Summer Crossing (6 page)

Having discovered that Steve Bolton’s name did not set off any commotion, Peter was bored with the subject. But Grady, waiting to hear, found her interest in Janet genuine: Janet, unlike Steve, was not seen at the small end of a telescope, but sharply in the foreground, present and punishing; and she remembered the morning when she’d prolonged Janet’s agony (with a remorse never quite felt before). “Or didn’t he mention them?”

“Yes, of course he did. Said they were fine. There’s another one, a girl this time. You can be sure he showed me a picture: whatever makes people do that? All those glossy snapshots of gooey brats! Perverse. I hope you never have any children.”

“Why, for God’s sake? I’d like a little bowlegged baby: bathe it, you know, and hold it up in the light.”

Here was a wedge and he used it. “A bowlegged baby? And what, my dear, would he think of that?”

“Who?” said Grady.

“You’ll forgive me, I don’t know the gentleman’s name,”
he said, serving a point. “I’ll venture to say, though, that it’s one fairly well-known (come now, isn’t this why you don’t tell me?), that he is some sort of intellectual and at least twenty years older: nervous girls of extensive sensibility always get goose-happy over daddy-types.”

Grady laughed, though laughter, she saw too late, authorized his making cartoons of her situation. She was willing to permit him this liberty, however: it was small payment for a service he’d done her this evening, one impossible to explain: it consisted simply in his now knowing Clyde Manzer existed; for his knowing it made Clyde dwindle to human size and exist, too. So long had she shrouded him in shadow and secret that he had come to loom greater than his actuality. To have another person know drained much of the mystery and lessened her fear of his dissolving: he was a substance at last, someone carried not just in her head, and mentally she floated toward him, ecstatic to embrace his reality.

Peter was pleased with himself. “You needn’t bother answering: but am I right?”

“I won’t tell you; if I did, then I shouldn’t have any more of your theories.”

“Do you want really to hear my theories?”

“No, as a matter of fact I don’t,” she said: as a matter of
fact, she did: it gave back something of the excitement of having still a secret.

“Tell me one thing.” Peter speared his palm with a swizzle stick. “Are you going to marry him?”

She recognized the purposeful quality of his asking and, keyed to banter, was disconcerted by it. “I don’t know,” she said, with a resentful chop in her voice. “Does one always have to want to marry? I’m sure there are kinds of love in which that is hardly an issue.”

“Yes: but aren’t love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is—if it’s just a matter of spreading her legs, almost any woman will do that for nothing. But seriously, dear?”

“Seriously, then (though obviously you’re the one not being serious): I have no answer to give, how could I when I’ve never really thought of it? We came here to dance, darling. Shall we?”

Awaiting them on their return was a photographer, surly with disinterest, and the Bamboo Club’s press agent, a sassy pouting man whose jeweled hands fluttered about the table arranging festive props: a champagne bucket, a vase of flowers, a monster-large ashtray on which the club’s name was brazenly photogenic. “That’s right, Miss McNeil, just a little
picture, you don’t mind? Now, now, mustn’t stare at the camera, that’s right, look at each other:
sweet
, absolutely darling,
couldn’t
be cuter! Artie, you’re taking a great picture, capturing young love, that’s what you’re doing. Ah, Miss McNeil,
I
know better—listen there, even your young man says I’m right! Don’t you, young man? And who
are
you, anyway? Wait now, I want to write it all down. But isn’t that someone awfully old or dead or famous or something, Walt Whitman? Oh,
I
see, you’re Walt Whitman the second; a
grandson
, are you? Well, isn’t that lovely. Thank you, Miss McNeil, and you, too, Mr. Whitman: you’ve both been
sweet
, absolutely darling.” He did not forget to take with him the flowers, the champagne, the ashtray.

Peter’s expense on whiskey had at last paid a dividend: which is to say, his sense of humor had reached a point that was without discrimination; and he was determined to push it even further: unfortunately, someone gave him an opportunity. It was a grey, inhibited little man who, goaded by his companion, a pink strawberry woman sipping brandy, leaned from the next table and gave Peter’s arm a diffident peck: “Pardon me,” he said, “but we wondered if you people are British royalty? My friend says because they took your picture you’re British royalty.”

“No,” said Peter, with a patient smile. “American royalty.”

Grady was persuaded they should leave: another minute and there would be a fight: it was with that expectation that Peter wanted to stay. He could at least be ashamed, he said, and got them as far as the dance-floor, but there he bogged down, insisting they dance and demanding the orchestra play his favorite tune: “Just One of Those Things.” She warned him to stop singing in her ear: “Just one of those fabulous flights”: so after a while she sang with him. A marathon of scarlet stars blinked on a circle of ceiling, and Grady, sprinkled by their light, dizzy in their whirl, drifted in the refuge of this sky: a voice, far down upon the earth, carried up to her: can you hear? that I say you are royalty? Dreaming, she thought it was Clyde, though how like Peter it sounded! And turning in space, her hair swung like a victory. They danced until all at once and as one the music dimmed and the stars went dark.

“The doorman gave me these,” said Clyde, almost a week later. He held out two telegrams, but Grady did not take them until she’d turned on the kitchen faucet and rinsed her hands of waffle-batter. “I’d like to take a poke at that guy: a real schnook! You ought to see the kind of looks he gives me. And that kid on the elevator, he’s a little fairy: I’ll hand him something to nibble on.” She had heard these complaints before, they needed no comment from her, so she said: “Where’s the butter, honey? And did you get the kind of syrup I wanted?” She was making a very late breakfast: they had not got up until after eleven. For the last few days the parking lot had been closed; the owner was having some trouble over his license. And the day before, accompanied by Mink and his girlfriend, they’d driven up into the
Catskills on a picnic. On the way back a tire had blown out, and it was two in the morning before they’d crossed the George Washington Bridge. “No soap on that syrup—so I got Log Cabin, O.K.?” he said, settling himself by the waffle-iron and unfolding a tabloid he’d brought back. His eyebrows, whenever he read, dipped like a scholar’s (and with a mumbling noise he chewed one after another of his fingernails). “Says here Sunday was the hottest July sixth since 1900: over a million people at Coney—what do you think of that?” Grady, remembering the blazing rock-strewn field where they’d scrounged around battling insects and eating unsalted hard-boiled eggs, didn’t think much. She finished drying her hands and sat down to open the telegrams.

Actually, one was a cable, an extravagant two-pager from Lucy in Paris: Safely here stop horrid voyage as daddy forgot dinner suit and we forced to stay evenings in cabin stop airmail dinner suit at once stop also send my hair switch stop put out the lights stop don’t smoke in bed stop am seeing man tomorrow about your dress stop will send samples stop are you all right query tell Hermione Bensusan to mail me your horoscope for July and August stop am worried about you stop love mother. Grady creased the cable with a groan; did her mother really believe she was going to get her involved
again with Hermione Bensusan? Miss Bensusan was an astrologist Lucy doted on.

“Hey, hurry up with those waffles. There’s a ball-game on the radio.”

“There’s a radio in the cupboard,” she said, not looking up from the peculiar message of her second telegram. “Turn it on if you want.”

He touched her hand softly. “What’s the matter: bad news?”

“Oh no,” she said, laughing. “Just something rather silly.” And she read aloud: “My nightly mirror says you are divine and the daily mirror says you are mine.”

“Who sent it?”

“Walt Whitman the Second.”

Clyde was fiddling with the radio. “Don’t you know the guy?” he said, between scraps of broadcast.

“In a way.”

“Must be a joker: or is he nuts?”

“A bit,” she said, meaning it: once, during the time he was in the navy, and when his ship had touched at some Far East port, Peter had mailed her an opium pipe and fifteen silk kimonos. She had given all but one of the kimonos to a charity auction, a generosity that backfired when someone discovered the simple designs that patterned them were an
illusionary trick: held in certain lights they revealed dreadful obscenities. Mr. McNeil, caught dead-center in the ensuing ruckus, had said, nonsense, obviously the value of the kimonos should increase: he hadn’t objected at all to Grady’s wearing one. In fact, she was wearing it now, though the cumbersome sleeves had a nasty habit of drooping into the bowl as she stood whipping up her waffle-batter.

