"If Jake starts talking about Egypt I'm leaving," one whispered to the other, across my salad.
"I know what you mean," the other said. "It's bad enough to have to read his columns."
"Oh, I don't read him," the first lady said, looking reflective for a moment.
"If it came to that, I'd rather fuck him than read him," she said. "I feel the same way about Max Lerner, for what that's worth."
It was at this point that we all heard the hideous scratching of eight little paws, all of them trying to gain a purchase on the highly polished floor.
Here came the pugs, old, fat, and black, making awful little mewling sounds as they tried to scratch their way across the floor, their wet red tongues hanging over their underbites. Twice they lost their purchase and sprawled on their stomachs on the slick floor, mewling more horribly than ever.
The second time this happened Perkins picked them up by their scruffs and carried them around the table to their mistress. That he managed to perform this chore without losing one whit of his dignity says all that need be said for the man's presence.
Pencil Penrose received the dogs cheerfully and they immediately began to compete with one another to scramble over her bosom and lick her face,
"Wogers!" she exclaimed. "Gogers!" as the little black dogs flung themselves at her overhanging bosom like salmon at a waterfall.
The immediate effect of her exclamation was to bring John C.V. Ponsonby to full wakefulness for the first time in hours. He blinked slowly, like the old frog he more or less resembled, and watched impassively as Wogers and Gogers attempted to scramble up or around Pencil's bosom.
Despite her fondness for them, Pencil soon tired of their sharp little claws and wet little tongues, so she without further ado simply set them on the dinner table.
Chapter X
I was frankly shocked. I had eaten at a number of tables where it was customary to set the plates under the table for the dogs, but never at one where the dogs were put on the table and given a go at the plates.
In view of the reaction of the ladies beside me, I'm inclined to think it's not a common thing, even in Georgetown. They snapped to attention and looked around them happily, as if they had received an unexpected benediction.
"Now that is an upper-class thing!" one whispered to the other.
Both of them sighed, in a refreshed way. Apparently the burden of years of middle-classness, if not worse, had suddenly been lifted.
The dogs were so delighted to be on the table that they frolicked for a moment, rolling around, mewling, and even briefly simulating copulation.
Fortunately for everyone's digestion, Wogers and Gogers were long past consummating anything. After a brief hump they shook themselves and stared myopically around the table. Then they trotted across the table as confidently as two black imps.
Just as the congressman from Michigan belatedly reached for his knife and fork, Wogers and Gogers spotted his chicken and made a beeline for it. The congressman happened to glance down, to see what he was eating, and saw a sight that would have unnerved Douglas MacArthur.
Wogers and Gogers were by this time ripping their way through a cold but toothsome chicken breast. Thanks to certain genetic drawbacks, such as blunt noses and tiny teeth, they were making a sloppy job of it. Both of them had their front teeth in the congressman's plate and were slinging drippings this way and that as they tried to tear a few filaments of chicken loose from the bone.
When I described the scene to Boog, the next day, he rolled on the floor and laughed until froth came out of his mouth.
"That gutless little piss-ant," he said. "I hope he swallert his tongue. He can talk more and say less than any man I ever met, unless it was Everett Dirksen.”
Jake Ponsonby was making an effort to keep himself awake. He was doodling what appeared to be, Latin hexameters on his shirt cuff".
Old Cotswinkle, meanwhile, had suddenly discovered that there was a girl sitting next to him—namely Cindy— and he was staring fixedly at her bosom.
Lilah Landry was employing her Georgia gift of gab for the benefit of an elderly Britisher who seemed to have recently unplugged his life support system. He was either dead or pretending to be, a fact that made no difference to Lilah. She continued to talk rapidly and smile dizzily in his direction.
For perhaps a minute the party seemed to lose what little motion it had. Few conversed, no one got up, the servants held themselves in abeyance, and the water in the finger bowls slowly grew cold. At the head of the table Senator Penrose was talking quietly about Mr. Jefferson—to hear him one would have thought that Mr. Jefferson had been to dinner the night before.
