THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF LOUIS AND ELLE.
Chapter 24. The Face on the Bomber.
“Louis,” Elle said as if she’d had a sudden thought, “that time you hypnotized me, did you by any chance tell me I was a pin-up girl?”
Startled, Louis looked over at his wife, wondering whether he should run and hide. His first foray into hypnosis* had landed him in big trouble with Elle, who was not only the professional hypnotist in the family but was also unquestionably the dominant partner, to whom he was expected—and usually thrilled—to play the submissive hypnotic subject, houseboy, and boy toy. There had been that one time, however, when he had covertly put Elle under—he felt himself starting to get aroused as he remembered his romps with hypnotized Elle the bikini bimbo, Elle the hippie chick, and finally Elle the pin-up girl.
“Well,” he said cautiously, “up to a point, I suppose, yes . . . .”
Elle was wearing the half-glasses she used for reading, flipping with elaborate casualness through the new issue of VOGUE. He saw the page she was reading: THE POWER OF RED LIPSTICK. That was the kind of leisure-time reading that ordinarily fascinated Elle, but he sensed that she was currently just pretending to be absorbed in the fashion spread; she had something on her mind, and Louis feared he was in trouble again.
“I’m remembering you had me dress in some … silk lingerie, was it?” she said a bit too casually, her eyes still on the magazine.
“You mean the red robe, matching camisole, and boy shorts?” he said. “With the silk stockings and the red mules? Um—oh, wait—I mean, I think it may have been something like that…Why do you ask?”
“Well, last week when I went up to State U. to visit Justine and Shahrzad**, she was telling me about some of her work in gender studies—it turns out she wrote a book on pin-up art of the 1940s….”
“You mean THE FACE ON THE BOMBER: MOBILIZING THE FEMALE LIBIDO, 1939-1945?” Louis said eagerly, then caught himself. “I mean—really, I guess I …heard that she did write … something about that, yes.”
Elle, her suspicions now well and truly roused, turned to face her husband, who was blushing bright red. “You’ve read her book, Louis . . . ?”
“Well—may . . . . be…. I mean, up to a point, I guess . . . .”
Clearly the book had made an impression on Louis. The conversation with Shahrzad had affected Elle, too. Shahrzad and some others in gender studies had a theory about pin-up art of the 40s; they thought it expressed female fantasy as well as male longings. “Pin-up art and noir movies were almost the only spaces in culture at that time where female sexual desire could be depicted,” she’d told Elle.
Elle had found the idea intriguing in its own right, but her interest had probably been heightened by a sudden image of Shahrzad herself as a pin-up goddess in silk and patent-leather heels. The image of the towering beauty in scanty lingerie and feathery heels had first stirred some longings in Elle, then given rise to an unfamiliar feeling of inadequacy. “I’m not sure I’d make a good pin-up,” she’d said to Shahrzad. “I’m not really … tall enough.”
“Are you kidding, Elle?” Shahrzad had said. “I’d paint you on my bomber any day.” As if at an unspoken invitation, she’d run her eyes over Elle’s body slowly, from head to toe. Elle had quickly changed the subject. But the memory had stayed with her, and the next night she’d had a flashback to the erotic trance experience Louis had spun for her without her knowledge. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten those encounters, but that they were sometimes a little hazy in her mind.
“Louis,” she said now, “do you by any chance have a collection of pin-up art hidden away somewhere?”
“Well,” he said, his face flaming, “Up to a point . . . .”
She looked sternly over the half glasses, so formidable and sexy that he did not know whether to hide in the closet or fall at her feet and howl. “Do you look at the pictures and . . . touch yourself?”
“Of course not, darling,” he said at once. “Remember you told me I can’t have an orgasm without your permission?”
“Correct.” She nodded as if he had passed a test. “But you used to, I take it?”
“Well, yes, when I was a teenager, I guess . . . may. . . be … .”
“Really, Louis? All your friends were jerking off to internet porn and you were looking at World War II pinups?”
“Um . . . up to a point . . . .”
“You may explain why.”
“The thing is, first, internet porn is boring,” he said. “And the old pinup stuff—well, I came across it once in my grandfather’s cabin at the lake. He was in the Navy in World War II, and after he died I opened a cabinet and found a bundle of letters he wrote to my grandma, and a sheaf of pictures he’d cut out of STARS AND STRIPES and ESQUIRE and so on.”
“Letters to your grandmother?”
“Yes.”
“Were there any letters from her to him?”
“Nope. I scoured the cottage high and low after that—nothing.”
Elle gave a half smile. She instinctively approved of a relationship in which the man poured out his heart and the woman gave back nothing. “What was in the letters?”
