![]() “Like SHOE and KEY.” Then, giving up, she’d burst out laughing. “Like SHOE-key,” she would yell at some handsome boy she’d just met on the dance floor, trying to make herself heard above the music. ![]() “Chouky” because, when she was a child living in Antibes, she was mad for cream puffs, choux. She was known to the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles as Ghislaine Signard de Poyen Bellisle Neale, to a great many people in Virginia as “the countess of Charlottesville,” and to a slightly smaller number of people as Chouky, which was the nickname that her mother, a real countess, had given her long before, during the golden days on the Riviera-days of parties with the Fitzgeralds, of afternoons when her father would take the Duke and Duchess of Windsor riding, of evenings when Marlene Dietrich would be sitting at the next table at some charity ball, sleek as a snake in her midnight-blue sequins. The wife of a wealthy county squire, she had recently scandalized the local gentry by going out and getting a job. On my second night at work, I met the hostess, a deeply tanned redhead who favored long dresses in bold prints. ![]() ![]() This might have gone on indefinitely if Flip, who tended to be smarter about me than I was, hadn’t persuaded me to stay in Charlottesville the summer after our junior year and wait tables with him at the Hardware Store, an enormous family-style restaurant downtown where you could order beer by the metre and where the chicken nuggets were served on miniature wooden basketball courts. Read more stories about sharing the places where we live. Skip, who was blond and built like a football player, liked to read about military history while watching reruns of “The Love Boat.” I, meanwhile, moped, memorized Greek verbs, pretended to enjoy Andrew Marvell, and wrote feverishly every night in my journal, using a great many ampersands, which is what the British diarists I was reading just then did. Flip was tall and skinny and dark-haired, a notorious punster and inventive cook. At the time, I was sharing an off-campus apartment with my two closest friends, a pair of Tennesseans named Flip and Skip. I’d met her a few years earlier, when I was a glum undergraduate classics major. I accompanied her to the rock-and-roll clubs where she liked to dance. She invited me to move in with her, and it was a good match. She was well into her seventh decade, a mother of three and grandmother of seven who counted among her relatives the Empress Josephine (“ ma cousine”) and had, among other things, danced with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, had her legs appraised by Gary Cooper, attended one of Picasso’s birthday parties, played Jane in a French adaptation of “Tarzan,” been around the world thirty-three times, and, most recently, taught disco dancing to the more open-minded citizens of Charlottesville, Virginia. I was barely twenty-five, and more or less a virgin-a nice Jewish boy from Long Island who still secretly thought that smoking Merits was pretty decadent. In the early spring of 1985, after failing miserably at the first and only regular job that I have ever tried to hold, I left New York City to return to the Southern town where I’d gone to college, and was there rescued from depression, or worse, by a French lady I knew who used to party with liveried monkeys.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |