Blue Movie (10 page)

F
OR
A
RABELLA, IT WAS
soon apparent, Liechtenstein was a place of tender memories—because it was here, many summers before, as a schoolgirl on holiday from her Paris
lycée,
she had frequently come to visit her cousin, Denise. And it was here, too, she had first known romance.

“There was the most wonderful place,” she was saying to Boris now, as she moved about the room, unfolding things from a suitcase which lay open on the bed, and hanging them in the closet—doing this in a smoothly efficient manner, swift but unhurried, with no wasted movement, and the grace of a cat, “. . . a beautiful place,” she continued, “where we always went for . . .
picnic.”
She smiled at Boris, uncertain of the word. “Picnic, yes?” Her accent was slight, and altogether delightful, her voice melodious—and though her English was nearly perfect, the care with which she selected each word gave her speech a charmingly tentative quality, deceptively coquettish.

Boris lay back on the couch, hands clasped behind his head, watching her. “Yes,” he nodded,
“picnic.”

“I will take you there,” said Arabella, hanging up a velvet jacket the color of blood. “It is ten minutes by car from Vaduz.” She turned and leaned her back against the closet door, closing it. “Now tell me about the picture—do I wear lots of beautiful beautiful clothes?”

“You
take off
lots of beautiful beautiful clothes.”

“Oh yes,” she laughed and crossed the room. “Well, it would not be serious picture unless I did that, would it? Now tell me, did my car arrive from Paris?”

“It’s parked in front of the hotel,” said Boris, regarding her with amusement. “Didn’t you
notice
it when we got here?”

“No,” she said, raising her brows in an exaggeratedly imperious manner, and playfully mimicking his own flat weary tones, “I did
not
‘notice it when we got here.’ I
never
notice things like that.” She bent over and kissed his cheek. “And,
chéri,
when I am with
you,
I do not notice anything else at all!” She glanced at her watch. “Now listen to my good plan. It is almost time for lunch, yes? We go to the
charcuterie,
we get nice things—
pâté, artichaut,
cold duck, cheese, whatever you feel . . . we get a nice bottle of Pouilly Fuissée . . . then I take you to my picnic place—my secret picnic place,” adding this last softly, not looking at Boris now, but out the window, and speaking as though from a distance, “. . . it is suddenly important to me . . . I feel it strongly.” She turned to him again, with a special smile—one that reflected a genuine camaraderie, along with just a touch of the bittersweet remembrance of things past; in her own way, she was extremely romantic. “It is good, yes? My plan? And you can tell me about the picture.”

Boris nodded. “It is
very
good, your plan.” He stood up and stretched. “How about if Wardrobe gets your measurements before we go? It’ll only take a second.”

Arabella drew herself up to her full hauteur once more.
“My measurements?”

“Does Helen Vrobel know them?”

The news seemed to interest her. “Helen Vrobel is on this picture?” Then she dismissed it with a shrug of let-them-eat-cake indifference. “Helen Vrobel knows my measurements,” she said matter-of-factly. “Helen Vrobel has my
patterns
—for everything.”

“All right,” said Boris, putting his head to one side, studying her body. “They can’t have changed much. Looks okay to me. Let’s go.”

Arabella laughed. “‘Looks okay,’ does it? Good.” She took his arm, and then started out. “My measurements,” she said distinctly, “have not changed
one centimeter
since . . .” She searched for it.

“Since
Bluebird of Happiness?”
suggested Boris.

She threw him a quick look of astonishment, but he only smiled.
“Exactement, chéri,”
she said evenly, “not one centimeter since
Bluebird of Happiness.”
And she leaned over and, very gently, bit his ear.

T
HE PEARL-BLUE
Maserati sucked at the surface and whined over the empty Alpine road like an artillery shell, drifting through the long sloping curves as if it were making turns inside a pneumatic tube. It was Arabella’s claim, and probably true, that Fangio himself had taught her to drive. Be that as it may her skill was extraordinary. To say that she drove like a man would be misleading; with the finesse of a Grand Prix driver, yes, but loose, no sign of the uprightness that may accompany intense concentration—driving, it seemed, with more ease and grace than a man, allowing her to maintain her animated, half-theatrical monologue without interruption, even to the point of favoring Boris with a brief but devastating smile while she shifted down going into a seventy-mile-an-hour curve.