“He had asked her to marry him before he went into the Navy, but she refused. She told him to ask her again if the U.S. won the war. And then she went to work for the government.”
“Really? You’ve never told me this! What part of the government?”
“I haven’t talked about it because she never really told any of us much. She always said she worked for some office that was supposedly in the—the State Department. But she never explained what she did, or why they flew her over to Europe after V-E Day to spend a year in Germany doing God knows what. If we asked about it, she would fiddle with her hearing aid and leave the room.”
“Really? She sounds like quite a character.”
“Oh, she was. Her maiden name was Müller, and her parents were from Germany. On the farm in Nebraska, they spoke German to each other, so she was fluent in two languages and I guess the—State Department or whatever—found that useful. And my granddad had a few pictures of her with his letters. She was a looker. I think she had quite a number of guys after her during the war.”
“And meanwhile your granddad was pining away for her? Where was he?”
“He was a navigator on a B-25 in the Pacific, jumping off carriers on bombing missions against Japanese troops on the islands. He didn’t talk about it much, but from what I’ve read it sounds like hell—taking off in all weathers knowing that if you didn’t find your carrier again you and your whole crew would end up in the water, knowing that even if you did find the carrier, you’d all drown if the pilot overshot the flight deck, then going to sleep knowing the ship might take a torpedo during the night and you’d drown in your sleep. I think he spent his spare time writing to grandma and looking at pin-up pictures.”
“I don’t know if that’s more sweet or more scary.”
“For what it’s worth, it had a happy ending,” Louis said. “He made it home and waited for her and in 1947 they got married. They lived together for 47 years and had four children and grandpa made a good living in the aviation business.”
“That is sweet, I guess. And you still have the pictures?”
“Yes, Elle.”
“You may go get them right now, Louis.”
He jumped up without a word and disappeared into his upstairs study. After a while he came back holding a file folder. From its edges protruded yellow, fragile-looking pages. Elle thumbed through them thoughtfully.
“MALE CALL?” she said. “Who is this character Miss Lace?” She held up a cartoon that showed two GIs ogling a stunning half-dressed brunette who was gazing dreamily into the distance. One soldier was whispering to the other, “The flanks are unprotected.” “Yeh,” the other replied, “and what flanks!”
“MALE CALL was a famous strip drawn by Milt Caniff, who invented TERRY AND THE PIRATES and STEVE CANYON,” Louis said. “He drew it free for military newspapers—apparently Miss Lace was quite a favorite of the troops.”
Elle sniffed. “I daresay she was.” She held up a picture of a laughing blonde in an abbreviated Navy uniform doing a pushup on a volume titled WAVES. “And this one?”
“That’s a Vargas girl from ESQUIRE,” Louis said. “He was the most famous pin-up artist of the 30s and 40s. Hugh Hefner brought him back to draw for PLAYBOY in the 1960s.”
“Louis, you may now explain why these pictures mean so much to you.”
His face flamed red again. “I’m not really sure—maybe it’s just that they were my secret, I found them when I was 13 or so, just the age when a boy starts to—”
“To what?”
“To fantasize, Elle, about adventure and women and female bodies and sex . . . But it’s not just that. It was reading my grand-dad’s letters—I never knew him very well, and he never talked about the war, but in the letters he laid out what life was like in case he didn’t make it home —he wasn’t complaining but he just wanted someone to know what he was going through, and he wrote like one of those tough-guy pulp novels that were so popular back then. He was flying off to drop bombs on Japanese-held islands and dodging anti-aircraft fire and coming back to the carrier with his heart in his throat—and then afterwards he would go belowdecks and look at pictures of Miss Lace and dream that life would be like that one day.”
“And did your grandmother know about his little …imaginary friends?”
“You know, Elle, I think a lot or people loved these pictures—women too. Shahrzad thinks so too—I mean, from the little … tiny … short little bit of her book I read. Because remember, there really weren’t any languid goddesses like this lying around in silk and satin back home. The entire country was in that war day and night doing stuff that wasn’t romantic at all. The girlfriends and wives and sisters were off at shipyards and factories building new carriers or planes, and they were wearing overalls and Rosie the Riveter headscarves, not fabulous gowns or high heels. All the silk and lace and nylon was being made into rope or parachutes for the troops and most of the guys they would have wanted to wear them for were off fighting anyway. I remember my grandmother told me she and her friends would draw black lines up the backs of their legs so it would sort of look like they had on nylon stockings. I’d bet lots of women also dreamed about this imaginary world where Miss Lace lay around looking dreamy and waiting to lift the morale of the troops, one soldier at a time—and feeling important because so many men wanted her.”
