream of Judy Garlands and Marlene Dietrichs out into the New York night.

  I was twenty-one when I finished my two years with Stella and I moved to Montreal. Gilbert paid me a visit and brought me an amazing, dark raspberry, silk dress. He said we needed to jump-start my life out of the poor student phase.

  The gift of the dress came the week that Dennis Russell, the person I hoped would soon be my boyfriend, had invited me to the Montreal opening of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Dennis had a contract to sing smaller roles with the Met during the season. The rest of the year he traveled and sang major roles out of New York. He was the leading tenor in this production of Carmina. I was desperate to jolt Dennis out of his gallant stage and lead him to something more intensely romantic. I hoped that with my new killer attitude, learned from Stella, and the raspberry dress, Dennis wouldn’t stand a chance.

  I did receive admiring looks from Dennis, who sang brilliantly. Following the performance we went to a reception at the home of the chairwoman of the Montreal Opera Society. The woman’s home was one of the old Montreal estates set back behind protective hedges. Polished antiques were carefully displayed against a background of vanilla carpet and Wedgwood green walls. The long buffet was covered with trays of small, edible, works of art. There were tiny cheeses in brilliant colors and a tray of Chinese vegetables arranged like lotus blossoms.

  Because of the dress I felt equal to the occasion. I was very aware that Dennis watched my progress as I smiled and mingled with the singers and opera goers. I stopped beside the smoked fish trays by a young man who told me he could have been the star of this production. He insisted he had the voice, but he couldn’t seem to memorize the roles. He was sure that they would let him hold the score in some future production. I was relieved when Dennis propelled me into a small sunroom that opened off the main hall.

  “Eva Deschampes insists on meeting you,” he whispered.

  I smiled because old ladies liked me. I often went to parties with high hopes of meeting mister right and ended up spending most of the evening talking to somebody’s grandmother.

  The woman standing in the sunroom was not an old lady. She was not like any opera society chairperson I had ever met. Eva Deschampes was in her mid thirties. She was tall and silver blond. Her beautiful, serious blue eyes were fixed on me.

  “I’m so very glad to meet you,” she said with an accent I remembered from a Swedish art film.

  “Thank you for inviting me. I love Carl Orff.” My mind raced for something sophisticated to say.

  “Jeannie is here in Montreal looking for work as an actress,” Dennis said. That sounded ridiculous. People looking for work as an actress were usually pathetic unless they recently completed a major run on Broadway.

  “I did a little acting in Copenhagen when I was in high school,” Eva volunteered. She was Danish not Swedish. “I was terrible but I had a crush on the person who was playing the lead so it didn’t matter.” She laughed.

  “You must have been wonderful. I wish we could have seen you.” Dennis was beginning to burble.

  He was finding it hard to maintain his composure while he was in this elegant woman’s company. I felt a jealous pricking at my skin. This was not how the evening was supposed to go.

  Eva asked Dennis how he came to sing at the Met and he took a breath and began to talk about his favorite subject. I thought I might as well begin to clear up dirty plates or pick the dead leaves from the plants in the sunroom windows. Certainly neither of them would notice what I was doing. Eventually Eva was called away by her husband. I followed Dennis to the living room where he was quickly surrounded by earnest and adoring opera patrons.

  I am not sure whether it was the smoked salmon on the buffet that gave me the terrible headache or the disappointment at not being the center of Dennis Russell’s world. I thought that if I could find a bathroom I could raid the medicine cabinet for aspirin.

  Down a short hallway that led from the dining room were swinging doors to the kitchen. I looked; the room was empty and mercifully quiet. I found a clean glass from a cupboard, got some water from the tap and sat with it at one of the long white counters.

  “You’re needing a little time away from the talk, talk, talk?”

  Eva had come into the room and was standing behind me. I immediately felt awkward. I shouldn’t have been helping myself in her kitchen.

  “Yes, I guess I do.”

  “Me too,” she said, and sat down on the stool beside me. “You know Jeannie, I think that is one of the most beautiful dresses I have ever seen and the person wearing it could stop my heart.”

  I blushed. I don’t usually blush because I’m not fair, but right then, I could feel the color rise from my chest and change my face to Pepto Bismol pink. I stumbled out a thank you and looked at her more carefully. She was wearing a pair of sleek, black pants and a white blouse, which she wore unbuttoned in order to show three gold chains lying against her pale skin. I could just make out her nipples through the layers of silk blouse and lingerie.

  “Have you gone with Dennis for a long while?” she asked. “He is such an interesting man.”

  “Off and on I suppose,” I said. The jealousy was jabbing at my stomach this time but it wasn’t clear to me why I was jealous. I think I wanted Eva Deschampes’ exclusive attention as much as I wanted Dennis’s.

  We sat for some time in the kitchen. She asked me about my relationship with Dennis and my time with Stella Adler. I found out she had two sons at boarding school. She took me into the basement and introduced me to her elderly German shepherd before she was called back to her guests. I felt honored she had taken so much time with me.