The congressman from Michigan recognized at once that his food was a lost cause, and attempted to put a dignified face on the matter.
Unfortunately, the congressman didn't have a dignified face. He had a weak, selfish face, on which the only thing writ large was self-esteem. Though bug-eyed with embarrassment, he had survived fourteen terms in the House, so when Cunny Cotswinkle glanced over to see if the pugs had finished picking his chicken breast he actually smiled—a shit-eating grin to end all shit-eating grins.
"I love dawgs," he said.
Chapter XI
When the pugs finished mangling the chicken breast they trotted back down the table and had another little frolic, this one directly in front of me. Also directly in front of me were two very fine Charles II casters. I had been admiring them all evening.
The pugs got up, snuffling from their exertions, and one of them started to lift a leg on the nearest caster.
No one was paying the slightest attention either to the pugs or me, so I reached over and jabbed the dog in the ass with my fork. Then, for good measure, I jabbed the other one too.
The reaction was wonderful. The first pug squeaked like a sick bat and darted straight across the table. In his myopia he mistook Lilah Landry for his mistress and leaped straight for her bosom.
Lilah was wearing an attractive burgundy gown, easily loose enough at the bust to accommodate a small slick dog. Since she was still treating the moribund Englishman to a display of southern dizziness she didn't see the dog coming. He hit her just above the breastbone and immediately slid down between her breasts.
The second pug had more voice. She squealed like a shoat trying to get at some slop and raced straight down the table toward Senator Penrose.
The Senator saw the dog coming just in time to swallow whatever he had been about to say about Mr. Jefferson, and ducked. The pug bounced off his chair, hit the floor, and fetched up in a comer, squealing horribly.
"Oh, Gogers," Pencil said, giving her a pettish glance. "Bad creature! No table manners."
If it was Gogers on the floor, it could only be Wogers neatly nestling between Lilah Landry's breasts.
By the time Lilah managed to check the flow of gab all that could be seen of Wog-ers was a little whimpering black snout, directly between her impressive breasts.
The sight was sufficiently novel to cause Jake Ponsonby to stop doodling hexameters. He blinked twice, put aside his pen, and slowly brought his froglike gaze to focus on Lilah's bosom.
At this point Pencil looked around and saw Wogers, too, had misbehaved.
"Uh-oh," she said.
Ponsonby was more eloquent. He lowered his head until the prominent vein in his nose was only an inch or two from the more delicate veins in Lilah's breasts.
"Lilah, my dear," he said, "is it your intention to suckle that pug?"
Ponsonby's voice was perfectly adapted to his favored role as Tory panjandrum and parliamentarian of Georgetown. In it one heard not so distant echoes of the Raj.
Lilah looked down at the pug for a second and gave the company her best smile.
"Why puppy dawg," she said, "how'd you get in there?"
Ponsonby blinked again. "Perhaps pedantically," he said, "I am put in mind of Livy, the first book. Do you expect to found a city?"
"If I do I hope it ain't nothin' like Macon
," Lilah said, addressing herself gingerly to the problem of extracting a pug from her bosom. By this time she had the undivided attention of everyone except old Cotswinkle, who, having found one nice bosom to stare at, saw no reason to play the field.
Lilah reached down as delicately as possible and tried to get Wogers by the neck, an action he didn't appreciate. Instead of coming out he wiggled deeper into the pleasant valley.
This brought his sharp little hind-toenails into contact with Lilah's tummy.
"Oh, puppy, don't tickle," she said, jumping up. "I can't stand tickles."
Jumping up was a big mistake. As Wogers scrambled for a purchase the law of gravity brought him into contact with yet more ticklish regions—so ticklish, in fact, that Lilah dashed wildly around the table, screeching hysterically and clutching the pug to her stomach as tightly as she could, another act that was counterproductive. Wogers concluded that he was being suffocated, a not unreasonable fear, and scrambled all the harder.