Elle turned a few more pages. “I certainly see why Shahrzad wanted to study these,” she said. “These girls look sexy as hell, but they’re also pretty innocent-looking, aren’t they?”
“Yes, Miss Lace is kind of a cross between Aphrodite and the imaginary kid next door in an old movie—you know, the one who started out cute and grew up to be beautiful while the hero was away at college.”
She tapped her teeth when a lacquered fingernail—usually a sign that she was having a thought. “So, Louis, you turned me into Miss Lace, then?”
“Don’t you remember, Elle?”
“I remember parts of it—I remember some lingerie, and I remember you made me smoke a cigarette—”
“Elle, it was a clove cigarette, like actors use—no tobacco in it!” he said desperately. “I would never—”
“I wasn’t complaining, Louis,” Elle said. “I was actually just impressed you could get me to do it on the first try. So . . . tell me, just out of interest, no particular reason, but if you were going to hypnotize me and turn me into a pin-up girl, how would you do it?”
“Well,” Louis said, drawing a deep breath. “I guess I would ask you to—I would tell you to—I would say—Elle, you know something? I have no idea what I said then and no idea what I would do now. I’m just drawing a blank.”
Elle smiled. That question had been another test. Louis didn’t know it but the last time she had him under she had removed all memories of how he hypnotized her, figuring that would keep her safe from another sneak attack.***
“I see,” she said. She reached out her forefinger and tapped him on the forehead; his eyes widened and focused on hers, seeming to lose sight of everything else in the room. “Well, let me ask you this—what if you were writing a scene where Charles has to hypnotize Milagro and make her into a pin-up girl?”
Charles was the private investigator in Louis’s supernatural mystery series, who had access to the world of witches and demons, and Milagro was the sexy witch who sometimes helped him, on rare occasions went to bed with him, and usually teased him and left him panting with lust. “Milagro…Elle, Milagro wouldn’t like that,” he said.
She tapped again, a bit more insistently. “What if Charles had to, Louis? Maybe it’s an emergency—he has to, I know, he has to disguise her as Miss Lace so the demons won’t realize who she really is—she’ll thank him later and besides . . . .” She tapped his forehead one more time, “besides . . . she’ll have fun. Anyway, just imagine it. It’s a story—how would Charles do it?”
Louis’s eyes were still focused on something a long way off, as if the had dropped away, leaving him on a broad dim landscape of muted colors and soft music. “Well, Milagro is very tactile—she loves to feel things—like the wind on her face as she flies, or water in a stream as she walks across it, or the black silk dress she wears to the coven meetings . . . silk, that’s how I … Charles would do it, he’d talk to her about silk, about how it feels in her hands or on her face or her shoulders, so rich and smooth as if it were an old friend, so soothing, and I’d … he’d have yo—her—imagine wrapping herself in silk, a silk robe, a camisole, like a cooling bath as well as a sensual garment, a whole world as she steps out of this one, a world without any worries, just feelings, just touch and small and sound, as she let herself dream, dream of that place where sh—where you’ve always wanted to be, smooth and dim and quiet and safe and so relaxed and sleepy and relaxing as you give in to someone else’s will for a change because you’re so tired of making decisions and you’d like to lie back like Miss Lace and let me think for you and let my words become your truth, and the silk brushes your legs, your face, your breasts, as your eyes grow heavy and you fall gently into that dim drowsy dreamy world and as you let go you are becoming Miss Lace, you’ve always wanted to be Miss Lace, Miss Lace is inside you, you’ve always been Miss Lace and Miss Lace is sleepy and warm and sleepy, sleeping, sleeeeeeeeep….”
The room had fallen silent and Elle’s body felt heavy and relaxed and so comfortable that she wouldn’t have moved it if she could. “Dream, Miss Lace, because I tell you to,” Louis’s voice was saying, she loved his voice, she loved the way he sounded when he talked to her, the love and attention and kindness, how much he wanted to please her or now how much she wanted to please him, “Dream now and you’ll hear nothing until I say your name again, do you understand? Good! That’s right, now sleeeeeeeeep . . . .”
Time went by, seeming very long but also much too short, a timeless period that raced by in an instant, a time to float in this easy space where she had nothing to do and nothing to think about and had no need to tell anyone else what to do or to worry about anything except that kind smooth voice and the feel of the silk she imagined against her face, over her breasts, and between her legs . . . .
