Louise Brooks

I ended the description of my night with Tracy with: she was home by eleven.  I forgot to mention that she lived with her parents still, a definite deterrent to any of her chosen dates trying to continue their pursuit of her after she was done with them.  She was in her mid-twenties and beginning a career as a second grade school teacher, at a school just blocks away.

Talking to Bones a few days later in his upstairs apartment I told him the whole, wild event. He just nodded and said: ‘That’s her’. Then I said: ‘somebody ought to buy that girl some sex toys’. But as I reviewed this statement later I changed my mind and thought: ‘No, nobody ever buy her a dildo. That would be an inestimable loss to the clientele of the Plough’.

I know she had some deep, dark issue with commitments. I didn’t know her history and don’t think I saw her again, (but seeing her once, in her undress, was a lifelong image). I don’t know what happened to her afterwards in life. I hope it was good. But for a few years running, at the Plough, the lottery was on. I think Mike H. and Paul B. enjoyed her one-night favors, maybe even Owen, after breaking up with Suzanne (and still living upstairs), as all of them spoke highly of her for no apparent reason, perhaps from just her looks. Yet all three were longtime regulars, all handsome and single, the types she chose.

I remember seeing her twice before at the Plough, but very briefly. You couldn’t miss her presence, it was so stunning and different. The first time I saw her she I was with a small group, male and female, some of whom she seemed to know. Maggie was one and we shared a few words. Mike H., Maggie's on again off again husband, was also a schoolteacher and a regular, and in good looks and mild, polite manners a prime bullseye for her one night attention, perhaps the best candidate of all. But she had a way of not offending spouses, those who knew her. It was just a quirk in her character, that neither she nor her choice could resist, and she’d never come back to the same man twice. So she was never a threat, just a fluke, an anomaly, impossible to explain but a wonder to experience.

The second time I was sitting at the bar next to Bones, drinking our pints, and he nudged me as she strolled in. She ordered her half-pint only a few feet away, and I had a good look at her incredible beauty. I also remember that when she saw Bones she smiled at him but said nothing. She also glanced at me for just a second, with a sort of serious, calculating look on her face, then moved to the other end of the bar. Bones told me about her right after this. I don’t know who she took away that night. I didn’t see. Then I heard about her reputation from several people, put two and two together and believed every word of it. Bones once told me that he even recommended me to her. I don’t know if I believe this, but if he did I have to thank him. She was a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience, the epitome of sexual desire and raw lust, what Coleridge captured in the line:

“By woman wailing for her demon lover!”

When I thought about her, her beauty and her habit, (as I couldn’t help doing in the following days) many questions arose. First I conjectured that perhaps she was a nymphomaniac and that the Starry Plough was just one of her venues, that she had a different bar for every night. But I dropped this theory because she lived nearby, some eight blocks away, as Dan the doorman, who knew her best, told me. Also, some of the regulars at the Plough frequented the other local bars, being pretty much daily drunks, and those with the widest range told me they’d never seen her in any other bar but this one. And if she did have that much sex, she would surely have contracted venereal diseases, which she didn’t, as I would have found out the hard way.

Like I said, she was always sober and picked her men with discretion and probably even information, recon, as Bones said she’d inquired about me. Then I realized that she’d have to do this homework, because she could only go off with a single man with a private place, otherwise she’d walk into wives, girlfriends, roommates and a whole range of ugly scenes. Thus the ‘joint’ request. So it all made sense. She picked her men carefully and infrequently, in total control, always the winner. If you want some idea of her face, picture the famous, silent movie star, Louise Brooks, of ‘Pandora’s Box’. She had the same raw sexiness too.

It’s amazing how one brief sight can stick in your mind forever, while a million others instantly fade from notice and are forgotten. When I was in Niagara Falls two years earlier I had another such eye opener. It was food for thought for weeks, something you didn’t ask for but couldn’t get out of your head, almost like witnessing a gory accident.

I had walked to the train station, just a few blocks from the library, to compare their prices with bus prices out west and noticed the most beautiful young woman pass by me as I was leaving. She wore a backpack and was obviously a tourist-traveler. But she was so ravishing I turned and watched. She went to the counter to buy a ticket. She was having a hard time because her English was poor. But within a minute she was accosted by two young men from two different benches, rushing up (uncalled for) to help her, one on each side, as if she needed help. I could tell she was German from her accent. I wished I knew German at the time but I didn’t, as I would certainly have been an eager third. She was blond, tall and had large breasts. The men were asking if they could help her, all over her, and me hardly any better for staring at her ten feet away.

I turned and left as I saw their obvious motives, ashamed of myself but wondering how she, with such overcharged sexuality, could ever go anywhere in the world without being hit on twenty times a day. As I walked home it seemed in my mind like a horrible curse, inescapable, unless she never went out, or dressed like a Muslim woman in a burqa or entered a nunnery. Even if she picked some escort to fend off others, she’d have his advances to deal with. And unless he was some monster in size, there would be snakes on every side trying to slither in. So I concluded that beauty was a curse, until I met Tracy. After I saw how smoothly she handled it, I had a much higher esteem of her intelligence. She’d solved the problem. No man could live with that sexuality for long and remain sane, she would destroy him. And she couldn’t live her life totally without a man and real sex. So this was her solution.

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