This main room was reached by descending a long staircase just off the bar. The girls checked their coats at the cloakroom at the head of this staircase and went on down. The dance floor was jammed, but once they elbowed through it they found that the management had left ample space for each table so that an atmosphere of leisurely pleasure prevailed. Annie spotted the two men and led Penny to their table.
Halfway there Penny’s heart gave a jump and she stopped in her tracks. Annie had pointed out Brian, and now Penny recognized the man with him. It was Studs Levine .
Studs Levine! The father of Penny’s unborn child! The man responsible for her pregnancy! The last man in the world she wanted to see—now, particularly—or ever. Studs didn’t seem too happy to see Penny, either. A strong trace of embarrassment showed through his customary poise. It was a few moments before Penny realized that Studs was embarrassed about her seeing him with Brian. He guessed correctly that Annie must have told Penny about Brian’s homosexuality, and he figured Penny would find him guilty by association.
“So you two know each other, do you, now?” Bryan threw a massive masculine arm around Studs’ shoulders in a gesture just possessive enough to be a giveaway of the fact that he was jealous of Penny. “An’ doesn’t that make everything friendly an’ cozy?”
“I’d like to be friendly and cozy, too,” Annie said pointedly, looking at Brian with big cow eyes that were naked in their expression of adoration.
“Sure, me darlin’, an’ there’s enough friendliness an’ coziness for all,” he told her. His other hand squeezed her knee in a gesture of reassurance made ambivalent by the fact that his arm remained around Studs’ shoulders.
Outside of a helpless glance at Penny, Studs didn’t seem to mind. “Of course there is,” he agreed. “How have you been, Penny? Long time no see.”
“Long time no call,” Penny reminded him.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been meaning to, but I’ve been so damn busy. You know how it is.”
“No, I don’t. Tell me. How is it?”
“Tumultuous.” Studs sighed. “The world is too much with me.”
“Late and soon. But then sooner or later you’ll catch up with it, Studs. Or it’ll catch up with you. Then beware.”
“It almost has. And I’m bewaring like crazy.”
“You two lost me somewhere,” Annie interrupted. “Come on, Brian, dance with me while these two deep thinkers solve the problems of man’s alienation from man.”
“Not from man.” Penny couldn’t resist the dig, and she was rewarded when it brought a flush to Studs’s cheeks. “From woman,” she added.
“Come on, Brian. Before the show starts,” Annie insisted.
“Oh, all right now.” Brian followed Annie onto the dance floor, casting a reluctant backwards glance at Studs.
Penny and Studs sat silently, watching them dancing for a while. They were doing the frug to a fast beat, both moving uninhibitedly to the music, their bodies gyrating for all the world as if they were victims caught up in the mass hysteria of moving flesh. They merged with the shadows already merged in the wild cacophony of sound and movement. Then they were propelled into view again, Annie’s breasts bouncing so strenuously that they threatened to escape her low-cut bodice, Brian’s pelvis rotating as if in a frenzied parody of a burlesque grind. Both their mouths were moving now, the words lost in the din. Brian’s expression was petulant, Annie’s conciliatory. It looked to Penny as if he was angry about something and she was trying to calm him down with some sort of explanation.
“I think your boyfriend is angry that Annie brought me,” Penny told Studs cattily.
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“No? Well, you could have fooled me.” Curiosity made Penny drop the sarcasm for the moment. “But how come, Studs? I know you’ve got the morals of an alleycat, but I never would have-guessed you’d go for boys.”
“These are desperate times we live in.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning the draft. I’m due to be called up any day now, And I’m allergic to Vietnamese cooking.”
“But what’s that got to do with playing choir boys with Brian?”
“The draft board won’t take you if you’re homosexual. If you can convince them, I mean. I’m just laying a little groundwork so if they investigate they’ll find I’ve consorted with a known homosexual.”
“That’s pretty chicken!”
“Yeah. Maybe. But I’d rather switch than fight.”
“I didn’t know you were such a coward.”
“I’m really not, Penny. Oh, not that I’m so anxious to go and get splattered all over the Vietnam landscape. I’m not. Still, I’d go along with it if it wasn’t for my mother. I’m her only son, you know, and it would kill her if I got dragged off to war. It really would.”
“But there must be some other way.” Penny thought a moment, and some malice crept back into her tone as she resumed speaking. “Why not get married?” she needled him.
“Oh, I thought of that. I really did. But it’s no good. Johnson’s latest edict is to call up childless fathers between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six. That would mean me, even if I was married. And I’d never be able to produce a child in time to avoid the draft.”
“Still, the swish bit seems pretty drastic.”
“It is. But what can I do with my mother calling me up every day and singing the same old lullaby of how she didn’t raise her boy to be a soldier?”
At this point Brian and Annie returned to the table and Studs and Penny cut the conversation short. Brian seemed in a better mood now, somehow less threatened by Penny’s presence. He didn’t even seem to notice that she and Studs had moved their chairs closer together while they’d been talking.
Still, Brian was solicitous of Studs in a way that was vaguely lover-like. “Can you see all right, me bucko?” he asked. “The girlies are about to do their bit.”
“I’m fine,” Studs assured him.
“Be sure now. You don’t want to be missin’ your sister’s number.”
“Your sister?” Penny was surprised.
“Yeah. Lascivia. She works here.”
“But I thought she was—” Penny bit off the sentence. She had reason to remember that the one and only time she’d met Studs’ sister, Lascivia had been employed in an establishment that was shady to say the least. But she didn’t know if Studs knew, and so she dropped the topic. Her near faux pas was covered as the lights went up for the show. It was spotlighted on a sort of platform like a birdcage which hung suspended over the patrons in the main room. Three girls appeared here and went into a fast-paced routine of twist variations to the stereo beat bouncing around the room.
As wild as it was, the show had obviously been carefully staged. There was something for every taste, with about a dozen girls rotating so that there were always three gyrating in the birdcage, and so that the three were always a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. They were tall and slender, petite and voluptuous, curvy and lissome, long-legged and high-bottomed, hippy and hip. The one thing that they had in common was that they were all quite bosomy. Also they were all far above average in beauty.
The costumes they wore were designed to display their charms: low-cut leotards cut shockingly deep at the crotch with fringed bottoms that displayed more than concealed the writhing plumpness of some of the most delectable derrieres to be found in New York; skin-tight netting that enhanced every writhing movement of the large, fast-swinging bosoms; bright-colored and skimpy bikinis from which pulsating hips thrust out with tantalizing torridity; transparent and gauzy lingerie-like costumes which might have hidden nothing at all if it weren’t for the fact that the girls wearing them were moving so fast that their luscious bodies seemed a blur of sizzling motion—such was the fleshy appeal of the Ginza show. It was an exciting but tasteful treat for the eyes as they interpreted the frug, the watusi, the monkey, the Boston monkey and the swim for the appreciative audience.