A Woman's Place, Where Exactly Is That? - Nancy Potter's Journey From Nymphet To Kitchen To Call Girl And Back

Whore or Saint? That has been men's dilemma or women's depending on who's asking.  Women, caught between biological imperatives and natural sexual desire, give both a whirl and, confident of their ability to sort right from wrong, good from bad, decide who they are.  

Nancy Potter was no different except that she was a nymphet, Vladimir Nabokov's delightful invention of a young girl, precocious beyond her years, aware of her sexual allure and sexual destiny, and determined to explore every nook and cranny of this demanding, remarkable, nature that she didn't choose but which was nevertheless hers. 

She experimented early on.  She was no more than eight or nine when she asked Bobby Vale to join her in the woods.  The poor boy, barely out of emotional diapers, clueless about everthing except Legos, Pokémon, and basketball, and still very much of a mamma's boy stood there as Nancy helped him out of his pants.  

The squirrels chattering in the trees knew more about what was happening than he, but as deaf and dumb as he was about sex, he had an inkling that what Nancy was about was verboten, in a class by itself, reserved for adults if then. 

She was a tigress in middle school and a Mata Hari in high school, but only at Oberlin, a small liberal arts college in the Midwest did she follow another track. While no one ever thought that pert, cute, devilishly sexy Nancy would sail beyond safe harbors, she turned out to be a whiz at numbers.  Not just 1+1 kinds of numbers but negative numbers, imaginary numbers, number series, mathematical projections, and number theory.  For four years she 'kept her knickers on', more interested solving Fermat's theorem than removing her panties.  

This early adventurism, said Harvard Professor of Psychobiology Adam Brookings, is not atypical of the prematurely sexual female, nor is its particular hibernation:

Nabokov was on to something, writing as he did of the fictional nymphet, a pre-pubescent girl of primal sexuality.  There are such girls, endowed with a special extra-sensory ability that is fine tuned for sexual adventure and gratification.  There are such real girls, in the shadows because of a persistent sexual obscurantism - girls who are women from the day they are born; women born to mate, to reproduce, and to thrive. 

The particularly highly-evolved woman is multi-dimensional, curtseying, trading, diverting, but always returning to form.  Such reproductively ur-females are rare but permanent fixtures on the asymptotes of the bell curve.

What Professor Brookings did not say was that the trajectory of such complex females can include regression, a pulling in of sexual antenna and growing other, more traditional sensors of womanhood. 

And so it was that Nancy turned ingenue, sexual innocent, woman of virtue, fidelity, and hearth-and-home desires. The third phase of her sexual history had begun.  She married and married well; but for her, now the very prehistoric image of a fertile, reproductive, full-bodied woman, social status was unimportant.  It was the giving birth, the ultimate expression of femaleness and femininity which mattered.  The sexual act, always enjoyed, became indescribably potent and passionate for it was the means to reproduction.  That in itself was destiny. 

However after a decade of childbearing, childrearing, and sexual fidelity, the quieted, banked sexual energies returned with a vengeance.  The years of mommyhood and dutiful second fiddle were over and she was on her own once again. 

 

The string of lovers was little more than irrelevant strands, thread come loose from the garment, bothersome trailers.  Like Portia in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, she entertained her male suitors, dismissing each in turn.  They were a pompous, self-absorbed, immature, ignorant lot, and she toyed with them, played with their hopelessly infantile assumptions, and finally settled for the pick of the litter, the importuning Bassanio. 

Nancy would be damned if she settled for a Bassanio or any other of his toadying ilk, at least not before she stepped out a bit, exposed that inexplicable sexuality within, and took as many lovers as possible - not for marriage but for the simple, pure feeling of being had - the female receptacle, the sought after, the desirable.  

Belle de Nuit is a film about such a woman as Nancy Potter - an aristocratic woman whose ordinary upper middle class  married French life is nothing more than a purgatory of good intentions.  Lovers are no anodyne to the desperation and the sexual desuetude of her marriage and she becomes a call girl -inanimate, dutiful, roll-over sex for a fee. 

Nancy was equally disaffected with the life for which she had been programmed and was following.  She, like Belle de Nuit would become available to all and would revel in the anonymity and the pure femaleness of her enterprise. 

She became once again her own woman with a growing reputation for sexual pleasure - she was the primus inter pares of Washington call girls, in demand, la creme de la creme. 

This wanton, uninhibited, anonymous, unattached sex was what she always had wanted - the ultimate sexual freedom, the defining exercise of free will and female distinction. 

The Belle de Nuit syndrome is but a temporary phase in the sexual life of the pre-pubescent sex queen - an exuberant excess, correct, and inextinguishable validation of womanhood.  Once a woman has passed through that exuberant, defining period, she can return to anything more prosaic. 

