I.

New Orleans is the city where the object of my lust currently resides, but this is the subject of another story.

New Orleans is the city that is synonymous with Mardi Gras. I went to New Orleans once, a long time ago. I was a little girl. Red brick streets, gray pigeons, white powdered beignets, and hammered copper pots swim through my memories, as thick as the muddy chocolate I can still taste on my tongue. But I never went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

I lived in the Deep South for a time, in Mobile, Alabama. As far as I know, when I was growing up, Mobile was the only other city in the United States to celebrate this holiday. I learned in grade school that the first American observance was originally held there. It was known as Boeuf Gras. The image of a fatted cow decorated with flowers and paraded down the dirt streets, as the town’s little boys ran alongside, enchanted me. Native-born snobs took singular pride that their forbears had kicked this off before the American Revolution, and would mention this fact as if you hadn’t heard. Now called Mardi Gras, or better yet, Fat Tuesday, it was a time of feasting and revelry the week preceding Ash Wednesday and the Lent season which led to Easter, but no one wanted religion to enter into anything. While the New Orleans celebration was wild and infamously chaotic, sexual and alcohol-addled, back in 1967 the Mobile Mardi Gras was an affirmation for the genteel and well-heeled of their superior social status.

The old city’s Georgian brick homes were surrounded by colorful, yet tasteful, estate gardens and massive, ancient oaks festooned with Spanish moss. Banana trees, long needled pines, bamboo, gardenias, doves, owls, Saint Augustine grass, and fire ants thrived there. Armadillos scuttled through the nearby woods. Venus fly trap plants grew wild in the city park at the edge of the lake. My little sister was bitten by a wolf spider, swelling her arm to the size of a football. Once, while digging a hole to make fortifications for my imaginary world, a black widow spider crawled over my bare foot. I swatted it with a shovel and killed it.

One week in the spring, Mobile hosted the antiquated Azalea Festival. For this, firemen fried up oyster dinners. Reclusive estate owners threw open their gardens for public enjoyment along the so-called Azalea Trail. Ladies competed for ribbons in flower arranging, and their teenage daughters, tarted up in antebellum hoop skirts, vied for the title of Mobile’s Azalea Queen. The Queen and the Azalea Maids—her entourage, which included the disappointed girls who didn’t win the crown—rode on a float in the biggest Mardi Gras parade of the year. Their white gloved hands waved to me with mechanical exhaustion. With their flipped up hair, stiff smiles, and pastel flounced outfits, they looked just like beautiful Barbies to me. Back in that day, Barbies only came white.

My mother and father attended a Mardi Gras ball in Mobile. Being from Missouri, even from the formerly slave-holding counties called Little Dixie, they were considered northerners. How they wrangled an invitation to a Mardi Gras cotillion, I have never heard. Mother wore a floor length white chiffon gown with silver netting and rhinestones that night. I found it last summer in her attic after forty years. I put it on for an over-the-top dress-up tea party with my daughter. I used a plastic flower candle wreath for a crown to complete my ancient goddess look—Aphrodite or Inanna or whatever. I looked silly, but all those years ago Mother looked beautiful in that dress and elbow length white gloves as she and Daddy kissed us goodnight and stepped out. That image played and grew in my imagination next to the stories of Cinderella and the tragic Jackie Kennedy.

That night, our teenaged babysitter, cracking gum, gave us her version of evolutionary theory. She had brought a pamphlet of some kind that illustrated racial differentiation in skull size. My tow-headed sister and I examined her propaganda with wide eyes. Try as she might, I remained unconvinced about racial purity. I thought the head depicting the traits of the Caucasian race was absurdly ugly with his too-steep forehead and pinched face. I would take steps to insure my future children didn’t look like that.

This tutorial happened on the cusp of desegregation. There was considerable tension in the air, even for us school kids. I walked home after a class in Alabama state history with the idea in my head that the Ku Klux Klan had been the good guys. My teacher had given me this impression. My mother straightened me out then and there.

The next year I rode a bus for just over an hour to an all-new middle school. It had about six black kids for every hundred, but none at all in my lily-white classes. The races only rubbed elbows in Phys Ed. Then the 1969 Supreme Court decision came down that forced desegregation of the schools. So the following year, I rode fifteen minutes away on a bus to a formerly all black middle school, which was now 60% white and 40% black. The nearby Baptist congregation created a bible school in a god-awful big rush, moving whole buildings onto the church grounds over summer vacation, but the preacher’s son rode the bus to public school with me.

