The Tale Of A Natural Courtesan - From Iowa Farm Girl To The Silks Of A Turkish Harem

Alicia Thomas grew up in Bolivar, Iowa, a settled, good place in the rural Midwest - a place of rectitude, solid principle, hard work, family, and faith; but to this young, precociously mature girl, a deadly, boring place. She was tired of cornstalks, the smell of milk and dung, and the endless routine of chores, pot roast, and early bedtime. 

 

By the time she was twelve, she had blossomed, a sensuous, sexually aware Delilah, an impossibly irresistible nymphet.  Her mother's own sexual precocity had been nipped in the bud by a Faulknerian zealot - a father who locked her in an airless closet and harangued her with shouts loud enough to shake the rafters of their cobbled, hand-strung, mud and wattle house on the Iowa prairie. 

 'Jezebel! Harlot! Whore', he howled, followed by verses from Samuel, Ezekiel, and Kings, spoken in hysterical tongues like a crazed Biblical prophet, while Elmira cowered in the closet, choking with the smell of camphor and breathing in dust devils and prairie mites from the cracks of the out-of-kilter raw oak floorboards. 

 

Alicia's mother saw herself in her young daughter, but let the bird fly free.  No daughter of hers would have to suffer anyone's mad ravings.  She at forty had barely recovered from the assaults of a wild man, married a staid, dumb, dray horse of a man forced upon her by her father; and glad only to be rid of the father, left with her husband and settled in Bolivar, had Alicia, and then slept as far away from him as possible on the corn cob mattress under the hay in the ramshackle, half-slatted barn. 

And so it was that Alicia Thomas began her life as a courtesan, accepted favors from an alderman, a legislator, and a Congressman, all of whom had marveled at her cornflower blue eyes, silken blond hair, and sensuous body.  Every one risked marriage and career for a night with her, and once taken, returned for many more until she tired of them, their increasingly doggy, simpering love, and their awful, pretentious male egos. 

Never in the course of her sexual escapades did she have one iota of shame, guilt, or regret.  Her sexuality was no matter for discussion with either preacher or God.  She was her own woman, an Eve, a Sarah Bernhardt, a Mata Hari, the consort of the Sultan of Izmir, a Cleopatra.  Her sexual ambition knew no bounds and as she matured, she learned the art of feminine wiles, the sexual immaturity of men, and the sexual determinants of power. 

 

Women had always bested men, sussed and vetted them with ease, enticed, seduced, and manipulated them with grace and enthusiasm, always came out on top, and left them crying on the curb.  The political fol-de-rol about misogyny, the glass ceiling, and the patriarchal dominance of men was sheer nonsense.  Shakespeare had it right in one.  His women were regal in bearing, absolute in ambition, canny in understanding, and indomitable in will.  Ibsen and Strindberg derived their heroines from the women they knew, not uncommon women of intractable will, intelligence, and authority. 

Whether queen or courtesan, woman was meant to rule.  When she left Bolivar, she left behind not only chicken feed and pig sties, but that particularly staid and settled moral rectitude of the Midwest - that sense of American originalism, the faux fantasy of the real America, the heart and soul of the republic. She was now not only her own woman, freed from the arbitrary, confining, presumptuous moral codes of her youth, but an expansive one, a woman whose ambition knew no bounds. 

The men she serviced in Washington were no different than any other.  The Governor of New Hampshire, after a cinq-a-sept in the Presidential Suite of the Mayflower hotel, came back for seconds and thirds and confessed to her that he had found his soul mate. Paid or not, she was beyond reproach and almost beyond reach for all her seductive beauty. Thanks to him, her stock in trade rose, her bank account swelled, and her already supreme confidence increased. 

Her fortunes were never more imperial than when she was visited by Ahmed Emiroglu, direct descendant of the Ottoman Turkish Sultan Suleyman I, the greatest Turkish ruler of that country's long and storied history.  Emiroglu was a fine and unpretentious man in his late fifties, a businessman with significant holdings in the Caymans, properties in Dubai ands Bahrain, a pied a terre in Bebek, and a home in McLean overlooking the Potomac.  A gentleman, a courtier, and a prince of a man. 

He, no different than other men who had been taken by Alicia's sexual charms and farmgirl beauty, offered her the chance to accompany him to Istanbul, be his companion and sexual consort and join his household.  

Now, although Ahmed Emiroglu affected a commoner simplicity and businesslike eagerness, he was the true heir of emirs, pashas, and sultans.  Although the republican leaders of modern Turkey did not want to admit it, Emiroglu lived in the style of his forbears - in a luxurious palace overlooking the Bosporus, attended to by a fleet of liveried servants, and accompanied by a harem of beautiful women from Iran, Palestine, and Jordan.  

Of course it was not a harem in the historical sense of the word - these women were not cloistered behind closed doors, visited whenever the pasha so desired, but free to come and go as they pleased but always at the beck and call of the master. 

 

It was an ideal arrangement for all concerned.  The women, well-taken care of by Emiroglu, were happy enough to be chauffeured here and there, squired by him at theatre openings and vernissages, photographed by Turkish paparazzi and sought after for the elegant soirees at the Presidential palace.  

Turkey may be an increasingly fundamentalist country but it has never lost the Roman sense of the sybaritic East.  Emiroglu was not the only man in Istanbul living the life of an Ottoman pasha, you only had to know who was who. 

 

Alicia was not disappointed, for what better place for a modern day courtesan than the harem of a latter-day pasha? 

And afterwards? What then? The thoughts of most aging women, but irrelevant to the likes of Alicia Thomas who, confident and unabashedly uncontrite and without regret until the day she died, never lost a beat in her retirement with stops in St. Tropez, Palm Beach, and eventually back to Bolivar whose farm-bred simplicity now appealed. To its credit the town welcomed her back without recrimination or worse.  She was one of theirs after all, all gussied up and famous but still the same, old Alicia.