In Nancy's case it was Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen. There was nothing more satisfying after an interlude of uncompromising sex than returning to an adoring farm family in Iowa - her family, dismissed and ignored during her exploratory phase but who welcomed her back after her fugue.  

She was the Mrs. Tyler Blanding of Ames, mother of four, marvelous cook, wife, and choirmaster of the First Methodist Church of Christ.  What goes around, comes around; and after a hejira more defining, powerful, and transformative as Muhammed's crusade from Mecca to Spain, she settled down.  The sexual genie had been satisfied. 

Infected! The Quarantine Of Ideas - A Windowless Gulag Of Identity And Censure

Rene Arguello  was born and raised in a poor family in rural Florida, a mixture of Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban.  His first name, Rene, was given to him by his father who admired the Haitian patriot Rene Dessalines, comrade of Toussaint Louverture, leader of the revolution which led to the country's independence from France to become, the first black republic in the Americas and a beacon of emocracy and freedom in the world. 

 

Juan Arguello knew something about oppression.  He left Cuba during the worst years of the Batista regime, an autocratic rule that mirrored that of the Shah of Iran or Louis XVI - a presumption of glory, longevity, and admiration by the people, an arrogance which led all three to their revolutionary downfall. 

Juan taught his young son the lessons of freedom, pride and dignity, and the rewarding struggle for political independence, individual freedom, and personal honor.  Juan was as serious and ambitious for his son as the Jews of the old Lower East Side or the Chinese below Houston Street.  He insisted on hard work, academic success, and a patriotism bred out of the love for his adopted country. 

The Arguello family was poor but never destitute.  Juan easily found work as an agricultural laborer in central Florida and more remunerative employment in one of the many cigar-rolling factories in Tampa.  Ironic, perhaps, thought Juan, working in an occupation as Cuban as he could imagine.  In fact the smell of cigars - the raw tobacco, the smoke from the puros smoked by the gerente, and the unmistakable scent of prime tobacco drying in the sheds of Macana.  

The irony was even more obvious when his son won a scholarship to Lefferts, a New England prep school located in the heart of tobacco country.  Connecticut broad-leaf tobacco was used for the outer wrapping of Cuban, Dominican, and Nicaraguan cigars and gave the product a special, unique draw and character. 

Those days were pre-diversity ones, and Rene was admitted not because of his race but his academic record, his extra-curricular activities, his obvious intelligence, and his neat, proper appearance.  His heritage, although distinctly Caribbean, carried the genes of Spanish grandees, French expatriates, and American adventurers.  He looked fully American. 

Things changed at the small Midwest college where, thanks to the prestigious Thomas Hooker award, a full scholarship prize named after the founder of Connecticut for citizenship and personal honor, he matriculated. at that Alford College at the time, the early Seventies had shed all of its farm ethos and had been radicalized just like its sister colleges in the East. The reforms of Dean Bradley Clark which opened the college to all not just the sons and daughters of well-heeled burghers, landowners, and agricultural grandees which had been the core of its student body since its founding, the period was one of civil disobedience, student occupations, and the beginning of 'diversity'. 

Rene grew out his hair Afro-style - the white colonial genes were recessive in that category - and he became the darling of the radical student body.  He got religion, a passionate conviction to racial and ethnic justice and he, because of his heritage, became the poster boy for campus revolt. 

He was detained on a number of occasions by the campus police - he was concerned enough about his future to avoid the protests that spilled out into the streets and were subject to municipal police authority - and earned his bars legitimately if not heroically.  He majored in Latin American studies, wrote his senior thesis on the revolutionary struggles of Haiti and Cuba, and had enough academic currency to be accepted to law school.  

His career was set.  He would focus on civil law, especially cases of racial discrimination, and would join government in one of the new specialized agencies overseeing the many new programs designed to prevent racial obstruction and to promote minority integration.  

It is here that the real story of Rene Arguello begins.  Something happened to him in his late thirties which changed him from a committed social justice advocate to a true believer - the cause of the black man was not just one of social inclusion but of righteousness and retribution.  It wasn't enough to open doors for easier admission, nor to challenge each and every insult to his racial integrity.  Rene had to see to it that the black man was raised to the top of the pinnacle of the human pyramid.  He felt not only the weight of the law but his own personal racial destiny - an imperative, ineluctable demand to right America's direction. 

To do so was not only to promote the black man and other oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, but to launch a frontal attack on the oppressor himself- the white man, the colonial master, the overseer, the brutal racial dictator, the implacably racist, immoral, reprobate.  It wasn't long before hatred displaced reason entirely. 