In this way I acquired a BS detector at a tender age.

They said the preacher’s son had a crush on me. That might have been true, but I fell in love with my black math teacher.


Aside from racist babysitters, for us children Fat Tuesday brought parades—many, many parades, an entire week of parades, which is a long time for children. Every mystic society sponsored a different spectacle. Le Krewe DeBienville, the Order of the Inca, Conde Cavalier, the Order of the Pharoahs, Neptune’s Daughter, Order of the Lashe, the Knights of Mobile, the Knights of Revelry. Our game was to throw paper streamers at the cars, floats, and people, hoping they would catch on them and flutter their way down the block like mermaid tresses. We also reached to catch shiny trinkets that came back our direction. Paper confetti and candy rained from the floats. Our neighbors’ lanky teenaged sons excelled in these interactive Mardi Gras sports. They snatched candy and beads and doubloons out of the evening air, often handing them over to my little sister. They never gave anything to me. I wore glasses and was too gawky and close to them in age for those boys to have any interest in spoiling me. My father put my sister on his shoulders. I wanted this too, but he said I was too big.

One night I wandered away from my parents. Famous people rolled by in convertibles, smiling and waving to the crowd. I couldn’t see. It might have been Debbie Reynolds, or it could have been the handsome actor who played Mannix on television. Even grown-ups wanted to catch some bauble, or at least a glance of a famous person. Now the much taller adults surrounded me, drowned me. I could smell their pungent odor, something I didn’t have yet. Bodies pressed tight against me, even taboo black bodies, lifting me up as they stretched for a catch. My feet became suspended off the ground in the chaotic press. Buoyed by a warm sea of torsos and limbs surging forward to gawk at the celebrities, my feet lifted off the pavement. In desperation I kicked, but the sky pulled me up. I closed my eyes.  I lifted off, over the garish parade, released from gravity by my imagination. It was Debbie Reynolds after all, smiling, waving. I could see her. I spread my arms like wings to try to avoid the magnolia trees that lined the boulevard, but I was inexperienced at flying and was whipped by branches. I wanted to fly higher, to clear the telephone poles, but it wasn’t easy, and I was afraid I would fall. From above, I could see my father. He seemed to have noticed that I had wandered off. I felt a little sorry for him, sensing his panic. I was panicked too, but I was equally pleased he had finally noticed something about me, noticed my absence.

As Debbie passed by, my Keds lowered back down to the pavement six or seven feet away from where I had stood, like a stranded boat carried down the beach by a storm surge.

It took one lifetime for a little girl’s panic to transmute. In four decades, desperate memory of the experience was sculpted into something useful. This evening became the first time I felt an ecstatic loss of control over my body—my first conscious memory of a strange pleasure.

I ran and told my parents what happened. They told me not to wander off.


II.

During Martedì Grasso in Vicenza, all the inhabitants wore expensive Italian shoes. All the women wore fur coats. The men wore fine suits. Olive green was in style while I was there, so everyone wore olive green.  Next season they would all have purchased equally fine clothing in a different color. The patrician couples strolled down the Corso Andrea Palladio, each with a well-scrubbed, well-behaved singleton child holding their hand. The child was dressed as a clown or a dog or a kitty cat or a princess. Each child held a sack filled with candy as they visited the shopkeepers along the corso. The evening was warm, and the light from the Veneto sunset tinged the handsome, well-proportioned buildings the color of Campari. Contrapuntally, I saw three thin men dressed in nuns’ habits sitting on the edge of a fountain. One held the string of a yellow balloon. They looked at me and smiled wanly. I didn’t speak their language, so I only smiled back.

I boarded a bus to go the short distance to Cittadella—a walled town—to see the Martedì Grasso celebration. It was festival time, but also commute hour, so the bus was packed, and I had to stand. As the bus took on more and more passengers, my arms were tightly pinned to my sides by the crowd. Like an iridescent beetle in a glass display box, I couldn’t move even a half an inch. As it happened, I was completely surrounded by men, all close to me in age.