By this time Lilah's screeches were so earsplitting that only Dunscombe Cotswinkle, deaf as a brass pig, was unaffected by them.
"Perkins!" Pencil said.
A nod from Perkins was all it took. Two alert Guatemalans grabbed Lilah, arresting her wild flight. Her bosom was heaving, but Wogers wasn't heaving with it. He yipped hopelessly from somewhere near her midriff".
"Here, get him," Lilah said, bending over. One of the Guatemalans thrust in a hand and got him, but a snag developed. Evidently one of his hind feet had hooked itself inextricably in Lilah's pantyhose.
At this point the two Guatemalans began to shake Lilah vigorously. Short of cutting Wogers' foot off, it seemed the only method likely to work, and it did work. Wogers promptly thumped onto the floor. Perkins picked him up and then went over in the comer and collected Gogers. Both were handed to a maid.
The company then all stood up. Lilah Landry had quickly shaken herself back into a state of world-class fashionability. The women, well trained as bees, made a beeline for the hallway and went up some stairs.
I started to follow, but came hard up against Perkins, who stood in the door.
"Brandy will be served in the study," he said.
Chapter XII
The minute we got in the study most of the men sank into big shiny red chairs and waited listlessly for their brandy.
The only person who had actually seen me stick the pugs was the Englishman I had too hastily taken for dead. His name was Sir Cripps Crisp. Both his name and his powers of observation belied his manner.
"If you'd tried that with my Schnauzers they'd have had your arm off at the elbow," he said, as we walked in together.
A small Philippine manservant was soon distributing brandy, under the watchful eye of Perkins. Senator Penrose trotted around with a box of cigars, looking nervous.
His nervousness was evidently prompted by Jake Ponsonby, who had settled himself in the largest, shiniest, and most centrally located red chair. Then he carefully placed the tips of his fingers against one another, and waited.
Most of the men seemed to know why he was waiting, and made haste to snip the ends of their cigars and get themselves ready. Only Sir Cripps Crisp seemed indifferent to hurry. He deliberated so long over the choice of a cigar that I thought the Senator was going to cram one in his mouth and light it for him. Alone among the company. Sir Cripps seemed unaffected by the fact that Jake Ponsonby had placed his fingertips together.
For his part, Ponsonby seemed equally unaffected by Sir Cripps's prognostications over the cigars, though now and then he made a little rippling motion movement with his fingertips, as a pianist might loosen up a bit before addressing the keys.
Eventually Sir Cripps located a cigar that met with his standards, allowed Perkins to cut and light it for him, and went off to the most remote of the red chairs, where he resumed his impersonation of a dead man.
The moment Sir Cripps's ass touched leather John C. V. Ponsonby cleared his throat.
"Let us begin with the Yemen," he said. "I speak, of course, of North Yemen. South Yemen is—or has been until very recently—ours. Whether the present administration has the skill—not to mention the will—to maintain that highly desirable state of affairs is perhaps open to question, but for now let us pass that question and consider the more vulnerable—and, I need hardly add—the more vital north."
He then proceeded to consider North Yemen and the regions adjacent to it in a speech of some twenty minutes duration, fetching up, finally, in the vicinity of the Sudan. As he spoke he tapped his fingertips ever so gently against one another, as if he were pecking out the sentences on an internal typewriter.
Each sentence came out perfect, edited as it emerged, and ready to go straight into one of his columns. In fact, a day or two later, glancing at one of his columns, I recognized a sentence or two, though the column they appeared in happened to be about Korea, rather than North Yemen.
If my initial respect for the sentences was high, it was certainly no higher than that of the gentlemen who listened with me. Ponsonby's stately periods must have been as familiar to them as their wives’ menstrual rhythms, but— with the exception of Sir Cripps—their attentiveness fell just short of worship. He was the orator, they were the chorus, and they greeted his statements with big puffs of cigar smoke and thoughtful nods of the head.
