“Do you care for Bizet?” I asked Worthington hopefully. “Biz-who?” he said through his pipe, as the waitress brought rolls and butter. “Bizet”, I mumbled, afraid that I had pronounced it wrong, that it should have been Busy, Bizette, or Byzay. Worthington didn’t answer so I took a roll and had just started to butter it when suddenly he reached across the table, took a firm grip on my hand, looked into my eyes and said, “Do you have any sexual desires?” Needless to say, for the rest of that lunch hour I never did go back to old rococo Bizet.
“What you need is fun!” Mary said as she hung up the phone after telling somebody named Clara that of course I’d love to go dancing with her Cousin Bill.
“Not when your idea of fun is fighting for my virtue in a pitch-black taxi cab while trying to figure out the German for CUT THAT OUT!”
“Oh, Hans!’ Mary said. “Europeans don’t have the same attitude toward sex that we do. Anyway, he’s gone back to Germany and he is a wonderful dancer.”
“He’s a wonderful dancer if you don’t mind having your bust pinched to music.”
Mary said, “Hans was simply charming at the Andersons. He’s a count and one of the Hapsburgs, you know.”
I said, “Mary, there were one hundred and fifty people at the Andersons’ cocktail party and I’ll bet half of them have Hans’ fingerprints on them some place. Do you know that he tried to pull my blouse down and kiss my bare shoulder in a movie.”
Mary said, “Oh, Betty. That’s European. They’re always kissing each other’s shoulders. You’ve seen The Merry Widow.”
I said, “I’m not going tonight. You’ve never seen Clara’s Cousin Bill.”
Mary said, “Betty, you know Clara, and she and her husband are going. Please, Betsy, just this once and I promise I’ll never get you another blind date. Anyway, I only got you a date with Hans because Helen told me that he was going to offer you a wonderful job.”
“He did”, I said. “Shooting wild goats in Austria. I was to tally the kill and to carry the one sleeping bag.”
Mary said, “Anyway, Bill is an American.”
I said, “How tall is he?”
Mary said, “He’s twenty-seven and sells advertising.”
I said, “How tall is he?”
Mary said, “I forgot to ask Clara about that but she says he has a sense of humour.”
“I don’t care how funny he is”, I said. “I’m sick of looking down into some little dandruffy parting.”
Mary said, “Betty, you know that some of the dates I’ve got you have turned out all right. You’ve even had a wonderful time occasionally. Please go tonight. I’ve already told Clara you would and you’ll never heal those wounds sitting around home brooding.”
“I wasn’t brooding”, I said. “I was studying shorthand and I’m not worried about those old wounds. My idea is to keep from getting any new ones.”
They came for me on the dot of seven. Clara, a little blonde dressed in yellow, was so sallow, so narrow and so flat she looked like a wax bean but she was sweet and very anxious for us all to have a good time. Her husband, Carmen, a large grey real estate man, had simplified the English language to just two words—‘poop’ and ‘crap’. He used them as common nouns and proper nouns and then by merely adding ‘ed’ and ‘y’ he had verbs, adjectives and adverbs with which to describe in detail, real estate transactions, the resort where he and Clara spent their honeymoon, the ‘home’ they were building, the music and decorations of the night club where we went—just everything. For punctuation he used nudges and winks. It gave his conversation a static sound like the Morse code.
Cousin Bill was exactly my height, five feet, seven inches, but we weren’t twins because I had on high heels and five feet of him was torso, and his legs looked as if they’d been meant for some-body else.
Bill wore a turquoise blue suit, little pools of spit in the corners of his mouth and a big pompadour smoothed greasily over a heavy tangle of hair, like a tarpaulin thrown over a brush pile. I thought he was the funniest-looking thing I’d ever seen but I didn’t feel like laughing.
Clara and Carmen thought he was funny acting and doubled up convulsively when he pulled the tablecloth over our laps and shouted at me, ‘Hey, baby, no fair, you’ve got most of the sheet’, or pretended one short leg was shorter than the other short leg when we danced or clapped his hands with the dirty fingernails together and yelled, ‘Hey, Garsong’, to the waiter. After we had danced, we had Chinese food and Cousin Bill further convulsed Clara and Carmen by yelling, ‘Pass the bug juice, Baby!’ or ‘Who’ll have another piece of sea gull’, or calling the waiters ‘Chowmein’ or ‘Foo Young’.
Louise’s husband’s buddy (Louise had gone to high school with Mary and me but I didn’t remember her and didn’t care) was tall and handsome, had beautiful white teeth, dimples, dried-blood-coloured shoes with sharp pointy toes and a yellow roadster. He took me to a country club for dinner and as he picked titbits off my plate with his fork, told me that his Mom was his best girl and would always wear his fraternity pin, but he thought a bachelor should have a normal sex life. I told him that if he expected to have a normal sex life he’d have to get that fraternity pin off Mom and dangle it around a little, and he said, “Betty, my dear, you’re far too cynical for your age.”
I learned during those trying times when Mary was getting me dates that most bachelors wanted a normal sex life even under the most abnormal conditions. Some were more eager about sex than others, especially Navy Officers who had been at sea.
Once Mary got our sister Dede, who is very small, a New Year’s Eve date with a tiny little Navy Officer. We warned her against regular Navy procedure and her date, like a true little clinger to tradition, immediately told her she looked tired and would she like to rest in his great big old empty hotel room.
Dede told us about it at the night club where we convened and when we all laughed, the little Navy Officer became so incensed he crawled under the table and bit the leg of a woman at the next table. The woman screamed and her escort, who happened to be a boot-legger, threw back his coat, disclosing two little guns, and said, “Who done that?” “A member of your United States Navy”, said Dede. “And I think it’s pretty rotten that he has to go to another table to find a leg he can bite”, said Mary’s date, a captain in the Marine Corps.
Occasionally Mary would get caught in one of her own traps and for a short time thereafter would be slightly cagey about lonely friends of second cousins of switchboard operators in the offices of former customers.
One such happy occasion was the arrival in town of two young mining engineers, friends of Mr Webster’s, who had been in South America too long. Mr Webster called Mary at Mr Chalmers’ where we were both working and asked her if we would have dinner and go dancing with his friends. Mary said ‘Yes’, and they could pick us up at seven-thirty at home.
At six or thereabouts, we were sitting in our bathrobes in the breakfast nook drinking coffee and complaining to Mother about how unfairly we were treated everywhere, when the doorbell rang and Alison came out to the kitchen and said that there were two funny-looking men at the door asking for Mary and me.
We went to the door and there were our dates—one with a tiny head like a shrivelled brown coconut—one with a huge white melon-shaped dome; both in Norfolk jackets belted in the back, and both with pipes. It hadn’t taken as long on the trolley as they thought it would, ha ha, and they guessed they were a little early. Mary and I asked them in, left Mother to entertain them and went upstairs to get dressed.
While we dressed, we sent spies downstairs to pick up titbits of information and report. “They’re going to take you on the streetcar!” Alison reported in a loud voice. “Oh, God, no”, Mary groaned as she fastened the brilliant buckle on the belt of her long green dinner dress. “Was it the Incas who shrivelled heads?” Dede asked as she came upstairs to report that little head’s name was Chester and big head’s Colvin. “Mother likes them, I can tell”, Alison reported. ?
??They’re talking about Mexico and she’s asked them for dinner on Sunday.”
“If she likes them so well she can go out with them”, Mary said. “I’m not going anywhere on the streetcar!”
I said, “Oh, yes, you are. You’re going to get a taste of what you’ve been doing to me for months and months.”
We went, but not on the streetcar, because Marv called a cab, but we did go to the Hotel and I drew Colvin with the big head and I guess he’d been in South America for a very long time because we’d been dancing for quite a while before he caught on that the man is supposed to put his arm around the girl—not vice versa. Mary said Chester held her the right way but kept springing up and down on her toes as if she were a diving board and anyway he had bad breath.
At ten-thirty Mary looked at her watch, shrieked and said, “Mother will die if we aren’t home in fifteen minutes”, called a taxi and we jumped in and charged it to Mr Chalmers.