The sociologist and longtime observer of the American political scene, Hamilton College Professor Emeritus Arnold Frampton, wrote this in an article to The American Journal of Sociology

True belief is a viral infection, invading the cellular structure of reason and good judgment and turning the believer into an automaton of received wisdom.  Once infected the true believer, like the zombies of Night of the Living Dead or Invasion of the Body Snatchers is compelled to infect others until the world is completely overtaken.  

There is no reason, no objectivity, no rational thought possible once the virus has taken hold.  Today's progressives are like body snatchers, an invasive species propelled by nothing less than some kind of inner compulsion bred of rapidly accelerating intellectual erosion. 

 

One would have thought that Rene, brought up with such moral rectitude in an environment of positivism and hope, would have become a reasonable advocate for legitimately-needed change and not the rabid, bilious hater he had become.  Professor Frampton weighed in:

True belief is insidiously compromising.  It not only crowds out reason and rational conclusions, it pushes consideration and generosity aside until there is no room for anything but virulent, increasingly violent, excoriating hatred.  There is only so much space within the human psyche, a space which is easily filled up with meanness and ignorance. 

Rene began to look at everyone through the lens of race, gender, and ethnicity; and based on what he saw he either accepted or summarily dismissed, cancelled, and removed.  There was no opinion, consideration, or judgment which could sway him from the progressive canon.  Any criticism of the black man - the persistent dysfunction of the inner city, the disproportionate rates of violent crime and incarceration, the abysmally low rates of academic performance, the lack of social cohesion - was met with accusations of racism. 

To use Prof. Frampton's words, the 'insidious viral invasion' of true belief infected every aspect of Rene's vision.  Received wisdom became canon, ex cathedra Biblical truth.  The climate was warming due to man's ignorance.  The newly-cited evidence that Antarctic was gaining ice and that the north polar cap was not losing it, that earth temperatures had shown no more than normal geological fluctuations was dismissed out of hand.  Gender choice was not preference but biological reality. 

'Eventually the virus kills the host', said Prof. Frampton. 'The true believer lives incarcerated within his ever narrowing gulag of ignorance until eventually he rots and dies'. 

True belief, however, is still alive and well, so its disappearance is not around the corner; but the epidemic is slowing.  More and more Americans see the naked emperor with his clothes off - there is no there there, the apocalyptic visions are no more than Chicken Little, sky is falling, fantasy. 

As for Rene? His rabidness is taking its toll.  He is emotionally drained and intellectually weary. However often he might shuffle, hoist himself with difficulty from the sofa, forget his medication, or wander about thinking it's Tuesday, he still worships at the altar, does his ablutions and says his prayers for the coming of Utopia.  'Not on my watch', he mumbles as he gets out of bed in the morning, not quite sure what that watch is, but steady as she goes. 

A sad story? A tragedy? Only an apocryphal warning.  'Pull up on the reins, Bobby Boy, or you'll find yourself in Blodgett's Creek', he remembers Tom Mix saying to his young nephew on the matinee screen at the Strand theatre in Tampa.  'Now, why did I think of that?' Rene asked himself. 

Life In A Turkish Harem, A Life Of Luxury And Sexual Sedition - The Victorian Journal Of An American Heiress

Abigail Cabot Putnam was the daughter of Isaiah Putnam, one of the descendants of John Davenport, early regent of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and founder of the New Haven plantations and Yale College. 

 

She led the privileged life of a Boston Brahmin.  Her family was the closest America could come to English aristocracy, and because of her wealth, family history, and stunning beauty, she was one of the most sought-after women in Victorian New England.  

She rode in elegant carriages, was seen to by valets, footmen, and personal servants, was dressed by her maid, served first at dinner, and was the belle of all the balls held at the family's summer estate on the North Shore. 

As many women of her class and station did, she travelled abroad; but after the obligatory and quite desultory trips to Europe, she wanted something more - a taste of the sybaritic east as Enobarbus had described it to Antony after seeing Cleopatra.  The splendor of her person, her palace, and her royal barge were beyond imagination.  An outing on the Nile was a spectacle of sound and light with Cleopatra at the center, a glorious woman of unmatched beauty, elegance, and charm. 

The glory days of Dynastic Egypt were long gone as were the glory days of Persepolis and Babylon, but the princely tradition of pashas, palaces, and resplendent harems still existed in Turkey, and it was reputed that the women of Suleiman Pasha were the most beautiful of the empire.  Suleiman himself was reported to be  handsome man, tall, stately, courtly and brilliant - a master at chess, a botanist, a visionary leader, and a devout Muslim. 

 

The splendor of his palace was renowned throughout the Middle East and nothing in the Saudi Kingdom or the Trucial states even came close.  It was a show case of the finest gold ornaments, crystal chandeliers, Carrera marble floors, Italian sconces, Persian carpets, alabaster and fine china, elegant balustrades, verandahs, and formal gardens. 