  She ushered me back into her living room and introduced me to a man who was actually looking for his wife and had little patience for party chatter. As soon as he backed away from me I looked for Dennis. I wandered from drink table to chesterfield back to the dining room without settling into conversation with anybody. Dennis was nowhere in sight. I saw two women descending the big staircase into the front hall. I hadn’t asked Eva for aspirin and the headache was now taking over my life. I was certain these women, who were wearing freshly applied lipstick, must have come from a second-floor bathroom. I went up the stairs and found it at the end of the hall.

  I opened the mirrored cabinet above the sink but there was only a row of extra soaps and some lotion on its narrow shelves. I went pee and sat with my head in my hands until I heard somebody outside the bathroom door. I figured they were waiting for a turn so I washed quickly and opened the door. It was Eva.

  “Are you all right?” she asked quietly.

  “Just a bit of a headache. I have to confess I was scrounging for aspirin,” I said.

  She looked at me as if she were puzzled.

  “In your medicine cabinet.”

  She nodded and smiled at me. My hands began to tremble. “Maybe I can help, I’m pretty good at getting rid of headaches.” She put out her hand and led me into a bedroom. It was a large, peach-colored room with a woven Persian bedspread. There wasn’t anything personal on the dresser or on the tables so I assumed it was a guestroom.

  She sat on
the bed and I sat beside her, facing the wall. Her fingers found the back of my neck. She stroked and probed. She found the pain; I moaned. She pushed her fingers so deeply into the place that hurt, I thought I would cry and then she pulled back. She pushed into the pain again and again until I felt euphoric. As my body relaxed she kissed my neck.

  “No, please . . . don’t.”

  She found my mouth. This was the first time I had really been kissed by a soft mouth. There were women who made love to me. Lovely women who came from my imagination and disappeared the moment I fell asleep. I didn’t allow them to surface during the day and I didn’t ask questions about the reason I found them so compelling, but a woman would always come when I was alone in the dark. Several times in my life a man had been lying in the bed beside me, exhausted after his frantic gyrations, but my orgasm always came much later, coaxed to its peak by a woman I was never able to touch. Now I could smell a woman’s spice and floral perfume. I could feel her skin. This was a person, pushing the straps of my dress away from my shoulders. I was horrified.

  “I just want to make love to you,” Eva said quietly.

  I was frozen.

  She pulled me up on the bed and switched off the light. I murmured ‘no’ as I closed my eyes and listened to her unbutton her blouse. I felt her naked body push up against me. I didn’t want to be this, not in real life, but it seemed impossible to stop. Although I gently pushed her to move away, my body was aching for her to make love to me. The fire between my legs put an end to my confusion.

  Eva talked to me. She murmured exactly what she was going to do as if she was afraid that if she startled me badly I would run. “Sweet girl, I’m going to kiss you there; hold my hand; yes, that’s it . . . now.” I could feel her fingers and kisses begin at my belly and travel with terrible slowness to where I waited. I watched her silvery hair come loose and brush my body with its softness as she kissed me.

  I remember the startling realization of her tongue and how carefully it explored the country of my clitoris. Although that night I didn’t actually know the word clitoris. In 1964 I had only heard the word orgasm once or twice. Once was when a jazz singer boasted he had given me one, when what he really had done was scare the hell out of me. There were few words spoken that related to a woman’s pleasure in middle-class 1964.

  Her tongue and hands became the center of the world until I lingered for a moment on that exquisite brink of orgasm and then let go.

  When I lay in her arms I had a moment when I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to make her happy. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to do for her what she had done for me. It is astounding how quickly you learn. My fingers were accustomed to the feel of a vagina. It was familiar ground. I found her breasts with my mouth as my fingers coaxed her clitoris to become round and plump. I kissed her breasts and sucked her nipples as if I had finally come home. Eva’s poise began to dissolve. I pulled away and watched her beautiful face relax, and tears fill her eyes.

  I made circles in her pale, pubic hair with my tongue. I licked it slowly until it shone in the light coming through the window from the street lamp. She moaned and I lay on top of her, pushing myself onto her pubic bone to find some relief from the new ache that was growing inside me. She pushed me back and raised herself up on her arm. She took my hand in her own and pushed it gently up and down in the valley of my own cunt. She watched as I felt myself until another orgasm began to swell inside of me and I fell on her with a cry of pleasure.

  I raised her hips in my hands and buried my face in her wet mystery. I remember it so well. She smelled like the summer sea. I took her clitoris in my mouth and I sucked until I was filled with her. She began to whisper demands as she came to the edge, her clitoris was firm in my mouth and I pulled back. I kissed the white skin between her thighs. She whimpered and begged me to love her. I took her in my mouth again and again. The power I felt was outrageous. Finally, we were at the place where there was no going back and I circled her with my tongue until her orgasm shook us both. I know the sounds that came from us were dangerously loud before we lay quietly in each other’s arms.

  I was drifting close to sleep when she took my face in her hands. “Please, put your number in the guestbook in the hall. I need to call you tomorrow. Please, don’t forget,” she said as she pulled on her clothes and quietly shut the door leaving me by myself.