Sunday morning we were delighted to wake up and find four inches of snow on the ground. “No trolleys, no dull little miners!” we thought exultantly. By four-thirty the snow was almost six inches thick, the house was filled with our friends and Mary and I were giving a demonstration of Chester’s and Colvin’s dancing techniques, when there were thundering raps, the front door opened, and there, snow-covered and eager, were Chester and Colvin. They had hiked out from town. “Nothing to it”, they said, stamping the snow off their big laced hiking boots. “Often hiked sixty or seventy miles in South America.”
“Any chance of your getting lost?” our gentle little sister Dede asked. “Unh, unh” said Colvin and Chester simultaneously. “We can find our way anywhere.”
When they left about eleven-thirty, Cleve gave them explicit instructions to follow on the return route, even kindly drawing them a map and explaining that he’d made a couple of minor changes in the regular route—changes involving a detour over the ice floes in the Bering Sea and along the entire coast of the Pribilof Islands. The last we ever saw of them they were standing in the snow under a streetlight studying Cleve’s map.
As time went on and I made friends of my own, Mary had to resort to ruses other than a promise of just plain fun, to get me to go out on some date she had arranged. Sometimes it was the promise of a good job. “Now I’m taking you to this cocktail party so you can meet Pierre”, she’d say. “He’s very French, quite old, separated from his wife, but he needs a private secretary.”
“What for?” I would ask suspiciously.
“What do you think?” Mary would say. “Because he’s a very successful broker and his secretary left last week.”
“Why?” I would ask.
“How should I know?” Mary would say. “And what difference does it make, do you want a good job or don’t you?”
At the time I was painting photographs, or working for a gangster or a rabbit grower, I can’t remember which, was eager for a good job and so I went.
Pierre was small and nimble, smelled of bay rum, had his initials on his cigarettes and, after we were introduced, propelled me over to a corner to talk business. He began the interview by stroking the inside of my bare arm with one finger as though he were honing a razor, and talking about ‘loff’. After an hour of this I worked my way over to my hostess and asked her if she didn’t think I’d been in that corner long enough. She said, “Have you and Pierre settled about the job?”
I said. “Unh, unh, he’s been sharpening his finger on my arm and talking about ‘loff’.”
She said, “Oh, he’s so French. I just adore Pierre. Did he tell you about women being like violins and cellos and plucking the strings?” “Yep”, I said. “For one long hour. Will I have to take that stuff in shorthand?”
She said, “Oh, Betty! Now let’s just go talk to Pierre.”
We did and Pierre said, “Talk business at a cocktail party? Nevaire!” So I had lunch with him the next day. After we had settled ourselves in a booth in an obscure Italian restaurant and Pierre had pulled the dark red velvet curtains, I thought, “Now he’ll talk about salaries and bonuses and things like that.” I brightened my eyes, firmed my lips and tried to look efficient. Pierre took a bite of breadstick and said, “American women are afraid of loff. They are afraid of loff because they don’t know anything about it. They are like children afraid of the dark. You are afraid of loff. You are like a child. You have been married yes but to an American. In ways of loff you are a virgin.”
The waiter brought the antipasto. Pierre took a large bite of anchovy and hot pepper then said, with his mouth full, “You are a sleeping virgin. But once awakened, Betty, my dear, you will be an exciting woman.”
I took an hour and a half for lunch, almost got fired from the job I had, and I didn’t learn a single thing about Pierre’s job. After all, when someone is telling you that you are a potential night-blooming cereus, but your insides are all shrivelling up like withered vines because of lack of ‘loff’, you can’t interrupt and ask things like, “Are you closed on Saturdays?”
I told Mary that I thought I’d forget about Pierre and his mythical job. It wasn’t that all his talk about ‘loff’ had made me afraid to work for him, because I had a hunch that Pierre’s virile luncheon talk was like the posing on top of a diving tower by a man who can’t swim. It was just that I couldn’t get him down to cases. I wanted to know how much the job paid, when it started, what the duties were and if I got a vacation.
