In 1920s Europe, Ben falls in love with Sandy, a rather unconventional woman. On their honeymoon in the South of France, she fulfills a fantasy of his.
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September 12, 1925
The tree had been there for more seasons than anyone could recall, a casualty of some long-forgotten storm, tossed in the river until it was deposited on the sand bar as the water receded. Subsequent currents had failed to dislodge it but had scoured the bark from the tree, leaving the wood to bleach in the sun until it was white. The full moon overhead illuminated its prone form. A match flickered for a second and started a fire in front of the tree. A second match flared, and a second small fire started to the left of the first. Both caught up into campfire sized blazes, illuminating the front of the downed tree with a warm glow to contrast the starkly white upper surface. The crowd became silent and unmoving. The only sound was the gentle gurgling of the river.
Just barely heard over the river, from the other bank, a piano started to play. The melody was familiar, but Ben couldn't name it. Two women emerged from behind the fires and moved toward the center, each mirroring the steps of the other. They wore costumes that seemed to come from an ancient Greek play, a tunic made of thin flowing material, over the shoulders, tied with a rope at the waist, but open at the sides. They both had bare feet.
After half a minute, they began to move to the music. The pace was a rondo, and their feet moved quickly, their arms, bodies, and heads, twirled in opposites. A mirrored dance, almost a pas de deux, the dancers acknowledging each other's presence, relating but never touching. Their movements were modern, almost walking and running steps, controlled, but far from classical ballet. Their legs and feet showed control, tension, and strength; their hands and arms seemed relaxed and unstrained.
The dance went on for five or six minutes, a time that stood still for the audience and finished long before anyone was ready. With the last bars of the music, both dancers turned and disappeared over the tree into darkness. The only sound for several long seconds was the gurgle of water on the rocks. One person started to applaud, and the crowd awakened from the spell the dancers had cast.
Applause, shouts of "Bravo!", even whistles came from all along the riverbank, revealing that the crowd was far more extensive than Ben had realized. Some were sitting on blankets; most were leaning on trees or just standing. He stood alone in the crowd, watching the watchers and the dancers. There were a few women from the university with their dates, a few with small groups of friends, but the men outnumbered the women at least four to one. Watching people was a favorite activity for Ben. For him, observing the reactions of the onlookers was almost as exciting to him as watching the dance, which was far more sensuous than anything he'd ever seen. He couldn't tell in the distance and the darkness, but he thought perhaps the women dancing were nude under the costumes, there were at least no lines indicating undergarments that he could see.
There were three more dances to classical piano pieces, Brahms and Beethoven. A break followed the last dance, then two black-clad figures moved behind the fires and dropped heavy canvases over them, extinguishing them and leaving a pall of smoke floating over the sand bar. The gentlest of spring breezes carried away the smoke, and the crowd became aware of a prone dancer lying in front of the tree. The piano started, and slowly the dancer stood upright and began to dance. Her short dark hair moved with her dress, black against the white of the tree. Less visible in the moonlight, the other dancer began to move in sequence with her but on top of the tree. A white cloth wrapped her head, leaving none of her hair exposed. Other than that, she was nude. At least she seemed to be. Ben looked for a small triangular patch of dark hair that would indicate she was indeed nude but saw none. He thought she must be wearing a bodysuit, but the moonlight clearly outlined her muscular buttocks. He heard several sharp intakes of breath from some of the women and saw movement among a couple of the men, indicating some degree of arousal and a bit of discomfort. The rest of the crowd was mesmerized by the dual movements of the women. One was fully costumed ankle to the wrist in flowing cloth, the other nude, Their movements in perfect opposite synchronization with the music. They danced for the entire piece, one on the sand, one on the tree. In the end, the one on the sand reached up to the one on the tree, held both hands, and was lifted onto the tree. They acknowledged the crowd with a nod rather than a curtsey or a bow and disappeared behind the tree.
Nothing else was seen from the other side of the river. Some of the crowd began to move up the bank through the trees to the road above. Ben stood motionless beside the tree. He first leaned against when he got there. He was aware of some of the dim shapes of couples around him, beginning to react with each other to what they had just seen. The beauty of the dance camouflaged the high eroticism of the movements and bodies on the other bank. Ben became aware of his arousal and felt the need to urinate. He clamped the muscles in his groin to keep from wetting himself on the climb and was surprised with an ejaculation. He climbed the bank trying to plan his path back to his room so he wouldn't be seen.
~~~
September 14, 1925
Luisito stopped by the open door. "Hey, Ben. Are you coming with us?"
"Where?"
"The Chancellor has a party in the ballroom of the old theater for all the students. Fancy dress. Should be lots of new girls there. Come on."
"Hmm. All right, give me a few minutes to find my tie."
Ben got up from the chair and walked to the closet. He looked at his clothes and picked the dinner jacket and pants. He was thankful he didn't have to wear the pants from two nights before. He hadn't gotten them cleaned since his surprise on the way back from watching the dancers at the river. He still didn't know anything about that event. There were many rumors about the dance, and the women performing, but no one seemed to have a definitive idea. Or, if they did, it was drowned out by all the other theories. Still, he couldn't get the night out of his head. Nor could he manage to stop the involuntary reaction in his loins every time he thought about the dancing girls, and the couples watching them and expressing their excitement by touching, kissing, and some making love right in the trees lining the banks. He wasn't sure which he liked more, watching the dancers or the people.
He dressed, and when Luisito returned, they helped each other master the intricacies of the bow tie. They joked that it was one of the marks of a university graduate if he could tie his own bow tie. Getting it straight seemed to require that, anyway.
Five other men met them at the front door. Ben recognized most of them but didn't know their names. He figured that would come as the night progressed. He wasn't very good with names, anyway.
The September air was fresh but still soft. A nearly full moon just above the large old trees that lined the curving path to the theater illuminated their way. The student reception was to be held in the ballroom of the theater. He had never seen it since he had just transferred to the university from a smaller college on the coast that was all male and had no real sponsored social life. He was excited at the prospect.
The exterior of the building was a dark grey granite, with a somewhat foreboding shape from the middle of the last century, but even that was a throwback to earlier designs. The oak doors were over a meter wide and in pairs and looked at least four meters high. There were three pairs across the front of the building, but the steady stream of people was entering using the pair on the left, which were held open with iron hooks set in the stone steps.
They entered the hall and continued to another pair of doors on the left, much less massive than the entrance doors. Through these doors a small dimly lit corridor with a ceiling Ben felt he could touch, dimly lit, compressed the senses, and made him feel large in a tiny room. Another small opening without doors led to the ballroom. He was unprepared for the explosion of space when he emerged into the room. The crowd gathered there was dwarfed by the space and moved comfortably through the room. In the far corner, a band was playing some of the jazz that was being imported from America. Ben didn't care for it. Along the wall to the right were the refreshment tables. He would have expected to see the faculty wives behind the tables and was surprised to see uniformed waiters and waitresses serving the guests all dressed in stiff black and white outfits. He suspected most of them were students, because of their age, working their way through school. One waitress, with short blond hair, bobbed in the latest style, with finger waves, caught his eye. She saw him looking and wrinkled her nose and batted her eyelids, not coy, but flirting. Ben thought the evening might be more fun than he had imagined at first. He went to her table, and she passed him a glass of some pale yellow liquid, that he assumed was wine, managing to touch his fingers lightly when she did so. He saw her nametag and said, "Thank you, Elana."
"You're welcome." A sight pause and another smile in her eyes, "I'm in Abran Hall."
Ben recognized the name as one of the women's dormitories on campus and filed the information away. Ben was rather shy and preferred it when people, especially women, were forward in meeting him. The crowd pressed him, and he let the pressure carry him to a massive column he could lean against, pretending a casual look to belie the nervousness mingled with an excitement that starting to move through his mind. Ben sniffed the glass in his hand — wine. He tasted it. Riesling. Not a good Riesling, either. He could never understand why his countrymen liked this German stuff over the far more sophisticated wines available just to the South in France.
Ben watched the crowd mingle, and when he noticed the dancing, he moved where he had an unobstructed view of the floor. The older couples danced close together or at least holding hands, the couples his age seemed to practice some ritual where to dance together they had to be on opposite sides of the floor, or so it seemed to him. He loved to watch people dance, but didn't like to dance himself, always feeling awkward, as if he couldn't find a way to move in concert with his partner. After trying many partners in the past few years, he realized it was his problem, not theirs.
The dancers changed partners with most songs. Sometimes he would notice exchange of names and other contact information as pairs hit it off; at other times, they parted in near desperation. The men universally wore black or white dinner jackets, but the women were a riot of color, all in what they hoped would be seen as the latest fashion, another thing Ben didn't understand. One woman, Ben noticed, danced better than any of her partners, and had a new partner for almost every dance. He watched her, mesmerized for several dances until she disappeared in the crowd after a particularly quick tune. He didn't want to seem desperate, but he started searching the group for her.
"Are you holding up this column?" The voice was soft, feminine, but somewhat low pitched.
"Well, I guess the opposite is true," Ben responded, turning to see who was speaking to him, and expecting Elena had found him on her break.
It wasn't Elena, but the woman he had been watching on the dance floor. Up close, he could see she had dark eyes that kept moving, kept smiling, and kept his attention. She was dressed in the latest fashion from the United States, something he knew they called Flapper, but he didn't know why. While most of the girls at the dance had their hair bobbed a couple of inches above the shoulder, hers was tied up and under a hat. Her slender neck arched down gracefully to her shoulders, where her dress caressed the softness of her skin.
"I've been watching you dance," he blurted, unable to think of anything else to say. "You seem to enjoy that."
"Dancing or being watched?" The playful reply tingled him.
"Well, I was thinking of the dancing, but perhaps I'm mistaken."
"No. I love to dance. And I love to perform, so of course, I love to be watched. But right now, I'm dying of thirst, would you be a love and get us some punch?" Another man was hovering at her elbow. "I'll be right back after I twirl this fellow around the floor once."
Ben was taken aback by how she asked him to get her a drink and then just wandered off with someone else, but he set off for the punch table, thinking if she didn't come back, he could always drink it himself or find another girl to share it. He got two glasses. Elana wasn't at the table serving. He wasn't sure whether he was glad or not, He would have liked to have seen her again, but he didn't want to ask her for two glasses of wine since that would imply that he had met someone interesting. He returned to the column with two glasses, and two napkins. His mother had told him to always take a napkin because girls liked that sort of thing.
He watched the last few bars of the dance and found a strange pleasure in watching her move with her partner of the moment. Their motion seemed so connected, so intimate that it appeared they had danced together for years. He knew she had just met her partner, and doubted that they'd even had time to exchange names. When the dance ended, she glanced in his direction over her partner's shoulder and flashed a small smile. He knew it was for him.