'I would like to meet him', said Abigail, and so it was that she set off for Constantinople for an audience with Suleiman Pasha. 

Her reputation preceded her, and when the Turkish prince got word of her request, he readily agreed. No effort would be spared to show the visiting American the very best of Turkish hospitality and regal attention. 

'A most charming man', she wrote in her journal, and went on to describe the caparisoned honor guard, the thousands of roses, the scent of frankincense and myrrh, and the magnificence of Suleiman Pasha's throne.  

'Greetings, my most honored guest and most beautiful woman', he said, gesturing to an ornate chair placed behind him  As they got settled tea and sweets were served and a chorus of dancing girls, all dressed in traditional costumes from the Black Sea, gracefully bowed and showed their gracious welcome. 

It was clear to Abigail that the pasha showed her more than just diplomatic interest.  His affections were respectful, correct, and proper but there was no mistaking his romantic intentions.  As he escorted her to the formal dining hall and seated her next to him, she had no doubt about the adventure ahead. 

Of course some cultural finesse was required and some retreat of Western sexual propriety - the man had a harem after all and three wives.  Sexual pleasure and connubial responsibility went hand in hand, parallel emoluments in a royal life, and if she were to become his lover, she would be one, perhaps not even primus inter pares. 

What in fact was a harem like? An elegant suite of women, draped in luxury and awaiting the bell? Private quarters with a shared convivial women's gathering place, a feminine place of gossip and lambency? What would it be like to be treated as next in line?

Or would it be the operatic love affair of The Thousand and One Nights? A royal seduction, bliss in the arms of her prince, loved by the wealthiest man in Asia, feted and treated like a princess, a queen?  She would be the woman to steal his heart, the power behind the throne, the legendary foreign queen of Turkish romance. 

Nonsense of course.  She was not one given to cheap dime-store novels of illicit romance.  She was more ethnographer and seditious interloper than dreamy-eyed American ingenue.  She would take what came, play the Queen of Hearts, the complaisant lover, the English peaches-and-cream beauty, the priceless gem of an already splendiferous collection. 

'Let me show you to your quarters' said Suleiman Pasha, and with a retinue of accompanying servants led her to her chambers, fanciful but tasteful quarters, the ornate windows of which opened on to the rose gardens below and the Bosporus beyond.  She would be alone here, the preamble perhaps to something more traditional; or perhaps this is the way it was done.  A harem might be a collective noun only not a clutch of women gathered around a bath. 

Well after midnight she was visited by Suleiman Pasha who stayed until the first morning light.  He had been kind, attentive, and an unadorned and sexually deliberate lover.   Never a jealous woman but only curious about the inner workings of a Turkish harem, she wondered when her turn would come around again, whether she would be moved to more suitable surroundings, etc. 

He visited her again the next night and the night after that, and when she felt more comfortable and more confident of his attentions, she asked him about his other 'duties'.  

'I have eyes only for you', he responded and slipped a ruby encrusted diamond ring on her finger. 'You are my goddess, my life'.  

This of course is what the Arabian Nights was all about - the elixir of love intoxicating a prince, a passionate lover stealing his affections from all other women, and her eventual reign as the Cleopatra of the Bosporus. 

This was not what Abigail Cabot Putnam was all about, however, and she quickly began to find the pasha's attentions predictable.  And the palace! She had held her tongue, this scion of stern Anglo-Saxon aristocratic New England heritage -Townsend secretaries, Chippendale chairs, Revere silver and Stuart, Copley, and West portraits on the walls. The palace was beyond Baroque and Rococo, a kitschy display of opulence.  There was no sense of order, discipline, or restraint amidst the glitz and glamour.  East and West would not meet anytime soon. 

The days of sexual quarantine were over.  Turkey was not Hanafi Saudi Arabia.  Elegance and chivalry still existed and that the pashas of the day were gentlemen.  Abigail would take her leave of Suleiman Pasha with due honor and respect.  She cared for the man, saw the unexpected turmoil she had caused in him - he had not been prepared for such a pearl-skinned, blonde, blue-eyed goddess of such infinite charm and sexual maturity.  'Oh to have children with her', he often thought as he retired to his chamber, overcome with a desire unbecoming of a pasha but profound nonetheless. 

'Let's be in touch'. Of course she wasn't that dismissive and cruel, and showed him all the courtesy and respect he deserved, but his hangdog look was simply not princely.  She rode in the royal carriage to the port and to the ocean liner to take her back to America, Boston, and Beacon Hill.  'Bye-bye' said and waved her handkerchief to the tearful pasha and his princely retinue.