Mary said, “You call up Pierre and tell him you will have lunch with him tomorrow and I’ll go along and we’ll just settle things once and for all.” So we did.
We ate in an obscure French restaurant, took two hours for lunch and settled a lot of things but they all had to do with ‘loff’, because just when Mary was getting ready to ask about the salary, Pierre would tell her she was a flaming hibiscus and should wear perfume in her eyebrows.
After we had left Pierre and were walking down the street, Mary said, “Let’s go up to his office and see if he has a secretary”, so we did and he did. A dusty little woman in a grey cardigan and Ground Gripper shoes, who looked as if she had been there all her life, intended to stay, and had never been interested in ‘loff’.
“I’ll bet he’s got a wife too”, Mary said. And he did. A dusty little woman with grey hair and thin lips, who looked as if she had been there a long time, intended to stay, and had never been interested in ‘loff’.
But there was something worse than having Mary get me dates, I learned; it was having a man, any man, get me a date with a pal. The thing about men is that they establish friendships on such a flimsy basis and they’re so unreasonably loyal.
“You can’t talk that way about Charlie”, Johnny’d say. “Charlie’s my friend. What if he did throw up on the love seat? He said the shrimps were spoiled.”
A man not only doesn’t see anything wrong with Charlie throwing up on the love seat, he doesn’t notice other details like black patent leather Oxfords, a long bob tucked behind ears, turquoise-blue suits, maroon silk socks or green teeth. Nor does he notice faults such as belching, dipsomania, kleptomania or nymphomania, remembering old bridge hands or a vocabulary of seven words, six of them dirty.
To him Charlie is, was and always will be, ‘Good old Charlie who got me out of that shellhole’, or ‘Old Fraternity Brother Charlie’, or ‘Old Golf Pal Charlie’, or ‘My Best Friend in High School Charlie’ or ‘Old Outfielder Charlie’. Which all adds up to the fact that men are basically much nicer than women but haven’t any more idea than a corn borer what constitutes eligibility.
“Hello, Betty, this is Jock (Jock was a current fiancé of Mary’s), a pal of mine from California is in town and I thought it would he nice if we all went out on the highway for dinner.” This was my first experience and I said ‘Yes.’
Old pal’s name was Stan and his first glaring fault was no chin. None at all. I realize that this didn’t keep him from being true blue or from making home runs on the baseball diamond, but I had my standards and one of them
was all my dates have chins. I said as much to Jock and he exploded. “Oh, you women make me sick. Stan’s one of the whitest guys that ever lived.”
I said, “I don’t care if he’s so white he shines in the dark, he hasn’t any chin and he can’t dance.”
Jock said, “Jesus, women!”
My brother Cleve said, “Now, Betty, John’s only been in the penitentiary three times and they never did really prove he shot those seals.”
I said, “I don’t care about his prison record, I don’t care that he sharpens his knife on his tongue, I don’t care that he chews tobacco, but I do care that he hasn’t seen a white woman in two years and plays tag for real prizes.”
Our friend Richard said, “Betty, Osbert, an old college friend of mine, is on his way to Honolulu and I thought we’d all go dancing. I know you’ll like Osbert, he’s a wonderful guy.”
Osbert referred to Anne and Joan as ‘the tykes and little folks’. He called dogs ‘poochies’—-he called Mother ‘Mom’—he called me ‘Doll Face’ and he called Mary ‘Ginger’. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke and he didn’t dance, but when the floor show came on and a girl wearing three strategically-placed very small patches came walking out on her hands under a blue spot, Osbert rammed and shoved his way into the very front row and became so absorbed that he didn’t even notice when the man next to him pressed the burning end of his cigar against his sleeve and set him on fire.
After the number was over, Osbert invited the eccentric dancer over to our table for a drink. She came but she turned down the drink with “No thanks, I haven’t never smoked or drank.” So Osbert ordered for her, at her request, ‘a chicken sangwidge on whoite bread with all whoite meat’.
The fact that she and Osbert were practically engaged before the second floor show was over, didn’t hurt my pride any. What bothered me was where he was going to pin his fraternity pin.