In less than the time it took for the bus to set into motion, someone cupped my ass and pressed his fingers into my cunt through my blue jeans. I gasped with a sudden urge to leave my body, but my violator’s inescapable physical presence wouldn’t permit this. He kept me there—pinned and claustrophobic—with his insistent pressure.

I looked anxiously at all the men surrounding me, perspiring, disturbing them as I tried to twist around, searching each face with increasing franticness. Each face was slack with the boredom of public transit. I couldn’t detect any reaction, any trace of a reaction from any of the possible perpetrators. About eight men seemed to be close enough and all fell under the moist cloud of my suspicion.

The bus was devoid of human sounds. There were the mechanical noises of vehicle, the drone of engine, the screech of brakes, but no voices. The humanity on the bus was physically close, but we didn’t share the additional intimacy of language. I didn’t speak. I couldn’t speak the language of my violator, so what could I hope to communicate? I tried to work out in pidgin Italian “A bad man has his hand in my ass,” but my vocabulary was too limited. I later learned how to say “Leave me alone you ugly son of a whore,” brutto filo di putanna! But this type of outburst might have been mistaken as Tourette’s syndrome anyway. I remained mute, absurdly hoping my violator was the good looking man to my rear left.

We went three stops like that, like dogs frozen in union after copulation. His hand, my ass. I couldn’t move away from him until a number of people dismounted the bus. Perhaps he dismounted himself. I never knew who he was. Not a smirk, not a nod, not a furtive glance gave him up. I can think of him detachedly now. I remember the loss of control and a strange loss of volition.

Arriving in Cittadella, I put on a feathered mask to join the dancing in the street that surrounded the Roman fortifications. My hips undulated to pulsing American rock and roll echoing off the stone walls in a swelling cacophony. Later, I went to a private party and watched Italians eat tiny grilled birds, so small, each little life was only one bite.


III.

Venice was an exquisite, slowly decaying corpse of a city. It was a city of colored plaster, cracked plaster, fallen plaster, shutters, wrought iron, marble paving, stone carvings, cobblestones, loose stones, stone bridges, waterways, police boats, delivery boats, garbage boats, vaporetti, and reflected shimmering dancing light. It was a medieval city of great beauty built upon a sand bar in a malarial swamp next to the Adriatic Sea, and everyone knew it was sinking.

Venice was animated by a street theater of vast proportions at Carneval time.  Witches, sheiks, pubahs, beasts, princes, their valets, their soothsayers, their harem girls, dozens of Spumonti-bottle-costumed-tap-dancers looking like penises, balloon dancers, fan dancers, ship figureheads, women clad in sequin bikinis, more cross-dressing nuns, Pierrot, and Charlie Chaplin mingled, flirted, conversed, sipped coca colas, drank coffees, people-watched, pantomimed, posed—all these people, personas and paparazzi filling up Piazza San Marco.

The vast piazza was a swirl of saturated color and surrealism. I saw the famous beaked white mask, black shroud, and tricorn hat of the Carneval Bauta worn to disguise the face and voice for Dionysian hanky panky. I saw a transvestite Viking with helium balloons tied to his braided blonde pigtails. His locks bobbed and floated skyward, trailing after him when he walked. I saw the mask of the medico della peste, the plague doctor, with a long nose for packing with herbs to filter the stench of death. A woman in a dress of straw flowers curtsied shyly for a small crowd of on-lookers.

The tourists gawked, gaggled, and clicked-clicked-clicked. The tourists were French, not American, so I didn’t feel self-conscious that I was also a tourist. All these tourists, including me, had traveled to Venice without finery, without personas, without context. I was the same, but also an anomaly.

Masks were everywhere throughout the city, not just in Piazza San Marco. Canvas stands sold the historical masks of the theater, the Commedia dell'arte: Arlecchino, the clever servant, also the rich niggard, Pantalone, the sweet maid, Colombina, and the Pulchinetta. These masks also lived year-round on certain buildings in carved stone and conversed with Commedia and Tragedia across the narrow pedestrian passageways and with the angels on the roofs of nearby churches. Their chatter filled the narrow streets and clamored.

Very late at night in Piazza San Marco, an Adonis in gold body paint, shiny lamé and purple feathers assented to my pantomimed request to snap his portrait with a slight nod of his head. You don't wear the mask, but mask wears you. I demonstrated my adoration of his gilt body with my camera. I genuflected in artistic veneration, bending over to get better focus of his up-turned sequined shoes. Pastel confetti had fallen into the cracks between the paving stones at his feet.

