Overheated cars lined the side of the road, their hoods up, their owners smiling and waving as the line of traffic inched past. A grinning boy flashed a placard lettered THIS IS WHERE IT’S AT, BABY! A tall blond girl, naked from the waist up, a garland of wild flowers around her neck, sat on the fender of a green Chevy and strummed a guitar while her boyfriend fiddled with the cap on the water reservoir. A geyser of steam went up behind her, and she leaped off the fender, grinning, and then sat by the side of the road and serenely resumed her strumming. More and more of the kids were abandoning their cars by the side of the road, cars that were overheated, cars that simply couldn’t budge in the traffic jam. They rolled up the windows in defense against the threatening rain clouds overhead, but they left the cars unlocked, heaving knapsacks, sleeping bags and guitars onto their backs, slinging water canteens from their belts as they began walking up the road, threading their way through the stalled cars and the masses of other kids on foot. Rusty swung the car up onto the shoulder in a space between a camper painted with sunbursts and a Dodge with a Michigan license plate. Together, she and Lissie began walking toward where everybody else was going.
It was beginning to rain, gently, but both girls were grinning from ear to ear.
The welcoming party on the Vineyard that Friday night was to have started at six-thirty, in anticipation of the six-fifty-seven sunset, Perry and Laura Lane apparently having come to their vacation paradise fully equipped with an almanac and a stopwatch. The rain began shortly after five, though, and the Vineyard summer people, used to the vagaries of the weather and the uncertainties of promised sunsets, did not begin arriving until almost seven-thirty, by which time the tentative drizzle had turned into a raging downpour. All notions of cocktails on the deck had been abandoned by then, and the score or more invited guests crowded into a living room the size of the one the Crofts had endured on West Seventy-eighth Street before fame and fortune had smiled upon them more beneficently than the weather tonight.
The guests were the usual Martha’s Vineyard summer residents (or denizens, as Jamie preferred to call them) with one exception: a dazzling young blonde wearing a gold-link halter top over nothing but skintight black velvet pants and gold slippers that added a good three inches to her already substantial height. She came in on the arm of a frail septuagenarian who seemed bewildered by the noise and the crowd. Immediately behind the mismatched couple was a writer who, for the last twenty years, had been grinding out dull potboilers, but who (on the basis of a single well-received book this year) had landed foursquare in the center of the Literary Establishment. But so it goes, Jamie thought, and studied the blonde’s ample naked chest under the gold-link top.
The top had been acquired in Rome, the girl promptly informed her hosts, during the filming of Cleopatra seven years before when she was just eighteen and an on-the-spot observer of one of the most publicized romances in the past decade. Jamie politely and dutifully told the literary mafioso how much he’d enjoyed his new novel, and then — being a photographer, after all — said, “You’re much taller than I guessed you were from the jacket photo.” The writer unblinkingly answered, “I write short,” and then immediately turned his back to Jamie and greeted another writer who had written a best seller ten years ago, but nothing since.
There was, Jamie had learned from past experience, something distantly chilling about these “authors,” never any plain and simple “writers” in this tight clique of scribblers who had earned the mantle of immortality during their lifetimes. He listened now as the two lionized scribes began comparing notes about how much one of the hand-tooled leatherbound book clubs was offering them for their priceless autographs on their respective novels. The newly elected capo had been offered two dollars a signature, the unheard-from-since soldier only a buck and a half. But both had been informed that they could actually sign the books anywhere in the world they chose, at the club’s expense, and the one who wrote short, and talked the same way, was saying he thought he’d opt for Hong Kong. No one had yet mentioned Jamie’s photographs in the current issue of New York.
Someone began playing the piano; on the Vineyard, someone always began playing the piano. The someone in this case was the composer of a current Off Broadway hit, and he sang without perfection the show’s eleven o’clock number, which was presently flooding the airwaves day and night. A woman photographer, who’d been introduced to Jamie as Bertha Somebody-or-other, began playing the bongos along with the composer, and another woman who — ages ago, judging from her appearance — had danced with Martha Graham, took off her shoes and began free-expressing herself all over the small, cramped, tightly packed living room. Two or three hardy souls wandered out onto the deck to watch the gray water, oblivious to the pouring rain. A young girl whose father owned one of New York’s biggest imported-wine outlets told the Lanes she’d just signed a singing contract with Capitol Records, and Perry Lane asked her if she wouldn’t do some of her own songs for them. The composer of the Off Broadway hit, who had by then run out of his own repertoire of tunes, happily agreed to accompany her. The first song she sang was something titled “Blue Roses,” a title which immediately brought to Jamie’s mind Tennessee Williams’s famous “pleurosis” malapropism, an association apparently lost on the song’s nubile creator. Jamie wandered out to the kitchen to mix himself another drink.
The actress in the gold-link top (was she an actress? If not, what had she been doing on the Cleopatra set?) was standing at the sink, engaged in earnest conversation with Laura Lane. Neither of them even looked at Jamie as he came into the room. He quietly poured two fingers of Scotch into a washed jelly glass, added three ice cubes to it, and was leaving the kitchen when he heard Laura say, somewhat heatedly, “Well, it’s your business, but I’d advise against it.” She stormed past Jamie without saying a word to him, and shoved through the swinging door to the living room, where the strains of “Blue Roses” flooded the salt-laden air. The girl in the gold-link top kept staring into the sink.
“You okay?” Jamie asked.
“Fine,” she said.
“I’m Jamie Croft,” he said.
“Mm,” she said, and nodded briefly and walked out of the kitchen past him.
In the living room, the newly signed Capitol Records recording artist had finished “Blue Roses” to a standing ovation, and was resisting the pleas of the crowd for another song. The crowd prevailed. She told the Off Broadway composer which chart to play for the next song, told him what key she sang it in, and hummed a few bars so he’d get the gist of it. Apparently he’d heard her singing the song at another Vineyard party long before she’d got her recording contract; he launched into it familiarly. The title, Jamie gathered from the first few bars, was “Antelope City.”