Black Milk - Elif Shafak [66]
“Do you have a light, darling?” she asks.
My blood freezes. Who is this woman?
“No, I don’t,” I say, determined to keep communication with her to a minimum.
“That’s okay, darling,” she says. “Thanks anyway.”
Opening her handbag, which looks like a tiny mother-of-pearl pillbox, she takes out a lighter and proceeds to light her cigarette. Then, pursing her lips, she starts to make perfect smoke rings and sends them, one after another, my way.
With my mouth agape, I watch this strange creature.
“You don’t recognize me, right?” she says in a half-velvety, half-naughty voice, like Rita Hayworth in Gilda. “Of course, that is very normal. When did you ever recognize me?”
She leans forward, exposing the deep cleavage of her breasts. I avert my gaze, feeling uneasy. Has this woman no shame?
“But, darling, I am not a stranger. I am you. I’m a member of the Choir of Discordant Voices. You expressed the wish to make peace with your body and I gladly took that as an invitation. So here I am.”
“But who exactly are you?” It is all I can come up with.
“My name is Blue Belle Bovary.”
“That sounds so—” I say, looking for a word that won’t offend her.
“Poetic?” she offers.
“Well, yeah. It alliterates, sort of,” I say.
“Thank you, darling,” she says with a wink. “My name is a tribute to Emma Bovary, the woman who did everything in her power to escape the banality and monotony of provincial life.”
“Right . . . but as you may know, she is also a rather problematic character. I mean, if you consider cheating on your husband, telling endless lies and dying in agony by swallowing arsenic a problem.”
“Don’t worry,” she says. “Better to live with passion than to die of boredom.”
She opens her bag again, takes out a compact and deftly powders the tip of her nose. Then she throws a piercing glance in my direction. “I like wearing sensual perfumes, silk clothing, sexy underwear and satin nightgowns. Enchanté, darling.”
I can feel my face grow hot. “Could you please stop calling me ‘darling’?” I say, my voice quivering. “I don’t and could never have an inner voice like you. There must be a mistake.”
“Oh dear, you are doing that again! You want to cast me back down into the dark abyss of negligence,” she says after taking a drag from her cigarette. “I scare the hell out of you, don’t I?”
“Why would I be scared of you?” I ask.
“Otherwise why do you always pose like you do in photos? In every interview you give, you appear guarded and serious. Your face scrunched, your gaze dreamy and distant. The contemplative-writer pose. Ugh!”
“Hey, wait a minute,” I say.
Yet even as I try to object, I remember an adept analysis once made by Erica Jong. She said it was not that hard today for women writers to finish or publish their works. The real difficulty for us was to be taken seriously. Jong believed that the biased attitude toward female writers became even more visible in literary reviews. “I have never seen a review of a woman writer in which her sex was not mentioned in some way.” I knew this to be true. In Turkey, a female writer can publish as many books as she wants, and yet it always requires a long struggle and much more work for a woman to be taken seriously by the conventional literary establishment.
“Why not wear fire-red lipstick, flowery dresses, and show a bit of skin? Would your writing career decline? Would you be less a woman of letters? You’re terrified of being a Body-Woman. Tell me, why are you so afraid of me, darling?”
Words desert me.
“Unlike you, I am a great fan of everything bodily and sensual. I adore the sweet pleasures bestowed on us mere mortals. After all, I am a Scorpio. Hedonism is my motto in life. I enjoy my womanhood,” she raves on. “But because of those boorish Thumbelinas, I have been censored, silenced, suppressed!”
A wave of the purest panic rolls over me. I break into a sweat.
“Of course you’re sweating,” she