Queen City and Other Dimensions. E.C. Wells
and nearly toppled onto the cobblestone alleyway that led to the parking lot. Fortunately, with the grace of Saint Joan, Philippe le Hottie reached out to help her regain her balance. Lily grabbed onto him. He was holding the playbill for her autograph, but dropped it when she, spontaneously and uncontrollably, gave her French god an arousing, blazing French kiss. He asked Lily if she’d like to see his hung meat and cheese. That was all her Albuquerque high school French could make of it. Surely she had misunderstood, but she was helplessly enthralled as she obediently took his hand. Spontaneously, hand-in-hand they strolled the few blocks to the Viande et le Fromage Boutique, Philippe’s family business. Her wishful thinking vanished from the embarrassment of her fallacious translation. But it was, after all, heard only by herself.
Philippe and Lily pushed aside the cheeses and meats that hung in the backroom. They came to a spot where muted music came from below. Philippe opened the concealed trapdoor in the floor, uncovering a staircase that led down into the catacombs of Orléans.
The impatient lovers maneuvered through yet more cheeses and meats. As the music grew louder, projections of spiraling colors splashed across cold dank walls and spilled over human bones. It was a Happening! A hundred or more young French men and women in cowboy get-ups, under hats measured in gallons, doing a Texas line dance to the music of a fiddler with a seeing-eye dog, was a jubilant surprise. A Happeningin a tomb under Orléans with a god named Philippe le Hottie. It was a wet dream come true——actually, she never dreamt it, but she will——oftentimes.
The following morning, after Lily found herself between Philippe and a wheel of stinky cheese, they walked arm-in-arm along their way to the waiting buses that would take Lilith Champagne, along with the cast and crew of Ben Hur, the Musical, to the airport. They stopped and shopped and fondled each other like playful puppies; almost forgetting they were on their way to their final au revoir.
It was during that forgotten spree, in another life, where Lily acquired her impressive assortment of Magdalenian bone and ivory implements of unknown usage. The common consensus divided them into three possible ways in which they could have been intended: for making war, for eating, or as sex toys. Imagine the things one can find in a magasin d'aubaines à Orléans,which is something like a Salvation Army thrift store.
Lily is a hoarder. She is a dedicated saver of the useless. Lily the Packrat saved everything that tickled her fancy, utilitarian or not. She, also, enjoys window shopping; everything is free.
V discovered Lily in the Gunnysack Players’ Performing Garage in downtown Queen City. The production of The Trojan Women made Lily’s performance of a man playing a woman playing a man remarkable. Sort of like Victor/Victoriawithout Julie Andrews——and requiring far less talent.
Talthybius, the herald (Lily), made all the announcements. An important role which sometimes required adding woes to those of the Chorus: woe, woe, woe to the boy-child Astyanax, whom Lily snatched from out the hairy arms of Andromache, his mother, when soldiers in black leather tunics entered, two on motorcycles and one on a motorized bicycle, to demand the boy-child’s death. They performed hideous choreography hideously (which may have made it better), before whisking Lily off the stage sidesaddle. Then Menelaus and Helen had a little speech, but nobody paid much attention to it. Lily entered with a bundle of broken doll’s parts which were supposed to be the severed remains of Astyanax. Finally, after Hecuba rolled out a papier mâchétoilet bowl painted red, white and blue for Lily to throw the bundle of pieces of Astyanax into, to the woe, woe, woes of the Chorus who waved red streamers to signify the burning of Troy, the set cleverly folded and toppled over hitting nobody. That was really about all V could make of it.
The critics were split. Babs DeVos of The Queen City Post loved it, but she had trouble telling her readers why. She has always been appreciatively vague without actually saying anything real, or otherwise. Maybe she never learned how. Bianca Purge of Westword did not like it and she had no trouble telling her readers the depth to which Theatre had sunken that night. And, then there was Billy Butts who wrote for Out and Beyond, a monthly Queen City throwaway tabloid found mostly at the entrances to gay bars, bath houses, and just about every establishment on Capitol Hill. Butts took an unusual position on The Trojan Women by not taking a position. Instead, he wrote about how he had been to Troy, New York, his position in society and brief, but highly personal, bits of information about those who were in attendance. Being a middle-aged gadfly in the city’s society Blue Book and knowing everybody who was in it; a trust fund baby with an abundance of idle time and the means to fill it, should have made Butts a happy man, but....
On the evening V attended that dubious performance, she might have said out loud, “Even a pole vaulter couldn’t throw this shit high enough to reach the gutter.” V hoped that she hadn’t said that out loud, but if she had, “Fuck ‘em!”That was how excruciatingly awful the entire evening was.
Afterwards, a wine and cheese affair for the audience to acquaint itself with the members of the cast. Especially with one black-leathered soldier who was the playwright, director, producer and manager of the Gunnysack Players’ Performing Garage, Stanley Oliver Sugarloaf, or S.O.S. to his eclectic collection of misfits. It was there, under those circumstances, when V took notice of Ms. Champagne who later turned out to be Lily Nettles formerly of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Lily was the only person in the theater who V found sincerely interesting, who wasn’t self-absorbed, or preoccupied with keeping an eye on the door. They’ve been the closest of friends ever since.
Lily swallowed the last of a candied cherry. “You might not settle the matter for posterity at all because you’ll change your mind more times than it takes to commit yourself to it. Imagine your anxiety then,” Lily sounded with such positive conviction while remaining so matter-of-factly about this.
V stiffened, her mouth fell open, her greenish eyes widened then closed into two narrow slits that appeared quite sinister. Her ears flew back like a startled jackrabbit. V was poised to capture the spirit behind what she heard while listening to its echo. It’s not complicated; V disdained small talk. V stared blankly into the space a few inches above Lily’s head before she could any longer remain silent and uttered in what many have called, that whiskey voice of hers, “You think I cannot commit myself to my choices, do you?”
“I do,” replied Lily. “Sometimes. I sometimes wonder if those Libra scales might be the root of your anxiety?”
“I need,” began V, making certain to establish direct and wide-eyed contact with Lily, who now was mustering every ounce of her attention and carefully aiming it towards where she felt it might do the most good. “I need,” V began again, “to know that when I am dead, gone and done with...” she paused to take some slack from the tautness of the moment’s tension, sighed, wrinkled her upper lip and continued, “...that it wasn’t all for nothing!”
“It?” a cautious Lily inquired.
“My life. My goddamn life! I need to know, Lily,” V sighed before adding with fierce intensity, “I need to know something better!” It was a chilling wind that filled the sails of her rhetoric.
“Well,” said Lily, resigned, “I don’t think your life has been all for nothing.”
“Think of something better. I cannot go on and go out as though I were never here; as though I had never been.”
“Why not? People do it every day. They come and they go and who remembers them? Or cares? Nobody cares and everybody forgets sooner or later, when they are dead long enough. Hardly worth the time consumed with anxiety about the inevitable.”
None of this, of course, sounded vaguely like anything V wanted to hear and so she conjured a familiar refrain which began with, “I refuse to believe...” but was stopped short when Max appeared quite suddenly, surprising them both.
“There’s no getting into the basement. ‘Zeus refuses, Papa Max!’That’s it. All. Nothing more. Just a voice from out the lower depths, ‘Zeus refuses, Papa Max!’How dare they, Victoria?”
“You know them better than I. Did you try the coal slide?”
“Nailed.