In the club, pink lights flicker off the garish cutouts of parrots mounted on the black walls. Real banana plants grace the corners. Palm thatch hangs above the bar. In the center of the room, on a floor of obsidian tiles, a woman is dancing. She sports a tight, black leotard, holds a huge gauzy scarf high above her head. A scooped neckline reveals much. Hair crow-black and very shiny sometimes sweeping across her face and catching on her mouth. One knee forward, and then the other. Bright red lips. Hiding her face now in the crook of her arm. Cheekbones now revealed, strong, full and high. Ivory cream.
Her feet are bare. Her thighs are thick and quite strong. You can tell she has built the dance from the sensation of sliding one against the other. White calves bisected by the tight black cuff of the leotard.
Someone over by the bar is arguing about Simone de Beauvoir. Women in dark clothes, some with faces flushed with wine, are kissing each other. The dancer stops, even while the music continues, and moves over to speak to a woman in a pinstripe suit. This one is not totally butch. Her hair is soft where it touches her shoulders, a cloisonne' butterfly pulling it back over one ear. The mouth has a full lower lip. She holds a silver lorgnette against it and smiles carefully. One strong finger with the nail cut short runs down the curve of the dancer's buttock.
She watches the dancer's face, slightly askance, sipping the house specialty, a julep, wondering, "Why does she not react? Why does she go on talking, not chattering exactly, not prattling, but still, so busy...so busy?"
The dancer is new to the city and enthusiastic about everything. Her voice echoes her words expressively, fluidly, as she speaks of the light on the Seine after a bateau mouche has passed; the light in the Monet's at the Jeu de Paume.
"Couldn't you just eat that light, that color?" She exhales the words toward the large, dark eyes of the shorter woman. "His paint is so thick, like little tisanes spread out, pasted on the canvas, all side by side and overlapping. Can't you almost hear the sunlight bouncing off those lilies?"
Though she nods, the woman at the bar hardly hears. The closeness of the dancer, the wine, the innocent perfume dissolving into the dancer's natural odor after dancing... all are fearful intoxicants. She feels the whole wide region from her heart down to her pelvis swell with warmth. She wants to swim up against the dancer's body like a beluga whale about to nurse. She wants to effortlessly swallow the nipple that is confined so close to her cheek, feeling it go hard on the back of her tongue, hear the almost inaudible "Oh!" as the young dancer loses control of her legs.
But the dancer is strangely cool. She knows where she is and to whom she is talking. She must feel that indiscreet hand on her derriere. But her attitude is strangely professional, as though this was a role in a film and the actresses, who at that moment are dancing while wrapped in soul kisses, would at any moment break for lunch, popping their gum, heading off to care for their sweet California children and master sergeant husbands.
The dancer stops talking and sips her drink, glancing around the smoky room with busy eyes, searching. Then she takes a sniff of her companion's hair and compliments her on the perfume or oil which gives it a unique fragrance.