She would not admit she was making a mess. Unfazed by bacon already shriveled and coffee stone-cold, she poured her mixings onto a grill she’d forgotten to grease, and said, “Oh I adore to cook: it makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way. And I’ve been thinking—if you’re going to listen to a ball-game, why, I might bake a chocolate cake: would you like that?” Presently, with a gust of smoke, the waffle-iron indicated a charred content; twenty minutes later, having scraped the iron, she announced cheerfully, and not without pride: “Breakfast ready.”

Clyde sat down and surveyed his plate with a smile so wan that she said, “What is it, darling? Couldn’t you find your ball-game on the radio?” Hmm, he’d found the right station, but the game hadn’t started yet: and would she mind heating up the coffee again? “Peter loathes baseball,” she said, for no reason other than that it was a detail she’d just remembered: as an opposition to Clyde, who appeared so to
guard his own talk, she’d begun saying whatever came into her head, regardless of how irrelevant. “Be careful,” she said, carrying the percolator from the stove and pouring him more coffee, “you’ll burn your tongue this time.” As she passed he caught her hand, swinging it a little to and fro. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Why?” he said. “Because I’m happy,” she answered, and swung her hand free of his. “That’s funny,” he said, “it’s funny you’re not happy all the time,” and his arm swept outward in a gesture she instantly regretted, for it indicated, indeed proved, how aware he was of her advantages: absurdly, she’d not thought him resentful.

“Happiness is relative,” she said: it was the easiest reply.

“Relative to what: money?” This retort seemed to give his spirits a lift. He stretched, yawned, told her to light him a cigarette.

“After this, you’ll light your own,” she said, “because I’m going to be very busy with a chocolate cake. You can get some ice-cream from Schrafft’s: won’t that be heaven?” She propped a cookbook in front of her. “Lots of wonderful recipes in here: listen to this—”

Interrupting, he said, “It just came to me: did you mean that when you told Winifred she could have a party here? She’s the kind of girl that’ll think you meant it.”

This derailed her own train of thought: what party? And
then, in a rainfall of memory that left her quite drenched, she remembered that Winifred was the dark, hefty, huge girl Mink had brought to the picnic in the Catskills: a picnic to which Winifred had contributed, in addition to a pound of salami, something near to two hundred pounds of giggling fat and muscle. Rhinoceros into wood-nymph, and clad in a pair of gym-bloomers, these a hold-over from athletic days at Lincoln High, she’d romped with nature all the afternoon, never letting go the clutch she kept on a sweaty bunch of daisies: there were some people who just thought it was funny the way she loved flowers, she said, but honestly there was nothing she loved better than flowers because that was the kind of person she was.

And yet, in an ill-defined way, she was admirable, Winifred. Like her spaniel eyes, there was a tender good kind of warmth in her unrestraint; and she so adored Mink, was so proud and solicitous of him. Grady knew no one she thought less attractive than Mink, or more preposterous than Winifred: yet together and around them they made a clear lovely light: it was as if, out of their ordinary stone, their massive unshaped selves, something precious had been set free, a figure musical and pure: she could not but pay it homage. Clyde, who, it would seem, had presented them as a warning that what was his would not suit her,
appeared surprised that she liked them. But when the tire blew, and while the men were fixing it, Grady had been left alone in the car with Winifred; and Winifred, luring her into a cave of feminine confidence, quickly brought about one of the few times Grady had ever felt close to another girl. They each told a story. Winifred’s was sad: she was a telephone operator, and that she liked, but her life at home was misery because, determined to marry Mink, she wanted to have an engagement party, and her family, who thought Mink worthless, would not allow it in the house: what oh what was she to do? Grady had said, well, if it was only a party, why she could use the McNeils’ apartment. Promptly Winifred had burst into fat tears: it was the nicest thing, she said.