Back in my hotel room, I forgot and almost swallowed tap water while brushing my teeth. After I closed the light and shut my eyes, I luxuriated in more thoughts of Adonis. I whispered my desire to the stone rooftop angels. They blew trumpet fanfares to their cousins across the Grand Canale in secret language.  They promised to look for him for me. I hoped they would find him and fly him to my balcony.

Walking in the early morning, before the mist had burnt off, I caught a glimpse of a woman in a mink jacket crossing a small footbridge in a residential quarter, wearing a half mask and the Venetian tricorn hat of the masque. I stopped in a café and ordered capputi, the word for a large white hat from a certain order of nuns, slang for cappuccino. The coffee was hot and bitter and sweet. It fortified me against the sea-born winter cold and drove away melancholy ghosts that still whispered in the Giotto. All the inhabitants of that sector had long since shipped away to Poland. A tiny child dressed as a brown bear chased a crowd of pigeons through the fog as vegetable vendors set up their stalls in the square.


IV.

At thirty, I traveled with my husband to visit his loquacious father. I dreaded these visits, which usually involved several days in Paris with Beau Père’s unctuous mistress (who was my age as well as my dress size). Not only did I have the feeling that the mistress might have slept with my husband at one point, but I was also expected to keep quiet about her existence when we spent the next week in Nice with Beau Père’s shrewish, alcoholic wife. Strict discretion is expected of a French daughter-in-law.

My father-in-law had an apartment on the Promenade des Anglais, just two blocks from the Negresco. In winter his telescope sat idly in the salon waiting for topless bathers to return to the pebble beaches across the wide boulevard. I went a la Américaine, not topless, knowing Beau Père might be watching me. Sometimes Florence and Yves drove in from Cannes to visit us, which was a relief to have friends our own age.

Although Nice is now French, the border city had been Italian for much of history. The principal city of the Cote d’Azur celebrated Carnaval with a parade: le Bataille des Fleurs. An American parade is a grand democratic gesture: half the town lines up on the sidewalks in lawn chairs, the other half of the town marches past. A parade in France is a different thing; it costs money to view the spectacle. The street is fenced and gated off.

My husband and I couldn’t go to the parade. We had to eat dinner. We always had to eat dinner in France, even if we were not hungry, because Beau Père always was. Sitting opposite Beau Père in Bistro Roman, I listened detachedly to the conversation. Contrary to popular American opinion, the French have plenty of chain restaurants and do not always discuss subjects any more scintillating than we do. I once fell completely sound asleep at a dinner party as Beau Père’s escort, due to the quality of the conversation, as well as the copious amount of red wine I consumed that evening. Now I sat as the good wife—la bonne femme—in another Bistro Romain, enduring rebellious heartburn and euro-kitsch décor as I missed the street party rollicking outside.

This evening I did not put much effort into following the conversation. I was outwardly content to draw with my fountain pen on the paper tabletop and check in from time to time on the subject at hand. I made little floor plans for Roman temples and market arcades. A fanciful Nolli map grew between the cheese plates and espresso demi-tasse cups. I sketched perky little Florence who was flattered. I sketched her lanky husband, Yves. I tried sketching my husband, but I thought of our heated argument the night before and stopped. We had argued about sex, our lack of, that is.

During all of this, I became aware that Beau Père was no longer dominating the dinner conversation as he normally did. He was preternaturally silent. For him, silence was a super human effort. I glanced at him. I caught him gazing at my nipples, which peeked through the white lace of my Austrian vintage blouse. The rose-brown areoles had become visible as the placket of white fern tendrils and lilies had slipped lower. A dumb expression came over his face as he licked his lips.

Curse Beau Père! Curse him for his audacity to look! Curse the audacity of the blouse to reveal! Curse the audacity of the nipples to display themselves! Curse the audacity of the girl who wears it! Curse the son to choose a girl such as this and never to fuck her properly!

After crème brûlée, we stumbled into the street just off the plaza where the Marché des Fleurs was held. Beau Père realized then that it was completely impossible to get to the train station.  There was only one grand avenue which headed to that part of the ville and it was clogged with the Bataille.  Threading through the medieval streets in the vielle ville would take over an hour and we would probably get lost. Fortunately, and unfortunately, the hour was late. The parade ground was now free to the general public. Beau Père declared that the only solution was to walk, counter to the direction of the parade, which now was in full swing.