“Miss Lace,” said that lovely voice, “Nod if you can hear me—very good, my beauty. Now listen carefully. When I count to three you will get up and go to the bedroom. You won’t see or hear anything on the way there, and when you get there you’ll see only the bed, and on the bed will be your lingerie, it’s time to put it on, do you understand? Of course you do—and when you’ve changed into the lingerie you’ll come back down here, thinking nothing, hearing, seeing nothing, until you get back to me. Then you’ll know what to do, because you are Lace and Lace always does the right thing. All right, one-two-THREE! That’s it, open your eyes! Off you go!”
Lace drifted smoothly up the stairs and down the hall to a room with a bed. On it were a rose-red robe, a matching camisole and a pair of red boyshorts. The silk felt so rich across her skin that she gave a little involuntary gasp of pleasure as she slid the panties on. She smoothed a pair of silk thigh-high stockings over her legs. Feeling the smooth silk on her smooth skin made her feel silken herself. Then she stepped into a pair of red high-heeled mules with feathers on the toes, and felt suddenly much taller, much sexier, as if any man within a hundred miles must be aware of her, must want her, must be available to her if she crooked her finger. When she was dressed, she felt a cool wave of confidence and arousal wash over her from the top of her head to her erect nipples to the tips of her red toenails. She cinched the robe around her waist and said, “Now let’s see to morale, shall we?”
“Well, look who the USO dragged in,” she purred as she entered the living room. “It’s my old friend Doghouse Reilly.”
“Hello, Lace,” said the handsome man on the couch. “Long time.”
She walked across the room until she was standing over him. “You stayed away,” she said. “What’s been keeping you?—Oh, wait, I know what you’re going to say. You can’t talk about what you’ve been doing, and you’d probably rather I wouldn’t talk about what I’ve been doing, so let’s just think about what you and I are going to do , okay, big boy?” She shrugged off the robe. Reilly tried to pretend not to notice, but she drew a red-tipped finger across his cheek and saw his eyes close in pleasure. “Whatever you’ve been doing, I am sure you were a very good boy,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind, but I may have been a very bad girl. Let me show you how.”
She dropped to her knees and reached for his zipper. “Come here, stranger,” she said to his erection as it sprang free. She leaned forward and took the hard length of him into her mouth, moving her mouth all the way down it as he groaned, then sliding it back up to the tip and taking hold of his shaft with one hand. “You’re glad to see Lace, aren’t you, little one?” She moved her tongue over the tip as she pumped him and suddenly he screamed “Lace!” She pulled off the camisole and rubbed his cock against her breasts as he came in spurts. His eyes had rolled back in his head and after a few seconds he simply collapsed back against the sofa, his breathing deep and slow.
“You enjoyed that, Reilly?” He nodded. She leaned forward and kissed him behind one ear. “Good boy,” she whispered. “Now let’s see what you can do for Lace, shall we?” She dropped the shorts and, straddled him, naked except for her red shoes. His cock was flaccid, but she teased it gently with her fingernails and whispered, “Come to Lace, big guy, I’ve got plans for you.” In a few minutes she felt his cock rise again. Raising her knees until she was kneeling on the sofa, she lowered herself onto him; he sighed with pleasure as he felt himself entering her. “That’s it, baby, give it to me now, Lace needs it, give it—give it—” She was moving up and down on him smoothly, her breasts brushing ever-so-lightly against his mouth with each up-and-down motion. He seemed barely to know where he was as his breath came quicker, and when the moment seemed right she reached out with her left hand and slapped him softly but firmly on the cheek, saying as she did, “NOW, Doghouse! NOW! Give it up! Give it all to Lace!”
She slapped him once more for good measure, and felt him coming again inside her. Her own answering shudder went on and on and on. “Oh, yes, baby,” she whispered. When he grew still, she took his face between her hands and looked deep into his eyes. “Doghouse, who is your favorite pin-up girl now?”
“You, Lace.”
“I’m sorry, Reilly, I didn’t hear you—who is your favorite pin-up girl?” She slapped him lightly a third time.
“You, Lace!”
“Say it again, little man!”
“Lace, Lace, LACE!!”
“Good boy, Doghouse,” she said, and patted his cheek. “In fact, there aren’t any other pin-ups, are there?”:
“No, Lace. Just you. Only you. You, Lace, only you, you!”
“Good boy. Why don’t you take a little nap now?” His eyes sagged, then closed. As his body went limp, she dropped her hand to her side. Then her own eyes suddenly felt heavy, her body felt heavy, and she slumped against him on the couch. The two lovers, having, without quite intending to, hypnotized themselves and each other, both drifted into darkness and, improbably entangled, dreamed the same silken dream for the rest of that long magical night.