Occasionally some member of the chorus would blurt out two or three sentences of response—"But Jake, there's the factor of Sadat" was popular—during which unwanted interruption Ponsonby would purse his lips as carefully as he placed his fingertips. When the interrupter paused for breath Ponsonby went serenely on with his discourse.
When he reached the Sudan a rumble was heard from Sir Cripps, who stood up and stuffed his cigar in the pocket of his dinner jacket. Fortunately it had long since gone out.
"The Crown lost the Sudan, and now we have lost the women," he said. "Personally, I would rather have the women, if they can be found."
At that moment, as if released by some celestial timer, the women began to pour through the door.
Chapter XIII
Whatever the women had been doing upstairs had evidently refreshed them, because they were all in high, if not raucous, good spirits when they returned.
The fuss they made upon entering would have wakened the dead, but at that it was barely sufficient to awaken their menfolk. Ponsonby's Augustan sonorities had done much to dissipate whatever tensions the company entertained—so much, indeed, that about half the company was sound asleep. Perkins had adroitly extracted half-spent cigars from a number of gently snoring mouths, preventing them from either being swallowed or falling out and burning holes in perfectly good cummerbunds.
Waking the gang was clearly thought to be women's work, and the women set about it with a vengeance, emitting shrill, drill-like peals of laughter and administering pinches, jabs, and an occasional well-aimed kick, as the occasion required.
One by one the men awoke, several of them exhibiting traces of surliness at the sight of their mates. Most of them simply sat and blinked, trying to get their bearings.
While I was watching them blink, Cindy came and stood at my elbow. She looked pleased, but it was hard to know what she was thinking. Her healthy smell held few clues.
"I can't imagine why I brought you to a respectable party," she said. "We could have just fucked."
We both looked at Cunny Cotswinkle, who was going at her husband with such a vengeance that it was hard to tell whether her intent was to wake him up or beat him to death.
Cotswinkle had failed into a deep sleep—probably dreaming peacefully of Yalta, or the Treaty of Versailles, something appropriate to his years and eminence; but his wife was not disposed to let him dream in peace. To put it brutally, she was slapping the shit out of him, as John C. V. Ponsonby looked on with what was possibly meant to be a smile.
"Jake's waiting for him to die," Cindy explained.
"Why?"
"Jake's writing his autobiography," she said. "
It's called The Last Professional.' Actually, it's finished, but he can't publish it while Dunny's alive, because Dunny's a professional, too. I hope I'm around when he finally publishes it."
"Eager to read it, huh?" I said.
"Are you kidding?" Cindy said. "I just wanta go to the parties. All the right people will give him parties. They do anyway, but these will be better parties. People from London and Paris will have to fly over."
"Why is Mrs. Cotswinkle beating her husband?" I asked.
"That's plain as a peanut," Cindy said. "She just found out he's fucking Olivia Brown."
Chapter XIV
To Jake Ponsonby's evident disappointment, Dunscombe Cotswinkle was not dead.
For that matter, he was not even subdued. As the next-to-last professional, he did not take kindly to being slapped around. When he finally got the sleep out of his eyes anger took its place. I twice saw him try to backhand his wife, but both times Perkins caught his arm and pretended to be stuffing it into a coat.
Within his limited domain, Perkins' professionalism was equal to either Cotswinkle's or Ponsonby's.
If anything, Ponsonby was harder to handle. The evening seemed to have taken a good deal out of him. He began to wobble, as if his legs were made of rubber, and wandered off down the hall in search of Lilah Landry.
Unfortunately, Lilah had just left with Eviste Labouchere, the small French journalist. This fact surprised no one but me.
"Lilah's a star-fucker," Cindy said. "Only she can't figure out who the stars are. On the whole I find her vague.
"I think she's got Eviste mixed up with Bernard Henri L6vy," Cindy added. "Can you imagine?"