He watched her face, aware of her mild exhilaration, and long since satisfied about her motives.

“I make the car
respond
to me,” she had once explained, “. . . like a
woman,
yes? With another woman, I am dominant,
n’est-ce pas?
With the car, it is the same—I am master—that is why I like it. You understand?”

The picnic place of Arabella’s childhood proved to be as remote as it was lovely, lending it, as she had already recalled, a “secret” quality, Shangri-la style.

After turning off the main road and following a secondary one until it stopped at an impenetrable wall of trees, they left the car and walked into the forest, along a soft pine-needle path, above which the boughs of the very tall trees intertwined, forming a canopy which blocked out the sun; so the passage was like a tunnel that appeared to lead nowhere, but from which they emerged into a picture-book setting—the grassy banks of a sparkling mountain lake, surrounded by pines, and, rising above on every side, the silver-blue Alps.

“This is the place,” said Arabella, moving toward the shade of a huge evergreen.

Boris surveyed the whole scene, then nodded. “This is the place all right.”

While she took out the things they had brought, and arranged them on the grass, he opened the wine.

“We pour one glass,” said Arabella, “then we put the bottle to chill in the lake, yes?”

“Good idea,” said Boris, pouring a glassful and putting the cork back in.

“Like Jake and Bill, yes?” said Arabella. “Very romantic.”

“Jake and Bill?”

“Yes, in Hemingway—
comment s’appelle? Le Jour Se Live?”

“Ah yes,” said Boris, remembering, “when they went fishing . . .” Then he laughed, “Why do you say ‘romantic’—you think they were fags?”

“Oh no, no, no, I mean
romantic
—in the classical sense?
Fags!
Mon dieu!” She shrugged as she unwrapped the Camembert. “I don’t know, were they
supposed
to be fags? . . . but he couldn’t do it, could he? Jake? His thing was gone—wasn’t that the story?”

“Hmm.” Boris thoughtfully stared at the chicken leg in his hand, then began to eat it.

“Of course,” said Arabella, frowning down as she studiously applied
pâté
to a small, thick, torn chunk of bread, “they
could
have done it—Bill could have made love to Jake, and Jake could have
kissed
Bill . . . how do you say,
‘sucked
him’? Yes?”

Boris smiled. “Yes.”

“Or ‘sucked him
off?
How do you say? Which do you say?”

“Either one.”

She nodded gravely, scholar of linguistics, serious actor ever in search of
le mot juste,
slowly chewing, then taking a sip of wine.

“Listen,” said Boris, “who, in all the world, would you rather make love to?”

She looked up at him, stopped chewing for only a second, then answered without hesitation:

“Angela Sterling.”

“Sorry, she’s already spoken for. Who, next to her?”

“‘Spoken for’? What does that mean, ‘already spoken for’? And what are you talking about anyway?”

“Well you know the part, in the movie,
your
part—I told you it was a lesbian sequence . . .”

“Yes?”

“Well, I thought it might be good to get someone to play it with you who you had always . . . had eyes for, so to speak . . . someone you’d always wanted to make it with, you know, make love to.
Compris?”

Arabella was delighted. “What a
marvelous
idea!”

“That way, you could sort of
have more feeling
for the scene, right?”

“Mais exactement!”

“Okay, who . . . besides Angela Sterling?”

Arabella brushed her hands and settled to the obviously savory task of thinking this through. “
Eh Hen,
let me see now . . .” and after perhaps three seconds, “ah, how about . . . Princess Anne?”

“Who?”

“Princess Anne . . .of England!”

“You mean Princess
Margaret?”

“No, no, no, Princess
Anne! La petite!
Mon Dieu!” She turned away with a show of annoyance.

“Wait a minute,” said Boris, standing up, “let me get some more wine.” He came back with the bottle. “Now, I’m sorry—two things I should have made clear: one, she has to be an actress; and, two, she must be at least eighteen.”

“She
is
eighteen,” said Arabella from the depths of her pique.

“Yes, well the thing about someone like her is that she’s not an
actress.”

“All the better—I will teach her . . .
everything.”

Boris sighed. “She’d never do it. It’s a nice thought, but she’d never do it.”

“Not be in a film of Boris Adrian? She would be
mad!”

“The only people who will be in this film,” explained Boris, “are people who need
money,
and
actors . . .
actors like you . . .
artists
who want to be involved—for one reason or another. She is neither.”

