Fabian ordered a second bottle.

I wished I liked the taste.

13

We were eight in the small screening room. My feet ached from the Louvre. The room smelled of twenty years of cigarettes and sweat. The building on the Champs Elysees was a shabby one with creaky, old-fashioned elevators. The peeling signs of the businesses on the floors we passed all looked like advertisements for concerns that were well into bankruptcy and minor evasions of the criminal code. The corridors were dimly lit, as though the people who frequented the building did not wish to be clearly observed as they came and went. With Fabian, Lily, and myself were Fabian's delightful French lady, whose name was Nadine Bonheur. At the console in the rear was the cameraman on the picture, a weary, gray professional of about sixty-five who wore a beret and a permanent cigarette hanging from his lip. He looked too old for this sort of work and kept his eyes almost completely closed at all times, as though he did not want to be reminded too definitely of what he had recorded on the film we were about to see.

Seated together on the far aisle were the two stars of the film, a slender dark young man, probably a North African, with a long, sad face, and a pert, pretty young American girl by the name of Priscilla Dean, with a blonde ponytail, an anachronistic, fresh-faced relic of an earlier generation of Midwestern virgins. She was primly dressed and looked as proper as a starched lace apron. 'It's a pleasure, I'm sure,' she said, her voice pure Iowa. I was introduced without ceremony to the others, the atmosphere businesslike. We might have been assembled for a lecture on the marketing of a breakfast food.

A bearded, long-haired man sitting apart, who was wearing a soiled denim jacket and who looked as though he had just bitten into something extremely distasteful, merely grunted when I said hello.

'He's a critic,' Fabian whispered to me. 'He belongs to Nadine.'

"Appy to make the acquaintance,' Nadine Bonheur said to me, looking up from a clipboard and extending her hand. Her hand was silky. She was small and slight, but with a perky full bosom, half of which could be seen over her low-cut black dress. She was tanned a beautiful even shade of brown. I imagined her lying naked on the beach at St Tropez, surrounded by equally unclothed dissolute young men. 'See what that hassole of a projectionist is doing,' she said to the cameraman. 'We only 'ave the room for teartty minutes.' Her accent in English was the sort that sounds charming to Americans.

The cameraman shouted something in French into a telephone on the desk in front of him and the lights dimmed.

For the next thirty minutes I was pathetically grateful that the room was dark. I was blushing so furiously that I felt that, although nobody could see me, the raw animal heat of the blood in my face must be raising the temperature of the room like a huge infra-red lamp. The goings-on on the screen, in color, were what my father would have described as indescribable. There were couplings of all sorts, in all positions, in a variety of backgrounds. There were triplings and quadruplings, animals, including a black swan, lesbian dalliance, and those caresses which we have been taught by Playboy to call fellatio and cunnilingus. There was sadism and masochism and behavior for which I, for one, had no name. As Fabian had said, there was something for everybody. The period seemed to be some time in the middle of the nineteenth century, as some of the men wore top hats and frock coats and the women wore crinolines and bustles, briefly. There were hussars' uniforms, boots and spurs, and an occasional shot of a castle, with buxom peasant girls being led behind bushes. Nadine Bonheur, scantily dressed, with her mischievous, incorruptible schoolgirl face topped by a long black wig, played a kind of mistress of the revels in the film, arranging bodies with the cool grace of a hostess preparing flowers in a salon before the arrival of her guests. Fabian had told me the script was literate, but since there was no sound or dialogue it was difficult for me to judge just how accurate his estimate was. The film was to be dubbed later, he told me.

From time to time, there was a shot of an angelic-faced young man in a long pink robe, trimmed with fur, clipping hedges. Occasionally he stared soulfully off screen. He was also to be seen seated on a throne-like gilt chair in a stone hall lit by candelabra, observing various combinations of the sexes in the throes of orgasm. He never changed his expression, although once, as the action reached a climax, he languidly picked up a long-stemmed rose and sniffed at it.

To her credit, I heard Lily, seated on the other side of Fabian, suppress a giggle.

'The story's simple,' Fabian explained to me in a whisper. 'It takes someplace in Mitteleuropa. The young man in the robe with the clippers in a prince. The working title, by the way, is The Sleeping Prince. He has just been married to a beautiful foreign princess. His father, the king - that's going to be shot next week - wants an heir. But the boy's a virgin. He's not interested in girls. All he's interested in is horticulture.'

"That explains the clippers,' I said, hoping that proof that I was still capable of speech would somehow pale my blushes.

'Naturally,' Fabian said impatiently. 'His aunt, that's Nadine, has been commissioned by her brother, the king, to stimulate his libido. The princess, his wife, awaits him, weeping in one of the towers of the castle, lying in the unused wedding bed garlanded with flowers. But nothing - and, as you see, every possible attraction is tried - nothing arouses him. He looks on with glazed eyes. Everybody is desperate. Then, as a last resort, his aunt, Nadine, dances alone in a diaphanous gown before him, holding a red rose between her teeth. His eyes lose their glaze. He sits up. He drops his clippers. He moves down from the throne. He takes his aunt in his arms. He dances. He kisses her. They fall to the turf together. They make love. There is cheering in the castle. The king declares the marriage to the princess annulled. The prince marries his aunt. There is a three-day orgy in the castle and behind the bushes to celebrate. Nine months later, a son is born. Every year, to commemorate the occasion, the prince and his aunt repeat the dance, in their original robes, as the church bells ring out. It's all pretty Iranian, if you tell it baldly like this, but it has an earthy charm. There's a subplot, of course, with a villain who is plotting for the throne himself and has a thing about whips, but I won't bother you with that...'

The lights went up. I made believe I had a coughing attack to explain the blaze of my cheeks.

'That's it,' Fabian said, 'in a nutshell. It's camp and it's not camp, if you get what I mean. We'll get the intellectuals, as well as everybody else.'

'Miles,' Nadine Bonheur, switching smoothly from her role of incestuous seductress to serious businesswoman, stood up from her chair two rows in front of us and faced us, ' 'Ow you like it, eh? It will lay them in the haisles[9], no?'

'It's jolly,' Fabian said. 'Very jolly. We're bound to make a packet.'

I avoided looking at anybody as we trooped out to the elevator. I took especial care not to glance at the American girl, who had featured prominently in all the most lurid scenes, and whom I would recognize, even with a sack over her head, on any nudist beach in the world. Lily, I saw, also showed an intense interest in the floor of the elevator.

As we walked down the Champs Elysees toward an Alsatian brasserie for refreshments, Nadine took my arm. 'The little girl,' she said to me. 'What you think of 'er? Talented, eh?'