“I wish I hadn’t spilled that drink,” she said irritably, but she was thinking of herself, not of the closet Downstairs, she left me without so much as a thank you and headed straight for Mike.
I roamed a while, listened to three under-thirty males discuss the implications for the legal profession of no-fault auto insurance, eavesdropped on girl-talk about dog shows, had another vodka and tonic, and eventually found myself alone in a corner when Betty, the Liz who wasn’t Liz, came over with her polite-hostess smile and said, “This party must be dull for you.”
“Does it show?”
The smile became a touch more limpid. “No,” she said, “you’re carrying it off very well.”
“So are you,” I told her. Regardless of the white dress, regardless of the hostess smile and the tamed-down gestures, this face and body were so completely the same as the face and body I’d just been humping in the upstairs closet that I couldn’t help a sense of familiarity, an easiness of discourse. Also, it was impossible to believe this one was as unlike her sister as she seemed; surely that throat could be made to produce the same low groans as Liz.
She raised one eyebrow. I’ve never been able to do that, and I’ve always envied people who could. “Don’t you think I’m enjoying myself?”
“You’ve had better times,” I told her, and reached out to pat a hand holding a glass containing what looked suspiciously like sherry. “And you will again,” I said. Then I noticed Liz frowning in our direction from some distance away, and casually I removed my hand and placed it instead in my pocket.
But it seemed already to have done its work. The hostess smile was all at once much more honest, much looser. She said, “Do you like good times, Mr. Dodge?”
“Cozy times,” I said, but it was all a charade and meaningless. Liz was too self-contained to break in on our chitchat, but she was circling on the far side of the room, her awareness as intrusive as an electric current. You can’t change sisters in mid-scheme. I’ve tried and I know; you lose them both. Blood is also thicker than oil, apparently.
The sister in purdah was saying something about ski lodges and roaring fires; following on my use of the word cozy, I suppose. “That’s why I’m a winter person,” she said. “I love the ice and snow, and then you come in and get all bundled up and warm.” She hugged herself, and sipped sherry. “Are you like that?”
“Depends who I’m bundling with,” I said.
She pretended to find me risqué, and took the opportunity to touch my wrist with her own cool fingertips. “Oh, you’re perfect for Liz,” she said. “She just loves fast people.”
“And you?”
“Oh, I’m just a spectator.” Her little smile was meant to be fatalistic, I suppose, but in truth it was smug.
“If you see something you like,” I suggested, “just ask for it”
“Oh, I think I’ll stay on the sidelines,” she said, with a depressingly flirtatious little smile. Then she said, “Do you know your eyes sparkle in this light?”
I wear contact lenses. “It’s because I’m a romantic,” I said. “And so do yours.”
“Oh, I wear contact lenses. Liz doesn’t, though; her eyes aren’t as bad as mine.” She gave me a coy look. “So we aren’t exactly the same, after all.”
“Two separate mysteries,” I said, with low-voiced melodrama.
“That’s exactly tight Isn’t it that way with you and your brother?”
The brother again. “Oh, I suppose we’re different in some ways,” I said.
“Would I like to meet him?”
A comical thought entered my brain — casual, fanciful, not yet serious. “You’d probably get along fine with old Bart,” I said.
“Bart, is that his name?”
“Mmm hmm.”
“Why don’t you bring him around some time?”
I smiled. “Maybe I will,” I said. “Maybe I will.” Then another ray from Liz’s eyes struck my left temple a glancing blow, and I bowed my head to look at my drink and say, “I believe I need a refill.”
We parted with mutual expressions of esteem, and Liz intercepted me at the bar. “My usual, Mike,” she said.
“Ha ha ha,” said Mike.
Liz tossed me a sidelong green-eyed glare. “Having fun with my sister?”
“She’d rather be in a ski lodge,” I said. “Before a roaring fire.”
“Or in one,” she muttered, and Mike gave us our drinks.
I said, “Let’s go back to the closet.”
She gave me a flat look. “Screw you,” she said, and went away.
I hung around a while longer, but she remained angry, and God knows there was no other reason to be there, so eventually I made my departure. I gave my hostesses separate farewells. “Drop in any time you’re in the neighborhood,” Liz said, with eyes much colder than her sister’s winter wonderland. Betty, in her turn, said she was glad to meet me and asked once more after my dear brother Bart. Then I left.
This protected enclave of the well-bred well-to-do; they even leave their bicycles out at night, unlocked, safe from the teen-age chimpanzees who harass the proletarian communities. I stole the first bike I came to, rode it to the end of Point O’ Woods, walked it with difficulty through the thick sand around the end of the fence, and then rode cheerfully down the central walk through Ocean Bay Park and Seaview and Ocean Beach. I had to abandon it men and walk along the beach to Lonelyville, but in Dunewood I found another untended bike — most unusual — and sailed along to Fair Harbor and the fair Candy, who had just had a raging fight with Ralph and wasn’t speaking to anybody. Ralph and I went to Hommel’s and drank, until Ralph asked me to go back to the house and try to soothe Candy. “She won’t talk to me,” he said. “Maybe she’ll talk to you.” So I went back to the house and soothed her.
4
The next day was Wednesday and I was going to the city. Ralph decided to go in with me, so we took a morning ferry together, wearing shoes and carrying attaché cases. Ralph bought a Times at the Pioneer Market to read on the boat, and I spent the time trying to work up some fresh greetings. I didn’t have a really good Get Well Soon, and it was also time to start thinking about Christmas. While the ferry wallowed across the Great South Bay, I doodled on a sheet of paper resting on my attaché case. “Get well soon — get well soon — get well soon—”
The voyage from Fire Island to Manhattan employs most of the transportation methods known to man. First the ferry to Bay Shore, on the southern coast of Long Island; then a cab from the dock to the railroad station; then a train on in to the city. “Get well soon,” I wrote. “Get well soon.” I was getting nowhere.
Then all at once a Merry Christmas dropped into my head, and I laughed aloud. “Ralph,” I said.
He looked up from the bridal announcements; Ralph reads everything in the Times. “Mm?”
“On the front,” I said, “there’s a drawing of a cute priest. Barry Fitzgerald. He’s smiling directly at us, with the caption, ‘Merry Christmas.’ And inside it says, ‘you Jew bastard.’”
“Mmmmm,” he said. “Won’t that offend some people?”
“You really think so?”
“Not everybody is as sophisticated as you are,” he said.
“Oh, go long with you,” I said. I don’t know why I sounding-board Ralph; he has no more sense of humor than a yak.
We separated at Perm Station, Ralph to cab downtown to the law firm with his homework, me to walk up into the bowels of the garment district My office is on the fifth floor of a building so infested with third-rate garment manufacturers I think of the place as an outpatient clinic for bankruptcy court. The regular elevator ceased to function during the Harding Administration, and this time I shared the freight elevator with a rack of thin floral dresses accompanied by a pair of four-foot-tall PRs. Hispanics, they prefer to be called, but most people use the abbreviation: spic.