  I was sure everybody was staring at me when I came into the living room but it seemed nobody had missed me. Dennis was happily talking to Ronald Deschampes, Eva’s husband.

  “I’ve been telling Ronald about your acting career, that you had a part on Broadway while you were still in theater school.”

  “It was a very small part.” I smiled as Ronald shook my shaking hand.

  “You must have been enchanting,” he said.

  Before we left, I slipped into the foyer and put my address and phone number in the blue guestbook on the hall table. In the comments column I wrote, “Thank you.”

  How can I describe the terror when I went to my door at noon the next day to find Ronald Deschampes standing with a paper bag and a bottle of wine? I knew he had come to kill me.

  As it turned out he didn’t come to kill me. He had come to make a contract. He told me because he found me attractive he would pay my rent, find me work in the theater in Montreal, and I would be his mistress. I am sure I wouldn’t have believed him if he had been the first middle-aged man to offer me rent for sex. I would have assumed he was playing a horrible joke. He wasn’t the first, and so I listened to him for a few minutes; declined his offer as politely as I could and showed him to the door. I kept the bottle of wine and bag of croissants.

  When I locked the door behind him I sank down on the floor to cry. I cried and laughed at the absurdity and cried again. I wondered if Eva would call and if I would I tell her about her husband’s proposition. Did she know he did this kind of thing? Would I allow Eva to make love to me again? Was I a lesbian? Would I disappear into that dark world nobody talks about, childless, and reviled by everybody I had once known?

  At three in the afternoon she appeared at my door. I told her immediately that Ronald had paid me a visit. She just smiled and shook her head. We sat looking out my window and talked until it was dark. We made love. We walked up the street and looked at the city lights from Mount Royal. I was so happy.

  Being a lesbian in Canada in 1964 was against the law. If Eva’s marriage ended because she was in love with a woman, her beautiful boys would certainly have been taken away from her. I began to tell lies to myself and to other people. The lies made patterns that criss-crossed everything I did. For nine months Eva and I loved each other. We were ecstatic and miserable in turn. One evening while she and I were having dinner in a restaurant we began to talk about the boys’ Easter vacation and thinking about her sons gave me a surge of resolve. I knew it wouldn’t last so I had to act quickly. I told her I was leaving because the risks we were taking were too great. I left the restaurant, took a taxi to my apartment, paid my landlady, packed a few things, got on a plane and never saw her again.

  Thirty years and two heterosexual marriages passed before another woman made love to me. How lucky I am that in that thirty years there were people more daring than I am who spoke out. They created an environment where I can live openly with the love of my life. My partner Liz and I have been happy for sixteen years. I hope Eva fared as well.

  Solo Hike

  Bliss

  The summer camp was my parents’ idea. They wanted me to spend more time with kids my own age. I wasn’t so sure about it, but looking back at the last two months, I’d had a great time so far. Like an Outward Bound program, the out-camping adventures were demanding and forced us to our limits—mind, body and spirit. We’d hiked on the Appalachian Trail, canoed on the boundary waters and bicycled in the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont. The days were filled with strenuous physical activity that should have brought exhausted slumber, but for me, Elise was at the heart of my dreams.
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br />   Genuinely kindhearted and pretty, Elise was popular with everyone. Shorter than me and curvy, she had tawny, shoulder-length hair that fell in soft waves and a heart-shaped face bronzed by the sun. Gray-blue eyes changed with her moods, and her pale pink mouth looked so very kissable.

  I often found myself staring at her lips. She caught me once, capturing my gaze as I memorized her features, and she smiled at me. A sweet, innocent smile that made me feel like a hungry wolf to her lamb. I was mortified. Still, I sensed Elise was different with me than she was with everyone else. Of course, that was probably just my imagination working overtime again . . . but then again, maybe it wasn’t.

  I didn’t expect anything for my sixteenth birthday, but Elise set up a party for me in July. The party was fun, but I wanted Elise to myself. She got me when others didn’t, she laughed at my jokes, and she touched me, a lot. Whenever I thought about her, my heart sped up, my mouth got dry and my palms got damp.

  It was easy to daydream while bicycling, and Elise had been my favorite topic over the last 350 miles. I couldn’t stop thinking about how she would feel in my arms . . . how soft her lips would be under mine. I was so lost in my fantasy that I nearly missed the turn to the cabin we would be staying in for the next few days. As I slowed in the driveway, I could see four tents already up. I hoped we’d be sleeping in the cabin, but it appeared that was not part of the plan.

  Elise and a friend, Annie, greeted me as I stopped the bike and stepped off with rubbery legs. Elise reached out to steady me; her touch sent a spark through my body.

  “You had a tough day,” she said. “A broken chain this morning, and the heaviest load. You really must have pushed to get here, Lou. You did good.”

  I smiled tiredly. “Please tell me there’s a shower with real hot water in the cabin.” They both shook their heads. I was crushed. Elise immediately gave me a hug that made me shudder with want as more sparks exploded throughout my nervous system.