Arabella shrugged, morosely.

“And then there’s the
Queen,”
Boris added as a clincher, “think how
she’d
feel.”

“Ah, yes,” Arabella was impressed, “the Queen. It’s true, it could upset her.”

“Break her heart,” murmured Boris, smiling at the thought. “No, you’ll just have to come up with someone else.”

“A compromise . . .”

“I’m afraid so.”

“All right, I will think.”

They continued eating, in silence now—Boris pursuing a fantasy about a lesbian and a princess, while Arabella explored her own world of dark writhing images for a suitable cohort.

Neither spoke for a while, until Arabella, having finished the last of the cheese, lay back on the grass, and sighed.

“You know,” she said after a moment, “it is here, in this place, I make love for the first time.”

“You mean with a
girl?”

“Certainly, with a girl! What did you
think
I meant—a
donkey?”

Boris lay back beside her, one hand behind his head, the other resting his glass of wine on his chest. “Who was it—that cousin you visited every summer?”

“Yes . . .
Denise,”
she said the name as though tasting it.

“Hmm. Right here, huh?”

“Right here exactly.”

He waited for a long moment, looking up at the sky.

“What happened?” he finally asked.

“What happened?” she repeated, shaking her head as though no longer certain, or as though it might be too intricate to recreate—or, yet again, as if at that very moment she was actually reliving it. Then she sighed. “I was fifteen,” she said. “Denise a year younger. She was my cousin, and we were together every summer for as long as I remember. I can’t tell you, I can’t express how close we were. She was an enchanted thing—strange, delicate, pure . . . a child of nature, or like something out of a ballet. And so . . .
exquisitely
beautiful. I
adored
her, because she was completely . . .
unselfish,
completely unaware of the material world. I was the opposite, like my friends in Paris—ambitious, always driving ourselves to the brink, obsessed with the idea of perfection and success. But I was her
idol—
I was already working in the theater, and studying . . . to her I represented all the mystery and excitement of Paris.” She paused for a moment, smiling softly. “You know, young girls—beginning about twelve years old—have an extraordinary interest in the development of their bodies. Every day they examine their breasts to see if they’ve grown anymore. And if they have a close friend, about the same age, they show each other and compare. Well, that’s how we were, Denise and I, except that I was almost a year older, and mine came first. Also I was naturally more . . . precocious in that way. In any case, by the time I was fourteen, my breasts were nice,” she involuntarily cupped her hand over one of them and looked down at it, “very nice, in fact, while Denise’s were still just beginning. Then I came back the next year—now
she
was fourteen—and her breasts had changed completely, they were marvelous. That was the first thing she did was show me, even though she was a little shy about it, because they were
perfect
—exactly the way mine had been the year before. So. That day we had our lunch here, just like this, and then we went in swimming, as we always did, not wearing anything. And that’s when it happened, when we came out of the water, and we were looking at her breasts again—and now fascinated, of course, at the way the nipples stuck out because of the cold water. We both touched them, and mine, laughing a lot and I said I’d like to see how it felt to
kiss
one, while it was all hard and sticking out like that. And Denise laughed and said all right, and that she would too. And we did, and it felt wonderful—I mean, her nipple in my mouth felt wonderful . . . so hard and cold from the water, yet underneath it warm and alive, and so
sensitive
—I could feel it getting harder and bigger as I kissed it. I think that’s how it began—the
response,
feeling her
respond
like that. And then I had this overwhelming desire to kiss her on the mouth—which we had actually done before, but never seriously—with the tongue and everything—but just sort of practicing, for how it was supposed to be with boys. But this was different—I wanted to kiss her very deeply now, and I wanted to feel those hard nipples pressed against my breasts. So I began kissing her, while we were still standing, exactly here, and caressing her—her sides and hips, and legs . . . and finally, her thing. And then I said to her I didn’t know why, but I would like to kiss it. And she said all right, and I dropped on my knees and began kissing it, her clitoris—and then we lay down, here, and kissed each other’s.” She reached out and gripped Boris’s hand. “It was so wonderful . . . so fantastic. We were delirious. Oh, we had both played with ourselves before, and maybe had something like an orgasm, a little one, but this was incredible—the way she would moan and twist, and then sob when she came. It gave me such a feeling of
power,
being able to affect her like that. Finally it was just me kissing her, making her come over, and over, and over . . .”