I was astounded that the people who understood French fluently—my husband and his father, Yves and Florence, the waiter, everyone except for me—hadn’t thought of how we would get to the train station. And I didn’t trust my father-in-law. I knew he didn’t want us to leave.

Beau Père pushed his big belly into the crowd. Yves and Florence and the son and his American wife followed in his wake. Our quintet threaded its way through marching bands, edged past floats of clowns, and pressed past bored beauty queens with their smiles painted on. I was enchanted and hypnotized, pelted with confetti and drizzled with silly string.

The big feature of this particular parade was the assemblage of giant papier mâche people who walked by. Immobile grins, bulbous noses, too large eyeballs, there were dozens and dozens of enlarged Howdy Doodies walking toward me, arms extended like cartoon zombies on Saturday morning. Last in the small line of counter-paraders, I became separated from the others by one of these Howdy Doodies, like a small cow cut out by a quarter horse. I was blinded by the glare of lights. I moved right, he lurched. I moved left, he again lurched. I was trapped, stapled by his papier mâche arms as Beau Père and my husband and his friends continued their sojourn, yabbering away in French, unaware, apparently, that I had been expertly detained.

Howdy Doody fell upon me. I closed my eyes. I landed backward in a soft pile of pastel dots of confetti. I smelled cognac through the painted wire screen in his neck. Without any foreplay or je-ne-sais-quoi, his phallus penetrated me. I was impaled by his papier mâche penis, stiff, of course, from hardened paste. His petit bon homme was fabricated from the cardboard walls of a frozen juice can. A wad of unread pages torn from a book of Apollinaire love poems were stuffed into the end of the tube to complete the member. The fabrication was artfully covered in tissue paper and painted. Honestly, I didn’t know, I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it, sure enough. He couldn’t feel, of course. My cardboard sexual predator’s woody was only artifice, but he pumped away. I writhed and jiggled for him. We copulated in the street. His dark moist eyes blinked through the wire screen, even though much of it was closed with paint. He smiled maniacally, his eyes bulged. I would have felt threatened by his bulbous nose except that it bobbed half a meter over my head, hitting the pavement after each thrust.

The crowd jeered and cheered and we were buried in a pile of yellow, green, and pink dots of paper. The confetti entered and filled my open mouth as I cried out. Whether I cried from alarm, or in pleasure, was no longer clear, least of all to me. My noises were muffled by the colorful snowfall and drowned by drums and horns and the shouts of the drunken voyeurs. They had paid to see the spectacle.

After he finished, my lover stood up and, with French gallantry, helped me to my feet. The confetti brushed off easily. It was not as sticky as sperm. I kissed him on the nose in parting. Je vous en prie, Madame, he said in a rich African accent.

I flew above the parade in post-coital bliss. I looked from above at the defile, which ironically ended only a block past the point of my defilement. Adroitly avoiding the Linden trees lining the avenue of the parade route, I saw them from above, Beau Père and my spouse, kissing in front of the train station in paternal-filial love.

Reunited with my husband on the east bound platform, we climbed aboard the train and found seats next to tired French women, their feet swollen, their shopping bags stuffed, their nylons torn (but I suspect they were not first torn today), their dresses and sweaters a bit too tight for their ample features. Beau Père kissed his son goodbye one last time, and then me, a little too ardently for my taste.

Finally the train lurched forward. My husband fell asleep sitting up as the train took the commuters, shoppers, and revelers away toward the Italian border town of Ventimiglia. I was glad to leave France. I had had enough by now. I picked confetti out of my hair. I tasted a piece to see if it was salty.


V.

New Orleans is the city where the object of my lust currently resides, but this will be another colorful story. One of these post-dissolution days, I will fly to the Big Easy, and the Roi of the Krewe du Vieux will pull me up on the grandest of all Mardi Gras floats by my gloved, lily-white hand, smiling. The King of Fat Tuesday and Inanna will be pelted with confetti as we ooze past the spectacle of crowded humanity streaming by. He might shower me with silly string before I once more turn into a dove or an owl and fly off above the trees.